Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.

Chekhov the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the king of the country whose national anthem is the minute-long sigh. The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our 19th-century Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big Questions. We wouldn’t want this kind of writing today—too un-ironic, too free with emotion, too un-relativist, too naive in thinking that the Big Questions have resolution at all. But we love the echo.

This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. I think of an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia. He’s no rake on a grand tour—he’s just completed a journey that would be arduous even today: a humanitarian visit to a penal colony in the Russian Far East. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a manifesto as his train races back to the capital. No, he has taken the long way home: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, about which he has written, to a patron and friend, “When I have children, I’ll say to them, not without pride: ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, in my day I had sexual relations with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and you know where? In a coconut grove on a moonlit night. . . . ’”

This isn’t a sodden aberration when no one is looking. Mr. Chekhov likes his ladies—his Lydias—of the capital; sometimes he goes out with Lydia Yavorskaya, and sometimes Lydia Avilova.[1] And he’s no urban snob. At a rural wedding at which he served as best man, as he wrote to his sister Maria, he “saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls . . . but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles! One of them . . . kept striking me on the hand with her fan and saying, ‘Oh, you naughty man!’”[2]

In the 1890 photo, the sun seems high, and Chekhov takes shelter on a bench alongside an acquaintance. Each is cradling a mongoose—why not. Chekhov is dressed like a cross between a peasant, an Eastern guru, and a rake: A fedora high on his forehead, an open-necked shirt, loose white pants. He’s grinning like a man who’s just risen from a choice bed, his hair mussed and his rumpled goatee clearly Leonardo di Caprio’s secret inspiration all these years. He is the very picture of joy and vitality.

Chekhov was moved by great passions—I can’t think of a Russian great with more skin in the game. But just as few could be as funny or bawdy amidst the sobriety because . . . well, because that’s how life is.[3] Forget that, early on, Chekhov made his living through humor pieces, a Dickens-in-reverse who got paid only if he came in under 100 lines. (He was paying for his medical education then, the “wife” to which literature was a “mistress.” Not for long.) I’m talking about “The Siren,” a lip-licking ode to food in the Russian mouth that reads like an extended version of that Gogol exultation about Ukrainian dumplings in sour cream flying into a certain gentleman’s mouth by themselves.[4] I’m talking about the wry, playful humor that breaks through the foliage of even the darkest story: “Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, scorched steppe cannot produce such gloom as one man when he sits and talks and nobody knows when he will leave,” he writes in “An Artist’s Story,” otherwise an account, included in this collection, of multiple sorrows. Or take the second epigraph of this essay. Take any “dark” story and count the exclamation marks.

Nabokov came from the library. Gogol from the government office. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from the clouds, where they wrote books meant to deluge the ground and sweep away the old order, ushering in a utopia of Christian suffering and redemption, in the former’s case, and moral rectitude, rural life, and vegetarianism, in the latter’s. Chekhov came from the earth. Literally. He was the only great Russian writer of the 19th century born to the peasantry rather than the nobility, the reason why the peasants in his stories are complex human beings, neither saints nor sinners, and as understandable as they are sometimes degenerate, rather than pegs in grand philosophies.

“While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky both believed that Christian faith was the main source of moral strength for the impoverished and ignorant Russian peasants,” the Chekhov scholar Simon Karlinsky has written, “Chekhov’s much more closely observed and genuinely experienced picture of peasant life shows nothing of the sort.” Just read “In the Ravine.” After the funeral for a defenseless creature gruesomely murdered out of greed and spite by an extended family member, a funeral during which “the guests and the priests ate . . . with such greed that one might have thought that they had not tasted food for a long time,” listen to “the priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom,” offer to the creature’s meek and suffering mother this magnanimous comfort: “Don’t grieve . . . For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” One imagines that just then the salted mushroom meant far more to him. As Chekhov wrote in a letter, “I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me . . . Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.”

But it’s also in Chekhov that you find the opposite portrait of a religious man. (Consider “The Letter,” included in this volume.) “For all their preoccupation with religion,” Karlinsky writes, “[Tolstoy and Dostoevsky] never thought of making an Orthodox priest, deacon or monk a central character in a work of fiction as Chekhov did . . . Most of these men of the Church are presented as full-blooded human beings with their own joys and problems.”

As radical as it is simple: Tell things how they are, not how they should be. This approach is as natural today as it was radical a century ago, and every time art moved from a depiction of the idealized to the real. (Think of European painting going, in the 17th century, from “angels with gauzy wings” to “the actual look and feel of a world, which, after all, God has created,” as the art critic Robert Hughes has put it.) If Dostoevsky was concerned by humanity in extremis, if Tolstoy sought final, unvarying answers, Chekhov concerned himself with ordinary people, and felt that no single philosophy could answer for a world of perennially shifting circumstances, to say nothing of the fungibility of human nature—the view of an empiricist and clinician, as per his training. He went quietly about the same work the others went about loudly.

As Dr. Zhivago says in the famous novel, Chekhov’s work has a “modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or its salvation. It’s not that he didn’t think of such matters . . . but to talk about such things seemed . . . pretentious, presumptuous.” It was a matter of creative philosophy: “I think that it is not for writers to solve such questions as the existence of God, pessimism, etc.,” Chekhov wrote in another diamond of craft advice. “The writer’s function is only to describe by whom, how, and under what conditions the questions of God and pessimism were discussed.”

But temperament played a part, too; it won’t come as a surprise that Chekhov had no great notions of himself. “If I have a gift that should be respected,” he wrote to an older novelist who had written to urge him to take on a novel, “I had got used to thinking it insignificant.” Some of this had to do with his beginnings: No one has diagnosed as articulately the self-abnegating servility which the low-born of the time and the place—the serfs, Russia’s version of the feudally bonded, and their descendants—carried within them.[5] “Try writing a story about how a young man, the son of a serf . . . brought up venerating rank, kissing the hands of priests, worshiping the ideas of others, thankful for every crust of bread . . . hypocritical towards God and man with no cause beyond an awareness of his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop.” Chekhov managed to do just that, a course of rigorous self-education and -improvement despite low means and a petty tyrant of a father that accomplished, in the elegantly acidic formulation of Chekhov scholar Aileen Kelly, “what Tolstoy spent his life trying vainly to do: He reinvented himself as a person of moral integrity, free from the disfigurements inflicted by the despotism that pervaded Russian life.”

If Chekhov took his talent lightly, he altogether ignored his health. He had tuberculosis for a decade before he finally bothered to have it diagnosed, so busy was he with writing and the social-improvement projects to which he constantly devoted himself. He spent the winter of 1891-92 working to relieve a countrywide famine caused by the previous summer’s failed harvest, “concentrating, with characteristic practicality, not on charity handouts, but on an organized campaign to prevent the peasants from slaughtering their horses for food, a practice that perpetuated the famine cycle, since it left no horses for next year’s spring plowing” (Karlinsky). The following summer, a cholera epidemic broke out in the area several hours outside Moscow where Chekhov had just purchased a home; he spent the next two seasons in an unpaid position battling the epidemic, and treating a thousand peasants along the way.

Every community he encountered was left the better for it: The library in Taganrog, in southern Russia, where Chekhov was born, was the beneficiary of a lifetime’s steady supply of books in multiple languages, as were libraries near his country home and in Siberia. He built schools, arranged for the construction of a local highway, created a clinic for alcoholics, bought horses for peasants who needed them, fund-raised for a journal of surgery, and even helped set up a marine-biology laboratory. Pleaded with to relent, he said he was happier giving medical care to peasants than enduring the literary chatter in Moscow.

Even on his deathbed, he couldn’t bear to turn away all those who crowded his doorstep. Maxim Gorky, one of the many writers who benefited from Chekhov’s encouragement and intervention, put it well: “In the presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which Russians, in their anxiety to appear Europeans, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves with shells and fishes’ teeth.” A single sentence of Chekhov’s, after Tolstoy visited him at his rural clinic, says it all: “We had an extremely interesting conversation, extremely interesting for me because I listened more than I spoke.”[6]

Chekhov brought the same values to his craft and his politics, though here they were far less welcome. The craft moves pioneered by Chekhov are de rigueur in high-end literary fiction today, but they were heretical in their time. Chekhov’s stories are “all middle like a tortoise,” John Galsworthy is supposed to have said; many have referred to Chekhov’s “zero ending.” It’s true that he can spend two-thirds of a story winding up, with conventional plot an afterthought left for the craft manuals. But if you ease into it, if you suspend the expectation of dramatic convention that is the norm even today, you will find yourself transported by description and characterization—of people, of places, of the human condition—as close as anything Flaubert observed about his clerk in felt slippers, and perhaps unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, and verve. Also the miracle of its simultaneous soulfulness and lack of adornment.

Look at the descriptions lavished on the secondary characters as “The Privy Councillor” winds up (“Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him . . . like a lovesick dove round its mate”), the description of winter that opens “An Attack of Nerves,” the casually aphoristic pronouncements that litter every story (“Learned things ruin the appetite,” in “The Siren”). He says in a line what would take another a paragraph: “I am old and not fit for struggle; I am not even capable of hatred” (“Gooseberries”). “Chekhov’s language is as precise as ‘Hello!’ and as simple as ‘Give me a glass of tea’,” the early Soviet poet Mayakovsky wrote. (And here was a man in search of revolutionary forms for a new nation.) “In his method of expressing the idea of a compact little story, the urgent cry of the future is felt: ‘Economy!’”

But no Chekhov reader has to subsist on high aesthetics alone. On so many occasions, the situation the author has been laying out for us suddenly coheres into something devastating and whole, the story snaps straight as a sail in high wind, and one begins to read feverishly. See if you can pinpoint the moment, in “The Privy Councillor,” “The Artist’s Story,” “The Name Day Party,” “In the Ravine.” Far less Chekhov ends at “zero”—in other words, no differently than where it started—than the stereotype has it, but there was philosophy behind the stories that do. Sometimes things change, sometimes not, non? Sometimes the sinner repents (Crime and Punishment), sometimes she goes unpunished (“In the Ravine.”) Sometimes, the adulterers go for it (and pay for it, as in Anna Karenina), but sometimes they don’t (and are no happier for their restraint). Read a story like “About Love” and tell me that it ends at is “zero,” even though, technically, “nothing happens.” To my mind, it’s a more moving exploration of love than the famous “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” where something certainly does.

For all its flickering beauty, real life offers little moral justice or dramatic convention. Take the moment, in “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” after the adulterers, Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, have slept together for the first time. Anticipation has given way to post-coital gloom. “Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly,” Chekhov writes of Anna. “‘It’s not right,’” she tells Gurov. “‘You don’t respect me now.’” The story, imagined conventionally, seems to beg for anything other than what follows: “There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. They were silent for at least half an hour.” Gurov doesn’t do this because he’s unfeeling, but because it’s the at once unexpected and inevitable thing that a person finds himself doing in such a circumstance, like plosive newlywed kisses sending up calf spasms and a taste of over-sweet raisins.

This is not the way Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote, which is, perhaps, the reason we wouldn’t call either a modern writer or, for that matter, a direct influence on much of posterity, geniuses though they were. Some of the most progressive literature of the last century—from Russia’s Silver Age surrealists to Western Europe’s modernists to Flannery O’Connor’s flaying precision (if not Chekhov’s tenderness) to W. G. Sebald’s anti-narrative instinct—has Chekhov’s mark on it. It’s no accident that Alice Munro, the Canadian short-story master and recent Nobel Prize winner, is often called “our Chekhov.” From the portraiture so close, at once full of precision and sweep, that makes you forget you’ve read 20 pages and the story hasn’t “started”; to all that set-up suddenly shaping into a predicament that puts your heart in a vise; to the way both situate so many stories inside stories told by others: it’s Chekhov.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Chekhov also declined to inhabit the straitjacket for which every Russian writer of the late 19th century was expected to fit himself by the literary establishment: that of the liberal critic of autocracy. It isn’t that Chekhov didn’t agree with the politics; he objected to the lack of freedom in the establishment’s dictates on how freedom should be promoted. He was against falsehood, hypocrisy, and compulsion in all corners, and didn’t hesitate to disagree with “his own” (just re-read the first epigraph of this essay). He had friends on both sides of the aisle, and in a poignantly naive view, as relevant for America today as for Russia then, “it [did] not even occur to him that unbiased observations . . . might be incompatible with patriotism” (Karlinsky). In staid times, such a man feels like a seer. In divided times, like a miracle. You want to live in his country, except it has so few citizens.

Chekhov was savaged for his supposed lack of ideology. Usually, it didn’t get to him: he nominated an especially scathing critic of his work to the Russian Imperial Academy. But sometimes it did. (He was no wallflower.) “You once told me,” he wrote to another author, “that my stories lack an element of protest, that they have neither sympathies nor antipathies. But doesn’t the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn’t that an ideology?” (Pity the author in a politicized society in a polarized time. Lampedusa, who portrayed Italy’s old, pre-Republican guard with nuance and empathy, and who himself, in the words of his biographer, “remained too skeptical and disillusioned to be a genuine democrat or a liberal,” was excoriated by the Marxists who dominated Italian literary criticism after the war.) As Nabokov wrote, “Chekhov’s genius almost involuntarily disclosed more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession of painted dummies. I shall go further, and say that that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life.”

A doctor committed to observable reality rather than ethical or dramatic convention, Chekhov also wrote about sex as a physical phenomenon rather than a moral dubiety best seen through Victorian gauze. (This didn’t endear him to Tolstoy, either.) Radically, he wrote about the predicaments faced by women with the clarity of a non-ideological feminist. (By non-ideological, I mean that he saw those women as clearly as he saw their oppressors.) He got married, at 39, to Olga Knipper, an actress who spent most of her time in Moscow and St. Petersburg while he remained in southern Russia for his health, an arrangement so unusual for its time (though not for ours) that even Chekhov’s most intelligent critics have been unable to refrain from seeing it as “pathetic” and “unhappy.” But if you read Chekhov’s letters, you’ll see that the terms not only suited him—he agreed to marriage for Olga’s sake—but made him rather frisky. (He called her “doggie.”) A man of the earth to the finish, he even wrote about ecological ruin, a subject that has trouble getting traction even today. He was 19th-century Russia’s greatest modern.

*

I used to feel little for Chekhov. I was born in the Soviet Union and majored in Russian literature at university to try to reconnect with my heritage after a decade of trying hard to pass for American. I was riven with confusion and doubt—so is every undergraduate, but I had an extra piece due to losing my home country at nine—and was easily seduced by the grandeur, nobility, moral preoccupation, and clarity of the grandees we read. America felt free, but more frivolous, than the Soviet Union. Here was the opposite of frivolity. Here were writers who believed—no, took for granted—that the writer was a moral accountant to a fallen world, charged with showing the way forward. (And that there was a way forward, as opposed to an endless array of equally compromised truths.) From a young age, my parents had generously exercised in me a self-respect, not to say self-regard, that few children get to feel. That ego was trampled by immigration. In America, I felt inept and painfully out of place. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—even the hand-wringing Turgenev—helped me find value, dignity, purpose.

It would take nearly 20 years to begin to see the occasional falsehood in the neat tie-ups of traditional storytelling, or in the protagonist breaking through to some understanding at the end of the story—to see that writing this way often has as much to do with the author’s needs as with those of his characters. In my early years here, I craved only one thing: certainties. I cycled through many false ones before Chekhov put me at rest about their impossibility even for less bifurcated people. If you can hold on to that, he seemed to be saying, you might live in a little more peace and write in a little more truth.

*

Perhaps the saddest way in which Chekhov remains relevant for our times is how accurate, in spirit, his portrait of Russia remains: power without account; greed, nepotism, and boot-licking; stability at the expense of freedom. What would Chekhov say of Vladimir Putin? He wouldn’t say anything about Putin. He might write a story about Putin’s press secretary misplacing the cufflinks the President gave him, which sends him into such a frenzy that he commits a crime so the most noticeable thing about his wrists is the handcuffs around them. Except that law enforcement doesn’t dare touch the President’s circle, and the poor man remains free, his torment in full view. (It would be called: “Cufflinks.” Or: “The Press Secretary.”) Or, less pointedly, the story of a Moscow man with a long walk home from the metro station, long and deflating, until he steps into a grocery and, somehow—well, out of desperation; to feel alive, perhaps—manages a flirtation with the counterwoman that leads to a relationship. Only there is enough initiative in him only for that gesture, and little by little the initiative in the family must migrate to the woman. Only that she does not want the initiative. She wants to be looked after. But they don’t divorce. They keep going, partly from fear, partly from suspicion that the human spirit has enough grace in it that there is still kindredness for them to discover. And enough mystery that we never know when we’ll manage to rise above ourselves once again.

And what would Chekhov say of America today, and America of him? Would it revere him as much as it reveres the playwright-of-twilight hologram, or would his actual perspective prove a little too sandpapery? For he would savage, equally, the witch-hunts enacted by social justice warriors, the soul-sellers lining up to lie for Trump, the provincialism of liberal echo chambers like New York and San Francisco, and the media’s reductions and manipulations. He wouldn’t touch the actual headlines, of course—he would write about individuals in concrete situations—but his brief would be the same: human nature, and its tendency equally to confusion and clarity; to small-mindedness, greed, and vulgarity as much as to generosity, self-transcendence, and love, all heavily dependent on circumstance. His stories highlight this above all, usually without judgment, always without bombast and remedy. How did such a “quiet man” and non-ideologue manage to survive such an unquiet, ideological century?

*

[1] Naturally, the latter used the acquaintance to press a manuscript on the author. “When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity,” he responded, “try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story, the characters cry and sigh.” This advice wouldn’t be out of place in an MFA program today.

[2] The entire time, he adds, “her face wore an expression of fear.” He goes on to report that the newlyweds “kissed so vehemently that every time their lips made an explosive noise… I had a taste of oversweet raisins in my mouth, and got a spasm in my left calf.” In its precise and contradictory observations, the acute perceptiveness of its ostensibly illogical associations, the way its humor lives alongside something darker, the letter is a Chekhov story in miniature.

[3] As Nabokov—no great mug in life and, if a wit on the page, then a heatless one—wrote, “Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness… Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun.”

[4] This kind of antic epicureanism, so readily associated with Gogol, has as much to do with the man—a megalomaniacal, hypochondriac priss and sexual paralytic—as the gloom-and-doom angle does with Chekhov.

[5] I shiver every time I read what Denis Grigoryev, “a puny little peasant, exceedingly skinny, wearing patched trousers and a shirt made of ticking,” says to the magistrate investigating him for a minor infraction in the story “The Culprit”: “That’s what you’re educated for, our protectors—to understand. The Lord knew to whom to give understanding.”

[6] Is there a greater pair of frenemies in literary history? Tolstoy had been mortified by Chekhov’s perspective on the peasantry, but, according to Gorky, he had “tears in his eyes” over the saintly heroine of Chekhov’s “The Darling,” included in this volume, the story of a woman who assumes the views of the men with whom she takes up. Too bad Chekhov meant that this made her pathetic. And he came to revile Tolstoy’s anti-sex manifesto “The Kreutzer Sonata”: “To hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All great wise men are as despotic as generals… because they are confident of their impunity. Diogenes spat in people’s beards knowing that he would not be called to account; Tolstoy calls doctors scoundrels and flaunts his ignorance of important [medical] issues because he is another Diogenes whom no one will report to the police or denounce in the papers.” But Chekhov venerated Anna Karenina because, he felt, it ideally formulated a problem it did not try to resolve, Chekhov’s measure for true fiction. That didn’t stop Chekhov, of course, from “rewriting” its plot in at least half-dozen short stories, three of which—“About Love,” “Anna on the Neck,” “The Darling”—are included in this collection, all of them implicit rebukes to Tolstoy’s quite undeniable resolution of Anna’s problem: The adulterous shall be smitten. And yet, it was typical of Chekhov that, for all their disagreements, the men maintained a warm, cordial relationship.

__________________________________

From the introduction to Chekhov: Stories of Our Time, trans. Constance Garnett, Ilan Stavans, and Alexander Gurvets. Used with permission of Restless Books. Introduction copyright © 2018 by Boris Fishman.

I was introduced to Donald Barthelme in college, in a writing workshop with the novelist Robert Cohen. We read “City of Churches” and “The School,” and for a week or so afterwards, I walked around in alternating states of elation and depression. On the one hand, after what seemed (at the time) like a long lifetime full of reading, I had suddenly found something I had never seen before. These stories seemed like magic; they tugged on the throat and stomach, while also being funny, while also arching a brow, by which I mean to say they were (and are) my perfect emotional cocktail. On the other hand, I despaired, because obviously I was never going to be a writer, because obviously I could never do what Barthleme had done, holy shit, how had he done this, I had better throw in the towel now!

While I would eventually read most of Barthelme’s stories, “City of Churches” and “The School” are still my favorites. And also “Rebecca,” which I would find later. “Rebecca” is incredible. You need “Rebecca” in your life. Go now, to “Rebecca.” I say all of this up front as a way of admitting something you and I both know anyway: that literary taste is subjective, and related to one’s experiences, particular proclivities, and personal interests, and that no one short story can actually be deemed by any reliable metric to be objectively the Best. I understand this fully. Still: this story is the best short story. I say this because I know it to be true. You may have your own best short story. But here is why “The School” is mine.

