The Paris Review's Blog, page 99

Alternative Routes: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin

Photo by Lauren Elkin.

Lauren Elkin’s new book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is composed of short diaristic notes that she made on her phone while traveling twice weekly to her university teaching post in Paris between 2014 and 2015. The idea that they might be collected in a volume and published did not occur to Elkin at the time of writing; the purpose of her project then was a personal one. It encouraged her to “observe the world through the screen of my phone, rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world,” she writes in the book’s introduction. At the core of Elkin’s work is a commitment to noticing, paying attention to the everyday and the communal places we share and move through. Inspired by the cataloguing methodology of Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux’s journal keeping, No. 91/92 is a thrillingly intimate work. In a recent interview, Elkin describes it as a “hinge book,” since writing it facilitated a shift in how she brought together external influence and direct personal experience, bringing about “a transition from feeling like a secondary source, to feeling like I could be a primary source.” Elkin is an incisive, playful, sensitive, and deeply curious thinker. We exchanged emails regularly over just a few weeks, a period of time that saw us both visiting friends and family as the world was beginning to open up again. It seemed apt that we were discussing the origins and significance of a book written in transit while we were both on the move, and I felt fortunate to have such a smart and fun traveling companion to help me navigate back into public space as a writer, as a woman, as a body.

 

CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

I read an essay recently by Sontag about Elias Canetti and his capacity for admiring other writers, such as Broch and Karl Kraus. “Writing in 1965, Canetti evokes the paroxysms of admiration he felt for Karl Kraus in the twenties while a student in Vienna, in order to defend the value for a serious writer of being, at least for a while, in thrall to another’s authority.” I love that idea of being “in thrall” to another writer—it seems more exhilarating and entwining than the rather more contrived and oft recommended exercise of merely imitating an author’s writing style. I know Sontag’s writing had a big impact on you when you were starting out as a writer—can you recall the nature of that impact and how you sought to attest to it? What “value” do you think there is in admiring another writer to the extent that one is “in thrall” to them?

LAUREN ELKIN

I love the Canetti essay—that’s one that really means a lot to me. I remember reading it in grad school and being struck by this part: “The message of the mind’s passions is passion. I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, ‘Relax!’ says Canetti. His work eloquently defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.”

This is something I felt so strongly about in my twenties, at a time when there seemed to be no room in the mainstream literary culture for that Sontagian seriousness. Now, rereading this passage, I realize the lines just before are: “Canetti is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words, and much of his work makes the effort to communicate something of what he has learned about how to pay attention to the world. There is no doctrine, but there is a great deal of scorn, urgency, grief, and euphoria.”

I had to purge the defensive need to carve out a place for seriousness, in a mode that would not be macho or snide—writing in the mother tongue rather than the father tongue, as Sara Fredman recently put it in a great essay on Kate Zambreno—in order to see that in attending to the world, in a mode free from doctrine but fueled by urgency, I could speak as a writer.

I was in thrall, as you put it, to Sontag all throughout my twenties and thirties because she was really the only model I could see for how to write rigorous criticism for a nonacademic audience. So throughout my twenties and thirties I wrote long, dense essays—and, of course, my Ph.D. thesis—under the sign of Sontag. Looking back at that writing, I can see the places where I was in thrall to the seriousness she saw in Canetti, and the places where I was willing to experiment with the attentiveness she saw in him. You can see the conflict in Flâneuse—the dutiful, I-am-a-responsible-critic sections, and the parts where I let the work go where it would. The split is there in Sontag’s work as well. She wanted to be celebrated for her fiction, not her essays—as a practitioner of literature, not only a critic of it. I’ve been trying, in my writing since then, to find a way to write with both seriousness and levity, to find a way to be both critic and practitioner at once. And keeping these diaries was, I think, a way of writing myself out of that critical obedience and into a kind of hybrid disobedience.

BENNETT

When I began work on what became Pond I thought I was creating something for the theater. At the time I was really interested in postdramatic theater, which was, is, a movement that seeks to unharness theater from drama and all the imperatives that the dramatic form enshrines, such as plot and character. What excited me about this was that I love the aliveness of theater, yet—and this is something that Peter Brook writes about so well—much of what goes into a theatrical space has already been worked out, and rehearsed, and finessed. So something pre-existing and sealed up and impervious gets slotted into this live, living space—flattening it, making it “deadly.” That paradox was something that both Artaud and Brecht, through very different means, were railing against. I didn’t know you had a background in theater, though I’m not surprised to learn that. Many writers I enjoy—Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride, Jon Fosse, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras, Sartre, Beckett—have been involved with or have written for theater. When I think about it now, what engages me about all these writers’ books, including yours, is the phenomenological dimension of their work, which I can engage with and am moved by much more than say a purely psychological mode. These writers are really gifted in being able to create a sense of presence in their work—which is something I find really exciting, and works quite differently than character, which is a more psychologized, Stanislavskian representational model of selfhood. It’s a quality that’s certainly there in your new book, Notes on a Parisian Commute, which could be read as coming out of an overwhelming desire to be in the world, and experience the world as and through a body. A female body. Does that align in any way with what was going on when you started work on it?

ELKIN

I’m so nostalgic for my acting days because I was so rooted in my body then. You know what it’s like—in acting class, in rehearsals, you’re always rolling around on the floor, or breathing while draped over a carpeted block, jumping around, playing with your voice. I have a good friend who’s a novelist who trained at Jacques Lecoq in Paris, Yelena Moskovich, and she has a very physical approach to writing her novels, finding her characters’ physicality, their walks, pacing around her flat to work out a section or dialogue or whatever. You feel it in her books—they’re so alive, the language is so visceral. I really admire that. Or Deborah Levy, another writer whose work I revere, I’ve heard her say in interviews that she learned economy by writing for the theater—in hearing your words spoken aloud you learn to strip back language to its most essential form. You want only writing that’s going to muscle its way to the back of the auditorium. Pond, too. I love that book so much. When language is in this hyperalert state—the most ready image is a boxer hopping from foot to foot—you can see every gesture, every move, with such clarity.

In my post-Sontagian life as a writer this is exactly what I’m after, and I can’t find my way to it writing pure criticism. I have to be in the text. I have to be playwright and actor. Except—to come back to your observation about Peter Brook—the most interesting writing, writing that invites more writing, isn’t the space of the finished, polished performance, but the black box of rehearsal and experimentation.

It’s really the most politically urgent kind of writing for women to do, because it stages a confrontation with the female body. By which I don’t mean we forever need to be rebelliously defending or promoting the female body as abject—though that’s not a bad thing to do—but we need to find ways of telling the truth of our experiences as bodies, to paraphrase Woolf. That’s the greater challenge, to normalize the female body in all its manifold physicalities. That’s the argument of my next book, anyway, and I hadn’t realized until I read your question that it’s also what I was up to in the bus book.

Jàures Paris. Photo by Lauren Elkin.

BENNETT

I’m writing this on my phone while sitting on the train, waiting for it to depart for Dublin from Galway. It’s 7:30 A.M. It feels synchronistic to be corresponding with you in this way, since it mirrors how you wrote Notes on a Parisian Commute. One of my favorite passages from that text is this one: “I want to be polite to her to show that I too am fair and civilised and well-brought-up. But my voice betrays me. It’s rough and uncouth, the voice of fatigue and illness, the uncontrollable, the abject. I am a bit more body than mind.” This idea of your body giving you away resonated so much! And maybe, yes, by involving the body in whatever ways we can in our work, we introduce an unpredictable, uncontrollable quality to the prose. Another passage that struck me is: “This bus is on diversion. The driver breaks the fourth wall to tell us. Then so do the passengers, consulting and commiserating with each other whereas ten minutes ago they pretended they were invisible. All of us departing from convention.” So here we have a theater analogy! I feel that your writing breaks the fourth wall—the way you describe overcoming an airtight doctrinal approach alludes to “urgency” and “disobedience,” uncontrollable qualities and energies that disrupt the surface of the text, break the fourth wall, not to labour the point. The notebook form is always alert and open to diversion, it thrives on it—pre-existing, rehearsed thoughts don’t really have a place in the pages of a notebook. I, too, am very much drawn to writer’s journals and am also inspired by Perec and Ernaux. What I love about Notes is that you left them exactly as they are. You didn’t use them as a basis for a longer serious essay with bigger things to say. There are a few pages at the very end where you reflect on the project and you explore some ideas around community and the everyday, and that feels very natural and unforced. Did it cross your mind at any stage to use these notes for something more weighty and analytical? I’m so glad you didn’t! It means as a reader I get to have those thoughts, I get to participate in generating and understanding the significance of these snapshot moments. It made for a completely engaging and active reading experience.

ELKIN

There’s this great Erving Goffman book called Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, and he talks about the phenomenon of public transportation, where you have all these strangers in small tight spaces who ignore one another, and how this might seem to be a violation of some social contract, not to acknowledge our fellow travelers, but that actually it’s an immense sign of respect not to acknowledge them, to leave them alone. Civil inattention, he called it. It’s a form of social courtesy. It’s also a form of according people their privacy, which I hope I didn’t transgress by writing about the people I saw on the bus. I didn’t talk to them or anything, just quietly noted what they were doing, or wearing, or saying.

But yes, I think those moments when someone breaks through through the facade and acknowledges that we’re all doing this thing together are so interesting. Not in a one-on-one sense—I’m one of those people who hates to be chatted up on a plane. I like finding out how things work, going behind the scenes, reading a writer’s diaries and letters, and those moments I describe in the book are a bit like that. The departure from convention that makes you aware of how the convention functions. And yes, I think that’s how I feel about writing as well—my own and other people’s. Which isn’t to say I love postmodern self-consciousness, I really don’t, but it’s great when you can feel that a work is thinking about its form instead of taking it for granted, following a blueprint or a behavioral mode. I love Elizabeth Bowen for this reason—it seems like she’s writing pretty conventional novels, they have chapters, they seem to be about recognizable people in recognizable situations, but the syntax of her sentences is completely baroque, they double back on themselves, they twist into cubist sculptures, she’s doing all this weird stuff with temporal inversion and weird slips of address in The House in Paris. You could read that novel as a straightforward story about childhood, or loss of innocence, but she’s up to something so much more devious. She’s a very theatrical novelist! She’s someone who’s had a huge influence on my work, across all genres.

