Since my daughter was born (four months ago, at the time of writing this) I’ve been thinking about rooms. The ones we enter in the early days of motherhood, the ones we exit, the ones that envelop us, welcome us, and the ones that keep us away. Virginia Woolf was right, a woman needs money and a room of her own, and a writer certainly needs somewhere to write. I wasn’t fully aware of what Woolf’s words meant until I had lost my room, both the space I needed to keep my mind at ease and a place to write. You see, since my daughter was born I can only write in sentences that read like first lines in a novel. I don’t feel like a writer anymore. I am myself and I am also not close to recognizing who I am anymore.

She clings to me as I write this with one hand.

She drinks from the nipple as I try to make out a full sentence in my head.

She is vocal about her wants and needs.

I have to abide and leave the page.

I think back on the delivery room at the hospital and remember how foreign the setting was: the absence of warmth in the lights, the furniture in the room functional and nothing more, the air tight. Each person entering the room gave me a name and I forgot it immediately. I do remember how well they did the job they came to do.

From the recovery room, I can recollect the light coming in from the windows, the laminated pages with bulleted advice stuck to the wall at the foot of my bed, and the blackness of the TV screen I never turned on. Two days spent with the doors always open and my chest always bare. With mind and body torn, I gave in fully to my new environment.

From the moment my daughter was born she slept by my side, in the hospital and in our bedroom. As she was testing her lungs, she made the faintest sounds that kept me from sleeping. The baby often startled herself as if she was surprised by her own existence outside of the space—within me—she’d occupied for so long.

I miss her deeply in the belly, and from the bottom of it. My midsection, now saggy yet still somehow bloated from compensating for her absence. Even here, there is an emptiness.

It didn’t take long for us to move the baby into the room my husband and I had intended for the nursery. Before her arrival it was my husband’s office and the place where I kept my clothes and shoes, perhaps also some art supplies. Before her arrival I wrote at our small dining table or in the café around the corner. I never thought I needed my own set of walls.

I started nursing into the late and very early hours of the night in her room. The noise machine constantly on like a forever ocean wind or a wave that never breaks. Time became elastic and staying awake in dim lights warped my mind. Morning came and turned into the day and folded into the early evening and there we were at the same place as the day before and none of the hours mattered yet all of the seconds were felt, each gnawing away and making dents at the back of my head.

Welcome to the Milk Bar—I’m open 24 hours, seven days a week.

Since I’m not a writer anymore, I’m also not much of a reader.

When I was pregnant, friends of mine—ambitious new mothers—told me they had finished Moby Dick or plowed through audio books from the many hours of nursing. Even in the early weeks of motherhood, while my baby and I were knee-deep in a kind of echo chamber of liquids, I tried to be a deep and romantic mom. I read poetry out loud while she was in a bottomless boobie trance. I felt none of the words but I did feel stupid.

Sometimes motherhood makes you feel like an idiot with sore nipples. What was the point in consuming art when I barely had any energy to enjoy it, let alone make any myself?

Like a tender rhythmic leech my daughter attached to me each night, and while she was gobbling away at the nipple, creature-like, I felt myself in a kind of gentle mourning, saying goodbye to the art I imagined I wouldn’t ever create.

Above us hung the picture I painted for her in the last weeks of my pregnancy. Looking over her changing pad a mobile dangled in the dark and still gave off some devious shadows. I sewed it together in the very first days of knowing she was something small but becoming. The baby was still oblivious to both.

One friend and mother told me that if you stop wanting things in the early days, it gets easier.

*

I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living on the subway, commuting to work. It’s a slim autobiography from the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist but it’s packed with descriptions of simple things in life that envelope larger themes of motherhood, womanhood, heartache, redemption, and writing (just to name a few). There’s a store-bought chicken that dies more than once, a speedy motorcycle, a revolver that’s really an electric screwdriver, bees appearing from the cold, sturdy succulents, and oranges split and shared with daughters. Levy elevates these ornaments and other details from life to such a degree that she’s convinced me that life is meaningful.

When she paints her walls orange, they hurt my eyes. When her necklace breaks, I see how each pearl escapes the confines of the string and where they skitter off to hide. Levy can make the purchase of an ice lolly bring you to tears, and it feels like a kind of magic; even the brief appearances of dull men with their unnamed women, rendered by Levy with deserved but delicate mockery, are enjoyable.

Few of the reviews do the book justice (or maybe it’s just that most of them give away her incredible tales: don’t tell me how the chicken dies the second time!). A couple of them mention the shed she rents from a friend in order to write but don’t spend too much time on its importance: this is the shed the autobiography is written in, the shed within which she will write other books.

As Levy mentions in the book, there are countless factors that have come together for her to write The Cost of Living, and just as many (if not more) for me to read it in these crowded, musty subway commutes. But of all of Levy’s marvelous details, the one I am most thankful for is the aforementioned shed: I cling to the freedoms it has given her. I take great comfort in imagining her sitting there alone with her thoughts and books and old journals, a blanket of freedom across her shoulders keeping her warm into the evening.

As I came to understand the importance of the shed to Levy and realized The Cost of Living was a direct result of the freedom and time she found within its walls, I hate to confess but I became jealous. My days now are filled with baby and daycare obligations, pumping, and, of course, my job, all in a seemingly neverending cycle. My evenings are consumed by more baby duties and keeping the milk bar open at all times. Blink twice and the weekend is over, with laundry still drying on the rack, a thousand miniature pieces of clothing in need of folding, like tiny envelopes addressed to no one. Sometimes my husband and I find moments where we inhale into a kiss and exhale into each other’s arms. Time spills away, like water.

Perhaps I didn’t quite “consider the facts” that Woolf laid out, about the years of dedication a mother gives to her child, and all those opportunities lost to make (potentially) great art. But those facts seem pointless to me now (and were, in some way, even before the arrival of my daughter). I have always wanted her. What I’m thankful to have realized with Levy’s book is that the great art can come later. I can work towards my room. Earn my money, get my shed.

I can’t quite convey the many thoughts you have when nursing in the dark, into the late hours of the night—that is partly the work I want to do—but I can say now that I have visited the most horrific places, met some vile creatures, stumbled upon love and light, structured plot and wondered about what will happen to this character or that. I’ve set the scenes for a story or two that I’d like to tell. For now, I play it on loop as my child draws nourishment from me.

At four months, she smiles a toothless grin and it really is something to see a part of yourself smile back at you. One day I’ll be able to describe it.

Date: January 9, 2019
Time: 2:10-5:00 pm
Location: Café de la Mairie
Weather: Cold and gray

I’m in Paris for a week, and I have been sitting in a lot of cafes. Yesterday I sat in cafés for six hours, just watching people. This is one of my favorite things to do, if it is a thing to do, and you can’t do it in the small North Carolina city where I live.

Today I’m sitting in another café. The Café de la Mairie. If you are facing the Église Saint-Sulpice, the Café is to the left. It has a red awning.

I choose a table at the front of the café, by the door, so I have a good vantage point on the Place Saint-Sulpice. The door keeps opening and closing, but I’m behind it, so I’m out of the draft. There are silver ashtrays on the café tables.

Outside, there are tables and chairs lined up, but no one is sitting at them. Inside, the café is crowded, and I can hear men talking at the bar behind me, standing up and drinking their drinks. I keep my coat on for a little while, and then I decide to take it off and hang it on the back of my chair. I order a glass of white wine and a croque madame and water.

I have brought Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, or Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, and I pull it out of my purse and put it on the table. The book is short. He wrote it over three days in 1974: October 18, 19, and 20. And he wrote the majority of it in this café.

Perec was interested in the everyday, in the things that escape our notice but are nonetheless important, even essential, parts of our lives. He called this the “infraordinary.” An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is about the kinds of ordinary occurrences that make up the experience of sitting in a café. Much of the book reads like a list. It is a kind of inventory: an attempt to catalogue, to exhaust, a place.

In Marc Lowenthal’s translation, Perec writes at the beginning that, “There are many things in place Satin-Sulpice…” and that,

A great number, if not the majority, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered. My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.

He was at the café on October 18 and 20, but not on October 19. At the beginning of each of the four sections that he wrote here, he notes the date and time:

Section 2 – 18 octobre 1974; 12 h 40
Section 4 – 18 octobre 1974; 17 h 10 (he is seated “a little toward the back in relation to the terrace”)
Section 8 – 20 octobre 1974; 11 h 30 (he notes that it is dimanche)
Section 9 – 20 octobre 1974; 13 h 05

He sat and watched.

There were pigeons on the plaza. The church bells rang. Cars and buses and people passed. He noted these things, these “tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy,” as he wrote on the first day. He noted the weather in each section. (Day 1 is “Dry cold. Gray sky. Some sunny spells”; Day 2 is “Fine rain, drizzle”; and Day 3 is “Rain. Wet ground. Passing sunny spells.”) He noted delivery men, dogs, colors, babies, a man eating cake, a girl carrying a tennis racket, tourists taking pictures of the fountain, an undertaker’s van, taxis, traffic jams, and lettuce sticking out of shopping bags. He noted the passage of time. His own fatigue. Pauses. A man carrying a plank. A man carrying a crate. The book ends with, “Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o’clock.”

Now the plaza is different, of course, but it’s also the same, still home to the same daily activities. From where I’m sitting, I can see a women’s clothing store (with a purple sign Seraphine), Vangelder Joaillier (with an orange awning), a Saint Laurent store, and a store with some sort of rabbit design in the window (appliqué on the windows).

To the side of the church, not far from the café, there are several Christmas trees with red and white bows on them, shaken by the wind. People walk around the trees. There are still lots of Christmas trees in the city. I have seen them over the last few days.

I drink my wine. I eat my croque madame. I look at the paper coaster under my wine glass and try to remember to take it with me when I leave, as a souvenir.

It begins to rain, and people huddle under the café’s awning. It also rains on Day 3 in the book (in section 8), so I turn to that moment. The third line reads, “The rain starts falling again.”

I watch.

A man walks by with his dog.

A woman walks by with an umbrella.

A car drives by.

A bus drives by. (Perec noted all the bus numbers and sometimes if they were empty or full or half-full.)

A woman walks by with a newspaper held over her head.

A woman walks by with a scarf tied around her head.

People wait at the bus stop.

Another car drives by.

