One summer day a few years ago, when the stream was brown and racing, I set out across the Hudson River to a village in the Connecticut Berkshires to visit a friend. Caroline is 20 years my senior, an interesting interval that makes us a short generation apart. Generations today are separated by vastly different experiences of a changing world, but Caroline and I share a language of place-love that can bridge that gap easily. These languages are not the same as what linguists look at but are rather skeins of references, usually to the natural world, regional or even local, that have emotional meaning to people who live there.

Paumanok, for example, is my name for a pre-suburban Long Island place language, a subcategory of mid-Atlantic, and there are Berkshire and Helderberg, which are related, belonging to the larger group I think of as Northeastern—but different, like dialects of Italian. If Paumanok speakers say, “The beach plums are ripe,” that evokes not only the dunes where they grow, not just the plums, and the sweet-sour taste of the deep red-purple jam that can be made from them, but also continuity going back, not just through human generations—certain kitchens, certain people, long gone, momentarily alive in the reference to beach plums—but the whole tapestry of a former way of life, now vanished, and, even, the longer history of the place where beach plums grow, back to prehistory as we think of the time of native tribes. (I haven’t been able to ascertain whether Long Island tribes used beach plums: they are very sour and require a lot of sugar to become palatable.)

There is a special intimacy in using place-language, usually unspoken, and the deepest level of the feeling communicated is of the way place itself transcends, connects. The associations are usually unspoken, their presence more likely conveyed with a glance or an especially tender way of spreading beach plum jam on toast. An equivalent in the Helderbergs might be “The ramps are in,” meaning a kind of wild leek that pops up in dense clusters in the forests before almost any other green has arrived, standing out spookily against the dead brown of the forest floor. I’d never heard of ramps when I came here, but knowing beach plum language I had an inkling of what they meant, and that helped me into the local landscape. When a basket of ramps was left anonymously on my porch, I knew that meant more, than, say, zucchinis. Wildness is a part of it. Place-love language can also convey a sense of uncanniness. On a mid-Atlantic coast, crows on the beach, on a windy late October day, are an unusual sight, conveying something reckless afoot, perhaps transgressive. I don’t yet know Helderberg well enough to cite an equivalent but am on the lookout.

Caroline and I are both native speakers of mid-Atlantic. Berkshire and Helderberg, respectively, are second languages for each of us: she doesn’t know Helderberg at all, while I have only a visitor’s smattering of Berkshire. So it was native fluency in mid-Atlantic that provided a language of powerful connection. Yet over time a kind of anxiety, a sense of generational alienation, had begun to undermine this, and not just with Caroline. I had begun to repeatedly have a feeling of my elders, sitting smug, safe, and oblivious in a seemingly intact world on one side of an abyss, abandoning me to horrid loss and exile on the other.

Caroline perceives the changes in the world from a perspective that evidently does not require her to question her beliefs about the landscapes she loves, nor does she feel any necessity to engage imaginatively with the new one engulfing us. I, in contrast, feel I have no choice, and that goes deep with me, is indeed the driving force of this whole exploration, an adventure from which I do not want to turn back. But when I feel generationally abandoned, self-pity takes over. How could I be stranded in this way, and Caroline not, when there is only 20 years between us? I can find myself wanting to strip her beautiful faith in the constancy of the places she loves from her, forcing her to come with me, even as I keep that faith for myself in my pocket almost like a secret vice.

And yet, at another time, we will communicate just fine, and I know that what I really want is company. I want someone to mourn with me who knows what is being mourned, and maybe a bit of applause for my struggle to let go of attachments and step into a reimagined world from someone who understands the cost. That’s not a longing that goes well with being an explorer.

In the week before going across the river to visit Caroline, I had been reading Howards End, a novel by the English writer E.M. Forster, published in 1910. I hadn’t read it since I was a young woman, when I loved it for affirming the value of the country landscape, though in English place-love translation. Indeed Howards End is a story written wholly in the language of place-love—and, place-hate, sometimes. The title is the name of a house and the lands around it that, while modest enough, represent the old landowning aristocracy of England that originated in feudal times.

The novel contains the phrase for which Forster is most famous: “Only connect!” It is the deep inner thought of his heroine, Margaret, an urbane person who learns from Howards End—the place, and the people who live there—the limits of cultural refinement and, above all, the supreme importance of a natural connective warmth between human beings that arises out of an older relationship to place and that was fast disappearing in a “commercial age.”

Human feelings are very much the subject of Howards End. The paragon of good in the novel is Ruth Wilcox, the aristocratic owner of Howards End when we first encounter it, who has a mystical connection to the place beyond normal language. Living on the estate, too, are people whose ancestors worked the land, still practicing customs dating from pre-Christian times. The pigs’ teeth embedded in the trunk of the wych elm that spreads over the house are the most concise image in the novel of the spiritual vitality of those roots. The foil to that spiritual vitality are Ruth’s husband and sons, unsentimental businessmen who don’t like Howards End because it has no modern conveniences. The true antagonist, however, the embodiment of the worst of the “commercial age,” is the loathsome tide of suburban sameness creeping inexorably out from London toward the house and its lands.

Forster was a humanist and progressive in ways that were daring for his time. And yet for these poor suburbanites he has so little love that he does not even bother to imagine them on the page. When I first read the book, and this second time, too, the question pressed at the edges of my enjoyment: How does he get away with romanticizing feudalism while demonizing democratization, which is surely what that line of approaching sameness was? What struck me this time was the longevity of the attitude. It seems not to have budged one bit in a century, our having passed into an entirely new era notwithstanding. But I saw something else, which I might not have seen had the era not changed: that I loved the village landscape because it was country, but also because of what it wasn’t—because it wasn’t suburbia, and that not being suburbia had, over time, become a part of the definition of “country” for me. Since I would be spending the night across the river I took Howards End, which I had not quite finished, with me.

Soon after my arrival we set out to meet Caroline’s friend Kate for lunch at a restaurant in a nearby village. Kate was about 12 years Caroline’s junior—that is to say, between us in age—and deeply fluent in Berkshire. Somehow suburban development cropped up in the conversation: how awful it was, and why it is that “Americans”—as if Caroline and Kate and I were not American—feel they have to have a freestanding house on a piece of land.

Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.

Of course I knew what they meant; they were speaking to my deepest springs of place-love. And yet, wrestling, as I was, with the paradox of Howards End, I felt I would blow my top any minute. We were in one of the most fashionable parts of the Berkshires, pastoral though it appeared to be. Didn’t they realize that the “countryside” they loved was really a kind of picturesque park, an amenity, a redoubt of privilege? Didn’t they see that they hated suburbia because it was an intrusion on that comfortable and exclusive bastion?

“Suburbia is an English invention,” I said, as a way to catch them off guard in their righteousness—a clever strategy because I knew Englishness had cozy associations of landscape authenticity for them. But then I faltered. I knew from experience that there is no winning against suburbophobia. That night I finished Howards End, closing it, for all my quibbles, with satisfaction. Illogical as Forster’s assumptions might be, his book had survived the crossing into our new era.

Raymond Williams was a Welsh literary critic who came along a couple of generations after Forster, and who took as his subject the meanings with which we infuse landscape and place. He invented the excellent phrase “structure of feeling,” for those powerful combinations of emotions and ideas that we attach to landscape— among other aspects of culture—to the point that we don’t even notice them because they have become a part of our emotional and intellectual lives. A structure of feeling to which he paid special attention is the idea, to be found in much literature, of a golden past, as embodied in the memory of an idyllic landscape, in comparison with which the present is degraded.

He then showed what the supposedly golden ages really were: never golden. Williams’ focus was on landscapes of the past, both real and mythical. The one venture he made into 20th-century suburbia was coining the trenchant phrase “mobile privatism” for that way of life—but not, as far as I know, examining our contemporary attitudes toward suburbia, or our sense of an earlier golden age, which I find interesting, given that, coming two generations after Forster, he lived well into the period of the suburbanization of England. But that, perhaps, reflects the scholar’s wise caution about wading into one’s own time. Still, we can surely use Williams’s wonderful conception to say that the opinion that country is good and suburbia is bad—which the tone of the phrase “mobile privatism” might be said to reflect—is a structure of feeling deep set in the progressive mind of our times.

Something I admire about Williams is that, despite his commitment to bursting bubbles of illusion with facts, he doesn’t mistake his scholarly debunking for the last word. He is engaged with a range of ways of knowing landscape, of which scholarship is just one. For example, he wrote a two-volume novel that begins in geological time, and in which, I have been told, the mountains of Wales are a major character. I confess I have not rushed to read this novel. But I love the way giving the mountains an important part in the novel implicitly acknowledges the ultimately strange yet intimately powerful presence of landscape in our lives, that there is always more to the meaning of landscape than service as a stage set for our doings; that it is always a bit beyond us.

What is especially puzzling to me about the suburbophobic structure of feeling is that it is as rampant in progressive circles as it is among the upper class, especially “old money” landowners who have a natural interest in preserving landscapes not only steeped in family tradition but representing a society in which their position has long been one of privilege.

Violence bookends Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. The narrative begins with a gory recreation of an instance of whale slaughter by 19th-century Europeans, who in unholy pursuit of blubber and baleen left in their wake the carcasses of hundreds of flenched whales. It concludes with cruelty of a different kind, an insidious butchering of the soul that festers in the dismal man camps of contemporary Arctic oil riggers, where “woman and machinery and the land are all spoken of in the same way—seduction, domestication, domination, control.” The moral erosion Lopez describes is familiar to me from two decades of documenting the human condition in extremis, including a dozen war zones on three continents. The backdrop changes, but the base in us, and the way we manifest it, varies little no matter the context.

The reason I have carried my paperback copy of Arctic Dreams with me to wars has been not to compare facets of iniquity, but because in times of depravity one must buoy oneself. One must reach for decency and the goodness that the world relentlessly kernels, against which to steady the soul. In the landmine-studded Turkestan Plains of Afghanistan; in the foothills of Chechnya, where fathers wept about sons abducted by government henchmen; in the dun Mesopotamian limestone, where man was killing man with bombs and bullets, Arctic Dreams reminded me to do the reaching.

To guard against cynicism, Lopez urges, foster an “alertness for minutiae” and “show an initial deference toward [the] mysteries” of a particular place and the human and nonhuman animals in it. He tells us to notice, and shows us water “whirled off in flat sheets and a halo of spray” off a polar bear shaking off after a dive; the “deep patience” of indigenous hunters that accompanies “the long wait at a seal hole for prey to surface;” the way “the serene arctic light…came down over the land like a breath, like breathing;” the sound of several thousand lesser snow geese rising from the water at once—“like a storm squall arriving, a great racket of shaken sheets of corrugated tin.” He is so open to astonishment that he begins to bow to birds in the tundra: “I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, towards the birds and the evidence of life in their nests.” The word “wonder” appears in the book 32 times.

To remain in awe; to linger; to reject “the kind of provincialism that vitiates the imagination,” to reflect the world back at itself at unexpected angles and to invite us, the audience, to ponder and question while reminding us that we are not alone, that someone is as perplexed and bereft and amazed as we are: that is, I think, the obligation of a writer on our overwhelmingly volatile planet. It happens to be, too, an aspect of dreaming, which Merriam-Webster describes, in one of its definitions, as “to pass time in reverie.”

Among the other definitions of the word “dream” are “a visionary creation of imagination,” “a state of mind marked by abstraction or release from reality,” “a strongly desired goal or purpose.” Many of Lopez’s arctic dreamers are whalers, roughnecks, mariners, hunters, colonial polar explorers afflicted by the racial superiority of either the white race or the human race or both—ambitious and often monomaniacal intruders who unpeople the landscapes of their imagining before they arrive in person to unpeople the physical landscapes, mutilating or erasing indigenous cultures, human and animal and plant. That the book begins with what Lopez calls “the carnage of wealth” and ends with the degradation of the human spirit is no coincidence: one cannot exist without the other. he muffling of decency and self-respect both ensue from and facilitate the loss of respect for the world the physical violence we commit.

Arctic Dreams can be interpreted as a parable of the recent history and present of North America. But in my experience it can, and must, be read more broadly. Part warning, part keening, part celebration, it also anatomizes the myopic greed of the Global North that shapes our world entire, that dictates mass violence and crosshairs its victims in the Global South, where I often work, where most of my loved ones live. The majority of modern wars are both the result and the cause of climate disasters, most of which are conditioned by the abusive small-mindedness of industrialism. There is no precedent in human history for the manmade geological changes that are destroying lives and livelihoods now, and for the yet worse catastrophes that climate scientists predict, new unimaginable calamities that will extinguish more species, erase more habitats, kill and displace more people.

As I watch a young Afghan mother take opium to stave off hunger so she can weave a carpet to support her family, as I go to sea with child fishermen in the depleted waters off West Africa’s coast, as I follow nomadic cattle herders through the drought-stricken Sahel where scrub reaches skyward in tragic pis aller, like someone drowning, I the last sentence of Arctic Dreams: “I was full of appreciation for all that I had seen.” “All:” the wingbeat of birds, the oil riggers’ quarters “wretched with the hopes of cheap wealth,” Yup’ik hunters cutting up a walrus they have killed, icebergs “so beautiful they also made you afraid.”

That sentence, as simple as it is magnanimous, suggests an emotional vocabulary for the way we live here, now, in many kinds of love and inadequate to the grief and suffering of the world. It invites an introspection: what can we hold onto and how, and how can we appreciate all that we witness, so that instead of vanishing into the gray without astonishment or hurt we remember to pause before the ineffable, we remember to quiver before a flock of geese lifting off the membrane of a lake.

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of power, featuring work by Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, Eula Biss, Aleksandar Hemon and Aminatta Forna, among others, is available now.

In the summer of 1900, Eva Palmer was reading the lines of Sappho in the company of her friends Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney, preparing for a series of Sapphic performances in Bar Harbor, a summer island resort on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. Of the three women, Barney and Vivien (who was later christened, in a portrait, “Sapho 1900”) are well known as formative members of a Paris-based literary subculture of self-described women lovers, or “Sapphics.”

In a period that scholars have identified as “pivotal” in delineating modern lesbian identity, they interwove the fragmented texts of Sappho in their life and work, making the archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos the quintessential figure of female same-sex desire and Sapphism, or lesbianism. They appear in the history of gay and lesbian sexuality as the women who contributed substantially to the turn-of-the-century decadent rewriting of Baudelaire’s lexicon of the sexualized woman.

Eva Palmer is largely absent from this history. She has made cameo appearances as the “pre-Raphaelite” beauty with “the most miraculous long red hair” who performed in two of Barney’s garden theatricals in Paris. Yet Eva’s correspondence, along with such sources as photographs and newspaper coverage, indicate that she participated in many more performances. From 1900 to the summer of 1907, the years when she moved with Barney between the United States and Paris, she developed a performance style that complemented the poetic language of Vivien and Barney by implicating Sappho in the practice of modern life. Eva’s acts helped transform the fragmented Sapphic poetic corpus into a new way of thinking and creating, before her differences with Barney propelled her to move to Greece to live a different version of the Sapphic life.

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But what was Greece to Eva? By what journey of intellect and desire had she come to embrace this particular Greek prototype?

A notion that the new world found creative ground in old things was integral to Eva’s 19th-century upbringing. It aligned with the progressive ideas of her parents, both from prominent American families and advocates of well-reasoned social and political change to counter the effects of industrialization. Her mother, Catherine Amory Bennett, a member of the Amory family descended from Salem merchants and part of Boston’s traditional upper class, was a classically trained pianist who dedicated herself to the arts and progressive causes such as women’s suffrage. She gathered musicians in the family home to play in her small orchestra or to sing. Operatic divas Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Marcella Sembrich, and especially Emma Calvé were near the hearts of Eva and her siblings. 

Eva’s father, Courtlandt, claimed he was descended from a knighted crusader and an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower. Trained as a lawyer at Columbia Law School, he spent his days “investigat[ing] for himself the questions, the problems, the mysteries of life. . . . No error could be old enough, popular, plausible, or profitable enough, to bribe his judgment or to keep his conscience still.” When he purchased a stake in Gramercy Park School and Tool-House (also known as the Von Taube School, after its originator and director, G. Von Taube), he supported its “new education” model of self-directed learning harmoniously combining theoretical and practical learning to prepare students for a business or scientific course. Yet he also directed pupils to study “Greek, French, German and English systems of philosophy, following his motto, “old things are passing away; behold, old things are becoming new.” This was his willful misreading of the passage in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that reads “all things are become new.”

Old Greek things were deeply ingrained in the look and feel of the world that these Mayflower descendants had inherited. Greece entered America (as it did Germany and Britain) as a country of the imagination, a special locus of aesthetic and intellectual origins, practically from the country’s founding moments. Initially the founders filtered Greece into American self-governance through the guise of Roman republicanism, considered a more congenial model than Athens’s direct democracy. Then, around the turn of the 19th century and coinciding with the receding of fears of the “perils of democracy,” American elites began drawing visible lines of affiliation that filled the gap between the new world and ancient Greece through a variety of Greek “revivals,” in architecture, education, and more.

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Over time and coinciding with her coming of age in the late 1800s, changes in the value given to Greek learning broadened its social reach. Hellenism was proposed as an antidote to the crude anti-intellectualism of industrial society. It became a “platform for the perfection of the inner self.” Thus imitation of the Greeks moved from elite domains of scholarship and governance to popular spheres such as athletics—for example, when the American team competed successfully, dominating the gold medal tally in the first international revival of the Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. Imitation of Greek prototypes became a private occupation too when figures such as the tragic heroine Antigone were upheld as good models for women of the rising middle class.

During Eva’s adolescence, as women began gaining access to higher education, they also took on leading roles in reforming American culture. In the public sphere, they actively sought to translate classical models for new purposes, which were as pointedly sociopolitical as they were scholarly.

A case in point was the solidly humanities-based curriculum of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, which Eva completed in 1891. As a day and boarding school, Miss Porter’s adopted a Yale preparatory curriculum for girls in grades nine to twelve. Even more revolutionary was the classically grounded humanistic curriculum that Eva followed at Bryn Mawr College, a school promising academic rigor equal to that of Harvard and Yale. After passing stiff entrance exams in Latin to gain entry as a twenty-two-year-old adult in 1896, she took advanced Latin and beginning and intermediate Greek classes there.

At Bryn Mawr, Eva would have encountered Sappho on many fronts. From the mouth of the college’s president, M. Carey Thomas, who set the school’s high-minded direction, she would have heard Sappho named “the greatest lyric poet in the world,” an exception in history, a sign of women’s as yet untapped genius, and call for the necessity of their solidarity. Thomas was the same person who established the goal that work done in women’s colleges should be “the same in quality and quantity as the work done in colleges for men.” 

Eva’s courses in Latin and Greek put that principle into effect by requiring that female students acquire skills in the original languages. They had to know the sources and stay informed about archaeological discoveries, such as the unearthing of new papyrus scraps of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Perhaps it was for them that “M. Maspero, the Director of Explorations in Egypt,” included the detail that “he detected the perfume of Sappho’s art” in those scraps in the sands of Oxyrhynchus. In her Latin studies Eva would have encountered stories of Sappho’s life in Ovid’s Heroides, or lingered on Catullus’s line about the young woman who made herself “Sapphica . . . musa doctior” (“more learned . . . than the Sapphic muse”). In Mamie Gwinn’s course on the English essay concentrating on “Arnold, Pater and Swinburne,” she would have read Swinburne’s Notes on Poems and Reviews in defense of “the very words of Sappho.”

Thomas’s message to students at Bryn Mawr College was double: that women’s higher education should replicate the “quality and quantity” of men’s colleges, on the one hand, and provide women students with prototypes such as Sappho who could serve as transformative models for women of the future, on the other. Indeed the twofold nature of Thomas’s notions was written into the project of women’s higher education.