“The School” was originally published in The New Yorker on June 17, 1974. It is very brief, just over 1,200 words, which is rare for a story this affecting, but not particularly rare for Barthelme. The format is instantly recognizable: it’s an escalation story. If you’ve been in an introductory workshop (certainly one taught by me) you’ve heard of those. Something bad happens; something worse happens; something even worse than that happens next. This is also the format of many jokes. In his essay “Rise, Baby, Rise!“, George Saunders places it “roughly in a lineage of ‘pattern stories,'” including Chekhov’s “The Darling,” Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” and “A Christmas Carol.” In this case the thing that happens—the pattern—is that things at the narrator’s school die.

The story begins like this:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

Immediately, with no set up, we are dropped into a distinctive but recognizable first person tone: our narrator is trailing off, he is nervous, maybe, likely he is apologetic, and certainly he is telling a story. He’s telling it directly to me, the reader—in the next paragraph he’ll say, casually, “you remember,” as if I live in the world he lives in. That world is the world of the school—we know this from the title, though we’re not told this explicitly in the first paragraph. We intuit that it’s the teacher speaking to us: “we had all these children,” etc., though we are not told this explicitly either. We are also, of course, introduced to the notion of things dying. The fact that it’s orange trees in this first paragraph probably means nothing. Maybe we’re in California, or possibly Florida—actually this does seem like the kind of story that would take place in Florida, because everyone knows that’s where the weirdest shit happens, so Florida it is. According to the online Symbolism Wiki (this exists) the orange tree is a symbol of generosity and wisdom and sometimes purity. (Take this with a grain of salt, of course, for all the usual reasons and because there is a misspelling in this entry.) Even if true, I doubt Barthelme was thinking of the symbolism. Orange trees are kind of lovely, and kind of odd, and the kind of things kids in Florida would probably want to plant. More specific than generic trees, and sweeter. That is enough, I think.

Anyway, next we are told that all the snakes have also died (what kind of school has multiple snakes, I wonder?), but that this was understandable because of the strike. The strike, which is never mentioned again, gives us just a small hint of turmoil in the world outside the school. I’ve always found the strike tantalizing; it could be an indication that the events in this story are a symptom of some grander scheme—even if only a impressionistic, and not a direct, symptom. It could just be a little color, a way to explain away the snake deaths. Either way, it seems unlikely that the snakes would die after only four days. They are usually pretty resilient.

Then we hear about the herb gardens, which have either been overwatered or sabotaged, and then, as if in afterthought, we are reminded about the gerbils, mice, and the salamander, who have also died this year. All of this is still in retrospect, a retelling. Then of course we have the tropical fish, and the gentle suggestion that what we’re looking at is a pattern that repeats, or has repeated, that it is not this class, this year, but all classes, all years:

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.

How chilling is that sentence, all alone as its own paragraph! We’ve been waiting around for the deaths to stop being funny, to start getting serious, and this is where it starts, with that ominous single line. You know what’s coming. You know it with dread and with excited anticipation, because how will this one die? In order to stave off what might be the increased sadness in the reader, on the scale of herbs to fish to puppy, Barthelme infuses the puppy with some real delight.

They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess.

I actually cannot fully unpack why I so ardently love “Distemper, I guess.” I just love it. I would tattoo it on my body were I not too afraid of pain to even have my ears pierced. Apparently distemper is a real viral disease in dogs (and cats, and seals, and skunks, and pandas, and a variety of other animals) and is also known as hardpad disease. According to Wikipedia, in dogs, “signs of distemper vary widely from no signs, to mild respiratory signs indistinguishable from kennel cough, to severe pneumonia with vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and death.” It is in the same family of viruses that causes measles and mumps. I did not know any of this until this very moment. I have always read the word as an antiquated way to say “ill temper” or, more to the point, “unhappiness.” Despite the fact that I am technically wrong, I still think this meaning lives, submerged, in the word, and adds to its official meaning. We all enjoy ambiguity. Everyone in this story suffers from a sort of distemper. As for the “I guess,” well, that’s just more of this narrator’s sad sack waffling, which by now we have all grown to love, have we not?

Well. On to the Korean orphan. Oh god, you think. But even still, the Korean orphan is far away, much farther than the children’s parents.

We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.

We know, of course, what this must be.

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.

After this diffuse and reflective—and actually quite sad—moment, Barthelme backtracks to say:

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

I can only marvel here, as he has somehow made the fatal knifing of the father of a young boy a laugh line. I mean, I laughed. Not only that, but this slight backtracking has provided space for the hinge in the story—we’ve been moving forward, with slight asides, the whole time, but now we have taken a breath. So, slight backtrack, and then the hinge, which allows us to slide into the conclusion:

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

The “where did they go” is of course heartbreaking because, well, don’t we all want to know the answer? But the way the students, who given all their pets we can only imagine to be elementary-age, transition into this elevated discourse, is Barthelme’s deftest move yet. Rules about common behavior are now irrelevant, as if they weren’t already. We are plunged into an entirely new mode. We are ready for it, of course; we’ve been prepared by all the surreality, to the point where it almost makes sense for ten-year-olds to use the phrase “fundamental datum.” I find this moment ecstatic—it is literally transporting, pulling you up out of the pattern and making you look around. It is as if we have passed through a door.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen but I said that I would not.

We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

After all, what could be said to be the opposite of death but sex, and that which it produces? It makes emotional sense but not logical sense—even though, as Saunders points out in his aforementioned essay, there was no Helen until she was conjured here, in the fourth-to-last paragraph. “The reader (this reader anyway) falls, once and for all, forever, in love with this story, at the line: ‘Helen looked out the window.’” Because in one ambiguous moment it is clear that the newly-formed Helen has not only been there the whole time but loved the narrator, the teacher, who has, you only notice now (or at least I only notice now) managed to shake off his ellipses and dithering and tell it to us straight, now that Helen is on the line. But in fact, there have been no ellipses since we transitioned into recounting the deaths of humans. Even our narrator can pull it together when necessary. One of Barthelme’s great skills, in this story and in others, particularly the others I have mentioned, is to play around and play around and play around and conjure delight and conjure strangeness and then right when you’re all woozy and giggly and your ankles are exposed—nail you with some plainspoken emotional resonance.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

Okay, wait. Who has knocked? Was it the gerbil? Was this how all of the other doomed creatures entered as well? Is this the key to their deaths? Or—has this gerbil been reincarnated? We heard about some dead gerbils earlier. Or, have the children, cheering, interpreted the new gerbil as the product of their teacher embracing Helen? It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know. It is perfect in its obscurity. The story has already done its work—it has created a feeling in the reader. I will quote, as many have, Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Don’t Write What You Know,” in which he argues: “Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things. Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.” The point of a story is to change things, to do something. For this reader, this one does something every time.

It’s very strange to take a full year off of doing something that you’ve been doing for over 15 years, knowing that you’ll return to it but are utterly detached from it in the meantime. For me, that is teaching literature at the college level. Going into sabbatical, I trusted that I would reflect on what (and how) I teach, and hopefully come up with some new ideas, maybe even some new methods.

Over the course of the year, I frequently found myself questioning the very base of what I do: what is literature, in the first place? In fact, this has been a nagging question for me; when I started a blog (it sounds so quaint now) in 2008, I called it “What Is Literature?” I meant this question in earnest. Even as I read more literature, taught literature classes, and wrote about literature, I was less and less sure I knew what it was, or what it did—beyond the easy definitions of poetry, fiction, and drama and their respective social functions. Because, for me, literature has also included airports, advertisements, long walks, Lego toys, and art, among myriad other things.

But even if we rein it in: what is this thing, literature, that seems at once so important to culture—people’s stories, shared traditions, structures of meaning—and yet sometimes all too disposable, just extraneous fluff? English professors can take themselves way too seriously, and can act as if that literature is the beginning and end of all things. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I want to step back and think slowly and deliberately about some of the literature that has impacted my students and me—in class and beyond (I hope). I don’t want to take the work of literature for granted—not in these accelerated times of general hostility to the arts and cultural diversity. But not just in these times. As I said, I’ve been asking this question—what is literature?—for at least ten years. And I want to keep asking it.

I find working answers in literature, often in small pieces of literature. In my classes, I often assign full novels, but we tunnel into specific passages. I think of when I teach Octavia Butler’s Dawn, a near future, post-apocalyptic alien romance that is also a metaphysical mindbender. At one point an alien is explaining to a human how he might open his mind concerning their new predicament of coexisting with the aliens, even mating with them, becoming part-them (and the aliens becoming part-human in turn). The human here has enjoyed part of this merger, but is frightened by other aspects, and their implications. But as Butler’s alien Nikanj puts it:

Interpretation. Electrochemical stimulation of certain nerves, certain parts of your brain. . . . What happened was real. Your body knows how real it was. Your interpretations were illusion. The sensations were entirely real. You can have them again—or you can have others.

That first word offered by the alien is “interpretation.” What more do students need to get out of an English class, really? Isn’t that the work of literature, in sum: the art of interpretation? But it doesn’t stop there, importantly. For Butler, interpretations are rendered as illusions, but illusions there for the weighing and choosing, and always linked to real-world conditions, sensations “entirely real.” And if you read the novel you’ll see that this is no simplistic dualism between mind and matter—it’s all entangled, fascinatingly so.

Dawn raises troubling questions about domination, biological determination, and free will.And there is a fierce hopefulness that runs through this novel: a refusal to give up and a resistance to retreat into timeworn adages or definitions. What I love about teaching this novel is the impassioned debates that my students get into as we discuss  it, concerning not just the plot of the novel but the stakes it raises: how important or unique is the human species, and how might we remain open to (maybe even becoming) something different, perhaps even better? Butler’s deceptively readable fiction invites us into these quandaries, and offers no ready conclusions. Dawn is only the first of a trilogy on this theme, but there’s something about teaching just this book that agitates endless conversation—conversation that, then, spills into the other works we read in the class. When do we not encounter aliens, in literature? What is literature if not an alien form that springs to life on the page?

Literature is a weird thing, and its effects can be grounding even when it unsettles things we think we know. Take a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of the knapsack. The binoculars. A half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two spoons. He set everything out in a row. There were five small tins of food and he chose a can of sausages and one of corn and he opened these with the little army can opener and set them at the edge of the fire and they sat watching the labels char and curl. When the corn began to steam he took the cans from the fire with the pliers and they sat bent over them with their spoons, eating slowly.

After reading this in class, I might ask my students to inventory their backpacks or purses, setting “everything out in a row” and taking stock of what they carry with them. We might talk about the functions of these things, how sooner or later they will use them—like the pliers and spoons that are named and then utilized mere sentences later, in McCarthy’s story. We might re-view our smartphones as things among others. At the very least, we’ll be off our smartphones in those moments, and in inventory mode. This can seem frivolous, or just silly. But it’s part of the work of literature. It slows us down, helps us focus on the things closest to us, if, then, possibly to engage these things more thoughtfully, more respectfully.

I realize this notion of what literature can do may sound wistfully hopeful, and even utopian. But I see it happen all the time in my classrooms: my students—huddled over literature, reading and making connections, often in amazement—are connecting with each other, and with things. And this inevitably spills over the borders of the classroom and into the world beyond.

__________________________________

From The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth. Used with permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2018 by Christopher Schaberg.

In April 1948, Wallace Stevens received a letter from a nun. Her name was Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, and she was completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin. It was their first correspondence, and she’d enclosed some notes on his poetry, for which he was thankful: “It is a relief to have a letter from someone that is interested in understanding.” His short response to her includes a curious personal admission: “I do seek a centre and expect to go on seeking it.”

In 1951, after a literary critic detected a sense of spiritual “nothingness” in his poetry, Stevens wrote Sister Bernetta with a clarification: “I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy.” Considering the debate over Stevens’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, his heartfelt letters to Sister Bernetta are tantalizing. What made the poet comfortable sending such honest thoughts from Hartford, Connecticut to Winona, Minnesota?

On Good Friday, 1934, 18-year-old Viola Roselyn Quinn felt inspired by the Chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, a grand church on the campus of the College of St. Teresa. Later that year she entered the Franciscan Sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, and took the name Mary Bernetta. She would go on to teach at several colleges until her retirement in 1983, and published books of scholarship on Modernist poets.

She also wrote letters. In addition to her correspondence with Stevens, Sister Bernetta exchanged letters with Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Robert Penn Warren, James Wright, Seamus Heaney, and others. She read their work with skilled attention, and they responded to her with sincerity and gratitude.

In September 1948, Stevens again wrote Sister Bernetta with a note of appreciation, saying “I cannot tell you how happy it made me to think that my poems have given any pleasure to a woman of your intelligence and goodwill.” In 1949, she sent him an Easter card that included a reference to the lion of Judah (a symbolic figure for Christ from the Book of Revelation)—which he then included in his poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

She would continue to send Stevens letters at Easter and Christmas. His December response in 1951 is lyric. Hartford was “covered with snow and ice . . . But we have been having the most saintly moonlight nights.” Tired of the “roaring” of the Christmas season, he envied the “loneliness” of Sister Bernetta’s empty college campus, where “one can collect one’s self and no doubt, in your case, collect a great deal more.” In other letters, he expressed gratitude that Sister Bernetta’s “notes bring me into contact with something that I should not have otherwise except for them.” Her letters “seem to come from something fundamental, something isolated from this ruthless present.”

Some critics use Stevens’s conversion as the flashlight to uncover the religious themes in his poetry. Such an approach can be taken too far, but Stevens did regularly thank Sister Bernetta for the attention she paid to the “smaller things” in his verse—which often included religious allusions and concepts. She never thought him a devotional poet; he never even thought himself a philosophical one (in May 1952, he told her: “If I felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy of my poems, I should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is poetry that I want to write”).

Sister Bernetta’s keen critical eye also earned the praise of William Carlos Williams, who called her reading of Paterson “something of second sight.” Like Stevens, who bemoaned “the endless common-place” of most letters from scholars and readers, Williams thought Sister Bernetta unique: “Certainly it frightens me to see, rather than how obscure it is to others’ minds, how clear it is to you. It shows me that since someone has looked discerningly into its motivations then others may see as much.”

In that letter from August 1951, Williams jokes that “You realize, of course, being a Catholic, that I am not a Catholic.” Yet he thinks it a “great virtue” of Sister Bernetta that she not “lay imputations” against his agnosticism: “You and I share something bigger than ourselves when we are tolerant—each of the other—as I have seen you to be.” He would again praise her religious sense upon the publication of her first book, The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (1955), noting that a generosity illuminated her critical work.

She had also begun to publish her own poetry. Dancing in Stillness (1983), her only book, collects work from those years. Even Flannery O’Connor praised Sister Bernetta’s verse, telling a Jesuit priest about “the Sister at Minneapolis that writes such good poetry.”

“You have brought me here to show me a secret thing,” she begins her poem “In Branches of Spruce.” The narrator sits on a garden bench, and is thinking how no one else but her can see “a trembling square / of cobweb” in the spruce tree. Although the gift is temporary—“this cloth of silver and pearl the sun will sever, / this veil of Veronica the wind will tear”—it feels like a divine gift: “You have given me this cobweb strung with rain / like a father’s whispered word to silence pain.”

Sister Bernetta wrote in the aesthetic tradition of Catholic poets of religious orders—from Gerard Manley Hopkins on to her own contemporaries, the nuns Maura Eichner and Jessica Powers—and the critical sensibility with which she considered Modernist work applied to her own. Channeling Hopkins, she described the idea of poetic metamorphosis as when “the author’s imagination transforms what is into a vision of what might be, an ideal thing somehow truer than the earthly, the soul behind the skull.”

Whether she was writing of a cobweb in a spruce, or of how a “leaf-green frog / Stiffens in hope its camouflage will work,” that awareness of transcendent grace comes with a healthy strain of melancholy. “I too have combated disaster thus, / used impassivity to win the day. / Behold the proof in livid cicatrice / That footsteps to do not always go away.”

Sister Bernetta lived in a space where faith and melancholy reside—but she was more interested in conversation and consolation than conversion. After James Wright gave a reading at the College of St. Teresa, she sent him comforting words: “When you first walked down the platform I was struck by what I recognized later was sadness . . . [don’t let] gentle seriousness . . . sink into solemnity, lest the ghost of Theodore Roethke haunt you.” Wright loved her presence in his life, and tried to explain her importance in a letter: “Always when I hear of you, or read your writings, or when I am in the presence of some grandeur, as in Italy or in the mountains of New York, or even when I am feeling sad about something—the last because I know that you would understand the sadness, even if no one else on earth did.”

She died in 2003, leaving unfinished the draft of a prose version of Dante’s Divine Comedy for children, titled Pilgrimage to the Stars. That might sound like an odd choice, but Sister Bernetta seemed to have particular gifts of transformation—literary or otherwise. In one of his final letters to her, Stevens wrote of how there was a calming rhythm to her seasonal notes to him. Those epistles “Somehow or other, take me back to a much simpler world of home which, while it is gone for good, is still a good deal more permanent than the present world can ever be.”

If William Faulkner had ever been given enough money to recreate Yoknapatawpha County in the world, would he have done so? The short answer is “no,” thus ending an essay long before it even had the chance to begin, ignoring my compelling concern about location and landscape stemming from Taylor Hagood’s academically thick definition of Faulkner’s definition of place…

Faulkner establishes plots of space informed by an Arcadian ethic and haunted by configurations and reconfigurations of pagan values. And he uses these places to tease out the conflicts of speech and speechlessness by invoking literal historic earth to expose the mythic layers of experience that define the mythic-imperial place and control its constituents.

…and what it might mean to physically sit with the maps of Yoknapatawpha County and the stories of Faulkner themselves.

I think Hagood’s point regarding Faulkner is a good point but is one that misses the breadth of usefulness contained in having a sense of location. Vladimir Nabokov used to recommend to his students at Wellesley that they draw out maps and rooms for characters as they made their way through the world of the novel. I keep that piece of knowledge in mind when asking myself, “What does it mean to map out Yoknapatawpha County as a writer? What does it mean that Armstid Farm seems to move in-between “Spotted Horses” and As I Lay Dying?”

Does this mean there is a secret story somewhere where Henry Armstid and his wife bring workers in and move their land from one spot on the map to another? Who did they bring in to get that job done? Were there children around? How do they remember the day?

And what does it mean that the rivers that run through the county don’t seem to act like normal rivers? What does it mean to tell a story to get a sense of where you are? How do you map the invisible amongst the lines of an “actual” map?

Would we find these questions aided if we tried to bring the actual Yoknapatawpha County into the world, buildings and all, as if it were a cross between HBO’s Westworld and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings?

Perhaps what the map emphasizes in Faulkner’s work— beyond the way in which characters mistreat the environment and African Americans— is the inadvertent idea that a location must be worthy of the story of our situation; that our feelings transpose us onto and into these places regardless of whether or not the location is directly capable of mirroring those feelings back to us, so even though— as John Michael Vlach notes in an essay on “The Architecture of Urban Slavery in the Antebellum South,” that  “…while the [slave] quarters [in the Robinson-Aiken house in Charleston, South Carolina] may have been pleasant to look at, the rooms in Aiken’s slaves quarters were oppressive”— the stories fill the place up. In “A Bear Hunt,” for instance, an enslaved man remembers the fact that a man in the party burned his shirt collar with a cigar, and— as a bit of revenge, years later— tells local Indians a lie so as to scare the man out of his wits, leaving the man thinking that he could very well be eaten alive.

When we ask ourselves where a story can situate us, we find ourselves asking parallel questions as well, questions that drag us back into the useless realm of perpetual usefulness: where does the phone situate us? Where the song situate us? Where does the computer screen situate us? Where does the movie situate us? (In a world akin to The Purple Rose Of Cairo?) Where does the highway situate us? The dirt road? The building? The neighborhood? The woods? The article? The book?

Barack Obama was repeatedly praised for his ability as a storyteller, but in rereading some of these articles of praise (like John Dickerson’s preview of Obama’s Inaugural in 2009) it was fairly clear that others kept coming up short in understanding the function of its use. (Though it appears Beto O’Rourke in Texas seems to have studied the function of story in Obama’s telling and gotten a decent sense of how to make it his own.) One reason why Obama was successful was that his storytelling situated. Note that “situated’ is different from ‘provided context.” And I’m aware that to single out Obama’s talents as a storyteller because of his ability to “situate” the listener almost suggests an invocation of an Eisenhower-styled era of idealism— which doesn’t quite get to the nub of as to why was as effective as he was— but the argument here isn’t about casting the act of situating in storytelling as being exceptional; it’s not; what this is about is what it means to tell the story of who we are—and where we are—in uninterrupted flows that make their way into the sky and beyond.

That’s why it’s worth studying—even if only for an afternoon— the way Faulkner’s characters move through the landscape, even if his stories seem to resist the gravitational pull of this particular dimestore exegetical impulse. To do so leads one to realize that the text we encounter is not Iain Sinclair walking through London in the name of psychogeography to declaim on the graffiti he sees without nudging his way too deeply into the history that brought that graffiti forth. We get a little closer to the idea of the dynamic we envision when we read Jean-Paul Clébert’s descriptions of Paris, but that isn’t quite the “there” of it yet. Instead, piece by piece, we read about a camping/hunting trip recounted in broad strokes with comparatively little attention paid to the landscape. A child recalls the same woods (and their legendary occupants) in mytho-poetic terms. The face of a relative of a man referenced during said camping trip is described as “big, broad, dust-colored … of a certain blurred serenity like carved heads on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist.” These linkages are made over three different stories— “A Bear Hunt,” “The Bear,” and “Red Leaves,” respectively. Ironically, they make clear that the process of situating ourselves is not and has never been done in a straight line.