He wrote section 6 on a bench in the sun (“La date: 19 octobre 1974 / L’heure: 12 h 30”). There are benches on the plaza, but I don’t know if one of them was his bench. Probably not. These are probably different benches today. Two bikes are locked to a green bench by a tree.

I drink my wine. I eat my croque madame. My croque is getting cold. The man at the table next to me asks, “Not hungry?” in French, and I say in French that I don’t know if I am because of le décalage horaire—jet-lag—and he smiles and turns back to his newspaper. Perec wanted to read Le Monde on October 18, but he didn’t find a copy.

I watch.

Several people cross the plaza with umbrellas.

A woman walks by with a shopping bag.

A man walks by with a shopping bag

Another man walks by with a shopping bag (the sales are on).

A man walks by with a rolling shopping cart (plaid).

A woman walks by, pushing a stroller.

A bus drives by.

A man walks by in a hooded coat.

Perec wrote section 3 at another café: Fontaine Saint-Sulpice (“La date: 18 octobre 1974 / L’heure: 15 h 20”). Here, he ate sausages and drank a glass of Bourgueil. It was cold and gray that day, as it is today. And he wrote sections 1, 5, and 7 at the Tabac Saint-Sulpice:

Section 1 – 18 octobre 1974; 10 h 30
Section 5 – 19 octobre 1974; 10 h 45 (he notes that it is samedi)
Section 7 – 19 octobre 1974; 14 heures (Paul Virilio walks by in this section, on his way to see “Gatsby le dégueulasse au Bonaparte”)

Now the Fontaine Saint-Sulpice and the Tabac Saint-Sulpice are both gone. The Café de la Mairie is the only place left.

I eat my croque madame. (I have eaten half.) I drink my wine. I watch.

A man walks by in a motorcycle helmet.

A woman walks by, talking on her phone.

A bus drives by.

A car drives by.

A woman walks by, smoking a cigarette.

A woman walks by, pushing a bike.

A man walks by with a cane.

A car drives by.

Another woman walks by, talking on her phone.

These are all ordinary things in a city I love. But what I am trying to do—to do what Perec did, to see as he saw—is a wonderful exercise in futility because I could never see Paris as he did. Not now. Its ordinary goings-on are not ordinary to me. They are extraordinary, each one infused with wonder because I’m an outsider, and in a few days, I will be back home. I have always wanted to live in Paris, and maybe one day I will, and then the buses and cars and people and pigeons will be ordinary, as they were to Perec.

And for now, this futility, or failure, is okay because I still have the pleasure of watching, of tallying up the things that make up daily life, of recording the movements of strangers, of cataloguing the city. This is only appreciated by those who love to watch.

I stay until it stops raining, and then I pay my bill and leave. I forget to take the paper coaster.

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 Yahdon Israel offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Nell Irvin Painter’s Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint).

*

In 2014, I watched a documentary about Iris Apfel, the now 97-year-old interior designer who—because of her illustrious wardrobe and bold sense of style—had become a fashion icon. At the time of the documentary, Apfel was 93 years old. And though I expected the documentary to look at Apfel’s life through the lens of a retrospective, seeing her life as something that happened—in the past tense—the documentary subverted every expectation of mine by dealing with Apfel in the tense of the present. Almost immediately, I realized that I was not looking at a life that had happened; I was watching a life that was happening.

Iris was a revelation because, before watching it, it never occurred to me to think that far into the future. The documentary made me aware that there was a limit to my imagination of what life could be past a certain point. Pushing this point even further, it hadn’t even occurred to me to ever consider that there was a point. In this confrontation with the limits of my own imagination, I was brought face to face with my own mortality. By mortality I don’t mean “death.” On the contrary: I mean life. This revelation from Iris served as the prerequisite for this 28-year-old critic to understand and appreciate what Nell Painter is doing in Old In Art School: A Memoir for Starting Over.

Almost as a rule, a memoir’s trajectory is that of the coming-of-age story—that journey we follow the writer on from childhood to adulthood. And though that point of adulthood is defined largely by the writer’s own sense of becoming, the arrival point of adulthood is often treated like a final destination instead of what could be, and often is: a pit stop on an ever long journey. As one of the most celebrated historians in America, Nell Irvin Painter could’ve made the decision to write the memoir that was “expected of her.” The memoir that told the story of how and why she became one of this country’s most important scholars on American history; she could’ve made the decision to write about her life in the past tense, as if it were a eulogy. Instead, Painter opted for the possibility that there was something beyond what others might arbitrarily consider the “last stop.”

“With my energy and excellent health,” Painter writes in the book’s first chapter, “I routinely refute expectations of the older woman, just as over the years I have grown accustomed to soaring above what was expected of me—me as a black person, me as a woman, me as a person of my generation. Why wouldn’t I be able to go to art school at sixty-four?” Her answer: “The pursuit of pleasure,” she writes, “concentrating on what I could see gave me intense pleasure, and seeing what I could make with my own hand and according to my own eye was even more satisfying.”

More dynamic than her insistence on life in the present tense—many of the verbs she uses in the book are in the present—is her desire to pursue and her ability to imagine a joy and satisfaction in the future; because what is living but having something to look forward to? Though Painter does achieve her goal of becoming some estimation of what she considers to be An Artist, you come away with the sense that her best years are yet to come.

__________________________________

Yahdon Israel is a writer, professor, and creator of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books cool. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, Brooklyn Magazine, LitHub, and Poets and Writers. Yahdon is the Awards VP of the National Book Critics Circle and, the host of the Literaryswag Book Club, a monthly book club that’s free and open to public.

“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?” Rex Harrison, the actor who played Henry Higgins in the 1956 Broadway version of My Fair Lady joked to the show’s playwright, Alan Lerner. They were walking along Fifth Avenue, discussing their love lives while the play was still in rehearsals. More importantly, they’d also set out to discuss the trouble with Harrison’s character. His presence faded so much in the second act that Harrison became restless. Past love affairs with women had wrung Harrison and Lerner both dry. Higgins might feel the same way. Would making Higgins gay solve his star’s presence problem?

Higgins is certainly coded as a certain gay stereotype. He is a lifelong bachelor, an upper-class man of means, sophisticated and bored. He is a snob who lives with another man. He’s well-dressed, worldly, and knowledgeable about culture. He expresses a preference for men as well, but since this is the 50s, sexuality and the deed itself must always remain in the offing, forever the tension beneath the surface of the moment.

“I said that I did not think that was the solution and we walked on,” Lerner later wrote in his memoir, The Street Where I Live. “But it stuck in my mind.”

For many viewers, it is the sexual tension between Higgins and Eliza that creates the movie’s mystique. But for others, it’s the tension of ambiguity that draws us in.

By the time Lerner reached his hotel, he already had the idea that would become the song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” which Lerner calls “a perfect second act vehicle through which Higgins could release his rage against Eliza for leaving him.”

The anger is there. That’s true. But is it gay?

The lyrics to “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” (which is also sometimes called “A Hymn to Him”) riff on the title phrase. In the sequence, Higgins asks his companion Colonel Pickering, “Well, why can’t a woman be like you?” They have a back-and-forth, with Pickering touting his finer qualities in short quips. While this song has caused a bit of speculation about Higgins and Pickering—are they living together or are they living together?—what’s more obvious about the song is the overt misogyny it shows in Higgins’s character:

Why is thinking something women never do?
And why is logic never even tried?
Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside?

Despite an increasingly obvious amount of values dissonance between the musical’s era—the 1950s—and today’s consciousness of gender and sexuality in their myriad forms, it’s clear that the audience is not supposed to like Higgins’s character at this point. Even for the 50s, an era that has become the poster child for sexism, Higgins’s lines read as black-and-white, empty misogynist pomp. Lerner made it that way on purpose. Because while Higgins is cultivating a little good breeding in Eliza, she is charming him. Higgins never would have experienced such an emotional response to a woman’s actions if she wasn’t already burrowing into his heart.

Even in Pygmalion, the 1913 play by George Bernard Shaw, the emphasis is on the reversal, but it’s perhaps more a reversal of class than a commentary on gender roles. In Pygmalion, cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle seeks speech classes from Henry Higgins so she might someday work in a flower shop. It’s true that Eliza is poor, but her main problem is that she lacks class. So Higgins attempts to shape her speech as well as her etiquette.

The same basic premise remains in Lerner’s musical stage adaptation. Lerner stuck to his source material. But the two plays do diverge. Pygmalion deemphasizes love: Shaw was adamant that Eliza and Higgins aren’t supposed to end up together. Instead, he focuses on class and, surprisingly, the rights of women.

Pygmalion came out in 1913, five years before women in Shaw’s Britain won the right to vote. Unlike many men in his day, especially stuffy, old-guard academics like Higgins, Shaw believed in women’s suffrage. Instead of the romantic comedy that the story would morph into as My Fair Lady, Shaw intended his play as a challenge to Britain’s classist, sexist status quo.

Lerner’s My Fair Lady, however, brings the possibility of love between Higgins and Eliza back into focus. That possibility ramps up between the stage and the screen. On screen, Higgins and Eliza share no overt affection, and yet “tension between them is palpable from start to finish,” Dominic McHugh writes in Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. The possibility of things unseen was far more tantalizing for the mid-century American audience. This tension between the platonic and the perhaps is why McHugh believes My Fair Lady is so perennially compelling.

But if the stage play and the screen play are largely the same, where does that tension come from?

You may know her as the woman in the little black dress. Her name is Audrey Hepburn.

*

In 1962, the Hollywood studio system was on its last legs, and Warner Brothers was far from immune. They needed a box-office smash, and so they decided to go with a known commodity: My Fair Lady, which had garnered glowing praise from critics and six Tony Awards, including Best Musical in 1957. With George Cukor directing and Jack Warner himself producing, the studio was going all in on this one. Warner Brothers spent upwards of $17 million on filming. But still, they were being cautious.

At that time, Julie Andrews, who played Eliza on Broadway, was not yet nationally known. Audrey Hepburn, on the other hand, had quickly become America’s sweetheart after starring in Roman Holiday and breaking rules as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Since Cukor planned to use the Broadway script and score almost in their entirety, Lerner remained attached to the production. But when Cukor and Warner decided on Hepburn to play Eliza, this alienated Lerner, and his control of the screenplay began to slip.

Funny enough, Andrews may have been pretty thankful in hindsight they passed over her for the role; her iconic performance as Mary Poppins debuted the same year as My Fair Lady and earned Andrews her first Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, while Hepburn wasn’t even nominated.