Specifically with regard to Greek learning, it was impossible for young women to embrace the discipline of philology in the neutral, unstressed ways of men, whose gendered lives as men were not changed by their access to Greek learning. At the very least, women made Greek learning a sign of their capacity for cultivation. This was no small matter, for by learning to read Greek at Bryn Mawr College as if they were men reading Greek at Harvard College, women showed their capacity both for doing what men were already doing and for assuming some of their roles. In this way, they were “invert[ing] the traditional privilege system that lends primacy to men.” They and their Greek books were implicated in a social transformation. “What didn’t the Greeks have?” Eva would later ask Natalie Barney, making the point that the Greeks gave her everything she needed to live a transformative life.

Eva embraced the contradictory directions given to her by Bryn Mawr College. Though no stellar student, she gained enough training in classical languages to understand the significance of gendered adjectival endings and pronouns (lost in English translation) and to recite Sappho’s poetry in ancient Greek. Then, following Thomas’s second line of argument, she made use of classical prototypes to invert social conventions. She was likely practicing some form of “inversion” in the sexual sense in her dormitory room in Radnor Hall in the spring of 1898—perhaps testing Sappho’s words of love on a fellow student. At least one female classmate, Virginia Greer Yardley, recalled having a devastating “crush on Eva Palmer” and remained emotionally attached to her for years. In any case, Eva was caught doing something strictly prohibited, and President Thomas wrote her a stern letter “[forbidding her] the right of residence in the halls of Bryn Mawr College for one year from the 28th of May, 1898, to the 28th of May, 1899.”

It was commonplace to believe that women might grow “unwomanly” or excessively free if they got too close to Greek learning. In Eva’s case, her accession to classical studies did bear something in excess of the anticipated outcomes of a college education. When she and her female friends exchanged Greek words in private moments, they were not just proving themselves to be “as fully classical as men.” These women were using the classical to renegotiate old gender and sex roles, circumvent the attendant taboos, and express new desires. They were pushing old Western cultural models onto unconventional ground as an unwelcome “heresy.” It was for some such unspecified heresy that Eva was suspended from Bryn Mawr in the spring of 1898 and traveled to Europe with her brother Courtlandt, who was studying piano in Rome.

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From Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins. Used with permission of Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Artemis Leontis.

In 1945, Samuel Beckett published an article entitled “Le Monde et le pantalon” (“The World and the Trousers”), which discussed the Dutch painters Abraham and Gerardus Van Velde, familiarly known as Bram and Geer.

Beckett concluded that “We are only just beginning to talk rot about the Van Velde brothers. I open the series. It is an honor.”

It is true that Beckett was talking rot. Indeed he was the only writer or critic, apropos of Bram in particular, who performed brilliantly in this respect. He said for instance that one picture “makes a very distinctive noise, that of a door slamming far away…”

Several times—even reluctantly—he returned to the case of Bram Van Velde. But Bram, true to himself, resisted all rot, sighing: “I don’t like talking. I don’t like people talking to me. Painting is silence.”

Van Velde was a serious guy. He was guileless, sometimes found himself grotesque, and knew that he could be the butt of mirth. After reading Endgame, he acknowledged that he had found some of his own observations in it. Beckett considered him the very model of “the totally desperate man.”

Van Velde dwelt in the sacred, in suffering, in indigence, just like his compatriots Van Gogh and Mondrian, steadfastly opposed to laughter, utterly hostile to excessive derision, and burdened down by the immense angst of Protestant lands.

Nor should we forget Beckett’s Protestant upbringing and its role in his writing, his personality, his rather disdainful prudishness and his taste for the unsaid.

Indeed, did he not see Van Velde as the perfect exponent, in all his austerity, of the unsaid? Better put, he finally found in Van Velde the painter unable to paint because there was “nothing to paint.”

“Are you saying,” asked a Georges Duthuit practically invented by Beckett, “that Van Velde’s painting is inexpressive?”

To which Beckett’s reply, two weeks later, was “Yes.”

Protestant, then, but also a joker, Beckett could find Van Velde’s abstemiousness amusing. He did not mock it, however, nor complain about it: rather, he enjoyed it, admiring and enthusiastic. Did this exiled artist perhaps remind him of his own exile? After all, exiles are a race.

Van Gogh carried his inconsolable sadness with him from his country, horizontal as far as the eye could see, to a eld of wheat, just as horizontal, where he put a bullet in his chest. As for Mondrian, he landed in Paris, then in New York, with, firmly preserved in his mind’s eye, rectilinear fields of tulips or potatoes stretching far into the distance.

Van Gogh and Mondrian’s paintings are streaked with horizon—the horizon of their native land. Van Velde’s paintings tend to the vertical. Considering that he quit the same gray, at country as they, what was it that he took with him that enabled him to have his pictures resemble open windows? Was it perhaps a few trees standing here or there, or the sails of a windmill, sole suggestions of verticality beneath the void of his sky, which he trailed along with him everywhere, even as far as Corsica and Majorca?

No exile forgets his country. When he met his young compatriot Samuel Beckett, the perpetual exile James Joyce reminded him of the rule: “Ulysse a fait un beau voyage, no doubt about it, but then he went home.”

Beckett never fully left his island, or his language. For a time he was nourished by the words of that incorrigible and impenitent Jesuit of a master, but then he found his own voice, his own laugh and, above all, the wherewithal to prompt laughter. He became the comic Protestant, a precursor able to transform any abby conversation into a dialogue simultaneously funny and devoid of hope, at once realistic and improbable.

In Van Velde’s gaze Beckett believed he spied a brother, the first to acknowledge that “to be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail.”

What an extraordinary misunderstanding! Whereas the one jubilantly turned his world into a clown show, the other opened his window onto silence and nothingness and there unsmilingly limned a few broad black lines between splashes of color—and this without forgetting to repeat that “Each painting contains so much suffering.”

By comparison with the painter, Beckett resembles a thoroughbred at the gallop, clearing hedges in a ash, and suddenly pulling up at the sight of this workhorse, long-suffering and mute save for a few definitive whispered words, such as: “Painting doesn’t interest me. What I paint is beyond painting.” Or again: “I paint the impossibility of painting.”

Prompted by this, Beckett’s response is: “What indeed is this colored surface that wasn’t there before? I don’t know, having never having seen anything like it before. It seems to have no relationship to art—not, at any rate, if my memories of art are correct.”

And so forth.

Beckett talks rot, granted. But not always. He is the one who declares that he is not an intellectual, that he is mere sensibility, and is moved by this painting, by “everything it offers by way of the irrational, the ingenuous, the incoherent, and the mal-léché.” Here he is getting close to its mystery, and relishing the fact, but he quickly reverts to his rot. He knows only too well where Van Velde’s angst can lead. And he knows in advance that in this staring match Bram will surely be the victor.

–Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith

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From Uncertain Manifesto. Used with permission of New York Review Books. Copyright © 2019 by Frederic Pajak. 

As long as I can remember, I have loved boats and words.

When I was about two years old, I was with my parents and three siblings in an eatery in Essex, Massachusetts. It was named “The Village Restaurant,” but by my mother still called it “Wimpy’s,” its previous name. I once was told that the restaurant was started by a woman who had sometimes cooked for my politician grandfather’s dinner parties, and partly with money he lent her. I still remember her mashed potatoes, which in retrospect must have had a very large quotient of butter and cream.

At the restaurant I looked out the big window at the Essex River boatyard across the road and down a slope. It is now a museum of shipbuilding. I pointed and, for the first time in my life, spoke. It was sometime in 1957, about the time that John Updike was moving into a small house a few miles to the north of Essex. “Boat,” I announced. It was my first word.

Essex was part of Boston’s north shore that the new Rte. 128, the nation’s first “beltway,” had six years earlier put in easy commuting distance of Boston. These new and unsettled suburbs, layered over old Puritan towns, provided the setting of Updike’s novel Couples. There are just a few books I have read three times (Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That comes to mind, along with Shakespeare’s tragedies, but not much else), but Couples is one of them. Updike has been criticized as a stylish miniaturist, but I think that in that novel about a group of young married couples in the early 1960s he captured the feel of the transition from the Eisenhower era into the Kennedy years and the cusp of the 1960s. The adults think they are so suave yet are painfully innocent about life and its costs.

It was only recently, when reading Adam Begley’s biography of Updike, that I realized how much Updike and I breathed the same disconcerted air in those years. My father, the son of a Wyoming cowhand, had been catapulted upward by the GI Bill, and had begun teaching at Harvard about the time Updike was an undergraduate there. Updike began work at the New Yorker a few weeks before I was born. When I was two years old, he moved with his wife to Ipswich, the town just north of Essex —and indeed his first house there was on Essex Road. Today the Cape Ann peninsula is just the fringe of Boston, but back then it was a new land. It was to me a lovely, rich mix of beaches, salt marshes, pine groves, polo and golf clubs, and occasional rocky headlands.

Updike’s beaches were my beaches—Crane and Wingaersheek, both located between Gloucester’s rocks and Ipswich’s marshes. As newlyweds, Updike and his first wife had worked at the YMCA Family Camp on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, while my family around that time spent a week of the summer at Squam Lake, the next body of water to the west.

With his second wife, Updike moved to Beverly Farms, just south of where we lived in Essex, and just east of the hospital where I was born, on the eastern side of Essex Street (yes, a different one). My great-grandfather, William Russell, summered a mile to the east, on Coolidge Point. When old and wealthy, Updike spent some of his royalty payments golfing at the venerable Myopia Hunt Club, where my grandparents sometimes took me to dinner when I was a child. I always had the roast beef and mashed potatoes, which to my childish self was the height of luxury.

My mother told me that once at a cocktail party, Updike poured a drink down the front of her dress. She was not sure if it had been on purpose. (My mother’s chest features in another family story, when she complained to McGeorge Bundy, then dean of faculty at Harvard, about her husband’s salary—I believe that in 1960, he was making $6,000. He allegedly pointed a finger at my mother’s ample breasts and said, “He’s a psychologist? There’s a world of grant money there. All he has to do is pick a teat and suck!” Soon thereafter he headed south to Washington to be John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor, where he helped enmesh our country in the Vietnam War.)

I first encountered Updike’s work in college. Couples, published in 1968, five years before I became a freshman, was a revelation to me. This was a writer. Yes, his subject matter sometimes was minor, but that made the skillful prose all the more luminous. He has a great eye, and ear. “Sometimes in these warm pale nights, as the air cooled and the cars on the road beyond the lilac hedge swished toward Nun’s Bay trailing a phosphorescence of radio music . . . .” Or, more simply, “Adultery lit her from within.” The windshield of an “old maroon coupe [is] aswarm with reflected branches and patches of cloud.” A man holds a cocktail: “Ringlets of vibration, fine as watch springs, oscillated on the surface of his Gibson as he laughed.”

For some reason I have for decades associated Updike with an experience I had in the summer of 1960 or 1961. It was the first time I saw adults scared, and it was a revelation to me. I believe it was the Fourth of July. My parents drove us all (five children, then) over to Marblehead to a big shingled house overlooking the harbor, which was filled with yachts and partygoers. We were parked in a basement playroom with some strange children we didn’t know, and were told to keep ourselves busy. My parents went to the cocktail party out on the lawn. This all struck me as terribly unfair, especially as I knew they were going to get out for a boat ride.

About two hours later my parents returned, ashen faced, and quickly herded us into the family station wagon. On the ride home my mother told us they had been taken out on a racing yacht their host had just acquired, I think a Lightning, a small, fast sloop. As they were heading toward Lighthouse Point, near the harbor’s mouth, crowded with holiday boats, a squall rolled through and a gust filled the sails. The Lightning responded just as it was designed to do, leaping forward and holding its accelerated speed. Doing so, it poked its bow into the side of a cabin cruiser. The new skipper had just learned an expensive lesson about boat-handling.

In retrospect, one benefit of being a member of a big family is that it is possible to get lost in the small crowd of siblings. Sitting in the back seat on that ride home to Essex, I looked out the car window and contemplated my parents’ state. Observing them, I sensed that the people put in this world to take care of me were not always capable of looking out for themselves. It was a powerful lesson: watch out for myself. It took a decade or more for some of my peers, cushioned by money, to learn that lesson.

My parents sometimes had an inattentive otherworldliness to them. At about this point in my life, they headed off to a dinner party given by a couple they knew and liked, but found rather stiff. They were served what they considered, to their surprise, a pretty casual, thrown-together meal. They were also puzzled that no other guests were invited. They found out months later that they had shown up on the wrong night.

As I write this, it occurs to me that it might be an interesting exercise to re-write Couples from the perspective of the children kept on the periphery of the story. My friend, the dance critic Suzanne Carbonneau, says that the problem of children in Updike’s novels is crucial, because it is “the place where his morality diverges so painfully from his aesthetics.” The children never get the attention they deserve, because the Updike-like heroes need so much. One of the side effects of this narcissism is that children in his writing seem to be afterthoughts, and sometimes impediments. I got the sense from the Begley biography of him that that is how he sometimes thought of his own offspring—they understood that the books came before them.

At one point in Couples, one half of an adulterous couple contemplating having sex on a pile of dirty clothes in a basement laundry room in a house on the outskirts of Ipswich looks up at the cellar window to check if a “child’s watching shadow cleft it.” I would have been seven years and eight years old in the year in which the novel is set, from early 1963 to early 1964. That might have been my shadow there.

And yes, I now have my own sailboat.

In the year 1730, a man named Colley Cibber was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. His literary contemporaries, notably Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding, did not think him the least bit worthy of the position—first, they considered him a very bad poet, and second, they were sure that the only reason he got the job was because he was a Whig, like the Prime Minister at the time, but unlike most of the other prominent writers of the time.

But Cibber was not only a poet but also an actor who established and managed his own company, as well as a playwright—though his plays were mostly adaptations of Shakespeare’s works. He had some success as a comedic actor but was roundly mocked when he tried to take on dramatic roles. His poems were parodied, his plays were derided, and in general he was considered to be Bad at Literature, despite his post. Pope in particular loved to attack Cibber in print, modeling oafish characters on him and directly insulting him.

In 1740, Cibber published his autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian, which only further inflamed his enemies against him. Case in point: on May 17 of that year, Henry Fielding, under the name Captain Hercules Vinegar, published a piece in The Champion called “The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian, &c. For writing a Book intitled An Apology for his Life, &c. Being a thorough Examination thereof; wherein he is proved guilty of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the English Language, and in characterizing many Persons of Distinction.” In it, he literally (mock-)tries Cibber in the press:

You stand indicted here by the name of Col. Apol late of Covent Garden, Esq; for that you, not having the Fear of Grammar before your Eyes, on the of at a certain Place, called the Bath, in the County of Somerset, in Knights-Bridge, in the County of Middlesex, in and upon the English Language an Assault did make, and then and there, with a certain Weapon called a Goose-quill, value one Farthing, which you in your left Hand then held, several very broad Woulds but of no Depth at all, on the said English Language did make, and so you the said Col. Apol. the said English Language did murder.

The prisoner pleads not guilty—after he figures out which hand to raise, ha ha, what a doofus—and two witnesses are called to assert that they had “often seen him with a Goose-quill in his Hand, and a Bottle full of Liquor before him.” Fielding is sure to note that “Several Exceptions were taken to the Indictment, as that the Wounds were not described and the English Language was not said to have died, &c. but they were all over-ruled.”

Then Cibber is allowed to plead his case:

Sir, I am as innocent as the Child which hath not yet enter’d into Human Nature of the Fact laid to my Charge. This Accusation is the forward Spring of Envy of my Lawrel. It is impossible I should have any Enmity to the English Language, with which I am so little acquainted; if therefore I have struck any Wounds into it, they have rolled from Accident only. I confess in my Book, that when I am warmed with a Thought, my Imagination is apt to run away with me, and make me talk Nonsense. Besides, if the English Language be destroyed, it ought not to be laid to my Charge, since I can evidently demonstrate that other Literati have used the said Language more barbarously than I have.

Cibber is about to be convicted when someone runs up to the Captain to whisper in his ear that he’d taken out two advertisements in The Champion, “upon which the Captain, not from the Motive of a Bribe, but of the Prisoner’s Submission to his Correction, and likewise considering that he had stood already three Times in the censorial Pillory, and been well pelted, directed the Jury in his Favour.”

The mock trial was a hit. If nothing else, at least Pope and Fielding would be gratified that their names are remembered (by some, at least) almost 300 years later, whereas Cibber’s is remembered by very few. I guess the moral of the story is that bullying works?

One of the defining characteristics of hip-hop music is the use of allusion. On his song “Dumb It Down,” Lupe Fiasco rhymes, “I’m brainless, which means I’m headless, like Ichabod Crane is…” In Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, schoolmaster Ichabod Crane never actually loses his head. That honor lies with the Headless Horseman. We let it slide though. These references are flexible. No one flinches when Method Man grabs his “Charles Dickens” on Biggie’s “The What.”

Allusions like these activate two texts at once, bringing to mind more than what they say on the surface. Rap lyrics are rife with allusions to other songs in the canon, as well as other media artifacts. These allusions give the oral history of hip-hop music a cohesion and a history similar to that created by the musical riffs of other live instrumental-based genres.

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, the guy who gave us the idea of paradigm shifts, described an essential tension in science between innovation and tradition: Too innovative and the theory is untestable, too traditional and it’s not useful. The same tension can be said to exist in hip-hop, as if one “innovates” without regard to “tradition,” one is no longer doing hip-hop. Where lyrical allusions are concerned, one must not adhere too closely to the original source lest one be accused of rote repetition at best and plagiarism or biting at worst. A practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. It is often difficult to tell which side of the line a lyric, a song, or an artist falls. The listener is often the one who must resolve the tension between innovation and imitation because rap itself is always somewhere in the middle.

Aesop Rock, widely considered one of the wordiest emcees, claims not to read books. “Yeah, reading bores me,” he told me years ago. He might have changed his media diet somewhat since then, but back in 2005 he claimed his intake and influences were “mostly movies and TV and comparing real life situations to similar nostalgic movie situations or things like that.” That methodology doesn’t seem that strange for any songwriter, raps, rhymes or otherwise, but the first rule of writing is to read. A lot. Through literary allusions, these are just a few of the ways that books have influenced hip-hop lyrics.

When it comes to rap lyrics and authors, two easy examples are Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim.

Donald Goines wrote about himself and his associates and their struggles as street hustlers, pimps, players, and dope ends. Goines wrote sixteen books in five years and helped redefine the genre in which he wrote. He interrogated the nature of human identity through the inner city. To retrofit a description, one could say that Goines wrote gangster-rap literature. They’re referenced in rap songs by everyone from Tupac and Ice-T to Ludacris and Nas.

Iceberg Slim, whose 1967 autobiography Pimp: The Story of My Life got a recent best-seller bump from a mention on Dave Chapelle’s Netflix special, The Bird Revelation, is also mentioned on Ice Cube’s “Who’s the Mack?” Ab-Soul’s “Christopher Droner,” Gucci Mane’s “All These Bitches,” Nelly’s “E.I.” Pimp C’s “Grippin’ on the Wood,” Too $hort’s “Money in the Ghetto,” “Bad Ways,” and Biggie’s “What’s Beef?” among many others. Jay-Z alone mentions Iceberg on his songs “Kingdom Come,” “So Ghetto,” “Fuck All Nite,” and “Who You Wit?” Ice-T even borrowed his name on his 1990 record, The Iceberg: Freedom of Speech: Just Watch What You Say, on which he raps, “Call me The Ice… or just The Iceberg.”