This is also what makes Facebook’s power plays (and the power plays of others, like Peter Thiel’s Palantir) and our broad cultural acquiescence to the rules contained within these power plays so pernicious. An A/B test of a hashtag of moral urgency can only move power to a certain point. People and a better understanding of the subtleties of dynamics are needed to carry the baton the rest of the way.

Our lack of appreciation for both empathy and polyphony— let alone our felicity with it (we insist on certainty; when we enter into the world of online rhetoric, we so clearly know; that clarity of intent drowned out our attempt to be critical or self-reflective for years)— leaves us stumbling through the wilderness hiccuping. And our insistence on reading everything within a lens of immediately actionable use speaks to the way in which the current matrix of power roils our senses. As of this writing, there are approximately 63,000 google searches done every second, and we seem to want to read and put pieces of information together as if we can move on par with that or perhaps even faster than that—as if we can move in a way akin to the language that was put to use at the beginning of the internet, as actual “surfers.” It puts me in mind of Maria Bustillos’s first piece for The New Yorker and how one can cultivate an analogous approach to reading.

But this isn’t to court the language of fatalism, defeat, or to describe one’s encounters with time. It’s just to write to say that if you find yourself adrift in this current socio-political moment and know you feel like you need to have someplace where you can begin; if you find what you could have sworn was the urgency of your personal clarity lost upon others who were keenly telling personal truths of their own and can feel your part in being part of the political moment moving elsewhere, then one way forward—if Faulkner is any indication—is to say that you couldn’t do any worse than by taking a look at where you are.

A couple years ago, Drake appeared on Saturday Night Live’s “Black Jeopardy.” If you haven”t seen that running skit, imagine the game show, but with categories like “Oh snap,” “Bye, Felicia!” and “Bruh.” The trick of each new episode is that the stereotypically “blacker” contestants are joined by an unlikely individual who appears destined, at least initially, to get every question wrong, but surprises us. In one episode, it’s Doug (Tom Hanks), a bearded man sporting a “Make America Great” cap. In another, it’s Alison (Elizabeth Banks), a woman who’s convinced she’ll do well since she once dated a Black man in college. And in the episode I’m interested in now, it’s Jared (Drake), a Black Canadian.

Jared is a shoo-in for the role of the surprising outlier. There’s his weird accent, like Steve Erkel raised in Scarborough. His answers are obscure. Asked to identify a comedian from the 80s, Jared responds “Rick Moranis.” For an experienced athlete, he says “Jaromír Jágr.”  There’s the moment we’re vaguely expecting as viewers: when host Darnell Haynes makes the obligatory jab that “no good rap comes from Canada,” and Jared asks “what about Drake?” Darnell’s comeback is “who are these people you keep mentioning?” It’s as if Jared has landed on earth “from a spaceship,” Darnell complains, adding “I think Canada has messed with your blackness.” “Why do I have to be your definition of Black?” Jared snaps back, “it’s making me so angry inside.” With that, the game bell sounds, and Jared is abruptly announced the winner. “It’s making me so angry inside” is “the secret Black phrase of the day”: the most correct thing a contestant on “Black Jeopardy” could ever say.

I’m Black Canadian, so maybe it makes sense that this skit has stayed with me. I’ve also spent a couple decades thinking pretty seriously about that related category “Black Canadian literature,” most recently as a writer understood as contributing to this body of work, and also as someone lucky enough to have his books published internationally. Black Canadian literature is extraordinarily diverse—hard to say what defines and distinguishes it, though it’s maybe worthwhile trying. And of course not every artist yearns to have their work framed as “Black Canadian,” especially when the term is far from guaranteed to win you widespread understanding and respect. All the same, Jared isn’t the first Black Canadian who has hoped to indicate his connection, if not restriction, to specific lands and communities—or at least hoped to suggest that we’re not, in fact, from outer space.

Some two and a half decades ago, the writer and critic George Elliott Clarke compiled a rather astonishing bibliography of Black Canadian writing, some two hundred years of written texts—thousands of them—stretching from slave narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries, to books and tracts by 19th century Black immigrants (e.g. the novelist Martin Delany, and the journalist Mary Ann Shadd), to the contemporary boom of writings by M. NourbeSe Philips, Dionne Brand, Dany Laferriére, Lawrence Hill, Wayde Compton, and Esi Edugyan, among many others. Read together, they put to death that old and enduring stereotype that Canada has no rich and longstanding Black presence, or that the nation exists as some fabled haven from anti-black racism. Canada, in fact, has had its own legacies of slavery, segregation, state violence, and systemic impoverishment; and Canada, no less than any other site of the African diaspora, boasts brilliant affirmations of Black life and creativity, powerfully “here,” but in complex intercultural and diasporic dialogue with the world.

For me, Black Canadian Literature is not only an archive of writings, but also conversations, connections, and intimacies. I’ve benefited from truly inspiring relationships with other Black writers. One relationship I feel compelled to mention here is with Austin Clarke, arguably the first Black professional writer of fiction in Canada. From 1964 until 2015, he published some eleven novels, six short story collections, as well as several memoirs, books of non-fiction, and poetry. Austin’s third novel, The Meeting Point, was very likely the first novel substantially chronicling Black experience in Canada.

A widely recognized figure of contemporary Caribbean literature, his life and legacy were complicated by the fact that, unlike his contemporaries, he ended up in Toronto, not in cities like New York or London. Despite his active presence on the contemporary Canadian literature scene of the 60s and early 70s; his presence and contributions are left out of many chronicles of “CanLit.” Both financially and in terms of critical reception in Canada, he remained vulnerable as a writer throughout his life. And perhaps for this very reason, he took special interest in me, and tried hard to assure me that I had a place in the world of letters that didn’t always see him. His support meant mandatory bouts of feasting and drinking, some lasting as long as 12 hours, in which he demonstrated himself a man of impossibly strong constitution, strolling home to write when I was quietly throwing up.

Austin and I were different in a lot of ways, culturally, generationally, and politically. He always signed his emails to me “as man,” a Bajan expression of strength and solidarity; but he styled his manhood in a way different from me. We also had very different tastes and aspirations as writers, different ideas of what we wished the novel to do. But our connection remained deep.

He offered me crucial support for my first novel, and took a special interest in the novel I’ve most recently published, Brother. For years, we had many long conversations about it.

Austin’s The Meeting Point centered on Black domestic workers from the “West Indies” who were able to immigrate to Canada during the period before the policies systematically barring visible minorities from entering Canada were lifted. His novel was about vulnerable individuals whom few, at the time, would ever think to look at. My own mother was one of those domestic workers. Austin gave me a sense that art could be about the struggles, hopes, language, and everyday beauty of those close to me “here”—the generation of working class immigrants represented by my Black mother and also my South Asian father. He also gave me a sense of deeper connection to a legacy of life and art stretching beyond my birthplace, and reaching not only the Caribbean, but also the bigger Black world.

I explained to him that I wanted Brother to be about the generation after the one he was the first to chronicle, about children growing up in a land their immigrant parents needed to imagine as one of clear promise, but which the children knew also posed often unacknowledged dangers. I wanted my novel to be about youth shadowed by poverty, by the racist gaze, by the threatened violence of those in authority. But I also needed my book to reveal beauty, and to show how toughened youths and young men could brave great acts of tenderness and love. I wanted it to be a novel of painstaking attention to both language and narrative form. And as Austin drew inspiration from the music of his generation, from the legacies of jazz, soul, and reggae, I wished to honor the music that was closest to me as a youth—the hip hop of the late 80s and early 90s, including the advent of turntablism, all set within a Toronto that had rocked and found its own voice years before the “breakthrough” emergences of artists like Drake and the Weeknd. I dreamt of celebrating the completion of this novel with Austin, but he died before it was published. I ended up dedicating it posthumously to him.

I don’t watch much SNL, but I do believe in accidental moments of connection between very different kinds of artists, moments when common legacies and challenges flash into collective sight. During that episode of “Black Jeopardy,” Jared is asked to identify the artist of a hot and recent album, and he answers “Kardinal Offishall,” a rapper he helplessly explains “was nominated for a Juno.” The joke again is of the presumed obscurity of both of the artist and the award. But, then again, some of us actually remember the work of Kardinal Offishall, and of the uphill battle he and other artists faced in getting his form of hip hop supported by Canadian cultural institutions and “out there” in the world—that old and enduring battle of shifting perceptions and hierarchies of voice, of changing the structures through which art is made and life is lived. When I smiled, it likely wasn’t quite the same way most others did in the studio audience. Even when voiced in jest, the name meant something to me.

I grew up in a house with very few books, but there was one that came with my family from Iran and never let me go: a slender, battered book of poetry my mother displayed on the mantle, next to photographs of our family and the country we’d been forced to flee. The cover showed a woman with kohl-lined eyes and bobbed hair, and the Persian script slanted upwards, as if in flight from the page. That book wasn’t an object or even an artifact but an atmosphere. Parting the pages released a sharp, acrid scent that was the very scent of Iran, which was also the scent of time, love, and loss.

I wouldn’t know this for a long time, but Forugh Farrokhzad, the author of that book, died in a car crash eleven years before my family left Iran for America. She was just 32 and when she died she was the country’s most notorious woman. Her poems were revolutionary: a radical bid for self-expression and democracy written in a time and place which showed little tolerance for either, particularly when women voiced the desire for them.

Like the thousands of other Iranians who left Iran in the late 1970s, my family escaped the country in a hurry. It was 1978, a year on the edge of political upheaval. Soon there would be gunfire and tanks and dead bodies heaped in the streets. In 1978 no one could know that, but many people—especially the poets and artists—sensed it.

That was almost 40 years ago. I was five, and yet the details are strangely vivid: my grandmother sitting me on her lap to watch the pop diva Googoosh on television while my mother packed our suitcases. It was winter, and the snow was falling fast that night in Tehran. “We’ll be back soon,” my mother kept saying, but something in her made her walk over to the bookshelf and pick up her favorite book—a book of poems by Forugh. Something in her must have known she would need it.

*

Growing up in America, I was made to think poetry is useless, that it’s dead or elitist or merely decorative. In Iran, meanwhile, there is no higher art form. Poets aren’t just venerated—they are loved. Everyone seems to have a favorite poet and can recite whole poems by heart. Iranians know that when you memorize a poem it becomes part of you. You carry it with you, even if in fragments, even in another country.

I don’t remember my mother reading Forugh’s book or any other book when I was growing up. The exigencies of immigration, of remaking a life, didn’t allow it. My most enduring memories from those first years in America are of her working at the motel she and my father bought: shuffling from motel room to motel room with an olive gray trolley stocked with cleaning supplies, her voice reduced to a broken English. She worked long hours and when she came home she’d stretch out on the couch with the television on until she fell asleep, but maybe it wasn’t that she was just too tired to read. Poetry was bound up with a self she had shed, and it might have been too painful to be reminded of that self. Still, she never gave her books away.

When I left home, her book of Forugh’s poems was one of the few things I took with me. In college I learned to read them in the original Persian. I’d devoured Plath and Rich, but I wanted to hear a particular voice—a woman and an Iranian—in whom I could see myself reflected. Forugh wrote about desire, about pain, about courage; reading her was a revelation. The very existence of those poems challenged the stereotype, so prevalent then, and prevalent still, that Iranian women were silent victims of fate. In those poems I found proof of everything America was telling me Iranian women were not and that Iran was telling Iranian women they shouldn’t be. Bold, brilliant, lustful, angry, difficult. Those poems saved me. They still do.

*

For Iranians in America the past 40 years have felt like an unbroken succession of losses and terrors. The revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the constant threat of military intervention—for us, the Muslim ban and current specter of war stir up a familiar dread. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, Iran and America were almost magnetically opposed. Both countries were part of me, but it became an intractable fact of my life to see them oppose and vilify each other. I became used to the opposition, but I was also pained by it. Poetry hasn’t solved that rift, but it has allowed me to articulate it, and as the prospect of war with Iran grows once again, I feel the pull of poetry, and in particular the pull of that slender, battered book by Forugh Farrokhzad.

W.H. Auden, whose poems I happen to love, famously asserted that poetry does nothing. The American in me is inclined to agree; the Iranian knows he was wrong. For all of its history, in Iran a poem could get you killed—and set you free. When hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tehran in 2009, their chants took the shape of poems, and often it was Forugh’s poems inscribed on their protest signs. Her poems have been banned and censored for nearly 40 years, yet Iranians continue to find ways to read them.

If you don’t know Forugh’s poems, there couldn’t be a better time to read them. Read her poems and you’ll find not only Iran but America. Read her poems and you’ll find the very forces that shape our moment: misogyny, censorship, nativism, consumerism, the annihilating violence of war. Read her poems and you’ll find that they, like all the best poems, don’t merely offer a reprieve from the abuses and terrors of the world, but a repudiation of the forces that make those abuses and terrors possible: ignorance and political regimes for which ignorance has been and will always be their life’s blood.

And this is me
A woman alone
on the threshold of a cold season
on the verge of understanding
the earth’s polluted existence
and the simple sadness of the sky
and the futility of these concrete hands.

I am cold,
I am cold and it seems
that I’ll never be warm again. . .
I am cold and I know
there’s nothing left of the wild poppy’s dreams
but a few drops of blood. 

–from “Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season” by Forugh Farrokhzad (translated by Jasmin Darznik)

Two hundred years ago today, Emily Brontë was born. She died only 30 years later, of tuberculosis. Her coffin was only 16 inches wide (though this may not mean what we think it means). She wrote one complete novel, which has become an enduring classic of English literature. Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Henry Miller recommended it. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes borrowed its title for poems. Others, some of them right here in the Literary Hub office, don’t care for it quite so much. For Brontë’s birthday, I offer to you a selection of literary opinions on her one hit wonder, which was polarizing at the time of its publication and remains so 171 years later.

Virginia Woolf:

Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel — a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers . . . ” the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all.

–from her 1916 essay “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” as published in The Common Reader

Alice Hoffman:

[My favorite novelist of all time is] Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived. Read “Wuthering Heights” when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.

–in her 2014 “By the Book” interview with The New York Times

Anne Rice:

Is there anybody out there who hasn’t heard of Heathcliff, the dark villian/hero of this high pitched and utterly committed work of madness? Oh, I love it. It was difficult for me at first. I’m a writer, but not a natural reader. But once I was into this book, once I stopped asking questions of the narrative and just entered the shadowy world of Catherine and her doomed household, I was quite literally spellbound. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. What a dreadful irony that this quiet, disciplined woman who lived out her life in a cold parsons’ house with her brilliant sisters, her drunken brother and her eccentric father (The man memorized Paradise Lost: imagine. And outlived all his children!) never even had an inkling that this outpouring of her heart and soul would become a classic, overshadowing even her sister’s highly successful Jane Eyre. Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes—to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time. One last point: the father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood, indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row. I study it; I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment.

–as reviewed on Amazon in 2004 (oh yes, Anne Rice writes Amazon reviews)

Elizabeth Hardwick:

Wuthering Heights has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for. It is on a different level of inspiration from [Brontë’s] poetry; the grandeur and complication of it always remind one of the leap she might have taken had she lived.

. . .

Catherine, in Wuthering Heights, is nihilistic, self-indulgent, bored, restless, nostalgic for childhood, unmanageable. She has the charm of a wayward, schizophrenic girl, but she has little to give, since she is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive. What is interesting and contemporary for us is that Emily Brontë should have given Catherine the center of the stage, to share it along with the rough, brutal Heathcliff. In a novel by Charlotte or Anne, Cathy would be a shallow beauty, analyzed and despaired of by a reasonable, clever and deprived heroine. She would be fit only for the subplot. There is also an unromantic driven egotism in the characters, a lack of moral longings, odd in the work of a daughter of a clergyman.

. . .

The plot of Wuthering Heights is immensely complicated and yet there is the most felicitous union of author and subject. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness.

Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. Emily Brontë appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

–in her essay on the Brontës in her 1974 collection Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature

Anne Tyler:

I have tried several times to read Wuthering Heights but it just strikes me as silly, so I always quit it. I don’t tell any of my friends this because women have very fond memories of reading it when they’re young and I don’t want to hurt their feelings.

–in a 2018 interview with The Guardian

I somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading Wuthering Heights, but then I found out that several of my women friends considered Heathcliff their all-time favorite romantic hero. So I read about three-quarters of it as a grown-up, and immediately developed some serious concerns about the mental health of my friends.

–in her 2015 “By the Book” interview with The New York Times

Maryse Condé:

When I read Wuthering Heights, I was 14. It was given to me at a prize ceremony for being good in writing. I read the book in September, which is rainy season in the Caribbean. I was lying on my bed in my bedroom, and for me it was an enchantment. I really was transported to wherever Emily Brontë wanted to transport me … and then I forgot all about it. I saw it at the cinema after that, by chance—the version with Laurence Olivier. It revived memories of my adolescence, so I read it again and discovered it had a meaning beyond the actual meaning, beyond the meanings the author wanted to give. It was a story you could transplant into any society. I was teaching a few years later and I discovered Jean Rhys, who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, a rewriting of Jane Eyre. I thought, It’s not so bizarre that I’m attracted to Emily Brontë. Because, in fact, there is something about the Brontë sisters that speaks to Caribbean women, regardless of their color, regardless of their age, regardless of the time they live in. So I decided I was going to rewrite it. But it was at least another five years for me before I really started. Because my husband, who is English, was shocked when I was telling him my vague intention. He did not see the connection between the Caribbean and Brontë’s work. It seemed blasphemy to him to rewrite Brontë’s masterpiece. So I took another five years to decide—and when I could not help it, I started to write.

. . .

It is such a masterpiece, such a beloved work in England. For example, when we promoted the book in England we went to the Museum at Haworth, where Emily Brontë was born. People came to listen to me but I could see when they were sitting down looking at me, there was a kind of … I wouldn’t say fear, but a kind of shock. What is she doing to the text? How can she dare touch that text?! I really had to convince them that I did not do any disrespect to Brontë; on the contrary, I was paying homage to her. It seems to me the greatest homage that I pay is to her artistry.

And it is another way of telling people that you should not draw barriers between colors, ideas, et-cetera. Everybody says: But why an English novel? Why not a French one? Why not an African one? You see—it’s as if you should never cross a barrier, when, in fact, to live is to cross barriers.

–in a 1999 interview with BOMB about her novel Windward Heights, a re-interpretation of Brontë’s classic

Katherine Anne Porter:

And of course we read all the eighteenth-century novelists, though Jane Austen, like Turgenev, didn’t really engage me until I was quite mature. I read them both when I was very young, but I was grown up before I really took them in. And I discovered for myself Wuthering Heights; I think I read that book every year of my life for fifteen years. I simply adored it.

–in a 1963 interview with The Paris Review

Joyce Carol Oates:

This great novel, though not inordinately long, and, contrary to general assumption, not inordinately complicated, manages to be a number of things: a romance that brilliantly challenges the basic presumptions of the “romantic”; a “gothic” that
evolves—with an absolutely inevitable grace—into its temperamental opposite; a parable of innocence and loss, and childhood’s necessary defeat; and a work of consummate skill on its primary level, that is, the level of language. Above all, it is a history: its first statement is the date 1801; and one of its final statements involves New Year’s Day (of 1803). It seeks both to dramatize and to explain how the ancient stock of the Earnshaws are restored to their rights (the somber house of Wuthering Heights, built in 1500), and, at the same time, how and why the last of the Earnshaws, Hareton, will be leaving the Heights to live, with his cousin-bride, at Thrushcross Grange. One generation has given way to the next: the primitive energies of childhood have given way to the intelligent compromises of adulthood. The history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons begins to seem a history, writ small, albeit with exquisite detail, of civilization itself.

. . .

Heathcliff’s enduring appeal is approximately that of Edmund, Iago, Richard III, the intermittent Macbeth: the villain who impresses by way of his energy, his cleverness, his peculiar sort of courage; and by his asides, inviting, as they do, the audience’s or reader’s collaboration in wickedness. Brontë is perfectly accurate in having her villain tell us, by way of Mrs. Dean and Lockwood, that brutality does not always disgust; and that there are those persons— often of weak, cringing, undeveloped character—who “innately admire” it, provided they themselves are not injured. (Though, in Isabella’s case, it would seem that she has enjoyed, and even provoked, her husband’s “experimental” sadism.) Heathcliff presides over a veritable cornucopia of darksome episodes: he beats and kicks the fallen Hindley, he throws a knife at Isabella, he savagely slaps young Catherine, he doesn’t trouble to summon a doctor for his dying son, as he no longer has any use for him. Unfailingly cruel, yet sly enough to appear exasperated with his victims’ testing of his cruelty, Heathcliff arouses the reader to this peculiar collaborative bond by the sheer force of his language, and his wit: for is he not, with his beloved gone, the lifeforce gone wild? He has no opposition worthy of him; he has no natural mate remaining; he is characterless and depersonalized will—a masklike grimace that can never relax into a smile. (Significantly, Heathcliff is grinning as a corpse—”grinning at death” as old Joseph notes.) Very few readers of Wuthering Heights have cared to observe that there is no necessary or even probable connection between the devoted lover of Catherine, and the devoted hater of all the remaining world (including—and this most improbably—Catherine’s own daughter Catherine, who resembles her): for certain stereotypes persist so stubbornly they may very well be archetypes, evoking, as they do, an involuntary identification with energy, evil, will, action. The mass murderer who is really tenderhearted, the rapist whose victims provoke him, the Fuhrer who is a vegetarian and in any case loves dogs. . . Our anxieties, which may well spring from childhood experiences, have much to do with denying the actual physicality of the outrages, whether those of Heathcliff or any villain, literary or historic, and supplanting for them, however magically, however pitiably, “spiritual” values. If Heathcliff grinds his victims beneath his feet like worms, is it not natural to imagine that they are worms, and deserve their suffering, is it not natural to imagine that they are not us? We feel only contempt for the potential sadist Linton, who sucks on sugar candy, and whose relationship with his child-wife parodies a normal love relationship (he asks her not to kiss him, because it makes him breathless). Consequently our temptation is to align ourselves with Heathcliff, as Brontë shrewdly understands.