For the other half of the Higgins-Eliza duo, Cukor and Warner waffled about casting. They briefly considered Cary Grant (too rough—and uninterested) and Peter O’Toole (too expensive) before settling again on Rex Harrison to reprise his stage role as Higgins. Yet still, Cukor and Warner had the gall to ask the veteran Harrison to do a screen test. Harrison refused and sent in pictures of himself instead. In these pictures, he happened to be naked, concealing himself with a magazine in one photo or a bottle of Chianti in another, according to Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Cukor, George Cukor: A Double Life.

“I don’t know why it was—perhaps because I was very thin at the time, and George may have been expecting to find me quite decrepit—but for whatever reason, those pictures appealed to him,” Harrison is quoted as saying in A Double Life. “The studios telephoned and said I had the part.”

That Cukor was gay seldom comes up in the discussion of casting, or really about the movie at all, perhaps because Cukor separated his private life from his public persona as much as he could. By the mid-40s, Cukor had come to be known as a “women’s director.” He worked with countless leading ladies: Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Katharine Hepburn, just to name a few. But the moniker was not a compliment. Masculinity carries privilege, and not just in the motion picture industry. Many floated “women’s director” like a homophobic epithet, implying that Cukor did not have the strength of personality to manage male leads. Even as he was helping to create some of the most iconic movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including A Star is Born, The Philadelphia Story, and Wizard of Oz, Cukor was starting to realize he had to be more cautious.

So Cukor cultivated a public persona to obscure his homosexual private life, which, especially in those days, could be seen as unsavory or even illegal. “Cukor could go to elegant houses in the afternoons and sip high tea with titled ladies—and he could live an active homosexual life behind closed doors—as long as those two worlds never intersected,” McGilligan writes in A Double Life. “If they did, there might be scandal, damage to his career, revelation, and humiliation.”

With Cukor as My Fair Lady’s director, it’s possible that a pulse of homosexuality beats at the story’s core. But even with a close viewing, it becomes clear that what homosexual subtext there is, if there is any, became vastly downplayed.

One glaring instance is the dilution of Colonel Pickering, Higgin’s charming friend and life partner.

“The whimsical Colonel Pickering is given so little focus as to become almost irrelevant,” McGilligan writes. “Revisionist directors of the musical have spotted the homosexual subcurrent between Pickering and Higgins; none of that for the homosexual director Cukor. Their relationship is flattened, much of the affection and comedy between them stepped on.”

Maybe Cukor was being overly cautious to protect himself. Or maybe he understood how little of a chance even the slimmest spark of homosexuality stood in the 1960s box office. Remember, Warner Brothers was playing it safe with My Fair Lady. They needed to make money, so they stuck with the old heteronormative standby.

*

The idea that happy endings must involve heterosexual love is an old concept. “All tragedies are finished by a death, / All comedies are ended by marriage;” Lord Byron writes in his 1824 poem, “Don Juan.” It’s a sentiment that has echoed through centuries of western literature, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to the campiest of modern rom-coms. (We all know Katherine Heigl gets married at the end of 27 Dresses just by looking at the movie poster.)

What complicates My Fair Lady even further is that it’s the end of a centuries’ old telephone game, the result of translations across time, place and dissonant values. So it’s no surprise that many audiences assume, despite so much ambiguity—despite almost no allusion to it in Pygmalion, the stage play or the screenplay of My Fair Lady—that Eliza and Higgins get together in the end: it’s what we’ve been trained to expect.

In Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, a sculptor believes he isn’t interested in women until Aphrodite brings his beautiful, perfect statue back to life. Petrarch, a poet and Renaissance scholar, took the tale one step further (or backward), using the statue as critique of idolatry and as a model woman. (No, really: “The statue is a literalisation of metaphors that describe the Petrarchan beloved as cold, stonyhearted and unresponsive, and as such, an exemplar of chastity,” Sarah Carter writes in Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature.) Shaw used the story of his cockney flower girl to critique British class structure and women’s lack of voting rights. Each of these instances mirrors the preoccupations of the times when they were written. They play on readers’ expectations, try to teach, try to persuade.

Lerner’s My Fair Lady, first and foremost, seeks to entertain. It still makes commentaries on gender, but the directors left an undercurrent of the sexual unknown to entice the audience. Cukor attempted to strip away anything in the movie that might hurt its sales. What he left was a movie that, while delightful, allows the audience to assume what it wants.

If the only kind of happy endings you know involve heterosexual love, that’s what you’ll probably see. Use the lesson of My Fair Lady and train yourself to look deeper: there is more than one kind of happy ending.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Charles Finch offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Adam Zagajewski’s Asymmetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

*

Adam Zagajewski had a long line of credit with me before I opened Asymmetry, his 2018 nominee for a National Book Critics Circle prize in poetry; but the book never had call to draw on it.

Zagajewski’s work has always seemed like an ember in a dying fire. He begins—not dissimilarly from Patrick Modiano—in the bewilderment of the wars in Europe, and wherever he is writing from, writes from them, giving last poignant life to historical traumas that are starting to fall out of human memory, to our cost.

The result is that his poems often seems to contain more than their author’s years of grief, displacement, and hope. Take these lines from Life Is Not A Dream:

We tried courage, since there was no exit.
We tried cunning, but it failed.
We tried patience and fell asleep….
We tried time; it was tasteless, like water…

And life went on, inevitable life,
so skeptical, so practiced,
coming back to us so insistently
that one day we felt the taste of ordinary failure,
of common tragedy upon our lips,
which was a kind of triumph

Inevitable life. It has turned Zagajewski 73, and readers make allowances for poets of that age.  But Asymmetry wants no clemency of us. It’s not a wispy twilight volume of poems—it’s as tough and alive and vulnerable as Zagajewski’s strongest poetry.

It does contain his usual trademarks, including his memorable lyric gift. It’s October, he writes, via the unsurpassable translator Clare Cavanaugh, and the golden trees obey the wind. It has lines that will make you laugh. (One of my favorite poetic laments: If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants.) It is obsessed with the subject nearest and most painful to his heart, still a child of Lvov—the grief that time must take everything.

But Asymmetry is also a gamble for the poet. More than any of his other books, it has a subtle internal organization, approaching and retreating, as in a minuet, its subject, which is the death of the poet’s mother. He comes at this impossible subject so slant—the very cover of the American edition is a horizontal picture of the two turned vertical—that it seems somehow to purify or authenticate the depth of his heartbreak, mostly invisible on first reading. He burst through his reticence just once or twice:

Only now, or so I think,
do I approach the proper tone,
only could I talk with my parents,
but I can’t hear their answers.

Every year there’s a murmur that Zagajewski might win the Nobel Prize. Canny bettors will be able to find him at, oh, 33/1 this year, I’d guess, maybe a bit lower.

To become a finalist for the NBCC award in poetry, though, is decidedly the opposite of a lifetime achievement award—this is a board that takes seriously its task of identifying and championing important new work.

It is to Zagajewski’s immense credit that he remains in both conversations. His gift in Asymmetry proves undimmed, and his sense of urgency fresh and heightened. We honor art, he writes, since we’d like to know what our life is. He doesn’t imagine that we will. And yet in his poems, at least, it seems vital that we try.

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Charles Finch, a board member of the NBCC, is a critic and a novelist who regularly writes for The New York Times and Slate. His newest book is The Vanishing Man.

I blame my first marriage on Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet married for gratitude and esteem, and these were exactly the feelings I had for my first husband. If they were good enough for Elizabeth, why wouldn’t they be good enough for me? But I wasn’t Elizabeth; I was much more like Emma, a far more flawed heroine. The romantic Emma would never have been satisfied with gratitude and esteem, and neither was I. To be fair, I know my husband felt the same way, although I don’t think he blamed Austen for his mistake.

For better or worse, my hasty marriage was simple to undo—at least with respect to its legal and social aspects. For my next chapter, I returned to graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in English literature and specializing in Austen and other novelists of her time. Had I been a more daring scholar, I might have realized that my youthful folly had posed some interesting questions: Why did I look to Austen and her characters for guidance about how to live my own life? And I’m not, by far, the only one to do this. Surely this trust couldn’t be separated from the great love I had for Austen. Why do so many people love Austen so intensely, and in such a personal way?

Austen certainly isn’t the only literary celebrity among Anglo-American authors whose work inspires interest in her life. Captivated by the dark drama of Wuthering Heights, we visit Haworth, home of the famous Brontë family; drawn into Emily Dickinson’s poetic vision, we tour the unassuming clapboard farmhouse where she slowly retreated to a life of solitude and poetry. Nor is Austen the only author who’s created realistic characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne said that Anthony Trollope’s novels were “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Indeed, readers tend to think of characters as real people when they read, especially when they read novels. One reason we read for the plot is that we want to find out what happens to people we’ve come to know and care about.

Nevertheless, Austen exerts a power above and beyond that of most other authors: She has a fandom rather than a following, readers whose devotion goes well beyond literary appreciation to infuse many aspects of their lives. “Janeites,” the term for Austen devotees, are more like Trekkies than Brontë enthusiasts; many are willing to dress in Regency fashion at the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society as easily as a Trekkie dons the Federation uniform at a Star Trek convention. Many, like myself, find guidance about how to live their lives in Austen’s work. But unlike Trekkies, who are more absorbed by the Star Trek world itself than by the writers who created it, Austen fans idolize the author as well as her works. Austen is our beloved wise cousin, our ally in the quest for the good life.

Alas, the puzzle of Austen’s influence didn’t dictate the path of my scholarly research. In fact, musings of this kind were actively discouraged by the intellectual climate in many English departments of the time. At the elite institution I attended, thinking about characters as real people was strictly taboo, the sign of naïveté and ignorance. Doctoral candidates were expected to be professional readers who realized that every “text” (we didn’t call them books or novels) consisted of words on a page and nothing more. We were being trained to decode, not to read. Many of us still harbored a “naïve” love of literature and authors, but this was our shameful secret, the madwoman who lived in hidden rooms in the attic.

It would take another 20 years and a late-flowering passion for psychology to prompt me to search for the reasons for Austen’s allure. At this point, I was reading book after book on psychology and neuroscience while also taking courses in the mind-brain sciences. I began to publish essays on the connections between literature, psychology, and the brain, and to teach on that subject as well. Thinking about Austen in the context of the mind and the brain, I was now able to find an answer to my question: So many of us love and trust Austen because she possessed extraordinary powers of empathy.