“Soul on Ice,” the last song on Ice-T’s previous record, 1988’s Power—the first record to bear a Parental Advisory sticker—can be seen as further homage to Iceberg Slim in both style and subject matter. Instead of riding a beat as is an emcee’s wont, Ice-T rhymes in a slow, storytelling style, much like Iceberg Slim’s own record from 1976, Reflections. Soul on Ice is also the name of Eldridge Cleaver’s first book. Written while Cleaver was locked up at Folsom State Prison, the memoir was at least as influential as contemporary texts by Slim, Goines, and Malcolm X. Upon his release, Cleaver served as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1971. Ice-T’s fellow L.A. emcee Ras Kass also adopted the name Soul on Ice for his debut record in 1996, and he makes reference to the book several times on the album’s title track. For example, “In limbo, I lamp, rape the lady, kill the tramp. The wrong action for the right motive,” which is from the first chapter of Cleaver’s book, “On Becoming,” in which he describes taking revenge on his white oppressors by ravaging their women. The cover of the record shows Ras Kass reclining in a jail cell.

Emcee Killer Mike mentions books and literature itself on several songs. On “Big Beast,” he raps “We the readers of the books and the leaders of the crooks.” On “Willie Burke Sherwood,” he says, “books I read ‘cause I’m addicted to literature.” On the latter track, Mike takes his cues equally from Tupac Shakur and William Golding. He compares himself to Jack in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Of the three would-be leaders on the island, Jack was the mean one, the one wielding weapons instead of words. The weaker boys, the strangely calm Simon and the overweight and overwrought Piggy, lost their lives, while Ralph, the more benevolent, diplomatic and democratic of the leaders, lost his mind. Killer Mike uses the situation in the book to illustrate that a civilized man can’t survive among the animals in the streets. At the very least, he must assert himself as such.

Speaking of animals, on “Animal in Man” (2000), Dead Prez retell the story of George Orwell’s best novel, Animal Farm (1945), adapting it from the Russian Revolution to the state of the United States at the start of the century. For instance, the farmer in the book becomes Sam, as in Uncle Sam.

Waka Flocka Flame’s raucous debut Flockaveli, a name that combines Flocka’s own with that of Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli, recalls Tupac’s last record as well, which was released under the name Makaveli. First disseminated in 1513 and finally published in 1532, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a standard of political strategy for those with agile ambition and flexible morals. It is used in the same way that Killer Mike uses Golding above: to justify tactics that might otherwise be taboo.

Any mention of Machiavelli’s The Prince in the context of rap leads to two similarly influential works, one before and one after: The Art of War by Sun Tzu (5th century B.C.) and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (1998). For instance, on the Remix to Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire’s “The Last Huzzah,” Kool A.D. of Das Racist says, “Let’s battle and see who sons who. I’m reading Sun-Tzu,” making clever use of the genre-old tradition of emcee battles but also referencing the author of the military strategy classic. He brings it back to Tupac, The Prince, and Miguel de Cervantes in the very next line, claiming he’s “translating Don Killuminati into Spanish.”

Greene’s 48 Laws have been referenced in songs by everyone from Drake, Kanye, and Jay-Z to Beanie Sigel, Rick Ross, and Ras Kass, the latter of whom did a whole song called “48 Laws (Part 1)” applying the first 24 laws to the hip-hop industry. For example, Ras Kass indicts mogul and producer Sean “Puffy” Combs for his liberal use of borrowed labor, rapping, “And Puff Daddy perfected rule number seven: Get others to do your work, but take all the credit.” 50 Cent even went so far as to collaborate with Greene on a book called, The 50th Law (2009). The book is a memoir written in the tone of inspirational business strategy, a street hustler’s manual.

No stranger to the streets, Detroit’s Danny Brown grew up on the works of Dr. Seuss. The nme of his fourth record, 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, is inspired by both the Joy Division song and the J.G. Ballard book of the same name. The Ballard book is a series of condensed novels, which is an apt description of the songs on Brown’s record.

On the Roots’ “100% Dundee,” Black Thought says, “Push pen to paper like Chinua Achebe.” The song is from their 1999 record, Things Fall Apart, which was the name of 1958 debut novel by Achebe. The Roots also reference Malcolm Gladwell’s debut book, The Tipping Point (2000), with their 2004 record of the same name. Now, this particular naming may be a coincidence, but Gladwell’s book had become a best-selling nonfiction title by then, and the Roots are smart folks. Years later in 2012, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis released The Heist, which jumps off with a song called “Ten Thousand Hours.” The track is named after Gladwell’s theory of mastery from his 2008 book Outliers. The theory states that in order to master a skill, one has to practice it for 10,000 hours, which Macklemore claims to have put in on his rap craft.

Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye provides the inspiration for Black Star’s song “Thieves in the Night” from their only record, 1998’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star. The song, like the novel, is about the differences between being seen as a person and being perceived as a persona: that feeling when where you’re from is at odds with where you’re at.

Allusions are everywhere in our media and can be found throughout hip-hop. The manner in which the music is made and the words spoken on top are often borrowed and bent for new purposes. It not only gives the genre agility and grace but also connections to everything it cobbles.

In the autumn of 1904, after Joseph Conrad had published Nostromo to disappointing reviews, and with his always precarious financial situation vitiated by an operation for his wife, Jessie, he abandoned England to spend the winter in Capri, motivated by thrift and the hope that the climate would conduce to her recuperation. He met Norman Douglas soon after his arrival, and they became fast friends. Conrad wrote to H. G. Wells that he had met “a Scot (born in Austria) once in diplomatic service, [which] he threw up I fancy in sheer intellectual disgust. A man who can not only think but write.” The purpose of the letter was to enlist Wells’s aid in getting Douglas published. To soften him up, Conrad added that he, Douglas, and Thomas Jerome had discussed Wells’s visionary novel A Modern Utopia, which was then being serialized in The Fortnightly Review, and they agreed that Wells was “the one honest thinker of the day.”

Capri disappointed Conrad, for reasons cited by many visitors before and after him. In a letter to his friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford, he reported,

I’ve done nothing. And if it were not that Jessie profited so remarkably I would call the whole expedition a disaster. This climate what between tramontana and sirocco has half killed me in a not unpleasant languorous melting way. I am sunk in a vaguely uneasy dream of visions—of innumerable tales that float in an atmosphere of voluptuously aching bones . . . The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing scandals, international, cosmopolitan, and biblical flavored with Yankee twang and the French phrases of the gens du monde mingle with the tinkering of guitars in the barber’s shops . . . All this is a sort of blue nightmare traversed by stinks and perfumes, full of flat roofs, vineyards, vaulted passages, enormous sheer rocks, pergolas, with a mad gallop of German tourists lâché à travers tout cela [loosed amid all this] in white Capri shoes over the slippery Capri stones, kodaks, floating veils, strangely waving whiskers, grotesque hats, streaming, tumbling, rushing, ebbing from the top of Monte Solaro (where the clouds hang) to the amazing rocky chasms of the Arco Naturale—where the lager beer bottles go pop.

Although Capri did not prove to be a good place to work, it provided the raw material for a brilliant short story, a genre that Conrad undertook infrequently in its pure, Chekhovian form. His near neighbor in Capri was a Polish compatriot, Count Zygmunt Szembek, who told him about an unpleasant incident he had experienced in Naples. “Il Conde,” subtitled “A Pathetic Tale,” is told by a classic Conradian narrator, chatty and confidential, an honest but unreliable informant. On a visit to Naples, he meets an elderly Bohemian aristocrat, “a good European,” an “intelligent man of the world, a perfectly unaffected gentleman.” They are staying at the same hotel, where they become dining companions. The Count, a widower, is elegantly dressed in a dinner jacket and evening waistcoat “of very good cut, not new—just as these things should be.” He reveals that he is a regular visitor to the Gulf of Naples, where he stays at hotels in Sorrento or rents a villa in Capri, for relief of a painful and dangerous rheumatic affliction. When the narrator leaves for a few days in Taormina, to look after a sick friend, the Count sees him off at the train station.

When the narrator returns, he finds the Count a changed man. After dinner, over cigars, the Count tells him about an “abominable adventure” that occurred in a public park in Naples. He went to hear a musical concert, he says, where he encountered a well-dressed young man of a certain type, “with colorless, clear complexion, red lips, jet-black little moustache, and liquid black eyes, so wonderfully effective in leering or scowling.” They shared a table without speaking. Soon after, the Count strolled near the bandstand and saw the young man again, and they exchanged glances. When the music began, the Count wandered down a poorly lit alley, where he once more encountered the young man, who asked him for a light for his cigarette. When the Count reached for his matches, the youth put a stiletto to his chest and demanded his money.

The Count tells the narrator that he felt powerless to call for help, because the robber could have thrown down the knife and claimed that he was the victim. “He might have said I attacked him” or “bring some dishonoring charge against me.” The Count handed over what little money he had but refused to give up his rings, one a gift from his wife and the other a legacy from his father. The robber melted into the night.

Shaken, the Count stopped at a café in Galleria Umberto to eat a risotto. After he sat down, he saw the cutthroat sitting at the end of the banquette. A cigar seller informed him that he was “a young Cavaliere of a very good family” and a capo of the Camorra. After the Count paid his bill with a gold coin he kept hidden for such an emergency, the hoodlum menaced him for the last time: “Ah! So you had some gold on you—you old liar.” He called him a rascal and a villain, and concluded, “You are not done with me yet.” The Count decides that he must leave Italy at once and never return, which the narrator calls the equivalent of a death sentence. He sees the Count off at the station and ends his story with the maxim “Vedi Napoli e poi mori”—See Naples and die.

“Il Conde” has excited as many critical theories as some of Conrad’s novels. The story anticipates the themes of anarchy and nihilism that he elaborates at length in The Secret Agent, which he was writing at the same time, and the novel that followed, Under Western Eyes. Modern critics have been attracted to the story because of its homosexual subtext, rare in Conrad’s work. Jim’s affectionate friendship with his native sidekick, in Lord Jim, possesses a sentimental edge, but the textual justification for a sexual charge is flimsy there and absent elsewhere in the novels. In “Il Conde,” however, the homosexual element is scarcely submerged.

From the start, the hints are plentiful. The narrator and the Count, both men traveling alone, first meet at the National Archaeological Museum when they are standing next to each other contemplating the bronze sculpture of a nude ephebe from Herculaneum, known as the Resting Hermes. Even before they meet, the Count attracts the narrator’s notice when he leaves a yellow silk parasol behind at the hotel’s dining room and a “lift boy” chases after him to return it.

The Count’s narrative of his abominable adventure is transparent. He sits at the young man’s table, they exchange glances in the crowd, he strolls past him as he sits alone in a dark alley. It is a classic description of what would come to be known as cruising, which culminates in asking for a light, the clichéd opening for a homosexual proposition. There is scant ambiguity, too, in the phrase “dishonoring charge”—what could it be, given the Count’s age and social position, apart from a sexual advance?

Yet the narrator of “Il Conde” portrays the Count not only in a positive light but affectionately. The gay reading of the story got support from Count Zygmunt Szembek’s grandson, who told Conrad’s Polish biographer that his grandfather was in fact homosexual. He also contributed a Pole’s insight that the plebeian Conrad might have been impressed by the real Count’s aristocratic polish, his air of instinctive cultivation, and even the discreet elegance of his wardrobe.

A more interesting issue than speculation about the elusive fictional “truth,” whether the Count went to the concert in search of a young man for sex, is the perennial question in Conrad of the relationship between the narrator and his tale. Does the Count suppress important information telling his story to a naive, credulous confidant? Or is the narrator himself a player in the game, who intends his story to be a cautionary tale, lightly coded, to other homosexuals? The latter approach might not have occurred to Conrad: although he was friends with several writers who were gay, he appears to have been oblivious or indifferent to their private lives and might have been naive about the phenomenon, as most of his contemporaries were. Perhaps he simply took a storyteller’s passing interest in the subject after meeting the charming, urbane Count Szembek and the intellectually brilliant Norman Douglas, who belied the stereotype of the predatory pederast, which resulted in this unique work.

*

Fifteen years later, another modern master of the novel came to Capri for a longish stay and wrote a small-scale tour de force that was distinctly unlike his best-known works. D. H. Lawrence met Norman Douglas in London when Douglas was working at The English Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford, where Lawrence launched his literary career. In November 1919, when Lawrence decided to leave England to live abroad, beginning in Italy, he wrote to Douglas, who was then living in Florence, to ask him to recommend a cheap lodging there. Douglas put him up at the same flophouse where he was staying with an American journalist named Maurice Magnus, previously an artist’s agent who had represented Isadora Duncan.

The three penniless writers passed a few strange days together eating, drinking, and bickering until Lawrence departed for Capri for a rendezvous with his wife, Frieda, and Magnus, for obscure reasons, left to take up residence at Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery eighty miles southeast of Rome. Lawrence transformed these encounters into Memoir of Maurice Magnus. Barely a full-length book, it is now all but forgotten, yet Lawrence himself later called it “the best single piece of writing, as writing,” he had done.

He is at his trenchant best in his account of bumping into the two men by the Ponte Vecchio immediately after his arrival in Florence, while he was looking for the hotel. In his observation, they are a music-hall comedy team: “Douglas tall and portly, the other man rather short and strutting,” the former “decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red face and tufted eyebrows,” and Magnus “very pink-faced, and very clean, very spruce, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit.” Lawrence pours on his contempt for Magnus. For all his bewhiskered apparatus of bohemianism, Lawrence was middle-class in his soul, “determined to keep a few pounds between me and the world,” as he put it, whereas Magnus lived beyond his means, cadging handouts from friends to pay for first-class train tickets.

In this memoir, Lawrence’s scorn is complicated by contempt for his new friend’s effeminacy. When he calls on him in his room, Magnus “minced about in demi-toilette,” looking “like a little pontiff in a blue kimono.” Even at this dingy boardinghouse, everything was “expensive and nicking,” with silver-studded suitcases and ivory-backed hairbrushes. “On his dressing-table stood many cut-glass bottles and silver-topped bottles with essences and pomades and powders.” In Lawrence’s observation, Magnus was “queer and sensitive as a woman with Douglas,” while his idol treated him disdainfully and even seemed to despise him. Yet, of a piece with Lawrence’s lifelong ambivalence toward homosexuality in principle and in particulars, he found himself charmed by the painted sparrow and promised to come visit him at the monastery.

Lawrence was even more acidulous about Capri than Conrad had been. He and Frieda soon became regulars in the island’s quarrelsome social scene, yet he held himself aloof, calling Capri “a gossipy, villa-stricken, two-humped chunk of limestone, a microcosm that does heaven much credit, but mankind none at all.” Soon after he had settled in, Lawrence received a wistful note from Magnus. He asked for nothing, but Lawrence intuited that it was an appeal for help. He made a fatal misstep: having just received a wind-fall from an American journal, he posted off a check for five pounds. Magnus wrote back immediately, overjoyed, reiterating his invitation to come for a visit at Monte Cassino. At this point, Lawrence’s memoir begins to resemble James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, about a man pursued by a familiar spirit, a grinning demon who turns up in his path everywhere he goes.

The narrative of his visit to Monte Cassino is a bravura performance of travel writing in a gloomy, gothic key. Lawrence’s journey begins in Capri, waking

in the black dark of the January morning, and making a little coffee on the spirit-lamp, and watching the clock, the big-faced, blue old clock on the campanile in the piazza in Capri, to see I wasn’t late. The electric light in the piazza lit up the face of the campanile. And we were there, a stone’s throw away, high in the Palazzo Ferraro, opposite the bubbly roof of the little duomo. Strange dark winter morning, with the open sea beyond the roofs, seen through the side window, and the thin line of the lights of Naples twinkling far, far off.

Lawrence arrives at the monastery, icy cold in January, and finds Magnus living in a sumptuous, well-furnished room with a dressing table for the pomades and powders. The monks appear to share Lawrence’s disdain for Magnus’s lordly pretensions and to have accepted him as a guest as an act of charity. Magnus lends Lawrence a luxurious overcoat lined in sealskin, made for him, he says, by one of the best tailors in New York, and takes him on a tour of the monastery. The monks are at their evening prayers, so “we went by our two secret little selves into the tall dense nearly-darkness of the church.” Magnus shows him the pillars and pavements, “all colored marbles, yellow and gray and rose and green and lily-white, veined and mottled and splashed,” and mosaics of trees and birds glinting with gold and lapis lazuli. “We tiptoed about the dark church stealthily, from altar to altar, and Magnus whispered ecstasies in my ear.”

Lawrence’s final encounter with Magnus was in Malta, an island he hated even more than Capri. There, he found him sponging off a pair of innocent locals who owned small businesses in the port. When the police came to arrest Magnus for bad debts, he bolted the door and killed himself by drinking poison.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri by Jamie James. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 19, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Jamie James. All rights reserved.

In literature and myth, tricksters are powerful figures. They’re clever, their lack of reverence for the status quo makes them dangerous to those empowered by societal norms, and their shamelessness is often a clarifying antidote to internalized oppression. Based on those qualities alone, one could see how well the presence of tricksters in our stories could help address much of the toxicity that exists in our culture. However, tricksters are more common in polytheistic traditions, whose moralities tend to reflect the ambiguities of lived life more than monotheism’s prescriptive notions of right and wrong. This push toward an inflexible moral binary in many contemporary cultures has resulted in just the sort of problems that trickster characters can help address. “We may well hope our actions carry no moral ambiguity,” Lewis Hyde writes in his book Trickster Makes This World, “but pretending it’s the case when it isn’t does not lead to greater clarity about right or wrong; it more likely leads to unconscious cruelty masked by inflated righteousness.”

There are many characters in contemporary stories that share some characteristics with tricksters, but most end up lacking in crucial ways. Our favorite fictional thieves initially seem promising. After all, tricksters are fixated on crossing and altering boundaries and thieves are known to violate the established boundaries of the law. But when thieves strive for riches or even just the pleasure of getting away with something, they fall short of the trickster who steals to reorder the world and keep it flexible. Based on that criterion, one might suggest Robin Hood as a possibility, since robbing from the rich to give to the poor is an obvious assault on the established order, but an important element of that myth is that he believes his actions are just, and so he fails the test of ambivalence, one of the trickster’s defining features. Satan is also commonly mislabeled as a trickster, though he fails the same important test since he tricks mankind out of hatred.

But Western literature isn’t devoid of tricksters. As is their custom, these shapeshifters tend to hide in plain sight. Below I’ve called out three of my favorite examples, some of which might not be obvious instances of the archetype. By highlighting them here I hope not only to make their status as tricksters clearer, but to demonstrate why that status is what makes their role in their stories and our imaginations so vital.

*
Manley Pointer

Tricksters love playing with boundaries and one of their favorites is the line that separates the sacred from the profane. So what better image to encapsulate the trickster archetype than a Bible that’s been hollowed out to fit a flask of whiskey. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story Good Country People, a cynical philosophy scholar named Hulga Hopewell is so distracted by her disdain for the assumed ignorance of the people around her that she ends up being taken in by the affected naiveté of a young Bible salesman named Manley Pointer. Hulga believes she’s seducing an innocent until he invites her up into a hayloft and persuades her to remove her prosthetic leg. Manley then reveals himself to be a scoundrel. He takes from his Bible not only a bottle of whiskey, but a deck of pornographic playing cards and some condoms. Here it seems worth mentioning that tricksters are often preoccupied with lust in a manner that’s roughly similar to a Tex Avery cartoon. Manley’s true self horrifies Hulga as the situation she thought she was in control of is suddenly inverted and she is forced to realize that she was the one who was being naive. Before he vanishes down the loft’s ladder with her prosthetic leg, Manley tells Hulga, “I’ve got a lot of interesting things … One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way.” He then adds, in reference to Hulga’s studies, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since I was born!” It’s the arbitrary nature of his thefts and this perfect articulation of his universal ambivalence that makes Manley an ideal trickster. The theft of Hulga’s leg was not committed for the personal benefit of the thief, but for the radical reorganization of Hulga’s worldview.