It’s Perec and Ernaux who taught me to do the thing you’re talking about, though, of just letting the work build up by accretion instead of trying to turn it into something more monolithic. It did occur to me, when I was trying to find a publisher for the book, that I ought to work up the second half of the book into something along those lines. The concern was that the notes themselves were “slight.” And they may be! But what is wrong with slight? How are we asking books to be when we dismiss them for being slight, what isn’t in them that “should” be there?

Paris Gare du Nord. Photo by Lauren Elkin.

BENNETT

I spent yesterday afternoon being what I call “really general,” which involves going into shopping centers and looking around major chain stores for stuff like sleeping attire and leggings and storage boxes. I spent a lot of time in TK Maxx reading the back of serum bottles, comparing their various antiaging ingredients. Then I went to Marks & Spencer, tried on a couple of puffa coats, bought some plums and reduced free-range chicken, and when I came out I sat on one of the gray seats that go around a big pillar and checked into a flight I’m taking tomorrow. I could have done that at home, it occurred to me, but I was kind of reveling in this sensation of being really general and undistinguished. I felt curiously unburdened. Experience is increasingly curated and there’s a pressure for everything—everything!—we do to be special in some way. It’s a relief not to always aspire, to feel fine with being just another passerby, one of the crowd, a woman with her shopping looking at her phone. Unburdened by the weight of wanting every moment to contribute to a specific idea I have about myself. So what. So what. That’s the quality in the bus journals that captivated me, and it’s a dimension of living that’s always there in Perec and Ernaux. I’m really looking forward to reading Exteriors, which takes the form of journal entries that Ernaux made while living on the outskirts of Paris. I’d love to hear how this book inspired your own, and if my somewhat vague notion of “being really general” resonates with you in any way—what might this apparently slight and anonymous mode of being in the world consist of? Why does it occasionally feel so good?

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s missive. I realize what I was describing is in line with something I experience in a variety of modes—a generalizing of the self. I recall experiencing it when I lived in a cottage and cut up vegetables. Aubergines especially. Women have cut up aubergines for centuries in a range of countries, and that was apparent to me, bodily and emotionally, whenever I prepared them. So even though I might well have been on my own, I didn’t feel alone at all. My self wasn’t an individual separate entity, it was a continuation, a function of womanhood more generally, doing what had already been done and perhaps containing the potential to further the female project.

ELKIN

“Being general”—I love it. Not to be confused with “being basic.” I’m sitting here in a neon-green hoodie I bought when I was being general in Target in Arizona. We’re in the realm of sociology now. Paging Henri Lefebvre!

I do love that about the bus. In this project in particular I was becoming aware (in a way I wouldn’t fully be until later) of the way that social media participates in this curation of the self—it’s not just about maintaining or escaping from an idea you have about yourself, but of maintaining it online. And I could say that the bus project was a means of turning away from that online curation, that I purely used my phone to look at the world around me, but I didn’t. I would swipe between apps even as I kept the diary, and there are loads of entries about tweeting or seeing things on social media. The social media voice definitely creeps in, in the occasional lack of punctuation—which I love, that’s something that I find very freeing about social media voice—the ironic, but now, to me, dated, hashtagging, the use of concepts like manspreading, it’s all very The Internet in 2014. So the bus book—with its cover that is both a picture I took for myself on my phone and love in its own right, and also something I posted on Instagram—is both outward-facing in an anonymous way, and also outward-facing in a curatorial way. Isn’t a writer’s oeuvre another form of self-fashioning?

Annie’s book was an important one for me. I don’t think I’d have been able to conceive of what I was doing as a book if it hadn’t been for hers. But her project is different to mine, even in some ways opposed. She is writing purely about the people and things she observes on her trips in and out of Paris on the RER, in the supermarket, in parking lots—she doesn’t write about herself at all. It is a strictly social kind of observation, you can see a direct line to the “we” voice of The Years. What can “we” observe about the world together—that’s a level of observation I think resonates with your notion of “being general.” But there are of course different ways of doing that. If I cling to the I within the we it’s to acknowledge that my ways of seeing are not other people’s, and I can only speak for myself. But that we is important. I think it’s the work of life-writing to find a way to negotiate between the two, work that forgets the group is going to, perhaps rightfully, be accused of navel-gazing or solipsism.

Your point about gendered generalizations is a good one—you are so good on vegetables and cottage life in Pond. I couldn’t help noticing the women more than the men on the bus. The older women especially. I find myself studying them more and more the older I get, because I know I’m going to be one soon, and I’m looking for models. I want to do the transition into the next part of my life in a smarter way than I did the transition into young womanhood. I didn’t have the right models then or even the tools to know how to find them. Maybe if social media had existed then I would have had an easier time finding them. I think being raised in the American suburbs was a very bad kind of being general, for me. Now I’m thinking about Checkout 19, which I’m in the early stages of reading. I don’t want to presume that’s an autobiographical book, but the teenager in those opening chapters seems to have a more functional sense of her own difference than I did. I knew it was there but I didn’t know what it meant or what to do with it because I didn’t recognize myself anywhere. I think that was the beginning of being a feminist—feeling aslant to everything.

BENNETT

There’s an entry in the diary where you mention these older women who eschew the Metro and always take the bus. I couldn’t help but imagine that with age they had developed a fear of leaving the earth’s surface and descending beneath it into the ground. Perhaps once they got down there they’d never be able to come back up again? I’d love to include those lines here, the way you describe them is spot-on and so evocative—ordinary and mythical at the same time, but I can’t since I don’t have the book with me. Throughout the journal there’s this subtle, tentative, age-sensitive thread that registers and reflects upon the presence and appearance of woman, young and old, with various attitudes of curiosity, mournfulness, criticism, pleasure. It really registered with me. We are in that zone where we are neither young nor old, but know with each day that passes that we are moving inexorably from youth to seniority. It’s a profoundly unsettling transition, as confusing and tectonically disruptive as adolescence. Checkout 19 draws on those experiences, and I’m curious about what you mean by the narrator having this “functional sense” of her own difference. I had a little chuckle at that. Being back in my hometown these last couple of days has brought back to me just that circumstance you describe, of how distressing and lonely it was to grow up somewhere where not only could you not recognize yourself anywhere in the immediate environment, but nobody seemed to recognize you either.

Porte de Versailles. Photo by Lauren Elkin.

ELKIN

This is the passage: “You never see people begging on the bus. Taking the bus you only see a certain kind of person. There are some women who just to look at them makes you think they smell like cigarettes and heavy secret smells and would get eye makeup all over your pillow. These women I often see on the bus.”

It’s hard to access the right mental state during a commute to appreciate other people’s idiosyncrasies, and reflect on where our observations of them leave us. But I think one thing that’s different about the bus is that it’s still connected to the world in a way the Metro, deep underground, isn’t. The buses in Paris can get busy, but rarely as crammed as the Metro during rush hour. So they create all this physical and mental space to look at other people and ruminate. We look at other people to know how to be—we compare ourselves to them to make adjustments. They’re not even only older women, these women. They’re just other. Other women are such a mystery to me. How do they do this thing of being embodied and socialized as female? What can I learn from them about sex, fashion, motherhood, aging, being?

And I’ve got my eye on the younger women, too, as you do. Watching the millennials, the oldest of whom are a few years younger than me, get older and be displaced by Gen Z, or whatever they’re called, has been weirdly really nice—it’s nice to settle into being older. Freeing.

About your book, Checkout 19—functional in the sense that her awareness of her difference seems to be something she has absorbed and can work with. There’s a self-awareness there that I didn’t have, of how the difference could perhaps be cultivated and become useful—even if it’s unclear how.

 BENNETT

“Other women are such a mystery to me.” Wow, yes, that really hits on something. In Checkout 19, reflecting on how women appeared to me when I was a young girl, I write, “I saw more of women than I did men, yet at the same time I felt I saw nothing of them. The way they managed to be practically omnipresent yet not really here at all was continually disquieting.” I love this looking for and at women that goes on in so much of your work. It’s important that we see each other.

 

Photo of Lauren Elkin. Francesca Mantovani for Gallimard.

 

Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, Fish Out Of Water, and Checkout 19. 

The Review’s Review: Quiet Magic

We Work Again includes the only known footage of the Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles through the Federal Theatre Project. Above, a photograph of the production: Charles Collins and Maurice Ellis in act III, scene 4 of the play.

I am a lover of old things. I could spend hours strolling through vintage furniture stores or flipping through clothing catalogs from the past, but my favorite is undeniably archival video. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of streaming links: The Black Film Archive. The site, which aggregates lists of comedies, westerns, dramas, and documentaries made between 1915 and 1979, is updated each month, and accepts submissions from the public. It’s free, and equal parts educational and entertaining. This week, I watched We Work Again, a video commissioned by a New Deal–era public works project, in which a narrator describes an idealized version of segregation in the United States over videos of Black life in the thirties. It was moving footage that I likely would have never come across otherwise. This weekend, I think I’ll watch Two-Gun Man from Harlem, a musical western about a deacon who becomes a cowboy. —Lauren Williams

I’m a lurker on Facebook, always about to delete my account, and will by year’s end. Right. But some months back, as if to redeem the bad faith of Facebook “connectivity,” I started seeing on that platform extraordinary poems by Katie Farris—riddling, devastating, peculiarly spritely poems about death, cancer, Emily Dickinson, the limits of mind and body:

Will you be
my death, breast?
I had asked you
in jest and in response
you hardened—a test
of my resolve? Malignant
magnificent palimpsest.