Empathy means seeing the world from a different perspective, walking a mile, or even a moment, in someone else’s shoes. It means actually experiencing, although in a weaker form, another person’s state of mind, while also maintaining your own perspective. So if a friend is panicking, becoming anxious yourself wouldn’t be true empathy but rather emotional contagion. Empathy means understanding your friend’s panic while at the same time realizing that the anxiety of the moment is hers, not yours.

Such perspective-taking involves thinking and feeling. Empathy’s cognitive aspect requires theory of mind (ToM)—also known as mentalizing, or a reflective capacity—which refers to the ability to infer other people’s beliefs and intentions from their behavior. This includes facial expression, body language, actions, and speech. If you see someone come into a room, look around, move papers and books, look under the desk, and then leave with a puzzled expression on his face, you’re likely to think that he was looking for something that he didn’t find.

Theory of mind also includes the ability to recognize feelings, but in a dispassionate, knowledge-based sense. If you see your boss frowning, you realize that he’s displeased about something and that this isn’t the time to ask for a raise. You don’t necessarily enter into his feelings; it’s enough to know what they are. Many sociopaths can often read other people’s feelings accurately, yet they possess zero empathy. Instead of empathizing with pain or sadness or even anger, they use their mentalizing powers to manipulate others.

Empathy is much better known for its emotional qualities. The first of these involves emotional resonance, feeling what someone else is feeling in an intuitive, subliminal mode. Empathy further involves knowing that you’re conscious of another’s feelings, that these are not your own. In everyday usage, the word empathy is used to include sympathy, which means responding in an emotionally appropriate manner—for instance, with compassion for suffering and delight at happiness. A more technical definition of empathy refers to taking another’s perspective and feeling what someone is feeling. True empathy includes both emotional resonance, the pure feeling part, and theory of mind, which includes your awareness that you’re grasping someone’s thoughts and emotions.

Of course, when I say that Jane Austen had empathy, I’m inferring the mental powers of the living, breathing woman who’s no longer with us from the evidence of the written record she left behind. But how else to explain Austen’s array of such differently minded and totally believable characters? For Austen to have created such a variety of convincing imaginary people, she must have been a profoundly astute mindreader of real people. And no one familiar with her work can doubt her compassion for the unfortunate, or her glad participation in the happiness of others. She knew loss and thwarted love in her own life, which enabled her to portray the sufferings of disappointed love. But she could also show the joy of love’s fulfillment. I can think of no other novel in which the happy ending is rendered so poignantly meaningful as it is in Persuasion. Yes, Austen must have possessed a high degree of empathy.

Yet it’s not an abstract appreciation of empathy that draws us to Austen, but the experience of empathy itself. Austen’s uncanny ability to convey what others think and feel allows two kinds of empathy to take place for the reader. The first is the empathy we experience for her characters. Countless people have shared the feelings of these fictional people: Elizabeth’s humiliation on reading Darcy’s reproachful letter, which shows how greatly she’s misinterpreted events (Pride and Prejudice); Marianne’s pain on being rejected by Willoughby, the man she loves with all her heart (Sense and Sensibility); Emma’s sudden realization that no one must marry Mr. Knightley but herself (Emma).

The second experience of empathy is even more crucial: Because Austen understands human nature so thoroughly, we have the sense that she empathizes with us, her readers. To put this in the apt phrase of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, when we read Austen, we have the feeling of “feeling felt,” of having our innermost feelings understood and resonated with. This is inherently gratifying because as a species, humans crave such understanding. We have a profound need for empathy, to know that we’re not alone with our joys and sorrows.

These two kinds of empathy, of recognizing and feeling recognized, are two sides of the same coin. Austen conveys her understanding of us, her readers, precisely by creating characters that we identify with. And we’re able to identify with Austen’s characters because they mirror our ways of thinking and feeling. In fact, mirroring is an important way that empathy and other forms of resonance are communicated. In person, this happens through facial expressions and body language that imitate, and through speech that restates, one person’s perception of another’s state of mind. You’re likely to convey empathy for a friend’s distress by mirroring her facial expression—a furrowed brow, for instance—and telling her that you’re sorry she’s so upset. You reflect her feelings verbally, with the word upset, and nonverbally, with a furrowed brow.

In telling your friend that you’re sorry she’s feeling bad, you also express sympathy. But this is almost unnecessary because mirroring behaviors do more than simply reflect content; they convey caring. This is because humans automatically perceive mirroring as positive and, in the case of distress, comforting. And the brain knows how to tell the difference between mirroring and simply reacting. So vital is mirroring to conveying understanding and support that counselors who specialize in crisis management and suicide prevention are trained to restate the feelings of the person at risk as a major strategy for alleviating distress; this is known as “reflective listening.”

And so, when we see ourselves reflected in Austen’s work through characters who resemble us and others we know, it’s like peering closely into a two-way mirror: We see Austen behind the glass, watching and understanding. She knows us, and we know that she knows us. We have the feeling of feeling felt.

Other features in addition to Austen’s wide-ranging portrayals of fictional people amplify our sense of empathy. Shared experience makes empathy more likely. If you’ve felt intense grief for the loss of a loved one, you’ll empathize more easily and completely with someone whose grief is of a similar kind. It’s also easier to feel empathy for people who are similar to us; the downside of this is how readily humans as a species fail to feel compassion for those who are of different races, cultures, and clans.

Austen’s subject matter is very much our own, and so contributes to our sense of a shared framework of feeling and experience. Austen famously claimed to work on “two inches of ivory” with “a fine brush,” creating a world that traces the intricacies of human interaction rather than the breadth of human endeavor. She concentrates on interpersonal relationships, an aspect of human life that’s universal. All of Austen’s heroines embark on a search for intimacy with a trustworthy person who can be both a lover and a friend; the allies and adversaries they encounter along the way include personalities of all kinds, rather than the monsters and warriors typical of the hero’s quest.

Such human universals explain why we can relate to literature of many different cultures. Literary critics argue that realism, the extent to which literature can feel true to life, consists of conventions that vary from culture to culture. Nevertheless, some aspects of being human are universal, and we tend to be able to accept the portrayal of such universals as true to life and meaningful, even when they’re set in times and places remote from our own. The literary scholar Patrick Hogan has found that love stories are told in cultures throughout the world, and that the same situations and emotions tend to appear within those stories no matter where or when they were written. We might find much about the Latin classic The Aeneid alien and even alienating, but we can still identify with Dido’s heartbreak when her lover, Aeneas, abandons her. Austen concentrates on this world of ubiquitous feelings and perceptions.

Not only does Austen tell stories of love and friendship of the sort shared by people everywhere, but these take cultural forms that are still easily recognizable to us, our vast advances in technology notwithstanding. We still live in families. We still interact with circles of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Marriage and other kinds of intimate partnership are very much a goal for many of us. Austen couldn’t completely anticipate our world, nor transcend many of the limitations of her day—she was insightful but not clairvoyant. And so she writes about universal topics with a limited cast of characters: heterosexual, Caucasian, upper- and middle-class families. Some find her off-putting because of this. But many readers are willing to forgive her for being of her age; they recognize her value, as demonstrated by the breadth and diversity of her global readership. I think her attitudes were progressive, given the limitations of her milieu and that her insights have value for all of us, even if they weren’t written with all of us in mind. But that’s a personal decision.

Austen’s style remains as accessible as her stories. She writes in pithy, crystal-clear sentences, creating novels that are paced quickly enough even for our impatient 21st-century sensibilities. In Austen, the heart of the matter, which is indeed the matter of the heart, is right there; we don’t have to penetrate layers of cultural and stylistic difference to get at it. Because Austen creates a world that has much common ground with our own, there’s a strong foundation for empathy.

Austen’s stories not only convey empathy through mirroring and identification, but they’re about empathy as well—who has it, who lacks it, and how some of her characters deepen their capacity for this important quality. Her novels get us to focus on the experience of empathy (neuroscientists would say they prime us to think about it) by showing its value repeatedly. So we find ourselves reflected in novels that are all about the value of being able to find yourself reflected in other minds and hearts. Yet we’re not fascinated by empathy because it’s brought to our attention, but rather we pay attention because empathy is essential to our well-being. And this is yet another reason we’re drawn to Austen—she understands this about us.

Perhaps it seems strange to characterize Austen’s novels as being about empathy. After all, Austen’s great subject is love: its different varieties, its frustrations, its nuances, and, above all, its satisfactions. And not just love between couples, but also between friends, parents and children, siblings. Austen certainly understood this most precious of human emotional resources.

But there’s no contradiction here. Austen’s novels show again and again that the most complete and satisfying relationships rely on perspective taking, understanding, and emotional resonance. Whatever its other features—gratitude, esteem, passion, nurturing—at its core, true love is empathy. Think about all of Austen’s happy couples and you’ll see that this is the case. Anne of Persuasion might be more intuitive and passionate than Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice, but sensitivity and understanding lead to happy endings for both of them.

In placing empathy front and center, Austen knew what she was doing. For Austen is no mere copyist of nature, but a deeply thoughtful novelist who explores the morality as well as the psychology of the social brain, those aspects of the mind-brain that imbue our relationships. This was brought home to me recently when I tried to read the novelist Georgette Heyer, a 20th-century writer who emulated Austen. Here were all the window dressings of Austen’s fiction, the Masterpiece Theatre costumes, plots, and themes, but hollowed out, not only of Austen’s distinctively brilliant style, but also of her philosophical and psychological depth. With apologies to all the Austen fans who cut their teeth on Heyer, I found her unreadable. In the humble guise of the novel of manners, a genre that focuses on social conduct, Austen’s works draw out the moral implications of being human: What do we owe one another ethically, and how do we go about fulfilling this obligation?

The simple answer: We owe one another the kinds of consideration and treatment that help all of us not only to satisfy our basic needs, but to achieve well-being and self-esteem. And this depends on empathy, the key to understanding another person’s needs. And so Emma caters to her needy, hypochondriacal, and often ridiculous father in Emma. So Edmund becomes young Fanny’s friend and advocate in Mansfield Park. So Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice tolerates the more absurd members of her family with calm consideration. In that last family, we might note that it’s with regard to this fundamental ethical obligation that Mr. Bennet fails so completely. Rather than helping his foolish wife to develop whatever potential she might have, he retreats to sarcasm to console himself for having to endure her company. As a result, she remains as silly as ever, learning only to ignore a husband she can’t understand and who doesn’t empathize with her.