*
Jeeves

Anyone who has read P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and short stories about Bertie Wooster and his perfect valet, Jeeves, might take issue with the assertion that Jeeves is a trickster. Tricksters tend to love dirt and chaos, whereas Jeeves can’t even seem to handle his employer’s poor fashion choices. In fact, many of the Jeeves and Wooster adventures begin with a tense domestic scene. Bertie has purchased some article of clothing that Jeeves feels is unsuitable for a proper gentleman (a checkered suit or a pair of cloth-topped boots that Bertie loves “like a couple of brothers”). In these situations, Bertie always brashly suppresses the complaint: “And when he tried to tread on me like a worm in the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot down and showed him who was who.”

That will seem to settle the issue until some social entanglement draws Bertie out of the domestic sphere and into the larger world. An important feature of tricksters is that they tend to thrive wherever uncertainty reigns, so it’s no coincidence that Jeeves doesn’t go to great lengths to assert himself until Bertie has been drawn into the confusion of his own social connections. At the first sign of trouble, Bertie will appeal to Jeeves for help and Jeeves will typically offer a series of suggestions that only furthers the chaos. As the chaos increases, so does Jeeves’s control over the situation. Eventually everything is resolved through his ingeniousness and Bertie promises to part with the offending article of clothing, which, in many cases, Jeeves has already taken the liberty of throwing away. Though the Jeeves and Wooster stories are formulaic, Wodehouse makes each one unmissable with his hilarious prose and the pure satisfaction that comes from seeing Jeeves-as-trickster at work. Employers are typically the ones empowered to tell employees how to dress. And historically the concept of a proper gentleman was a social construct meant to codify the distinction between people enjoying the benefits of dynastic wealth and the rest of the human race. In Jeeves’s hands, the constructs separating master and servant become a set of standards for his master to obey, making Jeeves a wonderful example of the situation-inverters and chaos sowers of the trickster archetype.

*
The Cat in the Hat

This classic and subtly subversive picture book begins with two children sitting by a window during a rainstorm while their mother is away. One of the central challenges of childhood is to learn what behavior is acceptable in what circumstances in order to mitigate the fear of losing your parents’ love. Outside is where it’s acceptable to run and play and to raise your voice. Inside is where you must be quiet and careful. For this reason, a rainy day in a children’s book is often shorthand for the stifling of natural impulses. A previously agreed upon boundary has become unbearable, which is the exact circumstance in which a trickster tends to materialize. In this instance it’s a cat. And he’s wearing a hat.

The cat attempts to entertain the children while reassuring them that his tricks “are not bad” even though he proceeds to make a mess that the mother would clearly categorize as bad. And yet, the cat’s insistence that his tricks aren’t bad doesn’t appear to be a lie. It’s clear from his demeanor that he simply doesn’t recognize or value the established order that would restrict the children’s behavior indoors. The cat even brings in a box containing child-sized role models, Thing One and Thing Two, in an effort to teach the children how to play inside the house as if they were outside the house. The first activity the Things attempt is to fly kites indoors. Frightened by the mother’s impending arrival, one of the children captures the Things and orders the cat to leave the house. The cat seems disappointed that the children have failed his invitation to play and he departs without protest. The house is now a mess and the children consider their fates until the cat returns with an elaborate cleaning machine that he refers to as “another good trick.” Even though the cat has helped to reestablish the status quo, the fact that he refers to it as another good trick certifies his ambivalence. In the end, his demonstrated behavior seems to have individuated the children from the established order by showing them that making a mess is not, in fact, the end of the world. When their mother returns they both greet her with wry smiles, wondering what of their misadventure, if anything, they should tell her.

_________________________________

Seth Fried’s The Municipalists is out now. 

In 2013, at an age past which most people live, W.S. Merwin published three books. One of them was a 1,500-page Collected Poems with Library of America, which even as it landed was out of date. A new volume was already scheduled for 2015. Others would follow. Just last month yet another book of prose arrived, full of Merwin’s account of meeting Pound, tales of translation woe, tiny shards of memory from travels long ago. This constant production, which in a writer like Updike could feel like mania, in Merwin felt proof that the meaning of living was to search, and the search could not end until he did. I carried these LOA volumes—and another 40 or 50—around for a year as I wrote the following essay*, surprised that the deeper I hiked into Merwin country, the less I felt I was in his territory. But rather the world itself opening up for me, his voice, his story, his words, like lamplights. Merwin’s search ended last week when he died at age 91. The lamp burns brightly still.

*Originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Just after World War II, a young Princeton student journeyed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, to visit Ezra Pound. The great poet had been tried for treason for broadcasts he made in Italy for the fascist government and, pleading insanity, wound up serving a dozen years in the psychiatric institution. To the astonishment of his young visitor that day in 1946, Pound greeted him as if he were a serious poet. Like an elder, he also offered advice. “You don’t really have anything to write about at the age of eighteen,” Pound warned. “The way to do it is to learn a language and translate. That way you can practice, and you can find out what you can do with language, with your language.” Despite their age difference, the two writers began a correspondence afterward, and some time later, as he prepared to enter graduate school in Romance languages, the young poet received a postcard from Pound. “Read seeds not twigs,” it pronounced, signing off, “EP.”

The young poet was W.S. Merwin, and if his pilgrimage to a master was a clue, apprenticeship was a notion he took seriously. At Princeton Merwin had memorized John Milton by heart, and he crashed R. P. Blackmur’s classes with John Berryman, who showed up the first time in a pork-pie hat. Following Pound’s call, Merwin also began to translate. He started out in school with the New York poems of Federico García Lorca and moved on to the early Spanish texts such as the epic Poem of Cid. Over the next 65 years, as he launched one of the most brilliant postwar careers in poetry, Merwin continued at the trade, working in a comically diverse array of languages: French, German, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Romanian, Greek, Irish, Quechuan, and Kabyle, to name just a few. A second collection of such translations was published this spring, alongside a new edition of haiku by Yosa Buson. Had he merely plied his trade as a translator, Merwin would have been one of the most significant figures in American letters.

But of course Merwin’s own poetry has eclipsed this work. Its awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J.D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell’s prodigious output seem puny. It is not the sheer amount collected here, however, which transports, but the radical evolution arcing through its pages, like an explosive chemical reaction that is still ongoing. (A new collection is already slated for next year, when Merwin will be 87 years old.)

Although he is known today for his oracular, quicksilver lines, their swift unpunctuated movement and stamped solemnity, Merwin began his career as a formalist, mimicking the chthonic tones of his masters: Milton, Pound, and W.H. Auden, too, who selected his first book, A Mask for Janus, for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952.

Merwin began that book in the early 1950s on the island of Majorca, where he had visited the poet Robert Graves—again another mentor of sorts. Full of technically virtuous songs, sestinas, odes, and a whole catalog of ancient poetic forms, it reads like the work of a young man attempting to please his masters from the library carrel he had built in his mind. But for a poet coming of age at the same time as Allen Ginsberg and raised in the shingled grit of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the Depression, there is very little sense of where Merwin was actually calling from.

In fairness to Merwin now, it’s clear from later work that as a young man he didn’t really know the answer to that question. In his incredible memoir Unframed Originals, published in 1982, Merwin wrote of his childhood growing up the son of a Presbyterian minister working a down-on-its-luck congregation in Union City, New Jersey, and later, northeastern Pennsylvania. This in a period when coal-mines still left a layer of soot on front porches, and much of the region was very, very poor. Merwin Senior’s relationships within his own family were so strained that Merwin met his grandfather, who had been a hard drinker and flamboyant spender, only once, even though the old man lived just on the other side of town. Merwin recalled how his proud but brittle father would occasionally produce a pocketknife, “which he said was the one thing he had that had belonged to his father. . . Talking as though his father were dead.” The true dimensions of his family weren’t apparent until he was an adult, and even then he had to break form to find them out. “I had been told repeatedly,” Merwin wrote in his later memoir Summer Doorways, “that it was rude to be openly curious about anything ‘personal.’” As much as he later admired Lowell, and traded letters with Sylvia Plath, including those containing early drafts of her great book Ariel, Merwin would not go the way of the confessionalists.

Instead he took four books to work through his early influences, untangle his syntax, and find his voice. It begins to happen in his fourth volume, The Drunk in the Furnace, from 1960, parts of which he read aloud to Lowell himself, to the elder poet’s approval. The book is dedicated to his mother and father, the man who used to take him to see destroyers and ships docked in New York harbor. There are several tremendous poems about life at sea, as if the poet is casting off and touching down all at the same time. “The Portland Going Out” describes a close passage of two ships at sea: “It looked that truthworthy,” he writes, “glassy and black / Like one of those pools they have in the lobbies / Of grand hotels.” In “Sea Monster,” this new clarity of simile and intensity of image is elevated further. One feels, finally, this is not a performance of virtuosity, but virtuosity lent to the mystery of experience. “Just after / The noon watch, it was, that it slid / Into our sight: a darkness under / The surface, between us and the land, twisting / Like a snake swimming or a line of birds / In the air. Then breached, big as a church, / Right there beside us.”

These poems, Merwin later wrote in an essay, were exaggerations of his own thin seafaring experience off the coast of England. The Drunk in the Furnace does, however, contain the first poems that are easily, readily identifiable as autobiographical. They are hardscrabble, flinty, and evoke the world so often described in the awkwardly gorgeous poems of his contemporary James Wright, a fellow traveler of straight talk about family life. “Grandfather in the Old Men’s Home” seethes with lack of nostalgia:

And he smiled all the time to remember
Grandmother, his wife, wearing the true faith
Like an iron nightgown, yet brought to birth
Seven times and raising the family
Through her needle’s eye while he got away
Down the green river, finding directions
For boats. And himself coming home
sometimes
Well-heeled but blind drunk, to hide all the
bread
And shoot holes in the bucket while he made
His daughters pump.

In these observations, Merwin’s poetry uncouples its long, winding search for meaning and morality from the lessons of the gods and starts looking to the experience of real humankind: his uncles and grandparents, his parents, and, most crucially, himself. He trades myth for the hard facts of the real world. It is a key transition for a poet whose later work would look so seriously and harshly at the capacity human beings have for destruction, not just in Vietnam, which he would vehemently oppose, but in the natural environment.

Merwin does not wallow here, in the past, but he does not give himself a free pass either. In “Grandmother and Grandson,” also from The Drunk at the Furnace, the poet describes a young boy tricking his grandmother, grown increasingly frail, into searching a large sprawling house for him. It is an odd, nasty little poem. The boy lures her into an attic and sneaks out behind her, laughing, leaving her lost and bewildered. “Being forgotten. In the unwashed light, / Lost, she turns among the sheeted mounds / Fingering hems and murmuring, ‘Where, where / Does it remind me of?’” Of all Merwin’s poems about death, this might be the most terrifying, how he intuits it might be personal, and cruel.

*

This inward movement of Merwin’s poetry happened simultaneously with a radical stylistic shift. In the introduction to The Second Four Books of Poems, Merwin describes how, beginning in the early 1960s, he began to shed punctuation, until he had given up on it entirely. “I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page,” he wrote. “Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in.” In The Moving Target, the first of these four books, one feels the heat and pressure of this change keenly. “To My Brother Hanson,” addressed to a sibling who died in childbirth, Merwin’s lines hint at the scale of his project to come. “Yes, now the roads themselves are shattered / As though they had fallen from a height, and the sky / It is cracked like varnish.” In this period, Merwin began living part of each year in a rundown farmhouse in south- west France that he bought on the cheap with a small inheritance. It was part of a very old world, whose history and animal life humbled him while it also provided a doorway to a new kind of writing. The Vietnam War was raging, and although few poems in The Lice address it directly, the grim vision they evince of life’s evanescence, its violence, even, have the barbed edge of anger. At times it reads as if the poet is trading his citizenship for a larger tribal sense of belonging. “If there is a place where this is the language,” he writes in “The Cold Before the Moonrise,” a poem about the turning of the night, “may / It be my country.”

One can feel Merwin beginning to tack toward the Buddhism that he has studied since the 1970s. He is not just shedding punctuation, but the attachments which the discipline instructs are ephemeral—self, identity, the lifetime of our lives. “For the Anniversary of My Death,” one of Merwin’s strongest poems ever, reads like a eulogy written simultaneously in the past and future tense.

Every year without knowing it I have passed
the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth

Mourning, in advance, haunts these four books of poems. Ash, stone, fires, and silence recur throughout them like postapocalyptic rubble. There is no rebirth, only continual death. “The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed,” he writes in “The Asians Dying.” Readily autobiographical details recede until they glint in the dark like very distant planets. The poem “Lackawanna,” which takes its title from the river which carves through his former state, ends with the remarkable line: “too long I was ashamed / at a distance.”

The forsaken country is replaced with the world around him in all its natural splendor and insentience. The Carrier of Ladders (1970), which won him his first Pulitzer Prize, is full of sumptuous poems about the changing of the seasons, animals, mountains, and dispatches from dreams. The poet is becoming a stranger to himself and, without the armature of a stable self, appears to see more clearly. He turns inward and finds fear, shame, and chaos pulsing in incantatory rhythms—especially in the propulsive poem “Fear”—while outwardly the world tilts on. Merwin uses this velocity to even greater effect in the poem “Psalm: Our Fathers,” each line of its 63 lines beginning with “I am” until the poet is everything and nothing.

This realization would have profound effects on Merwin as a naturalist. If one is nothing, all claims of ownership are fraudulent. Irrelevant. In this sense, the land one occupies, as well as the thoughts one possesses, are all temporary. The self is the useful handle grip of a tool for stewardship, a theme which begins to recur in this period, most spectacularly in the poem “Now It Is Clear,” which begins

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke
in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it.

The later poems in The Carrier of Ladders and throughout Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973) begin to approach the aphoristic torque of Merwin’s late work. Some are briefer than the haiku he continued to translate in this period. “Elegy” runs, in its entirety, “Who would I show it to.” The Merwin who began his career as a vehicle for forms and his Western influences has become a new kind of chimney for epiphany. The images here are stark, and poignant, as in ancient Chinese poetry. “Far away an empty lantern is swinging.” Whatever his influences once were, this poet is one talking on a different scale. “One travels,” he writes in “Traveling,” “to learn how not to look back. . .  out of words one travels / but there are words along the road waiting / like parents’ grandparents / we have heard of but never seen.”

*

To read Collected Poems is like watching a man crawl out from the underworld and into the light. But each summit turns out to be a kind of false summit, a new vantage point for a reminder of the slippery shale of truth. In the early 1970s, Merwin appears to have dealt with this challenge by dedicating himself, almost entirely, to chronicling the rhythms and stories of the landscapes he occupied, and worked, in France. His poems move toward a steadier, stiller music. The rage and anguish that vibrate in the work of the past decade is largely gone. The Compass Flower (1977) has a seasonal pulse. There are arrivals and departures, apples and snow, the birds who arrive for a temporary stay. Rain in June. Merwin’s unpunctuated style continues, but there is a gentler tonal wash of gratitude.

In 1973, Merwin began to venture ever more seriously into the East. That same year he published a collection of translation from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean proverbs, Asian Figures. The similarity of his poems from this period onward, especially “Feathers from the Hill” (1978), to haiku is impossible to ignore, even if he strays beyond the haiku’s syllabic limitations. He is in search, it appears, of wisdom, as it can be found in everyday things, in their essence. Several long poems proceed in short units, bursts, which juxtapose sensory images, as in “Summer Canyon.”

Far away a dog barks
on a windy hilltop
beyond which the sun is setting.

And late in the same poem:

Under a pine at noon
I listen to plates
clattering in a kitchen.

In this further reduction, Merwin’s poetry narrows the self to its observational register. It is also a devotional register, too—one he surely studied in order to bring love poems from Sanskrit into English in this period. Merwin was not the only poet of his time to be so inspired by the East. Gary Snyder, who has equal claim to the title of poet laureate of deep ecology, had made his debut in 1959 with Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, a book which was part poetry, part translation from the ancient poems of Hansan. His stripped down, de-articled style, with its abrupt juxtapositions and short lines, had become a kind of Buddhist shorthand. The Beat movement’s wisdom espresso shot. A child of the American West, raised in the shadow of mountains, it was a posture, and commitment, that came naturally to him.

In the 1970s, Merwin was just beginning to get seriously interested in Buddhism. In 1975 he made his first visit to Hawaii, and in 1976 spent the summer housesitting for Robert Aitken, who had become his teacher and mentor in the discipline. The study, however, didn’t come to dominate his work in the way it has with Snyder, in whose work one can almost always see the lofty mechanics of Zen practice pumping away in the background. Unlike so many poets who have evolved enormously in their lifetime, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich included, Merwin never entirely abandons an early style or register, he simply appears to deepen or expand them, return to it when it makes sense.

Merwin has stayed, part of the time, in Hawaii, ever since the late 1970s. While he began planting extinct palm trees and tending a small plot of land in Maui, where he was building a house, Merwin was still shuttling from there back to an apartment on Waverly Street in New York City. These books from the late 1970s and early 1980s syncopate between city and country, with sudden trips back to his early life. In this period both his parents died, and in several moving poems he revisits them in his work. One starts to detect the overheard quality of speech which characterizes Merwin most recently, as in “Yesterday,” from Opening the Hand.

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know.

Whereas Merwin’s poetry once juxtaposed images, now it is speech patterns. In some poems it varies line from line, almost like dialogue, and in other poems it happens within a line, such as in “Shaving Without a Mirror” or “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field,” when the jump happens within a single line, broken in the middle by unpunctuated white space. “Do you like your piece of pineapple would you like a napkin,” and so on. In the latter poem, it is more of a gimmick, as Merwin’s stylistic variations occasionally can be, briefly, but the intensity of his search, for the right language, for all situations, eventually pays off as it does in “A Birthday,” which has this incredible passage:

the long way to you is still tied to me   but it
brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you   what is already
yours
it is the morning    of the mornings together
breath of summer    oh my found one
the sleep in the same current    and each
waking to you

when I open my eyes    you are what I wanted
to see

Has there ever been a poet who has written in so many voices? The good, relentless student quality which has made Merwin such a great translator, and brought him early success, when applied to language over a lifetime gives us the sound of a poet who is perpetually preparing to meet his inspiration on its own terms, as if it is something he is merely guiding, not creating. As he writes in Rain in the Trees (1988), in the poem “Witness.” “I want to tell what the forests / were like,” it reads. “I will have to speak / in a forgotten language.”

In later books, especially his prose book about France, The Lost Upland, as well as The Vixen (1995), which chronicles his relationship to the home in southwest France, and The Folding Cliffs (1995), a narrative of Hawaii in the 19th century, Merwin resurrects old forms as a vessel for ancient places. The Vixen, though the slimmest of these books, is the most effective. Modeling his poems on the classical elegies, he spins one timeless poem after another. The strengths of Merwin’s previous styles are imported and incorporated into a longer line, giving them a spooky luminescence: the way an unpunctuated line controls a reader physically, the robust pivots of layered images, the ear he has tuned for speech. All of this is evident in “Walkers”:

I met an old woman who laughed and said
this was the way she had come all her life and between two
fingers she
accepted a fig saying Oh you bring me
dainties
there was still the man always astray in the
dark suit
and string tie who might emerge from a barn
and gaze
skyward saying Ah Ah something had
happened to him
in the war they said but he never took anything

Merwin has lived long enough that these elegies can feel, at the most superficial, like the constant goodbye of an elder poet. They are not, and what makes them remarkable is that he has evolved a poetic style that, in its selfless intensity, its recycled use of previous forms of expression, has given us a shifting terrain from which to observe evanescence itself. Here is where the poet’s oracular power comes from. He is telling us something which the readers must grapple with, no matter how they believe it all ends for us. The second volume of this project concludes with the great poems from The Shadow of Sirius and a selection of uncollected work. In the former, one finds Merwin at yet another pinnacle of expression, moving between his life and the natural world and the lessons the passage of both teach. “All day the stars watch from long ago,” he writes, “my mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right.” It is as if we are right there with him, overhearing these final words: “look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water.” Who said the end would be in fire?