Will you be
my death, Emily?
Today I placed
your collected poems
over my breast, my heart
knocking fast
on your front cover.

These (from “Emiloma: A Riddle & An Answer”) and other poems are in Farris’s 2021 chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving; her first full-length collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is due out from Alice James in 2023. The heart knocks fast with and for this poet, the top of one’s head blown off, as Emily Dickinson almost said. —Maureen N. McLane

The Lehman Trilogy may or may not be a good play—it’s impossible to trust yourself to form an objective opinion once you’ve been seduced by its irresistible themes of money/power/patrilineage, as impossible as it is to avoid whatever happens to your soul once you’ve been given a corner office on Wall Street (I assume). I can say certainly that there are monologues that trace with devastating clarity the decades of manipulation that kicked the American people into today’s late capitalism like a can, three very talented actors in three very distinguished overcoats, and nearly three hours of deftly executed third-person narration. —Lauren Kane 

The Japanese director and screenwriter Ryusuke Hamaguchi has become one of my favorite filmmakers. His movies, curiously intimate and subtly strange, attest to the mysteries of our selves and of the people we love—and to the strength of the bonds we share anyway. His latest, Drive My Car, which screened last week at the New York Film Festival, is a loose adaptation of a story from Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Men Without Women. In it, Yusuke Kafuku, an actor and director, grieves the sudden death of his screenwriter wife, Oto, haunted by the fact that he never revealed he was aware of her infidelities. Driving his red Saab, he listens again and again to the tapes she once recorded to help him practice lines for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. When he stages a production of the play at a festival in Hiroshima, he draws his cast from across the continent, the actors performing their roles in native tongues from Tagalog to Korean Sign Language—and his star is Takatsuki, a disgraced heartthrob he believes is the man he once, unnoticed, walked in on with his wife. Meanwhile, Kafuku chafes at the theater’s mandate of a personal driver, a laconic young woman named Watari, but as the days pass and Oto’s cassettes play, a friendship begins to unfurl out of their silences. I say all this, but the plot can only say so much: Hamaguchi has a gift for subtle shifts in feeling, for the moments life takes on the texture of candlelight. He works with, as Dennis Lim put it in his introduction to the film, something of a “quiet magic.” At a home-cooked dinner with his dramaturge, Yusuke is asked what he thinks, after his initial protestations, of his driver. She is so skilled, he says, he forgets he’s not alone, forgets he’s in a car. Sitting in the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, I suddenly remembered I was watching a movie. Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy opens at Film Forum on October 15; Drive My Car will open there on November 24.
—Amanda Gersten

Still from Drive My Car, courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.

Cooking with Amparo Dávila

Photo: Erica Maclean

The Mexican writer Amparo Dávila (1928–2020) is known for uncanny, nightmarish short stories full of strange visitations and sudden violence. Reading The Houseguest, a sampling of her work translated into English by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, my thoughts turned toward several people I love who are suffering from alcohol dependency, depression, or other mental health afflictions worsened by the isolation and unemployment caused by COVID-19. These conditions sometimes feel to me like evil spirits, loosed by social chaos, and they are all the more disturbing because of the ways they trick their hosts into participating with them. I find myself waking up at night worrying, strategizing useless things I could do, and I’m possessed by dark thoughts. Viewed in this light, the world teems with demons of the kind Dávila writes about—there’s nothing unrealistic about them.

Born in 1928 in the Zacatecas region, Dávila moved to Mexico City in 1954 and became the secretary and protégée of the prominent writer Alfonso Reyes. Though never prolific, she eventually won almost every major award in Mexico, and in 2015 the country’s first prize for fantastical fiction was named after her. Dávila has an ingenious way of setting up an eerie premise and then withholding something crucial from the reader. In one of the stories in The Houseguest, a woman’s bedchamber becomes a prison each night, but we don’t find out what happens there; in another, a man sits in the stairwell of his apartment building and devotes himself to suffering, though we never know why. In “Moses and Gaspar,” a man inherits two pets who destroy his life—all that’s clear about the nature of the creatures is their malice. The title story features a woman terrorized by the guest her husband has invited in, whom the reader only slowly starts to realize may not be human. What exactly he is, Dávila doesn’t say. She doesn’t go in for neat endings, either: when the woman eventually traps the houseguest in his room and starves him to death, the reader is happy for her, but faintly uneasy—can we really be sure which of them was the villain?

Though the stories are occasionally funny—the suffering man especially makes me giggle, with his passive aggressive, attention-seeking choice to weep in the stairwell while his neighbors walk up and down—Dávila’s brilliance is in the absences she leaves for readers to fill with our worst thoughts and feelings. Whatever kind of creature the houseguest is, he seems to embody the stress and sense of violation that comes with living in an unhappy marriage, where even your home feels unsafe. Many married people have hosted such a guest. And when the suffering man is offered sympathy by a woman he desires, he doesn’t pause for a moment in his commitment to his own pain; he even contemplates pushing her down the stairs in order to mourn her more deliciously, which is hard not to read as a dark commentary on the self-destructive, self-indulgent nature of romantic obsession. Still, Dávila never tells the reader what to think. No demon worth his horns comes into the world neatly symbolizing something.

For all their creepiness, most of the stories take place in domestic settings, and people are always cooking and eating. On the first page in “Moses and Gaspar,” two brothers describe a Christmas dinner: “ ‘We’ll have turkey stuffed with olives and chestnuts, an Italian Spumante, and dried fruit,’ ” one says. They also reminisce about their childhood, “the apple pasteles, the evenings by the fire.” The frightening houseguest likes to sneak up on his reluctant hostess while she’s cooking in the afternoons. “He ate nothing but meat,” she says. Her servant Guadalupe brings him a tray for his two meals a day, and the wife adds: “I can assure you she flung it into his room, for the poor woman was just as terrified as I was.” Then there’s a story called “Haute Cuisine,” in which the narrator describes a family tradition of eating a certain delicacy that must be boiled alive. We’re not told what kind of creature is being consumed—perhaps none that exists in nature—but we learn that it hatches during the rainy season in a vegetable plot, has black eyes that pop out of the sockets, and screams in agony as it cooks. Delicious!

A stuffed turkey breast was my version of the Christmas turkey that was the last happy meal the brothers in “Moses and Gaspar” shared together. Photo: Erica Maclean

I was curious to note that very little of the food in Dávila’s stories sounds typically Mexican, and I contacted her translators to ask why. It turned out that they had met Dávila before she died. She entertained them at home and served agua de lima, a lemonade-like specialty she made from citrus fruit grown in her garden. Matthew Gleeson, who lives in Oaxaca and cooks a lot himself, told me that the food in Dávila’s stories is nothing like the local dishes he knows “from pre-Hispanic foodways, which are still so prevalent and so deep and rich.” According to Gleeson, Dávila deliberately went against the grain of “certain folkloric currents in Mexican literature” by choosing dishes typical of a middle and upper class, a European-influenced milieu. She also layered European-isms into her language in ways that are not visible in translation, such as using the Latinate word pavo for turkey, rather than guajolote, the term that derives from Nahuatl. Since Dávila’s character-naming conventions pull from international sources, too, I wondered if these choices were intended to create another unsettling, ambiguous space for fear to creep in.

The two translators disagreed about whether it would be possible to cook Dávila’s food. Gleeson said we couldn’t know which dishes Dávila intended even when she used a specific word, which she often didn’t. The apple pasteles, for example, could be like the turnover pastries sold by German bakers in Mexico City, or a cake with a layer of apples on the top and bottom, or even an American-style apple pie. Audrey Harris, a lecturer in Latin American and Chicana/o literature at UCLA, was more encouraging, and suggested I consult the eighties-era cookbook A Taste of Mexico, by Patricia Quintana, which has midcentury Mexican recipes in the fine-dining style Dávila was referring to.

I decided to make the feast from the first page of the collection—turkey stuffed with olives and chestnuts, an Italian Spumante, and a dessert of dried fruit—and a spin on the terrifying soup from “Haute Cusine,” plus the agua de lima, the one thing we know from direct testimony that Dávila made and liked. The Christmas feast in the story would in all likelihood have involved a whole stuffed turkey; I made a stuffed-turkey-breast roulade, a more suitable portion for my nuclear family, and drew inspiration for its spicing from a stuffed pork loin in Quintana’s cookbook. For the Spumante (the word designates the fizzier type of Italian sparkling wine; Frizzante is the less fizzy type), I asked my spirits collaborator Hank Zona for a recommendation. He chose a Casina Bric Nebbiolo Brut Rosé, a relatively expensive option (at $30 a bottle) for prosecco drinkers, but still priced below fine Italian sparkling wine and Champagne. Nebbiolo is a wine-insider’s grape, which as a red wine tastes like tar and roses and has a jewellike ruby color. As a sparkling rosé, it was dry and floral, and colored a beautiful blush-beige. One of Hank’s favorite food wines, it seemed to pair well in both color and flavor with the holiday meal from “Moses and Gaspar.” To finish things off, I found what Quintana described as an “elegant recipe” that “exemplifies European influence in Mexican cuisine”—Mousse de Almendra y Ciruela Pasa, a moulded almond-and-prune mousse. This seemed appropriately fifties and Dávila-style creepy, too.