When Austen’s characters demonstrate kindness and tolerance, it’s because they’re able to imagine and sympathize with life from the point of view others. Emma indulges her father’s many absurdities because she can see that his worries are real to him. Edmund imagines what it’s like to be young, lonely, and intimidated in a new place, and so he’s kind to Fanny. Elizabeth knows that she might not be able to change her mother, but that failing to show her respect would be hurtful and accomplish nothing. Austen’s best heroine, Anne Elliot of Persuasion, owes her goodness and capability to her capacity for empathy. She can see from others’ perspectives, and this guides her feelings and behavior. As Wentworth, the man she loves, eventually realizes, there is “no one so proper, so capable, as Anne.”

For Austen, empathy is the core quality of all moral action. Here, Austen agrees with the philosopher David Hume, a near contemporary. In our own day, similar conclusions have been advanced by Simon Baron-Cohen, a neuroscientist who equates evil with a lack of empathy, and Frans de Waal, a philosopher and primatologist who views our capacity for moral action as grounded in empathy, which we find in less developed forms in other primates.

Above and beyond the kindness and understanding that empathy creates, it’s valuable because it unlocks the prison house of cosmic loneliness that threatens each of us with a life sentence of solitary confinement. Anglo-European politics, philosophy, and psychology have emphasized our separateness, condemned us without a trial, insisting that we’re stuck in a container, the body, looking out through windows, the eyes. We’re born alone and we die alone, even if other people are near us for these two defining events in the life cycle of every human.

But the latest work in social intelligence tells us that we’re profoundly interconnected in terms of brain, body, and mind. This has been a key insight of the literary imagination all along, that fund of wisdom and observation found in literature. In terms of understanding our connections with one another, no author is greater than Austen. And she shows that such connections depend on empathy, on being able to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. Through such exchanges, people find meaning and purpose in their lives.

*

Explaining Austen’s appeal in terms of empathy made sense to me, but as with all literary theories, and many scientific ones as well, if truth be told, supporting my hunch was another matter. While I realized I could never definitively prove my claims, I began to wonder if I could nevertheless offer convincing evidence. My take on the intense devotion Austen inspires hinges on the observation that Austen “gets us,” that she understands us and captures our attention, because she gets us right, creating fictional people whom real people find extraordinarily true to life.

As I became progressively more interested in the mind and the brain, I began to realize that I could make a case for Austen’s accuracy in portraying human nature by drawing on various findings in the mind-brain sciences, fields that include psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. I could show that Austen’s characters are true to what we know about social intelligence and the social mindbrain to support the claim that Austen’s appeal lies in her powers of empathy.

And if these scientific fields could be applied in support of a literary theory, that Austen’s empathy is conveyed by her ability to portray people realistically, then literature could also be drafted in the service of science. Austen’s accuracy in representing feelings and relationships makes her work ideal for discussing social intelligence, that aspect of being human that most concerned Austen herself: how people relate to one another. Austen’s characters provide imaginary case histories that illustrate the workings of the social mind-brain. These two stories, one about social intelligence and the other about Austen’s fiction, define one another in yin-and-yang fashion.

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Excerpted from Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen by Wendy Jones. Published by Pegasus Books. (c) Wendy Jones. Reprinted with permission.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Katherine A. Powers offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Tara Westover’s Educated (Random House). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

*

Tara Westover’s Educated is a fast-paced, unsparing account of being brought up in the 1990s and the early 21st century in rural Idaho as the youngest of seven children of survivalist Mormons. Her father, “a charismatic gale of a man” with a penchant for prophecy, was haunted by the Federal government’s lethal siege at Ruby Ridge and he believed that the End of Days was nigh, ushered in by the Y2K bug. Young Tara had no birth certificate, no vaccinations, and little access to the world outside her family. She was “home schooled”—though only in a rudimentary way—and the main lesson taught in this household was the “art of shutting up.”

Westover and her siblings toiled in their father’s scrap yard where they were hideously injured—smashed, gashed, impaled, burned, and concussed. Hospitals were ruled out as government traps, leaving Westover’s mother—a healer, herbalist, and midwife—to treat their wounds. Her brothers, “a pack of wolves,” were violent and reckless. Car wrecks were frequent. Still, young Tara was drawn to learning, entertaining a vague and, she assumed, futile hope of attending college. Against all odds, she managed to study, a modern-day Jude the Obscure. She did well enough in the college-entrance exam to gain entrance to Brigham Young University where she was immediately confronted by the depth of her ignorance. She had never heard of the Holocaust, Napoleon, Martin Luther King or the Civil Rights Movement. She believed Europe was a country.

What follows is an adventure in mind expansion: a viscerally exciting race through book after book, the liberating attention of a few understanding teachers, and eventually a degree followed by a fellowship at Harvard and a doctorate in history from Cambridge University. Along the way Westover gets across the beauty of the Utah countryside, her homesickness for it, and her continuing love for her family—even though some members no longer speak to her. 

Westover has shaped the book in episodes, each as engrossing as a short story, and each told with an urgency and immediacy that comes from personal experience. She notes that her memories of certain events are disputed by other family members, and in this way, this is also a book about memory. The number of memoirs of brutal childhoods are legion, but Educated, in the austerity and candor of its writing, its story-telling muscle, and lack of self-pity, is a true standout and deservedly the best seller it became.

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Katherine A. Powers is a member of the NBCC Board, past winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Novel of Family Life: the Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942 – 1963.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Michael Schaub offers an appreciation of fiction finalist Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Scribner). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

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Literary fiction has long had an obsession with desperate characters who find themselves in impossible situations. There’s no better example of that kind of character than Romy Hall, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room.

Kushner’s novel opens in a bus transporting prisoners from one California correctional facility to another. Among the passengers is Romy, who has been sentenced to life in prison for killing her sadistic stalker; the court didn’t believe her claim that the slaying
was in self-defense.

The Mars Room follows Romy’s life in prison as well as the time before her conviction. She grew up in San Francisco as a troubled young woman with an affinity for drugs; before her stalker ruined her life, she worked as a lap dancer to afford food and shelter for her beloved young son.

In prison, she endures horrific treatment at the hands of guards, and makes a host of unlikely friends, including an idealistic young teacher who provides her with reading material. The novel ends with a horrifying scene that highlights Romy’s pure desperation.

Kushner is an immensely talented author, and her considerable gifts are on full display in The Mars Room. Her prose is spare and straightforward but elegant, and it’s a perfect match for the dark subject matter. Her depictions of prison life, based on ample research, are chilling but never exploitative, and she forces the reader to reckon with the cruel realities of the American prison system.

All of the characters in The Mars Room are perfectly rendered, particularly Romy, who readers are unlikely to ever forget. She’s a wonderfully real character, broken but stubborn, loving but flawed. Kushner does a brilliant job bringing her alive without ever resorting to pathos or pity.

The Mars Room is an unforgettable novel that challenges the reader not to look away from those that our society has failed. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of American fiction.

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Michael Schaub is a regular contributor to NPR and the Los Angeles Times. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Guardian, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Odes are songs of praise, to a person or an event or an object—a wedding poem, or epithalmium, is a kind of ode, as are a lot of nature poems. Often, an ode can be a way to meditate on what makes the subject worth praising, so the topic can be less direct than the title implies. For example, the way I read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the real subject of praise is how we lose ourselves (briefly, fleetingly) when encountering something truly beautiful. You could say the nightingale is a vehicle for the poet’s praise of that feeling of losing oneself.

The great 20th-century Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a series of odes in the early 1950s that are some of his most plain-spoken and accessible poems. If you’ve had trouble getting past the lush surrealism of Neruda’s love sonnets or the more epic scope of his Canto General, the odes are a great place to start. Partly motivated by a political desire to speak to (and on behalf of) common people, Neruda wrote odes to mundane things like “Ode to My Socks,” “Ode to Broken Things,” and “Ode to the Tomato,” praising their usefulness and lack of pretention but also elevating their commonness by focusing his lyrical attention on them. The poems are also full of whimsy and joy and often a bit of nostalgia. He expresses regret that we have to “assassinate” the tomato to enjoy its freshness, and wonders at how his clothes “make me what I am” and vice versa. A teacher of mine once remarked that Neruda wanted to eat the world, and there’s something boldly loving in these poems that is only matched in my reading experience by Walt Whitman.

I mention Neruda because he’s clearly one of the presiding spirits for Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, the book from which this poem is drawn, and which contains a number of odes and praise-songs. The impulse to praise the simple and straightforward, even perhaps a socio-political desire to elevate the mundane by focusing poetic attention on it, is similar in both poets. But there are also some interesting points of departure. For one thing, Gay’s odes are mostly about actions rather than things. Neruda’s tomato, clothes, and yellow bird become Gay’s “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes,” “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” and here, drinking water with his hands. I want to explore this difference, but first here’s the poem:

Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands

which today, in the garden,
I’d forgotten
I’d known and more
forgotten
I’d learned and was taught this
by my grandfather
who, in the midst of arranging
and watering
the small bouquets
on mostly the freshest graves
saw my thirst
and cranked the rusty red pump
bringing forth
from what sounded like the gravelly throat
of an animal
a frigid torrent
and with his hands made a lagoon
from which he drank
and then I drank
before he cranked again
making of my hands, now,
a fountain in which I can see
the silty bottom
drifting while I drink
and drink and
my grandfather waters the flowers
on the graves
among which are his
and his wife’s
unfinished and patient, glistening
after he rinses the bird shit
from his wife’s
and the pump exhales
and I drink
to the bottom of my fountain
and join him
in his work.
— from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

If you’ve perused any of Neruda’s odes, you can see right away that the form here is a direct imitation/homage—the short lines, the straightforward language. The form forces us to slow down, but not in a way that feels pretentious. To me it reads more like the deliberate, present-tense wandering of the imagination as it connects back to memory. The act of drinking from his hands, which the speaker does “today, in the garden,” reminds him of his childhood when he first learned this skill from his grandfather.

A little side note about those first few lines: he’s telling us he’s forgotten these things (drinking from his hands, being taught how) as a way of telling us that he’s now remembered them. Just a neat little reversal as we go along, especially because it’s not only the skill that he’s now remembering.