Halfway through What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, the American poet Carolyn Forché finds herself alone on a Salvadoran coffee farm while Leonel, the man who has summoned her to his country, is off attending to his mysteries. She has little with her but a notebook and a pencil. The coffee pickers are deep inside the trees. The notebook lines she later finds are neither poems nor grammar. They are the urgent netting of the hour, the apprehension of the immediate and recalled, the thoughts of a young woman experiencing a country on the verge of civil war:

coffee ripens on the high slopes red coffee cherries in white mist it is the time of bloody stool in the ditch of maggots in wounds of flies in the clinic bodies found by the roadside are covered with lime no one wants to eat the fish from Lake Ilopango anymore the fish have been eating the dead.

Why has Forché come to this place—left her Southern California teaching gig and her long-distance romance, trusted a stranger, driven toward danger, accepted the identities that are constructed for her, tarried with the dead and the dying, visited men boxed into cages? She says yes, and she says yes, or perhaps what she doesn’t say is no. The war is coming, and there she is: learning to see, feeling through seeing.

There she is: “’What are we looking for?’ I ask, and as always, he doesn’t answer, swearing under his breath through the haze of smoke that hangs in the air where the corn had been growing. We stop near a cluster of champas, shacks made of mud and wattle. One of them has collapsed and smoke rises from it.”

The war that did come to El Salvador would last a dozen years, ensnare the U.S., ash the landscape with bones and bomb debris. I met and married my Salvadoran husband, an architect and artist, when the war was at full roar. I read Forché’s 1981 collection of poems, The Country Between Us, while steeped in my own research, while trying to understand, while briefly traveling to and from my husband’s birth home, where everywhere was danger and everywhere was beauty, where the colors were carmine, lemon, lime, where an old woman named Argelia made leche de burro in a blackened cauldron, where my mother-in-law, on the road to San Vicente, took one look at me and said, Swallow your ring.

I was alive in El Salvador, and I was afraid. I was confused, and I was reaching, and I understood, more than I wished to understand, how Forché’s allegiance was to a kind of knowing that would, I suspect, always remain beyond my reach. She was all in, steeped, and her language proved it. She was litigating what a writer is and what a writer does and what a writer must endlessly next become. She occupied the crevasse of witness. From “The Message:” “You will fight / and fighting, you will die. I will live / and living cry out until my voice is gone / to its hollow of earth…”

A few years after a fragile peace was brokered in El Salvador, I met Forché in the Czech countryside. I was a student among teachers at a workshop. I was there, an act of grace. In one of the photographs I have from that day, I stand between Jayne Anne Phillips and Gish Jen tipping toward Forché, a camera dangling from my neck. She has traveled the world by then, sharing her lines, consulting in smoky basements, reading to crowds, and how exhausted she must have been, how nearly empty of the emptying work of witness, and as I tipped forward she leaned back into the rough wood of the Czech shelter.

Proximity. Distance. The country between us.

The title of What You Have Heard is True is taken from Forché’s famous poem “The Colonel,” which recounts an evening in a refined Salvadoran home and concludes when the host, that eponymous colonel, “spilled many human ears on the table” and then “swept the ears to the floor.” “He literally poured ears on the floor?” Bill Moyers later asked Forché in an interview. “He poured them on the table,” Forché answered, and when I read again that interview I think of how fiercely Forché guarded against the slightest imprecisions. I think of how hard writing of true things is. True things. True words.

It took Forché 15 years to craft her memoir. It was summoned, she tells us, “with help from notebooks and photographs, reminiscences with those who shared in these lived moments, and research and to confirm the facts inlaid in the recollections.” There are long blocks of dialogue transcribed, we come to understand, from fading journal pages. There are views from the lips of sleeping volcanoes. There are roosters “crowing into the last of the stars” and “[l]ight poured into the hut through chinks in the lamina and wattle,” and there is the haze of great sickness, and there are obscene deaths, and there are turkey vultures with red masks that hiss.

Certainly, this is a book for anyone who cares about the lives of the impoverished and the atrocities of war and the necessity of witness, especially right now when our southern neighbors are demonized by generalized and false assumptions, when children are taken from their parents, when names are lost, and also lineage. Certainly, we need Forché now, again, to remind us of all that struggles toward the light, all that should be shaken down with words. Certainly, this is memoir of universal proportions, and yet, holding it in my hands, I am almost sure that it was written just for me, a wife of more than 30 years to a Salvadoran artist whose drawings come from a separate place that I am still learning how to see.

When I read Forché I am young again and there, in El Salvador, picking coffee cherries with the campesinos, chasing children down jungle hills, shopping in an open-air market with two armed men at my back. I am there with the beauty and the danger of my husband’s birth home, hearing the war from somewhere far off, wearing the ring I did not swallow.

“The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

“There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”

“But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.”

No other wallpaper, fictional or factual, has ever gotten quite so much attention as the titular wall covering in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

Thanks to its ubiquity on high school and college syllabi, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has a readership that’s surely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, strong. These readers might even know that Gilman’s own near-catastrophic experience with the “rest cure” under physician Silas Weir Mitchell inspired her to write the story. But it’s far less common to teach Gilman’s extensive nonfiction writing, and accordingly, most readers only know the story of one story. In her day Gilman was far better known as a lecturer than a fiction writer. She faded from public consciousness after her death. When the 1960s and 1970s saw more attention paid to Gilman’s work, feminists shaped her rediscovered canon, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” “acquired a cult status as an early feminist manifesto.”

Fiction and nonfiction both have the power to inform, to move, to stir. So why does “The Yellow Wallpaper” endure in a way that Gilman’s first-hand accounts on the same subject matter have not?

Is it because the short story itself is so clear, so simple? Narrator gets terrible advice from her physician husband and brother on how to manage her depression; follows it; loses her grip on sanity. It’s an easy text to teach, and students everywhere can quickly grasp how the narrator’s voice shifts from breezy wit to fully unhinged psychosis, from “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer” to “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

Gilman herself was rather more complex. After the postpartum psychosis and resultant institutionalization that inspired “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she separated from her husband—nearly unheard-of in 1888—and supported herself and her daughter as a single mother with her writing. She moved to California and lived with fellow writer Adeline Knapp, almost certainly as lovers. A few years later, she both divorced her husband and sent her daughter to live with him and his new wife. In 1900, she married her first cousin. Thirty-five years later, after a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, she intentionally took a fatal dose of chloroform to end her life. She had long been an advocate for euthanasia, and in this case, practiced what she preached.

Taken together, her choices form a clear picture of a woman ahead of her time. Except that in other ways, she was all too typical of white feminists of her day. She accused non-white immigrants of “diluting” the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called “enlistment,” for black Americans.

In her day it was her progressive attitudes that might have made potential readers uncomfortable; today, it’s her regressive ones that give us pause.

I ran across the broader, more complex reality of Gilman and her writing almost by accident. While researching first-hand accounts of women institutionalized in insane asylums and sanatoriums in 19th-century America for my novel Woman 99, I dove deep into Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840-1945. Gilman’s account is among those collected. Yet the readership for these accounts, powerful as they may be, certainly pales in comparison to that of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Fiction has the power to change minds. Does it also, by filtering facts through the lens of a created narrative, make unpleasant truths more palatable? Books like Ellen Marie Wiseman’s What She Left Behind and The Address by Fiona Davis draw from the harsh realities of how women were treated in 19th-century asylums, but set these stories in a larger fictional context with a clear, closed arc. It’s possible that many readers will pick up a fictional account more readily, that “something bad happened” is easier to handle than “something bad happened to me.”

As a fiction writer, I appreciate and embrace the ways that fiction blends education and entertainment. Historical novelists are time-travelers, magicians, magpies. Both fiction and nonfiction rise and fall on the selection of telling detail; fiction writers have a lot more freedom in where those details come from and how they fit together to form a cohesive, satisfying narrative.

But there is an authenticity to first-hand accounts that resonates with modern readers, and powerful nonfiction accounts are also on the rise. Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy were New York Times bestsellers, reaching readers with first-hand insight on the experience of diagnosis, treatment, and living with mental illness. Just last month, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias joined their ranks, debuting on the NYT list at #3. As we honor the right of too-often silenced voices to be heard, and work to destigmatize mental illness, these accounts make particularly powerful tools for empathy.

So why fiction for Charlotte Perkins Gilman? In a 1913 issue of The Forerunner, she recounted that after going back to work following her institutionalization, she was “naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape,” writing a story about the experience and “sen[ding] a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad.” Though Mitchell did not reply to her directly, she heard through the grapevine that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading “’The Yellow Wallpaper.’”

She wrote it to change one man’s mind. She succeeded.

“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,” said Gilman, “and it worked.”

Ruthie, a professional sex educator, was trying to help us out a bit. “Get into groups of three or four,” she instructed us, “and describe a significant spiritual experience you’ve had. Describe what it felt like. Then look for where your stories use similar language or images and try to create a definition of spirituality.”

We’d been gathering every other Tuesday in the large mezzanine of the historic synagogue we rent out for our church gatherings to discuss sex and spirituality. For many of us, just grouping the two words “sex” and “spirituality” felt uncomfortable, almost oxymoronic. It seemed like something you’d hear from a creepy 1970s Southern California guru—some lech in linen drawstring pants talking about self-gratifying nonsense.

Ruthie manages to talk about sex in such a non-awkward, matter-of-fact way that it had put most of us at ease almost immediately. She is a compulsive knitter, has the strong back and shoulders of a former competitive swimmer, and is almost as tall as I am. She also is the proud owner of what I consider to be the nerdiest tattoo at church, which is saying a lot since at least two people at HFASS have Flannery O’Connor–related ink. On Ruthie’s chest is a drawing of an old prop plane surrounded by a diagram of lines and equations, representing all the forces that act on an airplane when it’s in flight: lift, weight, thrust, and drag.

That night, we had grouped ourselves in threes according to Ruthie’s instructions: in one group a retired divorced librarian, a young single teacher, and a gay partnered accountant; in the next, a married social worker in her twenties, a widowed lesbian factory worker, and a straight baby boomer. We described what our spiritual experiences had been like, and reported to the larger group the similarities in our responses:

That which is beyond expectations.

That which brought a freedom from something (like fear or shame).

Awe—beauty or discomfort.

Support—even if it was uncomfortable, there was still something holding us.

Transformation—a radical acceptance of life and getting outside of one’s self.

Mystery—hard to put into words.

That which brings us both deeper into ourselves and lets us be outside of ourselves at the same time.

Reagan broke the silence: “Sounds like the kind of sex I’d like to be having.” Everyone laughed in solidarity as we realized that all of these responses about good spirituality did sound a lot like good sex.

It was a relief to laugh knowingly together about sex, especially since so many people in that room struggle with shame over sexuality.

But not Sheila, a close friend of our congregation. Sheila is shameless. She grew up with five older, overprotective brothers on a family farm. When her brothers realized that their teenage little sister was sexually active (she was blatantly unapologetic about this), they tried to keep her out of more trouble by piling up outdoor chores for her. Sheila developed a deep brown tan that tops her natural olive color, and which she maintained through young adulthood by remaining a lover of the outdoors.

“I think my skin is beautiful,” she is known to say, without a trace of embarrassment. Even now she makes her living outdoors, working as a zookeeper and specializing in various sheep and oxen from the Middle East. She and her partner, Mike, met at work. Apparently she finds time every day to flirt with him. If nothing else, she sends him sexy text messages that tell him where she wants to meet up later and what she wants to do to him. They compete with each other in a sweet and slightly old-fashioned way: by seeing who can write better poetic lines about the magnificence of the other’s body using only images they see at work. Sheila gets lots of jokey midday texts comparing her breasts to the baby gazelles in the zoo nursery.

I’ve often wondered what exactly people mean when they say someone is “in their body,” but even while I am still not sure of the answer, I know that Sheila is an example. She is self-possessed when she moves, as if in ownership and control of each bone and muscle, not just defaulting to the ones absolutely needed for ambulation. Like she is aware of each inch of her and delights that each inch of her is hers. Like she is both science and magic. It’s not vanity. Vanity is thinking everyone around you considers you the prettiest. What Sheila demonstrates is aplomb.

Sheila and Mike appear to have none of the sexual shame that seems to plague most of my congregation. They aren’t married and yet it never once dawned on them to hide that they are, indeed, lovers. They take great delight in each other and in their own selves, as if the attraction they have for each other has turned into a deep appreciation for and confidence in their own selves, personally, physically, and sexually. They belong to each other, body and soul, and yet remain distinct individuals.

I began to see Sheila and Mike as a standard of body positivity and sex positivity—that is, at the same time deeply spiritual. Their relationship to sex, to each other, and to themselves seems integrated and whole, a stark contrast to so many of my parishioners who were raised in “Bible-believing” churches. But why is it that Sheila and her lover seem to be exceptions to this rule? How is it that they seem so free from the shame of having a body, and a sexual body at that?

Well, it is because Sheila is not actually someone I know. She is the narrator of a very long, very hot erotic poem, a poem in which she expresses her sexual desire without shame, expresses the love of her own beauty without qualification, expresses a longing for and an appreciation of her lover’s body without apology. Where might you find this poem, you may ask?

You guessed it. The Bible. The b-i-b-l-e. The same book that brought you such sexual ethics as the rape of Tamar and “women, be subjects of your husbands” and “if a woman does not bleed on her wedding night, stone her” also brought you two unashamed lovers in an erotic poem called Song of Songs. Because the Bible, like sex and every other visceral experience, is never only just one thing.

When another kid my age at church told me there was a book in the Bible about sex, it felt as though they admitted that there was a book in the Bible about cocaine. So one Sunday afternoon, when I was alone in my room, I took out my Bible, the one whose cover featured pictures of hippies inside the big letters announcing “good news,” and found Song of Songs (mistakenly called Song of Solomon), eager to get some answers. But all I found were a couple of mentions of kissing and some guy comparing a girl’s breasts to animals, which felt weird. I was no closer to cracking the sex code than before.

Now I know. The Song of Songs tells a story about sex, but it’s not porn. It’s erotica. It’s more about desire than it is about coitus (forgive me for even using this word). But it is not just about desire in general. It is primarily about female desire. And as Carey Ellen Walsh says, rightly, it is “shocking that an entire biblical book is devoted to a woman’s desire . . . It is truly subversive, offering a dissonant voice of the canon, that of a woman in command of and enjoying her own sexual desire.”

All throughout the poem, Sheila says beautiful things like this:

As an apricot tree stands out in the forest
My lover stands above the young men in town

All I want is to sit in his shade
To taste and savor his delicious love

He took me home with him for a festive meal
But his eyes feasted on me!

Here we have nature, feasting, sensuality, sexuality, and desire . . . in the Bible. But since Song of Songs is a poem primarily about female sexual desire it should surprise no one that for most of its history, in the hands of male clergy, scholars, and theologians, it was not seen as such. It was read as allegory.

A rabbi from the second century, Rabbi Akiba, famously said of Song of Songs, “All the writings [of Israel] are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” He was saying that the writing in Song of Songs was not an erotic poem but a mystical key for understanding the love of God.

“For the next two thousand years,” writes poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker, “rabbinic commentary would interpret it as an allegory of the love between God and Israel.” Subsequently, Christians would read the same text as an allegory of Christ’s love for his church. If it’s true that the church sees sex as its competition, then Song of Songs is like if the competitor set up camp inside the church’s borders. Religious leaders bent over backward to deny Song of Songs its identity.

This happened pretty early on, beginning with a guy named Origen. Origen lived in Alexandria in the 200s and was a prolific Christian writer, thinker, scholar, and preacher. Origen reportedly wrote ten volumes about Song of Songs, much as Augustine—the guy who had such profound hangups about his penis—spent his career writing volumes about how Adam was able to control his erections before “the fall.”

Origen had a few lifelong hangups himself. (Surprise, surprise.) He was so tortured by his own sexual desires that he took the matter into his own hands, literally. Origen took seriously the Platonic notion (often repeated in some of Paul’s writings) that the spirit is of a higher plane than the flesh, that the body is an enemy of the soul. So rather than be plagued by sinful sexual desires, he castrated himself. That’s commitment.

Self-castration for the purpose of avoiding temptation seems so extreme, and yet it differs only in degree from insisting that women hide their bodies so that they do not tempt men, telling hormone-soaked boys that they have to avoid even thinking about sex, and describing sex as sinful and dangerous and toxic outside of heterosexual marriage. All of it smacks of the bullshit Cindy’s pastor barked about: “transcending our sinful bodies.”

But the fictional woman I’m calling Sheila seems to embody none of this separation between the flesh and the spirit. It’s why I find her poetry to be so freeing. She is so different from most of the people I encounter, so different from myself.

The writers of the New Testament lived in a deeply Hellenized culture, one in which Greek thinking held sway, including the belief that the body was corrupted and that only the spirit could be holy. There were even forms of Christianity early on that clung so deeply to this idea that they refused to believe that Jesus even had a body at all. He just seemed to, they said. And the Greek word for “seeming to” is the root of the word docetism, which describes a belief that denies the Incarnation—that little thing about who Jesus was. But orthodox thinking holds that Jesus is God made flesh. Flesh. Carne. Meat. So docetism was eventually ruled heretical.

Why, then, did Sheila’s erotic love poem become something Christians believe was written by King Solomon about Jesus’ love for the church? Marvin Pope explains it in his book Song of Songs: “Origen combined the Platonic and Gnostic attitudes toward sexuality to . . . transform it [Song of Songs] into a spiritual drama, free from all carnality.” How bizarre that a religion based on the merging of things human and divine—a religion based on God choosing to have, of all things, a human body; a faith whose central practice is a shared meal of bread and wine that we say and even sometimes believe is the body and blood of Jesus—could develop into such a body-and pleasure-fearing religion.

I find myself outraged at how the erotic nature of Song of Songs has been domesticated, forced into a tame little allegory, and how the anti-body, anti-woman, anti-sex teachings of the church we’ve discussed have hurt me and so many people in my care. It’s infuriating and makes me want to dismiss huge chunks of Christian teaching and history.

But then I think, Hold on. While I bristle at the interpretive move men have historically made regarding the one book in the Bible that is quite possibly written by a woman—and a sexually expressive woman at that—I remember how Ruthie taught us that sex and spirituality are inextricably coupled. Those who influenced the course of biblical interpretation may not have intended to make the text of Song of Songs even richer by pairing sex and the spirit—yet here we are, the Holy of Holies.

Because, again, the similarity between the language we used in that discussion group to describe spiritual experiences and the language we used to speak about really mind-blowing sex—the kind of sexual experience that Sheila embodies, unselfconscious, transcendent—was startling.

That night we participated in Ruthie’s exercise, we already knew the conversation was about spirituality and sex, so I wondered if that might’ve been why our answers skewed in a sexual direction. The next day I went on Twitter and asked, “What words or images would you use to describe a profound spiritual experience you’ve had?” Here’s a small sampling of the replies.

Amazed and confused. Then grateful.

I was placed in a bubble of warmth and a calm voice told me everything was going to be okay. My mind was changed about God then.

Warm. Unclenched shoulders. And then completely terrifying and bewildering and embarrassing as soon as I step out of the stillness and try to understand what happened. Comfort, freedom, release.

Home: being welcomed into a space that means I don’t need to make or do anything, but I can just be who I am at this moment.

Restorative.

Feeling deeply clean.

Overwhelming, tearful, burden lifting, joy.

No words . . . just the feeling of a great opening and inner spaciousness.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine if Sheila—so in her body, so free from shame—were asked to describe what it’s like to have really great sex. What might she have said? Would she have used words and phrases similar to those listed above? I can’t help but think so.

*

Back in the mezzanine at church, I was staring at Ruthie’s tattoo of the old prop plane when I remembered why she’d gotten it in the first place. She’d told me that she chose it because of her love for math and physics, and how, while those things explain how most stuff works, they don’t explain everything.

“How is it possible that we can reliably hurtle thousands of tons of human and metal through the air?” she said. “We should just fall to a fiery death. Humans have only ever dreamt of flight and have written myths about it for millennia. But now we do it every day without even giving it a thought. Air pressure doesn’t really begin to account for it. It’s also magic. So my tattoo is my reminder to sit back and wonder at the magic of it all.”

Maybe the same could be said of being human. There’s a classic Star Trek episode in which the crew encounters a highly evolved life-form that is basically pure consciousness, and this life-form derisively and yet also accurately describes humans as “ugly bags of mostly water.”

We humans are ugly bags of mostly water. We are a scientifically understandable combination of chemicals and particles—and, yep, lots of water.

But you cannot understand humans by simple formulas, scientific, religious, or otherwise. Because there is also magic. We can determine the amounts of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, calcium, and phosphorus that constitute a human body. But when we draw a diagram of the forces acting upon these bodies, there is still the one thing we can never solve for: The magic. Spirit. Soul. The imago dei. The breath of a living God who gives us life. Yah. Weh.

Too often, the diagram that religion draws up for explaining sex takes the snake’s-eye view—it names only the physics of fear, threat, and control, but none of the magic. Likewise, media and advertising thrust the commodification of sex our way, and sex becomes either something to trade in or just another aspect of life in which we are judged and found lacking. But neither of these approaches is enough. Neither points to the whole truth. Because there is also magic.

This magic is what God placed in us at creation. It is the spark of divine creativity, the desire to be known, body and soul, and to connect deeply to God and to another person. This magic is the juiciest part of us, and the most hurtable. This magic was breathed into us when God emptied God’s lungs to give us life, saying, “Take what I have and who I am.” This magic is what snakes seek to darken with shame. This magic was what was sanctified for all time and all people when Jesus took on human form and gave of himself, saying, “Take and eat, this is my body given for you.”

__________________________________

From Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. Used with permission of Convergent Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2019 by Nadia Bolz-Weber.

For two decades, my mother told me stories about going to a convent in Grenada. “It was where I learnt manners,” she would say, smiling. Her own mother, a grand woman from Curaçao who had married a Dominican man during the shipwreck chaos of the Second World War and moved with him to that legendarily green island in the middle of the Caribbean, had sent her 13 daughters to the convent of St. Joseph of Cluny, where the nuns taught them the indelible arts of propriety. They were punished if they did not wear their uniforms correctly, arrange their napkins in napkin holders the right way, or finish each grain of rice on their plates; one of my aunties wailed all night in front of an insurmountable plate of food, until she fell asleep at the table.

My aunties joked about the convent when I was growing up, but my mother always seemed to have internalized the divine rules the nuns had instilled in her. In particular, they had taught her—perhaps without outright teaching it—to wield her authority like a weapon, a cutlass that chopped down the rebellion she would see thick in her child as razor grass. She was beautiful, kind, self-sacrificing—and she was stern, rigid, distant, as much Tennyson’s imprisoned Lady of Shalott as her stone fortress. I am your mother, she would say often. I know best. In most arguments, it was her way or no way; to argue against her was a profession of hatred towards her. To concede was love.

A diminutive frame, she projected both the quiet of an introvert and the power of a ruler who takes it on faith, rather than election, that she rules. She both liked and disliked the island of her birth, Dominica, the land the Caribs deemed Waitukubuli, Tall-is-her-body, and which may have influenced how John Layfield, one of King James’ 54 translators of the Bible, imagined Eden as he recorded his travels to Dominica with descriptions that sounded like Paradise. To my mum, it was not paradise. It was sometimes fun, often hard, often backwards, always dense with ambivalent memories. With her lighter olive skin, red or fuschia lipstick, and dark brown hair treated to be wavy-straight, she looked almost like one of the women we called “Spanish” in the island, except on the rare occasions she let her hair get wet in the sea or in a pool.

Then, my father—darker brown, taller, salt-and-pepper curls on his head like short fine sprigs—would hold her, telling her how much he loved her natural curls; wouldn’t she wear her hair like that? She always refused, grimacing, glaring. What nonsense, she said, with or without saying it. She did not bathe in the sea often, whereas my father swam out far in search of corals and fishes without snorkel or goggles, at least until a fall from a ladder and, later, an ulcer destroyed his mobility. My mum stayed ashore, mostly, staring, appraising, both cold and warm, tundra and sunroom, in the way I understood as an introvert myself. She smiled if I was happy—if my happiness coincided with what she believed happiness was.

Her argument about where queer people like me stood was clear: we did not stand anywhere, did not belong. So outlandish were we in our strangeness and danger that she would, after mumbling, whisper words like gay and transgender, if she said them at all. In her world, once I came out as queer, I just didn’t exist; she had almost no language for me. And to have no language for something is akin to it not existing for us, so closely have we woven words to world. I had become an inscrutable, ugly tongue to her.

I have come, to my surprise, to be defined by my mother.

I loved her, and I have hated her, and have understood her, and failed to understand her, as jellyfish fail to understand a beach, or smoke struggles to understand the throat of someone who has never dark-kissed a cigarette.

I sometimes think I understand the gods I no longer believe in. Mothers, though, I still struggle with, and rage at, and cry over.

*

I hear her, on echo, each time I read Jamaica Kincaid’s masterful short reflection on her own mother, “Girl.” I wrote my own version of it years ago, loud with my mum’s commands to stay in my cramped closet. It has stayed with me, just as the memory of the feel of the closet, the memory of the weight of a parent’s words about how one should be, never goes away.

First published in 1978 in The New Yorker, where Kincaid—then a staff writer there—published many of the prose-poetic works that would later appear in At the Bottom of the River, her first collection, “Girl” captures Kincaid’s “mother’s voice exactly,” as she told Moira Ferguson in 1994. That she was a West-Indian woman—writing, at that, about her relationship with another woman, her mother—seemed remarkable even to Kincaid herself, given the dominance of male voices in Caribbean literature at the time. “West-Indian writing until very recently was all men,” she told Ferguson, and “it is now mostly women . . . Like everywhere, everywhere it’s mostly women who are writing anything interesting.” “Girl” examined womanhood in Antigua and the Anglophone Caribbean more broadly, musing on what it means to be a proper, respectable lady—at any cost. But it crosses geographic borders easily, as much great literature does.

“Jamaica Kincaid” was a pen name. She was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in Antigua, and, in 1973, when she turned 24, she adopted her now-famous pseudonym. She chose “Jamaica Kincaid” because she wanted both greater anonymity as an author and increased visibility as a Caribbean woman, which “Jamaica” was meant to evoke. (For this reason, some of my students have had the misfortune, on midterms, of assuming Kincaid is from Jamaica.) Despite her desires for anonymity, her fiction has always been strikingly autobiographical; her stories and novels, like Annie John, Lucy, and Autobiography of My Mother, hew closely to her own past, to such a degree that they sometimes seem closer to nonfiction.

Her texts often share elements: the dead reappearing in their suits; spirits who take the form of animals, such that one should not throw rocks at creatures, lest they come back as a person to punish you; cruel, if not evil, mothers, and cruelty in the world in general; a young girl who imagines marrying another girl (though Kincaid has argued, with a naïve surprise upon hearing that readers interpreted this as queer, that the image of a girl marrying another girl, which appears in Annie John and At the Bottom of the River, was not meant as lesbian coding, but rather an exploration of girlhood); and more.

Autobiographical or not, her fiction has a cold power that stays with you. The quiet brutality of her characters can seem curious when set against Kincaid herself, who smiles cutely, has a wry humor, and speaks in an idiolect reminiscent of the BBC English she listened to when young, as Antigua was still a British colony at the time.

“Girl” is a fine example of Kincaid’s amorphousness of genre; it can be read as a short story, lyric nonfiction, or a prose poem with ease, not unlike some of the other remarkably lyrical pieces in At the Bottom of the River. I’ve always found this fascinating, the way Kincaid’s work seems to exist at the border of fiction and nonfiction, challenging what it means for a text to exist purely as one or the other. Because of this, I’ve taught “Girl” in both fiction and nonfiction writing classes. But beyond this, it’s a striking evocation of girlhood. It shows a rigid understanding of what it means to be a woman—in particular, what it meant to be a black girl in Antigua when Kincaid was growing up.

“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry,” the piece begins. “Girl” is all one long sentence, chained together by semicolons. Almost every “sentence” is a command, instruction, or upbraiding. Although there are no quotation marks or named speakers, the genius of Kincaid’s “Girl” is that it still manages to create two distinct characters, one of which—the primary speaker—appears to be Kincaid’s mother, and the latter of which is someone who speaks only twice, identified by italics. The commands seem to take place not in one particular day or even year, but across the course of Kincaid’s youth. That it is all one long sentence, punctuated only briefly those two times by the secondary speaker, creates an image of a breathlessly domineering mother one does not speak back to, an image of a life made up almost solely of these injunctions.

The girl—presumably the person who speaks in italicized responses—seems mousy by comparison, hardly able to get a word in, and unable to convince her mother that she is wrong. When the mother says “don’t play benna in Sunday School; you mustn’t speak to the wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you,” the girl follows up with “but I don’t sing benna on Sundays and never in Sunday school”; the delayed answer about singing benna suggests that the girl has to fight to get a word in, and by the time she does, the mother is already off to new instructions (“this is how to sew on a button”). The soft anaphora at the start of the piece—“wash the clothes, wash the clothes”—suggests the repetitiousness of the mother’s decrees in general.

At points, the mother’s commands morph into sharp rebukes of her daughter’s supposed behavior, who she repeatedly labels a “slut.” “[O]n Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming,” the mother says; later, she demonstrates “how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t immediately recognize the slut I have warned you against becoming.” These chastisements paint a portrait of what the materfamilias seems to believe constitutes a “proper,” puritanical woman, which her daughter is failing at being. Yet the mother is complicated. At one point, she shows her daughter how to abort a child, implying that she, too, was taught this once: “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.” She also teaches her daughter “how to bully a man” and “how a man bullies you,” revealing that, for all her propriety, this mother will not let herself, or her child, be controlled by men.

She seems cruel and commanding at first, but by the end, she has become what many mothers are: complicated, animated by a multifaceted love daughters and sons may not understand until we, too, find ourselves speaking to a child in the ways we thought we never would.

*

My mother’s voice rings inside me, around me, a lot.

Keep your hair short, so it doesn’t curl, doesn’t show its kinks, doesn’t become the bad hair it’s so bent on becoming; don’t sit so close to the smokers; don’t sit with your back so low in a chair; stay away from those boys; turn off that show about all that, nobody is gay; I’ll talk to your father about beating you with his belt, you’re too old for him to take it off his waist and hit you like that, did you see what happened to Renee, the instructor beat her so hard that her skin turned red, it’s not right, but you still also mustn’t talk to your father that way; finish all the food on your plate; live in this home like a beautiful silent cage; this is how you curry chicken; don’t wear things on your lips that make them look shiny, too effeminate, it’s not right, in fact, don’t wear anything on your lips at all; I say this because I love you; don’t be like me when you grow up, because you were the only reason I stuck with my marriage; be like me when you grow up, proper; do not use slang; read your Bible, so you don’t become the abomination you so want to become; I say this because I love you; don’t let your hair get so long, because your kind of hair is bad, anyway; you know I love you, right; I know what the doctors said you were when you were born, a boy, how can you say you are a girl when I know what you are, how can you hate me so much when I tell you I don’t want this in my family, when I say I don’t want you to be a freak and a disgrace and someone who will make my sisters laugh at me and an unnatural anti-God thing, how can you expect me to react; you must hate me to do this to me; eat up; avoid biting into the mangoes with black spots on their sides; you will never find love, you will be homeless on the streets, who would want something like, like what you are, I cannot even say the word; I love you, you know.

*

Kincaid acknowledged that there were cultural differences between America and Antigua—and, with it, much of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. “I don’t think American women have much that we can draw from,” she said to Ferguson when asked about the “resurgence of black women writers in [America].” There is “a much different sensibility,” she claimed, in being black in America and black in a place like Antigua—a sentiment other Caribbean writers, like the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, have echoed. “I think that American black people . . . have a kind of nationalism about [being black] that we don’t have: black nationalism,” Kincaid continued. “Because they are a minority, they are more concerned with their identity being extinct, whereas we don’t feel that way. Everybody [in Antigua] is black. I mean, we don’t think white people are permanent,” she added with a laugh. “We don’t feel permanent, either, but that feeling of ‘there will always be white people sitting on top of black people’—we don’t have.”

The truth is mixed. Racism and colorism—whereby there is an overwhelming sense that lighter skin (though not Caucasian skin, per se) equals more beautiful skin—unquestionably persist in our islands. V. S. Naipaul spoke of black Trinidadians in racist terms, branding them in 1980 “monkeys” and “contemptible . . . brutes” only “interesting to chaps in universities who want to do compassionate studies.” Where I grew up, “black like an African” was an insult people frequently used to suggest one was both dark-skinned and ignorant; the term bundled together anti-blackness, from black and mixed people, and old colonial stereotypes about Africa. Light skin was pretty skin, and non-tight curls and straight hair were “good” hair.

Still, Kincaid’s central argument is important: that blackness in one country is not necessarily fully equivalent to blackness in another. All too often, naïve Americans—most often on Twitter—seem to assume that the experience of being black in America is universal; this Americentric presumption is false, for what it is like to be black in one place is not always the same as what it is like somewhere else, even as there are many overt ways in which anti-black rhetoric appears across seas and borders. Anti-black racism appears everywhere, but we need nuance in how we speak about experiences of blackness—and, for that matter, other identities—in other times and places.

Even as Kincaid captures a specific image of motherhood and girlhood in “Girl,” one influenced by British-colonial notions of what it means to be a “proper” lady, Kincaid also gives us something that can resonate with many readers, regardless of background. In a short piece that is all one long sentence with no named characters or setting, Kincaid still manages to create real characters with desires. Her language, italicizations, and the form of the piece become part of the characterization in “Girl.” This is what makes her piece so lasting and rich: that out of what initially seems just a list of commands arises a fragment of beautiful, poignant memoir. It is a kind of cold pool I look into, every now and then, both excited and nervous at what I will see each time I read it, wondering if I will see my mother’s face, or my own.

West
Initially, there was no such thing as “the Western.” The word was just an adjective that added some local color to a variety of genres ranging from “Western comedies” to “Western melodramas,” “chase films,” “romances,” and “epics.” But the adjective was a geographical one, and it quickly overshadowed the nouns it was supposed to serve, because geography was essential to the new form. Think of the titles: rivers (Red River, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande . . .); states and other large regions (The Virginian, Texas Rangers, Nevada Smith, California, Cimarron . . .); outposts (Fort Apache, The Alamo, Comanche Station . . .); a few cities (Vera Cruz, 3:10 to Yuma, San Antonio, The Man from Laramie . . .); plus an entire lexicon of space and movement (The Big Trail, Destry Rides Again, Stagecoach, The Bend in the River, Two Rode Together, Canyon Passage . . .).

Every story needs a space in which to unfold, of course, but the Western does more; it is in love with space; it foregrounds it, full-screen, whenever it can. The start of the cattle drive in Red River (1948): in two minutes, we get a static background (drovers and herd, at dawn, motionless against the landscape), a panoramic so powerful—this is our cattle, this is our land—not even a legendary continuity blunder can spoil it, a confident sense of direction (“Take them to Missouri, Matt”), and an explosion of joy. Beginnings are particularly good at evoking the immensity of this space: in The Man of the West (1958), a horseman appears on the horizon, looks at the empty expanse around him, and rides calmly off; in The Virginian (1929) and My Darling Clementine, a herd of cows disperses slowly in every direction; in Red River, The Man from Laramie (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959), it’s wagons that advance cautiously this way and that.

Cautiously, slowly, calmly: the initial tempo of the Western: Lento assai. The first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): three men at a station, a fly buzzing, a wheel screeching, a drop of water hitting the rim of a hat. In no other form does waiting—for the train, the attack, the night, the stage, the cavalry . . . —play such a large role: a dilated sense of time, mirroring the enlargement of space. The Big Trail, The Big Sky, The Big Country. Big, and empty: in film after film, the first to “set eyes” on the land is a white man, who sees nothing but an uninhabited country. Native Americans—“Indians,” as the Western calls them—were of course already living in the West (and everywhere else in America, for that matter); but by routinely introducing them only after we have already become familiar with white characters, the Western makes them look like illegitimate intruders. In reality, they were there first; in fiction, they arrive always too late. Seldom has narrative lied so spectacularly about the history it claimed to narrate.

*

Wagon train
“Cinema is the specifically epic art,” wrote André Bazin in a famous essay on American film, and “the migration to the West is our Odyssey.” Epic, yes; Odyssey, no. That there is no return is the founding act of the genre. Home is a vague hope, distant in space and in time; for now, all there is is a wagon; two or three generations, together, surrounded by hundreds of other families; all different, and all leading exactly the same life. Life in the open, on unsteadily undulating stoops, under everybody’s eyes; because what matters, in these films, is not the private sphere of the individual family—we never see the inside of a wagon, and the intimacy of a sentimental conversation, or of a good wash, are often met with rough collective humor—but the amalgamation of everybody into a community. Into a nation.

“Gathered from the North, the South and the East, they assemble on the bank of the Mississippi for the conquest of the West,” announces the opening of The Big Trail (1930). Conquest: the tempo remains slow, but it has become unyielding. The eyes of the American people, wrote Tocqueville at the onset of the great migration, “are fixed upon [their] own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature”; they “enjoy dreaming about what will be.”

Dreaming . . . But this is more like an obsession. The march of the wagon train can never stop: a hasty prayer, and the dead are buried and left forever behind; a child is born, and hours later is already on the move. Everyday life is both implacably everyday—always brewing coffee, always mending socks and washing their only passable shirt—and frightfully unpredictable: a danger that comes less from human enemies (although the conflict with “Indians” is present in most films of migration), than from the hostility of nature: it’s always too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy . . . rain, dust, snow, mountains, rapids . . . So much friction, in these films: not a journey in which a wagon doesn’t get stuck in the mud; not a scene in which they go downhill, for a change.

Rarely do fictional characters work as hard as in early Westerns: keeping the animals together, cutting down trees, crossing rivers, digging passages, overcoming crazy obstacles. After all this, they deserve the West. They have been a stubborn, single-minded human herd; which is the reason Red River, with its supremely unpromising storyline (moving ten thousand cows from Texas to Missouri, imagine that), is the greatest of all epic Westerns. Those cattle are the settlers: and in the film’s terrifying stampede, caused by a man who wants to eat sugar in the middle of the night, the destructive potential of the great migration erupts for a moment, earthquake-like, into the open.

*

Seven
The wagon train is an early figure in the history of the Western; eventually, the genre leaves the plains for the towns of My Darling Clementine, High Noon, or Rio Bravo. Somewhere in between, lies the great hybrid of Stagecoach: a film that moves from one town to another, declares them both unlivable, and then concentrates on the microcosm of Frontier society that chance has assembled together for the journey. Seven passengers, in the stage’s cramped public space: an escaped convict; an alcoholic doctor; a prostitute; a Southern ex-rebel and gambler; a corrupt banker; a wife hiding her pregnancy; and, the most “normal” of them all, a whiskey drummer. As if he were running some sort of experiment, Ford slowly raises the temperature around his passengers, and a memorable series of staccato one-minute scenes—framed by external shots of the stagecoach racing through Monument Valley, as if to remind us of the pressure they are under—shows the seven characters clashing over and over again.

During the last of these exchanges, the doctor makes explicit how implausible their encounter has been from the start: “Ladies and gentlemen, since it’s most unlikely that we’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting again socially . . .” Then an arrow whistles through the air, and the fight against the Apaches brings the seven together for a few minutes. Once the threat is gone, they part once and for all: the gambler has died; the whiskey drummer is taken to the hospital; the banker is arrested by the town marshal; the doctor makes his way to the saloon; the new mother joins her husband in the cavalry; the young prostitute prepares to return to her brothel, while Ringo proceeds to the shootout with the gang that has murdered his brother. Then Ringo survives, and takes her with him to his ranch “across the border,” in a Mexico we have never seen; but the real ending had come a few minutes earlier, with the disintegration of the stagecoach seven as a possible metaphor of the Frontier.

*

Shadows
Film noir also began as an adjective, used in France for the (mostly American) crime novels of the Série Noire; and then, beginning in 1946, for films that combined a mystery plot with a pervasive naturalist hopelessness. Noir: shadows. Stanwyck paces back and forth in front of MacMurray, and with her walks her double, stamped on the wall; changing shape, disappearing briefly, at times even splitting into two doubles. In The Third Man (1949), someone turns on a lamp near a window, and Orson Welles—who had died before the beginning of the film, and had been buried in front of our eyes—materializes from a dark awning; a shadow, brought back to life. Later, as Joseph Cotten and the occupation powers are waiting for him to show up at a rendezvous at night, all of Vienna turns into a city of shadows: statues, soldiers, alleys, and the unfathomable giant—a clear homage to expressionism—that turns out to be a harmless old balloon peddler.

Shadows harden Clifton Webb’s features in The Dark Corner (1946), and soften Jane Greer’s in Out of the Past (1947: “And then I saw her, coming out of the sun. And I knew I wouldn’t care about those forty grand.”). Shadows intensify our perception of the world, by presenting everything in an equivocal light; they pervade the noir’s visual aesthetics in the same way ambiguity permeates its language. Here, too, titles are a good index of the genre’s perspective on the world: vaguely threatening metaphors (Whirlpool, Nightfall, Vertigo, Impact, Blast of Silence—and, to be sure, Double Indemnity); an enigmatic use of the definite article (The Naked Kiss, The Third Man, The Dark Corner, The Clay Pigeon . . . which corner? what pigeon?); and plenty of allusions to unintelligible events: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Where the Sidewalk Ends, They Live by Night. In this company, Dial “M” for Murder and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye sound refreshingly straightforward.

*

Magic Mirror Maze
Though just as haunted by death and killing as the Western, the linear geometry of the duel is unthinkable in film noir. The Lady from Shanghai places Rita Hayworth and Welles face to face, looking straight into each other’s eyes; a few seconds, and a third person emerges from his words (“I thought it was your husband you wanted to kill”), to be immediately multiplied by hers (“George was supposed to take care of Arthur, but he lost his silly head and shot Broome”). They are alone—but they are not; someone else is always between them. A few more seconds, and “Arthur” (Hayworth’s husband, played by Everett Sloane) shows up in person. Now it is he and Hayworth who face each other, guns in their hands; but in the “Magic Mirror Maze” where the scene is set, optics are deceptive: in a particularly baroque moment, Hayworth is aiming straight at the audience, Sloane diagonally, in the same general direction, but also—reflected as he is from several different angles—seemingly at himself: “You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.”

As they start firing, and glass shatters everywhere, it’s impossible to say what is happening to whom (at a certain point, it even looks as if Welles is the one being hit); and even after Hayworth and Sloane die, we are left with the baffling memory of a shootout that adds a third person to the usual two. (The unlikeliness of this situation is the secret behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.) But in fact, triangulation is as essential to the structure of the noir as the binary logic was to the Western. It’s the triangle of adultery, of course, as indeed in The Lady from Shanghai, or in George Macready’s toast “to the three of us”—himself; his wife, Hayworth (always her); and her secret ex-lover, Glenn Ford—in Gilda (1946). But beyond adultery, what emerges here is the fundamental figure of the social universe of the film noir: the Third.

*

The Third
“The appearance of the third party,” writes Simmel in the chapter “Sociological Significance of the Third Element” of his Sociology, “indicates transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrasts.” The Third can mediate, and act as an impartial referee; it stands for all sorts of institutions that mitigate conflicts and strengthen the social bond. And it’s all true—just not in lm noir. Here, the Third multiplies conflicts, endlessly postponing their resolution. “Just don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a man gets too complicated, he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy, his luck runs out” (The Blue Dahlia, 1946). But things always get too complicated here. Robert Mitchum, addressing Kirk Douglas and Jane Greer in Out of the Past:

“All right, you take the frame off me. You pin the Eels murder on Joe [. . .] You will be happier if you let the cops have her [. . .] Somebody’s got to take the rap for Fisher’s murder [. . .] Besides, it’s not a frame. She shot him.”

“I’ll say you killed him. They will believe me.”

“Do you believe her?”

You, me, Eels, Joe, her, somebody, Fisher, they . . . The adulterous triangle is merely the starting point for an incessant proliferation of corpses. Double Indemnity:

“You got me to take care of your husband, and then you got Zachetti to take care of Lola, and maybe take care of me, too, and then somebody else would have come along to take care of Zachetti for you. That’s the way you operate, isn’t it, baby.”

In the Western, killing was definitive: it arose from the discovery of the fundamental conflict, and then—once the enemy was dead—the story was over, and the future could begin. In the noir, killing is just the first step in a series of ever-shifting alliances dictated by the interest of the moment: Stanwick and MacMurray against her husband; Stanwyck and Zachetti against MacMurray; Stanwyck and “somebody else” against Zachetti . . . It’s a multiplication of narrative forces that goes back to the great metropolitan novels by Balzac and Dickens—and in fact even further back, to Hegel’s description of “civil” or “bourgeois” society (the German “bürgerlich” encompasses both), in the Philosophy of Right:

In civil society each individual is his own end, all else means nothing to him. But he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular [person] [. . .] The whole [of civil society] is the territory of mediation.

In this territory of mediation, using others—turning them into the means for one’s own end—is a much better strategy than simply eliminating them (as was the case in the more rudimentary uni- verse of the Western). In the process, the border between legal and illegal becomes blurry, and narrative structure is placed on an inflationary path: it’s always possible to persuade someone to do something they’d never thought of; always possible to add one more character (and another, and another . . .), endlessly expanding the “middle” of the plot.

Legend has it that during the shooting of The Big Sleep (1946) no one could remember whether a certain character had committed suicide or had been killed (and if so, by whom); so they sent Chandler a telegram, and he couldn’t remember, either. The story is absurd, yet plausible: there is a Ponzi-scheme side to film noir, where long-term logic is routinely sacrificed to immediate effect. And it works: one is never bored, with these films; it’s only at the end, when the intrigue collapses like a castle of cards, that you feel a little disappointed—a little betrayed. But after all, betrayal becomes the noir.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Far Country: Scenes from American Culture by Franco Moretti. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux March 19th 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Franco Moretti. All rights reserved.

Millie, the 30-year-old narrator of Halle Butler’s second novel The New Me, has been working as a temp at a design firm for just under two weeks when she receives news that launches her into a rhapsodic fantasy. She will no longer just be answering phones; she will now be granted the extra responsibility of shredding documents. “Oh, fantastic!” she says to her boss, thinking, “my expectations [are] so fucked up that my relief at having more clerical work is real and strong.”

Showing the dissonance between a workplace’s chipper atmosphere and its workers’ despondency has become a hallmark of office satires—Office Space, The Office, and Daniel Orozco’s oft-anthologized “Orientation.” And Butler—whose first novel, Jillian, centers on an administrative assistant—uses this convention well. But what sets The New Me apart from its genre is its focus on a particular type of work, one that’s been steadily on the rise: the temporary job, aka the gig. Unlike workplace heroines past, Millie isn’t only caught up in the existential dilemma of reconciling her inner self with her ambitions, which require cunning, expedience, and charm. She’s also unsure how she’ll make rent on her own, and whether it’s worth it to get to know her co-workers, not because of a mismatch in temperament, per se, but because she may not see them again after spending a few months together.

The perils—and some of the privileges—of gig work have been the subject of several recent studies, although the findings have been disputed. By some estimates, around 30 percent of the working-age US population is involved in the gig economy. According to one study, about a quarter of those workers are unwilling participants—people who are strapped for cash and need to take on extra work, or who are struggling to find full-time work at all. Another study described a combination of “traditional” work and gig work as “the new norm.”

What these studies don’t show is the emotional impact of such a fragmented professional life. And that’s where storytelling comes in. There’s no dearth of workplace fiction, or even new fiction centered on working-class characters. Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter takes readers through the world of waiting tables; Joan Silber’s Improvement follows a working single mother who struggles to find a sitter for her son when she visits her boyfriend at Rikers Island. But Butler’s book—along with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a protagonist who loses her receptionist job at a gallery because her malaise is so complete that it manifests in constant napping—shows us that workplace exhaustion is spreading, infecting industries that once would’ve been considered fulfilling and stable.

For Millie, the lack of a regular schedule or a regular paycheck—of any regularity, really—makes it difficult for her to take her own life seriously, to be a participant and not only an observer. Her role as an outsider does make her a sharp and often funny critic of her workplace; she notices her boss’ artisanal pears, the uniformity of her coworkers’ dark-hued jeans, and one woman’s fixation with her pedometer. But the cost of all this detached noticing is that she never feels invested in the place that she works, or in the lives of her coworkers, with whom she spends most of her time. And why should she? No one has invested in her.

Instead, she’s caught in a cycle of small tasks, which have little bearing on whether or not she’ll be hired full-time, and so she completes them, or doesn’t, in the same foggy mindset in which she binge-watches crime shows at home. “There’s a lot of repetition in my life,” Millie notes. “No real routine or narrative, just a lot of repetition, and before I know it, I’m sitting in the break room drinking a cup of coffee (it doesn’t taste good) and staring at my phone again, scrolling, waiting for the motivation to get up and go to the desk.”

Butler uses the word “narrative” a handful of times throughout the book, usually while Millie is lamenting the listlessness of her job. Without long-term wants, she feels neither glee when she succeeds nor loss when she fails, and she’s painfully aware of this. The reality of this set-up presents a challenge for Butler, or any writer hoping to examine the ennui of temp work. When a character’s job is dull and cyclical, and when that job takes up the bulk of her time, is it possible to imbue her story with real drama?

In Millie’s case, the answer seems to be no. Between answering phones and working the shredder, she fills her time with little activities that may, if she’s lucky, bring on a rush of dopamine. She anticipates checking her email and allows herself to fantasize about what she might’ve received, bringing her palms to a sweat. “After all that drama, the contents are almost a disappointment,” Butler writes. “I am eligible for a mild discount at the Container Store, among other things.”

Outside of work, things aren’t much better. She sometimes meets for drinks with her friend Sarah, whose full-time job inspires long-winded stories that Millie resents. Afterwards, she goes home and watches Forensic Files, even though it’s “propaganda for the Justice Department.” Just as she envies Sarah’s petty dramas, Millie finds herself wishing she could live like a TV character, a soap opera star in particular. “They never watch TV, they never check email without event, they always worry about something real, always have a problem that needs to be, and can be, solved,” Butler writes.

At a certain point, Millie identifies her problem as a remove from the physical world, in which she rarely feels present, between time spent on TV and time spent checking email. “We’re so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world almost might as well not exist, for all it concerns us,” she observes. To fix this, she picks up running again; she walks to a park; she considers yoga. She tries to envision her future self, but even these visions slip quickly back into her current wants, which are limited to class signifiers that she can’t afford. With a full-time job, she thinks, she’d have, “peace, stability, a clean winter coat, a Swatch […].”

It seems that Butler wants us to recognize that even our avenues out of corporate listlessness have been repaved in corporate gloss. Practices that were meant to inspire deliberateness and reflection have been “hacked,” “disrupted,” and needlessly improved upon, so that now they serve the counterintuitive purpose of expedience, of getting you back to work. There are apps that make journaling more efficient and startups that provide therapy online. The tagline for a popular meditation app is “Ready. Set. Meditate.”

When even the act of unwinding feels oddly laborious, burnout is inevitable. And, according to a forthcoming book on the subject, women are more likely to experience workplace burnout than men.

In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain why this might be. Women, the authors explain, are expected to shoulder more of the social burdens at work, smoothing over disagreements and educating difficult co-workers on matters of tact and kindness. Sophie, a composite character the authors created by aggregating the thoughts of their interview subjects, “is an engineer, but she’s also a black woman so she rarely gets to be just an engineer. […] Since she is so often the only person of color and the only woman in the room, they all look to her to explain, ya know, why she’s the only person of color or woman in the room.”

Divvying up one’s time between work-work and the emotional labor expected of women at work, can, according to the authors, lead to a “decreased sense of accomplishment” and “depersonalization,” or “the depletion of empathy.” And the wellness industry capitalizes on the omnipresence of burnout. “The problem is that the world has turned ‘wellness’ into yet another goal everyone ‘should’ strive for,” the authors of Burnout write. Instead, they make their own prescriptions, such as “laughter,” “breathing,” and “positive social interactions,” which are vague enough to feel doable, but which still place the onus on their readers to cope with the effects of a sweeping institutional problem on their own.

This is the case for Millie, Sarah, and Millie’s boss, Karen. Collectively, they endure accusations of dressing “unprofessionally,” assumptions that they’re incompetent or unqualified, and expectations that they’ll do the unseen emotional work that goes into a smooth-running company.

Butler is not generous in her portrayal of these women; like her protagonist, she’s sharp and noticing. She gives us the reality of their situation, which is that listless work—especially listless work that yields no long-term benefits—is not likely to engender kindness.

The resulting narrative—or lack thereof—is flat at times. Telling the story of a burned-out temp worker is a tough job. But thankfully, someone’s done it.

Shortly after Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami sent out the galleys for her magnum opus, The Moor’s Account, in the summer of 2014, she headed to Wyoming for a well-deserved sojourn. “I took a deep breath and said, okay, I really need a break, and my next book definitely won’t be a work of historical fiction,” she recounted with a chuckle.

For almost five years, Lalami had labored over the intricate historical details of the fictional memoir, which chronicles the untold tale of Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamor, an enslaved African said to be the first black and Muslim explorer. Named Estabanico by his Spanish master, Mustafa was one of just four survivors of the ill-fated 1527 Narvaez expedition to Florida, and yet his story had been all but omitted from most accounts of the journey.

To build an authentic 16th-century world steeped in colonialism, racism, and early permutations of toxic masculinity, and to tell the story of Mustafa from his own perspective and in his own authentic voice, Lalami pored over hundreds of pages of historical texts. The author carefully studied everything from the fabrics the explorers wore and the dialects they spoke to the supplies they carried and the weaponry they wielded. (Lalami would later become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.)

During the trip to Wyoming, Lalami received a harrowing phone call from her sister that spurred the idea for her new and much-anticipated novel, The Other Americans. Her father was seriously ill back home in Rabat, to the extent that the family was certain he wasn’t going to make it. “It’s every immigrant’s nightmare,” Lalami said, “the idea that you’re going to get a call or text in the middle of the night and you’re going to be thousands of miles away from your family when they need you.” Lalami cut her break short and flew to Morocco, where her father fortunately recovered from his illness.

But after returning to California, where she lives and works as a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, Lalami couldn’t shake the fear of losing a parent while living at a distance from them. She took that fear and used it as the basis for The Other Americans, hoping to exorcise the unsettling feeling by examining what it might be like for an immigrant to be hurled into an unending state of grief and sorrow. At the time, hate crimes and politically motivated attacks against Arabs and Muslims were on the rise in America. And so Lalami decided to incorporate the political milieu into the novel, filling it with aggressions—both micro and macro—against immigrants, people of color and other minorities.

“I was thinking about the characters as people who feel their voices aren’t heard or included in the national conversation. In that sense, they’re ‘other,’” Lalami said of the book title.

The Other Americans expertly captures the state of America today by offering readers a panoramic view of its fault lines, from the standpoint of a novelist who some might consider an “other.”

The timely novel centers on the suspicious death of Driss, a Moroccan immigrant. Driss’s passing destabilizes his immediate family and sends shockwaves throughout a tight-knit community in a small town in the Mojave Desert. The book’s chapters are taut, rarely exceeding ten pages at a time; the author jumps from character to character as a gripping murder mystery and love story unfold in tandem. “I wanted to include different perspectives that never meet, and that altogether give you a sense of where America is at this moment,” Lalami said.

Most of Lalami’s characters happen to be of an immigrant background; all of them are in pursuit of the so-called American Dream and the prospect of upward mobility, which seem to be achievable only through integration. There is no one “immigrant story,” Lalami stresses—America is home to over 40 million immigrants, after all—and each of the novel’s characters carries a unique, standalone tale, filled with secrets and convoluted backstories.

Driss’s widow Mariam is initially ecstatic to have left Morocco, for example, but soon after finds herself longing for it. In one scene, while shopping at a supermarket, she catches the scent of rosewater from a passerby, and is catapulted into a despondent state of homesickness. “There’s an entire gamut of experiences that can be subsumed under the experience of migration,” Lalami said.

That said, the writer refuses to present those experiences as necessarily tragic, positing instead that the reality of immigration is an integral and inevitable facet of the human condition. “Migration is the oldest story of all,” she said. “My work is concerned with the transformation of identity, and how migration contributes to that transformation.”

*

In 1992, Lalami left Rabat at the age of 24 and moved to America to pursue a doctorate in linguistics. She never intended to settle in the US and had in fact hoped to return to Morocco to become a professor there. But “life intervened,” she said; she earned her Ph.D., secured a teaching job, got married, and ultimately became a naturalized US citizen who put down roots in LA. “I became an immigrant by choice and by chance,” she said.

Lalami’s hyphenated identity and personal experience with immigration have informed her writing in delightful and unexpected ways. To read Lalami’s work is to go on myriad journeys with her, from continent to continent and over the course of centuries.

There’s a foresight to even her earliest books, which mostly dealt with her homeland. In the opening chapter of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), Lalami’s debut, centering on the phenomenon of immigration from North Africa to Europe, a group of migrants makes a treacherous journey by boat across the Straits of Gibraltar, bringing to mind, of course, the journey that has been undertaken by Syrians and others fleeing war and persecution across the Mediterranean more than a decade later.

The protagonist in her second novel, Secret Son (2009), moves from the slums of Casablanca to an upper-class neighborhood, giving readers a snapshot of how class struggles can encourage the growth of radicalism in politically unstable societies. And in the Moor’s Account, perhaps her most ambitious work to date, Lalami tackles head on some of the atrocities of colonialism and the follies of Orientalism.

Taken as a whole, her work forms a constellation of stories about immigration and all its complexities under the motif of survival. In the process, Lalami has become an authority on what it means to be plucked from one’s homeland and to endure what is referred to in Arabic as al-ghorba, the angst that accompanies living in foreign lands.

*

Born in Rabat to a working-class family, Lalami grew up in a house filled with books, wanting nothing more than to become a writer. While her parents hadn’t attended college, she said, they were avid readers—by night, the bookish family of six would curl up with novels and read for hours at a time. The Lalami library was filled with an assortment of works spanning numerous genres: spy thrillers, science fiction, memoirs, and biographies all filled the shelves.

At six, Lalami gorged on French comics, including the Adventures of Tintin and Asterix before gradually working her way up to novels such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, also written in French. At 9, she finally put pen to paper and started writing “little stories” in her bedroom, injecting French colloquialisms and mannerisms into the text.

While Arabic is Lalami’s native tongue, she had attended a French school where she was immersed in the foreign language as well as the “colonial gaze” that so often accompanied it. Lalami noted she was cognizant even then that she couldn’t find herself in the stories she so enjoyed.

“When all of the works of imagination you see are represented in a different culture, it makes it seem as if only that other culture is worthy of your imagination,” she said. “It was a revelation when at 12, I opened a book by a Moroccan author and saw myself in that book.” Among the Arab and Moroccan writers she cites as influences are Driss Chraïbi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Fatima Mernissi, and Leila Abouzeid.

