The Paris Review's Blog, page 9

The Last Dreams

All photographs by Diana Matar.

Dream 203

I found myself in a strange and sad place when suddenly there was my old love, B. She walked burdened by old age. Knowing that I will never see her again, I felt such deep sorrow.

Dream 204

I saw myself in my forties, caressing a pale rose. It responded, encouraging me, but, given our age difference, I hesitated. My reluctance persisted until she left, leaving me alone to contend with my aging self.

Dream 206

I found myself in a spacious and elegant hall. Gathered to one side were my family and friends and, at the opposite end, a door opened and through it my sweetheart B. entered laughing, followed by her father. I lost all self-restraint and held my arms open wide. The Imam began writing in the marriage book. Joy overtook everyone. My mother congratulated the bride and burned incense.

Dream 207

I found myself walking down a long road. A window of one of the houses to my left opened and through it appeared a woman’s face. Although her beauty had disappeared behind a thick veil of ill health, and it had been fifty years since I had last seen her, I immediately recognized her. In the morning, I was deeply unsettled when, reading the newspaper, I came upon her obituary. I was profoundly saddened and wondered, Which of us had visited the other at that hour of death?

Dream 209

I found myself sitting with President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a small garden, and he was saying: You may be asking why we don’t meet as often anymore.

I said: I did wonder about that.

He said: It’s because every time I consult you about an issue, I find that your opinion either partly or entirely contradicts mine, and so I feared for our friendship.

I replied: For me, our friendship—no matter our differences—can never end.

Dream 210

I found myself at Café El Fishawi. A short distance away was the famous artist and ballerina soon to announce her retirement. I couldn’t help looking at her with great curiosity. She gracefully turned around and her lips gave me a faint smile. My companion said: Be glad, you won’t embark on life’s final battle alone.

Dream 213

I found myself in the local wedding photographer’s studio. Among the gallery of photographs, I spotted B. I examined her picture closely, taking my time, all the while enduring desperate regrets, and yet recognizing that I had not lost hope completely, and gleaning some solace from that fact.

Dream 214

I found myself at the tram stop just as I realized that I had been pickpocketed. I then spotted my friend Ahmed, who appeared in a hurry. I rushed up to him and told him what had happened to me. He laughed, saying: I too was robbed. I said: Then let’s go to El Abbassiya police station to find who took our money. He said, I urge you instead to volunteer for the new civil division working directly with the minister of the interior, whose chief goal is to rid the country of pickpockets.

Dream 222

I saw myself living through an era of great change, where all national borders were erased and—under the banner of justice, freedom, and the respect for human rights—all travel restrictions were lifted. I journeyed through the cities of the world and in each place found suitable employment, pleasurable distractions and excellent companions. Then I missed Egypt. I returned home and was greeted by my childhood friends. They asked me to tell them about my travels. I said: Let’s first go to the old town and pray at Al-Hussein Mosque, may God be content with him, and next have lunch at Al Dahan, then go on to Café El Fishawi to drink green tea and there I will tell you sheer wonders.

Dream 223

I saw my wife and myself struggling with a large suitcase when suddenly my old love B. came to help us. I turned dizzy with joy. I touched her hand and said: I will never forget this for as long as I live. She replied: You must forget, for believe me I am happy with my husband and children. It was as though the very last candle had gone out.

Dream 232

I found myself in the Al-Ghouriya district and there were twice as many police as civilians. I saw my father walking toward me with a policeman on either side of him. I panicked, thinking he was under arrest. But then he greeted me and said: I see a policeman on either side of you, and I’m afraid you’ve been arrested.

Dream 237

I saw myself entering the Garden of the Immortals in the El Gamaleya district. I was an adolescent again. I had on a pair of shorts. I saw a group of beautiful girls approach. They were about my age, led by the immortal Miss A. She smiled and my tears flowed till all her beauty vanished behind them.

Dream 243

I found myself searching for evidence that my love was not an illusion but real. My lover had departed in the glory of her youth, and by now the witnesses too were gone. The features of our street had changed, and in the place of her house with its flower garden a high-rise block stood, densely populated. Nothing remained of the past except memories without proof.

Dream 245

I found myself in the middle of a large crowd gathered to witness the state visit of the Emperor of Japan. At the same time, the prime minister Mustafa al-Nahas was leaving a dentist’s office: we followed him with our hearts and eyes until he disappeared inside his car. I thought how odd it was that the two men, and for completely different reasons, shared the same tragedy.

 

From I Found Myself … : The Last Dreams , translated by Hisham Matar, to be published by New Directions in June. 

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) began writing when he was seventeen. Of his nearly forty novels, the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, which focuses on a family in Cairo through three generations. In 1988, he became the first Arabic-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hisham Matar is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, an Arab American Book Award, and Germany’s Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. He is a professor at Barnard College.

Diana Matar’s photographs have been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London; the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris; Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

A Certain Kind of Romantic

Postcard from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers Collection. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

PARALLEL PARKING

The guidance counselor was my driver’s ed teacher. He liked to talk about football. He didn’t guide me much on driving.

I angled the car into the school lot. We never practiced parallel parking. Therefore, I failed the test for my driver’s license twice.

I had one more try. I diligently practiced between garbage cans in front of the house. It was like playing bumper tag. I didn’t know who got it worse—the fender or the cans.

My dad and I drove to Des Plaines for my last try. I pulled into the street. The instructor had a headache and blew off the part about parking.

I drove to the first McDonald’s on River Road to celebrate my special day. It was as spotless as all the others. But there were hundreds of green pickles dotting the lot.

“I guess they don’t want you to park here,” my dad said.

 

CAUTION

Whenever I drove, my mother sat in the passenger seat and slammed on imaginary brakes at yellow traffic lights. This was cautionary. When I was on my own, I stopped. When I was with her, I gunned it.

 

AFTER I GOT MY DRIVER’S LICENSE

I picked up my grandmother at her poker game on Saturday night. She wanted to show me off to her friends. She was in high spirits after the win. When we got back to her place, she drank half a beer to mark the occasion.

My grandmother didn’t want me to drink and drive. That was a laugh. I had never even had a full beer. I ate a pastry in celebration.

Whenever I had a date, I dropped off my grandmother in front of her apartment on Lawrence Avenue. She said, “Good luck in all your future endeavors.”

“Okay, Gram, but I’ll pick you up for breakfast in the morning.”

 

COFFEE-AND

My grandmother took me to Denny’s for coffee-and. “You’re going to like this,” she said. She ordered me a slice of apple pie with a piece of American cheese on top. I pretended to love it. After that, she ordered it for me every time we went out. I pretended to love it for the next twenty-five years.

 

DATE WITH DAWN

Dawn’s parents, the Lyons, wanted to know where I was taking their tiny Lyonesse. I explained. They frowned. When would I bring her home? I estimated. They disapproved.

I opened the front door to leave. Dawn was still holding her coat, like a lady. I helped her slip it on. We walked to the car. I sat down in the driver’s seat. The lady was still standing outside. The gentleman hurried around to open her door.

Dawn told me to choose a movie. She didn’t like the movie I chose. She wanted popcorn. I popped out to get it. She wanted butter on the popcorn. I popped back.

Dawn wanted Milk Duds. I didn’t say a word about duds. I had already had Good & Plenty.

I took Dawn to Lockwood Castle on Devon. We sat in a booth by the window. Dawn ordered a large hot fudge sundae. She took two bites and put down her spoon. She was finished.

I had had enough. I told her to eat the whole thing. You’d think she was plowing through the Giant Killer—that had twenty-four scoops with a sparkler and an American flag. Dawn ate one small scoop. This took longer than the movie.

I drove Dawn home. The trip lasted several hours. I walked her to the front door. That was fast.

 

A FEW DATES

I went on a few dates with Bettyanne. We had bashful back-seat experiences. But I had to give myself a B- because Bettyanne didn’t like me as much as Brett Balmer. He was blonder and balmier than me.

I crushed on Karen because she was cute in green culottes.

Hamlet at the movies: To put your arm around her or not? That is the question.

I went to a drive-in movie with Rochelle and her mother. Not every date likes to go to the batting cages.

Miniature golf is a novelty, not a sport. But Sheryl and I played it like the Masters. She shouldn’t have gloated when she beat me with a lucky shot on the eighteenth. I shouldn’t have pounded my putter up and down on the green.

We went to Riverview amusement park. I was wobbly on the wooden roller coaster. It wascalled the Bobs. I turned yellow and bobbed to the bathroom.

It was hellishly hot. The funhouse was called Hades.

 

A FEW DATES, SISTER VERSION

My mom wanted Lenie to wear more makeup, to put on false eyelashes and fake fingernails, and to bleach her hair blond. Lenie looked at herself in the mirror and said, “Who’s that vixen?”

Mom made sure that Lenie had a dime for her dates so she could call home if she got in trouble.

When Lenie’s date got too frisky at the drive-in, she climbed out the window. Later, she realized she could have just opened the door.

Lenie had one regret. She was sorry she left her popcorn in the front seat.

Lenie was mad at Phil. She told him to “get lost.” He took her literally and couldn’t find his way home.

Our front door had a little window. When Lenie stood on the front stoop saying good night to Ron, my mom’s face magically appeared. When his friends saw her, they drove away. Ron freaked and fell face down on the sidewalk chasing after them.

Everyone called Randy “the Lamb” because he had curly blond hair. The Lamb told Lenie to stop wearing a short skirt and shiny thigh-high black patent-leather boots. Why? He was upset because he saw her underwear.

Making Fred a flank steak was fine. Cooking it with plastic toothpicks was not.

Neil took Lenie to Lockwood Castle. He ordered tea and toast. He said he had stomach problems. He came back from the bathroom with a wet shirt. He said, “I got whomped by a chocolate soda.”

 

HAIR OF MANY COLORS

My mom was always dyeing Lenie’s hair. It looked like Joseph’s coat of many colors. In three years, it went from platinum blond to brunette to zebra stripes. Finally, they stripped all the color. It was white, but looked green because she was wearing a green dress. No one noticed. The next day she dyed it red.

 

TRACK AND FIELD DAY

Lenie’s reputation was shot after she won first place in the shot put. They publicized it in the school paper. Layf kept calling her Moose and so Lenie put down the heavy metal ball. An Olympian was lost.

 

HURRAH!

Horace Traubel called baseball “the hurrah game of the republic!” Whitman thought this was hilarious. From then on, he called it “the hurrah game!” He said that baseball “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.” Whitman had pep. So did Coach Coyer.

 

SOPHOMORE BASEBALL

Coach also had a bit of Zen in him. Every afternoon he repeated his favorite koan when we were warming up by throwing the ball back and forth: “Quick but not hard, boys, quick but not hard.”

Michael Grejbowski could throw. He was a quarterback who turned me into an end. He was a pitcher who made me regret being a catcher. Grabbo was so fast that I had trouble handling him. I dropped the ball and fired back remarks. He thought they were quick but not hard. We became best friends.

Coyer coached from third base. That left Michael and me on the bench. It was comedy school for high school baseball players. Uncle Mel made a mistake. I didn’t have the stuff to be a good catcher. I had the wrong physique. I lacked the arm. Runners stole on me. Balls got tothe backstop. Coach was on my case. I was getting tired of strapping on the tools of ignorance. It was dumb.

My mother watched me from the fence. “Don’t touch your crotch when you crouch.”

You weren’t superstitious when you got in the batter’s box. You just needed to pick up three pebbles and toss them between your legs before you settled down to hit.

 

MICHAEL AND I

Mine was a two-car family. Michael came from a one-car family. I could get my mother’s car on weekend nights. Michael couldn’t get his dad’s. Michael and I were inseparable. We had a one-car friendship.

Michael was an only child. He lived down the street from the high school in Morton Grove. Everything in his house was perfectly neat. It wasn’t chaotic like my house. I was afraid to touch anything. But it was good to stop there on our way to a double-cheese Whopper at Burger King.

After we dropped off our dates, Michael and I hung out at Booby’s on Milwaukee Avenue. We never ordered the Big Boob, but we met Ron, the original Booby.

Michael and I talked about sports and girls. We tried to figure out the score.

We traveled back and forth to Gullivers on Howard Street. The owner, Burt, named it after Gulliver’s Travels. That’s how I learned about Jonathan Swift, “who wanted to vex the world rather than divert it.”

The two of us brought our dates for caramelized pan pizza. The four of us talked about sports and books. The two of them told the two of us the score.

Michael and I worked Christmas vacation at Wertheimer. I couldn’t read on break. Maria was gone. We played odds and evens on the job: “One, two, three, shoot!” Loser stacks boxes. Loser sweats. Winner watches. Winner gloats.

Michael and I worked during spring break. This time we played rock paper scissors.

My dad got Michael and me a summer job at the Welch Company, which made scientific instruments and apparatus. We couldn’t play games. We were supervised.

The bald supervisor told us not to call him Moonhead. He told us not to break any glass instruments. He told us not to screw any of the girls on the floor.

“It’s a chemical supply company,” he said, “we don’t expect you to supply the chemicals.”

 

CHIVALRY AT THE MORRIS AVENUE BEACH

Some burly guy was trying to throw her into the lake. She did not want to go. I didn’t know the girl, but I intervened. Michael stood on the side. He didn’t budge.

The guy was too big. He spit and hit me in the chest. I spit but missed. He said, “Really?” Then he spit again. I missed him again. I couldn’t bring myself to spit on anyone.

It wasn’t a genuine fight. We just shoved each other around for a while. The girl went for a swim.

 

A CERTAIN KIND OF ROMANTIC

Mom said she was a romantic. I gave her flowers for her birthday. “Flowers are a waste of money,” she said. “They don’t last.”

We took her to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate Mother’s Day.

Mom cried because the food was bad.

 

This essay is adapted from My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy, which will be published by Knopf in June.

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

How to Find Your Mother in Her Portrait

Hidden mother with child. Linda Fregni Nagler, #0173, tintype from The Hidden Mother, 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots.

When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the little girl that was me, this portrait happened to be a document of the moment in which, for the first and last time, I had stood beside my mother in a studio, unaware that less than two months time she would be dead. That photograph must be a means of instruction, an exercise in recovering the moment that had passed, in recovering the features and presence of my mother or, as Barthes writes, “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see [in this instance, my mother] has indeed existed.”

I never had the sense that the woman in the photograph was my mother. Perhaps it is the anxious expression she turns toward the lens, as though, having stepped out of her domestic fortress, she now stood powerless. Perhaps it is the dress she is wearing, one I only ever saw her in once or twice on expeditions into town. Or maybe it is the hair that hangs down to her waist and which was usually plaited into two long braids that circled her head in opposite directions. The woman in the picture is not just different from what I remember of her, or want to remember: she is a ghost, like the ghosts I would see on strips of negatives as a girl. I would hold them up to my eye, trying to guess who they were, and when I grew bored of this, would fashion these haunted ribbons into bracelets around my wrist.

A woman and a girl, pallid because the acids were not properly washed off the paper. The woman unsmiling (though unaware she was to die exactly forty-seven days later). The girl unsmiling (though unaware of what death was). The woman has the girl’s lips and brow (the girl has the nose of the man who will remain forever outside the frame). The woman’s hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl’s hand clenched (not in anger but because it holds half a piece of caramel). The girl’s dress is not Egyptian cotton (Abdel Nasser, who manufactured everything, died years ago). The shoes are imports from Gaza (Gaza, as you’re aware, is no longer a free zone). The woman’s watch doesn’t work and has a broad strap (is that in keeping with the style of 1974?).

I wrote this poem in 2007 and it was published the following year before appearing in my 2013 collection Until I Give Up the Idea of Home. Setting aside questions of the poem’s ambitions or its failures, reading it now, I think of my mother’s portrait as an exercise in memory, a writing exercise, and at the same time a reexamination of the distance that divides us.

Why does the voice of the poem come across as neutral? Why does it invoke what is absent, draw out the connections between every detail within the image and all those that lie outside it? It is as though, being unable to reconstitute my mother from the picture, it simply reorganizes its component parts. Each sentence contains references to what the picture does not capture. It is a series of open-ended shots with no conclusion. If I had to rewrite it I might include other points of departure. Where, then, is my mother? Is the poem a blurred image of her? Or is it impossible for her to exist anywhere other than outside the frame—and never within it? Is my mother really so very distant? So mysterious? So hidden?

***

The earliest photographers resorted to various tricks in order to capture successful portraits of infants and little children. Naturally, they wanted pictures that weren’t blurred and for the infants to be their primary subjects: solitary, still, a minimum of thirty seconds motionless before the lens so that the image could be fixed in the wet collodion. To this end (so modern studies of nineteenth-century photography tell us), Victorian photographers would provide a specially designed chair to hold the children. But there was another stratagem, simpler and more successful: that the mother conceal herself behind the chair, or beneath a sheet or curtain, either holding the child or supporting them from behind so that they would adopt the desired pose. The success or failure of the resulting image, we can imagine, would depend on the professionalism and speed of the photographer, as well as the child’s mood and how safe they felt in proximity to their mother. Either they appeared in the photograph alone and unsupported—this being the goal—or else some evidence of the hidden mother would show: a hand, say, as though cut from a corpse, or the ghostly outline of her body through the sheets and covers.

In the 1860s, when the cost of studio photography was in reach of ever wider swathes of the middle class in Europe and North America, photographers devised other techniques.

For instance, removing the mother after the shot had been taken, excising her before the print was made, as it were, or developing the complete image on silvered sheets or glass plates, then scraping her away.

Various academic disciplines reference this phenomenon—there are many studies that touch on Victorian photography and the social life of the middle classes in the nineteenth century—but it also maintains a presence in late twentieth-century pop culture: you can find “hidden-mother photos” for sale on the websites of antique dealerships and online traders.

The Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler noticed an advertisement on eBay for one of these images, labeled “Amusing photograph of a baby and his hidden mother” by the seller, and she began a project in the course of which she assembled more than a thousand images of this kind, all dating from the late nineteenth century to the twenties, and then published them in a book entitled The Hidden Mother.

We might think that the essence of motherhood here is sacrifice. That we are seeing mothers who have erased their identities in front of the camera for the sake of a common goal: that their newborn infants are shown unattached, the focus of the image. Geoffrey Batchen, professor of the history of photography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has come to this conclusion. In his essay, which accompanies the images in Nagler’s book, he writes:

Interestingly, although these supporting figures are sometimes indisputably male, they are invariably referred to as “hidden mother” images in vernacular circles (and even in the title of this work), as if the erasure of self that is enacted in such pictures is a manifestly feminine subject position, even a specifically maternal one. We are asked to witness an act of modesty and self-effacement on the part of each of these figures, but also to examine a picture of women’s place in a patriarchal society, where she is inevitably figured as without an identity of her own, a mere passage, a vehicle of reproduction, a conduit between a man and his child.

The majority of those hidden in the pictures are mothers; in a few hide fathers. Those images that show fathers hiding behind their children instead of their mothers also contain the mother. But where? Nagler tells us:

The position occupied by the mothers of the children in these images is often indecipherable. I became aware of a series of problems linked to this aspect when I myself tried to produce Hidden Mother photography. Using the most frequent staging technique, during the shoot a situation like this tends to come about: in front of the camera there’s a person with a curtain over their head, while on the other side there’s a photographer hidden under a black cloth, crouching behind his view camera. The child, in the middle, is thus surrounded by ghosts, and so there needs to be a third person there to distract him, to stop him getting scared, and this task is most likely down to the mother, who therefore remains outside our field of vision.

This passage from Nagler prompts me, in turn, to imagine the mother behind the camera, in her child’s field of view. She doesn’t take the picture herself: there’s a professional photographer, of course. If the mother is not in front of the camera holding her child then she is standing to the right or the left of the photographer, as though she is the camera’s eye, gazing into her child’s eyes, trying to project a sense of security from distance.

Browsing through this book, the reader is able to track the evolution of the ingenious means by which the mothers concealed themselves: as a throne strewn with flowers, a duck behind a bench, a life-size doll holding a baby. Assembled in a single volume, the images have the capacity to inspire laughter since we, as readers, are aware that someone is hidden and are, on the whole, able to guess where they are and how they are posed.

But there is something sad there, too. We encounter children who are unfamiliar to us, and realizing that a century or more has passed, we assume that they are dead. We encounter mothers who look like pieces of furniture, as though they represent death.

Surely at least one of the children from these photographs, after they had grown, their mother now dead and gone, sat down to inspect her blanketed silhouette, or perhaps her ghost that had once stood before the lens (or behind it), and said to the person beside them: “Look. This is my mother. My mother was there.”

***

My mother’s portrait bequeathed to me a fascination with images of motherhood. The archive of these images dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and in books dealing with photography is categorized according to class (Upper, Middle, Industrial Proletariat, et cetera) or theme (World War II, Mothers from Rwanda’s Ethnic Cleansing) or by photographer (Annie Leibovitz, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt); there are even images from Facebook and the advertisements of professionals who specialize in photographing childbirth and family occasions. Here, the archive is the equivalent of the written narratives of motherhood discussed in the previous chapter.

Before I turned to the metaphor of the hidden mother, it was general questions about motherhood and photography that interested me. For instance: What is selected, documented, and displayed when motherhood becomes the subject of photography? Is there a preconceived idea of what needs to be captured in order to create a mother? What do we cut out or exclude in the framing of the perfect shot in order to affirm the ideal motherhood of our imaginations? Are certain images excluded from the family album if they fail to accord with this ideal?

Confronted by this archive I had to remind myself that I wasn’t attempting a study on motherhood within the medium of photography; I simply wanted to test out my questions on motherhood using photography as a medium. But whenever I attempted to write I would lose my way.

The metaphor of the “hidden,” “effaced,” or “voluntarily excluded” mother helped me circumvent these general questions, for all that they were important in their own right. I realized that it was the hidden mother who preoccupied me and that I was only able to address this vast archive through the prism of my question: If I am unable to see my mother in her portrait, what is it I see when I look at the mothers in the archive? Can I truly see other people’s mothers?

***

Among the pictures that caught my eye was the image of a seven-month-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of the August 1991 Vanity Fair. There have been many readings of this image that treat it as shocking, not because she is naked but because she is naked and pregnant. Part of its impact derives from the incompatibility of two elements within the dominant narrative: the erotic vs. the pregnant woman. This is what captures our attention, makes us give it another look: she is the archetype of the instrumental mother. But the picture is too idiosyncratic; it defeats my ability to establish a connection. There isn’t a chink for me to slip through, a single detail that draws me in: there is perfection, and it is this perfection, maybe, that renders it one-dimensional.

Furthermore, it is one of those images that quickly become the subject of imitations. Fashionable. At first, celebrity women, photographers, and magazines contribute to its reproduction, then the naked pregnant woman becomes a theme, and with time it is no longer limited to celebrity actresses and celebrated beauties but becomes a rite of passage, a souvenir image no different from photos of graduations or weddings.

When I look at Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, I confront the intentions of the “operator” behind the camera: her message, the harmony she has composed from the constituent elements of the picture. The photographer is Annie Leibovitz and to me she is far more important than Demi Moore here. Not because she is—as Michele Pridmore-Brown has written—the chronicler of shocking scenes that have disrupted society, the church, and conservative critics, pushed limits, broken taboos, and destabilized notions of the beautiful, the outré, and the poignant. And not because (as many magazine articles have asserted) the image contains any specific message that might compel people of influence in Hollywood to accept the natural life cycle of an actress and her right to bear children. Rather, it is because the photographer aspires to more: from lighting and angles and the unclothed pregnant body she seeks to fashion an icon.

I am not interested in engaging with the mother as icon nor am I amazed to find that it can be achieved. The truth is that when I look at the picture of Demi Moore I ask myself, “How do other mothers appear to their children?” I often wonder if they seem ghostly, hidden, absent in the way my mother does in the only picture of her that I have and which is before me now. How does Moore’s daughter, who must be twenty-five by now, see her mother? Does she recognize the woman posed before the camera playing a role: actress, celebrity, feminist, disruptor, et cetera?

Annie Leibovitz, the celebrity photographer who took the picture of Demi Moore in 1991, took a second photograph in 2001, a self-portrait, also pregnant and naked. In the decade between the two, the image of a naked pregnant woman has lost the same capacity to shock. Leibovitz created the icon and others imitated her. But Leibovitz’s self-portrait is shocking for other reasons. To Pridmore-Brown, this image confronted the public with queer motherhood. It rejected age limits or, to put it another way, it destabilized and deconstructed the limits and binaries associated with making a family. Over and above this, Pridmore-Brown celebrates the image’s liberating potential for all women in its redrawing of the limits of age and gender.

An image in black and white: Leibovitz pregnant at fifty-one, her wrinkles evident. Unlike Moore, she is not facing the lens, but has her head turned in three-quarter profile. It is a late pregnancy, the pregnancy of an artist who hasn’t had time before and now, at last, has decided to experience it for herself. Just as the dominant narrative was dealt a shock by the beauty of a pregnant Moore, it is shocked again by the pregnancy of the aging naked body, the menopausal pregnancy, a divergence from conventional pregnancy, which is associated with a specific biological age. More than that, Leibovitz is in front of the camera, not behind it as she usually is.

I first saw this picture in her book A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005, a photographic narration of Leibovitz’s relationship with Susan Sontag over the course of fifteen years: the places they visited together such as Jordan and Egypt; a picture of Sontag in bed with her typewriter; another of her receiving chemotherapy.

The book does not address a lesbian relationship but a friendship. The images of Sontag dying were taken by Leibovitz, while Sontag took the picture of a pregnant Leibovitz. So the book tells the story of two women who lived with one another for fifteen years in a relationship that remains uncategorized, one of them seventy years old and soon to die, the other in her fifties and about to give birth, and the primary medium of this narrative is the camera.

It is not just the narrative contextualizing Leibovitz’s pregnant picture that brings me back to examine it again and again. There is something painful in the daylight coming from the window to her right, in the white of the bedsheet and the glasses carelessly thrown down on it, as though Leibovitz or Sontag had removed them at the last moment before taking their positions in front of the camera and behind it.

As though the glasses are Barthes’s punctum. They are the detail that speaks to me, affects me mysteriously, pricks me, that possesses the capacity to extend and grow. Looking again at the abandoned glasses makes me think about resistance to death in the picture: the aging, pregnant body defying its biological limits; the ailing Sontag fighting against her own death that, though it isn’t the subject of this image, is present in all the images that surround it and is with her, too, as she stands hidden behind the lens.

Despite the differences between the two images, Leibovitz’s self-portrait seems to touch on one aspect of the absence that I perceived in my mother’s picture. The very absence that I failed to detect in the image of Demi Moore. Which is why, for me, it remained a one-dimensional picture, incapable of “pricking” me.

It is not simply the absence of Sontag behind the camera, or Leibovitz’s gaze directed towards her, or the glasses tossed down deliberately or thoughtlessly upon the bedsheet; it is also the daughter who will emerge from Leibovitz’s womb and the way she will subsequently regard her mother in the image. I can only imagine that she will see her as a ghost. As though what provokes us and prompts us to take another look at a picture that is neither ours nor concerns us (i.e., looking at other mothers) is both conditional on, and shaped by, the history of our relationship with our mother’s image in our album. In other words, to establish a relationship with other people’s mothers requires us to engage with what we have learned by staring at images of our own.

***

What is it you see, or don’t see, in a picture of a mother who belongs to you? Put another way, how do you see your mother in her picture? Is she visible and clear; can you truly grasp her? Do you see her differently because she carries with her a history or memories or a weight or details that others will not see as they page through your family album, or press “like” on Facebook or Instagram simply because the image is “beautiful” or “amusing” or “comprehensible”?

The response to questions such as these will be as various as the individuals who answer them, but why do I assume that it is always easy to find our mothers in their portraits? Is it not possible that the history and memories and details we share with them are a burden, functioning as a sheet or curtain that hides them from us? Isn’t knowledge—as per the dictum of early medieval Arab mystic al-Niffari—a veil?

Roland Barthes questioned what he knew about photography, and his answer was as follows:

I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.

Following Barthes a step further I would suggest that, as you look at an image of yours, an image of motherhood that concerns you personally, you are neither operator nor spectator, you are not the child in the photograph nor the mother that holds the child on her lap. You are the relationship that links you both, the relationship that is erased or hidden or even excluded from the picture itself.

Your portrait with your mother is a moment, a moment entangled with your personal narrative about her: the liminal stage of unity and separation from when you were inside her, then your birth, then the love or conflict or parting (or whatever it may be) that follows.

In images from the dominant narrative we confront the mothers of other people: conspicuous, clear, standardized, comprehensible. In their portraits, our mothers cannot be standardized or banal. And though images of the instrumentalized mother can provoke us to take another look or even stare at times (the image’s symbolism, the presence of an accompanying narrative, its oddity), our mothers require a journey in the opposite direction if they are to be seen.

It is a journey towards what has been excluded from the image, what it has failed to hold, what cannot be given or displayed within the frame. In other words, “my mother,” in her picture, cannot be standardized or banal, visible or invisible. I know that, in that moment, she was there before the lens, spectrum and spectacle, but my knowledge of her outside the frame conceals her from me. Unlike those mothers hidden behind a sheet or curtain it is not easy to find her outline. She requires a journey inside, a journey to save her from becoming a ghost or a silhouette, to save her from the absence that is the proposition of every image.

Adapted from Motherhood and Its Ghosts, translated by Robin Moger, to be published by Transit Books this month.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for Traces of Enayat, published by Transit Books.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep and Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping.

Keith McNally’s Rearview Mirror

From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review.

“Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it.

In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg,  Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C.

This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life. 

***

Much contemporary interest in restaurant culture gravitates toward narratives that are bustling, kinetic, chaotic. Think The Bear or the work of Anthony Bourdain—cigarettes and tattoos and arm burns; a masculine speed machine to which my psychoanalyst has implied I am quite possibly addicted. But in real life, there’s more to it. Quiet pauses, the catching of breath, the exhale of the new morning: the beats when the wave of service has crashed. McNally feels this too: “In my fifty years working and owning restaurants, my happiest times were at the Odeon, sitting down with the waiters and waitresses at three in the morning, listening to them joke about the night as they smoked, drank beer and counted their tips. Nothing since has ever matched that feeling.” Ideally something matches that feeling, but I know what he means. 

By staging meals in the same spaces every day, we disorient time. In restaurants, especially those with liquor licenses, there’s a sense in which, for the diner, it is always nighttime. A weird time glitch for service workers, too. “I feel like I was just here,” you often say to your coworker. But it has been hours, or days, or perhaps years. I used to run the kitchen at a bar. The kitchen was in the basement, but service happened upstairs. I would come in at 2 P.M., with the front of house. Light poking through the blinds, which would be raised as night unfolded, we would say that the bar was a set and we were in a one-act play. Our lives played out around the horseshoe bar, the spotlight moving from one of us to the other. 

There’s a comfort to this strange repetition, maybe even a power in its performance—especially on nights when service can feel futile and meaningless. There’s a soothing quality to the rhythm, until there’s not. One day, someone doesn’t show up for work. The play goes on, but the cast changes. We get older. Everyone moves on and out, to the next act; a sense of ending hovers. This is something McNally knows and emphasizes in the meandering memories of his life. As someone whose first real love was the theater, he is well aware of the timing and pacing of each era, the necessity of an act’s end. “I’ve screwed up so many times that I am constantly starting over,” he says, “And always for the last time.” 

A search for authenticity seems to be McNally’s most powerful motivator. In other words: “It’s okay to not play the fucking game.” He locates it—the real—briefly, which is more than many can say. Real love; real, tangible success; and abundant beauty in the places where he lives. He also locates a realness—or it locates him—in the limitations of the body and the brain. A stroke in November 2016 left him half paralyzed and without the capacity for language he’d formerly possessed. To McNally, in the mental hospital, a doctor quotes the psychologist William James, who emphasized that our bodies’ limits activate powerful emotional consequences. The consequence for McNally is the one that shows up for all of us: we don’t have that much time.

McNally is left with profound aphasia—a beautiful word for a tremendous loss. Without his old capacity for language and movement, he meets an existential futility and depression that make some logical sense. The stroke robs him of much embodiment, seemingly leading him (through the darkest places) to rely on perception and memory, tuning into a new frequency to process his own life. This profound new limitation, I think, is what makes the writing feel so urgent. On rest at McLean, he is asked to write about opening a restaurant. Instead, he finds the story of his suicide attempt flooding the page. Abandoning the original piece, he embarks on the telling of his gristly reality. This new subject arrives feverishly, the original prompt rendered arbitrary. Ever recalcitrant (his eccentric Instagram, in many ways, is an homage to rebellion), he follows this new urge: each morning he rises and writes. “I couldn’t wait to start.” he says. “Suddenly, I had purpose.”  