So back to the question of actions versus things. In this poem, and in the other odes I’ve seen by Gay, the action being praised isn’t significant in and of itself. This is in contrast to Neruda, who seems to want to elevate the subjects of his attention, in part just by virtue of his attention. This is a little unfair to Neruda, but I get a vision when reading his odes of all the little items of the world—marbles, pieces of string, dead mice—waiting outside his study hoping for him to bestow his poetic attention upon them. And that he would make time for them all if he could. Neruda’s vision (like Whitman’s) is all-embracing, and a little self-important.

Gay’s odes, on the other hand, don’t presume any kind of universalism. When he praises “drinking water with my hands,” there’s no presumption that this activity is as meaningful for everyone else as it is for him. (Notice how all of the titles of the Ross Gay odes I mentioned above include the word “my.” They are intended, without apology, to be specific to his own experience.) Drinking water with his hands today, in his own garden, reminds the speaker of his own grandfather watering graves—“mostly the freshest,” but also his own—and it’s that reminder that makes the action worthy of praise. The action calls forth a whole host of feelings of grief and love, not to mention the sensual memories that get brought up with it—the sound of water coming up the pipe “like the gravelly throat / of an animal,” or the “lagoon” that appears in his grandfather’s hands. I love that word “lagoon,” how it evokes the massive size (in the speaker’s childhood memory) of his grandfather’s hands. These memories and feelings are what’s really being praised.

Weirdly, by focusing on an activity that is meaningful in his individual way, Gay’s efforts feel welcoming, open to participation by us as readers. Instead of a line of little items waiting for Neruda’s attention, I get an invitation: “This is how drinking water from my hands is meaningful for me; what simple actions are meaningful in this way for you?” I don’t personally have any strong memories connected to drinking water out of my hands, but reading this poem I’m reminded of cracking my knuckles with my own grandfather, holding up my hand to his to measure its size, and am tempted to write my own “Ode to Cracking My Knuckles,” to participate in a dialogue with Ross Gay. So the poem evokes not just his own memories, but summons similar ones in a total stranger—no small feat for a praise song. What might your memory be?

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Excerpted from How A Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry by Adam Sol. © 2019 by Adam Sol. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd. “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands” from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, by Ross Gay, © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

In March of 1832, Honoré de Balzac received a letter at his Paris address. The postmark read Odessa—then a far distant city in the Ukraine—but there was no return address.

He opened it, of course, and inside was a critique of his most recent novel, La Peau de chagrin. The letter itself has been lost to time, “which is all the more unfortunate,” writes Balzac biographer Graham Robb, “since it is easily the most important letter Balzac ever received.” But from Balzac’s eventual reply, it can be deduced that the letter derided the “cynicism and atheism” of his latest novel, and its treatment of women, who “were portrayed as evil monsters.” The letter “urged him to return to the more elevated ideas of Scènes de la Vie Privée with their angelic victims.”

The letter was signed simply “L’Étrangère” (“The Stranger” or possibly “The Foreigner”).

Moved, intrigued, and impressed—and as Robb points out, very sensitive about any charges of irreligiosity—Balzac took out a classified  ad in a newspaper, the Gazette de France, hoping it might reach his anonymous critic. The April 4th issue that year ran his cryptic message:

M. de B. has received the letter that was sent to him on 28 February. He regrets that the means of replying has been withheld, and though his wishes are not of a nature that permits them to be published here, he hopes that at least his silence will be understood.

It’s not clear whether the letter writer ever saw this message, but she would write to Balzac again. Her name was Ewelina (Eveline) Hańska, a Polish countess married to a much older man, and a fan of the writer’s works. She came from a family of literary appreciation—her sister Karolina was Pushkin’s mistress, after all—and she was a major fan of Balzac’s. She was a particular fan of his portrayal of women—until La Peau de chagrin, that is. But being an educated noblewoman, she decided that she could do something about it, and so she became The Stranger.

The Stranger wrote to Balzac again in May, and multiple times that year; Madame Hańska arranged for a private courier so that they could write to one another directly, but Balzac was also obliged to provide lettres ostensibles, “dummy letters” that could make it seem as though she were corresponding with a family friend. Very early in the correspondence, Balzac was smitten. He began to fantasize about this mysterious princess. He wrote that he was “galloping through space and flying to that unknown land in which you, a stranger, live, the only member of your race. . .

I have imagined you as one of the invariably unhappy remnants of a people who were broken up and dispersed throughout this earth, perhaps exiled from heaven, but each with a language and feelings peculiar to that race and unlike those of other men.

She wrote back in similar terms:

Your soul embraces centuries, Monsieur; its philosophical concepts appear to be the fruit of long study matured by time; yet I am told that you are still young. I would like to know you, but feel that I have no need to do so. I know you through my own spiritual instinct; I picture you in my own way and feel that were I to set eyes upon you I should exclaim, ‘That is he!’ Your outward semblance probably does not reveal your brilliant imagination; you have to be moved, the sacred fire of genius has to be lit, if you are to show yourself as you really are, and you are what I feel you to be—a man superior in his knowledge of the human heart.

They continued to exchange love letters, sight unseen. They gradually learned more about one another, and though for a long time she protested that they would never meet, when she came to France with her husband in September of the year after the first letter, she couldn’t help herself. They arranged to meet in Besançon, on a promenade overlooking a lake. Neither was disappointed. According to Robb, Balzac would later say that he was “born in September 1833,” and write: “All my other passions were just a deposit for this one.”

Their affair continued, at distance, until Madame Hańska’s husband died in 1841. Even then, things were not simple, but on March 14th, 1850, they were married at last. Their happiness was short-lived—Balzac would die in August of that year. But still, the moral is clear: write to your favorite authors. You never know what might happen.

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.

*

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.

*

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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Seth Fried’s The Municipalists is out now. 

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.

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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.

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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.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s influential book, On Death and Dying. In it, she wrote about grief not as a way to live without someone who has been lost, nor as the means to get over the loss of a loved; as she continued to develop her ideas, Kübler-Ross suggested that grief is the method by which we learn to live with the loved one who’s dying or dead. In this way, grief might be considered more presence than absence, a living with loss rather than a living without someone. The grief memoir is underpinned by this idea that the loss and, by extension, the loved one remains, influencing our lives even as our lives keep going, even as we adjust and circumstances change. In the case of terminal cancer, grief often begins with the dire diagnosis as we begin to experience the losing well before the death.

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Running Home: A Memoir, Katie Arnold (Random House, March 12, 2019) · The Unwinding of the Miracle, Julie Yip-Williams (Random House, February 5, 2019) · Can’t Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist, Meredith Goldstein (Grand Central, 2018) · A Real Emotional Girl, Tanya Chernov (Skyhorse, 2012) · The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead, 2011) · Afterimage: A Brokenhearted Memoir of a Charmed Life, Carla Malden (Skirt!, 2011)

“I take long, scalding showers, trying to wash Dad’s sickness off my skin,” Katie Arnold writes in her memoir, Running Home, out earlier this month. She goes on to describe her visit to a Japanese spa for a salt scrub, but “sadness is still there and I feel worse.” Arnold’s father is dying of kidney cancer, and the time she spends with him “adds a new layer of despair, so uncomfortable that it feels like its own disease.” This memoir talks of grief as akin to a disease itself. Indeed, in my own experiences with the illnesses and deaths of my parents, grief can be an encompassing shift like a secondary infection that loved ones develop. While grief is often discussed as an emotional response, it is often experienced as a physical side effect as well.

Meredith Goldstein writes of this physical side effect in last year’s Can’t Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist, revealing that her friend insisted she join a “caregivers support group because she saw that I was anxious and twitchy and that the smaller lines on my forehead were becoming ravines.” Goldstein has stopped washing her hair and tweezing the one stray hair on her face. Though her mother is the one who has colon cancer, it’s as if she too is sick. “Every minute felt wrong,” she writes. Even though her mother’s colon cancer wasn’t imminently dire, “every result was just a little worse than the one before,” and she was feeling the effects herself. As for many of us who’ve traveled weeks or years alongside someone with cancer that’s not going to be cured, the physical and emotional manifestations of grief begin long before Goldstein’s mother dies. “Things were always going in the wrong direction,” she says, and that often wore both of them out.

Though I was familiar with Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, I hadn’t thought of grief as a side effect of terminal illness until reading Arnold. Now, I re-see other memoirs through this lens. Meghan O’Rourke, in The Long Goodbye, writes of her mother who has terminal colon cancer, “I already missed her. I was incredibly aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead.” Though O’Rourke links it to her mother’s impending radiation surgery, that realization of loss and the shift into grief often happens slowly over time as the result of steady decline. Grief took hold of O’Rourke as if it were an illness even as cancer took hold of her mother. She was learning to live with her absent mother even while her mother was alive.

Carla Malden, in Afterimage, captures the process slightly differently. Of her husband’s decline from colon cancer, she writes, “It had been a year of continually lowering the bar.” She’s talking about herself here as much as she is referring to her husband lowering the bar. “First, wanting real, true, normal life in all its sweet ordinariness. Then, hankering for a semblance of normal life as we accommodated the treatment into our existence. Then, no pain. Then, just life. And so suddenly—not now, not this day, not this moment.” Grief arose in the confused moments immediately following diagnosis, as if she’d been infected with something residual, and the effects got worse before they got better. The presence of her husband was also his impending absence, just as his absence became his past presence in her life.

Tanya Chernov, in A Real Emotional Girl, writes poignantly of her abrupt shift in balance between hope and grief—a sudden onset, to use the language of disease—when she is handed an envelope with a medical bracelet to take from the cancer clinic back to her bedridden father at home. “I spread the sides apart and looked inside to see my father’s name printed on a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ bracelet.” Chernov knew her father was terribly ill, of course, but in that moment, “Any remaining doubts of what the immediate future would hold for my family and me were unceremoniously expunged with the existence of that tiny piece of plastic.” Unlike Goldstein’s slide into grief with every worse result, Chernov realizes all at once “what I didn’t think I could face: that I was going to watch my father die.” She imagined the very moment of change from presence to absence before it happened, in part because it is not really a single moment in the mind. Having watched each of my parents die of cancer, I agree when Chernov says, “Watching someone you love die changes all the rules you thought the universe followed.” The moment of realization Chernov has, that it is her fate to watch her father die sooner rather than later, is akin to being diagnosed with grief and facing the confusion between presence and absence of the loved one.