Sheets of high-quality silver gelatin and miniature molds ensured that my prune dessert would set properly and look festive. Photo: Erica Maclean

The real nightmare dish was the “Haute Cuisine” soup. Gleeson made a special plea that I cook this, suggesting that the story linked eating animals to violence, cruelty, and fear. For me, the horror of “Haute Cuisine” is not in the killing of animals but in the child narrator’s fear of the dish, and the family’s oblivious relishing of it nonetheless. The story made me think of how a family can trample on a child’s most delicate feelings in ways that might seem accidental but are usually a form of sadism made even more terrible because the child is powerless—perhaps as small and powerless as the screaming thing in Dávila’s pot. I decided to look for a creature I was afraid of eating. The ones in Dávila’s story appear in the “vegetable plot,” which could imply snails or worms. Luckily, there was a “Maguey Worms, Pachuca Style” recipe in Quintana’s cookbook. As Gleeson explained, it’s common in Mexico to eat various insects and other small creatures plucked straight from their habitat, including many kinds of grasshopper, and a large winged ant called the chicatana. I took a spin through several Mexican groceries in a Brooklyn neighborhood near mine to see if they sold worms, grasshoppers, or winged ants, but they did not. I settled for a Quintana recipe for “Green Soup,” which asked for a fish head, tail, and backbone, and sixty-four whole, head-on shrimp. Shrimp have the type of popping eyes described in the story, and I find them creepy in appearance, though good to eat.

The narrator of the story “Haute Cuisine” explains that preparing the creature was “a very complicated affair and it took time.” Photo: Erica Maclean

Lastly, agua de lima should have been simple—you grate the peel, juice the fruit, and combine with sugar and water—but it’s made from limas, a mild fruit the translators described as tasting something like bergamot but less bitter, which is not available outside Mexico. Instead I made a similar agua from limes, from a recipe in Quintana’s book.

My attempt to cook Europeanized Mexican horror-story food had its highs and lows. Quintana’s techniques seemed unnecessarily laborious, with so many seemingly illogical steps that I kept misreading them and making mistakes. I was especially flummoxed to discover that the sauce for my turkey asked for onions and garlic in both raw and roasted forms, as well as for roasted peppers. By the time I realized I’d needed to preroast, my oven was occupied with the turkey, and I could only blister the peppers last-minute over the gas flame. The flavors weren’t perfect—the soup seemed watered-down and my own improvisation in pairing a spicy sauce with the stuffed turkey was jarring—but an amazing wine can mask many sins, and the Nebbiolo was that. The surprise winner of the evening was the dish I’d expected to be bad—the prune-and-almond mousse, which tasted like a rich, fruit-topped cheesecake. I’d happily make this meal for any houseguests of mine, who are treated quite differently from the one in Dávila’s story (usually).

Photo: Erica Maclean

Agua De Limon

Adapted from The Taste of Mexico, by Patricia Quintana.

8 cups water
1 cup sugar
10 limes, zested and juiced
2 cups ice cubes

Heat water and sugar in large saucepan, until sugar is dissolved. Cool, add zest and ice, and serve.

Photo: Erica Maclean

Turkey Stuffed With Olives and Chestnuts

Adapted from Once Upon a Chef and The Taste of Mexico, by Patricia Quintana. Note: the fruit vinegar should be started five days before you plan to cook.

For the fruit vinegar:
1 quince, quartered
1 pasilla pepper, roasted
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 cups beer
4 cups water
1/2 cup brown sugar

For the turkey and stuffing:
1 tbsp olive oil, plus more for brushing
1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic
4oz mild sausage
1/4 cup white wine
1 stick cinnamon
1 curl of orange peel
1 tsp oregano
1 sprig thyme
1/2 cup chestnuts, chopped
1/2 cup olives
1 egg yolk
4 cups stuffing cubes
1  cup chicken broth
1 large turkey breast (1/2 of the whole breast), boned and butterflied
Additional olive oil, for brushing
Salt & pepper

For the sauce:
3 ancho chilies
1 onion, divided
2 cloves Garlic, divided
1/2 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp Mexican Oregano
1 sprig thyme
3 tbsp fruit vinegar

Photo: Erica Maclean

To make the fruit vinegar:

Combine all ingredients in a large pitcher or jar, cover with cheesecloth, and leave standing on the countertop for five days. Strain and refrigerate.

Photo: Erica Maclean

To make the turkey and sauce:

Preheat the oven to 425. Prepare a rack and roasting tray by lining the tray with tinfoil and brushing the rack with oil.

Start the sauce: Place half an onion, three ancho chilis, and one clove of garlic in a baking dish and roast until blackened and collapsed, about forty-five minutes.

While the vegetables are roasting, start the stuffing. Heat one tablespoon of oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring frequently, until soft, about five minutes. Add the garlic and sausage and continue to cook, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon, until the sausage is cooked and slightly browned, about five minutes. Add the wine, cinnamon, orange peel, oregano, and thyme, and cook for two minutes more, using your spoon to scrape up any browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Remove the cinnamon stick and orange peel. Remove from the heat.

In a large mixing bowl combine the egg yolk, stuffing cubes, and chicken broth. Stir until the stuffing is moistened. Add the sausage mixture, chestnuts and olives, and stir to combine. Check seasoning and add salt and pepper to taste.

Place the butterflied turkey breast skin side down on a countertop or work surface and cover with plastic wrap. Pound the turkey breast to an even half-inch thickness. Brush the meat with olive oil, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Spoon the stuffing in an even layer onto the breast. Starting with the long side (and choosing the part of the breast with the least skin, if possible) roll into a long sausage. It’s okay if a little stuffing is falling out. Tie with kitchen string every one and a half inches.

Photo: Erica Maclean

Remove the roasted vegetables from the oven and turn the heat down to 375. Put the ancho chilis in a gallon freezer bag and seal. When the oven is the correct temperature, place the roulade on the roasting tray and bake until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the roll registers 155, about an hour.

While the meat is cooking, make the sauce. Remove the chilis from the freezer bag and run under cold water to loosen the skin. Peel, destem, seed, and devein. Combine the chilis, the roasted garlic, the roasted onion, half a raw onion, one clove raw garlic, and half a cup of water in the blender and puree. Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan, add the puree, the brown sugar, the fruit vinegar, and a sprig of thyme, and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook for twenty minutes, until thickened.

To assemble, spread the sauce on a plate and top with slices of the turkey.

Photo: Erica Maclean

Green Soup 

For the broth:
6 cups water
1 fish head
1 fish tail
1 cup dry white wine
1 medium carrot, peeled
1/4 white onion
1 clove garlic, whole
2 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
3 black peppercorns
2 tsp powdered chicken bouillon

For the soup:
2 poblano chilies, seeded, deveined, and chopped
1/2 cup parsley, chopped
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
2tbsp white onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, whole
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
Salt and pepper to taste
12 large head-on shrimp

Photo: Erica Maclean

To make the broth:

Place the water in a large saucepan or dutch oven, and add the fish head and tail, and all other ingredients for the broth. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for one hour.

Strain, reserving the broth, carrot, and onion and discarding the other solids. Puree the carrot and onion, using a little of the broth as necessary.

To make the soup:

Combine the poblano chilies, parsley, cilantro, onion, and garlic in a food processor and puree until smooth, adding broth from the soup as necessary. Heat a skillet to medium-high. Add the olive oil, butter, and the poblano puree, and cook until thickened.

Combine the remaining broth, the vegetable puree, and the poblano puree in a large saucepan. Simmer for ten minutes. Add the shrimp and simmer for ten additional minutes, until cooked through. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve garnished with lime wedges.

Photo: Erica Maclean

Almond-and-prune mousse
1 lb prunes, chopped
1 3/4 cup red wine
2 strips orange peel
6 tbsp plum jam
1 cup water
3 tbsp powdered gelatin, divided
2 1/2 cups raw almonds, soaked, skinned and ground
6 egg yolks, lightly beaten
2 cups plus 1 tbsp sugar
2 1/2 cups milk
1 vanilla bean
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup sour cream

Photo: Erica Maclean

Heat prunes with wine, orange peel, and jam in a small saucepan. Cook until the mixture thickens to the consistency of a thick jam, about twenty-five minutes. Remove peel. In another pan, moisten one tablespoon powdered gelatin in half a cup of water and heat until dissolved. Stir in prune mixture, mixing well. Let cool.

Line a nine-inch gelatin mold with saran wrap. Pour prune mixture into mold and refrigerate for forty minutes.

Meanwhile, puree almonds, egg yolk, sugar, and milk in a blender or food processor. Pour into a saucepan. Add vanilla bean and almond extract. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil. Remove from heat, remove vanilla bean, and cool slightly.

Moisten two tablespoons powdered gelatin in half a cup of water, and heat until dissolved. Add to the almond mixture and stir.

Combine heavy cream and sour cream and whip until peaks form. Carefully fold into almond mixture. Pour the almond mixture into mold over prune mixture. Chill for four hours or overnight.

Photo: Erica Maclean

Sentience and Intensities: A Conversation with Maureen McLane

Maureen McLane. Photo courtesy of Joanna Eldredge Morrissey.

Maureen McLane’s poetry is deceptively good-natured. It draws you in with its smooth, meditative rhythms and genial mood only to veer into hidden channels of ambivalence, cynicism, acute sadness, and occasional hostility. Reading McLane is like having a conversation with an old friend and being suddenly reminded that she has whole continents of experience you’ll never visit, judgments (including against you) you’ll never hear, and difficulties in which you’ll never share. In that sense, her work is an ongoing investigation of subjectivity: it plays with voice and tone, perspective, and persona to create an emotional world that is at once intimately recognizable and treacherous, strange. Always in dialogue with a richly conceived literary history—and with figures like Dickinson, O’Hara, the Romantics, and especially Sappho—the poems speak of a human nature at once less variable and more dynamic than we might have guessed, especially when it comes to the vagaries of desire both erotic and intellectual.

With the release of More Anon, a collection of poems from her first five books of poetry, McLane takes us on a sort of tour of her world, a well-ordered place where things (metrical forms, marriages) nonetheless go frequently awry. Her restless lyricism travels through bedrooms and classrooms, forest paths and quiet cars, searching, perhaps, for a stillness that doesn’t feel like paralysis, and never quite finding it. I spoke to McLane over email about her relationship to genre, “rhetorical IEDs,” and what it means to write in a queer poetic tradition. Her responses were generous, learned, and—like her poetry and her own criticism, of which she’s produced several books, including the acclaimed literary memoir My Poets—evidence of an omnivorous sensibility that finds almost everything interesting and takes nothing for granted. 

 

INTERVIEWER

This collection is called More Anon, and I know this is often how you sign emails or bring an end to text conversations. This seems fitting to me since I’ve always thought of your poetry as marked by a certain kind of conviviality: intimate but not overexposed, it’s very much alive to its place in a social world. With More Anon, we could say you’ve invited some poems to the party and not others. Can you talk a little bit about the principle of selection you used to choose which poems would be included here?

McLANE

I like thinking of the book as a kind of convivial party. Not that there aren’t a few funereal notes, too. I didn’t feel like a bouncer, say, excluding various poems, more like an anthologist, hoping to give a sense of the marrow and range of each book while not overwhelming a reader. I wasn’t crazily ruthless, but More Anon includes about half of the work in my first five books of poetry, so there was a lot of winnowing. I knew I wanted to preserve some major sequences; that I wanted to keep the poems “after Sappho” in each of the books; that I wanted to feature some long poems and some of the super-short ones. I wanted to preserve the mix of song, invective, essayistic, and meditative modes.  Some poems end up being synecdoches for absent others in a way. And I wanted this book to feel like a provisional whole, a new thing; it begins and ends with an envoi—a short poem or stanza that concludes a work and sends it into the world.  I looked at a few Selecteds I liked—one truly excellent one is Paul Muldoon’s: brilliantly pared, five poems each from twelve books.  I decided too that I preferred a Selected to a New and Selected. As for new things, let’s hope: more
anon—

INTERVIEWER

I’m glad you mentioned the envois. The one that opens the book is startlingly hostile—“Go litel myn book / and blow her head off / make her retch and weep / and ache in the gut”—and for all their conviviality your poems often erupt into these moments of sudden antipathy or aggression. How important is tone to you as a formal category or device?

McLANE

Well, I’m all for songs, ditties, envois that serve as slaps in the face as much as tender caresses. And I didn’t think of that envoi as startlingly hostile, but that may be ridiculous on my part—it’s a poem as rhetorical IED! But it’s also a poem that wants to make you feel “as if the top of [your] head were taken off” (viz. Emily Dickinson). I don’t know if “tone” per se is consciously important to me, though I do respond to poetries in a variety of keys: invective, curse, praise poem, meditative lyric, conceptual puzzle, verse essay . . . and I have wanted to have an array of tones and modes in my books, or rather, I wanted to put together books that exemplified that possibility: invective is not exclusive of praise, curse can give way to song, etc. The troubadours were great at those mixes, and some of early Pound is hilariously aggressive (let’s not get into later Pound). Some poets seem to gravitate natively to a kind of monotone (if I can use that term nonpejoratively), and some beautiful books come forth in that one key, as it were. Fanny Howe’s O’Clock is one, or you might think of books by, say, Jack Gilbert, or Linda Gregg, or Jane Kenyon. Or Wordsworth, in his inexorably pedestrian Wordsworthiness. Then there can be the kind of full-frontal careening wildness of work by Anne Waldman, or in another key, by Ariana Reines. I have been struck too by something the filmmaker and visual artist Shelly Silver said, that she is increasingly interested in making art that has within it a hard swerve.

And as for antipathy, aggression: it’s all energy, and it can all be a good muse, if not the only. I think about some of this musically too—attack, sustain, decay, harmonics.

INTERVIEWER

What I hear you saying is that tone is important to you insofar as it signals or belongs to certain generic registers—the anger in invective, the tenderness of an ode—and that you’re interested in modes before moods. But I don’t know—that seems a little sly, LOL! Lines like “The effort your life / requires exhausts me. / I am not kidding” are, for example, quite mean, and there are a lot of moments in the Mz N series where impatience or disdain for certain kinds of cant and cynicism (“It is contemporary / to ironize the contemporary / but in a light way”) break through. These moments don’t seem keyed to any particular genre. They seem rather like outbreaks of a very specific personality—literate, shrewd, self-effacing, maybe a little irritable but also humane—within a more general formal structure.

McLANE

Hmm, okay—what to say? Would you call Archilochus mean? Pound? Martial? Catullus? Maybe. I think of an essay by Tony Hoagland, “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.” Not something I aspire to, but also not something I abjure, at least in writing. I’m certainly interested in moods—some years ago it occurred to me that I could call a book, after Wordsworth, Moods of My Own Mind. Though I’m also interested in rhetoricity, tone in that sense, stance, attitudinal turn—the aside, the kiss-off, etc. But, yes, I think you’re right that various moments particularly in Mz N: the serial—hooked to a persona, a character—seem more upsurges of personality than otherwise. That was part of the pleasure of working in that mode, sustaining the figure of autobiography, in the third person. I both do and don’t agree with the Allen Grossman view that behind a poem is a person, or at least the category of “person.”

INTERVIEWER

Especially with regard to Mz N, in which, as you say, there’s an autobiographical conceit, and voice, that doesn’t necessarily gel with the idea of a historical individual. Who is Mz N, or what, and why?

McLANE

Ah: Who, what, why is Mz N? Years ago I was very taken with Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito
poems—they are wonderful, opening up a space for philosophical, psychological, alternately tender and astringent reflection, for critique, commentary, anecdote, fable. And Berryman’s Dream Songs might have also given me some ideas about personae—though I have no split speakers or minstrelsy (!!!). And then there’s old Wordsworth, who in The Prelude seems to proceed somewhat interminably “in his own voice.” But all of these are figures of rhetoric, of poetic occasion: autobiography as defacement, or re-facing. Maybe Mz N allowed me to claim in poetry some aspects of what others have been doing in so-called autofiction. Then, too, I’ve often thought I write pseudonymously under my own name. You’ve just been writing on Pessoa, so I’d be interested to know what you think happens under the category or function of “the name,” fictional or not. How names are for some writers enabling engines, generative matrices, for others perhaps loose rubrics, filing systems.

INTERVIEWER

What you say about writing pseudonymously under your own name reminds me of a line from Barbara Browning’s novel The Gift—when the narrator says, “My body is an extension of my body.”

McLANE

That is amazing. And it reminds me to read Browning! And now I’m wondering if I think my poems, or anyone’s, are extensions of my body. Certainly I think of language that way.

INTERVIEWER

You and Browning, in addition to being colleagues at NYU, have also both been honored with Lambda Literary Awards—her for her novel The Correspondence Artist, you for Same Life and Some Say, which were finalists for the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award. Both the Audre Lorde award and the Lambda Award are earmarked for something called “lesbian poetry,” and I’m curious, based on what you’ve said about pseudonymity, autobiography, and genre, what you think of that as a description of your work. In other words, what is lesbian poetry and do you write it?

McLANE

Ah . . . what is lesbian poetry? I have no ready answers beyond some of the obvious sociological and historical ones. I don’t programmatically set out to write (or to avoid writing) lesbian poetry, or women’s poetry (what is women’s poetry?), but it’s definitely plausible to read my work through those grids. And I do see myself as writing in a queer tradition, however that may be defined and inflected.

I just stumbled upon an essay by Mary Jacobus from some years ago—“Is There a Woman in This Text?”—and maybe you’re asking me, “Is there a lesbian in this text?” Now, this may be going very old-school—that essay is from the eighties, before (imagine that) Judith Butler—but I still carry a torch for certain modalities of feminist psychoanalytic criticism.  Jacobus wrote there, “The French insistence on écriture féminine—on woman as a writing-effect instead of an origin—asserts not the sexuality of the text but the textuality of sex.” Maybe it’s useful to think (at least sometimes) of texts producing, or at least inflecting, sexuality and gender, rather than the reverse. Jacobus ends the essay by saying the question should be “not ‘Is there a woman in this text?’ but rather: ‘Is there a text in this woman?’” There are a lot of texts in this woman, for sure. Certainly I responded to poets like Sappho, H.D., and Elizabeth Bishop, before I was fully aware they (or I) were queer; reading offered me a kind of queer echolocation. So yes, I feel enormously indebted to, and enabled by, a queer tradition—though I think more in terms of elective affinities rather than genealogies. The Venn diagram of writers and artists I have variously resonated with includes the poets I mentioned, and Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, and the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Lorde’s Zami made a big impression on me in the nineties, as did Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems and her essays, and Olga Broumas’s Beginning with O; later on Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle; more recently Meredith Monk’s work. We’ve talked before about how we both hugely admire Eileen Myles’s work. And of course now there’s a massive efflorescence of queer/gay/trans work, with all the contended and emerging vibrations of those terms. I just read a manuscript by Maggie Millner, Couplets, which is a knockout, a brilliant erotic coming-out fever dream of controlled yet wild intensities: I can’t wait for people to read it.

It’s striking that various queer genealogies and artists enable thought across the board: you, for example, drawing on Derek Jarman’s diaries and gardening in your recent book The Calamity Form, when you pivot between Romantic-era gardens and concerns and more recent ones.

INTERVIEWER

Derek Jarman described his use of the monochromatic palette in his experimental film Blue as an “effective liberation from personality” even though Blue itself, which is about Jarman dying from AIDS-related illness and going partially blind, is about as personal a work of art as you can imagine. It seems like the name “Mz N” does similar work for you, allowing a certain décalage or peeling-away of “Maureen McLane” from the page even as the Mz N poems dare us to consider them as anything other than autobiography. “Autofiction” doesn’t seem to quite cover the sort of careful drama at play here.

McLANE

Now we might have to pause this exchange so I can go watch Blue—though I don’t know if I can quite bear it right now.  These central works, these intensities, I have to prepare for, or make room for. But yes—“Mz N” isn’t even a stable (or unstable) “persona.” Your thoughts remind me, too, of Borges’s “Borges and I,” and Frank Bidart’s riposte, “Borges and I,” where the Möbius strip of name, purported “self,” abolished and abolishing “I,” and written/(over)writing “I,” unspools in strange and profound ways.

INTERVIEWER

At what point in your life as a poet did you begin to feel interested in staging a separation between those elements: name, self, the “I” behind and the “I” on the page? My guess would be—since I’m not a poet—that most people begin writing poetry because they want to revel in their own subjectivity and make it available to others. I mean, that’s not why Alexander Pope started writing poetry, I don’t think, but Pope was writing at a time before the category of “poetry” more or less collapsed into the category of “lyric,” and before “lyric” was a synonym for intimate self-expression and the assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between the mind of the poet and the mind of the poem.

McLANE

I don’t know that I was drawn to writing, or reading, poetry as a reveling in subjectivity per se, or my own subjectivity; my dim memories have me writing things first in response to other poems, and sometimes in “others’” voices. I was as interested in an escape from the prison house of subjectivity as in an embrace of it. I remember sharing some work when I was in college with an informal writing group—we submitted things anonymously, and people were taken aback to realize that the drafted (mediocre) poems I shared had all in fact been written by me. I think some of those readers thought this was a problem or deficit; I don’t know that it was. I first responded to poetry the way I responded to music, not the way I responded to, say, autobiography or memoir or biography. A rhythmic pulse and a sense of somatic presence—these were things that compelled me, and which I wanted, in an inchoate sense, to channel or register. Sentience and intensities, not subjectivity, were primary attractants. Not that “my own experience” wasn’t and isn’t a wellspring, but as Alice Notley writes, “Experience is a hoax.” You mention Pope: that sense of poetry as open to argufying, essaying, has also been a great spur. And regarding that coordination we often assume between the mind of the poet and the mind of the poem, as you put it: I often do write as if assuming this, but it seems to me quite unsteady, and more emergent than given. Like many writers (not all), I often do not know my own mind till I’ve written, and the ratios between “self,” “name,” and differently constituted “I’s” seem to be a shifting complex. Think of H.D., after Sappho: “I know not what to do: / my mind is divided.” More profoundly, the question of sharability you raise is central; I tried to write about that in My Poets, about “our desire to commune, to hear and be heard, to make the chaos of inner feeling not only sentient but sharable.” To bring the murk of inner corporeal urgencies into enunciation. That is only one wing of what poetries can do, have done. In terms of my own writing life, writing My Poets opened the door for a return to the Mz N wager, so to speak, to narrativity and to figures of autobiography.  The “my” in “my poets” was and is something to experiment with.

INTERVIEWER

I’m glad you mentioned My Poets. Needless to say, that book, in its marriage of literary criticism with autobiography, but also in its willingness to treat “autobiography” as a mode of writing that might be figurative rather than simple, straightforward self-description, was a huge influence on me when I was writing my book Keats’s Odes. But I also find myself talking to other people about that book a lot. It seemed, for its readers, really to open up a novel approach to criticism at a time when so many scholars feel exhausted by the ways of writing—dry, hectoring, anhedonic—that have become standard in the academy. Do you have any plans to do more in that vein?

McLANE

I think “figurative autobiography” is an excellent phrase for a core aspect of some really dynamic work—not least Keats’s Odes. I just started Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond and that might be another kind of example. Langdon Hammer’s recent LARB essay “Shadows Walking: With Wallace Stevens in New Haven,” beautifully weaves in a lot. Then, to turn elsewhere, one thinks of Chris Kraus, and some of Anne Carson’s work, or we might go back to Jarman. As for a prose modality, or a critical mode, that stays open to other dimensions—including the autobiographical, the explicitly rhythmical, the divagational—I’ve gone toward that in a few recent talks and presentations. Whether I’ll continue more in this vein, or more precisely in the vein of My Poets, well, we shall see: more anon!

 

Anahid Nersessian is a literary critic and professor of English at UCLA. Her latest book is Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse.

Dodie Bellamy’s Many Appetites

Screenshot from “Internet Archive” of the trailer for Dracula, Mina & John, 1931, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs,” writes Dodie Bellamy in The Letters of Mina Harker. It’s true that these body parts and many others assert themselves vehemently throughout the text, which is already a riot of warring impulses and contradictory or just chorusing voices. Most writing strives to unify impulses, to find harmony between the heart (or whatever) and the mind, the corporeal and the spiritual, the story and its narrator. Dodie begins this book by disassembling that expectation, mocking it as she discards it, bringing it up again and again only to find it eternally lacking. Formal contrivance can never compete for long with what’s real and right in front of us. This book interrupts itself often to critique itself, or tell the story of its own creation, or take a break from itself to eat a snack, jerk off, begin again.

I have to admit, the first time I attempted to read this book circa 2012, I didn’t “get it.” I came to it because I was obsessed with diaries and had loved Dodie’s then-latest book, which was a diary that she initially serialized as a blog of an affair with a shitty Buddhist teacher. The central conceit of “Mina Harker”—that the minor character from Dracula has been transported to mid-’80s San Francisco, in order to possess the body of Dodie Bellamy and correspond with her clique of queer poets, artists, and theoreticians—seemed arbitrary to me, or worse, overdetermined: vampirism standing in for AIDS, yikes. I had entered the Dodie-verse via a more straightforward strain of her writing. Reading “the Buddhist,” I was never wondering what Dodie meant. But in “Mina Harker,” as the first-person voice trails off midsentence or shifts into italics, the reader is never exactly sure who is speaking. The fictive Dodie and Mina and the author Dodie document each others’ existence in real time. The overall impression is of a huge box of tangled jewelry dumped out onto the bed, some of it tarnished, some of it obviously fake, but with precious gems mixed in and not always readily apparent. At the time of my first reading, I didn’t have the patience to sift. It had not yet occurred to me that the pile itself could be the treasure. “Bad metaphors are the only way we can approach the really important things, don’t you agree?”

The first letter, dated July 3, 1986, is addressed “Dear Reader.” In it, we meet Mina, who is desperate to set the record straight about Dracula, Jonathan Harker, and Van Helsing. We also meet Dodie, whose voice alternates sometimes interchangeably with Mina’s. July 3 was her wedding day. At first being married seems as much of a postmodern goof as any of the book’s other antics, getting off on the conventional subversion of a gay man and a queer woman dressing up and promising “til death.” Thirty-five years later, this book is a document of one of the early years of one of the greatest and most artistically productive marriages of all time. Though Dodie describes and addresses several other love affairs in this book, Kevin Killian is the constant, the book’s inciting presence and its reason for being. Their love is incandescent, funny and tragic and palpable in every sentence of the book. He is both larger-than-life sex god and droll observer, torrid bodice-ripper and quotidian meal-sharer. He and Dodie spend a lot of time watching rented videocassettes. He edits the book that he’s in: “ ‘Not another sex scene!’ KK tosses my manuscript on the coffee table, ‘It would be nice if the reader could occasionally see me doing something besides coming.’ ” More so than the transcendent sex scene that precedes it, this bit of dialogue is a portrait of ideal partnership.

Mina and Dodie write to Sam D’Alessandro both before and after his death from AIDS at age thirty-one. Death is as omnipresent in this book as sex, intertwined with it exquisitely and painfully. Dodie wishes to be like Sam, in writing and in life: “I’d love to live in your writing, to fuck with abandon as if that were the easiest thing in the world to come by.” After he dies, she writes to him as if he were still alive, memorializing by telling him about himself: “the Sam I knew was a typhoon of sex and hate, he loved the scars of others but flaunted his own beauty.” She doesn’t worry about boring him with her newsy dispatches from the world of corporeality, her love affairs and meals and outfits. This way of mourning could chafe or seem callous, but it’s real. Mina/Dodie keeps a photo of Sam to stare at as she writes: “Your eyes will remain unreadable to me, will never ‘reveal’—but that’s not the point, is it—the point is to look, not in horror not in pity or even in compassion, but to look as precisely as possible at the ever-wavering presence right in front of one—this is the closest beings as imperfect as we can come to love.”

Dodie’s descriptions of and evidence of graphomania make me jealous. She describes heading into a café for a caffeine and diary-writing “fix.” She marries the ephemeral—the intrusive-thought horror movie fantasies, the embarrassing half-thought that flits through the body and mind during sex—with observations that reverberate with import. The sex scenes that KK called out for being too omnipresent in the book are necessary, vibrant documents of moments that usually fade as fast as an orgasm. Since poets are fucking, language itself is a part of the sex act, and writing itself is also eroticized: “my breasts are no longer breasts but titties just the thought of keyboarding the word titties excites me SAY IT.” Writing and sex are the same in this book. It feels radical, in our pleasure-starved and inspiration-stunted moment, to encourage or confess an appetite for either.

 

Emily Gould is the author of three books including most recently the novel Perfect Tunes.

The Letters of Mina Harker  is being published by Semiotext(e) on October 19th, 2021. 

Committed to Memory: Josephine Halvorson and Georgia O’Keeffe

Ghost Ranch, 2019. Fuji Instax photographs taken by Josephine Halvorson in and around Georgia O’Keeffe’s houses, New Mexico, 2019–2020.

There’s a certain weather-beaten tree stump at Ghost Ranch—the U-shaped, adobelike home once occupied by the famed American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe—where Josephine Halvorson, the first artist-in-residence at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, often took breaks from her own work. It offered her a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the narrow New Mexican mesa that appears in many of O’Keeffe’s desert paintings, and where the artist’s ashes are scattered. From here Halvorson could observe weather patterns forming around the mesa’s caprock, circling the top and then sweeping theatrically down its cliff face, racing across the plain toward her.

Halvorson makes paintings on-site, in proximity to the objects she hopes to commemorate, and the museum offered her access to a rich archive of letters, clothing, books, as well as O’Keeffe’s two homes, Ghost Ranch and nearby Abiquiú. Halvorson spent two months there: one in the summer of 2019 and another a year later, during the pandemic. 

“It was through the sense of quiet and closeness that I connected with her things,” Halvorson recalls. “The museum registrar would open a cabinet or put the group of keys out on the table for me. No one who visited me was permitted to come into the house, so it was really just me there alone, working every day from dawn till dusk.” In Abiquiú, Halvorson made intimate acrylic gouache paintings of the tree stump, a curious grouping of tagged keys, and the interior of a kitchen cupboard stacked with O’Keeffe’s dishes. Wishing to manifest a sense of place, she used the same close crops to capture a National Forest sign complete with target practice holes, as well as an abandoned pile of kindling that she conceived as a memorial to her father, whose loss she was grieving—he had passed from coronavirus that year. Her still lifes are all framed by wide, chalky-colored “surrounds” that draw on the dusty hues of the area. Halvorson regards these as visual “buffer zones” between the object in situ and the white gallery wall. Each has a surface made rough by small rocks, which Halvorson collected on the property and then ground up to be preserved in paint as a geological account of the place and time. “The rocks represent a much deeper past than what I’m able to paint in real time,” she explains. The result is a series of paintings, eleven in all, that read like tightly framed long-exposure snapshots. The greatest challenge, Halvorson said, was “to make art that isn’t about O’Keeffe, but is instead in relation to her.”

 

Painting O’Keeffe’s Stump, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

 

Painting O’Keeffe’s Rocks, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

 

Painting O’Keeffe’s Dishes, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

 

Painting O’Keeffe’s Keys, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

 

Painting National Forest Boundary Sign, near Abiquiú, New Mexico, 2020.

 

Painting Sacred Site, near Abiquiú, New Mexico, 2020.

 

Contemporary Voices: Josephine Halvorson opens to the public on October 1 and runs through March 28, 2022.

Charlotte Strick is a principal at the award-winning, multidisciplinary, Brooklyn-based design firm, Strick&Williams. Her writings on art and design have appeared in The Atlantic, HuffPost, and The Paris Review, where she was the magazine’s art editor and designer from 2010–2021.

The Happiest Place on Earth?

Tuxyso, Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland Anaheim, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons.

My formative understanding of world events had two acts: the ancient history conveyed in the Bible and the modern arc approximated at Disneyland, which opened in Southern California in 1955, four and a half decades before my first visit.

I was ten. My mom and I took a 4:30 A.M. Greyhound bus from Sacramento for the fifteen-hour ride through the Central Valley, past fruit fields, oil rigs, and speed traps, around the Grapevine Hills, and into Anaheim. My mom slept or prayed the rosary most of the way, while I reviewed the two-day game plan I’d drawn up on a piece of binder paper, which I kept in my pocket, folded four times over for protection.

We stayed at a discount Anaheim hotel with a free shuttle to the happiest place on earth and took the first shuttle out the next morning, arriving before the gate opened.

At Disneyland, history starts in the castle at the center of the park, homage to the glorious medieval years after the bubonic plague wound down, when fair maidens and knights vanquished mysterious evils while kings and queens conquered the farthest reaches of the known world with the Christian God behind them, the Moors in retreat, the seas parting, the age of European discovery dawning. I skipped this Fantasyland stage on the timeline and went straight to Adventureland, the part of the park I was most excited to see.

Passing thatched huts with tribal masks at the threshold, I imagined myself an explorer entering the menacing labyrinth of an unfamiliar jungle. It didn’t occur to me that I was envisioning myself in the leather boots and beige cotton of a colonial-era European explorer. On the Jungle Cruise ride, the river snaked through sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, as the tour guide at the front noted—the colonized world mashed together into a pastiche of drums, dances, spears, and loincloths. Crates decoratively stacked on the riverbank were stamped STANLEYVILLE, a reference to Henry Morton Stanley, who led a two-hundred-man brigade into the jungles of central Africa in the 1870s, relying on forced native labor to carry his excessive supplies, killing hundreds on his path through what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the rubber-rich territory he claimed on behalf of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

I didn’t know Stanley’s name then. I was more familiar with Indiana Jones. I had watched all the movies, and I hummed the theme song under my breath as we whipped past giant snakes, poison darts, and bloodthirsty savages on the Indiana Jones ride, my favorite in Adventureland. Rumbling down the track in a make-believe jeep, I was a professor-explorer in the field gathering ethnographic notes to bring back to a campus filled with white students.

The history of the West moves west, from Athens to Rome to Paris, across the Atlantic and into the Plains. Once independent of Britain, the European settlers in America embarked on an inland conquest that would reach the Pacific within a century, statehoods granted at a ferocious pace. Frontierland stood as a living monument to my country’s manifestly destined expansion, with a roller coaster set in a mineshaft, a riverboat circling a lake, and a Wild West shooting range. Wearing a felt cowboy hat with Mickey Mouse ears, I imagined myself on a vast and barren plain, with tall red rocks casting jagged shadows and tumbleweeds rolling past. I didn’t know that the Plains hadn’t always looked so vacant, that they’d been home to bustling communities until Old World diseases ravaged their inhabitants, long before the colonial settlers began their program of massacres and forced relocation.

I lived my fantasies through the gaze of the colonizers. The Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square was designed to resemble an antebellum plantation. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride featured no apparent Caribbean natives but rather European outlaws who pillaged the trade ships loaded with the gold that paid for enslaved people. In Critter Country, set in the ambiguously old American South, my favorite ride was Splash Mountain, which had a thrilling downhill finale and a cast of animatronic animals from the 1946 movie Song of the South, which is about a Reconstruction-era Black servant telling a white child parables about the virtues of resilience in tough times and never running away—“an insult to American minorities,” said Harlem congressional representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Disney hasn’t shown the film since 1986, but it wasn’t until summer of 2020 that Disneyland would change the ride’s theme, its implications at last too blatant to avoid, unlike the more subtle tributes to oppression scattered around.

The first part of the park we passed through on our way in and the last on our way out was Main Street, U.S.A., an idealized vision of early-twentieth-century small-town America, decked out with ice cream parlors, trolley bells, straw hats, and accordion music, a grotesque phantasm straight from the mind of Walt Disney, the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, union-busting mastermind behind some of the fondest memories of my childhood. Disney based Main Street, U.S.A., on his own hometown of Marceline, Missouri, as he remembered it from his childhood, when it was segregated under Jim Crow-era enforcement. “For those of us who remember the carefree time it recreates,” he said when the park opened, “Main Street will bring back happy memories.”

All around me were the settings for myriad traumas. Thank God I couldn’t see any of that, because once you do, you can’t unsee it. Pity the child who wanders Disneyland in a haze of despair.

In hindsight, the edifice was delicate. When we rode It’s a Small World, I scanned the landscape of animatronic child dolls, looking for the one that represented me amid the alleged cultural diversity on display—twelve minutes of Inuit fisherfolk, Nordic ice skaters, lederhosen-clad Germans, British guards with tall black hats, French cabaret dancers, Spanish flamenco dancers, Scots with bagpipes, Dutch girls with blond pigtails, Italians riding gondolas, Russians in red bonnets, Arabs charming snakes, Indians beside a silhouetted Shiva, Japanese women bowing in kimonos, Chinese acrobats balancing jars, an Egyptian sphinx, sub-Saharan Africans with afros playing drums beside a lion, Mexicans in sombreros dancing around a bigger sombrero, Peruvians in ponchos on a mountain, white Americans sitting on hay bales, and so on. I nearly jumped out of my seat when I noticed the shirtless brown dolls wearing grass skirts and leafy crowns who apparently embodied South Pacific people at large. As if willing it to be true, I pointed out the generic dark-skinned islanders and said to my mom, “There’s the Philippines!” On our second time through, I devoted myself to listening closely to the dozens of languages singing, a merry global chorus. No matter how closely I listened, I didn’t hear any Tagalog. You can only fit so many cultures in a twelve-minute ride.

 

Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News. A Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, he is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City, which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.

From Concepcion by Albert Samaha, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Albert Samaha.

A Dispatch from Emily Stokes, Editor

Dear Readers,

We’ve missed you, and we know what you’re probably thinking: Why is there no Fall issue of The Paris Review? Has the staff taken some kind of sabbatical? Perhaps they have given up on print altogether? (There is, as you might have heard, a national paper shortage.) I am here to assure you that we have not absconded to a Greek island, nor have we (just) been curled up with cups of tea.

Since I joined the Review this summer, a flurry of activity has taken over our Chelsea office, which had been uninhabited since the pandemic began and was, as a result, a bit dusty. Things are starting to look quite different around here (thank you to Nick Poe for the tables and to Ohad Meromi for the rehang). We made the decision not to put out a Fall issue because we were feeling ambitious. Over the past few months, we have immersed ourselves in reading—manuscripts, transcripts of interviews in progress, and our very own archives. Inspired by the past issues we love most, we have been working on a beautiful new design for the print quarterly with the Pentagram designer Matt Willey and on all kinds of other surprises with our new art director, Na Kim.

We also have several other new staff members to introduce: Lidija Haas, senior editor, who recently interviewed the philosopher Amia Srinivasan; Amanda Gersten, managing editor, who has been setting deadlines with our new printer, Prolific, in Canada (rest assured, they have paper, and it’s recycled); Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor, who has already taken charge of our weekly “Review’s Review”; and Maya Binyam, contributing editor, whose writing you will soon be able to enjoy regularly right here. And you’ll find plenty of other sustenance there. Last week, we published “The Chorus,” a prose poem by Ben Lerner—also known, it turns out, as Benner—and we are excited to share more new work from some of our favorite writers in the coming months.

To tide you over, on October 27, we will launch Season 3 of our celebrated podcast, featuring the words and voices of Phoebe Bridgers, Molly McCully Brown, Yohanca Delgado, Joan Didion, Robert Frost, Amber Gray, Allan Gurganus, Edward P. Jones, and many more. (Listen to the trailer below.)

We can’t wait to share our Winter issue, no. 238, with you in December.

Emily Stokes
Editor

Photos (from left to right): Managing editor Amanda Gersten, designer Matt Willey, art director Na Kim, senior editor Lidija Haas, and Emily Stokes; Matt and Na with Emily; Emily, assistant editor Olivia Kan-Sperling, publishing manager Robin Jones, engagement editor Rhian Sasseen, development director Jane Breakell, contributing editor Maya Binyam, and Amanda; Na’s dog, Moon. Photos courtesy of Landon Speers.

Redux: Enemies Are Redheaded

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

PHOTO © OLIVIER ROLLER (DETAIL); MANUSCRIPT IMAGE COURTESY OF GALAXIA GUTENBERG

This week at The Paris Review, we’re writing about reading, and reading about writing. Read on for Enrique Vila-Matas’s Art of Fiction interview, Kate Zambreno’s short story “Plagiarism,” a piece of fiction by Chekhov called “What You Usually Find in Novels,” Gevorg Emin’s poem “The Block,” and a portfolio of Richard Prince art from 1978.

Interview
Enrique Vila-Matas, The Art of Fiction No. 247
Issue no. 234 (Fall 2020)

The kind of writer I like best is the one who has, at some stage, been a critic, and who at a certain point realizes that if he really wanted to honor literature he must immediately himself become a writer—step inside the bullring and prolong, by other means, what was always at stake in literature.

Detail from a Richard Prince piece, 1978.

Fiction
Plagiarism
By Kate Zambreno
Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

I’m not saying it was the exact same text—her small, lyric monograph and my novella-length essay. For one, her book was more conceptually focused, while my essay drifted too much and was too much about me. Still, the similarities were uncanny. Had I unintentionally plagiarized her, or had she unintentionally plagiarized me?

Detail from a Richard Prince piece, 1978.

Fiction
What You Usually Find in Novels
By Anton Chekhov, translated by Peter Sekirin
Issue no. 152 (Fall 1999)

All the characters are unremarkable, yet sympathetic and attractive people. The hero saves the heroine from a crazed horse; he is strong-willed and he shows his strong fists at every opportunity.

The sky is wide, the distances are vast and the vistas are broad, so broad that they are impossible to understand … this, in short, is Nature.

Friends are blond. Enemies are redheaded.

Detail from a Richard Prince piece, 1978.

Poetry
The Block
By Gevorg Emin, translated by Diana Der Hovanessian
Issue no. 57 (Spring 1974)

For two months
I have not written
a word.

My voice, a low
grumble, disturbs
our quarter

like the rumble
of the millstone
which having nothing to grind
grinds itself.

Detail from a Richard Prince piece, 1978.

Art
From None
By Richard Prince
Issue no. 73 (Spring-Summer 1978)

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

Ensnaring Sebald

Max © Reinbert Tabbert

Biography is always a matter of joining holes together, like a net, for reasons that W. G. Sebald’s own work explores: the fallibility of memory, the death or disappearance of witnesses, the dubious role of the narrator. All these reasons must exercise any biographer. But Sebald’s biographer more than most. For the holes in the net of this story are many.

The central absence is his family life, because his widow wishes to keep this private. Without her permission, his words from privately held sources, such as certain letters, cannot be quoted, only paraphrased. Even his published words, in books and interviews, can be quoted only within the limits laid down by the law.

There are other gaps as well. For instance, I write about Sebald’s four great prose books, but less about his academic writing and his poetry. There are excellent books on both by the scholar Uwe Schütte; so far they are available only in German, but I hope one day we will have them in English.

There are gaps, too, about an important friendship and about Sebald’s work with his last English editor, because both the friend and the editor preferred not to speak to me. I regret these, but not as much as the last and greatest silence, which takes us back to the first. It is the question why, despite a long and loyal marriage, despite devotion to his daughter, he was always alone. His books are so full of this aloneness that some critics scoff at it—why is every street, every landscape, so improbably empty? But really it was no laughing matter. Like his pessimism—which critics with more fortunate dispositions also question—his essential solitude was with him for most of his life. It coexisted with his charm, his humor, his deep empathy, but it could leap out at any moment and fix him in its icy grip. When he was young it leapt out rarely, with the closest friends and relatives of his youth not at all, but as time went on it took him over more and more. So that he felt for many years—the years of his writing—deeply alone, and the people he loved must have felt alone as well.

Why on earth, with these limitations, did I persist? I persisted because W. G. Sebald is the most exquisite writer I know; because I accept his widow’s right to protect her privacy and his, but not to stop any inquiry whatsoever into the roots of his writing; because I am as stubborn as the next person. But the main reason I would not give up writing his biography is a limitation of my own.

Readers of Sebald increasingly agree that it is wrong to see the Jewish and German tragedy of the Holocaust as the sole focus of his work: the darkness of his vision extends much further, to the whole of human history, to nature itself. That is true. But here is my limitation: I am the daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazism. It was the fact that Sebald was the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust that first drew me to him, and it is still one of the things that most amaze and move me about his work. He didn’t want to be labeled a “Holocaust writer” and I don’t call him one here. But though the Holocaust was far from the only tragedy he perceived, it was his tragedy, as a German, the son of a father who had fought in Hitler’s army without question. It was also my tragedy, as the daughter of Viennese Jews who had barely escaped with their lives. I think it is right to see the Holocaust as central to his work. But if I make it too central, that is why.

W. G. Sebald is famous for many things apart from the sheer quality of his prose, and for identifying more powerfully with Germany’s victims than any other German writer. What he is most famous for is that his books are uncategorizable. Are they fiction or nonfiction? Are they travel writing, essays, books of history or natural history, biography, autobiography, encyclopedias of arcane facts? His first British publisher, Christopher MacLehose, was so unsure that he listed The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo under three genres: fiction, travel, and history. (He would really have liked to list them under four, but three was the maximum allowed.) And no one has been sure ever since. Eventually, scholars and critics—and even publishers and booksellers—accepted something surprising but true: Sebald had invented a new genre, balanced somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. And many younger writers have followed his lead, from Robert Macfarlane in Britain to Teju Cole in the United States to Stephan Wackwitz in Germany, and many more besides. Every great writer creates a new genre, said Walter Benjamin. The twentieth-century writer who best passes that crazy test is W. G. Sebald.

The second-most famous thing about him is the main way he achieved this balance between fiction and nonfiction: by placing photographs and documents throughout his work. When you first open a Sebald book it looks like a biography: there are not only photographs of Edward FitzGerald and Roger Casement but also of Paul Bereyter and Ambros Adelwarth, and of Jacques Austerlitz on his cover. Or else it looks like an autobiography, with photographs of Sebald leaning against a tree in The Rings of Saturn, or with his face struck through in a cancelled passport picture in Vertigo. And it reads like autobiography, too, with the narrator following almost exactly W. G. Sebald’s path through life, from birth in a South German village to living in Norfolk and teaching at an English university.

There is no problem with Fitzgerald or Casement, or—as far as the photographs go—with Sebald. And at first there seems no problem with Bereyter or Adelwarth or Austerlitz either. Their photographs bring us closer to them than words—even Sebald’s words—can do. The encounter with their flesh-and-blood presence adds something immeasurable to their stories. It is as though we can look, if we can bear it, straight into their eyes.

But then we read the next story, and the next, and we begin to wonder. The stories are so doomed, so fatal, with their obsessive portrayal of suffering, mental and physical: this is beyond mere observation; it is a vision of life, or, rather, of death. Then you notice, too, how literary they are, with constant echoes of other writers, and how Vertigo is held together by a motif from Kafka, The Emigrants by the image of Nabokov. Those two works, then, are fiction, and so are all the others. There were models for all the characters, from Dr. Henry Selwyn to Austerlitz, but they were changed and combined by Sebald into fictional creations. And at this point something strange happens. Those photographs and documents that made them all so real to us—what are we to make of them now? If the characters are fictions, who are the photographs of ? And suddenly they flip. Where first they created an extraordinary closeness, now they create distance; instead of feeling intensely with the people pictured, we’re asking, Who are you? Precisely the technique Sebald adopted to make his creations real to us now makes us more aware they’re not real than if we had simply been left to imagine them, as in a normal novel. This is a circle he cannot escape from, like several others in his life. And my book traps him in it. If you read him without questioning, and are moved—that is his main aim. I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. It’s why writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me. But I would say to him, You’re wrong. You always wanted people to believe your stories. But they will believe them more, not less, when they know the truth.

It is not only the relationship of the subjects and their photos that is a game of smoke and mirrors. It is also the relationship of Sebald and his narrator—and even the relationship of Sebald to his interviewers.

I interviewed him soon after The Emigrants was published in Britain. He was kind, gloomy, and funny; he told me many things in his excellent English, slowly and seriously, and I believed every word. But doing the research for his biography, I saw that I’d been wrong. He had been honest about himself, and shockingly honest about his parents, but about his work he had spun me a tale. Which I published in my interview, and which has been repeated as a fact ever since. So I’ve made one of the holes in the biographical net myself. That would amuse him, at least.

 

Carole Angier was born in London and spent her early years in Canada. She returned to England, where she taught English literature and philosophy, including eight years’ work for the Open University. Her biography of Jean Rhys (1990) was published to critical acclaim and she subsequently published an equally acclaimed biography of Primo Levi (2002). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Copyright © 2021 by Carole Angier. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury. Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald is out on October 5.