 This book has a real sense of mourning—normal for a restaurant person, normal for anyone. Mourning for the errors, the things that could have been expressed, for the former body and brain, for youth, for botched films and unsuccessful plays. Seeming failures and shortcomings, all transmuted into what are called regrets, but regrets that seem quite crucial to a life. Much of the book describes McNally’s arduous journey to reopen Pastis in 2019 while recovering from his debilitations of mind and body. He succeeds, and the restaurant gets two stars from The Times. He has triumphed once again but maintains a refrain that defines the book: “Once I had achieved what I was after, I no longer desired it.” Depressing? Sure. But there’s a Zen-like quality to his honesty. Restaurants will break your heart. Or, perhaps more inevitably, restaurants or not, your heart will break.

I read the book quickly and was often moved. More than anything it all made me want to get a martini—with McNally, or at least in the soft glow of one of his restaurants, where time passes, but the light stays the same. 

 

Rosa Shipley is a cook and writer living in Brooklyn. She writes the Substack Palate Cleanse.

Souvenirs

in the back, a book of Corinne Day’s photos on the set of Sofia Coppola’s the virgin suicides, out from MACK this month.

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

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

 

From Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Corbin/Kiarostami/Lacan (MIT Press):

As Ishaghpour puts it in his essay “The True and False in Art,” “It would be fair to say that, according to Kiarostami, the whole world has just one wish: being photographed, appearing in a film, being on the screen. So much so, that it would be necessary to change Descartes’s formula into ‘I have an image, [therefore] I [am].’ ” Why should women be exempt from this elemental desire to have an image—a desire so elemental that even the God of Islam is acknowledged to have pined for one. For want of an image he was hidden even from Himself.

Those who protest against the assimilation of women to an image are right to do so, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is a critical difference between an image that assimilates what it depicts (or: reduces it to an object) and an epiphanic image. The latter—or “incorruptible”—form of the image performs an epiphanic function. It directs us to attend not merely to what it shows on its surface but also to what nestles in its shadow. One of the most famous illustrations of such an image is the painting of a veil by Parrhasios, which prompted those who looked at it to wonder what lay beneath it. The function of the image in this case is not merely to draw our attention to what is visible but also to what is not. 

 

A rendering by Stable Diffusion 3, in the style of Édouard Manet.

 

From Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (Verso), on the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion 3:

At its launch, SD3 might have profited from an automated cover-up function too. Just imagine the creatures in the image above all fitted with lovely abstract, sail-like covers. The generator could even have used the oversized tablecloth to wrap all four figures up into a single Christo-themed package. Just as the Berlin Reichstag looked much better when Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped it in 1995, Stable Diffusion’s creatures would have benefitted aesthetically from an abstraction cloak (which might also have hidden the disturbing puppeteering issue going on in the right hand side of the rendering).

 

In her Souvenirs (David Zwirner), first published in French in 1835, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, court painter to Marie Antoinette, writes:

Since I have already told you, dear friend, how much attention I excited at promenades and other sights, so much so that I often had crowds around me, you can easily understand that several admirers of my countenance made me paint theirs also, in the hope of pleasing me, but I was so absorbed in my art that nothing had the power of distracting my thoughts. Besides, the moral and religious precepts inculcated by my mother protected me from the seductions with which I was surrounded. Fortunately for me, I had never read a single novel. The first I read (it was Clarissa Harlowe, which interested me extremely) was not till after my marriage; up to that time I read only religious books, The Lives of the Holy Fathers, among others, for everything is contained therein, and a few class books belonging to my brother.

But to return to these admirers. As soon as I discovered that they wanted to gaze at me with les yeux tendres, I painted them with the eyes averted, which prevented them from regarding the painter. And then, at the least movement round of their eyes, I said, “I am just at the eyes,” which was annoying for them, as you can suppose.

 

From Sarah Bilston’s The Lost Orchid: A History of Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press), a history of nineteenth-century “orchidelirium” and the search for a rare orchid:

[The lost orchid] was rediscovered at a ball in Paris, in a lady’s corsage … where “an orchid enthusiast attached to the British legation saw it. He looked once, twice (in fact as often as etiquette would permit a gentleman to do).”

 

From Jordan Thomas’s When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World (Riverhead):

The Spanish were not alone in their hatred of flames. They were, rather, caught in a global wave of fire suppression that, at this particular historical moment, Europeans carried to every habitable continent. In 1749, the same year Junípero Serra arrived in the Americas, Pennsylvania passed its first fire ban. A few years later, the New England colonies restricted fire “as a check upon that very destructive practice taken from the Indians.” During that same period, Dutch trading corporations began executing Indigenous South Africans for burning the land. Meanwhile, British officials lamented that “the wild tribes” of India were “devastating the forests,” leaving “a heap of ashes and irreversible ruin in their wake.” As French industrialists colonized Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, they complained about “the fires started by the natives,” which were “the plague of Indochinese forests.” Even in Ireland, where farmers and shepherds had tended the land with fire since the end of the last Ice Age, the English, after invading, passed a 1743 law “to prevent the pernicious practice of burning land.” Everywhere European colonizers laid their claims, they extinguished fire.

 

From Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

If one is destined to live as a Sisyphus in an abyss, there is good sense in distinguishing a meaningful boulder from insignificant pebbles. A Sisyphus making a boulder out of a pebble would only become a comedy. In the past few months I’ve developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?

 

Meaning

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

I’m walking, as I do pretty much every day, along the Eastern Promenade near my home in Portland, Maine, when I feel my wedding ring slip off. Luckily, my hands are in my jeans, so no harm done. I slip the ring back on without breaking stride and return to contemplating Casco Bay. I make it another ten yards or so before it happens again. When the ring slips off my finger a third time, I give up and leave it there at the bottom of my pocket. Though the jeans I’m wearing are relatively new, I double-check anyway to make sure there’s no hole in the pocket. Having read Tolkien, I know some rings want to be lost, others to be found, and I’ve already lost one wedding ring, though that was decades ago.

The ring in my pocket doesn’t actually want anything, of course. It’s just a piece of metal and has no meaning other than what I attach to it. It’s sliding off my finger because it’s January and bitter cold and my skin is dry and—­who knows?—­maybe I’ve lost a couple pounds. As I said, it’s perfectly secure right where it is, yet here I am fretting about its safety and unable to reconcile its being in my pocket when it belongs on my finger.

My parka has a tiny pocket with a zipper, and I consider putting the ring there, but that would further distance it from the finger it’s supposed to be on. Also, the zipped pocket of my parka carries its own risks. I’m seventy-three and my memory is becoming porous. Sometimes I have to page back through whatever novel I’m working on because I can’t remember the name of a character who’s been absent from the last couple chapters. And like many men my age I too often find myself in front of the open refrigerator, peering at its contents in the hopes of spotting the reason I’m standing there. Am I even in the right place? Is what I’m looking for in the washing machine? The silverware drawer? The pantry? If I put the ring in the pocket of my parka where it can’t possibly fall out, will I forget doing so? If so, then two or three years down the road the ring will go with the parka to Goodwill, and in the meantime I’ll be left to contemplate what it means that I’ve managed to lose not one but two wedding rings. To some people—­maybe even to me—that might appear subconsciously intentional. My therapist, if I had one, would surely agree, which is why I don’t have one.

Part of the reason I’m fretting is that this would be a terrible time to lose the ring. For the last several months my wife has been suffering from headaches that we’ve been unable to diagnose. MRIs and biopsies seem to have ruled out the most terrifying scenarios, but there’s something scary about not knowing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which reacquainted all of us with mortality and the uncertainty of the future, realities that in the beforetimes we managed to sequester in the back of our brains. To lose my wedding ring at a time when my wife’s health is in question would mean something, wouldn’t it? Yes? No?

Okay, so now I’m going to tell you another story about this same ring, one you may find difficult, maybe even impossible, to believe.

As I said, my wife and I reside in Portland, but for many years we lived up the coast in Camden, where we bought a large, rambling house. It had been on the market a long time because it was old and needed a lot of work and was located on busy Route 1. The first couple years we were in it we spent a small fortune replacing windows, shoring up the back deck, updating some old knob and tube wiring so the place wouldn’t burn down, renovating the impossibly dated kitchen and purchasing new stainless-steel appliances. Money well spent, because our Camden years were wonderful. Our daughters came of age in that house, and when they went off to college and later moved away to begin their own adult lives, Barbara and I threw raucous, wine-soaked dinner parties for our friends, many of whom were also empty nesters. For the first time in my life I was able to write full-time, an unbelievable luxury. Barbara, an office administrator, got in the spirit of things by shifting gears and becoming a realtor. Summers, we had loads of visitors. Okay, life wasn’t perfect. (Did I mention the summer visitors?) I was traveling a lot and Camden was two hours from the airport in Portland, but all in all it was a magical decade and a half of good health, freedom from financial anxiety and general well-being, and it is in this happy context that I offer the story that many will disbelieve, in whole or in part.

But here goes. I’m in our renovated kitchen. I’ve just returned something to the fridge. I’m hurrying because, well, I’m always hurrying, even when there’s no reason to. When I close the

refrigerator door and head to the sink, I’m simultaneously aware of two things—that my wedding ring is not on my finger and that, just a split second before, it was. Time stops while I wait for the inevitable plink of the ring landing on the floor or a countertop. But … no plink. I examine my ring finger, half expecting to find it there, because, though I sensed its absence, I didn’t actually feel the ring slip over my knuckle and off my finger, like I would a decade later walking along the Eastern Promenade. But no, the ring is not on my finger. It seems impossible that it could be inside the refrigerator, but I check anyway.

Maybe when it slipped off my finger, it landed on something soft. A bag of spinach maybe, or a wedge of Brie. But no, it’s not in the fridge. I know this for a fact because I take every single thing out and examine the empty shelves.

When my wife returns, she finds me shining a flashlight into the garbage disposal. The ring, I’m theorizing, flew through the air, landed noiselessly on the rubber seal put there by manufacturers to keep dimwits from sticking their fingers into the disposal when it’s running, after which the ring slipped, sans plink, into the mechanism. Wildly improbable, you say? Maybe, but if you’ve read Sherlock Holmes, then you know that once all plausible explanations have been ruled out, the only remaining explanation, no matter how far-fetched, must be true. My wife has not read Sherlock Holmes and does not share his logic, and she demonstrates this by turning on the garbage disposal. I wince, fully expecting to hear the sound of my wedding ring being chewed to bits. But again … no.

I should be grateful to have been proven not just wrong but borderline lunatic, but I’m not. My wife’s explanation for the missing ring makes elegant use of Occam’s razor. The ring slipped off my finger earlier in the day, or the day before, or last week, and I’ve only now noticed its absence. I am, like my father before me, a careless man. Hadn’t I admitted as much years before when my first wedding ring went missing? Barbara had wanted to replace it with another gold-plated one, but I’d talked her out of it. The battleship-gray titanium ring we settled on instead was attractive but not terribly expensive, so that when I lost it as well, we wouldn’t feel so bad. A failure of imagination as it turns out, because here I am, staring at the stainless-steel sink of our remodeled kitchen in Camden, Maine, feeling ­really, really bad.

Now fast-forward a couple years. During this period my wife and I have discussed replacing the second ring but somehow haven’t gotten around to it. Because, really, what would be the point? I’d just lose that one, too. And since there’s no remedy for my carelessness, Barbara has had little choice but to send me out on book tours, to writers’ conferences, to the West Coast to work on film projects, as an apparent bachelor. During this same period our daughters have married and moved away. One is living in Brooklyn, the other in London. It seems unlikely they will ever live in Maine again, and with them permanently gone Camden has begun to feel remote, our large house too full of empty rooms. We think about selling the place and setting up shop in Boston or maybe on the Cape. We’ve had a great run in Camden, but all good things come to an end.

What I will miss most is the kitchen, and this is where I am when the thing you’re not going to believe happens. Once again I’m in a hurry and I go to the refrigerator, where I find what I’m looking for (back then when I opened the refrigerator door I knew what I was after), grab it with my right hand and close the door with my left. And just like that, in the time it takes to say Bilbo Baggins, the missing ring is once again on my finger.

Not instantly. It didn’t just materialize. Rather, I felt it magically slide on. That reality, however, is seriously undermined by the fact that it couldn’t have, so when I look down at my hand and actually see it there, I just about fall on the floor. Where has it been this whole time? In an adjacent dimension? But then, suddenly and blessedly, clarity arrives, and I understand. All this time the ring has been right where I put it. The handle on the fridge, like the one on the freezer, is not rectangular but rather curved, like a human ear—wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. You’d be much more likely to grab it at the top, where there’s room for your whole hand, than farther down, at the ear’s lobe, where there’s barely room for, say, your ring finger.

The day I lost the ring, I’d shut the door and without thinking slid my fingers down the handle as I turned ­ toward the sink. My ring had wedged itself into the handle’s curved bottom and remained there, patiently awaiting the return of my finger. I’d felt the ring both leave and return as a vague sensation that was difficult to ignore but also impossible to trust. Because come on, what were the odds? How many times—month after month after month—had my wife and I been in and out of that refrigerator? How many times had we slammed the door? How could it have remained there all that time? Answer? Somehow. It had somehow remained there where I unwittingly put it, not just wedged in but invisible, because you’d have to bend over at the waist to see it, and even then you’d be unlikely to because the stainless-steel handle of the door was the same color as the ring.

So. How much of this story do you believe? None? Some? All? How much should you believe? After all, I’m a professional liar. To me, though, whether or not you believe the story is immaterial. My point is that stories, by their very nature, are incubators for meaning. We tell them to entertain but also to make sense of things, or try to. Science would have us believe that very little of this world, or our experience of it, is intrinsically true. No matter how much we might want it to, the world, science argues, doesn’t mean anything. It simply is. Much of what we want to believe may well be an illusion, because in the end we have the same purpose as all other life-forms—­to successfully transmit our genes so that the species survives. Our desire to believe otherwise, to attach meaning to experience, is probably linked to our desire for agency. (Granted, not everyone is comforted by the idea of agency; some would be consoled by the lack thereof, because if free will is an illusion, then we’re off the hook, blame-­wise. Like the world we inhabit, we simply are, no need to fret over complicity.) To a storyteller, however, agency is as necessary as the air we breathe, and as natural. I’d no sooner lost my wedding ring than I began to attach meaning to the loss: it was gone because I was and had always been a careless, easily distractible man. Ironically, the ring’s return altered that narrative, but its replacement was just as heavily freighted with personal significance; my marriage, as it turned out, was strong enough to withstand the carelessness that I’d feared might doom it. Or maybe the ring’s return meant something else entirely. Maybe my wife and I were being given permission, or even encouragement, to leave Camden, to begin the next phase of our lives together. Now here was a meaning I could embrace.

Except it’s apparently not the last word on the subject, because a decade into that next and possibly final phase of our lives together, I am once again fretting as I walk along the Eastern Promenade, and not about something new but rather the same old thing. Despite accepting—­at least in the rational part of my brain—that the ring in my pocket has no intrinsic meaning, I can’t help feeling that it does. Rightly or wrongly, I often sense that the world is seeking my full attention, as if there’s something about my experience that it’s afraid I’ll miss. Which would explain why, over time, I have developed such a powerful conviction that even if the scientists are right and our lived experience has no intrinsic meaning, we are morally obligated to behave as if the opposite were true, as if divining its meaning were our primary mission.

What’s become clear during the writing of this essay—and probably should’ve been clear from the outset—is that what I’ve been fretting over all this time was never about the ring itself. It’s also clear that the meaning storytellers and other artists delight in searching for is infinitely flexible, tacking and veering with abandon as circumstances on the ground change.

Is this a bug or a feature? I’m inclined to believe the latter. We tell ourselves it’s answers we’re after, but maybe it’s the questions we love.

 

From Life and Art: Essays by Richard Russo, to be published by Knopf in May.

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are … , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls.

Man of the West: Akutagawa’s Tragic Hero

A drawing of the Noppera-bō by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

On the night of July 24, 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa swallowed a lethal amount of Veronal, slipped onto a futon beside his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was thirty-five years old. Proclaiming himself an atheist yet preoccupied by Christianity, he had written, shortly before his suicide, “Man of the West,” a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographical writer who has profound insight into all human beings but himself. Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer and one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to the son of God at a time when he suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife sometimes found him crouched in his study in Tokyo, clinging to the walls, convinced they were falling in.

Days before he died, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a crowded news conference the day after Akutagawa’s suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, “Note to an Old Friend,” commonly referred to as Akutagawa’s suicide note. The letter describes, in dark comedy, the practical banalities that undignify the grandiosity of arranging one’s own death: problems involving the rights to his work and his property value and whether he’d be able to keep his hand from shaking when aiming the pistol to his temple.

It is also a portrait of the author’s interiority in his final moments. “No one has yet written candidly about the mental state of one who is to commit suicide,” the note opens. “In one of his short stories, [Henri de] Régnier depicts a man who commits suicide but does not himself understand for what reason,” he writes. “Those who commit suicide are for the most part as Régnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation.” Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could see into the souls of all men—except his own. Perhaps he couldn’t look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motivation, there is culpability: precisely what he wanted to abdicate in death. “In my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease,” he writes instead. “I reside in a world of diseased nerves, as translucent as ice.” He mostly wanted rest, he wrote. In “Man of the West,” he writes, “We are but sojourners in this vast and confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep.”

***

Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo, fourteen years after the city became the new capital of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. His fifth story, “Rashomon,” published when he was twenty-two, heralded a force of emerging talent and went on to enter the canon of modern Japanese literature. Akutagawa wrote critically acclaimed stories, one after another—“The Nose” (1916), “Hell Screen” (1918), and “In the Bamboo Grove” (1921)—many of them still taught in Japanese high schools. Like Manet, who painted his French contemporaries wearing historical costumes in classical poses, Akutagawa often took the characters of historic Japanese legends and reanimated them with a contemporary sensibility. He was viscerally unsentimental. In “O-Gin” (1922), he describes an orphan girl who, along with her adopted Christian parents, will be burned alive unless they renounce God. The girl is the first to renounce her religion, not to save her life but because she knows it is hell where she will reunite with her dead parents. The narrator—Akutagawa always has a narrator, even in close third person—ridicules her as “the single most embarrassing failure.”

Akutagawa’s stories flourished during a time just after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, when old customs were falling away to Western influences pouring into a rapidly modernizing country. Modern Japanese literature flourished because there was a robust culture of literary magazines that published criticism, sometimes whole essays devoted to a single short story. The Japanese I-novel tradition—autobiographical novels and short stories that often mixed narration with essayistic lyric—enjoyed high acclaim with the bundan, a coterie of intellectuals, critics, and editors in Tokyo. Like the French, who adored Tokugawa-era literature and art, Japanese publishing did not stake a meaningful difference between autobiographical novels and memoir. The I-novel was said to be inherently Japanese, dating back to the zuihitsu of the medieval Heian period, a genre of autobiographical storytelling braided with lyric essay, verse, and literary criticism.

Much like contemporary autofiction, I-novel fiction often hinged on a confession, particularly unflattering, made by a narrator assumed to represent the author. The bundan praised fiction for how unlikeable its protagonists appeared, which signaled a greater risk by the author—higher stakes. In Toson Shimazaki’s A New Life (1919), the author’s stand-in discloses having sex with his brother’s daughter. Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human (1948) follows a sociopathic misogynist, an outcast of society who is locked up in an insane asylum.

Drawn to the prestige of the I-novel genre at a time when historical fiction was increasingly devalued, Akutagawa began, in what would be his late style, to experiment with autobiographical short stories and personal essays. Throughout these works, we encounter a young man who is funny and self-possessed, erudite in a comic way, uncommonly wise, and susceptible to lust and ambition. In “The Life of a Stupid Man” (1927), the narrator feels a “pain close to joy” after hearing that his mentor, the legendary Meiji novelist Soseki Natsume, has died. Regarding a cast-iron sake bottle with finely incised lines, he has an epiphany of “the beauty of ‘form.’” By listening to The Magic Flute alone, he knows that Mozart was a man who, like him, had “broken the Ten Commandments and suffered.”

Akutagawa’s suicide note is preoccupied with sin and transgression. The writer was “aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one.” He apologizes vaguely, “I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me.” From some of his autobiographical stories, published posthumously, we know that Akutagawa had an affair with the poet Shigeko Hide. He believed the affair, as he disclosed in a letter to Ryuichi Oana, his frequent cover designer, led to his suicide. In “Stupid Man,” Shigeko is pseudonymized merely as “crazy girl” and characterized as a charismatic and vicious woman. “I have not tried—consciously, at least—to vindicate myself,” he writes in a separate note to his friend Kume Masao. “Yet, strangely, I have no regrets.” What comes off the page is guilt only for his lack of guilt. One gets the sense of Akutagawa speaking out of both sides of his mouth, of someone both resisting and desiring to confess, to issue a mea culpa on his own terms.

But from what, exactly, does Akutagawa wish—or not wish—to vindicate himself? Centuries of classic Japanese literature, from The Pillow Book (1002) to The Life of an Amorous Man (1862), had already normalized the practice of adultery. A greater sin might be found in the final lines of “The Baby’s Sickness” (1923), in which Akutagawa recounts his infant son’s near-death illness. Akutagawa admits that he had once thought about writing a sketch about his child’s hospital stay but “decided against it because of a superstitious feeling that if I let my guard down and wrote such a piece, he might have a relapse. Now, though, he is sleeping in the garden hammock. Having been asked to write a story, I thought I would have a go at this. The reader might wish I had done otherwise.”

Akutagawa’s transgression is the act of writing itself, writing that takes suffering as its subject. Akutagawa allegorizes the sadomasochistic desire to tell stories about pain in his masterpiece “Hell Screen.” It tells the story of a Heian painter who can paint only from life. To paint a scene of people burned alive, the emperor arranges to have someone burned in front of the artist’s eyes. The painter agrees, but it is only during the burning when the emperor, smiling, shocks the painter by sending the artist’s own daughter, bound to a carriage, burning in flames. He watches in horror, then radiance—“the radiance of religious ecstasy.” His finished painting, the hell screen, is lauded by critics. The artist hangs himself.

The painter reaches his breaking point at the moment when he confuses his life’s realities with art’s imaginaries. This is a common theme in Akutagawa’s I-novel writing. In the posthumously published “Spinning Gears” (1927), the narrator, Mr. A., becomes convinced that pages from The Brothers Karamazov have been stitched into the middle of a copy of Crime and Punishment—presumably a hallucination. In his field of vision, he begins to see semitransparent wheels, spinning and multiplying, like the eyes or wings of the angel in the book of Ezekiel. “I opened my eyes, and shut them once again once I had confirmed that no such image existed on the ceiling,” he writes.

Born to a “lunatic” mother, Akutagawa was afraid in the years before his death that he, too, would lose the ability to tell what was real and what was not. Perhaps all autobiographical writers experience the moment when the imagination of their recorded memories begins to overwrite what actually happened. Akutagawa’s story “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” (1924), told in the third person, includes the memorable line: “He did not observe people on the street to learn about life but rather sought to learn about life in books in order to observe people on the streets.” In the beginning was the word. Here was a writer who could no longer distinguish between reality and the confabulations of his own mind.

***

For Aristotle, the tragic hero’s heroism carries the seeds of its own destruction: the tragic flaw. The tragic hero of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) possesses no flaw at all, only an inhuman, semidivine surplus that requires him “to do penance by suffering eternally.” Nietzsche’s influence on Akutagawa, of which the latter wrote often, is particularly legible at the end of his life. In “Man of the West,” there are, in addition to Christ, many other “christs,” incarnated in writers like Goethe and Walt Whitman. For their poetic temperament, these poets must suffer, like Christ, a “darkest, most desolate hour,” for “sentimentalism is easily confused with the divine.” In his suicide letter, Akutagawa writes: “I have seen, loved, and understood more than others. This alone grants me some measure of solace in the midst of insurmountable sorrows.” It is his godlike ability to see, love, understand more than others that constitutes his mortal transgression. The postscript to the letter reads: “Reading the life of Empedocles, I realized what an ancient desire it is to make oneself a god.”

By the end of his life, Akutagawa was no longer the artist watching his daughter burned alive; he was in the burning. In “Spinning Gears,” Mr. A. leaves the Imperial Hotel, where he writes, to walk in endless circles around Tokyo, over and over, like Dante’s damned. “I had sensed the inferno I had fallen into.” Only a writer as conflicted as Akutagawa—struggling between sensitivity and indifference, intellectual distance and delusions of the grandeur of his own pain—could effectively sensationalize his own mental illness as it was happening. Akutagawa’s craft was unparalleled in his generation. Here was a young man whose talent had accelerated beyond his own ability to comprehend it, much less control it.

A disordered mind: this affliction that so often appears in stories has, since antiquity, been sent by the gods. (At least as early as “The Bacchae,” of 405 B.C., Dionysus casts a vengeful spell of madness upon the entire city of Thebes.) “I was in hell for my sins,” Akutagawa writes. “I could not suppress the prayer that rose to my lips: ‘Oh, Lord, I beg thy punishment. Withhold thy wrath from me, for I may soon perish.’” In the world of literature, Akutagawa “discovered his own soul, which made no distinction between good and evil,” as he wrote in “Daidoji Shinsuke.” “I have no conscience at all,” he writes in “Spinning Gears.” To him, writing is amoral, has no compass except for the aesthetic, which is its transgression.

***

Each time I read “Note to an Old Friend,” I see a different person. I see a man convincing himself he is a god, or a god convincing himself he is human. I see someone who suffered a pain beyond empathy, immune to empathy. He fantasized about suicide the way people watch TV. A sensitive man distracted by his gifts of wisdom, he resisted the compassion of others because he had no compassion for himself. He numbed his fear with intellect, mistook self-pity for humility. He wanted to be forgiven—but never to apologize. He believed his own self-mythology was a public service.

His only happiness was in the mundane details of everyday life. Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize, quoted, in his 1968 Nobel Lecture, a passage at the end of Akutagawa’s suicide letter:

If we can submit ourselves to that eternal slumber, we can doubtlessly win ourselves peace, if not perhaps happiness, but I had doubts as to when I would be brave enough to take my own life. In this state, nature has only become more beautiful than ever to me. You love the beauty of nature, and would no doubt scoff at my contradictions. But nature is beautiful precisely because it falls upon the eyes that will not appreciate it for much longer.

Here, we find an articulation of the Japanese notion of mono no aware, the perception of beauty precisely at the revelation of its transience. Having decided to end his existence, Akutagawa begins to see clearly the beauty of every prior moment in his life, just before its extinction. The things of this world are revealed as beautiful because beauty is but a mask, however thin, for the void that constitutes its meaning. Is this why he didn’t trust the beauty that became visible only after his decision to kill himself?

Akutagawa might have felt a tremor of the spirit that he believed could be pacified only by merging with the void. There’s nothing all too special about that. Sometimes, you can see the void behind the snow falling on the river from the window of a subway car crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. You either make peace with it or you don’t. You can acknowledge the void, clutch your heart, squeeze your eyes closed, say your gratitude list, and then go on with your commute. Most of us know how to do this. We do it every day.

 

Geoffrey Mak is a queer Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Guardian, and Artforum, among other publications. He is cofounder of the reading and performance series Writing on Raving. 

On Fish Tales: A Forgotten Erotic Novel of Raw Longing and Fierce Freedom

Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan.

Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride.

The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene:

“Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room.

“Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.”

“Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?”

Brown’s wife tells Lewis that she should “disconnect [her] brain” from her private parts. Lewis takes the suggestion, leaping into another affair, with a friend, this time, named Woody. She marries him because he accommodates her drinking and her ongoing trysts with Mr. Brown.

The couple has no interest in monogamy. The very next Christmas, Lewis finds herself alone in a hotel room, calling “DIAL YOUR DESIRE” for company.

Preparing for her new lover, Lewis daubs her wrists with “a little fragrance of dianthus.” Kenny Burrell’s “Merry Christmas, Baby” fills the room. Kitty appears at her door bearing champagne, and he is “the most beautiful man I’d ever seen at any door of mine.” They go out dancing and bring another woman back to the hotel.

Throughout the novel, Lewis ricochets between affairs and nights of vodka; bouts of mania and depression; stints in jail and in the bohemian haunts of downtown New York City. Quick to abandon lovers and friends, she has no real sense of herself—until she falls in love with tall, disabled Brook. Lewis submits to his care. But a chorus of other women also jostle for the same position. Something about this act of devotion forces confrontation, and crisis. “He feels he has many reasons to live,” one of Brook’s women tells her. “You seem to have forgotten yours. Love yourself, sister.”

***

I first read the book in 2019 with great attention to Nettie’s fierce freedom. She couldn’t care less about respectability, it seemed, and she had no shame about the female body. It was less than a year after the death of Toni Morrison, who had acquired the novel. It was also one of the last books she’d worked on before leaving to write Beloved.

At Random House, Morrison deliberately chose writers involved in social movements agitating for Black people’s freedom. She worked with Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali. She also published writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, authors then shaping and deepening the tradition of Black women’s fiction. Sometimes their works revealed ambivalence about movements the authors themselves had labored in. They often told unpleasant truths about loneliness and sex and the vicissitudes of romance for a people under siege. Fish Tales both fit and expanded the lineage. It also may have appeared too soon—before literary tastes had evolved to accommodate such complexity in the mouth and mind of a Black woman artist. Nettie was passed around to different editors at the company and does not recall much revision or promotion. The novel fell out of print.

Its rediscovery began when the writer Michael Gonzales wrote a piece about it for Longreads, where I was then an editor. He had read it in the nineties, at the recommendation of his girlfriend. A few years later, it was acquired by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Its reprinting recovers a severed limb on the family tree of literature by and about Black women. While twenty-first century literary novels like The Turner House, Vanishing Half, and Luster present less-than-perfect heroines, the raw longing of Fish Tales feels distant from many novels published in the past twenty or thirty years. “Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful,” Zadie Smith wrote in an essay about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. “They take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, and spirits of history … they have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from.” Fish Tales luxuriates in its protagonist’s flaws and renders her erotic experiences without restraint. Her pleasure-seeking and her quest for self-annihilation resolve a tension between various modes of fiction writing. One could be high-minded and noble like the crusading authors of slave narratives. Or take a realistic approach, like Hurston in Their Eyes or Ann Petry in The Street. Novels marketed as street lit received little critical attention. But popular urban and erotic fiction caused a splash in the seventies and again in the nineties due to authors like Zane. Nettie pulled from it all, unflinchingly. She’d refused to choose.

***

Nettie Pearl Jones was born in the tiny hamlet of Arlington, Georgia in 1941. She is light-skinned with blue eyes because her grandfather was a white landowner in town. At five, with her immediate family, she left for Detroit. She had a daughter, Lynne, when she was seventeen, then eventually graduated from Wayne State University with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education. For nearly a decade, Nettie taught English and social studies in the public schools of Detroit. After relocating to Montreal with her second husband, she enrolled in Marygrove College for her master’s.

Late in her twenties, Nettie moved to New York and began taking courses in copywriting and advertising. In the city, she’d run into James Baldwin at various downtown haunts. She had many lovers. (“You know, orgies,” is how she put it.) She held adjunct appointments at Michigan Tech and NYU’s Gallatin School, where she taught her students the works of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. “What I would do up there in Michigan Tech, you know, was to free them. I told them ‘you can cuss, you can tell your most [private] secrets if you want to.’”

Writing with so much freedom did not come naturally to Nettie, whom I visited recently at her Brooklyn apartment. Now eighty-four, rouge adorns her cheekbones; faint lines curve around her eyes. “I wrote something and I think I was referring to female genitals,” she says. “I wrote it as politely as I could, because that’s what we’ve been taught. We didn’t even use the word pregnant. I wrote ‘Nancy’ or ‘your cute girl’ or something like that. Whatever we were told to say. And [Gayl] kept pointing at the word and was like, what’s the real word?  And I said ‘pussy’ and she told me to put that.” She was referring to her mentor, Kentucky-born novelist Gayl Jones, author of Corregidora and Eva’s Man. It was Gayl who’d given Nettie the contact information for Morrison, who’d also edited Gayl’s debut. Gayl and Nettie met when Gayl worked at the University of Michigan.

Through the years, most critics have labelled Fish Tales as semi-autobiographical. Nettie describes her writing as an embodied kind of knowing. “I’m like the piano player that sits down and finds that he or she can play without any training other than the [most] basic [instruction].” The story, heightened for fiction but sketched from real life, arrived into her mind fully formed, and she says, while writing, she felt the characters pulsing through her body. She was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her twenties. She believes that her mental illness helps her see and hear and channel the sensibilities of her characters with crisp lucidity.

Nettie says that her motivation for writing novels was money, or rather, “insufficient funds.” She hated the first edition’s cover, which showed a collage-like illustration of a brown-skinned woman lounging topless on a multi-hued quilt. Beside the woman was a pair of heels, above her head was a green-scaled fish. In the novel, fish does not refer to a seafaring creature, but to the quality, the essence of being fish, which is Black gay slang for real-live woman. In the disco- and drug-fueled seventies and early eighties, some transgender sex workers smeared themselves with fish oil, insisting that they’d smell more authentic—more like the fleshy parts of people born biologically female. Nettie also took inspiration from Jean Toomer, using an excerpt from one of his poems for the novel’s epigraph: “The human fish is intricate and hidden; the appearance of his fins are deceptive.”

She didn’t like that the cover figure was Black. “I’m Black, but I’m not a Black writer,” she says. “They put you on the Black table and then you get less sales.” She also told me she found some Black literature stuffy and staid.

Nettie published a second novel, Mischief Makers, in 1989, and many articles in anthologies and the Detroit Free Press. And she has worked off and on on a third novel she calls Puma. Mostly, the intervening years were full of struggle. She battled housing instability and addictions to alcohol and drugs, but now she is sober. “I thought I would end up like Zora,” she says, referring to Hurston, who died with much of her work out of print, cut off from most forms of literary community.

Republishing Fish Tales has recovered and assured her legacy. But I was heartened to find Nettie already living a full life. “We call it the Daisy Society,” she said. “It started when I was in the shelter.” Three women, all mothers, all struggling with an assortment of difficulties, created a close-knit sorority of sorts to look after one another. Glynda and Maria became first-year residents of the new facility alongside Nettie, and because they are two decades younger, help to make sure she runs her errands, stays on top of her medications, and eats enough nourishing meals. They go out to plays and restaurants in New York City together.

“We help each other. We make sure she’s okay,” Glynda said from Nettie’s doorway. She was born and raised in Brooklyn to parents who’d come from North Carolina and Florida. She and her mother were never close (“her mother didn’t [even] comb her hair,” Nettie says), and when her father died, Glynda became an addict.  Glynda claims the three women get along because they have experienced similar hardships. “We came up the same, you know, the hard-knock life. We had to struggle to be parents. And no one was really there for us. I see her as an older woman that’s teaching me the ropes still because both of my parents [are] deceased.”

It surprised Glynda to learn about Nettie’s career, but only so much. The elder woman had informally tutored her in reading when they still lived in the shelter. She’d helped Glynda battle the fear she’d developed as a schoolgirl because of trauma, shyness, and dyslexia. It was apparent Nettie had a background in education, but it would take time before the elder woman let her charges in on a secret: close to forty years before, she’d published a novel that had been edited by Toni Morrison.

“It was a wandering life,” Nettie writes, in the afterword published in Fish Tales’s newest edition. The slim novel has no filler, none of the laborious context-setting that many editors demand. It simply moves from moment to moment, from obstacle to pleasure and back again. The way human beings, Black, female, and everything else, actually live.

 

Danielle Amir Jackson is a writer and editor whose essays on literature, music, and film have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, and The American Scholar. Her first book, about women in the blues, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Wild Animal Tales

Edward the Leopard. Illustration by Bela Shayevich.

For Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who spent much of her childhood in Stalin’s Soviet Union shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria, storytelling began as a form of survival. “Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story—the kind that makes people hold their breath,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Paris Review’s new Spring issue. Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1938 in Moscow, went on to become a prolific writer, a darling, she says, of the noosphere, a cloud that dictated stories to her “down to the final phrase.” Beginning with her collection Immortal Love, which came out in 1988 and immediately sold out its first run of thirty thousand copies, Petrushevskaya has published dozens of collections of prose, drama, and fairy tales. A mother of three and, subsequently, a grandmother, Petrushevskaya was also always making up stories for her children. From 1993 to 1994, she published a series called Wild Animal Tales in the daily magazine Stolitsa. They feature a cast of recurring characters, including Hussein the Sparrow, Lev Trotsky, Rachel the Amoeba, a.k.a. MuMu (who splits into Ra (Mu) and Chel (Mu)), Officer Lieutenant Volodya the Bear, Zhenya the Frog, Pipa the Foreign Frog, and many, many others. As usual, Petrushevskaya’s work resists easy categorization; while all these creatures are childlike and cute, the things they get up to are squarely adult. How much should a child know about the prevalence of infidelity among mosquitoes? How old should she be when she learns about cockroaches, bedbugs, and flies huffing inhalants? In any case, it is never too late to find out the truth about the creatures who live among us.

—Bela Shayevich

 

A Domestic Scene

When Stasik the Mosquito fell for Alla the Pig, she wouldn’t even look at him. She just lay there, totally nude on the beach, fanning herself with her ears—he was too scared to even try to fly up to her.

Stasik laughed bitterly at his bad luck and his weakness. Meanwhile Alla the Pig had just one thing to say to him: “I know your type!”

Stasik pleaded that he only ever had nectar, only his female relations drank blood, he never touched the stuff. Alla the Pig, whose physique was as vast as all our wide-open spaces, was having none of it. She refused to let Stasik land on her, not for just one little second. She had this terrifying habit of making her whole body quiver that caused the hovering Stasik to fall straight out of the air as though he’d been struck, but never struck dead, which was exactly what had him so hooked—he kept on falling and falling, but he could never hit bottom.

Finally Stasik’s wife, Tomka, showed up to collect him; enough was enough. She tried to show Alla who was boss, which instantly landed her on the receiving end of an ear thwack. With the infinite patience of so many husbands before him, Stasik dragged Tomka off the battlefield, and on his way out, in passing, he finally managed to make a brief landing, brushing Alla’s incredible body with just the tips of his toes and immediately shooting back up like he’d been stung.

It turned out that Alla’s nudity had only been an illusion and that, in reality, she was covered from head to toe in a coarse stubble. Clutching his slender Tomka, the myopic Stasik took his wife home for the thousandth time, convinced for the thousandth time that there was no place like home!

 

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

 

Grandpa Eddie

The story of Edward the Leopard was a delicate, even ticklish, matter. Edward had once lived a life of leisure, racing through fields (at 160 kmh), savoring coffee and pastries, and nobody knew of his secret passion—aristocrats can be so secretive.

In the fields, Edward the Leopard had gotten a reputation among the mice for a game that he played with them using just one of his paws: tossing them up, catching them, and so on and so forth, all with only one paw.

It’s not that anything bad came of it for the mice. Edward took strict hygienic precautions, even washing his paw beforehand, but nevertheless, those mollusks from Greenpeace got word of his proclivities via a telephonogram from some mice, the parents of a certain Sophie, who’d gone to Edward’s for a quick tumble and never came home.

The mollusks sprang into action, swimming around with their banners, shooting their flares, and Edward couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation. It turned out that Sophie the Mouse, having gotten herself into Edward’s house, had chewed a hole in his dresser, hidden in one of his socks, and made a nest in which she gave birth to a litter—apparently her time had come.

The leopard was forced to adopt fifteen mice, including Sophie’s parents and grandparents going back three generations—and who could tell them apart?

However, Edward categorically refused to marry, insisting that neither the children nor the grandparents were his brethren. He even demanded blood tests (a fool’s errand), grumbling about genera, species, classes, and families, and in the end he got his way. Mstislav the Bedbug took everyone’s blood, although in the process he got so drunk on it that he answered “yes” to all subsequent questions, including those regarding the age and sex of the leopard.

The attorney Alla the Pig demanded Edward’s extradition and negotiated for alimony.

But Sophie’s kids grew up very quickly, they all intermarried, and the question of alimony became moot because the subsequent generations of mice continued living with Grandpa Eddie. Even now, whenever the mice go to the movies, they always make him babysit their kids, all of whom he scrupulously tosses up in the air with his one freshly washed paw.

 

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

 

On the Road 

Mstislav the Bedbug and Maxim the Cockroach were on the train and decided to ward off the boredom of travel with a can of pesticide. But how were they going to split it?

Mstislav the Bedbug insisted it had to be divvied up by the millimeter. He proposed opening the can using a diamond—he had inherited it from his father, who had been executed.

Maxim the Cockroach thought it unwise to try cutting into the can itself, but how else were they to proceed?

Just then Domna Ivanovna the Fly took a seat in their compartment, but although she too was a lover of pesticide, she couldn’t remember how one was supposed to partake.

They decided to toss the can out the window, then disembark at the nearest station and see what shook out. But then the fly flew out the window with the can, which was just like her, and so by the time Maxim hitched a ride in a Mercedes that happened to be going that way, Domna Ivanovna had already stripped down to her underwear and was crawling around on all fours, her fifth and sixth legs having given out, but what can you say—a party’s a party!

As for Mstislav the Bedbug, he got so impatient that he jumped out of the Mercedes before the end of the line and walked behind it the whole way, slowly imbibing the fumes.

By the time he found the party, having huffed more fumes with each step he took, Maxim the Cockroach was dead to the world, leaning against the dented can with his whiskers curled into tight spirals.

Some random village folk had joined in too and were passed out next to Maxim. And Lenka the Ant, who’d happened to be wandering by with his flock of lice, as well as the soldier beetle Andreyich, lay there entwined with his wife, Verka.

The party had been a solid success, only now Maxim had nobody to talk to about his murdered family members, and so he began to sing “The Bed Was Made,” with lyrics by Yevtushenko.

 

Pedicure 

One day Nikolavna the Caterpillar decided to change her gender and so she went to the hospital.

They bandaged her up and discharged him as Kuzma the Butterfly. The butterfly managed to fly out the door, but day after day he kept having to feel at his mustache, which kept growing fuller, wistfully reminiscing, as he circled the air, about his past on the ground.

He was now forced to travel ceaselessly, dragging his luggage behind him; airports, passports, suitcases, a razor, a pipe, long johns, six slippers, and always the greasepaint: everything always had to be handsome now!

Kuzma started to get some attention, for example from that sparrow Hussein, who offered him passionate fraternal friendship.

But something was off. Hussein was a bit too ardent for his new friend, and the shy Kuzma stopped even coming to the phone when it rang. Really, despite the mustache and the pants, Kuzma still called himself Nikolavna and, in moments of loneliness, gave himself pedicures.

 

Drawing by Bela Shayevich.

 

A Doorm

Edward the Leopard’s mother Galya couldn’t get ahold of her son. She decided to go to the post office (traveling 170 kmh) and send him a letter containing the essential points:

(1) hello (2) how are you, you are impossible to get ahold of (3) what do you mean “fine” (4) this is not news to your mother (5) it is high time you came up with something new to say (6) you’re always busy (7) so that’s why ) and where (9) don’t go running around there, the fields are dangerous (10) yes, for you (11) if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: you’re a klutz (12) but have you heard, I read in the paper that Hussein the Sparrow practically got his whole tail ripped out in the fields (13) fine, not his tail (14) then what (15) you never tell me anything (16) quit trying to hide things from your mother, I always find out (17) Edward, I can’t hear you, call me right back (18) hello (19) everyone laughs at me because I’m always the last to know (20) I’m a laughingstock (21) the article was confusing (22) so what happened then with Hussein the Sparrow, I can’t get over it (23) imagine yourself in his mother’s shoes (24) yes, I care about it as a mother and as a wild animal (25) how come (26) what’s wrong with me knowing (27) I swear I won’t tell anyone (28) what do you have against Caleria the Cuckoo (29) she is the only one who ever visits me (30) nobody needs me, an old (and here, the ink runs on the word “hag” ) (31) hag and (ink running on “nothing but”) (32) an old hag, I can hardly get around anymore, I go 100 kmh, tops (33) we can all tell where this is headed (34) the fact that you care more about Hussein than your own mother (35) and since when are you friends with that sparrow (36) Eddie, you’re nothing but a doorm (ink running on “at”). (37) and here comes Hussein, he will tell me himself (38) gotta run, bye! (39) Call me! (40) Hussein! Looking good! (not you, goodbye)—YOUR MOTHER.

 

The End of the Party

Domna Ivanovna the Fly got a craving for something sweet and started bugging Leyla the Bee, who was on her way to the garden with six empty buckets.

But Leyla didn’t want to have Domna Ivanovna over and wouldn’t agree to visit her in the trash heap either.

“Big deal!” Domna Ivanovna said and flew off into the house, where they were making jam.

But they were ready for her in there and even began trying to swat her with a wet towel.

This warm welcome made Domna Ivanova lose her bearings: she dropped into an open jam jar (three liters) and started sinking right to the bottom.

The jar was taken straight out to Domna Ivanovna’s homeland, where the fly was buried with great decorum, under all three liters of jam.

Huge numbers of Domna Ivanovna’s children gathered and the wake started, but after a while Domna Ivanovna climbed out of the jam and yelled up at Leyla, who happened to be flying by with her buckets all full, “Come on over! My treat!”

Leyla the Bee simply shrugged and replied that she didn’t need any of their slop.

However, just three minutes later Leyla was back with her buckets empty and the entire adult population of her hive with their own empty buckets in tow.

Over the protests of Domna Ivanovna and her many thousands of children, the bees worked, enraptured, until the very end of the workday.

“And where is the justice in that?” Domna Ivanovna asked Theophan the Worm, who had crawled up for some fresh air at sunset. “I invited everyone over, even those morons of labor the bees, then Alla the Pig showed up uninvited, broke down our fence, and ate everything. I barely made it out alive.”

“That’s how it always is at the end of the party,” posited Theophan the Worm.

 

The Careerist

Mstislav the Bedbug got a job as a lab assistant, but while he was still in training they wouldn’t let him do blood tests, focusing on other kinds of exams.

He dreamed of a promotion, imagining the moment he would work with a syringe, meanwhile confined to dripping the fluid with which he’d been entrusted, into thin sheets of glass.

The job wasn’t hard, but Mstislav had no opportunities for displaying his talents. At night he got depressed imagining the next day and all the smells that came with it.

“I want to take professional development classes,” he kept on repeating.

But there were still those who envied him: It was easy work, appetizing, you got clean green scrubs, and were up to your ears in the precious material, surrounded by smells. “You are nothing but a careerist, Msislav,” Domna Ivanovna the fly would say.

 

The Part

Klava the Roach decided she wanted to be in a movie so she called up her acquaintance Adrian the Mollusk.

It was as simple as that—Adrian asked her to be in a horror film, The Industrial Manufacture of Sprats in Tomato Sauce.

It was a background part, but they filmed on location by the Baltic Sea, and all of Klava’s friends saw her in the movie afterward. In one shot she lay (playing the role of a headless sprat) in a tin can, and the can began to slip, gained momentum, and suddenly there was an explosion—everything went flying into the air, with blood everywhere!

Klava laughed and laughed at her friends’ reaction: “It was only tomato sauce!”

 

Nina’s Defense 

Hussein the Sparrow got very interested in Nina the Moth and started waiting for her after work, watching her from the bushes with his eyes aglow.

Nina lived modestly. She had no appetite for these kinds of twists of fate, especially considering Hussein’s reputation (first it was Domna Ivanovna the Fly, then Tomka the Mosquito, and then that awkward affair with Kuzma the Butterfly).

But there was something attractive about Hussein the Sparrow. He had nice eyes for one thing, and strong wings he would stretch forth from the bushes, and then there were his powerful, muscular, masculine legs.

To make a long story short, things started going the way they always do, until Tolik the Goat intervened.

He ate the whole bush that Hussein always hid in. (The goat had always had a hankering for that bush, but the Greenpeace mollusks had gotten in the way.)

So when everyone started whispering about Hussein the Sparrow (identifying features: mustache, yellow glasses), Tolik began devouring the bush with everyone’s approval and even caught one of Hussein’s claws in his mouth, mistaking it for a twig, which made Hussein drop his suitcase, which fell and broke open, revealing his suspenders, his address book, some hardboiled ant’s eggs, and other masculine sundries. For example a bag of dried horse dung.

 

 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich.

Bela Shayevich is a writer, a translator, and an artist. Her most recent translation is Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia. Read her interview with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya here.

Style Is Joy: On Iris Apfel

Iris Apfel sits for a portrait during her hundredth-birthday party at Central Park Tower on September 9, 2021, in New York City. Photograph by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Central Park Tower.

Against the backdrop of a cold white room, Iris Apfel’s yellow outfit, which she wore on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, sings its own joyous song. Both here and elsewhere, Apfel, an artist and fashion designer, often paired gorgeous things sensually by color and texture, rather than by invoking some obvious theory or idea. She was not afraid to wear a yellow tulle coat with yellow silk pants (which she designed herself in collaboration with H&M). She celebrated yellow vivaciously; she took up space with yellow. With her arms raised in this picture, she looks like some sort of bishop or religious figure. Her open palms throw spectral glitter upon us. A spiritual icon. Just by looking at her, I feel her upturned palms manifesting my dreams.

Apfel famously said: “More is more and less is a bore.” This statement was in conversation with Coco Chanel’s equally famous fashion advice: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.” Apfel’s embrace of “more” surely was a celebration of life itself.

Apfel passed away in 2024. With her passing, she took away from this world a joy in everyday living and a view of the self through the lens of quotidian but bombastic fashion. She emboldened others to embrace their truest selves. Her looks asked us to dress not to gain the acceptance of others, but to be guided instead by our own visions. Her outfits combined items from high and low culture and seemingly unrelated accessories that coexist through poetic connections, all within the spirit of abundance.

My mother, Carole Lasky—an artist, art historian, art collector, and professor—passed away in 2024 as well. My life and style are forever in homage to her. My mother taught me that everyday life demands adornment, and that each day your aesthetic choices become important costumes of the self. Like Apfel, my mother worshipped abundance. She saw a sort of spiritual freedom in always embracing more. When I was a newborn baby, one of the first things she said to me was “We will have fun in this life—we will go shopping!”

And we did have fun. When I was growing up, we would go to flea markets together almost every weekend, always in search of the find that we might add to an existing collection or that might start a new one. The space of a flea market was an important classroom for me, especially as a young poet. It led me to an expansive understanding of what art could be. It taught me to resist what has already been deemed “good” art, and a formulaic sense of aesthetics. The chaotic space filled with vintage clothes and objects taught me to trust my own vision of what was beautiful.

In 2008, I wrote a poem called “Style Is Joy,” in response to a review of my first book, AWE, which stated that my poetry was all style and nothing more.

Even then, I thought: So what’s the problem with that? For a long time, I have embraced a poetics that endlessly blossoms, and a “more is more” kind of ethos when it comes to creativity. Over the years, as friends and lovers have told me to slow down–to stop writing so much, to stop collecting strange things, to stop my over-the-top expression–I have gone in another direction. For me, the act of creativity is not something to dole out in tiny crumbs. My mother taught me that creativity is endlessly generative and generous. And holy.

***

An all-turquoise look Apfel donned as part of a 2021 campaign for Zenni Optical has always been a favorite of mine. Apfel takes the basic power of monochrome and changes the world around her. She piles on bangles, necklaces, a faux-fur coat, and sunglasses, all in a blinding hue of David Hockney pool blue. Her nails and lips provide an accented tension in their complementary red, but the emphasis is on the electric turquoise and how its frequency brings the whole thing together. Texture and shape become interconnected by the high voltage of a love affair between blue and green.

Looking at her outfit, I think of the work of Louise Nevelson, whom I learned about as a child while sitting in my mother’s art history classes. Nevelson’s sculptures often marry disparate objects through a single color. Nevelson’s work reminds us how color makes a mood that can wash over anything, like the muted gold of her sculpture Royal Tide II, dated 1961–1963. In the sculpture, what might have been a wheel, a pipe, or other random household object is synthesized with the power of gold. There is a cohesion to form that is created in the monochrome, where the specific uses of each item are washed away. And yet the abstracted shapes, once everyday things, become more special within their golden symphony.

One thing I’ve always loved about Apfel’s outfits is that she seems to be trying to emulate a bird, or perhaps even a mythical creature. In a 2022 photo by Ruvén Afanador, she is birdlike and regal in a gold-and-black Giambattista Valli gown. Her golden necklace looks more like feathers than metal, spilling out from her neck. Her large gold bangles are armor or brass instruments, ready to herald a new day. There is something regal even to her pose, with her graceful, hot red fingernails upon her cheek, framing her face and iconic black eyeglasses. Her gown falls out of the frame, suggesting that the magic of a good costume is infinite.

 The Afanador portrait of Apfel reminds me of portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. Although, in depictions of her, I suppose there are no Iris Apfel glasses. Instead she sits in her sixteenth-century attire, her ruffled collar fanned out under her chin like a glamorous and lacy king cobra. Her gown emptying out of the frame of her portraits, stretching into an endlessness.

***

My mother told me that if you want to be an icon, you should pick one distinct thing to wear and keep wearing it. For Apfel, that must have been glasses. Glasses were always important to Apfel. All you need to see are her legendary large frames to know that an illustration is meant to signify her. In a 2022 W Magazine interview, she described collecting “interesting spectacles” in a box when she was very young. For Zenni Optical, Apfel designed a series of her glasses as affordable frames. I myself own several pairs, a few of which can be seen in the photo below.

Photograph courtesy of Dorothea Lasky.

Zenni has a cool service where, if you have an online account, they will do engravings for free up to a certain character limit. On the glasses above I engraved titles of books I’m working on or parts of poems, so that I can absorb the energy as I’m writing. As I write this, I am wearing the ones engraved with “The Green Lake,” which is the title of a book of poems I’ve just finished. It’s wonderful to wear glasses that Apfel herself designed. It’s as if I am able to see the world through her eyes.

***

Photograph courtesy of Dorothea Lasky.

Above is one of my mother’s paintings, likely done in the early seventies. I recently found out she titled it Red Things, which I had never known while she was alive. I saw the title written in the sweeping strokes of her familiar signature as I was moving it to a more permanent place in my apartment. Her title resonates with my poem titles, which often focus on simple and brutish descriptions of objects. It also reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s “pink things” from her poem “Fever 103°” (the same phrase engraved on my Apfel Zenni glasses above). In Plath’s poem, the line reads: “By whatever these pink things mean!” For me, “Fever 103°” has always been about the dissolution of ego in the afterlife. Perhaps the only eternal truth about existence is a grappling with the presence of things.

I’ll never get to ask my mother directly what moved her to call the painting Red Things. Maybe it was simply a celebration of the color red and the spirit infused in things that find themselves in the frequency of that color. An homage to the idea that “art is what is,” as she might say.

I’m not sure what the purpose of life is. Perhaps it is to be creative. That’s what I keep coming back to, at least.

Mother, as I venture through the uncharted waters of life now without you, I’ll think of the divinity of red things and their endlessly generative power. In your honor, I’ll try to think of more, not less.

 

Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e)).