–from “The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights,” originally published in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1983

Caryl Phillips:

I read it growing up but to me, as a young man, the most interesting aspect of the novel (because I was a boy) wasn’t the romance. Oh Heathcliff! Oh Cathy! I wasn’t interested in any of that stuff. It was the moors, the sort of bleak desolate nature of this place which was just on the periphery of Leeds. I was growing up in Leeds, a place where if you saw a blade of grass, you immediately ran out and kicked a football on it. We didn’t have gardens, certainly not in the place I was growing up in, in council houses. We went to the park to kick a ball, we didn’t go to learn the names of the trees. We didn’t go on expeditions to flora and fauna.

But as I was getting older, I was aware that right on the edge of Leeds, there was this wild strange place that, as an urban kid, meant nothing to me. So there were two books that I was reading at that time that introduced me to the idea that there’s another kind of life to England—not just a natural life, but a literary life too—that is rooted in nature. One book was Wuthering Heights and the other was The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, whose opening section is just about Egdon Heath. There aren’t any characters in it: the heath is the character. That was the prism through which I looked at Wuthering Heights, and I had no fascination with the origins of Heathcliff or the romance at the center of it. I didn’t even have any fascination with the Yorkshire dialect they’re speaking. It was just these brooding descriptions of this place that was slightly out of reach to me. When I reread the Brontës later on, again it wasn’t Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance or the Yorkshire dialect, it was more the isolation of Healthcliff. Why did he become so malevolent? Why did he become so cruel? Why was he so angry? Why was he so prey to these spasms of bitterness? There’s another element that completely fascinated me by that stage and that’s Emily Brontë herself, because I just loved the strange ethereal nature of the woman. And so I was as much fascinated with what kind of sensibility had written this as I was with what was in the book. And I think many years ago, when I wrote the novel Cambridge, I called the central character Emily because of Emily Brontë. In the novel she was about 30 or so—the age Brontë was when she died—and slightly strange, singular, willful. All the things I imagined Brontë might be. Obviously she’s not Emily Brontë, but there was a slight private doffing of the cap to this fascination with the creator of Wuthering Heights.

–in a 2015 interview with Public Books about The Lost Child, “an oblique, intricate re-writing” of Wuthering Heights

Philip Larkin:

It’s some time since I read [Wuthering Heights]. I never know what to think of it. In a way I don’t appreciate the emotion of Heathcliff’s love, or his hatreds—it doesn’t ‘come over’ to me: I think the novel splendidly constructed and written, but the central emotion doesn’t quite touch me, not like the emotion of, say, Lady Chatterley or Mr. Weston’s Good Wine or Tess or Jude, to name a few well worn okay works—only at the very end, when H. isn’t eating anything and doesn’t know if he’s coming or going, that part I like. Are people ‘moved’ by it, as by Lear or Othello? I don’t think I am. And Gothic—yes, but not Italian: German, isn’t it? Heathcliff to me is a sort of sprite of the bergs, a cousin to Mary Shelley’s monster, a creature of the northern mists, a gnome.

–in a letter to Monica Jones, August 19th, 1955

Charlotte Brontë:

I have just read over Wuthering Heights, and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people — to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the North of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive.

. . .

With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights, I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath.  Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character.  Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise.

. . .

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

. . .

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin—like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.

–from the preface to an 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights

Thomas Bradshaw:

Wuthering Heights is told so brilliantly. . . . Heart of Darkness also blew me away when I first read it. That, Wuthering Heights, and Hemingway showed me what literature could be; I could do whatever I wanted! . . . Heathcliff embodies the idea of acting on pure id. This guy is just doing what he wants; he isn’t adhering to any conventions of the day. And yet he is acting this way with this suit and tie—he becomes this refined individual on the outside, but inside he’s still totally brutal. The lengths that Heathcliff goes: he digs up Catherine’s body and hugs it, knocks out the side of her coffin so he can be buried next to her in the dirt and have their bones be together! It gets to an essence of truth that is more truthful than reality, and that’s what I’m talking about.

–in a 2009 interview with BOMB

Jeanette Winterson:

I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?).

Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost.

Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff.

Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin.

What’s love got to do with it?

(All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story)

–from Winterson’s website, 2011

Joan Didion:

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.

–from her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect” (and yes, I know this isn’t really about the book, but I couldn’t help myself)

“Ideas are more difficult to kill than people,” a figure in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, American Gods, announces ominously in one of the protagonist Shadow’s phantasmagoric dreams, “but they can be killed, in the end.” Gaiman’s chilling sentiment refers as much to ideas as it does to religions—appearing as its protagonist wanders through a lurid dream museum of forgotten gods—and it suggests that just about anything, over time, can fade away into the quiet stillness of being forgotten, until it disappears entirely, like the deceased in Pixar’s Coco when no one living remembers them anymore. Yet some ideas nonetheless resist burial, resist evanescing into the placeless place of the truly dead. They return when we need them most, even if we don’t always realize, at first, that we need them.

This notion of the persistence of important ideas animates Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, a too-little-known dystopian narrative from 1921 that has a peculiar resonance in 2018—as it did for George Orwell in 1946, shortly before he wrote 1984. Zamyatin had composed the novel under the increasingly bloody grip of Lenin’s Russia, and though We is set centuries in the future, its technocratic society bears obvious resemblance to 20th-century dictatorships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the iconoclastic Zamyatin—who had been jailed by the Bolsheviks prior to writing We—found his novel swiftly condemned and suppressed by the regime in power. So successful was the suppression campaign, indeed, that it would be years before the book began attracting attention, and, even then, it never managed to rise high out of the night-swamp obscurity it had been condemned to, despite praise by Orwell and Ursula Le Guin, the latter of whom declared it in 1973 “perhaps the finest science-fiction novel ever written.” A 2018 hardcover edition of the book, featuring black-and-white illustrations by Kit Russell reminiscent of the wordless novels of the early 20th century, seeks to restore the book to the spot it deserves next to the better-known dystopias it may have influenced, like Brave New World and 1984.

When I finished the book, I was struck as much by its disturbing ending as by how it conjured up elements of contemporary American and European politics. Seventy-two years ago, when Orwell came across Zamyatin’s odd, oneiric novel in a French translation, he, too, remarked on its political power and resonance. Indeed, it is possible that without We, Orwell’s signature work, 1984, would not exist. We “is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age,” he wrote in the Tribune, three years before 1984 was published; Animal Farm had come out just the year before he reviewed We.

While Orwell acknowledged—rightly—that the book was no contender for the best-written of tomes, he devoted much of his review to pointing out why We was politically superior, in his mind, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Although “Zamyatin’s book is less well put together,” he wrote, “it has a political point which the other lacks.” Orwell imagined that “Brave New World must be partly derived from” the obscure Russian novel, as “[b]oth books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence,” but added that “Huxley’s book shows less political awareness” because

[i]n Huxley’s book the problem of “human nature” is in a sense solved, because it assumes that by pre-natal treatment, drugs and hypnotic suggestion the human organism can be specialised in any way that is desired. A first-rate scientific worker is as easily produced as an Epsilon semi-moron, and in either case the vestiges of primitive instincts, such as maternal feeling or the desire for liberty, are easily dealt with. At the same time no clear reason is given why society should be stratified in the elaborate way it is described. The aim is not economic exploitation, but the desire to bully and dominate does not seem to be a motive either. There is no power hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure. Zamyatin’s book is on the whole more relevant to our own situation. In spite of education and the vigilance of the Guardians, many of the ancient human instincts are still there.

In other words, Zamyatin’s novel, for all the futuristic peculiarities of its central society, manages to feel more believable on a human level, largely because of the deep desires animating We’s protagonist, once he falls in love with a woman and begins to regain the imaginative faculties his totalitarian government has worked to suppress—despite the fact that in We, “love” and “imagination” are outlawed, outmoded concepts.

For Orwell, We conjured up a universal vision of a dystopia, less about any single country than about the possible perils of technocracy that could theoretically befall any society. “It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again,” Orwell concluded his review in a sentiment at once alarmist and genuinely alarming. (In terms of influence, Huxley, however, claimed that he had written Brave New World long before coming across Zamyatin’s text, but the idea of the Russian’s influence persisted, such that decades later, Kurt Vonnegut was able to inform Playboy that in order to write Piano Player, he “cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.”)

What does one do, Orwell asks, when a genie from a gleaming iron lamp, steam billowing from its tip like a locomotive, only grants the wishes of those in power, and one of those wishes is for us, below, to smile and do their bidding, never even knowing we are under a spell?

To stop such a spell, Zamyatin suggested—a spell requiring no magic—one needs a different kind of power: a revolution.

*

We follows D-503, a man who lives in the 26th century in a fiercely regulated, walled-in metropolis run by a totalitarian government christened OneState. His numerical moniker is the norm: humans are known as Numbers, and combinations of letters and numbers serve as names. OneState is entirely regulated: all Numbers are expected to live as if they were part of a great machine in sync, with all Numbers lifting their spoons to their mouths at the same moment every day, going on “obligatory walks” down “unalterably straight streets,” all Numbers expected to be in certain places at certain times, even for sex.

If this seems like a dearth of freedom, it is—and D-503 relishes it. Indeed, Zamyatin’s protagonist believes that freedom is primitive, “unbelievable,” and “disorganized wildness.” Liberty leads only to criminality and pain, he says; only by being perfectly restricted and controlled, like cogs in a machine, can humans achieve happiness. “[F]reedom and crime are closely related,” he declares, and “if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crimes.” Beauty is unchanging rhythm, like the fact that two and two make four, a truth D-503 frequently reflects on. When D-503 witnesses INTEGRAL, a machine designed to expand and colonize anywhere outside of OneState, being built, he reflects on the “beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet…. Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: because it is nonfree movement, because all the fundamental significance of the dance lies precisely in its aesthetic subjection, its ideal nonfreedom.”

In a surprisingly progressive move for the book’s time, the Numbers can elect, through mutual consent, to have sex with anyone seemingly regardless of gender by filling out forms and gaining pink tickets that represent each Number—but sex, too, can only happen during a prescribed block of time, and no one is allowed to form romantic attachments. Pregnant Numbers have their babies removed by the government. Originality is generally frowned upon, not unlike in Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” whereby the government has mandated equality by forcibly crippling its citizens, so that no one is smarter, taller, or stronger than anyone else. By the end of We, OneState has begun urging its citizens to undergo “the operation”—a petrifying brain procedure to remove any possibility for having an imagination.

At the helm of OneState is an enigmatic figure called The Benefactor, who the Numbers worship like a god, and who is supported by a Panoptic police force called The Guardians. Who the Guardians are observing is not always obvious, creating a carceral state of constant potential surveillance reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham and Foucault, except—scarily—that many of the prisoners not only blissfully accept their prisonerhood, but actively believe not being incarcerated would be barbaric and inhumane. The Benefactor destroys dissenters in grand public ceremonies in which they are vaporized through what Orwell argued was simply an updated version of the guillotine in a town square. Dissent is evil and worthy of destruction; obedience keeps life going, breeds happiness. While OneState—even by virtue of its name—is meant to appear egalitarian, D-503 calmly accepts the society’s unequal hierarchies, an ardent, patriotically brainwashed advocate of OneState’s autocracy.

When D-503 meets a woman he has never seen before, however, he begins, in increasing incomprehension, to fall for her. Unbeknownst to him, she is a member of a large underground resistance, which plans to topple OneState and stop INTEGRAL; outside the Wall, she and the other revolutionaries have learnt, other humans—or humanlike simians covered in fur of various colors—live in a sylvan society that seems to offer greater unity and love than OneState. She introduces D-503 to the verboten: alcohol, nicotine. His writing shifts dramatically as he gains an imagination or “soul,” becoming more and more vivid, jagged, and erratic, until it is more hallucinatory than de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Near the end, it is unclear what is real and what is a dream. Being drugged or inebriated isn’t the cause of his visions; unlike de Quincey or Huxley’s texts, the primary drug here is imagination, which opens up his world—but also festinates his becoming branded a potential enemy of the state. Whereas Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita describes real political chaos through a topsy-turvy, fantastical, sardonically winking narrative, We generally adopts a serious tone, rendering its psychedelic chapters even more disconcerting.

By the end, D-503 has been taken by the government to remove his own imagination through “the Great Operation.” “They extracted a kind of splinter from my head,” he puts it, “and now my head is easy and empty. Or I should say, not empty, but there’s nothing strange there that keeps me from smiling (a smile is the normal state of a normal person).” Once delirious with desire, D-503 has become a human machine once more, declaring war on “the enemies of happiness” who don’t wish to live under OneState’s soulless regime.

He has become hollower than the men in T.S. Elliot’s Conradian poem, his world having ended neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with an empty, helpless smile, aware and yet not at all aware just how empty his smile has become.

*

We is unlike our world today—but it is also very much like it, beneath the surface. Today, We seems both a conventional critique of 20th-century totalitarianism and a strikingly strange, disquieting text that stands on its own. When regimes resist our ideals, it becomes easy for visions of cruel, dictatorial governance to seem germane, if not eerily prescient; of course, when we toss about comparisons too readily, they lose some of their power. To be sure, the nightmarish circus chaos of the Trump regime lends itself to a variety of comparisons to dystopian texts, even as some are more of a reach than others. (One apt comparison I haven’t yet seen is to the blend of corruption, narcissism, desperate cruelty, and comical absurdity of an also obscure 1972 political satire from St. Vincent, Ruler in Hiroona, by G.C.H. Thomas.)

If Trump or his ideological ilk had zero resistance and absolute power, it is almost certain we would live in a country resembling OneState, where dissenters are publicly humiliated and then, if their offense is severe enough, destroyed, and where, if the Ben Shapiro wing of conservatism reigned, Shapiro’s signature catchphrase, “logic and reason,” would be lionized, yet logic by itself is not infallible—as any Philosophy 101 study of syllogisms with faulty premises shows—and reason bereft of empathy leads to large-scale suffering. We evokes multiple strains of contemporary conservatism—and then pushes each to an extreme.

Perhaps the most striking political image in America today and in Zamyatin’s novel is the idea of a wall—a crass, simplistic image wielded by Trump to represent keeping supposedly dangerous immigrants at bay, and a more sophisticated image in We representing keeping the outside world itself away. In We, the “Green Wall,” which encloses the entire metropolis, creates an enclosed, insular society, its population’s mental scope literally narrowed and demarcated by the city’s borders. What exists outside the wall does not matter, D-503 informs readers; what was there before OneState was savagery and failure. “[B]y this wall,” he says, “we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and beasts.” (This sentiment also echoes the Trump administration’s unsettling commitment to eradicate more and more of the natural world by revising the Endangered Species Act in service of development and oil-drilling.) D-503 has been so brainwashed that he gladly accepts not knowing what lies beyond an obvious border, gladly accepts not eating the fruit of the Garden’s snake-wrapped tree.

It doesn’t matter if Trump’s mythic, moronic wall ever gets built; it was always meant primarily as spectacle. It’s the idea of the wall and the fact that so many of his supporters fetishize it that matters. Those who gladly welcome such walls—even metaphorical, ideological ones—are little different from D-503, each brainwashed into believing that safety only exists in a small, tidy, familiar, regulated space, and that the world outside this space is dangerous and must be avoided. (Ironically, these are the same people who frequently castigate the notion of “safe spaces,” despite their fabled wall representing a large-scale version of just such a space.)

To be sure, Zamyatin’s book fits into 2018 in another sense: its casual racism. Despite D-503 living in the 26th century, he still tosses around the colonialist anti-black language of the century Zamyatin was writing in, an aspect of the book Orwell never addresses, perhaps reflecting, in part, Orwell’s own murky relationship with such prejudices as a figure at once a product and opponent of British imperialism. The “primitive” version of D-503 who has a soul and desires is described by the narrator in negative, primal terms as a “Negro,” and it is implied that even the humanlike beings who live outside the Wall all have white skin, despite possessing fur in varying shades; whiteness, it seems, is supreme here.

For all its radical futurism and imaginative esprit, Zamyatin’s novel is still very much a product of its time—a time, sadly, not as different from our own as some Americans would like to believe.

*

Zamyatin believed that the spirit of revolution never really dies, just as Gaiman wrote of gods. Instead, revolutions, like deities whose adherents have sailed to new lands, evolve, adapt, metamorphose to fit their new environments. “A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday’s clock, nor by today’s, but by tomorrow’s,” Zamyatin wrote in an essay, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.” He then begins to use language echoing the imagery of his novel: “errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs… This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.”

It may be simplistic to say there are no truths, but Zamyatin’s larger point is sound: that we must be free and willing to err, to go against the grain, to disturb in the service of finding a greater, if truer and still temporary, peace. When there is something to fight, we must resist. “Revolution is everything, in everything,” he wrote. “It is infinite. There is no final revolution.”

Perhaps that, more than anything, is Zamyatin’s great value in 2018, nearly a century after his novel was condemned because it, then, seemed too revolutionary. Error can be exceedingly deadly—but, sometimes, it saves us, as well, by disturbing us just enough to notice what’s wrong.

The Wind in the Willows is one of the most famous English children’s books, one of the most famous books about animals, and a classic book about “messing about in boats.”

Famous, it certainly is. Although it has never been quite the international icon that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become, Kenneth Grahame’s eccentric masterpiece can be read in Afrikaans as Die Wind in die Wilgers, in Italian as Il Vento nei Salici, in Finnish as Kaislikossa suhisee, in Portuguese as As Aventuras de Senhor Sapo and in dozens of other languages. It is currently available in well over 50 editions in English: there are versions in verse, graded readers for learning English as a foreign language, audio and video adaptations, plays (notably by A.A. Milne and Alan Bennett), films, picture books (with or without stickers), pop-up books, knitting patterns, graphic novels and scholarly annotated editions. There are sequels, such as William Horwood’s The Willows in Winter (1993), gospel meditations, a cookery book and Robert de Board’s Counselling for Toads (1998), an introduction to psychotherapy. E.H. Shepard’s illustrations have been used on national postage stamps and to advertise England itself in the 1980s English Tourist Board series, “Making a Break for the Real England.” The book has been the inspiration for a sculpture trail, one of the most successful rides in Disneyland and a musical adaptation (by Julian Fellowes) in 2016, which was the first London West End musical to raise £1 million through crowdfunding.

What makes all this mysterious (apart from the fact that this quintessentially English book was written by a Scot) is that The Wind in the Willows is not a children’s book at all—neither the author nor the original publishers ever suggested that it was. Nor is it an animal story: the characters are, as one of the original reviewers, the novelist Arnold Bennett, observed, “meant to be nothing but human beings,” or as Margaret Blount in her book on animals in fiction, Animal Land, put it, “for animals, read chaps.” And boats appear substantially in only two of the 12 chapters. Even the title is mysterious—the word “willows” never appears in the book: Grahame’s original suggestion for a title was Mr. Mole and his Mates.

Kenneth Grahame at 30: a rising young banker, and at the same time one of
“W.E. Henley’s Young Men,” writing short essays for the Scots Observer.

But, surely, it is a book about small and not so small animals—a Toad, a Rat, a Mole and a Badger (and therefore this must be a children’s book). If so, then these are animals who drink and smoke, own houses, drive (and steal) cars, row boats, escape from jail, yearn for gastronomic nights in Italy, eat ham and eggs for breakfast and write poetry—while Toad combs his hair, and the Mole has a black velvet smoking-jacket.

Of course, very occasionally they behave like animals. Mr. Mole, in the midst of thoroughly human spring-cleaning, briefly turns into a mole, scrabbling and scrooging his way to the surface; the aristocratic Otter, languidly enjoying a riverbank picnic (which includes cold tongue, pickled gherkins and lemonade) suddenly turns into an otter and swallows a passing mayfly.

But for the most part, the book is about a group of well-off, leisured English gentlemen. Even more importantly, the book hardly ever addresses itself to an audience of children: as Humphrey Carpenter put it, “The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with childhood or children, except that it can be enjoyed by the young.”

Of course, it begins—and began—as a children’s book. Like other famous children’s books—such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hobbit and Treasure Island—it started life as a story for a particular child, and this shows most in the opening chapter. Like all these books, The Wind in the Willows grew in the writing and ended up as something quite different from, and something much more complex than, a bedtime story. But whereas Alice’s Adventures is a children’s book that can be read by adults, The Wind in the Willows is an adult’s book that can be read by children. This is because (and this also accounts for its relative lack of international success) its landscapes and cultural references are deeply embedded in Edwardian England—whereas Alice moves in a detached world of fantasy, and the many period references in that book are hidden in the background.

Into which genre does it fit? The answer to that is that Grahame ruthlessly borrowed from and played with the major popular genres of his day: the river book, the caravanning book, the motoring thriller, the rural idyll (complete with Christmas carol), the pseudo-mystic “spiritual” writing of the “decadents” (complete with miasmic pagan verse) and, of course, the rollicking boys’ adventure story. And he cheerfully parodies George Borrow, W.S. Gilbert, and Sherlock Holmes, caricatures his friends, and celebrates his own delights and frustrations.

“There’s cold chicken . . . coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscress
sandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—”
Arthur Rackham’s 1939 view of the iconic picnic.

One of the mystifying things for those who would try to make The Wind in the Willows into a children’s book is its attitude to adventure. Anything likely to disturb its cozy world is ruthlessly suppressed—the Mole stops the Rat from heading to the warm south in “Wayfarers All”; Toad’s rebellion is crushed by all his “friends”—and the Mole’s initial, childlike curiosity about the world is put firmly in its place in the very first chapter. As he and Rat row along the peaceful river, the Mole looks into the distance:

“And beyond the Wild Wood again?” he asked; “where it’s all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn’t, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?”

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here’s our backwater at last, where we’re going to lunch.”

This certainly concurs with the romantic idea that children’s books should be safe, and the Edwardian period has been portrayed—especially in children’s literature—as peaceful and retreatist. In fact, it was a period of political and cultural instability, change and fear. Rumors of war—especially, although not exclusively, with Germany—were common; the German battle-fleet was expanding; the Boer wars had shaken Britain’s faith in its army. No wonder the Water Rat is no fan of the Wide World.

__________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Making of The Wind in the Willows by Peter Hunt, published by Bodleian Library Publishing. © 2018 by Bodleian Library Publishing. All rights reserved. Images copyright © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

I first heard Alan Spence in a cafe in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow called, auspiciously enough, the Third Eye Centre. It sounds other-worldly and, in some way, was. More definitely, however, it wasn’t. It held salads in giant spoonfuls and coffee served by doughty locals with little time for small-talk (the place was always lively, noisy and full) and the seating and tables were minimalist. All of which, of course, made it a haven for the bookish, the lonely, the karmic, readers of free newspapers and political pamphlets, students of all stripes and arty sorts (like me) and anybody up for a play, a performance or a reading in the theater at the back.

Founded by Tom McGrath, the Third Eye—“a shrine to the avant-garde” according to the Guardian—put on performances, readings and eye-popping indefinables by an astonishing range of people, including Allen Ginsberg, John Byrne, Kathy Acker, Annie Griffin, Edwin Morgan, Ken Currie, Whoopi Goldberg, James Kelman, and a fabulously educational female stripper whose name, to my shame, I forget. Its ambition was to give experience—mind expansion if you like—and what curious loner who loved books, music and surprises wouldn’t have turned up every weekend, all the way from Ayrshire, to gain it.

This Third Eye, then, was where I first heard Alan Spence. I had read his play The Sailmaker, but was unprepared for the calm half dark of the spotlight and the solitary poet in the corner, rolling out his own collection, Glasgow Zen. That words from one mouth can go into the ears of others and alter their thinking is not a given, but it certainly happens. I recall Alan’s intoning of “Joshu’s Mu,” a Japanese-inspired meditation upon questions, which I followed with my mouth open. That playful could be serious, that the cleanly stated could be also ripe with different shades of meaning and possibilities, was something I knew in theory, but to experience it in these surrounds was a kind of magic. The word Mu itself (meaning nothing, no thing, emptiness) and variations of Alan’s twin set of Mu poems still pop into my head whenever they want. I don’t have to prompt them; they just live there now.

What is the square root of minus one?
How many angels on the head of a pin?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
and thou no breath at all?
Mu.

To acknowledge poetry as something that makes life better, by which I mean clearer, is to say nothing unusual. Sentences and even single words may infer a question, a moment, that is capable of shifting how we think, which in turn may even shift our lives. A big idea offered in fragments has particular power. And those fragments, by dint of hard-won concision, stick. Alan is a writer who, in the succinctness of his telling and his gentle wit, stuck with me. Every day, we store lines of songs, phrases, family names for everyday objects, fragments of loved books and messages in birthday cards without memorizing them purposely: as curious animals, we crave more insight than our own. Words on the radio, lines of songs and things overheard on buses we collect in much the way a rook collects  shiny objects: to build on, to have handy. In case. To stockpile wisdoms is a human essential. They can, quite literally, change our lives, even save them. And the fact of Alan’s being there, a calmly reflective voice in what was, at times, a largely angry male culture, signified. It was a kind of permission. A means by which any reader, of whatever background, gender or tribal affiliation, might find words to sink, expand and mean more than they showed on the surface. Brevity, in the hands of someone who understands its possibilities, expands the mind. There are few greater gifts.

His first published book appeared in 1977. It’s about the Glasgow, the city, the author grew up in: from the place itself to its working people, the lives of Glasgow families and how notionally “ordinary lives” can shift according to prevailing culture over even a short time. A 19th-century sectarian Ulster-Scots folk-song, “The Sash,” that has played its own part in violence and religious bigotry in central Scotland echoes in the book’s title subtly enough to be open to more than one meaning or sectarian affiliation. The stories collected in this volume do indeed reflect the effect of sectarianism and alcohol (and the caged-in lives of generations of women). But this fragment of the title’s most notorious inference is only a tiny part of what there is to see. Of course not. With the lightest of touches, these stories present the far wider picture.

Between these pages are the overlooked, the wide-eyed and hopeful, and clear flashes of wonder. Beauty and significance, no matter how indefinable, show their colors too. A wider world and ways of being in it open themselves to view. Some characters turn to poetry instead of alcohol, some to mind-expansion of other types, including as much Glasgow-inspired as Zen-inspired transcendence.

Which is where the Third Eye, equally the “eye of insight” in the forehead of the god Shiva and the subtle power of poetry, prose and thought (as exemplified by the Sauchiehall Street haven that opened the eyes of so many) take us in this book.

In “Tinsel”, a six-year-old sees an other-worldly beauty on the Christmas tree he and his mother decorate on Christmas Eve, and the child alone glimpses another self, unreachable, in the window’s reflection. In “Sheaves”, an older boy can tell the time (time to go to Sunday School means half past one) by his mother’s “shouting him up” from play. “The Rain Dance”, some years on, shows a young groom-to-be getting drunk the night before his wedding as his mother waits up, worrying, only to be disappointed when he does appear (“Ah mean it wis the boay’s last night a freedom before e pits is heid in the auld noose,” his father, with breathtaking insensitivity, explains). Further along the timeline still, a young married man admires a beautiful Chinese brushwork illustration in a book and finds the appearance of Japanese landscapes, only half-mockingly, in the patterns of damp on his ceiling. What culture might be moves on. It touches our lives whether we invite it or not, offering fresh connections between the obvious and the half-glimpsed, the commonplace and the ethereal. Its Colours They Are Fine describes a time of enormous social and cultural change in a resolutely working-class city. Human happiness, folly, fleetingness and hope are its core.

__________________________________

From Its Colours They Are Fine. Used with the permission of Canongate. Copyright © by Alan Spence 2018.  Introduction Copyright © 2018 by Janice Galloway.

Do what you love most, and must do, and not only will you meet those who share your passion and know your devotion, but the choosing will lead you to mastery. Being able to live by such a creed is both an opportunity and a privilege. It is also a challenge, as any high ideal or serious endeavor requires determination, and for the most ambitious, a necessary amount of courage and strength.

In the mountains, women are undeniably able and strong and brave, though historically we have not always been allowed to just go out and do what we want to do. But that was yesterday, today is today, and it is no longer a simple story of we versus them. Now, women are not only allowed in the mountains, but they are making new history, choreographing lines up towering rock faces, aspiring to ever greater icebound limits and heights.

Still there are men who too often treat women as weaker or less driven.

And there are yet those women who call ambitious women competitive.

Shame on any person or group, so easily threatened, who lump people into a category of this or that, arguing politics, not morals, and who insist you stay in your designated lane. This, as opposed to acknowledging the unique human being each of us happens to be. In a just society, the philosopher John Rawls has argued, we must each of us put ourselves into a hypothetical original position (behind a veil of ignorance—as if not knowing our race, our religion, our gender, our class) and from this state of awareness agree on the social rules and basic rights that govern us all. Only by adopting this perspective (not knowing who you might turn out to be in society) can we live in a world that is morally fair. Then we may each have the opportunity and privilege to do the work we want most to do.

*

Climbing a mountain is about extending yourself, reaching for a faraway aim, venturing to rise to the very top of it. Most people are content to stand in a valley and look upward, capturing a glorious pinnacle by eye or by camera at a distance. It’s not necessary to climb to the top of a peak to be awed by nature or the sublime. A railway in Switzerland bores through the Eiger up to the col between the Jungfrau and Mönch, so anyone can travel to great heights by train. What is it but folly, anyway, even irreverence some would say, that incites a person to climb? An Indian guide once said to me as I pointed to a particular mountain and asked the route up, “Why, have you lost something up there?” And there are some mountains in the world that are not to be climbed at all, being instead reserved for the Gods. Like Mount Kailash, in Tibet; you may circumambulate the peak, and cross a 19,000 ft. pass in order to do it, but no human being is allowed to stand at the top of the sacred mountain.

Those compelled to reach a summit usually care little about custom or ritual, the common, the ordinary, the routine. Most itch to be away from the mob, wanting instead to be up out of the valley to head straight up the hill. To endeavor, to risk, to move toward some unknown, to feel more alive—whether male or female—these are strivings a climber is born to.

*

Male colonial explorers were the world’s earliest mountaineers, traveling with thermometers and artificial horizons, compasses and sextants, ice axes and picks, with the aim of measuring and appropriating land. It wasn’t until the 1800s that mountaineering turned recreation and sport, most notably in the alpine lands of Switzerland, Italy and France. With Alpine Clubs and professional guides, the Alps became a European playground, and though most of the climbers of that era were men, there were women who immediately entered the picture. Marie Paradis, an 18-year-old French woman, climbed Mont Blanc in 1808—the first female summit of known world record. In 1838, Henriette D’Angerville made claim to the same peak, popping a bottle of champagne at the top.

English and American women were in the meantime doing the equivalent: Lucy Walker, in 1871, claimed the crown of the Matterhorn. Fay Fuller, who helped establish the Washington State Alpine Club, arrived in 1890 to the top of Mount Rainier, awing the all-male party that followed. At the turn of the century, another American woman, Fanny Bullock Workman, one of the founders of the American Alpine Club, went off with her husband trekking in the Himalaya, planting her banners—“Votes for Women”—into the icy skins of 22,000 foot peaks. Wherever there were mountains, there were women climbing them, and plenty of men who enjoyed their camaraderie. Then again, some men did not. The thought experiment of the original position is one many people prefer to ignore.

By the 1970s, as Rawls was busy polishing his theory of justice, expedition membership among women was increasing, though the numbers varied from country to country, as did male attitudes about equality on the slopes. Polish teams were making record-breaking feats (Wanda Rutkiewicz and Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz entered the history books by climbing 26,089 ft. Gasherbrum III, the world’s highest unclimbed mountain at the time), but in the United States there were several men resistant to having females along on expeditions at all. Of the 100 applicants for the 1963 American Everest expedition team, three were woman, and none were chosen; male reasoning, it is said, that attested to the weaknesses of both sexes—women who would not be strong enough to carry their load and endure the harsh conditions, and men who could not be trusted to behave properly while in their company.

When Dianne Roberts, wife of Jim Whitaker, made the 1975 K2 expedition team (with her spouse) one male climber in particular had his gripes about it, a man consistently vocal each time a woman was invited on any major climb. Meanwhile, Arlene Blum was making her point about gender; having been rebuffed enough times by male expeditionists, she began organizing all female teams. “A Woman’s Place is on Top” was the banner planted at the summit of Annapurna by Irene Miller and Vera Komarkova, the first Americans to reach the summit of this notorious peak. Critics called the achievement highly politicized, but the same claim could be made about the nationalistic fervor long associated with most organized climbs (or team sports of all kinds); another version of the us versus them type of mindset, a tribal habit or norm people everywhere in the world fall into with ease.

While the high altitude expeditionists were working out their problems of inclusion/exclusion, needing to be part of large orchestrated parties, female rock climbers in Yosemite Valley, who knew a willing partner is all one needs, if that, were enjoying the golden years of the 1960s and 70s without much protest and grumble from any of those positioned at various points along the sexual spectrum. Liz Robbins and Johanna Marte were hammering into rock alongside guys who were awed by their strength and grace. Beverly Johnson and Sibylee Hechtel made the first all-female ascent of the 3,000 ft. granite monolith El Capitan, a seven-day quest hauling haulbags that weighed more than they did. Mari Gingery became the first woman to scale The Shield. When in 1994 later Lynn Hill free climbed the Nose of El Cap in just 23 hours—free climbed!—she called down to her fellow Stonemasters, “It goes boys!” It would be a little over a decade before Tommy Caldwell finally beat Lynn’s record.

Back in the Himalaya, the British climber, Alison Jane Hargreaves, was also making history. In 1995 she was only the second person in the world (Rheinhold Messner, the first) to ever have solo’d Mount Everest—and without oxygen. Pasang Lhamu Sherpa would be the first Nepalese woman to summit Everest in 1993, though she perished in bad weather on the descent. And Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed the summit of Everest six times while assisting on expedition teams.

Nanda Devi Unsoeld, a young woman from Washington State, was the instigator of the 1976 Nanda Devi climb, once the highest mountain in India (now the second highest: in 1975 Sikkim joined the republic of India). Devi’s father, Willi Unsoeld, a theology professor at Evergreen College, was one of the first Americans to climb Mount Everest (he and Tom Hornbein traversed the west ridge, a legendary ascent that has not since been accomplished). Unsoeld had caught sight of the mountain that inspired his daughter’s moniker while trekking through the Himalaya in his younger days. “I dreamed of having a daughter to name after the peak,” he said. He did, and she grew up wanting to summit the pinnacle for which she had been christened. Devi Unsoeld would have established a new record for American women climbers had they reached the summit. Devi, whom the porters on the trip had come to regard as a goddess returning to her mountain, died on her namesake at 24,000 feet. The mountain has since been closed.

Marty Hoey was an accomplished American mountaineer and Mt. Rainier guide who would have been the first woman at the summit of Everest had she not fallen 6,000 feet to her death while attempting it. As with Devi Unsoeld, people close to Marty comforted themselves in knowing that she died doing what she loved doing most of all.

*

Show me your work and I will know you, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Put a person into a down climbing suit and cover the face with a mask, and it will be difficult to know who the ascender is—call it an empirical veil of ignorance—but you will surely know that climber’s ability. Gender, sex, or sexual preference, make no difference at all. Skill, strength, endurance, perseverance, nerve, fascination, faith; this is what it takes to produce a philosophic study of totalitarianism, pioneer research on radioactivity, paint Music in Pink & Blue, or crawl up a 3,000 ft. granite rock face. What matters is the enthrallment, the optimism, the devotion, the conviction. Then onward and onward, as Emerson said. In liberated moments we know a new picture of life, one that is already possible.

In 1962, in an infamous section of The Middle Passage, Sir V.S. Naipaul’s critical tour through a variety of Caribbean islands, Naipaul pauses in his specific critique to address the supposed problems of the Caribbean as a whole. He had undertaken the journey at the behest of Dr. Eric Williams, then the Premier of Trinidad. “History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul—born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul—said. Here was a rank dismissal of the very world he nonetheless captured with care in his books, a contradiction in identity that defined Naipaul to his death.

I don’t know how not to feel conflicted about Naipaul, the Trinidadian who would have bristled, instinctively, at being remembered as a Trinidadian. (Upon seeing himself listed as a “West-Indian novelist,” Naipaul once abandoned a publisher; he did not like having identities thrust upon him in general.)

On the one hand, some of his books brim with power, beauty, and wit. I remember, fondly, reading A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street in particular, fathomless books that seemed to capture something I understood myself about my experiences growing up in Dominica, a number of islands up from Naipaul’s own Trinidad and Tobago. His Nobel lecture seemed a work of historical uncovering, as he described not only his upbringing in his birthplace, Chaguanas, but histories he had never encountered in school about the Amerindians who had lived there before, as well as the East Indian descendants of indentured laborers who lived, he wrote poignantly in the speech, “in our own fading India,” a “kind of India” they had brought to Trinidad, “which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land.”

This reflection was at once specific to Trinidad and resonant through much of our archipelago, this way that we could live simultaneously in one makeshift version of an ancestral country—perhaps one we had never even set foot in, though our parents said we were English, or Indian—and in an island still in search of its own self-definition. The titular Mr. Biswas seemed an existential exemplar of qualities I saw growing up: frustration, naivete, a quiet tragicomic sadness, a desire for more amidst failures. How I loved the novels and stories of his I read early on. Naipaul is integral to our region’s literary history. He will never fade.

On the other hand, you almost wanted him to fade, not because his star was too bright, but because it had become incandescent with shame. He was an embarrassment as much of riches as of vile, venomous bigotry. In an example of misogyny so blatant as to almost seem comical, Naipaul argued that women could not write as well as men—and that, so as to avoid wasting his time reading the products of such inferior minds, he had learnt to tell from the first few paragraphs of any book the gender of its author. With a blend of demented pride, blunt honesty, and self-flagellation, he told his authorized biographer, Patrick French, just how he had beaten and bruised Margaret Gooding, the Anglo-Argentine lover he met in 1972. “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand begun to hurt,” he was recorded as telling French in The World Is What It Is (2008). “She didn’t mind it at all,” he continued. “She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was really bad. She couldn’t appear in public. My hand was swollen. I was utterly helpless,” he added, somewhat surprisingly. “I have enormous sympathy for people who do strange things out of passion.”

Incredibly, this instance of abuse occurred because, according to Naipaul, his lover “was having a relationship” with an Argentine banker “for the means to get to me”—in other words, so as to be able to visit Naipaul more easily. In Naipaul’s account, Gooding “said she would have slept with him a hundred times to get to me, and I believed her actually . . . I was very upset.” The woman with whom he was cheating on his wife had seemingly cheated on him in order to get closer to him, and this justified his abuse of her, he seemed to believe, living less in reality than in the swirling pantheon in his head, a necropolis and Acropolis dense with ithyphallic obelisks and architecture built by great men.

He claimed to have been sexually assaulted by his cousin Boysie at six or seven, a revelation that makes me feel sympathy for him. Yet Naipaul, refusing to be pitied, couched the repeated painful incidents in abrasive language: a tactic of deflecting the severity of abuse on the one hand, and typical Naipaul on the other. The molestation “gave me a hatred, a detestation of this homosexual thing,” he said, and argued that “I think it is part of Indian extended family life, which is an abomination in some ways, a can of worms . . . All children are abused . . . It is almost like a rite of passage.” Such passages are so Naipaulian. It’s hard not to look at him in a softer light after such a revelation, yet his statements—mixing queerness with molestation, generalizations about Indian families—feel like an unwarranted slap.

Beyond this, Naipaul incurred the wrath of Edward Said, amongst many others, for his repeated negative generalizations about Islam, which he viewed as catastrophic. Africa as a whole he deemed “an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people” in a letter to Paul Theroux after hearing of Idi Amin’s notorious expulsion of Asians from Uganda. While he was repeatedly drawn by some ancestral pull to India, he was able to just as easily quip that women wearing bindis signified “my head is empty.” In 2004, he demeaned multiculturalism as “absurd” and dismissively labeled it “multi-culti”: a cultish belief that had, in his view, failed, since “if a man picks himself up and comes to another country he must meet it halfway.” (He avoided, however, writing indignant books about, say, Germany and China, despite readers asking him in letters to do so; they were not his to write about, he said, showing that he gave himself boundaries.) When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001, he declined to mention Trinidad in his statement of acceptance, naming, instead, England and India. Invoking Trinidad would “encumber the tribute,” he explained when asked about this large omission.

Like Derek Walcott, the Caribbean’s other literary Nobel Prize winner, Naipaul was an epochal, multitudinous author who wielded his power to try to take advantage of women—they both belonged to a class of men who seemed to believe they could get away with anything where women were concerned. If they resembled each other in such negative particulars, Walcott was more direct about the ambiguity, the multifariousness, of his ethnic and cultural identities. This led to the St. Lucian poet getting the upper hand on Naipaul before the former’s death, as Walcott, in a smilingly cruel poem delivered to a live audience at a literary festival, declared Naipaul’s fiction “dead” and called Sir Vidia a “mongoose,” a pointed comparison meant to suggest that Naipaul was little more than a symbol of colonialism, as mongooses had been introduced to certain islands by the Europeans.

Naipaul was an abusive, irascible, melancholic man, an archetype of the sneering provocateur, of the grinning clown who sat on stoops in a town and made fun of everyone passing by, of the bigoted uncle whose presence the less bigoted dread at certain family gatherings, of the Internet troll who delighted in causing offense. He was at once a towering talent and a brown man who sequaciously prostrated himself before his former colonial masters, quipping that those of us who had darker skin and those of us who were women—heaven forfend we be both!—were inferior.

Yet he was also, unquestionably, a great writer.

The author is not dead, contra Roland Barthes—but how, then, to deal with Naipaul and his ilk?

*

In some senses, Naipaul was an enigma, a Blakean contradiction come off the page, a melancholy man convinced he was little more than dust and one of Plato’s cave shadows—by virtue of being born in an island so forgettable, so clothed-in-the-night-of-civilization—and, at the same time, a man utterly certain he was flame and brilliance itself, fearful symmetries, fire burning both tigrine and tamed. Naipaul could see that those of us living in former colonies had to work harder for recognition in the wider world; all the same, he yearned for the recognition of a largely white, male literary class that fetishized, without questions about its omissions, the Western Canon. Naipaul could critique colonialism; Naipaul was also an apologist for colonialism, a type you see now and then in our islands, the kind of man who thinks everything was better when the British were in charge because they, at least, knew what civilization was, and aren’t our failures to ape them the result of us being, as Naipaul once called black Trinidadians, “monkeys?” Right down to the Oxbridge accent he cultivated and maintained throughout his life, he was a member of the old guard, sycophantic towards “civilization” and furious at what he perceived as the failures of the Commonwealth.

What wealth was there, really, the choleric author mused, in these commons, even as these “common” places and people were what furnished his earlier—and arguably most memorable—books? Yet his power came, in part, from a world he looked down upon, and he never fully learnt how to live with that uncomfortable truth.

Perhaps the incident that best illustrated his conflicted reputation was how nations around the world responded to his Nobel Prize win. As French notes, Trinidad and Tobago’s president sent Naipaul a congratulatory letter “on heavy writing paper”; Indians—from Bollywood stars to the president—sent “adulatory letters”; and Spain’s prime minister told Naipaul he should “drop by.” At the same time, “an Iranian newspaper denounced him for spreading venom and hatred,” and the Muslim Council of Britain viewed his win of the Nobel as “a cynical gesture to humiliate Muslims.” He was loved; he was hated. You might similarly read his being knighted in 1990 as an honor or as confirmation of a cringe-worthy desire for colonial acceptance.

“My background is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused,” he acknowledged in his Nobel lecture, which was fittingly titled “Two Worlds.” This is why we must not bury Naipaul’s memory. His contradictions are part of the swirling questions of what it means to be Trinidadian, as well as Caribbean more broadly. His subject was, he reflected retrospectively in his Nobel lecture, a “widespread colonial schizophrenia,” a term that, while perhaps outdated, implies the sharp see-sawing of identity in his work.

“[E]verything of value about me is in my books,” he declared in the same lecture. “I am the sum of my books.” The speech circled around Proust’s arguments against the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who had argued that one must know a writer outside their books to understand the writer inside them; Naipaul and Proust fervently disagreed. There is value, indeed, in Naipaul’s books. But we cannot ignore what he did outside of them. As with all artists, all people, it is critical we remember all sides of Naipaul if we want a nuanced view of his impact. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote in “Modern Fiction.” For Woolf, life resisted too-simple symmetries; it was instead “a luminous halo,” something complex, something harder to pin down into a clear, definitive equation or rhythm. Few histories are black and white, even as Naipaul, particularly outside his fiction, appeared to desire a more monochromatic world. Instead, history, like most things, is grey, blurred. So too is Naipaul, who never fully found the stable, well-lit place he, like Mr. Biswas, longed to call his own. I can’t forgive his sins. But some of his stories remained in me, as they did in many others.

And perhaps that is what literature does: it removes the ground beneath our feet, but it also gives us a home, diaphanous yet durable, and the best of it also finds a place, later, inside us.

Of all the things you can read on the internet, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is one of the only good ones. In perpetual conversation with itself, ever growing and expanding—perhaps threatening, in its accumulated obsessions, to become self-aware—this index of the fantastic documents possible pasts and futures alike. It bristles with Tarzan arcana and the history of Croatian science fiction. It features enthusiastic discussions of Medieval futurism, feminism, bug-eyed monsters, dream hacking, and Leonardo da Vinci. Almost any sci-fi author you care to mention has an entry there, alongside accounts of many authors no one cares to mention at all. That you could be reading it right now goes without saying, since in some alternate universe you surely are.

While the SFE’s purview is “science fiction” broadly conceived, its articles have warring impulses. On the one hand, they aim to educate. Within these pages, you’ll find explanations of numerous literary tropes, both those well-known (the generation starship used in many tales of space exploration) and those more obscure (a jonbar point, or the small, seemingly insignificant moment that proves to be the difference between two alternate histories, in time-travel stories). But when the entry on Gene Wolfe declares that he is “quite possibly” science fiction’s most important writer, no shy excuse for this partiality follows. More than informative, this encyclopedia enthuses, anoints, or dismisses. What it has to say about Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and J.G. Ballard is aimed squarely at canons and reputations. The SFE quarrels its way into being encyclopedic.

Originally published in physical form in 1979, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction won a Hugo award for best nonfiction book in 1980. A second edition followed in 1993, with a CD-ROM supplement a few years later. The encyclopedia won another Hugo in 1994, and a decade later began its migration online, where it launched in 2011 as a precursor to its current digital form. No paywall bars access to this archive. Though you can donate money to support it, the UK publisher, Gollancz, in collaboration with the SF Gateway, keeps it in the black. To say the encyclopedia has flourished would be an understatement. According to the site’s statistics, as of late July 2018, the SFE contains 17,516 entries totaling over 5.5 million words.

I got nearly all of the information in the preceding paragraph from the SFE’s entry on itself. That should indicate, I hope, its ambition to be all-encompassing. This is an encyclopedia with its own selfie included. Its editors also maintain a statistics page, which they update regularly with figures on the number and composition of their articles. They update individual entries as well, and every version of each article remains accessible via links at the bottom of any given page. If you choose to do so, you can read all 87 iterations of, say, the article on Isaac Asimov. While this self-documenting tic might look funny, it gives way to something rich and strange—namely, to those who write these entries in the first place.

Peter Nicholls comes to mind, as does David Langford, but among all the contributors, one stands out. His name is John Clute. A Canadian critic and founding editor of the encyclopedia, he has written 6,644 of its entries by himself. The second-most frequent contributor, Langford, has written 582. While the encyclopedia’s FAQ page emphasizes that many of Clute’s entries run on the short side and that others have tweaked or contributed to his overall work, there’s no doubt that he’s written 2 million more words for the site than any other contributor.

And how baroque those words are. Nowhere is Clute’s style more apparent than in the encyclopedia’s entry on . . . John Clute. Naturally enough, in a Philip K. Dick kind of way, Clute wrote it himself. He refers to his early criticism as mostly practical, “despite some studiously flamboyant obscurities.” It’s a joke at his own expense, but only someone who presides over an encyclopedia could use it for florid self-deprecation. Clute has also written a blunt but admiring entry on his current partner, the novelist Elizabeth Hand. On Hand’s first novel, he comments, “the prose is occasionally very powerful, but the book is rather too long.” I’ll leave it to more able critics to tease out the implications, but the call appears to be coming from inside the house.

And yet.

In an entry on Octavia Butler’s Patternist novels, Clute emphasizes that the “strength of the Patternist books lies not in the somewhat melodramatic action template put in place in [the] first published volume, but in Butler’s capacity to inhabit her venues with characters whose often anguished lives strike the reader as anything but frivolous.” Call it a long sentence, call it oddly backhanded; you’d be right. But Clute’s comment is right, too. It captures the blend of earnestness and horror that works so well in Butler’s fiction. Anguish animates her stories, and there are few who write with such compassion about the intimacies of alien (and alienated) life, the fear and necessity of contamination.

Clute’s description of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man as “savage and cleansing in its anger” likewise cuts right to her appeal. Like a magician performing a trick, Clute can conjure an entire reading list in only a sentence or two, as when he declares that Sarah Joy Fowler’s excellent novel, Sarah Canary, is, with John Fowles’s A Maggot, “the finest First Contact novel yet written, certainly from a non-genre perspective.” Entire worlds appear in commentary like this.

The epitome of Clute’s style and of the SFE’s self-documenting habits come out in one of the few places you might actually be able to guess: the entry on Ursula K. Le Guin, of which there are 62 versions. A titan of the genre, Le Guin died this year at the age of 88. Her entry in the SFE was revised almost immediately, not only to reflect her passing but to reformulate the gist of its argument. In the months since then, an editor—likely Clute—has revised the entry a further seven times. It’s the last paragraph that has most shifted.

Before her death, Le Guin’s entry offered an open-ended criticism of her work. Its final paragraph read:

John Clute once wrote of her as “eminently sane, humanitarian, concerned” but went on to lament a “fatal lack of risk“. This may be overstatement, and its author would not now apply the comment to her work as a whole, but it pointed to a quality in her work that had been observed by other critics. It is true that Le Guin’s certainties could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But can self-confidence justly be evidenced as a flaw?

Clute’s words appear in quotation marks. Though preserved, they are in question. Two days after Le Guin’s death, a new version of the entry removed the question about confidence altogether. I surprise myself every time I read it, because I find its brief metaphorical flourish moving:

It is true that Le Guin’s certainties could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But those certainties were always subject to later scrutiny; the traces of her thoughts and her increasingly cogent rethinkings of old verities can be seen as marking a significant intellectual odyssey which reached harbour only with her death. Indeed, in this journey that extended nearly two decades into the new century, Le Guin more and more justified the role that had early in her career been granted her: as a speaker of wisdom.

The latest version of this paragraph fleshes out Le Guin’s role as an elder of American literature, singling out her essays and her thrilling speech at the 2014 National Book Awards. Introduced by Neil Gaiman, Le Guin went on to denounce profit and consumerism as forces that conspire against the freedom to make art and to make a living doing it. True opposition, she implied, is necessary. My favorite bit is the moment when she compares capitalism to another reality once thought impossible to undo: the divine right of kings.

That Clute’s phrase (“fatal lack of risk”) has retained its place in the entry on Le Guin, going back to 2011, seems almost apophatic. It looks like a reckoning, not simply with Le Guin, but with Clute’s earlier judgment. There’s no drama here, but the encyclopedia seems to be ever so slightly taking the piss out of Clute for making his pronouncement it in the first place, even as it raises a serious question about the kind of fiction Le Guin was apt to write. Clute appears to admit that he questioned Le Guin exactly because of her confidence. Or that he and others questioned her work because from the beginning it exhibited a quality that could only be accurately named as wisdom after Le Guin had aged and was being celebrated for her entire career.

As usual, the SFE talks to itself in a mirror. What it reflects in this case are the second thoughts and further refinements of the critical practice. I think Le Guin would approve. She tirelessly refined and rethought her own work. She seemed to quarrel with herself. Her devastating 1990 novel, Tehanu, revises the world she created in her first Earthsea trilogy nearly 20 years before. Her short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” looks askance at the utopian society established in The Dispossessed.

Quarrels like these make for passionate reading, and they are the reason people write. Nothing settles for long in either case. The SFE in particular fuses fandom with criticism, with a fervency familiar from other corners of the science fiction world. Making no effort to avoid the partisanship that’s a hallmark of being a fan, the SFE possesses the kind of purity you can only get from corrupt endeavors. It’s by turns cranky, self-doubting, and ultra-confident, but it couldn’t be more deeply engaged with the genre of science fiction. I’ve never gotten the impression that the World Book or Encyclopedia Brittanica was written by enthusiasts of life on planet earth. Those were done for the science and pleasure of cataloging. The SFE, on the other hand, really loves something.

E.M. Forster conceived of A Room with a View in 1901, when he was 22. Months after graduation from Cambridge, marooned with his mother in a dreary Neapolitan pensione that catered to middle-class British tourists, without a job or even the prospect of a career, the young Forster felt alienated and adrift. He sketched out a list of characters—“Lucy . . . her cousin Miss Bartlett . . . Miss Lavish”—followed by the urgent question “Doing what?” It would take seven years of stops and starts to answer that question. But in wrestling A Room with a View into print, Forster came to understand both his characters and himself. His lifelong subject would be the tragicomic limitations of the English character and the moral consequences of an “undeveloped heart.” Writing this novel showed him who he was and where he belonged in the world, and as he found himself, he found his voice as one of the great writers of the 20th century.

In his final months at Cambridge, Forster was elected to the secret intellectual society known as the Apostles. Ethics was their subject, friendship their secular theology. This small fraternity dedicated to liberal ideas produced some of the most influential British men of the 20th century: the economist John Maynard Keynes, who devised policies that would lift the Great Depression of the 1930s; the editor and political writer Leonard Woolf; the art critic Roger Fry, who brought the French post-impressionist painters Cézanne and Matisse to British audiences; the biographer Lytton Strachey; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The Apostles were serious about their philosophy, and sometimes eccentric in their mien. They knocked down Victorian shibboleths to make way for modern new ideas—women’s rights and social equality, personal liberty and public art. As they migrated after university to the then-shabby Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum, the bohemian circle extended to women who were barred from Cambridge because of their sex—Virginia Woolf (who would marry Leonard) and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. Thus Forster was knit into the Bloomsbury Group at its inception.

But for Forster, that intellectual and artistic community was still far in the future. Just at the moment when his friends began to hone their plans for occupations in the civil service, colonial administration, or teaching, Forster lost momentum. It was considerably easier for him to see what he was not than to imagine what he might become. His undistinguished marks on exams foreclosed the prospect of an academic career; he shifted his course of study from classics to history and stayed on for a fourth year to complete his degree. In 1901, the year Queen Victoria died, Forster graduated from Cambridge. He embarked on a yearlong tour of Italy in the sole company of his mother.

Gloves, parasol, guidebook. By the time Lily Forster and her son set off on their not-so-Grand Tour, Italian tourism had devolved into a carefully orchestrated industry. Baedeker travel guides cataloged the sights that must be seen and the things that must be done, and fueled a proliferation of respectable pensiones. Ensconced in a bubble of English tourists, Forster felt cut off from the real; he complained to a friend: “Our life is where we eat and where we sleep and the glimpses of Italy that I get are only accidents.” Month after month the pair followed a prescribed itinerary: five studious weeks in Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples, a week in minor places like Ravello, San Gimignano, Perugia, and retreat to the Italian Alps in the heat of summer. It was difficult to revel in the wonders of Renaissance humanism or to celebrate the artistic glory he had read about in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice while eating boiled mutton.

Armed with a pocket notebook, Forster began to record snippets of overheard conversation, contrasting the pinched puritanical attitudes of British tourists with the warmth of Italy and its people. “Cherish the body and you will cherish the soul,” Italy seemed to say to Forster. Southern Italy especially seemed uninhibited and Hellenistic, a place where “the belief in wearing away the body by penance so the quivering soul might be exposed had not yet entered the world.” And the Italian men looked like gods.

The very act of anticipation—all this studying and reading and appreciating—seemed to preclude the possibility of surprise.

I missed nothing [he noted in his private diary], neither the campaniles, nor the crooked bridges over the dry torrent beds, nor the uniformity of the blue sky, nor the purple shadows of the mountains over the lake. But I knew that I must wait for many days before they meant anything to me or gave me any pleasure.

Forster could articulate his observations. But too much writing had interposed for any educated Edwardian man to approach Italy as freshly as Percy Bysshe Shelley or Ruskin had done. Raised to be “afraid to feel,” Forster had lost the hang of it. In middle age, Forster astutely analyzed this psychology in his famous essay “Notes on the English Character.” But as a young man, he was under its spell. In letters to friends at home, Forster began to observe himself detachedly, as if he were a character in his own life. “I watch my own inaction with grave disapproval but am still as far as ever from settling what to do.”

“It was considerably easier for him to see what he was not than to imagine what he might become.”

As he lingered in Italy, Forster’s sense of humor bubbled up, and his self-consciousness relaxed into a sort of comic detachment. As it would do for his heroine Lucy Honeychurch, “the pernicious charm of Italy worked on [him] and instead of acquiring information [he] began to be happy.” He gathered little aperçus and private jokes in his notebook, and slowly they made their way into the gestating novel. A pair of elderly women from the pensione overlooking the Arno became the Misses Alan. In Perugia Forster encountered a lady novelist of a certain age, soaking up the atmosphere for a bodice-ripping romance set during the 19th-century Italian revolution. Though frugal and cautious, Miss Emily Spender fashioned herself a renegade. As Miss Lavish, she is immortalized in a pun: Lavish (Spender). The earliest drafts of what Forster called the “Lucy novel” favored caricature over character, and character over plot. But the voice, both sympathetic and ironic, came into focus. Displacement, Forster began to understand, reveals who you actually are. But how to make things happen in a narrative remained elusive to him.

Then suddenly, the inspiration for a short story seized Forster. In Ravello, while walking along the hills overlooking the sea, he conceived a story whole:

I would bring some middle-class Britishers to picnic in this remote spot, I would expose their vulgarity, I would cause them to be terribly frightened they knew not why, and I would make it clear by subsequent events that they had encountered and offended the Great God Pan.

Forster composed “The Story of a Panic,” his first published fiction, in two days of frenzied writing. He stole the plot, such as it was, directly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A peevish schoolboy separated from his family during a thunderstorm becomes inexplicably uninhibited and wild—barking like a dog, embracing an Italian waiter. Eustace’s carnality makes him run mad and ends in tragedy, but the story’s comic power stems from the English narrator’s obtuseness. He never grasps the essential mystery that the anarchic spirit of Pan has overtaken the boy. In writing so closely to his own fears and desires, in an allegory of suppressed gay desire, Forster uncorked a wild energy. But Lucy Honeychurch and her story remained frozen like a bee in amber when Forster and his mother returned home in September 1902.

This wry romantic novel gave its author a lot of trouble. Although the “Italian half” of the Lucy novel was Forster’s earliest experiment in fiction writing, A Room with a View would become his third published novel. Twice he set aside the manuscript to write and publish Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). A Room with a View came into print in 1908. Forster intermixed the drafts of all three early novels, salvaging phrases and ideas from one to another draft. He felt his way along in all three, testing the question of “whether I am conventional or not” in narrative form.

The working notebooks for A Room with a View reveal a young writer strikingly unsure of how to advance a plot, either innocent of literary conventions or resistant to their rules. A family friend, a novelist, complained that Forster “did not make up his mind at the start whether it was to be a tragedy or a comedy. It seemed quite a new idea to him . . . that one ought to have any conceptions of one’s intentions in this respect.” An early draft ended inconclusively, with Lucy bolting from Charlotte to travel alone to Rome. In two others, Forster contemplated killing off not one but both Emersons. (Here Forster’s propensity for melodrama verges on preposterous: when the lovers plan an elopement, George Emerson is dispatched by a falling tree.)

In December 1903, recording in his private diary that he sensed the “Idea of a new novel getting coherent,” Forster took matters in hand. He bought a new notebook, labeled it “New Lucy,” and placed his protagonist in a love triangle between the restless young man now named George Emerson and a new character, the buttoned-up aesthete Cecil Vyse. He added characters: Lucy’s mother and brother, and Rev. Beebe, who “was, from rather profound reasons, somewhat chilly in his attitude towards the other sex”—perhaps because he secretly favored George.

Decisively, Forster framed out an “English half” and animated the plot by bringing Lucy home. Even in Summer Street, a fictional village at the margin of London’s suburban sprawl, Italy’s anarchic power lingers. Panic and Pan stalk Lucy in Surrey just as they had in Fiesole. At the local rectory Rev. Beebe reappears at Windy Corner, and the Emersons unexpectedly rent a villa nearby.

“He was tired of the ‘old, old answer marriage.’ Partly because he could not imagine such a happy ending for himself, partly because marriage felt like a capitulation to a comedic formula, Forster yearned for something more capacious.” 

Forster worked steadily on the manuscript for a year. But just at the moment when Cecil Vyse proposes to Lucy—perhaps in a moment of queer panic—Forster abandoned the draft. A new novel burst into Forster’s imagination “with almost physical force.” In Italy Forster had overheard and recorded a tidbit of gossip, scandalized whispers about a young English widow going rogue to marry an Italian man. In Where Angels Fear to Tread Lilia Herriton’s impetuous romance promises liberation, but it ends in tragedy for her and for the benighted English family bent on “rescuing” her child. In December 1904, Forster wrote the whole novel headlong—ten short chapters in under a month—and sent it off to a publisher. The following autumn, he was rather dazed to find himself a published author.

*

In 1907 he dutifully returned to the unfinished manuscript that he had been drafting for six years.

I have been looking at the Lucy novel. It’s bright and merry and I like the story. Yet I wouldn’t and couldn’t finish it in the same style. I’m rather depressed. The question is akin to morality.

“Akin to morality” is a telling phrase. Ending the story with Lucy’s marriage now felt coercive to Forster. He was tired of the “old, old answer marriage.” Partly because he could not imagine such a happy ending for himself, partly because marriage felt like a capitulation to a comedic formula, Forster yearned for something more capacious. He wanted to be true to the complexities of his inner life, he confided to a friend. “I can’t write down I care about love, beauty, liberty, affection, and truth, though I should like to.” As he wrote the last chapters of A Room with a View, Forster worked through his ideas for a new genre of novel in a lecture for the Working Men’s College. If a happy ending in fiction required a marriage, he told his audience, he was all for pessimism. The novel’s form must be pliant enough to reflect the reality of modern life. After all, Forster told a crowd of young working-class men, “the woman of today is quite another person” than “an early Victorian woman.” And yet, to be true to the comic premise of its plot, Lucy must get wed.

Forster’s ingenious solution in fiction, as in life, was to be at once conventional and subtly subversive. He did this by marrying two strains of the traditional novel of manners—a male and a female tradition—into the two halves of A Room with a View. At the time Forster could not credit his innovation in melding the tourist novel and the marriage plot. But we can.

The tourist novel essentially had been the domain of male writers, from Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey to Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Forster had read James’s novel while at Cambridge, and was fascinated with its craft but repelled by its chilly insistence on observing its young heroine as a purely aesthetic object. (Chapter IX, “Lucy as a Work of Art,” satirizes this view.) But female writers, confined to the domestic, deepened the moral questions of the marriage plot. So Forster took Jane Austen as his guide. It was bold for a young writer to emulate Austen, and bold for a male writer to identify with Lucy’s point of view. Forster focused particularly on the problems Austen explored: the tension between female characters understanding things and their being able to do anything with their discernment. (In her later fiction, Austen pursued this narrative problem with steely precision. Persuasion’s heroine Anne Elliot has insight but no agency; Emma Woodhouse the inverse—great social power without self-knowledge.) Like Austen, Forster was at once firmly situated inside bourgeois culture and detached enough to satirize it. So as both critic and empath he adopted Austen’s free indirect discourse—the third-person narrator who slips in and out of the consciousness of characters, especially the imperfect lens of the mind of his heroine.

*

The publication of A Room with a View in 1908 rounded off Forster’s seven-year apprenticeship as a writer. He found his great themes here, and his brilliantly ambivalent narrative position, but after this novel he would refuse to be constrained by comic forms. After A Room with a View, Forster plumbed the moral complacency of the “English character” in a darker tone. In his later novels, he widened the focus from the future of a pair of lovers to the fate of England—and indeed all of humanity. In Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), Forster peered across the chasm of his own privileged social position, giving subordinated characters agency and voice.

In his later fiction, and in his pungent political essays of the 1930s and beyond, Forster turned the lens back on Englishmen, exposing the tribalism at the heart of English identity, and even testing the limits of liberal goodwill. After he abandoned published novels—“wear[y] of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa”—he wrote seminal gay fiction—the novel Maurice, and two collections of short stories, The Life to Come and The Other Boat. He directed that they should be published posthumously. Forster lived into the modern world—past the First World War and the Blitz, past the atomic age and the moon landing and even the Stonewall riots. He died at 91, in 1970, in, of, and transcendently beyond the Edwardian world of his coming-of-age.

How wide a vista can be seen from a room with a view? Surely a room with a view is still a room. What kind of insight does such a sheltered point of view afford? Forster reminds us in this novel that even if we are self-conscious, we are nevertheless always contained and contextualized, always looking at the world through the particular frame of our social position. We can’t escape our conventions and our prejudices, but we can come to know them, laugh at them. And we can grow. Embracing constraint, Forster asks his readers to strive for a capacious vision of the possible and the real.

__________________________________

From the introduction to A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, Copyright © 2018 Wendy Moffat. Used with permission of Penguin Classics. 

When I began teaching Little Women in my American literature survey courses, I wondered how many of my students had read the book before. In that first class, only one said she had read it in high school. A few of the women had been given the book to read as girls. None of the men had read it. This was a small sample, admittedly, but I wondered if it was being taught in middle and high schools. Surely if books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were being taught, their near-contemporary and, shall we say, feminine counterpart, Little Women, was as well. It didn’t take much digging to find out how wrong I was and why Alcott’s classic had not endured as a book for schools while Twain’s tales of boyhood had.

Little Women, it turns out, is barely on teachers’ and students’ radars. Its educational heyday in the first half of the 20th century is a distant memory. Surveys of teachers’ favorite or recommended texts conducted by the National Education Association ranked Little Women at 47 in 1999 and 73 in 2007. A 2010 survey of four hundred English teachers indicated that none were teaching anything by Alcott. The same year, the annual What Kids Are Reading survey, based on 6.2 million students’ reading records, listed the 40 most frequently read books by grade. Little Women was not mentioned in the report.

Also in 2010, however, Little Women received a potential boost from the new Common Core Standards Initiative. Along with benchmarks students should reach in each grade came lists of “exemplar texts” having sufficient quality and appropriate complexity for each level. Little Women made the list for grades 6–8 (as did The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). It hasn’t much benefited from the recommendation, however. According to the 2012 What Kids Are Reading report, which includes a focus on the Common Core exemplar texts, only 0.08 percent of the 7.6 million American students surveyed had read Little Women the previous school year. By 2014, while some texts on the Common Core exemplar list had received a nice boost since the initiative began—Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, for instance, was read by ten times as many students as before, and Tom Sawyer by four times as many—Little Women’s increase was only two hundredths of a percentage point, meaning it was read by 0.1 percent of students. In the 2016 surveys, conducted in the U.K. as well as the United States, Alcott was not mentioned in either report, which represented the reading habits of 9.8 million students in the United States and 750,000 in the U.K.

Most educators and parents have been less than thrilled with the Common Core, which many states have challenged. The list of “exemplar texts” has been particularly controversial among education specialists, raising concerns about creating a new literary canon. Classics in general were deemed to be overrepresented on the list, but Little Women was the target of a specific kind of criticism. For instance, one education blogger complains,

I yowled when Little Women first appeared on the Common Core list of exemplary texts for 8th graders. And I’m still yowling. The point is not whether you or I loved this book eons ago. The point is whether it is appropriate for today’s 8th graders. . . . If someone polled 500,000 8th-grade teachers, asking them for book recommendations, what are the chances that Little Women would appear on anyone’s list?

In other words, Little Women is presumed to be hardly worthy of rescue from the educational oblivion into which it has fallen.

Another blog post takes a different approach to the subject, but its title pretty much says it all: “Please, Do Not Teach Little Women!” The author, who chairs the English Department at a middle/high school in Connecticut, thinks that Little Women is appropriate as an independent reading choice but nothing more. She has “a great fear that some educators will consider the novel a ‘teachable text.’ ” She regrets that girls will not “linger over every page,” as she did when a child, and that they will be forced to take multiple choice tests about it rather than be allowed to develop a personal relationship with the March girls. Her regret that the novel could cease to be a private pleasure, read alone with a flashlight under the covers, is understandable.

But then she claims, “Although I am not gender-biased with literature, I would not assign this novel to pre-teen boys.” She pleads instead for teachers to choose Tom Sawyer and to leave Little Women alone. Her claim to a lack of bias notwithstanding, her comment that she would not assign this novel to teenage boys perfectly reflects the clear gender bias that she and many teachers have about using what are deemed to be girls’ books in their classes. Another educator, a library media specialist, reacted to the Common Core list by asking, “How many 12-year-old boys will be engaged by Little Women?” As far as I can tell, no one is concerned about whether 12-year-old girls are engaged by Tom Sawyer. But their reaction is not what concerns educators. It’s the boys’ responses they are worried about.

Still assuming there must be some elementary and middle-school teachers out there using Little Women in their classes, I naïvely posted a query on a very active listserv that includes academics in education and children’s literature as well as education professionals working in schools. I simply asked who was teaching the novel, hoping I could follow up with interviews about their experiences. I received only a handful of responses. They were not encouraging. They mostly explained in various ways that teachers don’t teach Little Women because it’s a book for girls and they fear turning off the boys, whom they perceive as unwilling to read books about girls. One educator admitted how unfair this was, considering that the girls are made to read books focusing on boys. Another was more vehement, stating simply that the boys would loathe it. The surest way to teach them how to hate reading would be to make them suffer through Little Women, she said. It is “a private book for girls,” not one to read “publicly, in a classroom.” Yet another respondent explained that it was not well suited to classroom discussion in a mixed-sex school and that it was more appropriate for girls to read at home.

This is the real issue. A book that is about girls, whose very title seems to announce its gender exclusivity, is to be kept at home, not brought into the glaring light of the schoolroom. As we have seen, this wasn’t always the case. Little Women was initially a wildly popular book devoured by children and adults of both sexes. It gradually became, however, “more of a women’s novel, then an adolescent girls’ book, and finally . . . a notable piece of children’s literature, specifically perhaps, a work for seventh and eighth grade girls,” as one teacher wrote on its centenary.5 Since then, I think it’s fair to say, the book has migrated further down the age scale, to fifth and sixth grade. As a book for young girls, then, Little Women seems to warrant little if any attention in the schools. I searched in vain for a local school where I live, in New Orleans, that was teaching it. Even at a progressive K–12 private girls’ school, where I knew a couple of the English teachers, not only was no one teaching it, but my attempts to interest them in the idea fell flat. As one of them showed me the way out after one of our meetings, she admitted that they teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and wondered, “If we don’t teach Little Women, who will?”

The story of how Little Women has migrated from the classroom to optional summer reading lists and homeschooling text lists (another way it stays at home) has at least three strands that relate to feminism, the preference for contemporary texts, and concerns about a crisis in boys’ reading. In the first instance, I can’t help but wonder whether Little Women fell out of favor with educators because of its association with feminism. At about the same moment (the 1970s and ’80s) that it became a hot topic of conversation among feminists, Little Women went underground and under the covers, where it could safely remain a book for girls without wider cultural significance. As we have seen, Little Women became less of an innocuous family tale and more the kind of book that could ignite uncomfortable discussions. Teachers were likely wary of addressing feminist issues with their students and found boys’ books less potentially controversial.

What makes for an ideal memoir? It could be an incisive story of a life (or part of a life), told with veracity and a precise attention to detail. It might be a work of prose that finds fascinating thematic overlaps between its author’s life and some moment in culture of history. Or it could be a glimpse into a point in time that fascinates some ideal reader based on the events it describes. One commonality that these share, however, is a realist aesthetic.

There’s an understandable groundedness to most memoirs—which makes sense, especially in light of the scandals that erupted a decade and change ago when James Frey’s bestselling memoirs were revealed to be less nonfictional than was previously believed. (Though the “nonfiction versus autofiction” debate is also nowhere near being resolved.) But there’s another approach to memoir that can be dramatically effective at conveying the author’s essence without blurring the facts or venturing into Herzogian “hysterical realism.” Some of the most effective ways of recounting a memoir emerge when their authors embrace the weird. There are a host of ways one can do this, each veering away from traditional realism in a way that illuminates their authors’ lives in unexpected ways—while still remaining decidedly nonfictional.

Certain life stories—or elements of lives—can best be evoked through prose that veers into the surreal. Or, in at least one case, Surrealism proper. Most of the writings of Leonora Carrington are bizarre and unsettling journeys into mythology and the visceral, prose explorations of some of the same themes and motifs that she explored in her visual art. Her short memoir Down Below is somewhat different: for one thing, it’s her only work of nonfiction. It charts a particularly gut-wrenching period in Carrington’s life: when she suffered a mental breakdown after the Nazis invaded France.

The events documented in Down Below took place in 1940; Carrington began writing about them three years later. In her introduction to the 2017 edition of Down Below, Marina Warner calls the book “an unsparing account of the experience of being insane.” And throughout the book, Carrington evokes this mental state through a blend of the factual and the ecstatic. Some passages evoke the everyday aspects of her daily life grappling with an increasingly harrowing situation—at times reminiscent of William Seabrook’s Asylum—while others venture into the same ritualistic, metaphorical, and sacred aspects that she channeled in her fiction. To wit:

I ceased menstruating at that time, a function which was to reappear but three months later, in Santander. I was transforming my blood into comprehensive energy—masculine and feminine, microcosmic and macrocosmic—and into a wine that was drunk by the moon and the sun.

Had Carrington’s book simply been an account of her wartime institutionalization and her grappling with the authoritarianism around her, it would have been gripping enough. But the addition of these leaps into the ecstatic make it more singular. One can trace a fairly direct literary line from this to Wendy C. Ortiz’s 2016 book Bruja. Ortiz describes her book as a “Dreamoir,” defined in part as “a narrative derived from the most malleable and revelatory details of one’s dreams, catalogued in bold detail.”

What that means in practice is months upon months of short vignettes, in which figures and places from Ortiz’s life recur in different permutations. The presence of dream logic here is understandable: several of these dreams take place in Olympia, Washington—but “Olympia-that-is-not-Olympia” also shows up as a distinct location. Each short vignette stands well on its own, but the cumulative effect reveals recurring motifs—a sense of dislocation, questions of borders and travel, sublimated familial violence—that slowly emerge. It’s an elegant and subtle way to evoke these concerns in prose. There’s no analysis provided, simply the raw stuff and bizarre imagery of dreams.

Ortiz is one of a handful of authors whose bibliographies serve as fascinating examples of how to filter the same life through different literary styles. The surreal dreamscapes of Bruja are far removed from the more straightforward realism of Excavation or the fragmented scenes in Hollywood Notebook, but the sum total of all three makes for a fascinating study in contrasts. Likewise, avid readers of Maggie Nelson’s work may note some thematic overlap within the lyrically written Bluets, the more analytical prose of The Art of Cruelty, and the autobiographical poems found in Something Bright, Then Holes.

Deborah Levy’s works of nonfiction, the books Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, take on a similar refraction of memory through surreal structural choices and a sense of intentional dislocation. Much of the former involves Levy’s childhood in apartheid-era South Africa. And while the structure of it is clearly that of a mature writer regarding their younger years, Levy leaves certain gaps in the narrative, neatly evoking the gaps in knowledge that one can have as a child. Those breaks are evocative for their absences; they evoke the frustrations of youth with a memorable deliberation.

The subtitle of Things I Don’t Want to Know is On Writing, while The Cost of Living’s is A Working Autobiography. Both books delve in and out of Levy’s own fiction, including her novel Swimming Home, showing how elements of her own life are transformed into the stuff of fiction, and how the lines between the two can grow blurry. The Cost of Living offers more of a portrait of the mature Levy than its predecessor did, but it also makes use of some precise disorientation—in this case, temporal. It begins with endings—the end of a marriage, the decision to sell a home—but leaps around in time, accruing certain motifs as it goes: questions of intimacy, family, and mortality in particular.

The Cost of Living opens with a nod to another artist who understood narrative misdirection. “As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story.” That sense of potential—and that question of endings, happy and otherwise—hangs over the rest of the book, reminding us throughout that, though nominally realistic, this is as constructed a narrative as any foray into history or the fantastical. Like Javier Mariás’s Dark Back of Time, this is a work that utilizes metafictional concerns for nonfictional ends. And given that this is a narrative that focuses on the end of a life and the end of a marriage, that question of where certain stories end takes on a powerful thematic heft.

The means by which certain authors utilize surreal or otherwise experimental narrative elements in their memoirs can turn certain familiar narratives into something unpredictable. But more than that, they also create a way for the authorial voice to be magnified, and for certain distinctive motifs to emerge. The surreal can be a valuable tool for some writers, and it can help take the memoir into new territory along the way.

Yet another mid-list novelist was scheduled to lecture that afternoon at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003 and Barry Hannah wanted no part of it. After lunch we stood out beneath a singeing Tennessee sun as attendees and Hannah fanatics dispersed down several sidewalks. We watched them go, not at all eager to follow. Hannah asked me if I had been fishing lately and I said, “Like a Nazarene.”

He had recently become reinvigorated by the Christianity of his boyhood—born again, or born anew, though we are all being somehow born anew in our various walks and ways—and he had gone sober after a lifetime of being a venal Baptist and then nearly dying in an Oxford, Mississippi, hospital from too many maladies: lymphoma, pneumonia, organs napalmed by decades of cigarettes and booze. As a twenty-something sycophant and Hannah fanatic myself, I referenced Christ when I could—my Catholic learning on me like a party hat—and even recited for him the religious sonnets of John Donne and Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Those bards are bent believers,” he said. “Sing more,” and I did.

He was used-up and feeble all that week, Band-Aids on the slack sun-wrinkled flesh of his arms. We walked to his motel room to retrieve the fishing poles and right away he lit a Camel filter: out of view, the door bolted, since he knew that worried people were keeping watch and might attempt a rescue. The doctors had ordered him off tobacco and sin but Barry Hannah had a hard time abiding rules. Rumor whispered of him still swilling whiskey by the jug and agitating the Christian calm of Oxford on his Harley-Davidson.

This transgressive quality is what one experiences instantly upon entering his fallen world: the sentences laid down as if by a Dionysian celebrant invested equally in creation and destruction, a syntax activated in chaos and ecstasy, his South an almost-apocalyptic, near-dystopian swamp of shame from which the customary and commonsensical have fled for good. Step lively: God’s grace is far from given. It’s an unsafe world, a repository of ruin, waste, and doctrinal despair, shot through with the ominous sense that something sinister can occur any second, something outrageous and hell-bent and beautiful, and that hazard is precisely what makes his fiction so exciting, “such a beloved reprieve from the usual,” as the narrator of his novella Hey Jack! describes snow in the South.

Richard Ford recalls his first encounter with Hannah’s stories: “His sentences had, among their teeming effects and emotions, a perilous feel; words running . . . between sense and hysteria; verbal connectives that didn’t respect regular bounds and might in fact say anything.” Those unpredictable and blissed-out sentences had made him the only living godfather of Southern literature, honored and sought-after by scribes south of the Mason-Dixon line or anyplace in the nation where readers recognized mayhem as magic.

Hannah assembled the fishing poles in a cigarette fog, and I noted the phalanx of pill bottles on his dresser. It occurred to me then that the godfather could perish in my custody and that this would make me persona non grata. When I asked if he felt well enough to fish, he said, “I’m tired. But I need to be tired, tired enough to sleep the night through since I can’t seem to do it. I’m not complaining. I’m thankful to be alive.” I was more an imposter-reporter than a new fishing pal: I scribbled his every other sentence into a notebook, aware that I would need to remember, to get it all down right. I could not afford to do without Hannah’s wicked brand of acumen—in my life, in my work—and he didn’t mind my furious scribbling. He was used to it by now.

But how to capture that voice? And I don’t mean the molasses Mississippi drawl but the slightly reptilian hiss that preceded his every clipped clause, the calculated elocution of someone who handles a sentence like an affable hatchet. Hearing him chat as he prepared a fishing pole was identical to sitting at the worn sandals of some heretic wizard mostly bored with his large abilities.

And why would this rebel of the English language, this prose mastermind who had zapped to life a generation of younger writers, choose to pass time with a toady kid from Boston he had met only a few days earlier? I suspect because during our previous conversations I never once mentioned writing; because I spoke of bass fishing in the deep green of Maine; because I was a far-from-home melancholic whose heart was just then being howitzered by the woman he loved; and because Barry Hannah’s own heart was as capacious and willing as his instinct for cyclonic phrases. Forget the ridiculous mythos of Wildman Hannah—his kindness could have cured the lame. What did Allen Tate say of Edgar Poe? “If he was a madman he was also a gentleman.”

“I scribbled his every other sentence into a notebook, aware that I would need to remember, to get it all down right. I could not afford to do without Hannah’s wicked brand of acumen—in my life, in my work—and he didn’t mind my furious scribbling.”

Mick Jagger wailed at half volume from a portable radio in the bathroom. (Hannah once referred to the Rolling Stones in a story as “those skinny, filthy Lazaruses.”) He ordered me to obtain the Blue Note albums of Jimmy Smith, jazz organist-genius—“You will want and need him,” he said—and then classified Jimmy Hendrix as a god not fit for this foul world. In Hannah’s short novel Ray, the fighter-pilot protagonist rocks out to Hendrix over Hanoi; and in “Idaho,” from the collection Captain Maximus, the narrator seeks relief in Hendrix after being ravaged by a divorce and the cancer death of a friend.

Hendrix mattered to Hannah the way deliverance matters to a Pentecostal, and music—like tennis and flying—is everywhere in his work, center stage or stage right. In a 2005 interview Hannah says: “Some of my pals are Bach, Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Mozart, ear perfect people. They stir me.” In a 1993 essay, Will Blythe wrote that “what Hendrix did with the guitar, Hannah does with prose: invent a whole new American music.” Are not all poets and fiction writers in some sense closeted musicians, those who wish to croon and jam but are held back by the daunt of instruments and audience?

But in a 1997 interview Hannah says this: “People who try to make a direct connection between prose lines and music are fools. You can’t write music.” His story “Testimony of Pilot,” from the inestimable collection called Airships, is equal to James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” or Eudora Welty’s “Powerhouse” at capturing the ostensibly ineffable, transformative quality of song. The matchless lines in Airships put you in half-frightened awe at the altar of English: “ruesome honks poured from his horn”; “what a bog and labyrinth the human essence is”; “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out”; “profundity of the eternal sort had passed near.” My God, I thought upon first experiencing that book, what a golden tongue this man has.

Hannah’s work is a postmodern fever dream of semi-free association, a theater of the absurd with overtones of Ionesco in which spiritual isolatos and vagabonds have become severed from civilization and all the laws it requires to work. In The Tennis Handsome, one character says, “Neither of us is really from anywhere now,” and another replies, “That happens to a lot of us.” Hannah’s is the unholy language of an outraged id, verbal voodoo inventing itself. You may hurl “lyrical” as a slur to mean plotlessness plus poeticism—all that prettiness in service of nothing, more blah from the tenderhearted—but the twisted lyricism in Hannah always administers narrative, navigates through the rock-jagged darkness to the hub of us, and approximates the religio-mythical path from destruction to redemption. Break it down to build it up, fertility from fire. Hannah’s cosmos becomes a kind of backward Babel where the assignation of new language permits not befuddlement but clarity, a Windexed view onto a once-lush garden. He dismantles traditional American syntax and then constructs a bastardized hybrid of verse and prose that is both riveting and irregular, a hell-for-leather homage to his first literary influence, Dylan Thomas. (In a 1999 essay called “Mr. Brain, He Want a Song,” Hannah writes lovingly of Thomas: “God, to be Welsh and drunk and start hollering out surrealism.”) Choose any book; fan to any page. Here’s a bit from “Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night,” from High Lonesome, Hannah’s finest, fullest story because it achieves equal parts hilarity and heart-wreck, every paragraph a marvel of linguistic bravado:

Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory. They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon-whelp Romeo. Tornado in a razor factory, that’s what sweetness.

The lover as aberration: somehow both hyperbolic and dead-on. The unexpected and inevitable choices of “territory” and “ask the locals.” The clause “they are not nice”: a child’s simplicity with newfound might. The deliberately understated “careless” combined with the alliterative comic bedlam of “blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok.” The Motown oddity and collision of opposites in “how sweet the wreckage.” And of course “pube-rioting Juliet” and “moon-whelp Romeo”: the mind behind those two phrases just doesn’t function like yours and mine.

In the story “The Spy of Long Root,” from Bats Out of Hell, Hannah writes that high-tech bicycle helmets are “reminiscent of magnified sperm in full motility.” In no other American writer save Updike could you discover an image comparable in its sheer sexual accuracy and surprise. (About Updike, Hannah said to me, “He’s a genius, okay? But I don’t get him.” Updike wrote a favorable review of Hannah’s Geronimo Rex in 1972.)

After we had prepared the fishing poles that afternoon in his room and were ready to set out, Hannah asked me how my lover was leaving me. Not why but how, since he knew that the why is always the same: sacrifices regretted, promises ignored, emotional realities unacknowledged. Growing up factors in prominently. Dreams, too, have something to do with it. I replied with some forgettable gibberish my grief had forced on me. I didn’t know how, and I barely understood why.

Hannah’s philosophy of love is clear enough to anyone who studies his work: love often means compulsion wed to delusion. He is both a prophet of lust unafraid of semen and blood and an apostle of womanhood: many of his men confuse infatuation with ardor or neurosis with zeal, and they usually pay mightily for their mess-ups, as I was paying mightily for mine. “Love Too Long” in Airships ends with: “Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. . . . I’m going to die from love.” Try to rebuff the truth of those lines. From his first book, Geronimo Rex, in 1972, to his last, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, in 2001, Hannah deploys a slinky wisdom of men and women in love and hate and what we do to one another in our worst moments, which are frequent, and frequently unforgivable.

Readers do not often regard Hannah as a prophet of the heart, a “love maniac,” as Rick Bass describes him. Female readers and scholars appear either to shun or abhor him. (The most notable exception is Ruth Weston in Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic. Hannah himself admired the book.) His work might contain pro-female passages fit for a Sapphic rally, but his overall depiction of sex and women, like his depiction of human behavior in general—unpleasant, duplicitous, sometimes savage—has won him no fans among feminists or the easily unsettled. “Ride Westerly for Pusalina,” from Bats Out of Hell, ends in sexual violence shocking enough to jolt those deadened by the Saw franchise, and the narrator of “Carriba,” from High Lonesome, christens one woman “a roving clamp.”

Many tend to discount the goodness and mercy in his fiction—such as the scenes between the narrator and his pal’s girlfriend in “Testimony of Pilot,” or the human decency at the core of Boomerang—and instead make a show of turning on the wipers to clear away the gore, and this despite Weston’s smart assertion that the “spirit of Hannah’s fiction” is “essentially optimistic.” Hannah writes in “Carriba” that “we have to love each other . . . Even if we don’t want to, we have to.” Those words deliberately recall Auden’s oft-cited line from “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die.”

Academics in general have a hard time getting a handle on Barry Hannah, which has little to do with the fact that he had scant regard for scholars—the narrator of “Idaho” dubs them “drudges working with computers against Shakespeare”—or that he was, like Richard Yates, always a writer’s writer with a short range in the marketplace and the academy. Rather, his ferocious vision of the South and the oddities of his style and storytelling sensibility seem either to discourage academics or else inspire a cacophony of incoherence—Perspectives on Barry Hannah, for instance, in which most of the contributing academics do what academics do best: earless, obscurantist prose. I drove us in Hannah’s old Jeep Cherokee to a spot he knew on a river not far from the conference, and once we sat on a grassy patch and began casting our lines into the current, he told me about a book he was halfway through: Edward Leslie’s The Devil Knows How to Ride, about William Clarke Quantrill, the Confederate guerrilla and mass murderer. “He was a killer,” Hannah said, “a ruthless killer, nothing more. Killed as many people in Kansas as he could, mostly civilians. Makes you wonder how a demon like that gets born.” He said this with a mix of admiration, contempt, and bewilderment, as if Quantrill were an obstinate algebraic equation that needed immediate solving.

The violence throughout Hannah’s work is remarked on at least as much as his newfangled language; some readers and critics want to believe he invented brutality in literature. Hannah is indeed awestruck before human cruelty and chooses to paint it in Homer’s radiant red—no one complains of the violence on the sand at Ilium (Hannah told an interviewer in 2001 that he is “a student of the myths, the true myths”)—but not because he is a sadist out for titillation. Philip Roth gets it right when he describes the cruelty in Ray: “the brutish, menacing, driven stuff of life.” The narrator of that novel notes that “some days even a cup of coffee is violence.”

Our baffling lust for brutality is part of the human fabric, and this fabric—all the strands that compose it and how those strands are woven—is Hannah’s subject as it was Homer’s. To shrink from accurate illustrations of the bloody evil in men amounts to cowardice, an unfinished portrait of this ravening world and our uncertain place in it. Hannah’s reality is our own, “a reality sufficiently terrible,” as Tate says of Poe. Monsters dwell inside us, and they will have vent. Hannah once said: “Privately we are all monsters, if we’d only look at our obsessions.” The final paragraph of “A Christmas Thought,” from Bats Out of Hell—a brief parody of inane bloodshed—perfectly captures Hannah’s postlapsarian credo:

When you read and wonder, for six seconds, about the random, pointless violence of these days, then are blissful it was not you, having, really, a better day, stop and think: Could not these felons be, really, God’s children, loose, adept, so hungry and correct in our world?

Open a history book or just glance around you: see what God’s correct children are capable of.

And yet for all his intrepid rendering of human violence, Hannah is only one part of a contemporary Southern triumvirate of blood-scribes. Cormac McCarthy and William Gay practice a godless butchery that surpasses Hannah’s. The cosmic carnage rampant in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has no equal in American letters, and Lester Ballard nightmares through Child of God like a thing bubonic, a heinous, deliberate misfit unlike any of Hannah’s upright villains. In Gay’s terrifying novel Twilight, Granville Sutter, a devil without creed or cause, uses a switchblade to slaughter an entire family—and their dog. That species of straight-faced sadism has no counterpart in Hannah’s world; when his characters go gorily berserk, as they do in the novel Never Die, the violence is usually satirical.

His tragicomic savagery puts him more in league with Harry Crews than with either McCarthy or Gay. Even his battlefield tales of the Civil and Vietnam Wars can’t compare to the malaise and murder in Thom Jones’s famous story “The Pugilist at Rest.” In a 2002 speech he delivered at Bennington College (published as “Why I Write” in Harper’s in 2010), Hannah mentions his “need to listen to the orchestra of living,” and the necessary “bursts of kindness in improbable times, the warm hand in dire straits.” Those who miss this in his work are missing much.

So Hannah was a little uneasy about his reputation as a connoisseur of human calamity, and confused about why the violence in his fiction would be so off-putting to some. “This is the most violent era I’ve ever lived in,” he once told an interviewer. “Mothers killing babies—I’ve never even touched that subject. I’ve never really gotten to the grisly, hideous things that you read in the newspaper.” (Hannah is no doubt referring here to Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who murdered her five young children in a bathtub in June 2001.) I can tell you how he released a five-pound catfish from a hook: with concern and Samaritan pity. “This one’s got some growin’ left in him,” he said.

“Hannah’s philosophy of love is clear enough to anyone who studies his work: love often means compulsion wed to delusion.”

The following night Hannah gave his reading to a standing-room-only lecture hall, a flock of admirers, emulators, disciples, and those car-crash gawkers who came to hear how Wildman Hannah might blaspheme and spew. But the only mildly inflammatory mention was about how most of the student work he’d been reading at the conference didn’t have “hope of finding even an elegant trash can.” He then read from a half-finished essay about his vision of Christ while he recovered from cancer, an essay that would appear in 2005 with the title “Christ in the Room.”

“I hesitate,” he began, “but there’s no argument or apology here. Four years ago in April Christ appeared to me in a dream firmer than a dream. He was six feet tall, dark hair to the shoulders, with the body of a working man.” I’m not sure if it sounded to anyone like the man had gone mad and was now erect on an Evangelical soapbox, but some did glance around to gauge the reactions of others. His sentiments should have surprised no one: Hannah’s South has always been as Christ-plagued as O’Connor’s, and now it had simply gone from plagued to possessed.

After the essay, he read from a short story about two friends, both archetypal Hannah heroes, beaten down and trying to be better. Three-quarters of the way through he began to get weepy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never cried during a reading before, never.” The story reminded him of a cherished friend who’d just died. I suspect he was weeping also because he could smell his own death in that room, with all of us looking at him, waiting for his legendary vitality to wilt. The pieces he read might have been disjointed that evening, but they reduced half of the listeners to silent sobbing. At the end he said goodbye to his Sewanee friends, some of whom he’d known for decades. He seemed certain that he didn’t have much time left, and he wasn’t the only one.

In fact, he had nearly seven more years to live—seven more years to extend the language with his particular wizardry. But he didn’t or couldn’t produce another book and had sworn off short stories for essays. He’d told me on the river that he abandoned short fiction because no one but other writers cared for it and because there was no money to be had. “Essays are creative,” he said, “the same thing.” The few essays Hannah published between the time we met in 2003 and his death in 2010 have their invaluable moments of Hannahesque mischief and shine, yes, but they cannot touch the effulgence of his best fiction and are mostly alternate riffs on his comprehension of scripture. In 2009 the journal Gulf Coast published an excerpt from a novel in progress called Sick Soldier at Your Door—a Hannah title if ever there was one—and Harper’s reprinted the excerpt, but thus far no word that Sick Soldier is finished and forthcoming.

It became difficult to determine over the years how much Hannah was writing—no new stories appeared in the magazines and journals—or how his health was faring. Friends in the South would send word to me on occasion; either Hannah was thriving on his Harley or tethered to an oxygen tank indoors. In the letters we exchanged he wrote of his students and the many books he was reading—the Gospels, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus—but only vaguely of his work and never of his health. After a long time of feeling ambivalent about teaching, he had come to think of his students as his darlings—he treasured them now. During his fiction workshop at Sewanee a student had asked him for the best advice he could give, and he said: “Thrill me.”

When I returned from Sewanee that year I sent him some CDs of various under-the-radar musicians I wanted him to hear—Ike Reilly, Joe Henry, Bob Schneider—and photos of him holding up the catfish to the camera. His return letter, all vintage humor and wit, revealed that the man was unable to write dead sentences. Near the end, he jokes about being “a minor James Brown without the musical talent but all the moves,” and then declares, “I did it my way.” We will remember him just like that, always, as a witness who had the guts to live well and read well and then return to tell us of the thrill he’d found.

–This profile originally appeared in AGNI, 72

__________________________________

From American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring, by William Giraldi. Used with permission of Liveright. Copyright © 2018, William Giraldi.

The 18th century was a golden era for finding stuff in England: Roman coins in the garden soil, plesiosaur bones in the Dorset cliffs, passions buried under the crust of social expectations.

Among the more delightful discoveries of the age was the 1771 realization of a new art form by Mary Delany, a 72-year-old Englishwoman recovering from the grief of widowhood on an extended visit to a friend. After an inspiring meeting with Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, the botanists who accompanied Captain Cook on his journey through the South Pacific, Delany took a pair of scissors and began to cut a piece of handmade paper. The result was the first of the Flora Delanica, a collection of 985 paper mosaics of plant life so startling in their accuracy that botanists still consult them more than 200 years later.

These blossoms husbanded from the barrenness of grief were a remarkable act of creation by a woman with no formal training or credentials, apart from “eyes that had 72 years of pure noticing,” as the poet Molly Peacock writes in her luscious biography of Delany, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.

The mosaics belong now to the British Museum. The complete collection is available to view in the museum’s online gallery or in person by appointment, and two rotating examples are on perpetual display in the museum’s Enlightenment Gallery. Designed as the personal library of King George III, the gallery has the high molded plaster ceilings and inlaid mahogany floors befitting a monarch’s place of learning. Its display cases and shelves are a menagerie of the oddities whose inspection and categorization the Enlightenment found so enlightening: ichthyosaur jaws and Greek urns, flint axes and dried blowfish.

A walk through the gallery’s aisles reveals how many of the museum’s early collections were seeded by people whose hobbies provided creativity and meaning perhaps not found in their daily roles. Gustavus Brander was a director of the Bank of England and an avid fossil hunter. Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode was a wealthy bachelor who left behind a bequest of prints, shells, fossils, and engraved gems, plus an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine that noted with some awe that he had never ridden a horse. The desperately poor Mary Anning sold seashells to tourists near Lyme Regis, while quietly unearthing, preparing, and classifying one of 18th-century Britain’s most important troves of paleontological discoveries.

Delany’s primary occupation, of course, was being a woman of some means, a role so all-consuming society strongly discouraged any other activity. “She lived in an age when women hid their lights,” Peacock explains, “but to hide a light means you know you have one, and it means you understand that you have to protect it from threat and nurture it for growth.”

Delany lived first through a forced teenage marriage to a grotesque, much-older landowner, then a relieved early widowhood, and then a happy union of nearly 25 years to Patrick Delany, an Irish theologian with whom she enjoyed friendship and and a mutual passion for British gardens. It was a relationship in which both parties flowered and thrived, two late bloomers (Mary was 44 at their wedding, Patrick 57) taken aback by the pleasure of one another’s company.

His death in 1768 cast a darkness. There was no model for elderly widows to find purpose or self-expression in a new medium expertly layering art and science. Mourning the end of a marriage and the loss of a kind and loving life companion, Delany’s cultivation of art from the loam of her grief was a creative act as bold as any of her blooms.

Mary Delany, Night Primrose, 1780. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

I thought I’d have to look hard for them when I visited the British Museum on a late April day this year, but Delany’s flowers were just to the left of the gallery’s southerly entrance, tucked behind a bust of botanist John Ray and two cases over from the mounted, taxidermied feet of a zebra, giraffe, and rhinoceros. The glass-encased cabinet bloomed with a moss provence rose, a delicate-seeming but deceptively resilient pink blossom encased by a prickly stalk, and a night primrose, another late-blooming wonder erupting bold and yellow against an inky black background.

In person, the mosaics resemble pressed flowers more than paintings. The detail is stunning: each one a delicately overlaid assembly of as many as 200 pieces of finely cut paper, every vein and anther its own deliberate act. It was a failure of eyesight, not of imagination, that ended Delany’s artistic career in 1783. She wrote a farewell ode to her beloved blossoms and lived another five years in a cottage provided by George III, he of the elegant library and deep admiration for Delany and her work.

Unexpected flowers can have wondrously uplifting effects. I visited Delany’s blooms shortly after a period of marital metamorphosis, the kind brought about not by any single cataclysm but by the accumulation of life’s ordinary trials, like a petal collapsing suddenly under the weight of a soft summer rain.

It was one of those times in which the only viable resolutions are to break apart (the leaf falling from the branch, the brittle blossom crumbling at the touch) or to grow into something new, a form that acknowledges and accommodates the specimens you have grown to be. We chose the latter, and in the aftermath I wandered the museum exhilarated, exhausted, looking for examples of second acts of greater depth and color than the first.

“Living a full life requires invention, but that needs a previous pattern, if only to react against or, happily, to refigure in the making of something new,” Peacock tells us. It’s true in art, and in love, and in the long unfurling toward maturity that is every life’s work. A marriage is an act of constant creation, one that demands a brave and watchful eye willing to seek the shoots of new growth in the ashes of what’s been lost. We marry as two-dimensional silhouettes, opaque to one another and ourselves; over time we layer our shared joys and heartbreaks, disappointments and discoveries into figures we could never have imagined as we faced one another unseeing, into shapes that take our breath away with their depth.

A seed germinates in the detritus of plants that died before it; our earlier missteps fertilize a more mature love. There is always something new to be found.

In the Autumn of 2013, I undertook a creative writing workshop. One seminar, our teacher shared what he’d written alongside us. In it, a middle-aged woman lay on a sofa, gently pleasuring her skin with a cold spoon she’d stored in the freezer, teasing it along her shoulders and the crook of her hip. The piece was funny, wry, and very human. Our teacher was a big believer—as he put it in that class—in sex and in shitting. Both, he said, were part of everyday life, and could be present in our fiction; we shouldn’t be afraid to depict the bodies of our characters in their wet, weird, animal, processes: inside their sexual power. This class really struck me, and I started to experiment with writing about sex.

Writing sex is notoriously hard, and certainly intimidating. Alongside the cultural shame many of us have been socialized to feel, there’s also a lack of shared language for sexualized experience outside of cis-manhood and heteronormative experience. There is plenty of terrible sex writing out there, evidenced each year by the Bad Sex Awards, in which hyper-masculine imagery (often sexualizing non-consensual violence); diminutive or patronizing language depicting passive womxn; and description that—more often than not—serves to mystify feminine sexuality and hyper-sexualize girlhood, make up the disturbingly consistent “bad sex tropes.”

I started to attempt writing sex in a different way: hyper-naturalistic, and from inside the heads of womxn. I wanted it to feel subjective and not objectifying, to be located in bodily experience. I didn’t need it to always be sexy. One day I brought a sample piece into class for workshop. In it, a youngish cis-woman has sex at a party; she’s drunk, and although it’s consensual, it definitely isn’t sensual, or even particularly pleasant. I thought I had written something quite funny: clumsy and frank. Many of my classmates laughed, but one, in her feedback, told me she’d found it sad. She said, “The character just seems really unhappy; it’s obviously not the kind of sex anyone would want to be having.”

What she said was—I guess—quite judgmental, but it really struck me, and I went home thinking about it a lot. This work of writing sex was inherently complicated for me. The summer before I’d started the workshop, I had been raped on a first date, and this was by no means the first time I’d experienced sexualized violence. I was beginning, that autumn, to interrogate what this all meant for me, what it was: this sluggish, silencing, wound-up well of shame I carried in my gut; what it made me want to do, to run from, to run into. I realized that the characters who had sex in the work I was writing were deeply disconnected from their bodies, and while they had lots of sexual freedom, they had lost their sexuality as it lived physically inside them. Unable to articulate specific desires, they sought bodily affirmation from others, or ways to escape their thoughts and feelings through substance abuse, whilst simultaneously striving for a sense of control in their own bodies.

I started to talk about all this with my friends, to discuss our own bodies’ narratives and the narratives of sex we had access to. All of this pain and shame felt as hidden in the literature we were reading as the gorgeous, world-transforming sex we knew was also out there: in a space where communication, self-knowledge, and respect overtook the impulse for self-destruction-through-shagging. While, as my classmate put it, this may not have been sex people wanted to have, it was sex people I knew were having. I wanted this to be reflected in fiction, alongside the myriad other ways sex happens or doesn’t. I wanted to be able to read stories that didn’t shy away from pain and complexity in a bid to always depict (the same kind of) womxnhood as sexy and desirable. I wanted to be shown that healing is possible, and to start to explore—through fiction—the kinds of sex I might be longing for.

My writing class was in 2013, and I find it astonishing and exciting how rapidly things have been changing ever since. It feels like we are writing and reading in a literary moment where more inclusive, radical, and transformative depictions of sex are slinking into the anglophone mainstream in a delightful haze of fluffy pubes and lovely queer bodies (of course, they’ve always been there, but it seems to be more and more central). My first encounter with a novel that depicted both sexual assault and the beginnings of a recovery steeped in love was Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Americanah. The Neapolitan Novels followed, with their sharp interrogation of how gender and class intersect, and of sexual awakening and violence. Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends is frank and acerbic in its exploration of a queer 21-year-old’s (constantly overlapping) experiences of sex, politics, insecurity, and love. Sphinx—a novel by Anne Garreta and translated into English by Emma Ramadan—tells a love story between two people whose genders are never made known.

Right now, it feels like short stories are leading the way on sex; Carmen Maria Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Parties didn’t remotely shy away from the violence that is experienced by womxn and held in their bodies, but there’s such tenderness and fantasy in these genre-bending stories that they offer healing even as they hurt. Miranda July’s depictions of sex (both in her novel The First Bad Man and recent short story “The Metal Bowl”) blow apart stereotypes of desire as she writes into the tension of (a white) womxn’s sexualized power and simultaneous objectification. Last year’s viral short story “Cat Person” saw Kristen Roupenian explore sexual dissatisfaction and unenthusiastic consent.

These—and many more—are stories in which characters are having sex within a context of empowerment (or where there is an explicit awareness that they aren’t); sex that is loving or funny; with depictions of violence that aren’t sexualized or used as plot devices, but are instead a mode of understanding and empathizing. It is an exciting time, and I for one want more of it: sex through the eyes of womxn, written in language that embraces actual bodies, disabled bodies, fat bodies, trans bodies, rather than always being a white, heteropatriarchal fantasy of quiet, violent submission.