In this context, it’s helpful to remember that the Kübler-Ross stages were originally outlined to explain the emotional progression of someone diagnosed with a terminal illness, that the patient’s grief is considered central. A terminal cancer diagnosis makes that person aware that everything will be lost to them; the end is their end. Only later have the stages been applied to loved ones, as if we are affected by another version of that awareness of loss, horrible but less complete.

Julie Yip-Williams, in an early chapter (which also appeared at Lit Hub) of her recently published, posthumous memoir The Unwinding of the Miracle, describes her excruciating sense of loss within the first hours of being diagnosed with colon cancer. Yip-Williams cried not so much because she was going to die sooner than she’d thought possible but because she imagined her daughters without her. She imagines her own absence and immediately sees their loss of a mother as the primary long-term side effect of her illness. In fact, she cannot bear to spend time with them at first. She writes of her children as “casualties of the war I had begun fighting,” saying, “We were all victims of cancer, with them being the most undeserving.” Of course, they do not have cancer—they have grief.

Of all these memoirs—terminal cancer memoirs—Arnold’s invites comparisons with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Like Strayed, Arnold uses physical exertion—in her case, long-distance running—to treat her grief and restore an eventual equilibrium. In fact, her gorgeous descriptions of her body in motion through the physical world immerse the reader in her state of mind, so that we too are “high on my mountains, the world below reassuringly close and yet distance enough.”

Running a path works literally in this memoir but is also a metaphor for the journey through her anguish. Even Kübler-Ross referred to grief as having terrain. “When I began,” Arnold writes, “I did not have a map of where I was going or how I would get there or where there even was.” Goldstein talks similarly about this sort of upending when she writes, “The thing that surprised me most after my mother’s death was how much everyone else continued to live.” Everyone else had a there to be, and Goldstein had trouble seeing somewhere in the future to go. In my own life, my parents’ separate terminal cancer diagnoses thirty years apart rattled my own sense of the there I knew. For a long time in each case, I couldn’t make out a new there where I might end up without them—or where I could be present despite their absence.

Along with Yip-Williams, Arnold digs deeply into her own family’s past. As part of that digging, she shares family photographs and the timeframes they represent, allowing readers to grow up with her all over again, understand how her relationship with her father has been fraught, and realize that the loss of a parent is not only about that parent’s absence but about how we remember the story of our own lives. Arnold writes of the effects of her parents’ divorce in the 1970s, when “there wasn’t a road map for how to get divorced,” and of the goodbyes they’ve had since, in train stations and airline terminals, in front of schools and in driveways. She writes both of the past and of the present when she and her family clear out the hayloft filled with the stuff of nostalgia. In this process, “Dad is the arbiter of what stays and what goes.” In this memoir, the verb tense shifts to weave us back and forth, like following switchbacks up a hill, and the author is the arbiter of what stays and what goes. In other words, she shapes the presences and absences by telling the story of them.

Any memoirist is the arbiter of what matters to the story, and maybe the point of any memoir is Arnold’s conclusion: “Being alive does not mean just not being dead.” This statement suggests to me a conclusion akin to Kübler-Ross’s about what it means to live with someone’s absence. Or in Goldstein’s words, “There’s no such thing as closure, but there are continuations. Developments.” For these memoirs, a cancer diagnosis is a beginning, but the parent’s death isn’t the end of that story—the presence of the person’s absence is the rest of the story. These new books commemorate, perhaps unintentionally, Kübler-Ross’s ideas of fifty years ago.

Really, of course, a cancer diagnosis isn’t the beginning of the story. March is both Kidney Cancer Awareness Month and Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month and, therefore, an opportunity to note that Arnold’s father was diagnosed with kidney cancer and that Goldstein’s mother, O’Rourke’s mother, Chernov’s father, Malden’s husband, and Yip-Williams herself all were diagnosed with colorectal cancer. While there exist no screening tests for kidney cancer (and luckily, many instances of it are caught early enough for a good chance of long-term survival), there exists effective screening for colorectal cancer. As with most cancers, the earlier colorectal cancer is detected, the greater the chance of long-term survival; the five-year survival rate for localized colorectal cancer at about 90%. Malden’s husband was at higher risk for developing colon cancer, yet put off his colonoscopy, which left them both wondering briefly about what might have been otherwise. The colonoscopy is a cancer screening that also can be preventative, as polyps can be removed before they might lead to cancer.

As these memoirs suggest, individually and together, there’s no way to eliminate the risk of cancer and or be spared from grief. In addition, they call into question the popular notions that grief proceeds in simple, sequential stages. It’s messier than the popularized notion suggested by Kübler-Ross’s stages. The value of these stories, in part, lies in how they portray the common experience of grief as individual, as something more complex than a step-by-step process aimed at acceptance. The proliferation of memoirs like these is a rewriting into myriad ways to live with and understand grief. To use the words of Joshua Williams from the epilogue to his wife’s memoir, these books allow us to draw “back from the brink when it feels that all in your life is spinning out of control” even when that seems like the hardest thing to do.

The word spring uses almost everything that the mouth can do, from front to back. It hisses the S, shuts it up with pursed lips and then explodes it with the P, releases the flowing RIN with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, and closes the word from the top of the throat with the guttural G. It is fun to say, a roller coaster ride for the mouth, and it has been said almost unchanging for many thousand years. But not until the last few hundred years has it meant simply a season of the year.

In Proto Indo European, the word meant to hurry or to pounce, in Sanskrit to wish eagerly and to hurry towards. By old English, it could mean a welling up of water, as a wellspring, but mainly it meant to spurt, to burst forth, fly up, to arise, to gush, to spring out, to arch upward. Spring has taken on so many meanings that it requires six pages, three columns each, in the Oxford English Dictionary, to account for it. You spring up from a nap, spring over a fence, spring onto your quarry, spring out of hiding, spring a shirt to wet it slightly before ironing, spring for the tab to pay for a friend, spring a prisoner from jail. A stallion springs his mare.

But along with these it has meant since the beginning the sprouting buds of trees. Bursting is exactly what they do, and eagerly at that. For 5,000 years, people from Japan to Africa to Europe to the Americas learned to cut or burn their trees and shrubs, to wait patiently through the winter, and to delight in their springing when the weather warmed. Within anything from 1 to 20 years, they would harvest that new growth for fodder, for posts and poles, for building wood, for firewood and charcoal, even for ship’s timber. That was the springtime that not only made the first towns and farms, but also the healthiest and most diverse woodlands that the world has known.

As the days lengthen—what the word Lent once meant—you can almost hear the buds on the twigs swelling, creaking, chafing. All of a sudden they unfurl, and whole trees are punctuated each with many thousands of green dots, as though someone had turned loose the pointillist Seurat with a sharp tipped brush among them.

Spring time is not a season, but an action. It is the moment when the dormant buds awake. The buds, as the saying goes, break, and new twigs thrust out bearing their leaves, the beginning of their flowers, and even the rudiments of next year’s buds. Billions upon billions of stems erect into the sunlight. Sometimes not only the leaves but even the new twigs are shining green, as though the plant could not get enough photosynthesis to please it and wanted to have its every bit of tissue make fresh food. “A wande shall spryng from Jesse’s roytt,” sang the 15^th century Townley Plays, referring to the birth of Christ but in the language of a springing sprout.

Shakespeare loved to pun on the name, especially in the spring songs of the comedies, for the arching sprouts bear a close resemblance to other erections. Losing the old meaning of spring, we also lost the puns. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the players sing a song called simply Spring. In it, the flowers of meadow and of freshly coppiced woods appear, as does the cuckoo, a once-widespread European migrant bird with a mixed reputation. Its cuckoo song means spring is here, but the bird lays its eggs in the nest of others, particularly in those of common copse dwellers like reed warbler, garden warbler, pipit, robin and dunnock. The host birds don’t know it until a foreign chick grows up in their nest. A cuckold is the bird (or the man) who raises another’s young. The cuckoo’s song is “a word of fear to married ear,” as it suggests the ungovernable power of all the season’s erections.

The pair who sing to Touchstone and Audrey at the end of As You Like It, play constantly on “Spring time, the only pretty ring time,” in which “sweet lovers love the Spring.” Not to leave the listener in any doubt about their meaning, one verse sings, “Between the acres of the rye / These pretty country folk would lie.” The spring arises between them, after which they conceive that “this carol they began that hour / How that a life was but a flower.” They set out with the sign of their desire, and live with its fruits. So as I go through Spring this year, I want to see it not just marking the calendar, but arising and embarking on the beautiful risk of growth and renewal.

Say the word spring. You can hear it begin.

In a recent trailer for the second season of BBC America’s dramatic thriller, Killing Eve, we’re treated to a brief but comic exchange between the flamboyantly modish serial killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and an enthusiastic passerby, a scene that seems both inevitable and winking.

Villanelle is situated in the most picturesque of settings—writing at a sunny café table alongside a sun-dappled channel—and, ever aware of her potent physical charms, she has dressed to rival this comely backdrop: her porcelain skin glows against a satin, rose pink blouse, knotted at the waist, just above a full magenta skirt. Chunky gold art deco earrings gleam from her ears, and her honey blonde hair is pulled back from her face in a low, soft knot, though the wind teases out stray, soft strands that flitter above her face like halo thread.

“Wow, you look amazing!” exclaims the pretty blonde in a yellow fitted blazer—she is holding a vintage camera, and a red designer bag hangs from her wrist. “Can I take a picture of you for my Instagram?”

“No, no, of course not,” Villanelle shoots back, and the presumed Instagram influencer—or blogger, though her polished appearance implies that she has ascended the hierarchy—scurries away, head down and clearly mortified. Villanelle, in turn, is repulsed by what seems to her a frivolous request. “Get a real life!” she calls after the young woman.

Knowing what we do of Villanelle, her reaction is characteristic: funny to witness, but decidedly and callously cruel. It also demonstrates her opaque self-understanding. It’s not a little ironic that Villanelle tells this avid young woman to “get a real life,” when her own livelihood is something of a gritty, blood-bathed inversion of a social media influencer’s lustrously filtered lifestyle. After all, an influencer’s success depends upon their ability to broadcast and sell a certain narrative of identity, often one that is stylish and healthy according to conventionally exclusive metrics. Starting a public social media account is certainly not a possibility for Villanelle, whose work as an assassin demands her ability to blend into a scene—she loves a flourish, and so struggles with this job detail somewhat—and to seem, to crime scene investigators, utterly improbable and unsuspicious. “Fashion blogger” would, in fact, be an excellent cover.