As a teenager and into her early twenties, before moving to the US, Lalami mostly wrote in French. Afterward, trapped between languages, and burdened by the idea that her Arabic had suffered as a result of her submersion in French, Lalami abandoned writing fiction in French altogether, however, feeling it carried “colonial baggage.”

At the University of Southern California in the early 90s, Lalami focused solely on her dissertation, which dealt with how humans process sentences. It was highly analytical work, she said, but she benefited from the research skills required of doctoral candidates.

Lalami described academia as less fulfilling to her than her fiction writing practice. And so she “tried her hand” at writing fiction in English, deciding that she would write with the very specific intent of being heard by others.

That third linguistic way allowed Lalami to explore storytelling with a fresh pen. Mastering another language, she felt, helped her shake off the linguistic remnants of French colonialism, and she ultimately turned much of her attention to pressing matters in contemporary America.

*

As a disciplined and prolific writer, Lalami adeptly moves between fiction and nonfiction. She writes for a minimum of two hours daily from a study at her home, sometimes running into eight if she’s feeling especially invested. “Writing is word after word and sentence after sentence,” she said. “That is how books are written. I’m a big believer in that kind of work ethic.”

Lalami comments on timely national affairs in a column at The Nation, named “Between the Lines.” She regularly takes aim at the Trump administration, particularly its policies on immigration, in the column and elsewhere. She’s also an avid and occasionally viral Tweeter, with a following of almost 40,000.

Lalami’s next release will be her first book of nonfiction. Titled Conditional Citizens, it delves into the relationship between the individual and the state, examining how that relationship is undermined by variables including race, gender, and, sure enough, national origin.

The idea had been lingering in the author’s mind for a while, she said, and the timing—with publication slated for 2020, the year Americans head to the ballot box for what will prove to be a deeply existential moment for the country—feels just right.

“When writing fiction, I withhold judgment. There are some unsavory characters in The Other Americans, for example, but I don’t write about them as if I’m judging them; I’m trying to listen to them,” she said. “Nonfiction is something else. Carrying a child away from their parents and putting them in a jail in the middle of the desert is completely immoral. I think it’s evil and it needs to be called out.”

I’m standing in front of a house outside Cleveland, half-waiting for a spaceship to arrive. When it finally appears, blotting out the sky, I will crane my neck and stare at its sleek, impossible angles. People will shout, point, and run. But I don’t see it.

Instead, the house at 1652 Lincoln Avenue sits quiet. It was built in 1917 of stone brick with a front porch. The house is a duplex, split in two by an interior wall I can only imagine. There is a single dormer window sticking out from the attic, perched towards the sky. There is a big tree on the left, whose tips are already turning to fire, here in the September sun. The front door is closed.

When I decided to organize a new edition of Clare Winger Harris’s stories, I knew I wanted to see the place she once lived in Lakewood, Ohio. But as I stare at her old house, I see little in the way of connection. There are some old grating and windowsills that may have survived the century, but that’s about it. The old bones are there, but the paint is new. People still live here, but there is no one home, so I don’t push it.

What’s to push, anyway? This wasn’t William Faulkner’s house. Or Emily Dickinson’s. It didn’t belong to Langston Hughes, who went to high school in Cleveland. No, this was the house of Clare Winger Harris, who wrote weird science fiction in the early decades of the 20th century. If I rang the bell and announced that, like I was some door-to-door literary merit salesman, I can easily guess the reply:

Who?

It’s a fair response, especially for a woman author who wrote in a marginal genre in cheap magazines. That is why I wanted to write something here that wasn’t the usual elevation of her work. I don’t want to tell you what to think of her stories; I just want you to read them. Instead, I want to tell you about her.

I circle around again, looking at the cracks and corners. I again hope for some unexplainable trans-temporal event, a sudden fold in space-time from which Ms. Harris would appear, stepping through a shimmering tunnel with Mary Poppins-like authority to answer my questions in full.

I then realize that the people who live here now, whoever they are, might have one of those security cameras to guard against people stealing their Amazon packages. As I duck behind the dashboard, I think about what Clare might think of such an invention. I think of similar things possibly inside this house: phones, computers, microwaves, and televisions; pads and tablets and smart things you can shout at. In a way then, she was here in full.

I look again. Maybe instead of an alien ship I can I hear the three baby boys she raised here, something we have in common. I can see her husband Frank, hat in hand, out the front door and on to his job as an engineer at American Monorail. I can almost see the postman come to the door. All writers, regardless of decade, wait for the mail.

But I still can’t see her. I can’t see Clare. But she’s inside. I know it. I can hear the typing.

*

Claire Marie Winger was born on January 18th, 1891, in the county seat of Freeport, Illinois, to Mary Porter ‘May’ Stover and Frank Stover Winger, an electrical engineer. Frank was related to Mary; he was a Stover on his mother’s side. Clare had a brother, Stover Carl Winger, born 1893, who was named after their mother’s wealthy father, Daniel Carl “D. C.” Stover, founder of the Stover Engine Works. After their children were born and raised, Clare’s parents divorced.

In 1910, Clare graduated from Chicago’s Lake View High School and went to Smith College with a bright future ahead of her. While at school, Clare met Frank Clyde Harris, a veteran of World War I who worked as an engineer designing heavy armor plating. He might have seemed very familiar to her. Clare dropped out and they married in 1912 in Chicago. The newlyweds traveled to Europe before relocating cross-country as Frank finished his Master’s in architectural engineering. During these years, Clare had three sons: Clyde Winger (1915), Donald Stover (1916), and Lynn Thackrey (1918).

In 1917, Clare’s father published a novel with the fantastical title of The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger. How did an electrical engineer become drawn to science fiction? He most certainly read the best trade magazine on the subject, The Electrical Experimenter, which later became Science and Invention. In addition to publishing circuit diagrams, editor Hugo Gernsback pontificated on all kinds of bizarre, theoretical inventions like the “thought telegrapher” and “television.” He also advocated for a new type of literary genre called “Scientifiction” that used scientific fact as the basis for imaginative stories.

In 1923, Clare wrote her first and only published novel, the classically-themed Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece through the Boston-based Stratford Company. Three years later, Weird Tales Magazine published her story “A Runaway World” in its July issue. Attributed to “Mrs. F. C. Harris,” it is the first American science-fiction story by a woman using her own name.

The realm that Clare was publishing in was a decidedly strange one. Though writers had been publishing weird science stories since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, it wasn’t until the advent of the pulp magazines that the genre became popular. The pulps, with names like Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, were aimed at the youngish reader with their fully painted covers, spot illustrations, and dense stories printed on cheap paper. They had letter columns where readers could offer critique and exchange letters in a kind of early typeset Internet. Many of these early letter writers rose up into significant and lucrative roles as writers, editors, and publishers. Science fiction was embraced, and then run, by its first-contact fans.

In June 1927, while Clare was living in Lakewood, Amazing Stories ran a writing contest cooked up by Gernsback, who had now fully embraced science fiction publishing. Clare entered, along with 358 other people, with her environmental space opera “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” in which Earth’s water supply is stolen by opportunistic Martians. Clare won third place for her story (with a female lead) and signed it “Clare Winger Harris.”

In announcing the winners, Gernsback, whose earlier editorials probably influenced Clare’s father, gave praise couched in the cultural moment:

“That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientification writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.”

The prize opened doors for Clare. She published extensively in the pulps for the next three years, especially for Gernsback. The stories run the gamut of quaint, thrilling, and terrifying.

Her story “The Ape Cycle” in the May 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly is generally considered her last. It might also be a largely unacknowledged source for a popular media franchise, but I will let you judge that for yourself. Then suddenly, at age 39, Clare stopped. Someone even wrote into Amazing Stories in late 1930 and asked, “What happened to Clare Winger Harris? I’ve missed her . . .” Every single account of her life says that she quit to focus on raising her children.

When Clare quit, her popularity was so great that her name was regularly being used on covers as advertising. She could have, like her peers, gone on to write novels, comic books, or even for the screen. But she walked away. Or did she?

In the early 1930s, after “The Ape Cycle,” a fan of Clare’s from the east side of Cleveland wrote her a fan letter. He gushed about her work. He said that he was working on his own magazine with his best friend and would like her to submit to it. He was in high school.

Clare might have smiled at this request, which might be why she sent a story. It appeared in 1933 in the fifth and last issue of a stapled, mimeographed pamphlet called Science Fiction that had a print run of maybe—maybe—50 issues. The boy who wrote her was Jerry Siegel and his friend was Joe Shuster. In a couple of years, they would go on to create Superman, the most recognized science fiction character on the planet.

*

Clare and Frank eventually divorced, and Clare moved out west. In an April 10th, 1960, interview with the Plain Dealer’s Jane Scott, Frank Harris looks back on his life in Cleveland, where he stayed  after the divorce. His monorail company was integral to the war effort and he was now—in 1960—worth six million dollars. Frank, still a workaholic, doesn’t mention Clare. He says his hobbies are collecting oriental art with his new wife, whom he met on a golf course. He is also proud of his children: Clyde develops missile systems, Don is an engineer in Indiana, and Lynn is a research writer for the government in California. Some later accounts of Clare’s life claim that Frank, as the fully realized technological man of the future, was an inspiration for her own work.

Though Clare disappeared from the writing life, her stories were reprinted with great regularity in other sci-fi mags, though with similar biographical blurbs. In 1947, she self-published a collection of her short stories titled Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science from Dorrance Press without any introduction. Other reprints and inclusions by fans and scholars followed, from Richard A. Lupoff and Lisa Yaszek, among others. She was recently included in a 2018 summertime exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of History celebrating science fiction authors in the area. Every single published account of Clare Winger Harris ends that she stopped writing, raised her family, and died in 1968. Some go so far as to say she had no living relatives.

She left only her stories behind.

But for someone who wrote about spaceships, cyborgs, and apemen, such an ending is, if we’re being truthful, a little unsatisfactory.

For several months, I try in vain to locate relatives of Clare Winger Harris. I finally give up. I send a last, desperate Facebook message to someone named Dan. He writes back and says he is part of the larger Harris family, but doesn’t know anything. I give up again. The following Monday, I get a call. I almost don’t answer until I see the glowing words “California.”

“Hello,” I say.

“Hi.” A pause. “It’s Don Harris. I got your number from my nephew.

You wanted to talk about Clare?”

When Don was 12 or 13 years old, he remembers visiting the Brookmore Apartments, an elegant, four-story brick building in Old Town Pasadena. Don went there to visit his grandmother. When he entered her one-room apartment, he was always struck by one inescapable fact: it was filled to the top with books.

“You could tell she was smart,” Don says.

Donald Lynn Harris visited his grandmother every couple of months. She shared books with him on Tibetan Buddhism and Rosicrucianism. She was analytic, but also philosophical. Don remembers one time she gave him a book by Manley P. Hall, the metaphysical thinker and occultist whom Clare knew. It sparked quite an interest in him. One time, she gave him her own book of stories. He remembers reading part of it.

“Clare was brusque and businesslike,” Don says. “But she was nice to me. She would have been a bad grandma for a young child, but she was a good one for an older person.”

Years later, Don and his family crowded around the computer and started typing the names of relatives into a search engine. They were astounded when Clare’s name filled the results.

“There was nothing about my grandfather Frank,” Don says. “We thought he was more famous than her.”

When I ask why they divorced, there is a pause.

“We have a whole family of eccentrics,” Don says, laughing. They stayed together until their kids were fully grown, but their personalities were just too similar. Grandfather wanted to be chief of the roost. He was a big man—six feet, eight inches tall. His sons saw him as overwhelmingly powerful.

“But he was gentle with me,” Don remembers. “He gave me some Chinese art once.”

Don recalls that Clare didn’t have a lot. Sometimes, when she needed extra money, she would work the switchboard at the Brookmore, plugging wires in and out. She was supposed to inherit a great deal of money from C. Stover, but by the time it eventually reached her, the estate had been plundered. Others tried to warn her of this, but she was reluctant to believe it. She was a loner.

“They found her in the hall,” Don says. It was October 26th, 1968. She was 77. “I’m not sure any of us knew what it was. A heart attack? She didn’t waste away. She was very healthy.”

All three of her sons came to California for the funeral. There was the elder Don, who flew missions in World War II. There were rumors he had flown over Dresden. Someone whispered that during one flight, one of his copilots got hit and had his head severed. Don flew back with it in the plane with him.

“He came back darker,” says Don, who was named after him.

Lynn was a Marine who came back with a little bag of gold teeth. He showed them to Don. Lynn was very close to Clare. But he was always getting into trouble, says Don. He lived in the Yucatan and she had to bail him out of various problems. When Clare died, Lynn was accused by the family of looting her apartment.

“He took the TV,” Don says. “I have some stuff of hers, mostly books. She didn’t have much. She was relatively reclusive.”

When I ask if the family was influenced by her work, or at least the spirit of it, Don says that his dad was the biggest fan. Clyde Harris was a physics nerd who worked on heat-seeking missile systems. Don, a liberal, would often argue with his dad and try to guess at his various projects, which were classified. His dad would often cave, and they would argue about the ethics of it all.

“It was all in good fun,” says Don.

After his dad died, Don traveled to Nepal with his wife. They went to Lumbini, the windswept birthplace of the Buddha. Don attributes his interest in Buddhism to his grandmother Clare, who he said was one of the first in southern California to embrace it.

Don takes a breath that I can hear over the phone. He explains to me that he saw something very strange on that trip. Something weird.

“There was a dog,” he says. “Only I looked into his face and I saw my dad. I can’t explain it. But I saw it. My dad told me something then, just by looking at me. I had a big change after that.”

Donald Lynn Harris is the grandson of Clare Winger Harris and lives in a house in the California woods. When he was younger, he was into drag racing. He joined the Back to the Land movement, bought land, and set up probably the first solar panels in the county. He started small-scale hydro systems to encourage renewable energy resources. He set up similar systems in Nicaragua, where he met Benjamin Linder, the American engineer who was murdered by the Contras in 1987. Infuriated, Don became vocal and political, drawing the attention of the government. Years later, he would end up, for a moment, on a long list of suspects in the Unabomber case. Don laughs when he tells me this. He is still very political but gives me the advice to choose my battles. But, he says, thinking aloud “the older I get, my belief system means more to me than my own aging body.”

Don must radiate out from his remote home to get a good wireless signal. I picture him under an open sky, his voice beaming through the ether like the radio waves in his grandmother’s stories. He wouldn’t have it any other way, living along the outer rim of society, even though it’s getting a little harder to chop his own wood.

Don has no children. His wife of 42 years recently passed away. When I offer my condolences, he tells me it’s okay.

“We believe in other dimensions,” he says, using the present tense. “So, keep an open mind,” he tells me, cheerily and full of wonder.

“We believe in that stuff.”

__________________________________

From The Artificial Man and Other Stories by Clare Winger Harris. Used with the permission of Belt Publishing. Introduction copyright © 2019 by Brad Ricca.

There are times when I’m struck by how extraordinary writing, text, and the human capacity for literature are; how of all the organically evolved orders language is the most remarkable. For example, this occurs when I read about the production of Ruben Östlund’s most recent film The Square. The actor Claes Bang says: “There was this one scene that needed at least one hundred takes. At take 95, Ruben pulled me over, pointed at his monitor and said: ‘Look! Enough of this awful TV-acting, get it together!’ It was like a kick to the head” (Svenska Dagbladet, May 22, 2017).

As an author, I too rework most passages 100 times, and with the 95th comes the worry that the text will never be rid of its club foot. The wonderful thing is that here, nobody will be degraded or receive a tongue lashing. And when I make cuts to the text and eliminate whole characters or arguments, no one is disappointed to have ended up on the cutting room floor and there’s no producer raging about having spent money on unnecessary labor. Only the author has been engaged, whereas the poor film director has from the very start relied on countless workers’ abilities and in this way is subjected to their shortcomings.

It’s always others who will realize the director’s inner vision. The author only engages help once the work is done. For these reasons writing is not despotic, and it’s hardly heroic. The conditions of production are grueling but not complicated. Whereas filming must take place with actual bodies and objects in the troublesome material world, the author only works with representations and language. This is a grace.

And all of this has to do with the essence of language and writing. Language is abstract, film concrete and material. The text can say human, whereas the film can never show human, it has to be a particular human with certain qualities. Text is furthermore the only medium that can say would have had or not, no one, nothing.

In the physical world, negations and the conditional mood do not exist. They belong to a meta level, to thinking about the world and its depiction in language. These intrinsic abilities of people and language have made text the prime medium of the intellect, and set it in harmony with the distinctiveness of humankind. To be human means being able to abstract, conceptualize, and interpret.

Plato’s Socrates is skeptical of writing, the set text, because it is mute and does not respond when addressed. To him it seems as undialectical as empirical measured data. “[W]riting shares a strange feature with painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if they were alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they are solemnly silent . . . if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it gives just the same message over and over . . . And when it is faulted or attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone it cannot defend itself or come to its own support” (Ed. Cooper, John M., Plato: Complete Works, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1977, p 552e).

But this isn’t a problem of writing so much as of language. What is essential for the creature of language is, thus, to keep alive its power of dialectical thinking, to carefully ward its knowledge of the material world’s relationship to language and thought. You could also call this intellectual integrity.

With his method of investigation and argumentation, Plato and his teacher Socrates compensate for language’s built-in muteness, what ensures that there is always a risk of statements decaying into rhetoric, empty ornamentation. And in the same way, the reading and dialectically interpreting reason acts as compensation in the encounter with mute writing, that which cannot alone “defend itself or come to its own support.”

Most essential to text-based work is the insight that language can never be material. Speech does not create the world. Humans know this, but robots do not. If there’s anything lacking in the artificially intelligent robots I have encountered, it is precisely this dialectical capacity; their access to meta levels is dismal, which makes it difficult for them to understand context as well as wordplay. That’s why they so often seem half-witted even though they’re aces at chess and can enumerate all the decimals in pi.

Robots don’t really have language even though they can speak; they have data but not understanding. Presumably, one of their problems is that those who program them consider Plato’s dialectical philosophy to be obsolete, wrong, and metaphysical. The robot is raised to be a positivist.

But if the goal is for them to understand us people in order to perform tasks for us they must be programmed to have their own emotional life and the insight that the ability to abstract is a human commodity. For the robot, language seems to be a fixed material, whereas for the dialectical human it describes and it makes the material comprehendible. As long as robots haven’t deeply understood the difference, they will continue to be subpar servants, and terrible masters.

–Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of power, featuring work by Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, Eula Biss, Aleksandar Hemon and Aminatta Forna, among others, is available now.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Kerri Arsenault offers an appreciation of nonfiction finalist Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River (Riverhead Books).

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Francisco Cantú’s account of his work as a US Border Patrol agent is Lodestar in our understanding of who crosses the border and who guards it, an issue of political and human significance as we watch the US President try to implement a zero-tolerance immigration policy on our southern border. Cantú negotiates his own crossings as well: as an international relations major who descends into the world of armed law enforcement; as the grandson of Mexican immigrants living in the US; as a compassionate man who looks into the eyes of men and women he processes for deportation.

Working at the border was the only way Cantú thought he would really understand the situation, that books, ironically, don’t seem to really show the full situation there. What he finds that largely very ordinary people straggle across the line in the sand, so to speak, tired, hungry, frazzled, or even dead. While the journeys are harsh enough, Cantú watches as agents piss on the food left behind by hiding migrants, acting like dogs marking their territory. He witnesses acts of cruelty that are difficult to comprehend, never mind watch, and the repeated transactions of these violences lead to their normalization. Moreover, Cantú finds the act of watching its own sort of violence. Who’s in or who’s out depends on who has the panopticon’s view.

This work may determine for future generations what building a wall does to magnify the heartache of plight and flight, of people moving between nation and nationality, of people disenfranchised and unmoored, defined by their landscape and the arbitrary lines of a map, without the agency to define it themselves.

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Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine and is a Contributing Editor at Lithub. Her book-length essay, What Remains (St. Martin’s) will be published in 2020.