To hit her marks, Villanelle, like so many social media influencers, must constantly and compellingly enact a role, but in her case, plurality is fundamental—she is a nurse, a sex worker, a waitress with aspirations of developing her own line of perfumes. And yet, always, her femininity and disarming, Pre-Raphaelite beauty are central to the mission. A female Instagram influencer weaponizes her femininity in a corporate sense; for Villanelle, the act is chillingly literal. She does not traffic in “sponcon,” and her bacchanalian tendencies are at odds with Goop-y wellness ideology, but her life is, in its way, sponsored by The Twelve, the shadowy organization that has hired her to carry out their dirty work. Her dreamy Paris apartment, that candy pink organza frock—these are, if purchased by her, the trappings of her own business arrangement, perks of the gig.

When the two women regard each other, the effect is one of a Carrollian looking glass. Here is what Villanelle might have been, divested of the sociopathy and hedonism, and whatever she might protest, she would have loved it. Her grandiose vanity, at least, would have been nourished, her materialistic delight glutted, and the yawning maw within her, so ravenous for love, fed with the adoration of faceless admirers, to whom, by virtue of the asymmetrical arrangement, she owed practically nothing.

Get a real life, sneers Villanelle. But when you are a savage killer, brutally beautiful and unrepentant, and your survival is predicated on existing just beneath the blinking radar—and when you risk everything because of your feral attraction to the woman who has been tasked with tracking you down—it’s nearly impossible to discern how, according to your capricious calibrations, a “real life” might look.

*

Yet, when I hear Villanelle issue this insult, I squirm self-consciously, her voice following the chastened young woman, but boomeranging through the fourth wall and into my stomach. I’m disinclined to use the phrase “the Instagram influencer is all of us,” but our identification with her is palpably insinuated. The first season of Killing Eve, the most recent project of writer, director, and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, introduced us to Villanelle and all the violence, whimsy, and luscious sensuality that renders her an ineffably magnetic figure. She might not always be “likable”—that perpetually re-adjusting needle of male-attuned calibration—but she is desirable in nearly every sense.

Of course, as others have aptly established, Villanelle is not always so breezy and attractive; by the conclusion of the first season, she is battered and exhausted and altogether aggravated. She can be as churlish as she is winsome. And her alias is no coincidence. In literature, as Jia Tolentino points out, “villanelle” refers to a poem with the rhyme arrangement “aba”—gesturing to the character’s paramount vulnerability: lucid, trackable behavioral patterns. A villanelle’s framework hangs on its repetition, a structure that encourages its writer to dwell upon obsessions (think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” one of the form’s most famous examples, in which the speaker ruminates, with increasing fervor, over the resistance of a passive death). 

Villanelle inspires obsession; this is, after all, the premise of Killing Eve. But, as we quickly ascertain, she is equally susceptible to them. She falls in love with certain types of women (generally those with luxurious dark curls—thus, Sandra Oh). She does not always dispatch her marks in the same way, but she’d like to—the hairpin, if ill-advised from a strategic standpoint, does make for a stunning weapon. Russian born, she is drawn to anything French, and it’s the language she most prefers to speak (in Victorian literature, this would be a tremendous tell that a character was deviant—Lady Audley, when she is finally cornered, speaks French).

And yet, we’ve made Villanelle’s preoccupations our own, and in so doing, become thoroughly preoccupied with her. This avid interest, dare I say obsession, has rendered her something more of an influencer than may be immediately discernible. Earlier this year, as starlets floated down the red carpet just before the Oscars, a slew of viewers, myself included, remarked upon the clouds of bright pink tulle enveloping Kacey Musgraves and Linda Cardellini like soft spun sugar, not to mention the general ubiquity of the color—they’re channeling Villanelle, we exclaimed.

It can be dangerous to hold someone, fictional or real, in esteem for superficial reasons, but this is not revelatory information, and Killing Eve is not didactic television. Just as we do not need to be admonished against admiring Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) of Basic Instinct (1992) or Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) of The Last Seduction (1994), we understand that Villanelle, for all her frenetic feminine charm, is—if not utterly devoid of warm tendrils—above all else a self-involved and wholly merciless murderer. Simultaneously, the titular Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), an MI5 functionary who, to her great elation, is promoted to MI6 and tasked with hunting down Villanelle, becomes obsessed with the mission, not for altruistic reasons, exactly, but for intimately personal ones: fascination with Villanelle’s skill; desire to avenge Bill (David Haig), her friend and mentor who Villanelle killed; and, ultimately, the increscent homoerotic burn that entangles hunter and hunted.

This is not a narrative that parcels out what and who is right, placing them in steadfast opposition to evil, but instead dwells in the specificities of two women’s endlessly flawed impulses, yearnings, and motivations. Eve may be “better” than Villanelle, so to speak, but as Alice Bolin suggests, this might be a mere accident of inclination: “Eve would never actually be able to kill someone.” We’d often regard this as a marker of moral robustness, but in this case, it is “a kind of merciful cowardice,” particularly when we consider how brashly Eve tosses others across Villanelle’s lethal sights. Bolin makes the astute point that, in the case of Bill’s death, Eve carries hefty responsibility: she is the one who urges him to accompany her on the Berlin operation where he was killed, after all. And she does, in the end, stab Villanelle in the abdomen—she promptly freaks out after doing so, but she does it all the same.

Still, the question of Villanelle’s influence lingers. When I watched the trailer for the second season, I laughed at Villanelle’s exchange with the sweet-faced Instagram personality—it’s funny, after all—but the contours of the moment felt weighted, sly. Someone explicitly asks to render Villanelle a work of art, and Villanelle, who revels in any opportunity to exploit feminine aesthetics—she kills a man with an ornate hairpin!—refuses. On the one hand, it’s yet another moment in which Villanelle resists being reduced to the sum of her parts: her creative flourishes are extensions of her own power, and they are hers to deploy and discard as she sees fit. Setting aside the ways it might compromise her safety, she would never commit to the objectifying stasis of someone else’s photograph.

In the meantime, we’ve elevated Villanelle to couture iconography, relishing her ensembles and, with a compulsive verve to match Eve and Villanelle’s cat-and-mouse antics, we share shots of Villanelle lounged on the sofa in pink tulle. Catherine Tramell, and to a lesser extent, Bridget Gregory are similarly canonized. Catherine, mile-long legs crossed, in the carnal black mini dress, of course, but also swathed in serene, neutral tones, strolling on the beach. Bridget, like liquid in the long forest green dress she wears as she slips into a limousine, her con successfully fulfilled. I am weary of the term “strong female lead,” but wearier still of their paucity: even now, most onscreen, non-superheroic female characters who are unimpressed by men are killers. Perhaps it’s no wonder that we long to frame film stills and hang them over our mantles, that we want to wrap ourselves their clothes—the draw is not only sartorial, it’s a matter of control of—there it is again—influence: Villanelle, dressed in pink, not giving a fuck, while others fall at her feet.

*

Nobody is telling us not to love Villanelle, or even that we must contend with what it means to do so. But the stakes of emotional investment in a female killer are fundamentally different from our interest in male anti-heroes, like the toxically masculine Walter White. Like Eve, we want to locate something sympathetic within this angel-faced villain, to learn that she was somehow victimized. Determined to tell a different story about Villanelle, we rage against the one set before us: that she is a bonafide sociopath, that a life lived according to sound morality would bore her to tears—which, come to think of it, might be the first time we see her cry. But it’s too enticing, the hope for some recuperative detail. Then setting her photo as our desktop background, lusting after her, and designing our wardrobes based on her predilections might seem somehow more rational.

But Villanelle is a fictional character—she can’t get a real life—and so maybe it’s absurd to think too much about it. It’s safer, in any case, because Villanelle, however much she wants to be adored, is uninterested by love’s redemptive possibilities. Her own obsessions gesture not to underlying tenderness, but to the full-bodied thrust of id: a poem of desire and blood. And unlike the social media influencer, Villanelle hasn’t sought a platform. She is more or less content with her shadowy notoriety, and she doesn’t stand for anything but the kaleidoscopic meanings we hoist upon her, again and again and again.

I love Maxim Osipov’s prose. I started rereading his stories and caught myself thinking that his prose now reads like something of a diagnosis: an accurate, unforgiving diagnosis of Russian life. Although the author is filled with love for a simple, human existence, he is simultaneously struck by how little this existence actually coincides with his own expectations. The drama of those raised by culture, raised by books. Culture normally protects us diligently from reality, but here it is hardly able to do so, because Osipov is a writer with a double vision: First, he is a doctor—a cardiologist—a profession directly related to time, to the impermanence of man; the heart is nothing more than time. And second, when you live in the provinces, it’s harder for culture to deceive you, harder for it to mask reality with fashionable ideas and superstitions—that of the “Russian world,” for example.

Out in the provinces, everything is in full view, more exposed—both human nature and the times beyond the window. And that’s why the author isn’t moved by the sight of the oh-so-familiar peasant when he sees him running naked through the streets, chasing his mother with an ax, “a crucifix dangling from his neck.” In another story, one of his characters (a policeman) explains to a writer—a naïve man, as he sees it—that murderers are “just your average people.” These stories tell of people who haven’t come to understand the meaning of their existence—what is it all for? Very few of us have, it must be said. The soul is forced to toil night and day. But who has the strength? The author relates to his characters as to patients; he asks them where it hurts and whether . . . in general, does it hurt in the soul? The Russian soul—yet another myth. In reality, there is but one soul; the real question is: Is there a person?

Russia as a country has overextended itself across an enormous territory, and it lives as though time had stopped. And any attempt to speed up time—the October Revolution, for example—has ended in bloodshed. When you delve into Osipov’s texts you see that they are deceptively simple, just like Shalamov’s: Behind this childish ordinariness there lies a hidden chasm. The whole time they leave you thinking how difficult it is to love humanity—wonderful, repulsive, and terrifying as it is—but in order to stay human, that’s exactly what you must do: You must love man. Your soul is restless—it is thinking. To inspire such thoughts—that’s something that only true literature can do.

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From Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov. Used with the permission of the publisher, New York Review Books. Preface copyright © 2019 by Svetlana Alexievich. Edited by Boris Dralyuk. Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson.