PEN America Issue 2: Home and Away (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers) 0934638187, 093463839X

Citation preview

Published by PEN American Center, an affiliate of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers working to advance literature and defend free expression.

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers Volume 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2001) PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012, Telephone: (212) 334-1660. Fax: (212) 334-2181. e-mail: [email protected]. Web: www.pen.org/journal. This issue is made possible in part by the generous funding of Furthermore, the publication program of The J. M. Kaplan Fund. Copyright © 2001 PEN American Center, Inc. Opinions expressed in PEN America are those of the author of each article, and not necessarily those of the editor, the advisory board, or the officers of PEN American Center. All rights reserved. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the formal consent of PEN American Center. Authorization to photocopy items for internal, educational, or personal use is granted by PEN American Center. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale. Printed in the United States of America. Postmaster: send address changes to PEN America, c/o PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012. ISBN: 0-934638-18-7 eBook ISBN: 0-934638-39-X ISSN: 1536-0261 cover photograph: Christa Parravani

Please see page 224 for the text acknowledgments.

CONTENTS TRIBUTES James Baldwin’s Grand Tour Freedom Fighter Thulani Davis On the Avenue Carl Hancock Rux The White Problem David Leeming Family Secrets Hilton Als Making James Baldwin Nikki Giovanni To Change the World Russell Banks Our Man Jimmy Amiri Baraka On Solid Ground Eleanor Traylor With Fire and Bare Hands John Edgar Wideman The Day I Finally Met Baldwin Chinua Achebe Proust Regained

After the Fall Roger Shattuck Theories of Relativity William C. Carter The Architecture of Thought Lydia Davis Recognitions Marilynne Robinson Toward Total Recall William H. Gass Cross-Pollination Nadine Gordimer The Consolations of Art Edmund White Parce que c’était lui … André Aciman Flannery O’Connor and the Making of Mystery Leaps of Faith Maureen Howard The Subtleties of Violence Rick Moody Blues to Be There Stanley Crouch The Invisible Parade Roy Blount Jr. Bad Behavior Mary Gordon Wise Blood Robert Giroux

ESSAYS Ghosts of Ellis Island Mary Gordon Stranger in the Village James Baldwin Shakespeare in the Bush Laura Bohannon Skeleton of a Human Habitation Heinrich Böll Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction Flannery O’Connor Going Out for a Walk Max Beerbohm The New Nomads Eva Hoffman MEMOIR Walls Amitav Ghosh Ken Saro-Wiwa: The High Price of Dissent Larry Siems Running in the Family Ken Wiwa After the Wars C. K. Williams Housekeeping Pramoedya Ananta Toer FICTION

Memory’s Defeat W. G. Sebald The New Lodger Amy Hempel The City Outside Time Julio Cortázar The Kiss Angela Carter Capiche? Bernard Cooper CONVERSATIONS Homemaking Albert Mobilio and Geoffrey O’Brien Portable Culture, Global Identities Kelefa Sanneh, Coco Fusco, Martin Roberts, Kwame Anthony Appiah POETRY Two Poems Guillaume Apollinaire Tenebrae Richard Matthews FORUM On Translation Robert Kelly The Untranslated Proposals from PEN Members

LAGNIAPPE Short Talks Anne Carson Photographs Christa Parravani

EDITOR’S NOTE

W

ith this issue, we welcome a gratifying number of new readers, thanks in part to Library Journal, which named PEN America one of the “Ten Best New Magazines of 2000.” For those of you who are having your first encounter with our journal, here’s a bit of background. PEN American Center is the largest branch of International PEN, an association of writers, editors, and translators which since 1921 has defended authors whose ideas inconvenience or endanger those in power. Lately, as censorship has diversified, PEN has endeavored to break silences imposed by reactionary ideology, economic and technological consolidation, poverty, and inadequate access to education. As well as speaking up for imperiled writers abroad, PEN members work closer to home, fighting illiteracy and building audiences for serious literature. At public events—and more quietly, in schools and prisons and community centers—volunteers look for ways to connect good readers with good books. PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers aims to provoke spirited exchanges of ideas about the written word and its place in the world. We publish literary essays; award-winning fiction, poetry, and nonfiction; conversations about issues of concern to writers; profiles of those whose work has been suppressed; and speeches from PEN tributes to literary forebears. We entitled this issue “Home and Away” because locating a congenial habitat preoccupied each of the three writers honored at recent PEN Twentieth-Century Masters Tributes. To make a home for himself as a writer, James Baldwin needed to leave the country of his birth. Flannery O’Connor, after a

couple of years up North, returned home to Milledgeville, Georgia, and stayed there for the rest of her life; she said that everything she needed could be seen from her own front porch. And Marcel Proust ruminated for three thousand pages not only on lost time but on places lost and found and found again; for some readers, his insights have permanently changed our view of the landscapes within and around us. We built the rest of the issue with variations on these themes, like birds making nests from twigs and bones and fur and moss, pieces of bright ribbon and telephone wire. In the spirit of eclectic nestbuilding, we’ve included brief passages from a variety of books— nonfiction, fiction, poetry—under the recurring rubric “Home and Away.” We’ve also included a translation forum: Robert Kelly has provided enticing commentary on literature that can’t be read in English, and PEN members have nominated books that urgently need new translations. And from time to time, at the bottom of the page, you’ll find a visual lagniappe: part of a photo essay by a talented young photographer named Christa Parravani or one of Anne Carson’s laconic, alchemic “Short Talks.” These photographs and essay-poems weave through the issue, rub up against longer articles, bounce off them—echoing, insinuating, and opening spaces, we hope, where you can assemble literary homes of your own. —M. Mark September 8, 2001

HOME AND AWAY

In Rwanda … the government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government, and an astounding number of its subjects, imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed. All at once, it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. During the months of killing in 1994, as I followed the news from Rwanda, and later, when I read that the United Nations had decided, for the first time in its history, that it needed to use the word “genocide” to describe what had happened, I was repeatedly reminded of the moment, near the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when the narrator Marlow is back in Europe, and his aunt, finding him depleted, fusses over his health. “It was not my strength that needed nursing,” Marlow says, “it was my imagination that wanted soothing.” I took Marlow’s condition on returning from Africa as my point of departure. I wanted to know how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country, and how they were getting on in the aftermath. The word “genocide” and the images of the nameless and numberless dead left too much to the imagination. —Philip Gourevitch, from We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

GHOSTS OF ELLIS ISLAND Mary Gordon

I

once sat in a hotel in Bloomsbury trying to have breakfast alone. A Russian with a habit of compulsively licking his lips asked if he could join me. He explained that he was a linguist and that he always liked to talk to Americans to see if he could make any connection between their speech and their ethnic background. When I told him about my mixed ancestry—my mother is Irish and Italian, my father was a Lithuanian Jew—he began jumping up and down in his seat, rubbing his hands together and licking his lips even more frantically. “Ah,” he said, “so you are really somebody who comes from what is called the boiling pot of America.” Yes, I told him; yes, I was; but I quickly rose to leave. I thought it would be too hard to explain to him the relation of the boiling potters to the main course, and I wanted to get to the British Museum. I told him that the only thing I could think of that united people whose backgrounds, histories, and points of view were utterly diverse was that their people had landed at a place called Ellis Island. I didn’t tell him that Ellis Island was the only American landmark I’d ever visited. How could I describe to him the estrangement I’d always felt from the kind of traveler who visits shrines to America’s past greatness, those rebuilt forts with muskets behind glass and sabers mounted on the walls and gift shops selling maple-sugar candy in the shape of Indian headdresses, those reconstructed villages with tables set for fifty and the Paul Revere silver gleaming?

All that Americana—Plymouth Rock, Gettysburg, Mount Vernon, Valley Forge—it all inhabits for me a zone of blurred abstraction with far less hold on my imagination than the Bastille or Hampton Court. I suppose I’ve always known that my uninterest in it contains a large component of the willed: I am American, and those places purport to be my history. But they are not mine. Ellis Island is, though; it’s the one place I can be sure my people are connected to. And so I made a journey to find my history; I had become part of that humbling democracy of people looking in some site for a past that has grown unreal. The monument I traveled to was not, however, a tribute to some old glory. The minute I set foot upon the island I could feel all that it stood for: insecurity, obedience, anxiety, dehumanization, the terrified and careful deference of the displaced. I hadn’t traveled to the Battery and boarded a ferry across from the Statue of Liberty to raise flags or breathe a richer, more triumphant air. I wanted to do homage to the ghosts. The minute I set foot upon the island I could feel all that it stood for: insecurity, obedience, anxiety, dehumanization, the terrified and careful deference of the displaced.

I felt them everywhere, from the moment I disembarked and saw the building with its high-minded brick, its hopeful little lawn, its ornamental cornices. The place had not functioned for more than thirty years—almost as long as the time it had operated at full capacity as a major immigration center. I was surprised to learn what a small part of history Ellis Island had occupied. The main building was constructed in 1892, then rebuilt between 1898 and 1900 after a fire. Most of the immigrants who arrived during the latter half of the nineteenth century, mainly northern and western Europeans, landed not at Ellis Island but on the western tip of the Battery, at Castle Garden, which had opened as a receiving center for immigrants in 1855. By the 1880s, the facilities at Castle Garden had grown scandalously inadequate. Officials looked for an island on which to build a new immigration center, because they thought that on an

island immigrants could be more easily protected from swindlers and quickly transported to railroad terminals in New Jersey. Bedloe’s Island was considered, but New Yorkers were aghast at the idea of a “Babel” ruining their beautiful new treasure, “Liberty Enlightening the World.” The statue’s sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, reacted to the prospect of immigrants landing near his masterpiece in horror— he called it a “monstrous plan.” So much for Emma Lazarus. Ellis Island was finally chosen because the citizens of New Jersey petitioned the federal government to remove from the island an old naval powder magazine that they thought dangerously close to the Jersey shore. The explosives were removed; no one wanted the island for anything. It was the perfect place to build an immigration center. I thought about the island’s history as I walked into the building and made my way to the room that was the center in my imagination of the Ellis Island experience: the Great Hall. It had been made real for me in the stark, accusing photographs of Louis Hine and others, who took those pictures to make a point. It was in the Great Hall that everyone had waited—waiting, always, the great vocation of the dispossessed. The room was empty, except for me and a handful of other visitors and the park ranger who showed us around. I felt myself grow insignificant in that room, with its huge semicircular windows, its air, even in dereliction, of solid and official probity. I walked in the deathlike expansiveness of the room’s disuse and tried to think of what it might have been like, filled and swarming. More than sixteen million immigrants came through that room; approximately 250,000 were rejected. Not really a large proportion, but the implications for the rejected were dreadful. For some, there was nothing to go back to, or there was certain death; for others, who left as adventurers, to return would be to adopt in local memory the fool’s role, and the failure’s. No wonder that the island’s history includes reports of three thousand suicides. Sometimes immigrants could pass through Ellis Island in mere hours, though for some the process took days. The particulars of the experience in the Great Hall were often influenced by the political events and attitudes on the mainland. In the 1890s and the first

years of the new century, when cheap labor was needed, the newly built receiving center took in its immigrants with comparatively little question. But as the century progressed, the economy worsened, eugenics became both scientifically respectable and popular, and World War I made American xenophobia seem rooted in fact. Immigration acts were passed; newcomers had to prove, besides moral correctness and financial solvency, their ability to read. Quota laws came into effect, limiting the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to less than 14 percent of the total quota. Intelligence tests were biased against all non–Englishspeaking persons, and medical examinations became increasingly strict, until the machinery of immigration nearly collapsed under its own weight. The Second Quota Law of 1924 provided that all immigrants be inspected and issued visas at American consular offices in Europe, rendering the center almost obsolete. On the day of my visit, my mind fastened upon the medical inspections, which had always seemed to me most emblematic of the ignominy and terror the immigrants endured. The medical inspectors, sometimes dressed in uniforms like soldiers, were particularly obsessed with a disease of the eyes called trachoma, which they checked for by flipping back the immigrants’ top eyelids with a hook used for buttoning gloves—a method that sometimes resulted in the transmission of the disease to healthy people. Mothers feared that if their children cried too much, their red eyes would be mistaken for a symptom of the disease and the whole family would be sent home. Those immigrants suspected of some physical disability had initials chalked on their coats. I remembered the photographs I’d seen of people standing, dumbstruck and innocent as cattle, with their manifest numbers hung around their necks and initials marked in chalk upon their coats: “E” for eye trouble, “K” for hernia, “L” for lameness, “X” for mental defects, “H” for heart disease. I thought of my grandparents as I stood in the room: my seventeen-year-old grandmother, coming alone from Ireland in 1896, vouched for by a stranger who had found her a place as a domestic servant to some Irish who had done well. I tried to imagine the

assault it all must have been for her; I’ve been to her hometown, a collection of farms with a main street—smaller than the athletic field of my local public school. She must have watched the New York skyline as the first- and second-class passengers were whisked off the gangplank with the most cursory of inspections while she was made to board a ferry to the new immigration center. What could she have made of it—this buff-painted wooden structure with its towers and its blue slate roof, a place Harper’s Weekly described as “a latter-day watering place hotel”? It would have been the first time she had heard people speaking something other than English. She would have mingled with people carrying baskets on their heads and eating foods unlike any she had ever seen—dark-eyed people, like the Sicilian she would marry ten years later, who came over with his family at thirteen, the man of the family, responsible even then for his mother and sister. I don’t know what they thought, my grandparents, for they were not expansive people, or romantic; they didn’t like to think of what they called “the hard times,” and their trip across the ocean was the single adventurous act of lives devoted after landing to security, respectability, and fitting in.

What is the potency of Ellis Island for someone like me—an American, obviously, but one who has always felt that the country really belonged to the early settlers, that, as J. F. Powers wrote in Morte D’Urban, it had been “handed down to them by the Pilgrims, George Washington, and others, and that they were taking a risk in

letting you live in it.” I have never been the victim of overt discrimination; nothing I have wanted has been denied me because of the accidents of blood. But I suppose it is part of being an American to be engaged in a somewhat tiresome but always selfabsorbing process of national definition. And in this process, I have found in traveling to Ellis Island an important piece of evidence that could remind me I was right to feel my differentness. Something had happened to my people on that island, a result of the eternal wrongheadedness of American protectionism and the predictabilities of simple greed. I came to the island, too, so I could tell the ghosts that I was one of them, and that I honored them—their stoicism, and their innocence, the fear that turned them inward, and their pride. I wanted to tell them that I liked them better than I did the Americans who made them pass through the Great Hall and stole their names and chalked their weaknesses in public on their clothing. And to tell the ghosts what I have always thought: that American history was a very classy party that was not much fun until they arrived, brought the good food, turned up the music, and taught everyone to dance. I came to the island, too, so I could tell the ghosts that I was one of them, and that I honored them—their stoicism, and their innocence, the fear that turned them inward, and their pride.

HOME AND AWAY Off and on I get a thing for walking in Queens. One morning, I strayed into that borough from my more usual routes in Brooklyn, and I just kept rambling. I think what drew me on was the phrase “someplace in Queens.” This phrase is often used by people who live in Manhattan to describe a Queens location. They don’t say the location is simply “in Queens”; they say it is “someplace in Queens” or “in Queens someplace”: “All the records are stored in a warehouse someplace in Queens,” “His ex-wife lives in Queens someplace.” The swooning, overwhelmed quality that the word “someplace” gives to such descriptions is no doubt a result of the fact that people who don’t live in Queens see it mostly from the windows of airplanes landing there, at La Guardia or Kennedy airports. They look out at

the mile after mile of apparently identical row houses coming up at them and swoon back in their seats at the unknowability of it all. When I find myself among those houses, with their weightlifting trophies or floral displays in the front windows, with their green lawns and nasturtium borders and rose bushes and sidewalks stained blotchy purple by crushed berries from the overhanging mulberry trees, and a scent of curry is in the air, and a plane roars above so close I think I could almost recognize someone at a window, I am happy to be someplace in Queens. —Ian Frazier, from “Someplace in Queens” The first thing you have to understand about my childhood is that it mostly took place in another language. I was raised speaking French, and did not begin learning English until I was nearly seven years old. Even after that, French continued to be the language I spoke at home with my parents. (I still speak only French with them to this day.) This fact inevitably affects my recall and evocation of my childhood, since I am writing and primarily thinking in English. There are states of mind, even people and events, that seem inaccessible in English, since they are defined by the character of the language through which I perceived them. My second language has turned out to be my principal tool, my means for making a living, and it lies close to the core of my self-definition. My first language, however, is coiled underneath, governing a more primal realm. —Luc Sante, from “Living in Tongues”

Mary Gordon has been nominated for this year’s PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

On Waterproofing Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremberg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, heCarson said. —Anne

JAMES BALDWIN’S GRAND TOUR In America I’m not really a private person. No, I’m a public person. And a public person cannot write. Writers always have to find a way to do their work, because if you don’t do your work, then you really are useless. The best thing I ever did in my life, I think, was in effect flee America and go to Paris in 1948. It gave me time to vomit up a great deal of bitterness. At least I could operate in Paris without being menaced socially. Nobody cared what I did. —JAMES BALDWIN

FREEDOM FIGHTER | THULANI DAVIS

As an international organization dedicated to the advancement of literature, PEN works to spread literacy in all communities, and to defend freedom of expression. For that reason it is easy to understand why we want to celebrate James Baldwin, a writer who was not only active with PEN but, more importantly, whose life and work have liberated minds and bodies everywhere. James Baldwin is one of those rare figures in literature and history, a man who was truly engaged in all the issues of his time. He was prescient, fierce, elegant in word and deed, and he was right. We miss him, and he still keeps us going. ON THE AVENUE | CARL HANCOCK RUX

I

didn’t know him, but he knew me. He knew Harlem, he knew poetry, he knew Jesus, and he knew my mother. He knew sin. I did

not know him, but when I first read him, he knew me. This excerpt comes from “The Fire Next Time”: I became during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me, and the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way too…. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots. Just before, and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church. For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every winestained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and

their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible, small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst. Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility, but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers —would never, by the operation of any generous feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There seems to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

THE WHITE PROBLEM | DAVID LEEMING

In Go Tell It on the Mountain, the young protagonist, John Grimes, stands on a hill in Central Park: “He felt like a long-awaited conqueror, at whose feet flowers would be strewn, and before whom multitudes cried, Hosanna. He would be, of all, the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord’s anointed; and he would live in this shining city which his ancestors had seen with longing from far away.” The hill in question is one on which the young James Baldwin had often stood, and the thoughts were the young Baldwin’s, too. The city was of course New York, but it was also America, the New Jerusalem, which Baldwin’s ancestors could only long for from far away. John Grimes’s thoughts are those of a prophet-to-be, of the Lord’s anointed, who one day would experience both the adulation and the condemnation of the shining city as he revealed it for what it was. John Grimes is James Baldwin, and James Baldwin became that prophet. A black American, born into the bleakness of poverty and the lie of the American Dream, who would rise up, with a voice dedicated like those of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, to tell his people, the American people, where they had gone wrong. And what a voice it was, and is. It could explode into fiery life at a meeting with Robert Kennedy, or at a polite dinner party of liberals at an Upper East Side apartment. Most of all it cried out in the great essays like “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My Name,” and “The Fire Next Time” (“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!”) and in the agonizing dilemmas of novels and plays like Giovanni’s Room and Another Country and Blues for Mister Charlie.

Baldwin’s voice was uncompromising and unrelenting, like Jeremiah’s, like Ezekiel’s. It often hurt people, but it always contained the truth about who and what we are. When I was working for Baldwin in New York and Istanbul in the 1960s and discussing a biography with him in the 1980s, I asked him about his early influences, about who or what had made him what he used to call “the perfectly impossible man” he was. Where did he learn to deliver that frightening but somehow loving rhetoric that could leave people in tears as it broke down comfortable attitudes and woke up tired minds? “It’s not the Negro problem,” he said to a sincere student questioner after a Harvard speech, “it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white. You’re the nigger, baby.” Where did he learn that there came a time when it was appropriate to call the president a “motherfucker” from the pulpit of a great cathedral? Or that it was vitally necessary to keep a room spellbound and terrified for over eight hours through a long night while the lettuce on our plates wilted and he described how he had picked the cotton for all of us. Baldwin listed several primary influences at various times in our conversations. The first and most important, he always said, was his mother. Mrs. Baldwin, whom many of us here knew, was a consistent source of strength and self-esteem. In letters and at Sunday dinners, and any way she could, she preached the doctrine of love to her son. It was she who taught him that racism and hatred hurt the racist and hater as much as the racist’s victim. If he was to do something important in the world, he must reach out to both. The man Baldwin always called his father was an influence, too. In “Notes of a Native Son” we learn that it was the example of his father that led him to understand just how self-destructive hatred could be. Mr. Baldwin’s anger ate away at his mind, said his son. He was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart he really believed what white people said about him. He knew that he was black, but did not know that he was beautiful.

“It’s not the Negro problem,” he said to a sincere student questioner after a Harvard speech, “it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white. You’re the nigger, baby.”

And there were school influences. Gertrude Ayer, the first black principal in New York, who at P.S. 24 recognized something special in this seemingly lost little boy with big eyes and a funny walk, and assigned him for special work with a young teacher from the Midwest who later, with her husband, took her charge to plays and political meetings that gave foundation to a developing belief in the power of art and political action. That teacher, Orilla Miller, would remain a friend for life. At Frederick Douglass Junior High, Jimmy was taken over by Bill Porter and Countee Cullen. Both Porter and Cullen encouraged him to write, and through Cullen he absorbed the twilight of the Harlem Renaissance, an interest in things French, and a sense of an as yet mysterious, shared, intimate otherness that could be powerful in its own right. At DeWitt Clinton High School he continued to be taken up by teachers and now fellow students who recognized the growing power of his voice as a speaker and writer. But meanwhile, another powerful influence was the Pentecostal Church in which Baldwin had —like John in Go Tell It on the Mountain—been saved, and in which he became, for a while, an apprentice preacher. Baldwin left the church in his late teens, but not before absorbing the rhetoric of the Bible, and the sense of the mysterious power of the Word to move people and change their views and ways. He always said he left the pulpit to preach the gospel. The struggle during his adolescence between church, spirit, Harlem, and home on one side and school, art, the world out there, and the growing needs of the flesh on the other led Baldwin to the first of many emotional crises. But more important, it led him to the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, and into the metaphorical and philosophical arms of the great painter Beauford Delaney. Beauford had been recommended to Baldwin by a friend as someone who might help him. When Jimmy got up the nerve to knock on the door of the shabby apartment at 181 Greene Street, he was confronted by a short, round, brown man, who, “when he had completed his instant

x-ray of my brain, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column,” invited him in. I know what that meeting and that examination were like because years later I would be received at Delaney’s door in Paris and have much the same experience.

Baldwin always said he had opened that unusual door not a moment too soon. Here was a gay black man, like him the son of a preacher, who was nevertheless making it as an artist. Beauford took on the boy as his primary charge. He taught him, as Luke teaches his son David in The Amen Corner, that the church-forbidden jazz and the blues, the music of Ethel Waters and Ma Rainey, of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, the literal and metaphorical music of the streets, was just as sacred as the spirituals and gospel songs of the sanctified. Beauford bridged Baldwin’s two worlds, his many sides. He became what Baldwin would later call “my principal witness,” and remained a close friend and mentor, really a father, if sometimes a very needy father, until he died in Paris in 1979. Perhaps most important, Beauford taught the young James Baldwin to observe the world around him with meticulous care and to translate that observation into his art. Through Beauford Delaney, the prophet-tobe learned that what one sees and cannot see says everything about you. There were, of course, other influences on the early life: the books pored over at the Schomburg library, meetings with Richard Wright, the legendary Mother Horn, and Marian Anderson. Perhaps one final influence, however, needs to be mentioned. In December 1946, Eugene Worth, a young African American whom Baldwin loved, jumped off the George Washington Bridge, and in so doing,

remained in the writer’s mind until he became Rufus in Another Country. Eugene’s suicide convinced Baldwin that he had to leave the shining city, at least for a while, so as to see it from a distance. In his growing despair over the waywardness of his people, the American people, he could follow Eugene or he could make his way to Paris, long the sanctuary of so many black voices in the struggle. In 1948 he took that leap, and so began another stage of the story we’re here to tell. FAMILY SECRETS | HILTON ALS

Four years ago, shortly after I had begun thinking about the life and work of James Baldwin, who has been dead for fourteen years now, Dr. Betty Shabazz, widow of the martyred political leader Malcolm X, lay in critical condition at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, 80 percent of her body covered in burns. It was June. James Baldwin’s famous eyes, the shape of poppies in bloom, stared out from the paperback editions of his novels and plays, essays and dialogues, which I had begun to read and reread earlier that spring, not long before I sat—as if in a narcotic trance—before my television set, taking in the newsreel images of Betty Shabazz’s life. One of the conditions of being a writer is that all those authors you have loved and learned from, and by necessity have taught yourself to forget, the better to get on with your own work, end up encroaching on the real events of your life. It was impossible for me to look at Betty Shabazz, or the grandson who had allegedly set his grandmother aflame, without wondering what Baldwin would have made of it all. I imagined he would have seen in the story of Malcolm X, whom he had known, and Betty Shabazz, and their orphaned children, a parable of the splintered black American family. In particular, he would have seen something of himself in that scared and angry and messed-up black boy, committing, horribly, such irrevocable violence against his family, believing he had nowhere to go. That spring, I existed in a kind of self-protective numbness, paused between the death of Betty Shabazz and my own

resurrection of James Baldwin. I became lost, once again, in Baldwin the writer; lost in the rise and fall, the rise and fall of his language. As I read Baldwin in my present incarnation, I realized that he did not have a great formal mind. He did not have an expansive command of American history or politics. He wrote out of a sense of presumed intimacy with the reader, an early precursor to many of the memoirists currently in vogue. In order to read him again, I had to submit to his mind—obsessive, emotional, and self-reflective as it was. He invented and reinvented himself, book by book. And through that invention he had grown dependent on his audience’s ability to make him feel complete, seen, known. I had learned from his example: the writer of delicate, precise talent who becomes a public figure, a spokesman, ceases to be the writer he meant to be. Yet, what I identified with in Baldwin’s work—the high faggot style of his voice, the gripping narrative of his ascent from teen evangelist to cultural icon—had not changed substantially since the days when I had devoured his books like some weird food, as he had described his own early love of reading. My admiration for the way in which he alchemized the singularity of his experience into art had not diminished. As a child I had suspected that Baldwin and I were similar, but for a long time, I was unprepared to accept that. I have never been comfortable being identified as a black anything, spokesperson in particular, particularly when that description comes from a white audience that knows nothing about its limitations. Nor have I ever been comfortable with the presumed fraternities some black writers, academics, and intellectuals feel with one another. I have spent my entire life trying to come to grips with my feelings for my own family, and I have not had room to be adopted by a family to whose provincialism, competitiveness, and numerous apprehensions I am not genetically bound. Baldwin, at one point in his life, felt the same way. In 1959, when he was thirty-five, he wrote from self-imposed exile in Europe that he had left America because he wanted to prevent himself from becoming “merely a Negro writer.” He went on to become the greatest Negro writer of his generation. Perhaps none of us escapes

the whipping post we’ve carved our names on. Baldwin’s career became a cautionary tale for me, a warning as well as an inspiration. After leaving home at nineteen, he worked for a while at a defense plant in New Jersey. “I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people…. That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once the disease is controlled, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood …” In November 1948, when he was twenty-four, unwilling to end up like his stepfather, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors, Baldwin used the money from a literary fellowship he’d won to book passage to Paris. He arrived with just over forty dollars to his name and few contacts, other than Richard Wright, who’d arrived there two years earlier. But postwar Paris proved to be a refuge for a number of black Americans, and the Parisians, as Baldwin’s friend Maya Angelou has said, were delighted with them. They were neither les miserables nor Algerians. France was not without its race prejudices, she recalled in an interview; it simply did not have any guilt vis-à-vis black Americans. And black Americans who went there, from Richard Wright to Sidney Bechet, were so colorful, and so talented, and so marvelous, and so exotic, who wouldn’t want them? “In Paris,” Baldwin said, “I didn’t feel socially attacked, but relaxed, and that allowed me to be loved.”

Shortly after his arrival, Baldwin met a seventeen-year-old Swiss artist named Lucien Happersberger. The fact that Happersberger was white and Baldwin was black was less of a transgression than it would have been back in the States. “In Paris,” Baldwin said, “I didn’t

feel socially attacked, but relaxed, and that allowed me to be loved.” But Lucien, who was bisexual, and more attracted to women, was not completely available to Baldwin. Straight and bisexual men were to Baldwin’s taste—or rather, to the taste of the isolation he fed on. For Baldwin the first principle of love was what love withheld. His purpose was to get through another man’s terrors in order to recognize his own. In the gay demimonde, where looks count for a great deal, Baldwin was not a success, even after he became famous. There’s a famous eighteenth-century person, a poet told me, who used to say, “I can talk my face away in twenty-five minutes,” and Jimmy could do that, to a point perhaps. But he was not pretty enough to compete in a world he had chosen for himself. If one is black and gay, and one’s primary sexual interest is in men who are neither, one lives at a distance from one’s desire. Baldwin pitted his ugliness against Western standards of beauty in his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), a short tale of love and abandonment that takes place in the bars and hotels of postwar Paris. The protagonist and narrator is a white boy from New York named David, who is in, one assumes, his late twenties. David is adrift in Paris. He is adrift, or more accurately in flight, from his homosexuality. At a gay bar he frequents, he meets an Italian bartender named Giovanni, who is sweet and passionate, and just a trifle dimwitted, but who feels—shades of E. M. Forster. David can commit neither to Giovanni nor to his fiancée, Hella. His lack of a moral center has serious consequences. Made desperate by David’s abandonment, Giovanni steals from his former employer and murders him in a scuffle. The melodramatic plot, in which each man really does kill the thing he loves, creates in microcosm the tone of Baldwin’s later, unwieldy novels, notably the passionate Another Country (1961). Giovanni’s Room isn’t exactly self-affirming, but the fact that Baldwin wrote about the world of his sexuality at all is extraordinary given the year and his race. So intense was the stern Puritanism of most blacks I knew while I was growing up that one was not simply a faggot but a damned faggot. When Giovanni’s Room was published, Richard Howard recalls, “It was regarded as an exceptional book, and gay people were proud that such a thing

existed, and that it should have been written by a black person was kind of phenomenal.” Baldwin was not a natural novelist. His voice as an essayist intrudes on the plot lines of every novel he wrote, except Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was, in nearly every sense, his story. It was in Baldwin’s essays, unencumbered by the requirements of narrative form, character, and incident, that his voice was most fully realized. And his attacks on the straight white gatekeepers of culture and politics remain appropriately vicious. In the 1950s his most pugnacious contemporary was Norman Mailer. In 1959 Mailer published Advertisements for Myself, which contained his essays, evaluations, quick comments on the talent in the room. In it, he declares his admiration for James Jones and other major novelists of the time, but says, “James Baldwin is too charming to be a major writer. If in ‘Notes of a Native Son’ he has a sense of moral nuance, which is one of the few modern guides for the sophistications of the ethos, even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume. Baldwin seems incapable of saying ‘fuck you’ to the reader. Instead he must delineate the cracking and the breaking and the melting and the hardening of the heart, which could never have felt such sensuous growth and little deaths, without being emptied as a voice.” Fag bashing? Baldwin did not take Mailer’s comments lying down, and it’s the faggy exhaustion of Baldwin’s voice, the hardening of his heart, that amuses. Baldwin’s subsequent essay about Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” published in 1961, deflates Mailer’s macho posturing with perfumed wit: “Norman, I can’t go through the world the way you do because I haven’t got your shoulders,” he writes. “‘I want to know how power works,’ Norman once said to me, ‘how it really works, in detail.’ Well, I know how power works. It has worked on me, and if I didn’t know how power worked, I would be dead.” This is not ebonics, but gaybonics—the stylish voice one hears in many a black gay bar. Baldwin slyly makes fun of Mailer’s infatuation with a predominantly black gay jazz world. “Negro jazz musicians really liked Norman,” he writes, “but they did not for an instant consider him as being even remotely hip. They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.” Baldwin did

not, however, own up to his reciprocal fascination with straight white boys and their privilege. Another Country, Baldwin’s hip book about interracial sex, gay sex, pot smoking, and nihilism, turned out to be an artistic challenge. By the time Baldwin published Another Country and the essay collection Nobody Knows My Name, both in 1962, he had become America’s leading literary black star. Both books were commercially successful, but the reviews of Another Country were mixed. The novel centers on Rufus, a black male artist, who falls in love with a Southern white woman he meets at a party and has sex with her on the host’s balcony. After becoming involved with her, Rufus is tormented by a world that cannot understand their love. He beats her, she ends up in a mental ward, he commits suicide. The subplots, about adultery, bebopping, and ambition, are equally melodramatic. Elizabeth Hardwick astutely observed in her review for Harper’s, “In certain respects this novel is a representation of some of the ideas about American life, particularly about the Negro in American life, that Baldwin’s essays have touched upon. But what is lacking in the book is James Baldwin himself, who has in his nonfictional writing a very powerful relation to the reader.” To try and unravel the various contradictions in Baldwin’s work is to risk seeming foolish. Ideology denied in one book is confirmed as gospel in another.

When Baldwin began writing Another Country, he had temporarily renounced his exile to return to the States. He wrote part of the book in the novelist William Styron’s guesthouse in rural Connecticut. Styron recalled: “We gave him a place to stay. It was winter. I used to watch him, this very black figure, climb through the snowdrifts toward our house. I was writing Nat Turner, and I talked to him about it. Later, he defended the book, which came under attack by black intellectuals. We’d feed him, and he’d come around at night. We’d have these very liberal political people over, and Jimmy, who’d embarked on his role as a preacher, used to stand in front of the fireplace and say, ‘Baby, we’re going to burn your mother-fucking houses down.’”

To try and unravel the various contradictions in Baldwin’s work is to risk seeming foolish. Ideology denied in one book is confirmed as gospel in another. In his earliest essays he insisted he did not want to be the things he eventually became, merely a Negro, merely a Negro writer, merely a homosexual, merely a spokesperson for his race. And yet these contradictions are one of the most valuable features of his work. Without a large edition of work about his culture, his history, his politics on which to base himself, he had to make himself up, which is still the curse for others not unlike him who feel they only have James Baldwin to work against. Baldwin understood this particular kind of ambivalence, having written the following at thirty-six: “One of my dearest friends, a Negro writer now living in Spain, circled around me, and I around him, for months before we spoke. One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he for real, or is he kissing ass? Negroes know about each other what can be here called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can mock the other’s hustle. Therefore one exceptional Negro watches another exceptional Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the hoax has been.” Reading Baldwin, I was able to laugh again. This laughter is somewhat quelled by the knowledge that there is one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published, one composed in an atmosphere of focused intimacy, and that is a volume of his letters, letters his family does not want published. When I asked one of his biographers why the Baldwin family wouldn’t allow his letters to be published, he explained that the family felt he shed a negative light on them, particularly on David Baldwin, who was their father, and not his. And they were uncomfortable with his homosexuality. And yet Baldwin left his legacy in their hands. In the end, even a bastard may be reclaimed by his family. MAKING JAMES BALDWIN | NIKKI GIOVANNI

What does this mean … Countee Cullen taught you in junior high … in Harlem … with that great history of renaissance but only Langston remained … what does it mean when you know you really don’t want to deliver packages or be some sort of clerk in a back room somewhere way downtown … what does it mean when you know what nobody has told you YOU WERE BEFORE HIM WHOM YOU CALL FATHER who didn’t so much dislike you as simply not understand why you were a witness that he wasn’t first and you had all this to deal with while thinking maybe I’m not good looking and maybe I’m not ordinary … would this make you a James Baldwin so when you are looking around and you realize you’re angry because it just ain’t right that people who look like you people who are small and black and lonely but bright and funny and sweet can’t find a way in this world and every time you do something you think is pretty wonderful that man WHOM YOU CALL FATHER is trying to grind you down to his size which isn’t so much small as afraid of what’s out there and somehow you keep trying to please the un-pleasable so you kiddie preach in church because at least everybody says amen and you think: have I found a place but you know you can’t find a place when people still look at what your heart desires and what your arms need as the worse sin worser than lynching black men and women worser than denying prescription drugs to old people worser than withholding vaccinations from poor children worser than anything because even bad off niggers want to find something worser than their pitiful lives and they are trying to use you and your talent and your hopes and dreams to make themselves more whole … would that make you a James Baldwin and then it occurs to you If You Are A Deer In Headlights move and avoid being steam rolled move and don’t take the hit move and find another place to be … move downtown and meet people who accept you not judge you move to Europe and fall in love move with your love to Switzerland and write your books and determine never to deny what your heart knows is true never turn your back on what your mind knows is right never refuse to hear the cry of the anguished or the laughter in the blues do it all because one time you go around is the only time to do it so be a stand up guy

who stands up first for yourself then all the people who need an arm to lean on or a heart to hear a voice to raise for the righteousness of it and maybe that would make you a James Baldwin TO CHANGE THE WORLD | RUSSELL BANKS

Though I never met James Baldwin in person, and never even saw him at a public event, he is nonetheless to me like a father, or a beloved uncle, or mentor. That is to say, he is in my mind nearly every day, for the very simple reason that he was instrumental in creating my mind. And to the degree that my life and work have been shaped by my mind, especially in the way it is positioned with regard to race in America, James Baldwin shaped that life and work. Our actual lives never touched, except through his words, which is the most intimate touch of all. And his words expressed in those early essays which later became Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time entered my life at a time when I was a very young man, impressionable, confused, ignorant, and emotionally turbulent. Still a boy, actually, a well-intended white New Englander who had romanticized his sweetly naïve but pragmatically useless youthful idealism so that he could take pride in it, so that he could think better of himself, seated somewhat uncomfortably in a guilt-drenched 1950s white-boy garden of privilege. However, although I had almost no idea of how to go about becoming either, I wanted to become a writer and a good person. I was a pipe fitter in New Hampshire then with no college and little travel—an unpromising situation. But thanks to my fuzzy, self-serving idealism, and my twin desires to become a writer and a good person, I was reading in those days—the late 1950s, early 1960s— periodicals like Partisan Review, where I read for the first time the mind-altering essay “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South.” And then the brilliant dissection “Faulkner and Desegregation,” troubling to me, for Faulkner had already been at work creating my mind for several years. I was also reading The Progressive (possibly the only person in Concord, New Hampshire,

at that time, certainly the only pipe fitter), where I came upon “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” And then one unforgettable night, I read in The New Yorker, transfixed and transformed, the long essay that we remember now as “The Fire Next Time,” called there, “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” Baldwin’s words, his language, trickled into my ear, and became an inner voice that woke me suddenly from a long, mind-numbing, conscience-killing slumber. I can imagine, many generations earlier, a young New England boy reading Emerson for the first time, and feeling, thinking, as I did on first reading James Baldwin: Here was the undeniable, inescapable truth of the matter, and Good God, it was right in front of my eyes all along, and I never saw it. You felt as if you had been blind and were suddenly given sight, or foolish and had suddenly been given sense. It’s so easy when you are a white man in America to remain blind to what lies in front of you, and a fool. How ashamed, yet wonderfully liberated I was, when I read this sentence, for example, among many others: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this —which will not be tomorrow, and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” I could feel my heart and head clear together. My thoughts and pulse racing from premise to conclusion at the speed of light, it seemed, as I sat in my rented room in Keene, New Hampshire, now, and read not quite by candlelight, but in the dim glow of a bedside lamp, Baldwin’s elucidation of the so-called Negro student movement, the earliest manifestation of what soon became the civil rights movement—an elucidation that gave me leave, a few years later, to cleave in my own feeble way to the work too. “The goal of the student movement,” he wrote, “is nothing less than the liberation of the entire country from its crippling attitudes and habits. The reason that it is of the utmost importance for white people, here, to see the Negroes as people like themselves is that white people will not otherwise be able to see themselves as they are.”

“The reason that it is of the utmost importance for white people, here, to see the Negroes as people like themselves is that white people will not otherwise be able to see themselves as they are.”

I truly wished to see myself as I was, and to the degree that I have been successful in this, Baldwin taught me how. His aphoristic style, his mixture of high diction and low, the rhetoric of the pulpit and of the street, his willingness to take the universe personally, his uneasy relationship with Christianity—these are qualities he shares with Emerson, one of my earlier fathers, and in fact I believe that Baldwin’s essays can stand easily alongside Emerson’s. Because there lies, at the center of Baldwin’s thinking, the central fact of the American imagination, which is race, his essays in the end will go further toward the shaping of the American imagination than those of any other writer so far, and will do so for generations to come. “You write in order to change the world,” Baldwin said, “knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” His heart was a target of opportunity, and he suffered terribly for it, but James Baldwin changed the world. OUR MAN JIMMY | AMIRI BARAKA

In these days of American Weimar, with a counterfeit president for a fake democracy, it is a deeply inspiring and absolutely necessary weapon and shield of true self-consciousness against an oppressor nation, its lieutenants, deranged pets, hired killers, artists, academic courtesans, and the dangerously uninformed, to reflect on the obvious grandeur, wisdom, and strength of that tradition of the AfroAmerican intellectual, artist, teacher—and know that it is revolutionary and democratic. Jimmy B. is high up in that tradition. Certain Skip Gateskeepers try to make trouble by whispering, Holy Doo-Doo, if not for Baraka and those other over-the-top colored types, Jimmy might have passed blazing into the Britannica

pantheon of white right. But alas, there are neither colored mens nor womens in that cave of virtual significance. They said DuBois would have made it but he always be talkin about real shit. In the fifties I did criticize Jimmy in some review, complaining in my infantile leftist mode that while Jimmy was playing the distressed aesthete in Europe, and moaning that instead of confronting the racial animal we should all try to love each other, my rejoinder was that we should get back to our real work: cutting throats. Actually, given the recent seizure of the presidency, which super-whitened the already amazingly Caucasian crib, this is an idea whose time has apparently never split. When Jimmy returned to the U.S. with some visible hereness, it was to rise at the very center of the civil rights movement, often at Dr. King’s side. To me, three voices heroically characterizing the fieriest period of the civil rights movement are Dr. King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. That is one of the principal reasons this brother is respected and loved, particularly by black people. Because he was not just a cocktail-party social theorist, or a typewriter paladin, but a great artist whose written word and spoken word came fully to reflect his real-life practice and fearless humanity in the world. Dr. DuBois was attacked for the crime of being an activist and speaking out against nuclear weapons in the fifties. He was attacked, as Jimmy was later, for being a people’s democrat, which is indeed revolutionary in what he called “the last white country on earth.” Like DuBois, Jimmy Baldwin was attacked for being a social activist as well as an innovative grand master of thought and language. But the mustard-seed–sized ideology of the Gateskeepers and academic Rent-a-Cops of the imperialist superstructure, its institutions, and the philosophies it is built to forward and maintain, despite all cosmetic hocus-pocus and gibberish, still gives off the insidious perfume of a crowded commode. Imagine, in the face of Notes of a Native Son, The Amen Corner, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room (Jimmy was never in no closet), The Fire Next Time, the great Blues for Mr. Charlie, or the still unsung masterwork Evidence of Things Unseen, the stooges want to raise up some Johnny-one-note sycophant of literary, social, and political

conservatism, who is really celebrated so energetically because he dismissed both black nationalism and Marxism, and for a boffo exit let the heebie-jeebies castrate him symbolically (literarily, of course —it’s called deconstruction, you dig?), and then as dénouement turn his soul into an insect (the National Book Award). Jimmy, like W.E.B., was in the great social-aesthetic tradition of the Afro-American people, an oppressed nation with the right of self-determination. Because of slavery and national oppression, black people have a common though not monolithic psychological development which is expressed in a generally common culture, though all nations and peoples have two cultures: the culture of the oppressed and the culture of the oppressors. These are defined as contradictory ideological poles of class, as form and content.

So Mr. One-Note expresses the artistic culture of the conservative wing of the black petty and national bourgeoisie. Baldwin, until the day he left here, was in the main a voice of the Harlem toilets. Once more, check out evidence. It was DuBois who laid out the psychological double consciousness of Afro-America, where black people are torn between being obviously black and de jure, albeit Native, Americans. But the legacy of that teaching today is that we have come to know we are both, and that those contradictions are actually two edges of the terrible swift sword of Afro-American struggle, wielded with such profound and dangerous beauty by giants like James Baldwin. As far as his going back and

forth to the south of France, after his honorable service in the AfroAmerican people’s democratic volunteers, under the inspired and inspiring leadership of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X during the height of the civil rights and black liberation movements: During this period Jimmy was in the United States regularly. That’s when we would go to West 100th Street, where his brother David would try to waste both of us with cavalier quantities of spirits. And thus fueled, we’d go off dialoguing under the blue-black city night, looking to peel the apple right down to the core. In those later years, the main reason Jimmy went to the South of France was to write, since he was, independent of his will, obstructively visible and very public when sailing around in this place. David was our contact and connection, my man, the laughing raconteur of West 100th Street, but now they’re both gone, and we must conjure all our strength to face the crowd of wooden Negroes who, lacking any culture but that of the bourgeois white behind, now energetically join the class of savage right-wing bushwhackers. But if we are true to that irrepressible tradition that animated our man Jimmy Baldwin, listen to this, “The western world is located somewhere between the Statue of Liberty and the pillar of salt,” or, dig this droll film review titled, “The Devil Finds Work.” Even when I criticized Jimmy as a young man, when I first saw him as an undergraduate at Howard University, with The Amen Corner, I still understood that his direct TV eyes had daunted and welcomed me into our writing, from the cover of Notes of a Native Son. And disguised behind the infantile “yo brother” I hurled at him, he saw the younger brother, as he called me, the younger brother chiding the older brother to get on it. Because if we’d read and understood Baldwin, we knew that couched and loaded within his sermonic expression, his public stature, was a deep religious regard for righteousness and a moral opposition to evil anywhere it appeared. And as I noted at the Black Arts Convention in ’84, the religious hypocrisy to Jimmy was the same as the social hypocrisy. White America was no more democratic than it was religious, black people were no more citizens than white Americans were Christians, so that in many critical points in the works, Baldwin would use the

Biblical text as the Amen, the shout of recognition, the “Yes, Lord,” of the witness, that what he had seen and felt was truth. The grandness of Baldwin’s written prosody was of speech made into text so that the spirit of the written word conveys the moving life of the speaker.

For Jimmy, spirit was the animating reality of our living consciousness and relationship to the world. It was what made us human or not. His constant metaphor for the spirit of white America is menace, danger, murder, atrocity. His own work sought to evoke the spirit and truth of the excitement and drama of the church from its evocative Wordship, its altar from whence the Word would come, that high place. And so the grandness of Baldwin’s written prosody was of speech made into text so that the spirit of the written word conveys the moving life of the speaker. Baldwin is able to give us the motion of the peripatetic observer observing the Atlanta horror in its complexities, bearing witness to the individual and collective guilt of white America and its petty bourgeois Negro management class with the precision and deftness of his own Jimmy self at some noncocktail, non-party, where the squares hang on the walls like wallpaper waiting to be pasted. The spirit of Jimmy’s work is of a high moral prophetic vision, the witness who has been buked and scorned like John the Revelator, digging the coming attraction on Patmos, the spirit of that grimly beautiful message to the churches. What was grim was what Jimmy spoke of when he said that white America thinks that black people’s religious beliefs are childish. But that’s the trick, the grim payback, because as DuBois laid out, suppose you really believed in God? Suppose you really believed in all that—the Old Testament, the New Testament? Suppose you believed one night you might meet the Savior walking down the street and you were that blood, and here was the lamb that had promised to deliver you: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:/ He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;/ He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword …” What that eternity of humming meant, even after the drum got took away, at the coming of

the Lord: This gonna be your ass, all you heathens, this gonna be yo natural ass. This was, likewise, Jimmy’s religion, and his spirit. ON SOLID GROUND | ELEANOR TRAYLOR

When I first met the wide smile of James Baldwin face to face, I just burst into tears. In less than a heartbeat, he opened his arms as wide as his smile. And as he held me close and hard, he said, “And what have I done to deserve all this?” The time was the late seventies, the place his sister’s apartment in the famed West 71st Street house. The living room which framed us with its walls of pictures and books and African-draped chairs and sofas and pillows was also a studio filled with Paula-made hats and long silhouette dresses in gorgeous earth tones. This day, the room was alive with the aroma of groundnut stew and paella, and the sound of the Roberta Martin Singers’ new release, Be Still My Soul. We four, then—Gloria, Paula, Jimmy, me—hugging up, laughing through rainy eyes. Suddenly, as if I had not made enough of a fool of myself, I began to recite his observation recorded in “Notes of a Native Son,” as he stands before the great cathedral at Chartres. He had said that while some may admire “the power of the spires and the glory of the windows … I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which the heretics were hurled to death, and the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone…. I have known God in a different way.” When I had finished this second outburst, his great eyes widened, his face lit up, this time absent of a smile. He looked at each of us as though to assure himself that we were palpable, and then almost as a whisper he said, “Child, sit.” He sat on a pillow and we beside him gazing straight into that face where midnight and dawn shared equal time at play. His stark white shirt opened at the neck emboldened the ficus tree of his back. For a moment he was pure portrait. Then he spoke. “That is exactly what I meant,” he said, “this sound, this smell, these faces, this love,

this moment.” And we said, all three of us together, “And Sonny went all the way back.” The man’s laughter shook the room. “That sound,” he said, is how Go Tell It on the Mountain got its name. Then he told us a story. “That is exactly what I meant,” he said, “this sound, this smell, these faces, this love, this moment.”

“One day, as Lucien and I were returning from a small village below the chalet, we discovered that we had lingered too long and that night would soon fall. For fear that we might miss our trail, Lucien suggested a shortcut which required us to leap across a gorge. Lucien was a mountain boy, I was not. I stood before the gorge, trembling, and Lucien said, ‘Now is no time to lose your head.’ I had made a mistake. I looked down into the abyss and knew that if I failed the leap, I was lost. I paced back, I ran forward, I took the leap. When I felt myself on solid ground I began to weep, and something from home grabbed me and brought me to my feet. I heard the sound, I heard the song, I didn’t find the song, it found me. It was Go Tell It on the Mountain.” By the time the room began to fill with friends, the conversation had turned to the terms of existence in the American novel. It was a conversation that lasted throughout the day and night; it has not ended and will not end as long as you and I shall live. For the terms of existence is, after all, the Baldwin subject. It informs a hundred and twenty-four book reviews, seven works of nonfiction, two plays, a collection of stories, six novels, one scenario, and a collection of poems. His terms for existence. Of his own growth to maturity James Baldwin has said, “I was at war with, was completely unable to accept the assumptions of, the official vocabulary into which I had been born. Which assumptions, it had been supposed, would guide my life and keep me in my place.” Baldwin’s central project throughout his writing career was to shatter that official vocabulary, and in doing so he claims an ancestral role in the formation of contemporary literary and social theory and pedagogy that drive the academy today. Though he

clearly precedes what the academy in the United States promotes at the millennium as the public intellectual, Baldwin had no base in the academy until 1978, when he was invited to residency at Bowling Green University and also lectured at the University of California at Berkeley. Five years before his death in 1987, he became a Five College professor of literature at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts. But long before then, and ever since, he had defined the condition of knowledge, queried the situs of authentic being, and attacked the foundations of the large historical schemes that have defined being and commanded our belief, investment, and adherence. Baldwin’s steady attack on these traditional attitudes, these monsters of the mind, these fantastic and fearful images, or social texts, called “nigger,” or “queer,” or any other established index meaning “not us,” informs the current project of the academy and inflects American and global life as much as it precedes current theoretical formulations. As early as 1955, in Notes of a Native Son, he had said, “Of traditional attitudes there are only two—For or Against—and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain…. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center, and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.” From this moral center he located and unmasked traditional attitudes or, in his words, “theologies that deny one life.” “For,” he said, “the basis of the vocabulary into which we were born is that white Christians, aided perhaps by a few Jews, are the authors and custodians of civilization and history. A delusion validated only by the action and reality of white power. Now that that power is being contested, the moral basis of our vocabulary is being revealed, and it is not an ennobling sight. The gates of our cities are barred, and famine, danger, and death are the ruling citizens. It is time to reexamine the principles of the vocabulary which has led us to this place.” From Notes to his final novel, Just Above My Head, he warns us that what the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety.

But for Baldwin, the only safety is to dare love. Love is the term for existence that he left us. It remains a challenge for the academy, and for our lives. WITH FIRE AND BARE HANDS | JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

James Baldwin bequeathed to me—and to you—a language and a mission. That language was the language of the King James Bible transmuted by African-American vernacular speech into an instrument which gained the attention of all Americans, and I think the power of that language can be measured, can be gauged, because it was the last language which allowed so-called white Americans and so-called black Americans to look each other in the eye and pretend that we shared a country, and shared a destiny, and perhaps there was some way that we could get it together and inch this country forward from the horrors of its past. There has been no writer since, there has been no language since, in the literary community, that has accomplished that kind of magic. And for that alone we owe James Baldwin a great debt. As a writer, I am tired of hearing Baldwin’s literary heritage chopped up into two pieces: the essays and the fiction. That sort of approach seems to amount to giving with one hand and taking away with the other, so we’re left with—what?—nothing, mediocrity. And that approach is only possible if one forgets that language is language, and good writing is good writing, and the borders that some of Baldwin’s detractors are attempting to trace, in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of class, are the very borders that are inhibiting their understanding of the fluidity of Baldwin’s language and his literary heritage. We don’t need to chop him up into kinds, we need to read, and listen to the music and the truth, because his mission was truth. I remember James Baldwin as a colleague, as a friend. I remember him singing, and I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t remember that social being, because it was his life, it was his energy, his willingness to give—forget whether he’s right or wrong—

his ability to be there, to be in the midst, to be present for all of us, that is his legacy. The eyes. Sitting across from him, looking into those eyes: For James Baldwin What can we say to this this knife-edged air this ice blocking streams this bluesteel sky How do we speak to you who is our voice and still now. Too patient to laugh at us but smiling yes yes and the glass in your hand your steepled knee that elegant rag of many colors swirling round your throat Surely we knew it would come to this it always does. Against fiery last ditch light trees are x-rays of themselves prisoners stripped, flayed to the bone One black boy so scared pee-pee bout to run down his pantleg but he ain’t turning round not today. No woman no cry. Not today, momma. Gon tear that old building down. With love with fire and bare hands and words like ten thousand

trumpets shaking hills to their foundations Poor boy long way from home Poor boy long way from home Poor boy long way from home Been here—and now he’s gone Been here—and now he’s gone Think of little David and his slingshot, monkey shine signifier blowing the Emperor away We wait for the earth to turn and tilt again the shadow to lift Rainbow wisdom of the elders grandfathers, priests, kings mother shuffle and warrior woman strut and tons and tons of babies still to come our people our breath your words tell us the circle is strong will not be broken though the clay, the clay my brother, is weak, weak as a slave ship ought to be Steal away. Steal away. We gather in this frozen land beside a river of mourning. Saints chant: Be not dismayed

what ere betides and you march in your billowing black robes down the aisle mount the pulpit and shout us sing us bound to glory man wherever that might be wherever you are now catching your breath and testing it and amen how sweet it must be free free at last the cup to your lips and emptied and full and go on with your fine self, child. Home. THE DAY I FINALLY MET BALDWIN | CHINUA ACHEBE

The 1960s opened propitiously for me, and for my country, Nigeria. In 1960 Nigeria freed itself, at last, from British colonial rule. I published my second novel, and proved to myself that the first one was not a flash in the pan. The fact that a senior executive from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York knocked at my door in Lagos, with the offer of a travel grant, I think, proves the point. Where would I like to go? I said, “East and Central Africa,” and it was done. Two years later UNESCO came along with its grant. This time, I elected to go to the U.S. and Brazil. In UNESCO files, the purpose of their grant was to meet writers and study literary trends. Privately, I wanted to see how the African Diaspora was faring in their two largest concentrations in the New World. I was curious about America, because the British colonial education I had received took pains to put America down. One of my teachers in high school was fond of reading out editorials written by Nigeria’s leading nationalist, who, apparently, wrote very bad English. And my teacher linked this deficiency of the Nigerian to his American education, which was, of

course, totally inferior to the British brand, and featured such subjects as dishwashing. I wanted very much to meet this man with the fearlessness of Old Testament prophets and the clarity, eloquence, and intelligence of ancient African griots.

Needless to say, American books and writers did not feature in my education, with one exception: it was called Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington. And so, when I encountered Baldwin’s books, they blew my mind. I wanted very much to meet this man with the fearlessness of Old Testament prophets and the clarity, eloquence, and intelligence of ancient African griots. Unfortunately, Baldwin was not in the U.S. when I arrived, but in France. The organizers of my program apologized, casually, and went ahead to arrange for me to meet those who were around. I went to Rutgers University and met Ralph Ellison in his poky little office. He was okay. But I had a sense that it was not a happy meeting. He seemed so anxious to establish that Europe contributed a good deal to his identity, that Beethoven was as much a part of it as jazz. Why was he telling me? Everybody knows that. Or did I look somehow like a kidnapper on the prowl? No one else I met quite gave me the same feeling: Langston Hughes, Paule Marshall, Amiri Baraka, then called LeRoi Jones, and others. By the way, I also met Arthur Miller, who graciously took me to lunch and spoke enthusiastically about the new Lincoln Center. My chance to meet Baldwin finally came almost two decades later, in 1980. My joy no doubt triggered the rather untypical flamboyance with which I greeted him: “Mister Baldwin, I presume.” You should have seen his severe countenance crumble instantly into boyish happiness. The occasion was an annual conference of the five-year-old African Literature Association, meeting that year in Gainesville, Florida. The association had invited Baldwin and me to open their conference with a conversation. Everything was going swimmingly. The tone was joyful and also serious. With typical hyperbole, Baldwin called me his buddy, a brother he had not seen in four hundred years. The packed auditorium exploded in gleeful applause and nearly missed the terrible aside: “It was never intended

that we should meet.” What he said about my novel Things Fall Apart was quite extraordinary. He read it in France, he said. It was about people and customs of which he knew nothing. But reading it, he recognized everybody: “That man, Okonkwo, is my father. How he got over, I don’t know, but he did.” Halfway into our conversation, a mystery voice broke into the public address system, and began to insult Mister Baldwin. The geniality vanished. Some of the stalwarts in the audience rushed out to guard the exits. For a fraction of a second, Baldwin seemed nervous. But he quickly recovered his composure, stood erect and defiant, and began to reply to the intruder. “But Mister Baldwin will have his say; white supremacy has had its day.” Looking recently at an amateur video recording of that strange evening in Florida, I took note, for the first time, of one unfulfilled prophecy from Baldwin. He said there were only twenty years to a new century. And he said he would be there, because he was stubborn. But, as we all know, he did not make it. He did not even make it to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which had invited him and me for the fall semester in 1987. Our conversation had been stopped for good. Or has it? Literal-minded people have always had trouble with the language of prophets. As when Baldwin says to his nephew, “You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, / My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

A bitter critic accused Baldwin of encouraging Black Nationalist automatons in the belief that they were descendants of kings and queens, and should therefore uncritically identify with Africa. Baldwin did not advocate uncritical identification with anything. All his life he bristled with critical intelligence. He had a problem with Africa, which he called the African Conundrum. At one point in his life, he compared his African heritage most adversely with the heritage of humble Swiss peasants. “Out of their hymns and dances came Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.” Those are not the words of uncritical advocacy. The difference between Baldwin and some of his critics is that he was not scared of anybody or anything. He was not even scared of Africa. These talks were originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to James Baldwin, sponsored by PEN American Center and Lincoln Center, with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The New Yorker.

STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE James Baldwin

F

rom all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American— that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro. It is a fact that cannot be explained on the basis of the inaccessibility of the village. The village is very high, but it is only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne. It is true that it is virtually unknown. Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here. On the other hand, the villagers are able, presumably, to come and go as they please—which they do: to another town at the foot of the mountain, with a population of approximately five thousand, the nearest place to see a movie or go to the bank. In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen. There are about six hundred people living here, all Catholic—I conclude this from the fact that the Catholic church is open all year round, whereas the Protestant chapel, set off on a hill a little removed from the village, is open only in the summertime when the tourists arrive. There are four

or five hotels, all closed now, and four or five bistros, of which, however, only two do any business during the winter. These two do not do a great deal, for life in the village seems to end around nine or ten o’clock. There are a few stores, butcher, baker, épicerie, a hardware store, and a money-changer—who cannot change travelers’ checks, but must send them down to the bank, an operation which takes two or three days. There is something called the Ballet Haus, closed in the winter and used for God knows what, certainly not ballet, during the summer. There seems to be only one schoolhouse in the village, and this for the quite young children; I suppose this to mean that their older brothers and sisters at some point descend from these mountains in order to complete their education—possibly, again, to the town just below. The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach. In this white wilderness men and women and children move all day, carrying washing, wood, buckets of milk or water, sometimes skiing on Sunday afternoons. All week long boys and young men are to be seen shoveling snow off the rooftops, or dragging wood down from the forest in sleds. The village’s only real attraction, which explains the tourist season, is the hot spring water. A disquietingly high proportion of these tourists are cripples, or semi-cripples, who come year after year—from other parts of Switzerland, usually—to take the waters. This lends the village, at the height of the season, a rather terrifying air of sanctity, as though it were a lesser Lourdes. There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds; and wherever I passed, the first summer I was here, among the native villagers or among the lame, a wind passed with me—of astonishment, curiosity, amusement, and outrage. That first summer I stayed two weeks and never intended to return. But I did return in the winter, to work; the village offers, obviously, no distractions whatever and has the further advantage of being extremely cheap. Now it is winter again, a year later, and I am here again. Everyone in

the village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America—though this, apparently, they will never really believe: black men come from Africa and everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a woman who was born here, and that I am staying in their chalet. But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.

It must be admitted that in the beginning I was far too shocked to have any real reaction. In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted by trying to be pleasant—it being a great part of the American Negro’s education (long before he goes to school) that he must make people “like” him. This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to say that it did not work at all. No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted. My smile was simply another unheard-of phenomenon which allowed them to see my teeth—they did not, really, see my smile and I began to think that, should I take to snarling, no one would notice any difference. All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous—or infernal—in the eyes of the village people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more

than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They are brimming with good humor and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them. Just the same, there are days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play with them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother was a nigger. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. There is a custom in the village—I am told it is repeated in many villages—of “buying” African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. There stands in the church all year round a small box with a slot for money, decorated with a black figurine, and into this box the villagers drop their francs. During the carnaval which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened—out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like ice—and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money for the missionaries in Africa. Between the box in the church and the blackened children, the village “bought” last year six or eight African natives. This was reported to me with pride by the wife of one of the

bistro owners and I was careful to express astonishment and pleasure at the solicitude shown by the village for the souls of black folk. The bistro owner’s wife beamed with a pleasure far more genuine than my own and seemed to feel that I might now breathe more easily concerning the souls of at least six of my kinsmen. I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed. I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they’ll ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. And this is so despite everything I may do to feel differently, despite my friendly conversations with the bistro owner’s wife, despite their three-year-old son who has at last become my friend, despite the saluts and bonsoirs which I exchange with people as I walk, despite the fact that I know that no individual can be taken to task for what history is doing, or has done. I say that the culture of these people controls me—but they can scarcely be held responsible for European culture. America comes out of Europe, but these people have never seen America, nor have most of them seen more

of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited. For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive. The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. This is a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk, having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine it, quite fail to understand. Also, rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt. There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare—rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men. What is crucial here is that, since white men represent in the black man’s world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really,

either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naïveté, or else to make it cost him dear. The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being. This is a very charged and difficult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in the white man’s naïveté. Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors. He is inescapably aware, nevertheless, that he is in a better position in the world than black men are, nor can he quite put to death the suspicion that he is hated by black men therefore. He does not wish to be hated, neither does he wish to change places, and at this point in his uneasiness he can scarcely avoid having recourse to those legends which white men have created about black men, the most usual effect of which is that the white man finds himself enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language which describes hell, as well as the attributes which lead one to hell, as being as black as night. Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. It is of quite considerable significance that black men remain, in the imagination, and in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the disciplines of salvation; and this despite the fact that the West has been “buying” African natives for centuries. There is, I should hazard, an instantaneous necessity to be divorced from this so visibly unsaved stranger, in whose heart, moreover, one cannot guess what dreams of vengeance are being nourished; and, at the same time, there are few things on earth more attractive than the idea of the unspeakable liberty which is allowed the unredeemed. When, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is. What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one’s own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of

what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is. I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first summer I arrived, but this is not quite true. The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me. And the fact that their wonder now exists on another level is reflected in their attitudes and in their eyes. There are the children who make those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures of friendship in the unpredictable fashion of children; other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach. Some of the older women never pass without a friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems that they will be able to engage me in conversation, other women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk. Some of the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski—partly, I gather, because they cannot imagine what I would look like on skis—and want to know if I am married, and ask questions about my métier. But some of the men have accused le sale nègre—behind my back—of stealing wood and there is already in the eyes of some of them that peculiar, intent, paranoiac malevolence which one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when, out walking with their Sunday girl, they see a Negro male approach. There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience.

There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.

For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact—and the necessity—of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves. But between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama which begins for Americans over three hundred years ago at Jamestown, there are at least two differences to be observed. The American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thing, as slaves in past epochs had supposed and often done, that he would ever be able to wrest the power from his master’s hands. This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprecedented fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resurrected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means—if only in memory—of revering and sustaining the forms of his former life, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor. At the time

—to say nothing of the circumstances—of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power from his master’s hands. There was no reason to suppose that his situation would ever change, nor was there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a “motive for living under American culture or die.” The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters. For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet Nigger! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe quite sincerely fails to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its effects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe’s black possessions remained—and do remain—in Europe’s colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character. When one considers the history of the Negro in America it is of the greatest importance to recognize that the moral beliefs of a person, or a people, are never really as tenuous as life—which is not moral—very often causes them to appear; these create for them a frame of reference and a necessary hope, the hope being that when

life has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above themselves and to triumph over life. Life would scarcely be bearable if this hope did not exist. Again, even when the worst has been said, to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. The ideas on which American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men. This was, literally, a hard necessity. It was impossible, for one thing, for Americans to abandon their beliefs, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacrifices they had endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs afforded them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy. Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the world’s notice that those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a certain unprecedented uneasiness over the idea’s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea’s validity. The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous

civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological. At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession— either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.” In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him—the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in

the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice. The cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth. Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world— which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white—owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us—very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and

very much against our will—that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

HOME AND AWAY And that’s what it was like most nights: abuse from Shiva and others, condescension from Ardashir; never seeing Alsana; never seeing the sun; clutching fifteen pence and then releasing it; wanting desperately to be wearing a sign, a large white placard that said: I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND

OTHERS. I AM FORTYNINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES.

But, no such placard existing, he had instead the urge, the need, to speak to every man, and, like the Ancient Mariner, explain constantly, constantly wanting to reassert something, anything. Wasn’t that important? But then the heartbreaking disappointment—to find out that the inclining of one’s head, poising of one’s pen, these were important, so important—it was important to be a good waiter, to listen when someone said— Lamb Dawn Sock and rice. With chips. Thank you. And fifteen pence clinked on china. Thank you, sir. Thank you so very much. —Zadie Smith, from White Teeth

On Major and Minor Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct time. There are more major things than minor things overall, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra. —Anne Carson

WALLS Amitav Ghosh

U

sing his powers, ‘Amm Taha foretold the events of Nabeel’s brother’s wedding ceremony the morning before it was held. There would be lots of young people around their house, he said: all the young, unmarried boys and girls of the village, singing and dancing without a care in the world. But the supper would be a small affair, attended mainly by relatives and guests from other villages. Old Idris, Nabeel’s father, had invited a lot of people from Nashawy too, for their family was overjoyed about the marriage and wanted to celebrate it as best they could. But many of the people he had invited wouldn’t go, out of consideration for the old man, to cut down his expenses—everyone knew their family couldn’t really afford a big wedding. Their younger friends and relatives would drop by during the day and then again in the evening, mainly to dance and sing. They would be outside in the lanes; they wouldn’t go into the house with the guests—the supper was only for elders and responsible, grown-up men. “They’ll start arriving in the morning, insha’allah,” said ‘Amm Taha, “and by the time you get there they’ll all be sitting in the guestroom. They’ll want to talk to you, for none of them will ever have met an Indian before.” My heart sank when I realized that for me the evening would mean a prolonged incarceration in a small, crowded room. “I would rather be outside,” I said, “watching the singing and dancing.”

‘Amm Taha laughed with a hint of malign pleasure, as though he had already glimpsed a wealth of discomfiture lying in wait for me in his divinations of the evening ahead. “They won’t let you stay outside,” he said. “You’re a kind of effendi, so they’ll make you go in and sit with the elders and all the other guests.” I tried to prove him wrong when I went to Nabeel’s house that evening, and for a short while, at the beginning, I actually thought I’d succeeded. By the time I made my way there, a large crowd had gathered in the lane outside and I merged gratefully into its fringes. There were some forty or fifty boys and girls there, packed in a tight semicircle in front of the bride and groom. The newly married couple were sitting on raised chairs, enthroned with their backs against the house, while their friends and relatives danced in front of them. The groom, ‘Ali, was dressed in a new jallabeyya of brown wool, a dark, sturdily built young man, with a generous, open smile and a cleft in his chin. His bride and cousin, Fawzia, was wearing a white gown, with a frill of lace and a little gauzy veil. Her face had been carefully and evenly painted, so that her lips, cheeks, and ears were all exactly the same shade of iridescent pink. The flatness of the paint had created a curious effect, turning her face into a pallid, spectral mask: I was astonished to discover later that she was in fact a cheerful, goodlooking woman, with a warm smile and a welcoming manner. A boy was kneeling beside her chair, pounding out a deafening, fast-paced rhythm upon a tin wash-basin that was propped against his leg. Someone was dancing in front of him, but the crowd was so thick around them that from where I stood I could see little more than the bobbing of the dancer’s head. Bracing myself against a wall, I rose on tiptoe and saw that the dancer was a boy, one of Nabeel’s cousins; he was dancing bawdily, jerking his hips in front of the girls, while some of his friends reached out to slap him on his buttocks, doubling over with laughter at his coquettish twitching. All around me voices were chanting the words of a refrain that invoked the voluptuous fruitfulness of pomegranates—“Ya rummân, ya rummân”—and with every word, dozens of hands came crashing together, clapping in unison, in perfect time with the beat. The

spectators were jostling for a better view now, the boys balancing on each other’s shoulders, the girls climbing upon the window-sills. The dance was approaching its climax when Nabeel appeared at my side, followed by his father. After a hurried exchange of greetings, they put their arms through mine and led me firmly back towards their house. The moment I stepped into their smoky, crowded guest-room, I knew that I was in for a long interrogation: I had a premonition of its coming in the strained boredom on the faces of the men who were assembled there, in the restlessness of their fidgeting fingers and their tapping toes, as they sat in silence in that hot, sweaty room, while the lanes around them resounded with the clamor of celebration. They turned to face me as I walked in, all of them together, some fifteen or twenty men, grateful for the distraction, for the temporary rupture with the uncomfortably intimate world evoked by the songs outside, the half-forgotten longings and reawakened desires, the memories of fingers locking in secret and hands brushing against hips in the surging crowd—all the village’s young and unmarried, boys and girls together, thronging around the dancers, clapping and chanting, intoxicated with the heightened eroticism of the wedding night, that feverish air whose mysteries I had just begun to sense when Nabeel and his father spotted me in the crowd and led me away to face this contingent of fidgeting, middle-aged men sitting in their guest-room. I looked around quickly, searching for a familiar face, but to my dismay I discovered that they were all outsiders, from other villages, and that I knew no one there, no one at all, since Nabeel and his father had gone back to their post outside to receive their guests. There were a few moments of silent scrutiny and then the man beside me cleared his throat and asked whether I was the doctor who had recently been posted to the government clinic. A look of extreme suspicion came into his eyes when I explained my situation, and as soon as I had finished he began to fire off a series of questions—about how I had learnt Arabic, and who had brought me to Nashawy, and whether I had permission from the Government of Egypt. No sooner had I given him the answers than

he demanded to see my identity card, and when I explained that I did not have a card, but I did indeed have an official letter from the Ministry of the Interior which I would gladly show him if he would accompany me to my room, his face took on an expression of portentous seriousness and he began to mutter about spies and impostors and a possible report to the Mukhabbârit, the intelligence wing of the police. He was quickly elbowed away, however, for there were many others around him who were impatient now, brimming with questions of their own. Within moments a dozen or so people had crowded around me, and I was busy affirming that yes, in my country there were indeed crops like rice and wheat, and yes, in India too, there were peasants like the fellaheen of Egypt, who lived in adobe villages and turned the earth with cattle-drawn ploughs. The questions came ever faster, even as I was speaking. “Are most of your houses still built of mud-brick as they are here?” and “Do your people cook on gas stoves or do they still burn straw and wood as we do?” … they had constructed a certain ladder of “Development” in their minds, and because all their images of material life were of those who stood in the rungs above, the circumstances of those below had become more or less unimaginable.

I grew increasingly puzzled as I tried to deal with this barrage of inquiries, first by the part the word “still” played in their questions, and second by the masks of incredulity that seemed to fall on their faces as I affirmed, over and over again, that yes, in India too people used cattle-drawn ploughs and not tractors; water-wheels and not pumps; donkey-carts, not trucks, and yes, in India too there were many, many people who were very poor, indeed there were millions whose poverty they would scarcely have been able to imagine. But to my bewilderment, the more I insisted, the more skeptical they seemed to become, until at last I realized, with a sense of shock, that they did not believe what I was saying. I later came to understand that their disbelief had little or nothing to do with what I had said; rather, they had constructed a certain

ladder of “Development” in their minds, and because all their images of material life were of those who stood in the rungs above, the circumstances of those below had become more or less unimaginable. I had an inkling then of the real and desperate seriousness of their engagement with modernism, because I realized that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time; I understood that their relationship with the objects of their everyday lives was never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which did not have mud-walled houses and cattle-drawn ploughs, so that those objects, those houses and ploughs, were insubstantial things, ghosts displaced in time, waiting to be exorcized and laid to rest. It was thus that I had my first suspicion of what it might mean to belong to a “historical civilization,” and it left me bewildered because, for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in imagining. The supper was a quick affair; about ten of us were taken to another room, at the back, where we helped ourselves to lamb, rice, and sweetmeats standing around a table, and as soon as we had eaten, we were led out again and another lot of guests was brought in. I decided to take advantage of the bustle, and while Nabeel and his father were busy leading their guests back and forth, I slipped out of the guest-room and back into the lane. It was long past sunset now, and the faces around the bridal couple were glowing under a dome of dust that had turned golden in the light of a single kerosene lamp. The drum-beat on the washbasin was a measured, gentle one and when I pushed my way into the center of the crowd I saw that the dancer was a young girl, dressed in a simple, printed cotton dress, with a long scarf tied around her waist. Both her hands were on her hips, and she was dancing with her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her, moving her hips with a slow, languid grace, backwards and forwards while the rest of her body stayed still, almost immobile, except for the quick, circular motion of her feet. Then gradually, the tempo of the beat

quickened, and somebody called out the first line of a chant, khadnâha min wasat al-dâr, “we took her from her father’s house,” and the crowd shouted back, wa abûha gâ‘id za‘alân, “while her father sat there bereft.” Then the single voice again, khadnâha bi alsaif al-mâdî, “we took her with a sharpened sword,” followed by the massed refrain, wa abûha makânsh râdî, “because her father wouldn’t consent.” The crowd pressed closer with the quickening of the beat, and as the voices and the clapping grew louder, the girl, in response, raised an arm and flexed it above her head in a graceful arc. Her body was turning now, rotating slowly in the same place, her hips moving faster while the crowd around her clapped and stamped, roaring their approval at the tops of their voices. Gradually, the beat grew quicker, blurring into a tattoo of drumbeats, and in response her torso froze into stillness, while her hips and her waist moved ever faster, in exact counterpoint, in a pattern of movement that became a perfect abstraction of eroticism, a figurative geometry of lovemaking, pounding back and forth at a dizzying speed until at last the final beat rang out and she escaped into the crowd, laughing.

“Where have you been all this while?” a voice cried out behind me. “We have been looking everywhere for you—there’s so much still to ask.”

Turning around I came face to face with the man who had demanded to see my identity card. Nabeel was following close behind, and between the two of them they led me back, remonstrating gently with me for having left the guest-room without warning. There was a thick fog of smoke in the room when we went back in, for the wedding guests had lit cigarettes and shushas now and settled back on the divans to rest after the supper. Nabeel’s father handed me a shusha of my own, and while I was trying to coax my coal into life, my interlocutors gathered around me again, and the questions began to flow once more. “Tell us then,” said someone, “in your country, amongst your people, what do you do with your dead?” “They are burned,” I said, puffing stoically on my shusha as they recoiled in shock. “And the ashes?” another voice asked. “Do you at least save the ashes so that you can remember them by something?” “No,” I said. “No: even the ashes are scattered in the rivers.” There was a long silence, for it took a while before they could overcome their revulsion far enough to speak. “So are they all unbelievers in your country?” someone asked at last. “Is there no Law or Morality: can everyone do as they please—take a woman off the streets or sleep with another man’s wife?” “No,” I began, but before I could complete my answer I was cut short. “So what about circumcision?” a voice demanded, and was followed immediately by another, even louder one, which wanted to know whether women in my country were “purified” as they were in Egypt. The word “to purify” makes a verbal equation between male circumcision and clitoridectomy, being the same in both cases, but the latter is an infinitely more dangerous operation, since it requires the complete excision of the clitoris. Clitoridectomy is, in fact, hideously painful and was declared illegal after the Revolution, although it still continues to be widely practiced, by Christian and Muslim fellaheen alike.

“No,” I said, “women are not ‘purified’ in my country.” But my questioner, convinced that I had not understood what he had asked, repeated his words again, slowly. The faces around me grew blank with astonishment as I said “no” once again. “So you mean you let the clitoris just grow and grow?” a man asked, hoarse-voiced. I began to correct him, but he was absorbed in his own amazement, and in the meanwhile someone else interrupted, with a sudden shout: “And boys?” he cried, “what about boys, are they not purified either?” “And you, ya doktór?” “What about you …?” I looked at the eyes around me, alternately curious and horrified, and I knew that I would not be able to answer. My limbs seemed to have passed beyond my volition as I rose from the divan, knocking over my shusha. I pushed my way out, and before anyone could react, I was past the crowd, walking quickly back to my room. “They were only asking questions,” he said, “just like you do; they didn’t mean any harm. Why do you let this talk of cows and burning and circumcision worry you so much?”

I was almost there, when I heard footsteps close behind me. It was Nabeel, looking puzzled and a little out of breath. “What happened?” he said. “Why did you leave so suddenly?” I kept walking, for I could think of no answer. “They were only asking questions,” he said, “just like you do; they didn’t mean any harm. Why do you let this talk of cows and burning and circumcision worry you so much? These are just customs; it’s natural that people should be curious. These are not things to be upset about.” I sometimes wished I had told Nabeel a story. When I was a child we lived in a place that was destined to fall out of the world’s atlas like a page ripped in the press: it was East

Pakistan, which, after its creation in 1947, survived only a bare twenty-five years before becoming a new nation, Bangladesh. No one regretted its passing; if it still possesses a life in my memory it is largely by accident, because my father happened to be seconded to the Indian diplomatic mission in Dhaka when I was about six years old. There was an element of irony in our living in Dhaka as “foreigners,” for Dhaka was in fact our ancestral city: both my parents were from families which belonged to the middle-class Hindu community that had once flourished there. But long before the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan was created, my ancestors had moved westwards, and thanks to their wanderlust we were Indians now, and Dhaka was foreign territory to us although we still spoke its dialect and still had several relatives living in the old Hindu neighborhoods in the heart of the city. The house we had moved into was in a new residential suburb on the outskirts of the city. The area had only recently been developed and when we moved there it still looked like a version of a planner’s blueprint, with sketchy lots and lightly pencilled roads. Our house was spanking new; it was one of the first to be built in the area. It had a large garden, and high walls ran all the way around it, separating the compound from an expanse of excavated construction sites. There was only one other house nearby; the others were all at the end of the road, telescopically small, visible only with shaded eyes and a squint. To me they seemed remote enough for our house to be a desert island, with walls instead of cliffs. No one ever explained to me what those groups of people were doing in our house and I was too young to work out for myself that they were refugees, fleeing from mobs.

At times, unaccountably, the house would fill up with strangers. The garden, usually empty except for dragonflies and grasshoppers, would be festooned with saris drying in the breeze, and there would be large groups of men, women and children sitting on the grass, with little bundles of clothes and pots and pans spread out beside

them. To me, a child of seven or eight, there always seemed to be an air of something akin to light-heartedness about those people, something like relief perhaps; they would wave to me when I went down to the garden and sometimes the women would reach into their bundles and find me sweets. In the evenings, large fires would be lit in the driveway and my mother and her friends would stand behind huge cooking-pots, ladles in hand, the ends of their saris tucked in purposefully at the waist, serving out large helpings of food. We would all eat together, sitting around the garden as though it were a picnic, and afterwards we, the children, would play football and hide-and-seek. Then after a day or two everyone would be gone, the garden would be reclaimed by dragonflies and grasshoppers, and peace would descend once more upon my island. I was never surprised or put out by these visitations. To me they seemed like festive occasions, especially since we ate out of green banana leaves, just as we did at weddings and other celebrations. No one ever explained to me what those groups of people were doing in our house and I was too young to work out for myself that they were refugees, fleeing from mobs, and that they had taken shelter in our garden because ours was the only “Hindu” house nearby that happened to have high walls. On one particular day (a day in January 1964, I was to discover many years later) more people than ever before appeared in the garden, suddenly and without warning. They began to pour in early in the morning, in small knots, carrying bundles and other odds and ends, and as the day wore on the heavy steel gates of the house were opened time and time again to let more people in. By evening the garden was packed with people, some squatting in silent groups and others leaning against the walls, as though in wait. Just after sunset, our cook came looking for me in the garden, and led me away, past the families huddled on the staircase and in the corridors, to my parents’ bedroom, upstairs. By the time we got to the room, the shutters of all the windows had been closed, and my father was pacing the floor, waiting for me. He made me sit down, and then, speaking in a voice that could not be argued with, he told me to stay where I was. I was not to leave the bedroom on any

account, he said, until he came back to fetch me. To make sure, he left our cook sitting by the door, with instructions not to leave his post. As a rule I would have been perfectly happy to stay there with our cook, for he was a wonderful storyteller and often kept me entranced for hours on end, spinning out fables in the dialect of his region— long, epic stories about ghosts and ghouls and faraway lands where people ate children. He was from one of the maritime districts of East Pakistan and he had come to work with us because he had lost most of his family in the riots that followed Partition and now wanted to emigrate to India. He had learnt to cook on the river-steamers of his region, which were famous throughout Bengal for the quality of their cooking. After his coming the food in our house had become legendary amongst our family’s friends. As for me, I regarded him with an equal mixture of fear and fascination, for although he was a small wiry man, he seemed bigger than he was because he had large, curling moustaches which made him somehow mysterious and menacing. When I tried to imagine the ghouls and spirits of his stories, they usually looked very much like him. But today he had no stories to tell; he could hardly keep still and every so often he would go to the windows and look outside, prising the shutters open. Soon, his curiosity got the better of him and, after telling me to stay where I was, he slipped out of the room, forgetting to shut the door behind him. I waited a few minutes, and when he didn’t come back, I ran out of the bedroom to a balcony which looked out over the garden and the lane. My memories of what I saw are very vivid, but at the same time oddly out of synch, like a sloppily edited film. A large crowd is thronging around our house, a mob of hundreds of men, their faces shining red in the light of the burning torches in their hands, rags tied on sticks, whose flames seem to be swirling against our walls in waves of fire. As I watch, the flames begin to dance around the house, and while they circle the walls the people gathered inside mill around the garden, cower in huddles and cover their faces. I can see the enraged mob and the dancing flames with a vivid, burning clarity,

yet all of it happens in utter silence; my memory, in an act of benign protection, has excised every single sound. I do not know how long I stood there, but suddenly our cook rushed in and dragged me away, back to my parents’ bedroom. He was shaken now, for he had seen the mob too, and he began to walk back and forth across the room, covering his face and tugging at his moustache. In frustration at my imprisonment in that room, I began to disarrange the bedclothes. I pulled off the covers and began to tug at the sheets, when suddenly my father’s pillow fell over, revealing a dark, metallic object. It was small, no larger than a toy pistol but much heavier, and I had to use both my hands to lift it. I pointed it at the wall, as I would my own water-pistol, and curling a finger around the trigger I squeezed as hard as I could. But nothing happened, there was no sound and the trigger wouldn’t move. I tried once more, and again nothing happened. I turned it over in my hands, wondering what made it work, but then the door flew open and my father came into the room. He crossed the floor with a couple of strides, and snatched the revolver out of my hands. Without another word, he slipped it into his pocket and went racing out of the room. It was then that I realized he was afraid we might be killed that night, and that he had sent me to the bedroom so I would be the last to be found if the gates gave way and the mob succeeded in breaking in. But nothing did happen. The police arrived at just the right moment, alerted by some of my parents’ Muslim friends, and drove the mob away. Next morning, when I looked out over the balcony, the garden was strewn with bricks and rubble, but the refugees who had gathered there were sitting in the sun, calm, though thoroughly subdued. Our cook, on the other hand, was in a mood of great elation that morning, and when we went downstairs he joked cheerfully with the people in the garden, laughing, and asking how they happened to be there. Later, we squatted in a corner and he whispered in my ear, pointing at the knots of people around us, and told me their stories. I was to recognize those stories years later, when reading through a

collection of old newspapers, I discovered that on the very night when I’d seen those flames dancing around the walls of our house, there had been a riot in Calcutta too, similar in every respect except that there it was Muslims who had been attacked by Hindus. But equally, in both cities—and this must be said, it must always be said, for it is the incantation that redeems our sanity—in both Dhaka and Calcutta, there were exactly mirrored stories of Hindus and Muslims coming to each other’s rescue, so that many more people were saved than killed. The stories of those riots are always the same: tales that grow out of an explosive barrier of symbols—of cities going up in flames because of a cow found dead in a temple or a pig in a mosque; of people killed for wearing a lungi or a dhoti, depending on where they find themselves; of women disemboweled for wearing veils or vermilion, of men dismembered for the state of their foreskins. But I was never able to explain very much of this to Nabeel or anyone else in Nashawy. The fact was that despite the occasional storms and turbulence their country had seen, despite even the wars that some of them had fought in, theirs was a world that was far gentler, far less violent, very much more humane and innocent than mine. I could not have expected them to understand an Indian’s terror of symbols. From In an Antique Land

HOME AND AWAY Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard. They are sitting tall and proud, surrounded by chickens and roosters. Their feet are separated from the dirt by thin sandals. My grandfather’s broad forehead is shining. So too are my grandmother’s famed sad eyes. The animals are obliviously pecking at the ground. This looks like a wedding portrait, though it is actually a photograph my grandparents had taken late in life, for their children, especially for my mother….

When my mother, a Catholic girl from the South, decided to marry my father, a Buddhist gangster from the North, her parents disowned her. This is in the photograph, though it is not visible to the eye. If it were, it would be a deep impression across the soft dirt of my grandparents’ courtyard. Her father chased her out of the house, beating her with the same broom she had used every day of her life, from the time she could stand up and sweep to the morning of the day she was chased away. —Lê Thi Diem Thúy, from “The Gangster We Are All Looking For”

On Parmenides We pride ourselves on being civilized people. Yet what if the names for things were utterly different? Italy, for example. I have a friend named Andreas, an Italian. He has lived in Argentina as well as in England, and also Costa Rica for some time. Everywhere he lives, he invites people over for supper. It is a lot of work. Artichoke pasta. Peaches. His deep smile never fades. What if the proper name for Italy turns out to be Brzoy—will Andreas continue to travel the world like the wandering moon with her borrowed light? I fear we failed to understand what he was saying or his reasons. What if every time he said cities, he meant delusion, for example? —Anne Carson

SHAKESPEARE IN THE BUSH Laura Bohannon

J

ust before I left Oxford for the Tiv in West Africa, conversation turned to the season at Stratford. “You Americans,” said a friend, “often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.” I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be clear—everywhere—although some details of custom might have to be explained and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes. To end an argument we could not conclude, my friend gave me a copy of Hamlet to study in the African bush: it would, he hoped, lift my mind above its primitive surroundings, and possibly I might, by prolonged meditation, achieve the grace of correct interpretation. It was my second field trip to that African tribe, and I thought myself ready to live in one of its remote sections—an area difficult to cross even on foot. I eventually settled on the hillock of a very knowledgeable old man, the head of a homestead of some hundred and forty people, all of whom were either his close relatives or their wives and children. Like the other elders of the vicinity, the old man spent most of his time performing ceremonies seldom seen these days in the more accessible parts of the tribe. I was delighted. Soon there would be three months of enforced isolation and leisure,

between the harvest that takes place just before the rising of the swamps and the clearing of new farms when the water goes down. Then, I thought, they would have even more time to perform ceremonies and explain them to me. I was quite mistaken. Most of the ceremonies demanded the presence of elders from several homesteads. As the swamps rose, the old men found it too difficult to walk from one homestead to the next, and the ceremonies gradually ceased. As the swamps rose even higher, all activities but one came to an end. The women brewed beer from maize and millet. Men, women, and children sat on their hillocks and drank it. People began to drink at dawn. By midmorning the whole homestead was singing, dancing, and drumming. When it rained, people had to sit inside their huts: there they drank and sang or they drank and told stories. In any case, by noon or before, I either had to join the party or retire to my own hut and my books. “One does not discuss serious matters when there is beer. Come, drink with us.” Since I lacked their capacity for the thick native beer, I spent more and more time with Hamlet. Before the end of the second month, grace descended on me. I was quite sure that Hamlet had only one possible interpretation, and that one universally obvious. I was quite sure that Hamlet had only one possible interpretation, and that one universally obvious.

Early every morning, in the hope of having some serious talk before the beer party, I used to call on the old man at his reception hut—a circle of posts supporting a thatched roof above a low mud wall to keep out wind and rain. One day I crawled through the low doorway and found most of the men of the homestead sitting huddled in their ragged cloths on stools, low plank beds, and reclining chairs, warming themselves against the chill of the rain around a smoky fire. In the center were three pots of beer. The party had started. The old man greeted me cordially. “Sit down and drink.” I accepted a large calabash full of beer, poured some into a small

drinking gourd, and tossed it down. Then I poured some more into the same gourd for the man second in seniority to my host before I handed my calabash over to a young man for further distribution. Important people shouldn’t ladle beer themselves. “It is better like this,” the old man said, looking at me approvingly and plucking at the thatch that had caught in my hair. “You should sit and drink with us more often. Your servants tell me that when you are not with us, you sit inside your hut looking at a paper.” The old man was acquainted with four kinds of “papers”: tax receipts, bride price receipts, court fee receipts, and letters. The messenger who brought him letters from the chief used them mainly as a badge of office, for he always knew what was in them and told the old man. Personal letters for the few who had relatives in the government or mission stations were kept until someone went to a large market where there was a letter writer and reader. Since my arrival, letters were brought to me to be read. A few men also brought me bride price receipts, privately, with requests to change the figures to a higher sum. I found moral arguments were of no avail, since in-laws are fair game, and the technical hazards of forgery difficult to explain to an illiterate people. I did not wish them to think me silly enough to look at any such papers for days on end, and I hastily explained that my “paper” was one of the “things of long ago” of my country. “Ah,” said the old man. “Tell us.” I protested that I was not a storyteller. Storytelling is a skilled art among them; their standards are high, and the audiences critical— and vocal in their criticism. I protested in vain. This morning they wanted to hear a story while they drank. They threatened to tell me no more stories until I told them one of mine. Finally, the old man promised that no one would criticize my style, “for we know you are struggling with our language.” “But,” put in one of the elders, “you must explain what we do not understand, as we do when we tell you our stories.” Realizing that here was my chance to prove Hamlet universally intelligible, I agreed. The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals

from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, “Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them.” “Why was he no longer their chief?” “He was dead,” I explained. “That is why they were troubled and afraid when they saw him.” “Impossible,” began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, “Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.” Slightly shaken, I continued. “One of these three was a man who knew things”—the closest translation for scholar, but unfortunately it also meant witch. The second elder looked triumphantly at the first. “So he spoke to the dead chief, saying, ‘Tell us what we must do so you may rest in your grave,’ but the dead chief did not answer. He vanished, and they could see him no more. Then the man who knew things—his name was Horatio—said this event was the affair of the dead chief’s son, Hamlet.” There was a general shaking of heads round the circle. “Had the dead chief no living brothers? Or was this son the chief?” “No,” I replied. “That is, he had one living brother who became the chief when the elder brother died.” The old men muttered: such omens were matters for chiefs and elders, not for youngsters; no good could come of going behind a chief’s back; clearly Horatio was not a man who knew things. “Yes, he was,” I insisted, shooing a chicken away from my beer. “In our country the son is next to the father. The dead chief’s younger brother had become the great chief. He had also married his elder brother’s widow only about a month after the funeral.” “He did well,” the old man beamed and announced to the others, “I told you that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like us. In our country also,” he added to me, “the younger brother marries the elder brother’s widow and becomes the father of his children. Now, if your uncle, who married your widowed

mother, is your father’s full brother, then he will be a real father to you. Did Hamlet’s father and uncle have one mother?” His question barely penetrated my mind; I was too upset and thrown too far off balance by having one of the most important elements of Hamlet knocked straight out of the picture. Rather uncertainly I said that I thought they had the same mother, but I wasn’t sure—the story didn’t say. The old man told me severely that these genealogical details made all the difference and that when I got home I must ask the elders about it. He shouted out the door to one of his younger wives to bring his goatskin bag. Determined to save what I could of the mother motif, I took a deep breath and began again. “The son Hamlet was very sad because his mother had married again so quickly. There was no need for her to do so, and it is our custom for a widow not to go to her next husband until she has mourned for two years.” “Two years is too long,” objected the wife, who had appeared with the old man’s battered goatskin bag. “Who will hoe your farms for you while you have no husband?” “Hamlet,” I retorted without thinking, “was old enough to hoe his mother’s farms himself. There was no need for her to remarry.” No one looked convinced. I gave up. “His mother and the great chief told Hamlet not to be sad, for the great chief himself would be a father to Hamlet. Furthermore, Hamlet would be the next chief: therefore he must stay to learn the things of a chief. Hamlet agreed to remain, and all the rest went off to drink beer.” While I paused, perplexed at how to render Hamlet’s disgusted soliloquy to an audience convinced that Claudius and Gertrude had behaved in the best possible manner, one of the younger men asked me who had married the other wives of the dead chief. “He had no other wives,” I told him. “But a chief must have many wives! How else can he brew beer and prepare food for all his guests?” I said firmly that in our country even chiefs had only one wife, that they had servants to do their work, and that they paid them from tax money.

It was better, they returned, for a chief to have many wives and sons who would help him hoe his farms and feed his people; then everyone loved the chief who gave much and took nothing—taxes were a bad thing. I agreed with the last comment, but for the rest fell back on their favorite way of fobbing off my questions: “That is the way it is done, so that is how we do it.” I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, “That night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet’s dead father spoke.” “Omens can’t talk!” The old man was emphatic. “Hamlet’s dead father wasn’t an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.” My audience looked as confused as I sounded. “It was Hamlet’s dead father. It was a thing we call a ‘ghost.’” I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn’t believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality. “What is a ‘ghost’? An omen?” “No, a ‘ghost’ is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.” They objected. “One can touch zombis.” “No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made Hamlet’s dead father walk. He did it himself.” “Dead men can’t walk,” protested my audience as one man. I was quite willing to compromise. “A ‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.” But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.” “They do in my country,” I snapped. The old man quelled the babble of disbelief that arose immediately and told me with that insincere, but courteous, agreement one extends to the fancies of the young, ignorant, and

superstitious, “No doubt in your country the dead can also walk without being zombis.” From the depths of his bag he produced a withered fragment of kola nut, bit off one end to show it wasn’t poisoned, and handed me the rest as a peace offering. “Anyhow,” I resumed, “Hamlet’s dead father said that his own brother, the one who became chief, had poisoned him. He wanted Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet believed this in his heart, for he did not like his father’s brother,” I took another swallow of beer. “In the country of the great chief, living in the same homestead, for it was a very large one, was an important elder who was often with the chief to advise and help him. His name was Polonius. Hamlet was courting his daughter, but her father and her brother … [I cast hastily about for some tribal analogy] warned her not to let Hamlet visit her when she was alone on her farm, for he would be a great chief and so could not marry her.” “Why not?” asked the wife, who had settled down on the edge of the old man’s chair. He frowned at her for asking stupid questions and growled, “They lived in the same homestead.” “That was not the reason,” I informed them. “Polonius was a stranger who lived in the homestead because he helped the chief, not because he was a relative.” “Then why couldn’t Hamlet marry her?” “He could have,” I explained, “but Polonius didn’t think he would. After all, Hamlet was a man of great importance who ought to marry a chief’s daughter, for in his country a man could have only one wife. Polonius was afraid that if Hamlet made love to his daughter, then no one else would give a high price for her.” “That might be true,” remarked one of the shrewder elders, “but a chief’s son would give his mistress’s father enough presents and patronage to more than make up the difference. Polonius sounds like a fool to me.” “Many people think he was,” I agreed. “Meanwhile Polonius sent his son Laertes off to Paris to learn the things of that country, for it was the homestead of a very great chief indeed. Because he was afraid that Laertes might waste a lot of money on beer and women and gambling, or get into trouble by fighting, he sent one of his

servants to Paris secretly, to spy out what Laertes was doing. One day Hamlet came upon Polonius’s daughter, Ophelia. He behaved so oddly he frightened her. Indeed”—I was fumbling for words to express the dubious quality of Hamlet’s madness—“the chief and many others had also noticed that when Hamlet talked one could understand the words but not what they meant. Many people thought that he had become mad.” My audience suddenly became much more attentive. “The great chief wanted to know what was wrong with Hamlet, so he sent for two of Hamlet’s age mates [school friends would have taken long explanation] to talk to Hamlet and find out what troubled his heart. Hamlet, seeing that they had been bribed by the chief to betray him, told them nothing, Polonius, however, insisted that Hamlet was mad because he had been forbidden to see Ophelia, whom he loved.” “Why,” inquired a bewildered voice, “should anyone bewitch Hamlet on that account?” “Bewitch him?” “Yes, only witchcraft can make anyone mad, unless, of course, one sees the beings that lurk in the forest.” I stopped being a storyteller, took out my notebook and demanded to be told more about these two causes of madness. Even while they spoke and I jotted notes, I tried to calculate the effect of this new factor on the plot. Hamlet had not been exposed to the beings that lurk in the forest. Only his relatives in the male line could bewitch him. Barring relatives not mentioned by Shakespeare, it had to be Claudius who was attempting to harm him. And, of course, it was. For the moment I staved off questions by saying that the great chief also refused to believe that Hamlet was mad for the love of Ophelia and nothing else. “He was sure that something much more important was troubling Hamlet’s heart. “Now Hamlet’s age mates,” I continued, “had brought with them a famous storyteller. Hamlet decided to have this man tell the chief and all his homestead a story about a man who had poisoned his brother because he desired his brother’s wife and wished to be chief himself. Hamlet was sure the great chief could not hear the story without

making a sign if he was indeed guilty, and then he would discover whether his dead father had told him the truth.” The old man interrupted, with deep cunning, “Why should a father lie to his son?” he asked. I hedged: “Hamlet wasn’t sure that it really was his dead father.” It was impossible to say anything, in that language, about devilinspired visions. “You mean,” he said, “it actually was an omen, and he knew witches sometimes send false ones. Hamlet was a fool not to go to one skilled in reading omens and divining the truth in the first place. A man-who-sees-the-truth could have told him how his father died, if he really had been poisoned, and if there was witchcraft in it; then Hamlet could have called the elders to settle the matter.” The shrewd elder ventured to disagree. “Because his father’s brother was a great chief, one-who-sees-the-truth might therefore have been afraid to tell it. I think it was for that reason that a friend of Hamlet’s father—a witch and an elder—sent an omen so his friend’s son would know. Was the omen true?” “Yes,” I said, abandoning ghosts and the devil; a witch-sent omen it would have to be. “It was true, for when the storyteller was telling his tale before all the homestead, the great chief rose in fear. Afraid that Hamlet knew his secret, he planned to have him killed.” The stage set of the next bit presented some difficulties of translation. I began cautiously. “The great chief told Hamlet’s mother to find out from her son what he knew. But because a woman’s children are always first in her heart, he had the important elder Polonius hide behind a cloth that hung against the wall of Hamlet’s mother’s sleeping hut. Hamlet started to scold his mother for what she had done.” There was a shocked murmur from everyone. A man should never scold his mother. “She called out in fear, and Polonius moved behind the cloth. Shouting, ‘A rat!’ Hamlet took his machete and slashed through the cloth.” I paused for dramatic effect. “He had killed Polonius!” The old men looked at each other in supreme disgust. “That Polonius truly was a fool and a man who knew nothing! What child

would not know enough to shout, ‘It’s me!’” With a pang, I remembered that these people are ardent hunters, always armed with bow, arrow, and machete; at the first rustle in the grass an arrow is aimed and ready, and the hunter shouts, “Game!” If no human voice answers immediately, the arrow speeds on its way. Like a good hunter Hamlet had shouted, “A rat!” I rushed in to save Polonius’s reputation. “Polonius did speak. Hamlet heard him. But he thought it was the chief and wished to kill him to avenge his father. He had meant to kill him earlier that evening …” I broke down, unable to describe to these pagans, who had no belief in individual afterlife, the difference between dying at one’s prayers and dying “unhousell’d, disappointed, unaneled.” This time I had shocked my audience seriously. “For a man to raise his hand against his father’s brother and the one who has become his father—that is a terrible thing. The elders ought to let such a man be bewitched.” I nibbled at my kola nut in some perplexity, then pointed out that after all the man had killed Hamlet’s father. “No,” pronounced the old man, speaking less to me than to the young men sitting behind the elders. “If your father’s brother has killed your father, you must appeal to your father’s age mates; it may avenge him. No man may use violence against his senior relatives.” Another thought struck him. “But if his father’s brother had indeed been wicked enough to bewitch Hamlet and make him mad that would be a good story indeed, for it would be his fault that Hamlet, being mad, no longer had any sense and thus was ready to kill his father’s brother.” There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it no longer seemed quite the same story to me. As I thought over the coming complications of plot and motive, I lost courage and decided to skim over dangerous ground quickly. “The great chief,” I went on, “was not sorry that Hamlet had killed Polonius. It gave him a reason to send Hamlet away, with his two treacherous age mates, with letters to a chief of a far country, saying that Hamlet should be killed. But Hamlet changed the writing on their papers, so that the chief killed his age mates instead.” I encountered

a reproachful glare from one of the men whom I had told undetectable forgery was not merely immoral but beyond human skill. I looked the other way. “Before Hamlet could return, Laertes came back for his father’s funeral. The great chief told him Hamlet had killed Polonius. Laertes swore to kill Hamlet because of this, and because his sister Ophelia, hearing her father had been killed by the man she loved, went mad and drowned in the river.” “Have you already forgotten what we told you?” The old man was reproachful. “One cannot take vengeance on a madman; Hamlet killed Polonius in his madness. As for the girl, she not only went mad, she was drowned. Only witches can make people drown. Water itself can’t hurt anything. It is merely something one drinks and bathes in.” I began to get cross. “If you don’t like the story, I’ll stop.” The old man made soothing noises and himself poured me some more beer. “You tell the story well, and we are listening. But it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means. No, don’t interrupt! We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work. We told you it was the great chief who wished to kill Hamlet, and now your own words have proved us right. Who were Ophelia’s male relatives?” “There were only her father and her brother.” Hamlet was clearly out of my hands. “There must have been many more; this also you must ask of your elders when you get back to your country. From what you tell us, since Polonius was dead, it must have been Laertes who killed Ophelia, although I do not see the reason for it.” We had emptied one pot of beer, and the old men argued the point with slightly tipsy interest. Finally one of them demanded of me, “What did the servant of Polonius say on his return?” With difficulty I recollected Reynaldo and his mission. “I don’t think he did return before Polonius was killed.”

“Listen,” said the elder, “and I will tell you how it was and how your story will go, then you may tell me if I am right. Polonius knew his son would get into trouble, and so he did. He had many fines to pay for fighting, and debts from gambling. But he had only two ways of getting money quickly. One was to marry off his sister at once, but it is difficult to find a man who will marry a woman desired by the son of a chief. For if the chief’s heir commits adultery with your wife, what can you do? Only a fool calls a case against a man who will someday be his judge. Therefore Laertes had to take the second way: he killed his sister by witchcraft, drowning her so he could secretly sell her body to the witches.” I raised an objection. “They found her body and buried it. Indeed Laertes jumped into the grave to see his sister once more—so, you see, the body was truly there. Hamlet, who had just come back, jumped in after him.” “What did I tell you?” The elder appealed to the others. “Laertes was up to no good with his sister’s body. Hamlet prevented him, because the chief’s heir, like a chief, does not wish any other man to grow rich and powerful. Laertes would be angry, because he would have killed his sister without benefit to himself. In our country he would try to kill Hamlet for that reason. Is this not what happened?”

“More or less,” I admitted. “When the great chief found Hamlet was still alive, he encouraged Laertes to try to kill Hamlet and arranged a fight with machetes between them. In the fight both the young men were wounded to death. Hamlet’s mother drank the poisoned beer that the chief meant for Hamlet in case he won the

fight. When he saw his mother die of poison, Hamlet, dying, managed to kill his father’s brother with his machete.” “You see, I was right!” exclaimed the elder. “That was a very good story,” added the old man, “and you told it with very few mistakes.” There was just one more error, at the very end. The poison Hamlet’s mother drank was obviously meant for the survivor of the fight, whichever it was. If Laertes had won, the great chief would have poisoned him, for no one would know that he arranged Hamlet’s death. Then, too, he need not fear Laertes’s witchcraft; it takes a strong heart to kill one’s only sister by witchcraft. “Sometime,” concluded the old man, gathering his ragged toga about him, “you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.”

HOME AND AWAY Often in the lunch hour I sit idly on a bench. The trees in the park are quite colorless. The leaves hang down unnaturally, like lead. Sometimes, it is as if everything here were made of metal and thin iron. Then the rain descends and wets it all. Umbrellas are opened, coaches rumble over the asphalt, people hurry, the girls lift their skirts up. To see legs protruding from a skirt has something peculiarly homey about it. A female leg like that, tightly stockinged, one never sees, and now suddenly one sees it. The shoes cling so beautifully to the shape of the beautiful soft feet. Then the sun in shining again. A little wind blows, and then one thinks of home. Yes, I think of Mamma. She will be crying. Why don’t I ever write to her? I can’t tell why, can’t understand it, and yet I can’t decide to write. That’s it: I don’t want to tell anything. —Robert Walser, from Jakob von Gunten

On Orchids

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia. —Anne Carson

MEMORY’S DEFEAT W. G. Sebald

I

n mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St. Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible. For almost a fortnight, an interminable column of men, animals, and equipment proceeded from Martigny via Orsières through the Entremont valley and from there moved, in a seemingly never-ending serpentine, up to the pass two and a half thousand meters above sea level, the heavy barrels of the cannon having to be dragged by the soldiery, in hollowed-out tree trunks, now across snow and ice and now over bare outcrops and rocky escarpments. Among those who took part in that legendary transalpine march, and who were not lost in nameless oblivion, was one Marie Henri Beyle. Seventeen years old at the time, he could now see before him the end of his profoundly detested childhood and adolescence and, with some enthusiasm, was embarking on a career in the armed services which was to take him the length and breadth of Europe. The notes in which the fifty-three-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection. At times his view of the past consists of nothing but grey patches, then at others images appear of such extraordinary clarity he feels he can scarce credit them—such as that of General Marmont, whom he believes he saw at Martigny to

the left of the track along which the column was moving, clad in the royal- and sky-blue robes of a Councillor of State, an image which he still beholds precisely thus, Beyle assures us, whenever he closes his eyes and pictures that scene, although he is well aware that at that time Marmont must have been wearing his general’s uniform and not the blue robes of state. Beyle, who claims at this period, owing to a wholly misdirected education which had aimed solely at developing his mental faculties, to have had the constitution of a fourteen-year-old girl, also writes that he was so affected by the large number of dead horses lying by the wayside, and the other detritus of war the army left in its wake as it moved in a long-drawn-out file up the mountains, that he now has no clear idea whatsoever of the things he found so horrifying then. It seemed to him that his impressions had been erased by the very violence of their impact…. For that reason, the sketch below should be considered as a kind of aid by means of which Beyle sought to remember how things were when the part of the column in which he found himself came under fire near the village and fortress of Bard. B is the village of Bard. The three Cs on the heights to the right signify the fortress cannon, firing at the points marked with Ls on the track that led across the steep slope, P. Where the X is, at the bottom of the valley and beyond all hope of rescue, lie horses that plunged off the track in a frenzy of fear. H stands for Henri and marks the narrator’s own position. Yet, of course, when Beyle was in actual fact standing at that spot, he will not have been viewing the scene in this precise way, for in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different.

Beyle furthermore writes that even when the images supplied by memory are true to life one can place little confidence in them. Just

as the magnificent spectacle of General Marmont at Martigny before the ascent remained fixed in his mind, so too, after the most arduous portion of the journey was done, the beauty of the descent from the heights of the pass, and of the St. Bernard valley unfolding before him in the morning sun, made an indelible impression on him. He gazed and gazed upon it, and all the while his first words of Italian, taught him the day before by a priest with whom he was billeted— quanea miglia sono di qua a Ivrea and donna cattiva— were going through his head. Beyle writes that for years he lived in the conviction that he could remember every detail of that ride, and particularly of the town of Ivrea, which he beheld for the first time from some three-quarters of a mile away, in light that was already fading. There it lay, to the right, where the valley gradually opens out into the plain, while on the left, in the far distance, the mountains arose, the Resegone di Lecco, which was later to mean so much to him, and at the furthest remove, the Monte Rosa. It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d’ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them … From Vertigo Translated by Michael Hulse

HOME AND AWAY It isn’t even eight A.M. and I’m hot. My rear end is welded to the seat just like it was yesterday. I’m fifty miles from the motel and about a thousand and a half from home, in a little white Mazda with 140,000 miles on it and no rust. I’m all alone in Alabama, with only a cooler and a tape deck for company. It’s already in the high 80s. Yesterday, coming up from the keys through Florida, I had a day-long anxiety attack that I decided last night

was really heat prostration. I was a cinder with a brain; I was actually whimpering. I kept thinking I saw alligators at the edge of the highway. There were about four hundred exploded armadillos, too, but I got used to them. They were real, and real dead. The alligators weren’t real or dead, but they may have been after me. I’m running away from running away from home. —Jo Ann Beard, from “Out There”

THE NEW LODGER Amy Hempel

O

ne of the locals said at the bar, “I hear you’ve got a new lodger.” I thought, Word travels fast—I only got here last night. In a corner booth of the Soggy Dollar, an old beach bar that also serves food, I can listen to other customers without seeming to eavesdrop; I’ve got postcards fanned out on the table. I’m trying not to say the same thing on every one. The best is an aerial view of the road you take to get here. Seeing this ahead of time, you would choose to go somewhere else. Hugging the inside curves of the road, taking steady deep breaths, I can drive myself here, but not back. I hire one of the locals to drive my car down to the junction of the road where I can take over. I arrange for a taxi to meet us there, and I cover the large fare back. “It’s imported,” the bartender says, and pours a glass for the guy at the bar who meant lager. “What do you think?” the bartender says. “Should I order more?” It is not easy to get to this beach. The one road is dangerous even in good weather, even during the day. It winds around the hills on the edge of a cliff, climbing above the ocean until it suddenly grades down. People have lost their lives on the way to this beach, or on their way home from it. Heading home puts you in the outer lane where there is no guard rail, not that it would help. There is only the occasional turnout for a scenic lookout point, and people mindful of others pull over to let them pass.

It’s a moody beach, more often foggy than bright. It is rarely warm enough to take a swim. It is pretty to look at, the cove a perfect C, and there’s the haunted house tour if you’re that hard up. For excitement: the peril of a storm that washes away a residence, fire in the dry hills, a fight that breaks out among bikers passing through. The new lager. I hadn’t been to this town since the time, years before, when I nearly drowned. I credit the pancakes I’d had that morning for giving me something to draw on to fight the current, until I remembered not to fight the current, but to swim parallel to land until I had swum past the current and could then turn in toward shore. I took a room in the annex to the Soggy Dollar that had not been built the last time I was here. The first time I saw this beach was with a man who, during our stay, compared himself to Jesus, so the trip had not been a waste of time for him. Someone else brought me the second time. We rented, for a day, a cabin across from the beach with atmosphere and damp chairs. I told him it was my birthday. He left me in the cabin, and came back carrying a piece of chocolate cake. There were no plates or forks. He watched me as I ate the cake. I said, “What—am I covered with frosting?” “Every day of your life,” he said, and went home to his wife. The third time I had those pancakes. I’ll stay for as long as it takes. I will not get in touch with anyone on my list. Not the friends of friends who live nearby, whose gardens I must see, whose children I must meet. Nor will I visit the famed nature preserve, home of a vanishing tern. Why get acquainted with what will be left, or leaving? Farther up the coast is where you have to go for stuffed plush whales and orange rubber crabs, for T-shirts and mugs, placemat maps. Postcards are what the store can manage. That’s okay with me. I don’t have to hunt up souvenirs. It is enough to feel the pull of the old home, pulling apart the new.

PROUST REGAINED Thus my body builds around it room after room: wintry rooms where one loves to hold the outer world at bay, where one keeps the fire going all night and wraps about one’s shoulders a cloak of warm air, smoke-colored, smoke-scented, and shot with ruddy gleams; summer rooms where one loves to be gathered to the breast of nature, rooms where one sleeps, a bedroom I had in Brussels whose proportions were so pleasing, so spacious and yet so cozy, —MARCEL PROUST that it seemed a nest to hide in and a world to explore.

AFTER THE FALL | ROGER SHATTUCK

Without official approval, I should like to dedicate these proceedings to the reading groups and secret Proust readers who are here tonight, and who have produced something called a house. A full house, for Marcel Proust. And we will honor Proust most, I believe, if we stick for just a few minutes to scripture. Therefore, here beginneth the first verse of the first chapter of the book called A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: “Je m’endors.” Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu’il était temps de chercher le sommeil m’éveillait … And now a translation of the opening passage composed for this occasion. Those of you who have tried to translate the first sentence will know that it is impossible. Therefore it has to be translated:

Early to bed with a book. I have tried that for years. Many times I would blow out my candle and drop off to sleep so fast that I didn’t register what was happening and, half an hour later, the thought that it was time for me to go to sleep would wake me up again. During that brief sleep, I had entered into the life of the book I was reading, had entered it so utterly, that I became its subject. A quartet, a church, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V. This belief in a new identity didn’t trouble me, but like a film over my eyes, it prevented me from noticing that my candle had blown out. Tenderly, I pressed my cheek into the plump pillow, so cool and soft that it seemed to offer me the cheeks of childhood itself …

Soon Proust does go on to describe the magical childhood of the young Marcel. But something not often noticed happens first: there comes the great fall. By about page three, we are swept away into a swift and deep descent, a descent back to childhood, a descent back to Adam and Eve, a descent back to the cavemen, and finally, back to the condition that Proust calls “the abyss of non-being.” This distinct fall at the beginning links Proust’s book to Genesis, to Dante, with the descent into Hell at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, and to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, beginning with the rabbithole. But Proust’s descent, or his narrator’s fall, is much more dire and dreadful than that of these other books. If you grasp the true significance of that immense fall at the beginning, then you will also

understand why it took Proust three thousand pages to climb back up out of that hole to find the present again, to find his own skin, and finally, to find that puzzling set of conventions that we call civilization. Along the way, Proust offers us a million little details, delicious items, small things like—I shall only mention it—the asparagus. Like the street cries, which the narrator listens to in his bed. And, if you’ve read far enough, like the two pimples which appear on Albertine’s forehead, signifying what? We never quite learn. But all these millions of little things add up, I believe, to one big thing. In Search of Lost Time offers us a record of how it feels, of how it feels in our very system, to be alive—both to be alive as generic human beings, and to be alive as our own sorry, yearning selves. Proust, many of us understand, is the most sensuous novelist who ever lived and wrote for us, and we give thanks. THEORIES OF RELATIVITY | WILLIAM C. CARTER

Marcel Proust lived from 1871 to 1922, an era that he characterized as the Age of Speed. These exciting, momentous years encompassed the Fin de Siècle, Belle Epoch, and World War I. By the time Proust was forty, the gas-lit world of his youth had been transformed by electric lighting, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the airplane, and motion pictures. When he began writing his novel, Paris streets bustled with an astonishing variety of pedestrians, ambulatory vendors, drivers and their horses, and a number of the new self-propelling vehicles called automobiles. He could see the past and future on parade, as horse-drawn carriages made way for cars. Part of the fascination of reading In Search of Lost Time derives from its vivid depiction of the major social, political, and technological forces that changed daily life, and the way people perceived time and space. In September 1905, when Proust was thirty-four, his mother died. His intense grief lasted until 1907, when a summer vacation brought about a dramatic change in him. Depressed and ill, he had in recent months gotten out of bed only once a week, without dressing. After

he arrived at the seaside resort, the pure air, joined with a deadly dose of caffeine—seventeen cups—allowed him to hire a driver, Alfred Agostinelli, and go out every day in a closed car. Riding across the Normandy countryside with Agostinelli in his red taxi was, Proust said, like being shot out of a cannon. As the taxi sped along the road toward Caen, famous for its medieval churches, Proust watched the distant spires appear and disappear against the horizon in constantly shifting perspectives, and he marveled at the phenomenon of parallax and relativity, so keenly felt in the automobile. Stillness and mobility relate to art and desire in Proust’s world. Girls in motion, most often seen on bicycles, aroused desire in the narrator. Albertine, chief among the girls whom Proust calls “creatures of flight,” always exhibits an enthusiasm for sports and bicycles, automobiles and airplanes. Fast by nature, Albertine becomes, through the narrator’s obsessive jealousy, a truly volatile figure: “Even when you hold them in your hands, such persons are fugitives. To understand the emotions they arouse, and which others, even better-looking, do not, we must realize that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corresponding to that which in physics denotes speed.” Proust’s elaboration on the theme of time shows that he is not only aware of the constantly shifting nature of things, but is haunted by it. Change, and reaction to change, set the tone of the period. The Great War, in which common soldiers became the heroes, and also the first one in which airplanes were used to launch bombs, accelerated the process of transformation. After the war, the Guermantes’ salon, once the epitome of aristocratic elegance and snobbery, is described as a broken-down machine no longer functioning properly and unable to maintain its fierce exclusivity. This is but another turn of the Proustian kaleidoscope. Even the ultra-chic Faubourg Saint-Germain must yield to the forces of time, as the narrator observes: “Thus it is that the pattern of the things of this world changes. That centers of empire, assessments of wealth … all that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned, so that the eyes of a man who has lived can contemplate the most total

transformation, exactly where change would have seemed to him to be most impossible.” Late in life, the narrator returns to the Bois de Boulogne, hoping to find living memories of his youth. “Smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me many years before along the same paths, I wished to see anew before my eyes at the moment when Mme Swann’s enormous coachman … endeavored to curb the ardor of those horses,” frenzied and light as wasps on the wing, as they thundered over the ground. “Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic…. How horrible! I exclaimed to myself. Can anyone find these motor-cars as elegant as the old carriage-andpair?” “The places we have known,” he concludes, “do not belong only to the world of space, on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” The new heroes of the Age of Speed—the cyclist, the chauffeur, and the aviator—all appear in Proust’s novel. Albertine the cyclist is a mysterious, erotic creature, while the aviator symbolizes the artist. At the beginning of the novel’s climactic scene, the narrator, at last looking inward for the keys to his past, suddenly feels himself rising in flight, like an airman who, hitherto, has progressed laboriously along the ground, abruptly taking off. “I soared slowly toward the silent heights of memory.” One of the most modern aspects of In Search of Lost Time is that it is an open-ended novel, built on the model of the universe. In 1931, Edmund Wilson declared this book the literary equivalent of Einstein’s theory: “Proust has re-created the world of the novel from the point of view of relativity. He has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent on the full scale for the new theory of physics.” In doing so, Proust creates new ways of looking at the world, making In Search of Lost Time one of the most complex and

stimulating optics that we have for viewing our own lives. Through the dynamic use of shifting perspectives, as the narrator journeys toward his goal, Proust offers the reader a kaleidoscopic view of a world in motion. Few writers have given us so many enthralling ways of looking at the world and our own experience. By making us aware of the unplumbed layers within ourselves, Proust expands and celebrates the range and depth of our perception. One of the most modern aspects of In Search of Lost Time is that it is an open-ended novel, built on the model of the universe.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THOUGHT | LYDIA DAVIS

The apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in which Proust wrote most of In Search of Lost Time is now owned by a bank. The bedroom in which Proust slept, rested, ate, received visitors, and wrote is used by the bank for meetings with clients. And it is relatively bare of reminders of Proust. There is a portrait of him on the wall and some of his books in a bookcase. The only other furniture is a table and four chairs and a sideboard. What is still there that Proust looked upon daily is the marble fireplace, the doors, the two tall windows, and the wood floor with its herringbone pattern. Sparsely furnished like this, it does not seem very large, though Proust described it as vast. Sometimes, after he’d been awake a few hours, though still in bed, Proust would decide on impulse to go out and see a friend. At ten or eleven at night in a dark bedroom, the only light comes from the lamp by his bed, and the fire in the fireplace if it’s winter. The dark room is crowded with furniture, including two large bookcases, a wardrobe, a grand piano, an armchair for visitors, and various little tables. Proust leaves his bed, crosses the short hallway, and gets dressed. His suit is made to measure and his patent leather boots were bought at the Old England Shop. He does not tend to wear out

his shoes. He is transported by taxi and walks on carpet and parquet floors. He arrives at his friend’s house, waking him up, and begins talking. His friend, perhaps exaggerating, later reports that Proust speaks in one long sentence that does not come to an end until the middle of the night. This sentence is full of asides, parenthetical remarks, parentheses, dashes, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. The sentence, in other words, attempts to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of reality, and yet to be correct—to reflect Proust’s entire thought. To be exhaustive and correct is of course an infinite task. More can always be inserted, more event and more nuance, more commentary on the event, and more nuance within the commentary. Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Swann’s Way appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections; there were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. “I can’t read it,” said one old father to his son. “You read it aloud to me.” This sentence is full of asides, parenthetical remarks, parentheses, dashes, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes.

The sentences did not seem as long when they were spoken as when they were read on the page. The voice punctuated. On the page, the punctuation is eccentric. Certain sentences are remarkable for their absence of commas, and others for having suddenly so many more commas than you would expect. The punctuation obeys some other law. Is this style conversational or not? Well, it seems to want to give the illusion of the conversational. Sentences begin with “and so,” “but,” “in fact,” “actually,” “and yet,” “of course,” “yes,” “no,” “wasn’t it true,” “really.” But what a strange conversation, long and one-sided, composed in darkness and silence. And sentences so elaborately constructed with towering architectures of subordinate

phrases that you have to stop and think, and then go back over them, just to figure them out. Proust felt that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought. When he used a deliberate effect like alliteration, it was there not as an empty flourish, but to tie two similar elements or contrasting elements together in one’s mind. He despised empty flourishes. He categorically rejected sentences that were artificially amplified, that were overly abstract or that groped, arriving at a sentence by a succession of approximations. Great length was not desirable in itself. As he proceeded from draft to draft, he not only added material but also condensed. “I prefer concentration,” he said, “even in length. I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them,” he said. “If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.” “Please break up these long sentences” is the plaintive request that a translator of Proust hears at least once. No, the book is really more about thought than plot. And in any case, in Swann’s Way at least, there is a nice balance. Eighty percent of the sentences are not excessively long. The sentences must be kept intact, long and short, and they must retain as many elements of their complexity as possible, the parallel structures, the pairs of phrases, the triplets, the alliteration and assonance, the meter. But above all the intricate architecture of syntax by which Proust inserts his parenthetical remarks and digressions, delaying as long as possible the outcome of the sentence. So this means in the end trying to preserve not only the ease of a sentence when it is easy, but also the difficulty of a sentence when it is difficult, and it means asking oneself the same question with each sentence, though with a different problem in each: If I can’t produce, for example, the hexameter which Proust has so beautifully embedded in this phrase, by just how much will I have changed his thought? RECOGNITIONS | MARILYNNE ROBINSON

When I was in college, it was my good fortune to be a student of John Hawkes. Momentously for me, he once put a blessing on a paragraph of mine. He called it Proustian. He did this to shelter it from the criticisms of my fellow students, who were aflame then with a stern undergraduate passion for truth-telling, for tearing away veils and dispelling illusions. I was as impressed by this project as anyone, and I made certain poor attempts at it, which the formidable Mr. Hawkes discouraged by invoking this great name to approve one straying memory of my primordial Idaho. I had read no Proust at the time. I was much struck by the freedom from constraint and expectation I suddenly enjoyed. Thereafter, I could complicate my sentences and elaborate my metaphors and explore my memory without prosecutorial intent, and still be respected by my peers. I learned a true thing then, that no one is ever in advance of Proust. The most radical aesthetic will always accept him as an honored contemporary and collaborator. So I associated Proust with the blessing and freeing of language and memory and of the testimony of the individual spirit, even before I discovered by reading him that he should indeed be associated with just these things.

Given the vagaries of historical reputation, it is startling to find anyone whose influence is what it ought to be. Why is this so singularly true of Proust? It is as if the great purity of Proust’s motive

in writing—I take this to be a profoundly courteous desire to give us back to ourselves—has made the whole phenomenon of his work proof against an alteration. He restores us to our purest innocence as readers. His young narrator, Marcel, tells us how it was, and is, to pass a summer morning engrossed in a book: This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity. For the reader of Proust the animation and the shock come simultaneously with the recognition of the perfect aptness of his description, and also of the brilliance of an experience we are delighted to recognize as our own. Reminded what it is to read, those of us who write are reminded why we write. He tells us that the very limitations of the art—its very departures from strict truth—have an intrinsic moral, that is, compassionate, value. He says, “A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion. Indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea that he has of himself, that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.” The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections impenetrable to the human soul their equivalent in immaterial sections. Things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate. Proust asserts and proves the primacy of aesthetics. The mysteries of apprehension and comprehension, destiny and will are

all negotiated by him in aesthetic terms. By this he means to restore us to a kind of experiential innocence, as if we could be recalled to a time when language and memory, when our mind and our senses, astonished us, as indeed they should never cease to do. His metaphor for this is the memory of the impassioned perceptions of childhood, but the state he describes is an atemporal one, in which the senses are awakened as they are only sometimes by art or when we are dreaming. And as they do in dreams, frustration, anxiety, the fear of loss or shame give the beauty of things and people and the weather of our minds an ineluctable too-present strangeness, a beauty too pure to be merely beautiful. Marcel, old and nostalgic, visits the autumnal Bois de Boulogne and sees there, farther off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone, small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, tossing in the breeze an ugly mane of red. Reading Proust, we are always recalled to a sense of the elegance of our most ordinary perceptions, and how richly they are changed by habit, by accidental associations, by regret and yearning, by misapprehension and disenchantment, and by time. I will not say, by love, since love, if it exists, is merely the great sum of all these things. Just so does truth, if it exists, impartially include in its great sum, and among its marvels, the shabbiest and the most opulent of veils and illusions. TOWARD TOTAL RECALL | WILLIAM H. GASS

Was it in the summer? It probably was … when you thought you had enough time on your hands to fill them with a book, when an unappointed space had appeared in your life … the summer when you decided to read Proust. Perhaps the impossible purpose appeared to you in late afternoon, at an hour customarily assigned to tea and to fingering volumes by Henry James. You would have had to have been—hear the toll of those terrible tenses?—you would have had to have been young. Or recently retired. Ambitious. Or

convalescent. Feeling the need, sensing the opportunity, to improve yourself. When André Gide first looked into Swann’s Way, it must have seemed a stack of sheets like any other, so his mind would not have been filled with the kind of foreboding that faces the climber of a mountain while still in the foothills looking up at his goal, a blanched peak whose slopes are already dotted with many a failed ambition. Gide’s encounter with the name “Proust” would not be like any of ours. He would remember the frivolous social snob while we would be ready to regard that same person as bearing a title, perhaps like others so often in the literary news—Joyce and Kafka and Mann—so that if we didn’t positively love what of Proust we finally read, we would never let on, for some small sins are more shameful to the soul than many a public crime. Yet that’s the way we should have got into Swann’s Way— unaware, when it first came out—because during every decade after, in addition to the rambling work itself, books of commentary and criticism would begin to surround it like a barricade, adding to one’s trepidations. Not to mention idle conversations about the great work’s length, its difficulties, and laughable place in summertime’s hammock—attitudes that built its popular reputation. Am I ready? Am I worthy? Couldn’t I settle for Colette or even Sagan, each equally French? When we begin Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, how much of the story does the author expect us to keep in mind as we read along? He expects us, I think, to remember about as much of Tom Jones’s history as Tom Jones does—for instance, to remember that Tom broke his leg, but not to remember all that was said by the visitors who appeared at his bedside. The text is meant to dwindle away, as past times do, and if some element is supposed to be retained for future use, we can be confident that Fielding will prompt us. How otherwise it is with Joyce, to name the most guilty. He would have us recollect Bloom’s orangeflower water hundreds of pages after its first appearance, while recognizing that the soap with which it is associated is even more important. The text is not a boat’s wake, meant to subside behind us; instead it rises up like a tidal wave, and

pursues us as we read, ready to flood each succeeding page with previous meanings, and altering all that has gone before the way Henry James’s predicates surprise and abash their subjects with an ultimate turn of phrase. How can past time be found, if the text in which its discovery is meant to be made is itself as forgetful as Smollett or Fielding or Scott or Trollope? Nor must a text that is the result of dauntless revisions be read as the skater skates, at the sharp edge of blade and the blunt of ice. Proust’s novel remembers more fully than any memory might. Moreover, it remembers in words redolent with sensation and rich with reflection. What has taken place in this novel, what has been rendered into such a verbal vision, it now remains for us to seek and realize and serve. That M, whose world I read of there, also stands for me. So much less was once required.

When the world is remembered in writing, it alters almost utterly in its density, in its absence of detail. “It, my body,” M says about waking, subsiding, waking up again, “my body would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I woke.” And the master makes certain that the reader has M’s sense of fullness, as if nothing has been or

will be overlooked: “and my body … brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its ball of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling …” Yet it is only the suggestion of completeness that is given, not its reality, for those chains are darkening their brass with dust, the blue in the flame is rhythmically retreating before the orange, and in the chimney-piece of Siena marble that M mentions, there is a noticeable nick that I just put there—in short, no description possesses as much “this or that” as a camera might catch in the flicker of a finger, not to omit the states of mind that furnish a room from time to time with longing, appreciation, and panic. Things and creatures in the real world buzz and blossom by the billions and we know to beware of their brevity, because decay and death are as continuous as being born or burgeoning. Reading Proust we are constantly, sadly, guiltily, reminded of the paucity of our own recollections: that life went on around us and we missed it; we might have pondered our place but we did not; we might have discerned connections, for they were there in Jamesian numbers, yet we failed to follow; we might have indulged an obsession, but we were too distracted by the trivial; we might have retained a fond touch, a glimmer of insight, a bit of wit; we might have; we might … have … If the distance between what happens and what we have understood about it is dismaying, what of the difference our memory makes on the third day thence, the fifth week after, the seventh year just passed? An habitual victim of his body, Proust knew how great the chasm was between the mind and body. Outside M. Teste’s and Paul Valéry’s theater of the head, there was a reality indifferent to the plays put on by consciousness. We knew that world in part; it supplied our senses; it gave us occasion for concern, for delight, for desire; it gave us our place—Balbec, Paris, Combray—yet of us that world of matter and motion remained utterly unaware. Our lungs knew their air, but not our aspirations. Speaking of his grandmother’s failing health, M says, “It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no

knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.” To remember, to imagine, to dream (all specialties of this house), is to depart the body for a land through which the body cannot travel. To read is to leave the library.

To remember, to imagine, to dream (all specialties of this house), is to depart the body for a land through which the body cannot travel. To read is to leave the library. Yet it is the body, as it stirs restlessly through the opening pages, that remembers M’s rooms; it is the body that prompts him; it nudges him without knowing he is there; its posture reminds him; his stiffened side reminds him, but his muscles do not feel the cramp they bear. So when we assume the position we habitually assume when we read, we ready our departure; our body must know, like a pet from the smell of our luggage, that we are off, and our eyes will see no more floor or wall or ceiling because we, as the true Proustian performer always does, will adopt another body, that of the type-furrowed field—the conceptual page—and become its syllabic music. The real world is full of pointless purpose, inattentiveness, confusion, pain, and perplexity, as well as the hazards of its satisfactions. Yet in Proust’s pages, it is perceived, it is felt, it is contemplated, in a manner so utterly satisfying that those pains, in their depiction, become pleasures; confusions are given an order only we are permitted to understand; defeats are now worth every word of their account; failures victories if only in their voicing. And that is why—to live for a while, as we ought, in a fully realized world, though its understanding will be forever incomplete and quite beyond us—that is why we read Proust. CROSS-POLLINATION | NADINE GORDIMER

There are two ways in which great literature impacts upon society. The one is cultural, a narrow definition of culture as practice of the arts. The writer breaks the traditional seals of the word, takes off into

exploration of new modes of expression, challenges and changes what fiction is. After Proust, after Joyce, yes, the novel could never be the same. How Marcel Proust changed the concept of the novel as a form, I know, has been and will be expounded in this company of eminent Proustian scholars, and so I shan’t have the presumption to enter the debate, which I find, so far, has been a very fascinating one. The other impact of great literature is its power of changing the consciousness of the reader, even if that lay reader were to have no awareness of how it’s been done—the literary techniques and devices the writer has taken up, activated, re-invented, or invented. As a fiction writer, I have of course been alertly privy to and, no doubt, I’ve learned from the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. But a writer finds her or his own voice, or isn’t a writer. What has remained with me for a lifetime is the influence of Proust’s emotional and aesthetic perceptions. So what I want to talk about is this other impact, the Proust who influences the persona—the Proust after reading whom, the reader can never be the same. This is a grave matter, wonderful, perhaps dangerous. For there are those among us whose epiphany comes not from the face of religion, philosophy, or politics, but from the illumination of the subterranean passages of life by the imaginative writer. I was at quite an advanced age, I think in my late teens, for one who’d lived in books since early childhood when, long after Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, I came upon that mistitled Remembrance of Things Past, in the Scott Moncrieff translation. I’d survived a lonely, mother-love–dominated childhood, and so my first response was one of recognition. Here was a writer who understood that childhood better than I did myself. It was an identification. But later, as I read and returned to that book, its effect was something different, prophetic to the series of presents, existential stages, I was coming to, passing through. Holed up in an armchair in the tin-roofed house of a mining town in the South African veldt far, far away from Combray, Balbec, and the Boulevard Haussmann, I discovered that the intense response that I had to natural beauty, to flowers, trees, and the sea, visited once a year, wasn’t something

high-mindedly removed from the drives of existence I was struggling with, but was part of a sensuality which informs and belongs with awakening sexuality; the conflation of emotional and the aesthetic formation. Every time—anytime—one turns back to the novel, one finds the delight of something relevant to past perception that one had missed before. For example, in my recent rereading of A la recherche du temps perdu, my third in French, I’ve seen how pollen recurs: the natural product become a metaphor, the wind-distributed fecundity part of the very air which we breathe. First coming from the regard of the girl—you will remember that the narrator follows with his eyes on the drive with Mme de Villeparisis in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. And then there’s that bumblebee that enters the courtyard with pollen that signifies the attraction cast in the air between the Baron de Charlus and the lowly waistcoat maker Jupien. Proust himself pollinates ineffable connections between needs and emotions aroused by various means in us. In the context of projected existence, I came to Proust from D. H. Lawrence and Blake. Sexuality was fulfillment guaranteed to the bold, to anyone who would flout interdictions and free desire: Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs & flaming hair, But Desire gratified Plants fruits of life & beauty there. And this Blakian gratification between men and women was the image, to me, of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing on simulated clouds. Like Italo Calvino, I formed my notion of future emotional life as innocently and lyingly portrayed by the movies of the time. The processes of loving, as exemplified in the desperate pilgrimage of Swann—and what a way that is: ecstatic, frustrating, impossible to turn away from, viewing the pursued beloved from the terrible angles of suspicion, losing the will to continue, grabbed by the will to go on. Always, moving along with him, one has moments

when one wants to shake him and say, “Stop!” And one sees he cannot, he will not. Maybe that’s the principle of love. And in the end, of course, that devastating conclusion, this woman, for whom he spoiled years of his life, was really not his type at all. Proust reformed, informed, my youthful understanding of the expectations of sexual love, showed me its immense complexity, its ultimate dependency on the impossibility of knowing the loved one— the very defeat of possession—and this concomitant process of selfknowledge, often dismaying. The cloud-mating of Fred and Ginger dispersed forever. In the life of the emotions I was embarked upon, my expectations were tutored by the greatest exploration ever made of the divine mystery of the sexual life in its ambient world of sensuality. There’s no time to discuss the continuation of the theme with Albertine, only I’d like to observe that not only does it not matter a damn if Albertine was really an Albert transformed by the alchemy of imagination rather than a sex-change operation. No one has written better than Marcel Proust, himself a homosexual, of heterosexual relations. Perhaps literary genius can be defined yet once again as creativity that is all things, knows everything, in every human. After early readings of the book, I read Les Plaisirs et les jours, Jean Santeuil, and Contre Sainte-Beuve, but to these I haven’t returned. I have more or less the gamut of Proust scholarship in English and French, but all has been surpassed, for me, by the publication this year of Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, an amazing feat of originality where one would have thought that all the goldbearing ore had long been brought to the surface. My present reading of The Book has become a new one because of Roger Shattuck’s book, filled with new understanding, possibilities, and new joys, through the variety of lenses provided by Shattuck’s radiant vision: Marcel Proust is a writer with whom one moves along for life, reading, and re-reading, without ever exhausting the sources he reveals only when one is ready for them. At the grand and poignant final social gathering of all social gatherings, narrator Marcel finds past friends and acquaintances unrecognizably changed by age while still having the sense of

himself as he’d been in his mother’s eyes. And you’ll remember that he replies to a young woman’s invitation to dine: “With pleasure, if you don’t mind dining alone with a young man.” And only when he hears people giggle, he adds hastily: “or rather, an old man.” Later he realizes that the span of time represented by the aspect of that gathering not only had been lived through, but was his life presented to him. As I grow old, I find myself ready for the revelation in Time Regained, of this Proustian source, when among old friends with whom I was always the youngest of the circle, I realize we are now, all alike, disguised in the garb of aging. And I, like everyone else, have to be introduced to myself. Proust makes it another epiphany. THE CONSOLATIONS OF ART | EDMUND WHITE

No matter how strange Proust’s life might have been, it has been subsumed, as he hoped, into the radiant vision of it that he presented in his writing. Nevertheless, the intensely intimate, if not always personal, quality of Proust’s novel makes him more and more popular in this age of memoirs. Whereas other modernists—Stein, Joyce, Pound—rejected confession in favor of formal experiment, Proust was a literary Cyclops, if that means he was a creature with a single, great I at the center of his consciousness, no matter that the first-person narrator is only occasionally the literal Marcel Proust. Every page of Proust is the transcript of a mind thinking. Not the pellmell stream of consciousness of a Molly Bloom, or a Stephen Dedalus, each a dramatic character with a unique vocabulary and an individuating range of preoccupations, but rather the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice, the sovereign intellect. Proust may be more available to readers today than in the past because, as his life recedes in time, and the history of his period goes out of focus, he is read more as a fabulist than a chronicler, as a maker of myths rather than the valedictorian of the Belle Epoch. Under this new dispensation, Proust emerges as the supreme symphonist of the spirit. We no longer measure his accounts against

a reality we know. Instead we read his fables of caste and lust, of family virtue and social vice, of the depredations of jealousy and the consolations of art not as reports, but as fairy tales. He is our Scheherazade. Of course Proust is also popular because he wrote about glamour, rich people, nobles, artists. And he wrote about love. It doesn’t seem to matter that he came to despise love, that he exploded it, reduced it to its shabbiest, most mechanical, even hydraulic terms. By which I mean he not only demystified love, he also dehumanized it, turning it into something merely Pavlovian. The love Swann feels for Odette is in no way a tribute to her charms or her soul. In fact, Swann knows perfectly well that her charms are fading and that her soul is banal. Modern readers are responsive to Proust’s tireless and brilliant analyses of love because we too no longer take love for granted. Readers today are always making the personal public, the intimate political, the instinctual philosophical. Proust may have attacked love, but he did know a lot about it. Like us, he took nothing for granted. He was not on smug, cozy terms with his own experience. We read Proust because he knows so much about the links between childhood anguish and adult passion. We read Proust because, despite his intelligence, he holds reasoned evaluations in contempt, and understands that only the gnarled knowledge that suffering brings us is of any real use. We read Proust because he knows that in the terminal stage of passion we no longer love the beloved. The object of our love has been overshadowed by love itself. Proust writes: “… and this malady, which Swann’s love had become, had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him.” As surgeons say: his love was no longer operable. Proust may be telling us that love is a chimera, a projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly mysterious surface. But nevertheless, those fantasies are undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise, the artificial paradise of art. I doubt whether many readers

could ever be content with Proust’s rejection of rustling, wounded life, in favor of frozen, immobile art. But his powerful vision of impermanence certainly does speak to us. The rise and fall of individual loves on the small scale, and of entire social classes on the grand, the constant revolution of sentiments and status, is a subject Proust rehearsed and we’ve realized. Proust is the first contemporary writer of the twentieth century, for he was the first to describe the permanent instability of our times. PARCE QUE C’ÉTAIT LUI… | ANDRÉ ACIMAN

The little phrase I’m about to read comes from a famous passage in Sodom and Gomorrah when Marcel the narrator is suddenly reminded of his grandmother. He had stayed at the same beach resort in Balbec with her once, but now, more than a year after her death, he’s back at the very same hotel. What he finds, as Proustian characters always find when they expect maximum emotion is, however, minimum sensation. He encounters, more or less, what he experienced at the time of her death, a sense of surprise at feeling so singularly numb, almost indifferent, blasé. All of it is colored by Marcel’s overloaded feeling of not feeling enough, and by the hope that this shamed admission of emotional inadequacy might itself pass for a form of genuine emotion. Now, surrounded by the indolent charm of the grand hotel, what the young adult Marcel thinks of when he arrives at Balbec is not his grandmother, but the social life awaiting him, of the band of young girls he had met there once before, and of the vague, tantalizing thing which Marcel always looks forward to: something exotic, someone new, unexpected, different, who might ultimately lure him out of his humdrum, bookish cocoon, into what Proust calls a new life. As for his grandmother: well, if bereavement is the toll the living must pay for the loss of a loved one, then clearly Marcel, to use Jane Austen’s words, has been let off easily. But we are, of course, being set up. For as soon as Marcel is in his hotel room, and bends down to undo one of his boot buttons, something his grandmother had

helped him do in that very same room, he suddenly bursts out sobbing, vehemently. What hits him is not just that he misses her terribly, but that he will never, ever, see her again. Because for the first time in his life, and in a manner that devastates him, the archpremeditator Marcel finally understands, long after it happened, that his grandmother is in fact dead. Yet, come to think of it, this shouldn’t be surprising. Emotion, as every reader of Proust knows after about thirty pages, always comes unannounced, obliquely, inadvertently, just as it does, say, in Freud. The more unexpected, the more poignant it is. Proust—this cross between Freud, Woody Allen, and Murphy of Murphy’s Law—is one of us.

This is how life works in Proust. Conversely, one may bump into the right people, but never when one wants to. One may get what one wants, but only after giving it up, or wanting something else instead. We reach out to seize precious moments not as they are happening to us, but once it’s clear that we’ve lost them. So far, so good. The set up is familiar enough. Proust—this cross between Freud, Woody Allen, and Murphy of Murphy’s Law—is one of us. How well we know him, and how well he knows us. How well he understands repression. And how simple and direct that outburst of earnest grief, and how admirable his knowledge that it is always better to feel something, anything, than to feel nothing at all; that human beings should, and want to, feel things; that we are each of us heat-seeking subjects starved for feeling. Which is why, even at the risk of getting hurt, or making tremendous fools of ourselves, we will not shirk from being drawn to certain places, to certain objects, certain odors, to art, to tears, to plants, to writing, to memory, to music, to vice, and of course, to other human beings. Because by so doing, each of us finds a secret, private conduit to an inner life that is not just our new life, or our true life, but our whole life. How magnificently—and predictably—modern Proust is. So, for the sake of argument, because I am perverse, let me overturn everything I’ve been saying and ask: What if this true inner life is

nothing more than a life made to be lost? But lost before it was ever possessed, or even glimpsed, though it seems to have been lived, because it claims to be remembered. What if this true, inner life hovers on the horizon like a ghost ship that never materializes, but never vanishes either? What if this other life were an ancillary life called: paper. An unlived life made on paper, lived for paper, by a man raised and fed on paper, who has learned that life itself can be so drearily unimaginative sometimes that by a sort of miracle that justifies his life-long commitment and confinement to paper, life will mimic what could only have happened on paper. Where else but on paper does a man desperately seeking a woman among millions in Paris actually bump into her on the streets at night? Proust’s bookish eye is transfixed by those moments in life that are stunning, not because of their inherent beauty, but because they cry out to be committed, that is returned, to paper, to literature, to fiction, the ultimate seat of the inner life.

Small wonder that Proust put so much stock in style. The Proustian sentence, which personifies procrastination, allows him to sink in to paper and never to come up for air, to pile up metaphors and clauses, and take all sorts of sinuous turns, the better to take sorrow and pain and spread them out like gold into cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to be, or to become, or to have been, then just the act of searching, and probing, in that particularly cadenced way, becomes a way of feeling, and of being in the world. And yet, having built such a paper world, Proust can suddenly

overturn everything I’ve been suggesting, and jolt out, like someone waking from a dream, sputtering things as randomly, and inchoately, as a man who has barely learned how to speak. No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to cut through layer after layer of searching and probing prose and write as brief a sentence, if only because it too, like his sudden outburst, wells up in him and erupts on something that is more than just paper now. “You ask me why I love my grandmother,” he says. “I don’t know. All I know is this”—and here is the little sentence I promised you earlier—“Elle était ma grand-mère et j’était son petit-fils.” She was my grandmother, and I was her grandson. And if that’s not enough, a few lines down, Proust will say it again, more forcefully. While staring at her photograph in his hotel room, he will say it in even more guileless terms: “C’est ma grandmère, je suis son petit-fils.” It’s my grandma. I’m her grandson. Anyone can write this. But of course, what surrounds it makes it eloquent. More to the point: life can’t compete with this. Life doesn’t even come close. And, come to think of it, perhaps no one alive can today.

HOME AND AWAY We would rake the twilight for that possible sliver, and it made the city and the body both shudder with expectation to see that little slip of a moon that signified Ramzan and made the sky historical. How busy Lahore would get! Its minarets hummed, its municipalities pulled out their old air-raid sirens to make the city noisily cognizant: the moon had been sighted, and the fast had begun. For three wintry seasons I would wake up with Dadi, my grandmother, and Ifat and Shahid: we sat around for hours making jokes in the dark, generating a discourse of unholy comradeship…. Dadi adored

that mammoth infusion of food at such an extraordinary hour. She hooted when the city’s sirens sounded to tell us that we should stop eating and that the fast had begun: she had a more direct relationship with God than did petty municipal authorities and was fond of exclaiming what Muhammad himself had said in her defense. He apparently told one of his contemporaries that sehri did not end until a white thread of light described the horizon and separated the landscape from the sky. In Dadi’s book the thread could open into quite an active loom of dawning: the world made waking sounds, the birds and milkmen all resumed their proper functions, but Dadi’s regal mastication—on the last curried brain now—declared it still was night. —Sara Suleri, from Meatless Days

These talks were originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust sponsored by PEN American Center, Lincoln Center, the PEN Forums Committee, and Lipper Publications.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Voyage à Paris

Ah la charmante chose Quitter un pays morose Pour Paris Paris joli Qu’un jour Dut créer l’Amour Ah la charmante chose Quitter un pays morose Pour Paris

Hôtel

Trip to Paris

Ah what a charming ride To leave a gloomy countryside For Paris Lovely Paris Which long ago Love must have beautified Ah what a charming ride To leave the gloomy countryside For Paris

Hotel

Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages J’allume au feu du jour ma cigarette Je ne veux pas travailler je veux fumer

My room has the dismal shape of a cage But the sun slips its arm in at the window And I thinking of a cigarette’s mirage I have this sunbeam for a light I don’t want to work I want to smoke Translated by Roger Shattuck

THE CITY OUTSIDE TIME Julio Cortázar

“I’d like a bloody castle,” the fat diner had said. Why did I go into the Polidor restaurant? Why, since I’m asking that kind of question, did I buy a book I probably wouldn’t read? (The adverb was already a trick, because more than once it had occurred to me to buy books with the tacit certainty that they would be lost forever in the bookcase, and yet I bought them; the enigma was in buying them, in the motive that possibly demanded that useless possession.) And into the chain of questions now: Why, after going into the Polidor, did I go to sit at the rear table, across from the large mirror that precariously duplicated the faded desolation of the room? And another link to put in place: Why did I ask for a bottle of Sylvaner? (But that last item is left for later; perhaps the bottle of Sylvaner was one of the false resonances in the possible chord, unless the chord was different and contained the bottle of Sylvaner just as it contained the countess, the book, and what the fat diner had just ordered.) “Je voudrais un château saignant,” the fat diner had said. According to the mirror, the diner was sitting at the second table with his back to the one where Juan was sitting, and therefore his image and his voice were forced to have recourse to opposite and

convergent itineraries in order to come together in suddenly solicited attention. (The book, too, in the shop window on the Boulevard Saint-Germain: the sudden leap forward of the white NRF cover, coming toward Juan as had the image of Hélène before and now the fat diner’s phrase as he ordered a bloody castle; like going to sit obediently at that absurd table in the Polidor with his back to everyone.) Of course, Juan was probably the only customer for whom the diner’s request had a second meaning; automatically, ironically, as a good interpreter accustomed to the instant liquidation of all problems of translation in that struggle against time and silence which is an interpreter’s booth, he had fallen into a trap, if it’s proper to speak of a trap in that acceptance (ironic, automatic), in which saignant and sanglant were equivalents and the fat fellow had asked for a bloody castle, and, in any case, he had fallen into a trap without being aware in the least that the displacement of the meaning of the phrase would suddenly cause the coagulation of other things already past or present that night—the book or the countess, the image of Hélène, the acceptance of sitting down with his back turned at a rear table in the Polidor. (And having asked for a bottle of Sylvaner and drinking the first glass of chilled wine at the moment when the fat diner’s image in the mirror and his voice, which reached him from behind, had merged into something Juan couldn’t name, because chain or coagulation were nothing but an attempt to give the level of language to something that presented itself like an instantaneous contradiction, took shape and fled simultaneously, and no longer entered language spoken by anyone, not even that of an experienced interpreter like Juan.) … automatically, ironically, as a good interpreter accustomed to the instant liquidation of all problems of translation in that struggle against time and silence which is an interpreter’s booth, he had fallen into a trap …

In any case, there was no reason to complicate matters. The fat diner had asked for a bloody castle, his voice had stirred up other things, especially the book and the countess, the image of Hélène a

little less (perhaps because it was closer, not more familiar, but closer to everyday life, while the book was something new and the countess a memory, a curious memory, furthermore, because it wasn’t so much a question of the countess as of Frau Marta and what had happened in Vienna in the King of Hungary Hotel, but in the final analysis everything was the countess, just as clearly as the book or the fat diner’s phrase or the aroma of the Sylvaner). “You have to admit that I’ve got a kind of genius for celebrating Christmas Eve,” Juan thought as he poured himself the second glass, waiting for the hors d’oeuvres. In some way, the advent of what had just happened to him was in part the door of the Polidor, he having suddenly decided, knowing it was stupid, to push open that door and dine in that sad room. Why did I go into the Polidor, why did I buy the book and open it at random and read, also at random, any phrase at all scarcely a second before the fat diner ordered a steak that was almost raw? As soon as I try to analyze I’ll put everything into the famous reticular lunch basket and I’ll falsify it beyond all cure. The most I can try to do is repeat what took place in a different zone in mental terms, trying to distinguish between what made up a part of that sudden conglomeration in its own right and what other associations might have become incorporated into it parasitically. But beneath it all I know that everything is false, that I’m already far away from what just happened to me and that, as on so many other occasions, it comes down to this useless desire to understand, missing, perhaps, the obscure call or signal of the thing itself, the uneasiness I’m left with, the instantaneous display of another order where memories, potentials, and signals break out to form a flash of unity which breaks up at the very instant it drags and pulls me out of myself. Now all of this has left me with just one kind of curiosity—the old human topic: deciphering. And the rest of it, a tightening at the mouth of the stomach, the dark certainty that around there somewhere, not with this dialectical simplification, a road begins and goes on. It’s not enough, of course. In the end we have to think, and then analysis comes, the distinction between what really forms a part of that instant outside of time and what associations were put into it so

as to attract it, make it more yours, put it more onto this side. And the worst will be when you try to tell other people, because a moment always comes when you have to try to tell a friend about it—let’s say Polanco or Calac, or everyone at the same time at a table in the Cluny, vaguely waiting perhaps for the act of telling to unchain the coagulation again, give it a meaning at last. They’ll be there listening to you, and Hélène will be there, too; they’ll ask you questions, they’ll try to help you remember, as if memory were something purloined from that other force which in the Polidor had been capable of erasing it as past, showing it to be a living and menacing thing, memory escaped from its noose of time to be in the very instant that it disappeared again; a different form of life, a present, but in another dimension, a power acting from a different angle of fire. And there were no words because there was no thought possible for that force capable of converting stretches of memory, isolated and anodyne images, into a sudden dizzying mass, into a living constellation that is erased with the very act of showing itself, a contradiction that seemed to offer and deny at the same time what Juan, drinking his second glass of Sylvaner, would explain to Calac, Tell, Hélène later on when he met them at the table in the Cluny, and which now he had had to possess in some way, as if the attempt at fixing that memory hadn’t already shown that it was useless, that he was shoveling shadows into the darkness. “Yes,” Juan thought, sighing, and sighing was the precise admission that all of it came from the other side, was exercised in the diaphragm, in lungs which needed a deep breath of air. Yes, but it was also necessary to think about it because, after all, he was that and his thought, he couldn’t stay in a sigh, in a contraction of the solar plexus, in the vague fear of what had been glimpsed. Thinking was useless, like desperately trying to remember a dream where the last threads were reached only when you opened your eyes maybe; thinking was destroying the cloth that still hung in something like the opposite side of the sensation, its latency repeatable perhaps. Closing his eyes, letting himself go, floating in a state of total

disposition, in a propitious wait. Useless, it had always been useless; from those Cimmerian regions he came back poorer, farther away from himself. But thinking like a huntsman was valuable at least as a re-entry into this side, and so the fat diner had ordered a bloody castle, and suddenly it had been the countess, the reason he was sitting facing a mirror in the Polidor, the book he had bought on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and opened to a random page, the flashing coagulation (and also Hélène, of course) in a concretion that was instantly concealed by its incomprehensible will to deny itself in its very affirmation, dissolving at the moment of coming together, removing importance from itself after inflicting a mortal wound, after insinuating that it was not important—a mere associative game, a mirror and a memory and another memory, the insignificant luxuries of an idle imagination. “Ah, I won’t let you get away like that,” Juan thought. “It can’t be that once more I happen to be the center of something that comes from somewhere else and at the same time leaves me expelled from what is most mine. You won’t get away so easily, you’ve got to leave something in my hands, a little basilisk, any one of the images that now I can’t tell whether they’re part or not of that silent explosion …” And he couldn’t help smiling while he was present, a sardonic witness of his thought, which now brought the perch of the little basilisk within reach—an understandable association, because it came from the Basilisken Haus in Vienna, and there, the countess…. The rest invaded him without resistance. It was even easy to support himself on the central hollow, what had been an instantaneous fullness, a display which at the same time was denied and hidden, making him now incorporate a comfortable system of analogous images that joined themselves to the hollow because of historical or sentimental reasons. Thinking about the basilisk was thinking about Hélène and the countess simultaneously, but the countess also meant thinking about Frau Marta, about a scream, because the servant girls of the countess must have screamed in the garrets of the Blutgasse, and the countess must have liked them to scream. If they hadn’t screamed the blood wouldn’t have had the smell of heliotrope and marsh.

Pouring himself another glass of Sylvaner, Juan lifted his eyes to the mirror. The fat diner had unfolded France-Soir, and the full-page headlines suggested the false Russian alphabet of mirrors. Applying himself, he deciphered a few words, vaguely hoping in that way, with that false concentration which was at the same time the will of distraction, for an attempt to repeat the initial hollow through which the star with evasive points had slipped away, concentrating on any kind of stupidity, such as deciphering the headlines of France-Soir in the mirror and distracting himself at the same time from what really mattered, that perhaps the constellation would burst forth intact out of the still present aura, would become a sediment in a zone beyond or this side of language and images, would trace its transparent radii, the thin sketch of a face which at the same time would be a pin with a small basilisk, which at the same time would be a broken doll in a chest, which would be a desperate moan and a square crossed by countless streetcars and Frau Marta on the deck of a barge. Perhaps now, half-closing his eyes, he would be able to replace the image of the mirror, territory that interceded between the semblance of the Polidor and the other semblance still vibrating in the echo of its dissolution; perhaps now he would be able to pass from the Russian alphabet in the mirror to the other language that had appeared at the limits of perception, a fallen bird, desperate to flee, flapping against the net and giving it its shape, a synthesis of net and bird in which there was only flight or the shape of a net or the shadow of a bird, flight itself a prisoner for an instant in the pure paradox of fleeing from the net that entrapped it with the delicate weave of its own dissolution: the countess, a book, someone who had ordered a

bloody castle, a barge at dawn, the crash of a doll as it broke on the floor. The Russian alphabet is still there, wavering in the hands of the fat diner, telling the news of the day just as, later on in the zone (the Cluny, some corner, the Saint-Martin canal, which are always the zone), it will be necessary to begin telling, to say something, because they’re all waiting for him to begin telling, that ever restless and somewhat hostile circle at the start of a tale. In some way they’re all there waiting for you to tell it in the zone, in any part of the zone, you can’t tell where anymore because it’s in so many places and so many nights and so many friends—Tell and Austin, Hélène and Polanco and Celia and Calac and Nicole, as at other times it’s the turn of one of them to come to the zone with news from the City and then it’s your turn to be part of the circle that waits avidly for the other one to begin telling, because, in some way, in the zone there’s a kind of need, somewhere between friendly and aggressive, to maintain contact, to know what’s happening because something almost always happens that might be of use to all of them, as when they dream or bring news from the City, or come back from a trip and enter the zone again (the Cluny at night, almost always, the common ground of a café table, but also a bed or a sleeping car or an automobile that speeds from Venice to Mantua), the zone, somewhere between ubiquitous and limited, which resembles all of them—Marrast and Nicole, Celia and Monsieur Ochs and Frau Marta —is at the same time part of the City and the zone itself, it’s a trick with words where things happen with the same force as in the life of each one of them when outside the zone. And that’s why there’s a kind of anxious present, even though none of them is now near the one who remembers them in the Polidor; there is the saliva of distaste, openings, garden shows, there’s Hélène, always, Marrast and Polanco; the zone is an anxiety that viscously insinuates itself, projects itself; there are telephone numbers that someone will dial later on before going to sleep, vague rooms where they don’t talk about this; there’s Nicole struggling to close a valise, there’s a match

that burns between two fingers, a portrait in an English museum, a cigarette that thumps against a pack, a shipwreck on an island; there’s Calac and Austin, owls and blinds and streetcars, everything that emerges in the one who ironically thinks that at some moment he will have to start telling and that perhaps Hélène won’t be in the zone and won’t hear him, even though underneath it all everything he’s going to say is Hélène. It might well be that he’s not only alone in the zone the way he is now in the Polidor, where the others, including the fat diner, don’t count for anything, except for saying that all that could mean being even more alone in a room where there’s a cat and a typewriter; or perhaps being someone on a station platform looking at the instantaneous combinations of insects fluttering under a light. But it might also be that the others are in the zone as at so many other times, that life wraps them up and you can hear the cough from a museum guard as a hand slowly searches for the shape of a throat and someone dreams of a Yugoslavian beach, while Tell and Nicole fill a suitcase with disordered clothing and Hélène looks for a long time at Celia, who’s begun to weep with her face to the wall, the way good little girls weep. Forced to think while waiting for them to bring him the hors d’oeuvres, Juan retraced the night’s itinerary. First, perhaps, came the book by Michel Butor bought on the Boulevard Saint-Germain; before that there was a listless strolling through the streets and drizzle of the Latin Quarter, feeling the emptiness of Christmas Eve in Paris against the grain, a night when everyone has gone home, and all there is left are people with an indecisive look—almost that of an accomplice—looking out of the corner of their eyes at the bars in cafés or on corners, almost always men, but also an occasional woman carrying a package, perhaps as an excuse for being out on the street on a twenty-fourth of December at ten-thirty at night, and Juan had the urge to go up to one of the women, none of them young or pretty, but all of them alone and somewhat exceptional, and ask them if they really had something in the package or whether it was just a bundle of rags or old newspapers carefully tied up, a lie

that protected her a little more from that lonely walking while everyone was at home. The second thing to keep in mind was the countess, the feeling of the countess that had become defined on the corner of the Rue Monsieur le Prince and the Rue de Vaugirard, not because there could have been anything to remind him of the countess on that corner, unless perhaps it was a piece of reddish sky, a smell of dampness that came from an entrance-way, which suddenly were worth a whole territory of contact, in the same way that the house of the basilisk in Vienna in its day had been able to make him take a step toward the territory where the countess was waiting. Or perhaps the blasphematory, continuous transgression in which the countess must have moved (if one accepted the version of the legend, the mediocre chronicle that Juan had read years before, so long before Hélène and Frau Marta and the house of the basilisk in Vienna), and then the corner with the reddish sky and the musty entrance-way became joined to the inevitable realization that it was Christmas Eve in order to facilitate the entry of the countess, her otherwise inexplicable presence in Juan, because he couldn’t stop thinking that the countess must have particularly liked blood on a night like that, amidst church bells and Midnight Mass, the taste of the blood of a girl who twists with her feet and hands tied while so close by are the shepherds and the manger and a lamb who washes away the sins of the world. So that the book he had bought a moment before, the passage of the countess and then, without transition, the anodyne and gloomily lighted door of the Polidor, the glimpse of an almost deserted dining room enveloped in a light that only irony and illhumor could characterize as purple, with some women armed with glasses and napkins, the slight cramp at the mouth of the stomach, his resisting going in because there was no reason to go into such a place, the rapid and wrathful dialogue, as always, in those punishments of his own perversity: Yes / No / Why not / You’re right, why not / Go in, then, the gloomier the better you deserve it / For an imbecile, of course / Unto us a boy is born, glory hallelujah / It looks like the morgue / It is, go in / But the food must be horrible / You’re not hungry / That’s right, but I have to order something / Order

anything and have a drink / That’s an idea / Chilled wine, very cold / That’s it, go in. But if I had to drink, why did I go into the Polidor? I knew so many pleasant little bars on the Right Bank, on the Rue Caumartin, where, besides, I could always have ended up celebrating Christmas Eve on the altarpiece of a blond who would sing me some noël from Saintonge or Camargue and we’d have a good time. That’s why, thinking about it, the least comprehensible was the reason I finally went into the Polidor restaurant after that dialogue, giving the door an almost Beethovenian shove, bringing myself into the restaurant where eyeglasses and a napkin at armpit level were already approaching me decisively to lead me to the worst table, a joke of a table facing the wall, but the wall disguised as a mirror, like so many other things perhaps that night and every night and especially Hélène, facing the wall, because on the other side, where under normal circumstances any customer would have been able to sit facing the dining room, the respectable management of the Polidor had erected an enormous wreath with colored lights to show the concern that the Christian feelings of the kind customers deserved. Impossible to get out from under all that forcibly: if, in any case, I had consented to sit at a table with my back to the room, with the mirror offering me its swindle above the horrible Christmas wreath (“les autres tables sont réservées, Monsieur / Ça ira comme ça, Madame / Merci, Monsieur”), something that was getting away from me but which at the same time had to be very much mine had just forced me to go in and order that bottle of Sylvaner, which would have been so easy and so pleasant to ask for somewhere else, among other lights and other faces. Supposing that the one who tells it told it in his own way, since a lot had already been told tacitly for those of the zone (Tell, who understands everything without words, Hélène, to whom nothing is important if it’s important to you), or that out of some sheets of paper, a phonograph record, a magnetic tape, a book, a doll’s womb, pieces of something that would no longer be what they’re expecting you to start telling came out, supposing that what’s told didn’t have

the slightest interest for Calac or Austin and, on the other hand, desperately attracted Marrast or Nicole, especially Nicole, who loves you hopelessly, supposing that you began to murmur a long poem where it talks about the City, which they also know and fear and sometimes go through, if at the same time or as a substitute you took out your tie and leaned over to offer it, rolled up with great care in advance, to Polanco, who looks at it with stupefaction and finally passes it to Calac, who doesn’t want to take it and, scandalized, consults Tell, who takes advantage of it to cheat in the poker game and win the pot; supposing absurd things like that, because in the zone and at that moment such things could happen, you’d have to ask yourself whether there’s any sense in their being there waiting for you to start telling, in any case, for someone to start telling, and whether the piece of banana pastry that Feuille Morte is thinking about wouldn’t be a much better substitute for that vague expectation of those who surround you in the zone, indifferent and obstinate at the same time, demanding and mocking as you are with them when it’s your turn to listen to them or to watch them living, knowing that all of it comes from somewhere else or is leaving for who knows where, and, for that very reason, it’s what counts for almost all of them. And you, Hélène, will you look at me that way, too? Will I see Marrast, Nicole, Austin leave, saying good-bye with a gesture that will look like a shrug of the shoulders, or talking among themselves because they will have to tell, too, they’ll have brought news from the City or will be on the point of taking a plane or a train. I’ll see Tell, Juan (because it might happen that I, too, will see Juan at that moment, in the zone), I’ll see Feuille Morte, Harold Haroldson, and I’ll see the countess or Frau Marta if I’m in the zone or in the City, I’ll see them leaving and looking at me. But you, Hélène, will you be leaving with them, too, or will you come slowly toward me, your nails stained with disdain? Were you in the zone or did I dream you? My friends go away laughing, we’ll meet again and we’ll talk about London, Boniface Perteuil, the City. But you, Hélène, can you have been once more a name that I carry against nothingness, the

simulacrum that I invent with words while Frau Marta and the countess approach and look at me? “I’d like a bloody castle,” the fat diner had said. Everything was hypothetical, but you had to admit that if Juan hadn’t distractedly opened the book by Michel Butor a fraction of time before the customer had given his order, the components of the thing that tightened his stomach would have remained scattered. And it wouldn’t have happened with the first drink of chilled wine, waiting for them to bring him a coquille Saint-Jacques that he didn’t feel like eating, for Juan to open the book and discover without great interest that in 1791 the author of Atala and René had deigned to contemplate Niagara Falls, of which he would leave an illustrious description. At that moment (he was closing the book because he didn’t feel like reading and the light was terrible) he distinctly heard the fat diner’s order and everything coagulated into the act of raising his eyes and finding the image of the diner whose voice had come to him from behind in the mirror. Impossible to separate the parts, the fragmented sentiment of the book, the countess, the Polidor, the bloody castle, perhaps the bottle of Sylvaner: the coagulation remained outside of time, the privileged horror, exasperating and delightful, of the constellation, an opening for the leap that had to be taken and which he would not take because it wasn’t a leap toward anything definite and not even a leap. The contrary, rather, because in that dizzy emptiness metaphors leaped toward him like spiders, like eternal euphemisms or the stuffing of ungraspable display (another metaphor), and, besides, the old woman with glasses was putting a coquille Saint-Jacques in front of him, and things like that always had to have a word of thanks in a French restaurant or everything would go from bad to worse all the way to the cheese and coffee. (And the City, which from here on will have no capital, because there’s no reason to make it strange—in the sense of giving it a privileged value in contrast to the cities we were used to…. Now it is

proper to talk about it from here on because we all agreed that any place or any thing could be attached to the city, and so it didn’t seem impossible to Juan that what had just happened to him had been matter from the city in some way, one of its eruptions or its entranceways opening up that night in Paris as it might have opened in any of the cities where his profession of interpreter took him. We’d all walked through the city, always unwillingly, and when we got back we’d talk about it, we compared streets and beaches during the hour at the Cluny. The city might appear in Paris; it might appear for Tell or Calac in a beer hall in Oslo; it had happened to one of us to go from the city to a bed in Barcelona, unless it were the opposite. The city was not explained; it was. It had emerged sometimes in conversations in the zone, and although the first one to bring news of the city had been my paredros, being or not being in the city became almost a routine for all of us except Feuille Morte. And since we’re aready talking about that, it could for the same reason be said that my paredros was a routine in the sense that among us there was always something we called my paredros, a term introduced by Calac and which we used without the slightest feeling of a joke because the quality of paredros alluded, as can be seen, to an associated entity, a kind of buddy or substitute or babysitter for the exceptional, and, by extension, a delegating of what was one’s own to that momentary alien dignity without losing anything of ours underneath it all, just as any image of the places we had walked could be a delegation of the city, or the city could delegate something of its own (the square with the streetcars, the archways with women selling fish, the north canal) to any of the places through which we walked and in which we were living at that time. Translated by Gregory Rabassa Excerpted from 62: A Model Kit, and translated by Gregory Rabassa, winner, with Alastair Reid, of this year’s Gregory Kolovakos Award. This award is given to a translator, scholar, or educator whose life’s work has contributed to the appreciation of Hispanic literatures by English-language readers.

On Rain It was blacker than olives the night I left. As I ran past the palaces, oddly joyful, it began to rain. What a notion it is, after all—these small shapes! I would get lost counting them. Who first thought of it? How did he describe it to the others? Out on the sea it is raining too. It beats on no one. —Anne Carson

THE KISS Angela Carter

T

he winters in Central Asia are piercing and bleak, while the sweating, fetid summers bring cholera, dysentery and mosquitoes, but, in April, the air caresses like the touch of the inner skin of the thigh and the scent of all the flowering trees douses the city’s throat-catching whiff of cesspits. Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightforward, geometric shapes with crayons from a child’s coloring box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, blonde terraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers. Against these bleached pallors, the iridescent crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the ancient mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beneath a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaine, the scourge of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand. The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, black and white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colors that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewelry made of red glass.

They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black line straight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years. They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbaned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the foreign eyes as a unicorn. They exist, in all their glittering and innocent exoticism, in direct contradiction to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow in the gutters. In the teahouse a green parrot nudges the bars of its wicker cage. The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In the early part of the year you can buy only last summer’s dried fruit—apricots, peaches, raisins—except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open on the stall to show how a wet nest of garnets remains within. A local specialty of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios. An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lunch and eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing. She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had come and, the last tale of all concluded, fall silent. Then, the lily-seller might vanish.

A goat is nibbling wild jasmine among the ruins of the mosque that was built by the beautiful wife of Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine’s wife started to build this mosque for him as a surprise, while he was away at the wars, but when she got word of his imminent return, one arch remained unfinished. She went directly to the architect and begged him to hurry but the architect told her that he would complete the work on time only if she gave him a kiss. One kiss, one single kiss.

Tamburlaine’s wife was not only very beautiful and very virtuous but also very clever. She went to the market, bought a basket of eggs, boiled them hard and stained them a dozen different colors. She called the architect to the palace, showed him the basket and told him to choose any egg he liked and eat it. He took a red egg. What does it taste like? Like an egg. Eat another. He took a green egg. What does that taste like? Like the red egg. Try again. He ate a purple egg. One egg tastes just the same as any other egg, if they are fresh, he said. There you are! she said. Each of these eggs looks different to the rest but they all taste the same. So you may kiss any one of my serving women that you like but you must leave me alone. Very well, said the architect. But soon he came back to her and this time he was carrying a tray with three bowls on it, and you would have thought the bowls were all full of water.

Drink from each of these bowls, he said. She took a drink from the first bowl, then from the second; but how she coughed and spluttered when she took a mouthful from the third bowl. Because it contained, not water, but vodka. This vodka and that water both look alike but each tastes quite different, he said. And it is the same with love. Then Tamburlaine’s wife kissed the architect on the mouth. He went back to the mosque and finished the arch the same day that the victorious Tamburlaine rode into Samarkand with his army and banners and his cages full of captive kings. But when Tamburlaine went to visit his wife, she turned away from him because no woman will return to the harem after she has tasted vodka. Tamburlaine beat her with a knout until she told him she had kissed the architect and then he sent his executioners hotfoot to the mosque. The executioners saw the architect standing on top of the arch and ran up the stairs with their knives drawn but when he heard them coming he grew wings and flew away to Persia. This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colors of a child’s box of crayons. This Tamburlaine’s wife of the story would have painted a black stripe laterally across her forehead and done up her hair in a dozen, dozen tiny plaits, like any other Uzbek woman. She would have bought red and white radishes from the market for her husband’s dinner. After she ran away from him perhaps she made her living in the market. Perhaps she sold lilies there.

HOME AND AWAY It was, gentlemen, after a long absence—seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe—that I returned to my people. I learned much and much passed me by—but that’s another story. The important thing is that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing among them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was not long before I felt as though a piece of ice

were melting inside of me, as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone—that life warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land “whose fishes die of the cold” …. I listened intently to the wind: that indeed was a sound well known to me, a sound which in our village possessed a merry whispering—the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it passes through fields of corn…. I felt like a palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with purpose. —Tayeb Salih, from Season of Migration to the North It was the island’s colored neighborhood but it was not the colored town she’d grown up in. It had come into being overnight when the industrialists’ tunnels broke the surface and they laid a sign: SUBWAY STOP HERE. These rowhouses, tenements, the line of them across the Island from river to river. That’s how the first tenants found this neighborhood and that’s how she found it. She emerged from the heat of the underground tunnel and pondered the intersection. Any street as viable as any other. Lila Mae randomly picked one amiable block. Halfway down, after dodging the white spray of an open fire hydrant, she saw the sign. ROOMS FOR RENT, the little afterthought VACANCY swinging on two iron hooks beneath it…. A new start. Lila Mae thought, she could make a home in the city. —Colson Whitehead, from The Intuitionist

SKELETON OF A HUMAN HABITATION Heinrich Böll

S

uddenly, on reaching the top of the hill, we saw the skeleton of the abandoned village on the slope ahead of us. No one had told us anything about it, no one had given us any warning; there are so many abandoned villages in Ireland. The church, the shortest way to the beach, had been pointed out to us, and the shop where you can buy tea, bread, butter, and cigarettes, also the newsagent’s, the post office, and the little harbor where the harpooned sharks lie like capsized boats in the mud at low tide, their dark backs uppermost, unless by chance the last wave of the tide had turned up their white bellies from which the liver had been cut out—all this seemed worth mentioning, but not the abandoned village. Gray, uniform, sloping stone gables, which we saw first with no depth of perspective, like an amateurish set for a ghost film; incredulous, we tried to count them, we gave up at forty, there must have been a hundred. The next curve of the road gave us a different perspective, and now we saw them from the side: half-finished buildings that seemed to be waiting for the carpenter: gray stone walls, dark window sockets, not a stick of wood, not a shred of material, no color anywhere, like a body without hair, without eyes, without flesh and blood—the skeleton of a village, cruelly distinct in its structure. There was the main street; at the bend, by the little square, there must have been a pub. A side street, another one. Everything not made of stone gnawed away by rain, sun, and wind— and time, which patiently trickles over everything; twenty-four great

drops of time a day, the acid that eats everything away as perceptibly as resignation … If anyone ever tried to paint it, this skeleton of a human habitation where a hundred years ago five hundred people may have lived: all those gray triangles and squares on the green-gray slope of the hill; if he were to include the girl with the red pullover who is just passing along the main street with a load of peat on her back, a spot of red for her pullover and a dark brown one for the peat, a lighter brown one for the girl’s face, and then the white sheep huddling like lice among the ruins—he would be considered an unusually crazy painter: that’s how abstract reality is. Everything not made of stone eaten away by wind, sun, rain, and time, neatly laid out along the somber slope as if for an anatomy lesson, the skeleton of a village: over there—“look, just like a spine”—the main street, a little crooked like the spine of a laborer; every little knuckle bone is there; there are the arms and the legs: the side streets and, tipped slightly to one side, the head, the church, a somewhat larger gray triangle. Left leg: the street going up the slope to the east; right leg: the other one, leading down into the valley, this one a little shortened. The skeleton of someone with a slight limp. If his skeleton were exposed in three hundred years, this is what the man might look like who is being driven by his four thin cows past us onto the meadow, leaving him the illusion that he was driving them; his right leg has been shortened by an accident, his back is crooked from the toil of cutting peat, and even his tired head will tip a little to one side when he is laid in the earth. He has already overtaken us, already murmured his “nice day,” before we had got our breath back sufficiently to answer him or ask him about the village. No bombed city, no artillery-raked village ever looked like this, for bombs and shells are nothing but extended tomahawks, battle-axes, maces, with which to smash, to hack to pieces, but here there is no trace of violence; in limitless patience time and the elements have eaten away everything not made of stone, and from the earth have sprouted cushions on which these bones lie like relics, cushions of moss and grass.

No one would try to pull down a wall here or take wood (very valuable here) from an abandoned house (we call that cleaning out; no one cleans out here); and not even the children who drive the cattle home in the evening from the meadow above the deserted village, not even the children try to pull down walls or doorways; our children, when we suddenly found ourselves in the village, tried it immediately, to raze to the ground. Here no one razed anything to the ground, and the softer parts of abandoned dwellings are left to feed the wind, the rain, the sun, and time, and after sixty, seventy, or a hundred years all that is left is half-finished buildings from which no carpenter will ever again hang his wreath to celebrate the completion of a house: this, then, is what a human habitation looks like when it has been left in peace after death. Still with a sense of awe we crossed the main street between the bare gables, entered side streets, and slowly the sense of awe lifted: grass was growing in the streets, moss had covered walls and potato plots, was creeping up the houses; and the stones of the gables, washed free of mortar, were neither quarried stone nor tiles, but small boulders, just as the mountain had rolled them down its streams into the valley, door and window lintels were slabs of rock, and broad as shoulder blades were the two stone slabs sticking out of the wall where the fireplace had been: once the chain for the iron cooking pot had hung from them, pale potatoes cooking in brownish water. We went from house to house like peddlers, and every time the short shadow on the threshold had fallen away from us the blue square of the sky covered us again; in houses where the better-off ones had once lived it was larger, where the poor had lived it was smaller: all that distinguished them now was the size of the blue square of sky. In some rooms moss was already growing, some thresholds were already covered with brownish water; here and there in the front walls you could still see the pegs for the cattle: thighbones of oxen to which the chain had been attached. “Here’s where the stove was”—“the bed over there”—“here over the fireplace hung the crucifix”—“over there a cupboard”: two upright stone slabs with two vertical slabs wedged into them; here in this

cupboard one of the children discovered the iron wedge, and when we drew it out it crumbled away in our hands like tinder: a hard inner piece remained about as thick as a nail which—on the children’s instructions—I put in my coat pocket as a souvenir. We spent five hours in this village, and the time passed quickly because nothing happened; we scared a few birds into flight, a sheep jumped through an empty window socket and fled up the slope at our approach; in ossified fuchsia hedges hung blood-red blossoms, in withered gorse bushes hung a yellow like dirty coins, shining quartz stuck up out of the moss like bones; no dirt in the streets, no rubbish in the streams, and not a sound to be heard. Perhaps we were waiting for the girl with the red pullover and her load of brown peat, but the girl did not come back.

On the way home when I put my hand in my pocket for the iron wedge, all my fingers found was brown dust mixed with red: the same color as the bog to the right and left of our path, and I threw it in the bog. No one could tell us exactly when and why the village had been abandoned; there are so many deserted houses in Ireland, you can count them on any two-hour walk: that one was abandoned ten years ago, this one twenty, that one fifty or eighty years ago, and there are houses in which the nails fastening the boards to windows and doors have not yet rusted through, rain and wind cannot yet penetrate. The old woman living in the house next to us had no idea when the village had been abandoned; when she was a little girl, around 1880, it was already deserted. Of her six children, only two have

remained in Ireland: two live and work in Manchester, two in the United States, one daughter is married and living here in the village (this daughter has six children, of whom in turn two will probably go to England, two to the United States), and the oldest son has stayed home: from far off, when he comes in from the meadow with the cattle, he looks like a youth of sixteen; when he turns the corner and enters the village street you feel he must be in his mid-thirties; and when he finally passes the house and grins shyly in at the window, you see that he is fifty. No one could tell us exactly when and why the village had been abandoned; there are so many deserted houses in Ireland, you can count them on any two-hour walk.

“He doesn’t want to get married,” said his mother, “isn’t it a shame?” Yes, it is a shame. He is so hard-working and clean; he has painted the gate red, the stone knobs on the wall red too, and the window frames under the green mossy roof bright blue; humor dwells in his eyes, and he pats his donkey affectionately. In the evening, when we go to get the milk, we ask him about the abandoned village. But he can tell us nothing about it, nothing; he has never been there: they have no meadows over there, and their peat cuttings lie in a different direction, to the south, not far from the monument to the Irish patriot who was executed in 1799. “Have you seen it yet?” Yes, we’ve seen it—and Tony goes off again, a man of fifty, is transformed at the corner into a man of thirty, up there on the slope where he strokes the donkey in passing he turns into a youth of sixteen, and as he stops for a moment by the fuchsia hedge, for that moment before he disappears behind the hedge, he looks like the boy he once was. Translated by Leila Vennewitz

FLANNERY O’CONNOR AND THE MAKING OF MYSTERIES A good short story should not have less meaning than a novel, nor should its action be less complete. Nothing essential to the main experience can be left out of a short story. All the action has to be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of motivation, and there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, though not necessarily in that order. —FLANNERY O’CONNOR

LEAPS OF FAITH | MAUREEN HOWARD

D

ear Miss O’Connor, I should say Flannery. You once wrote to “A,” your unidentified correspondent, that Miss O’Connor was too proper. Your letters had settled into friendship, and you wrote that you were learning to walk on crutches and felt like “a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St. Thomas or Aristotle.” But you surely did think of both those gents, as you stalked about on aluminum props. And in writing to A, you thought clearly about matters of faith, but your most intimate words to A—and I’d say to critics, mentors, and the just plain curious—were about your work, your art and your craft. For a writer to consider her doubts about a half-written story, or reconsider a published one, even in the closed circuit of personal letters—that takes spunk. It smacks of the magician’s calculated risk, displaying the techniques of the trick, then fooling our very eyes. In the mid-fifties, you were writing a lecture on the freak in modern fiction, which was finally titled, “The Grotesque in Southern

Fiction.” A lecture for those university types, and you did wonder out loud, so to speak, if you shouldn’t be writing, not talking about writing. Lord knows it was an appropriate subject. You were drawn to the carnival, to a view of distortions and excess in humankind. There’s not a Flannery O’Connor story (that’s how we tag these works so particular to your spirit and your fine mind), not one in which you don’t portray bodily disfiguration, the visible manifestations of imperfection—what is marred or missing in all of us in varying degrees. From the view of the tramp in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (“his face descended in forehead for more than half its length and ended suddenly with his features just balanced over a jutting steel-trapped jaw”) to “Parker’s Back,” in which O. E. Parker’s tattoos are the sign of his self-beautification (decoration’s only skin deep), there’s not one soul who escapes dire limitations, physical, cultural, spiritual. Your characters seem a commedia dell’arte troupe called upon in story after story to play out their follies. Mrs. Cope, in “A Circle in the Fire,” and Julian’s mother, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” are plain ridiculous in their ladylike pumps, their Sunday hats. You let it be known that Mrs. Cope’s hat was “still stiff and bright green,” while Mrs. Pritchard’s identical hat was “faded and out of shape.” But then, Mrs. Pritchard is hired help, who makes it clear with her ghoulish chatter that she is in no way white trash. As for the very large Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” what you convey in the bloat of Ruby Turpin is her selfinflation. All her horrendous judgments on class and race, spoken and unspoken, are the pronouncements of a clown, who is finally not to be laughed at. I would add to your celebration of the grotesque that your depiction of gentility is grotesque, as powerful in its crippling moral view as fumblings in the fiery field of sin and redemption that you so often assign to the lame, the halt, and the blind. I, too, was raised in gentility, though in the North. For my wedding, the maiden aunts presented me with arcane objects that I might crumb my table to render my linen, if not virginal, always presentable. In an early story, “The Crop,” this task is given to Lucia Willerton. “It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if

Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first.” Her task hankers back to manners that are as stale and meaningless as the romantic story she is writing, which is blown right out of her head by the sight of lovers walking too close for refinement. The woman is garishly dressed, her face set in an insane grin, the man long and wasted and shaggy—minor figures in your gallery of misfits and the merely unlovable. Yet their very presence reads like a note to yourself to put aside Miss Willerton’s nonsense and get down to the business of discovering your material, what will be extravagant and often cruel, yet always genuine in your stories. “It’s not necessary to point out,” you wrote of the grotesque, “that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic.” In writing of the grotesque in gothic sculpture, John Ruskin begged his readers to examine once more those ugly goblins and formless monsters: “But do not mock at them, for they are the signs of life and liberty in every workman who struck a stone, a freedom of thought.” Such freedom to fashion your characters, no matter how flawed in body, misshapen in spirit, and at times unredeemable, you understood to be dangerous. Taking yet another risk, you wrote that “if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious … what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.” You spoke of your belief that the writer of the grotesque fiction looks for one image that will embody the concrete, what is not visible to the naked eye, but which is just as real, more real to you. You asked a good deal of the strong, exfoliating images in your stories, though no more than Hawthorne, whom you so admired, asked of a birthmark, or a carbuncle. Often you found that one image—a hat, a shoe, a skeleton, a bull, a fire. To me your most powerful image is the boxcars. In one of your last letters to A: “I am reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. Anything is credible after such a period in history. I’ve always been haunted by the boxcars, but they were actually the least of it.” Those boxcars show up in several stories. In the mealy-mouthed words of Mrs. Cope, “Why, think of all those poor Europeans, that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord, we ought to spend

half our time on our knees.” In “Revelation,” Ruby Turpin’s demonic sociological review of the breakdown of class and race ends in a nightmare in which “all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a boxcar, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” In the end, that bestial woman sees into the life of things in a pigpen, and is afforded an apocalyptic view right out of the Book of Revelation. You worried about the grandeur with which you finished that story, but you surely brought it off—the panorama of salvation in which all classes and kinds are freed in a processional, the Negroes in white robes. Ruby Turpin is included, though her sort no longer leads the pack. And of course the camps, the boxcars, are central to the displaced person. Though you did go on in your lecture about the need for fiction to reach beyond any instructive message, political or social, you wrote from the South, from the farm, this most wonderful story that knows no region in its excoriation of man’s silent complicity in evil. I believe that you would loathe e-mail, and just hate coming in from feeding the birds to find a fax poking up on yet another machine. Not because you rejected the new, though you did not much admire the moderns, but you believed in the careful consideration of each letter you wrote, even quick notes carried the life of your voice. (The last entry in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, “Judgement Day,” is a rewrite of the opening story, “The Geranium.”) I love the scolding letters, written as though to yourself, your impatient confession that you didn’t get it right. And till the very end you were troubled by the final stroke in “The Enduring Chill,” in which the stain on the ceiling becomes the Holy Ghost. You suspected that the ending was not earned, that your belief may have determined the sighting of that sacred bird. I’ve just returned from Florence, and you were surely on my mind: so many saints, so many devils on view. You would take pleasure in Ghirlandaio’s “Last Supper,” where they, the usual suspects, are all assembled for the sacramental moment while a peacock, poised above the table, takes no notice. He’s arrogant, unconcerned; his gorgeous tail feathers are some kind of miracle. And I thought of you when I looked long at

Masaccio’s “Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise,” those poor, disfigured creatures, because that’s what you wrote about in all your stories: the fall from grace of humankind. Salvation in your world of grotesques is acrobatic, requires a leap of faith like the leap of faith you ask of yourself and your readers, a belief in fiction itself.

Catholic girls of our era were instructed in humility. We were not allowed laurels. Well, now you’ve taken your place with Poe and Hawthorne, Faulkner and Welty, in a distinguished Library of America edition of your work. Preen your feathers, Flannery. Cheers, Maureen THE SUBTLETIES OF VIOLENCE | RICK MOODY

As in the movies, there are in literature certain kinds of violence that themselves seem to do harm, that seem be acts of violence committed upon the reader as well as upon characters, that seem to be engenderers of violence rather than literary or moral formulations on the difficulties entailed in violence. Were I to attempt to formulate some characteristics of these violent episodes of literature, I would want to speak to how character is depicted in these works. That is, if literature intends to permit or even facilitate violence, it has only to dispense with the construction of complex character, which is so essential to the mission of literature in general. If we know nothing of a character, if we know nothing of his or her tastes or ambition, then

how can we care if she or he is beaten, tortured, or murdered? Work that avoids characterizing victims of violence makes violence easy because it dispenses with the cost implicit in force: human potential, human associations. Such work, then, tolerates and even appreciates the callousness and menace of violent behavior. For a middle-class woman of education and relatively serene circumstances, Flannery O’Connor seems to have known a lot about violence.

If a certain lassitude is sometimes evident in the construction of victims of violence, there’s also a danger in a shorthand with respect to its perpetrators. That is, it’s too easy to portray the thieves, rapists, murderers, and warmongers of our literature as simple villains or miscreants. This abbreviated characterization overlooks the potential for violence that is immanent in each of us. The lessons of modernism make clear that the old heroism is no longer enough, will no longer completely illustrate humankind, and the same is true for the modern villain. He can be just as sympathetic, just as flawed, just as human as his victim; indeed, he ought to be, if we are to understand how he came to be where he is, with his pistols and knives, free to act while knowing better. So: if it is to be depicted properly in contemporary literature, in such a way that we know precisely its harrowing cost and inexplicability, violence must take place between fully imagined people, between complete, genuine lives. On to the case at hand. For a middle-class woman of education and relatively serene circumstances, Flannery O’Connor seems to have known a lot about violence. It is there in the margins of many of her stories, it is there in the very center of a great many of them, but my hypothesis tonight is that it’s always there in two antipodal guises, namely in a grotesque form, or, contrarily, in a restrained form. In interviews, O’Connor has referred to the method of her stories as both comic and grotesque, and there’s obviously plenty of evidence to support these points of view. When the mortal violence in O’Connor stories brushes up against her comic and grotesque

methodologies, we get such moments as the grandmother (in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) hailing her eventual murderer with the words, “You’re The Misfit! I recognized you at once!” As if she were greeting a baseball star or celebrity crooner. The Misfit’s pronouncements of murderous intention are likewise faintly comic in their punctiliousness: “The boys want to ast you something. Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?” Later, after considerable bloodshed has already transpired, the Misfit apologizes for appearing before the grandmother without a shirt. He shoots her without mercy, just the same: “The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.” Much has been made of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as a Christian or theological allegory, but it’s not mine here to attempt to interpret the Misfit so much as to say that perhaps the conjunction of these allegorical interpretations with grotesque and slightly comic violence is fitting. Because we don’t exactly believe the realism of this story, in the fact that a family driving in the southern part of the United States and taking a wrong turn would run into a hardened killer they have been discussing only hours before. Thus, we are ourselves lofted into a register of interpretation that is fabulistic or oneiric or theological. Since the Misfit’s savagery doesn’t feel exactly realistic, he must stand for something else. The problem of emblematic or symbolic violence is apparent elsewhere in the work. In “Greenleaf,” for example, a story largely about relations between a widowed farm owner and her employees. The story’s specific concern is the bull belonging to the sons of Mr. Greenleaf, an incompetent caretaker, which bull has busted out of his containment and wandered adrift in Mrs. May’s herd of cows. Mr. Greenleaf’s stylized method of address with respect to the bull is again hilarious: “They was just going to beef him, but he got loose and run his head into their pickup truck. He don’t like cars and trucks. They had a hard time getting his horn out of the fender and when they finally got him loose, he took off.” In fact, throughout the story, Mr. Greenleaf is more likely to refer to the bull with honorifics:

“This gentleman is a sport,” or “That gentleman tore out of there last night.” The bull, of course, is going to gore someone, just as surely as the handgun that turns up in a movie is going to be discharged. However, this is not the bull’s only responsibility. Even a foggy acquaintance with O’Connor’s Catholic armature of emblems will suggest that the omnipotent bull in the story stands for grace, stands for the mystery at the heart of Mrs. Greenleaf’s evangelical and pentecostal fervency, such that the reader is doubly prepared for the moment when the bull will erupt in all his inscrutable glory. Accordingly, the end of the story, as in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is grossly violent and hyperbolic: “She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed.” For me, though the language here is a tiny bit ethereal, even murky, the moment is brutal, in an Old Testament way, though O’Connor herself might resist the word. This is from one of her interviews: “People keep referring to the brutality in the stories, but even ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ is, in a way, a comic, stylized thing. It is not naturalistic writing and so you can’t really call it brutal.” I’m more drawn to the Flannery O’Connor who finds violence in potential, violence in the world of Southern manners, violence barely suppressed between people in a constant, repetitious way. As O’Connor says, “The South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us an identity.” For all the grotesquerie and comic hyperbole in O’Connor’s work there is an equal and opposite realistic force which finds its most compelling example in the observance among O’Connor’s characters of rigorous social norms and regulations for politeness and conduct. These tendencies crop up even amid the more heavily allegorical constructions in “Greenleaf.” Yet carefully wrought examples of O’Connor’s perfect ear for social relations are more apparent in stories like “Everything That

Rises Must Converge,” and one of my favorites, “Good Country People.” In the former story, mainly about relations between a mother and son, a liberal college-educated young man is forced to ride on the bus with his unnamed mother during the early period of desegregation. The mother’s behavior, of course, is appalling. But before we even get to O’Connor’s astute illustration of politics during early desegregation, “Everything That Rises” gives almost a quarter of its length to a discussion of the hat that the mother intends to wear to her weight-reducing class that night. This hat passage, which is of course a set-up for the moment when an African-American woman gets on the bus later wearing the very same hat, is noteworthy for what a splendid job it does conveying the expanse of the mother character, her hopes and social ambitions, her insecurities. Julian, her son, is meanwhile revealed in opposition to the hat, which he loathes, even though the passage concludes with him saying, “You are not going to take it back, I like it.” This is the first example in the story of the social acuity concealed beneath O’Connor’s symbolic and theological intentions, but this picture of Southern manners and habits is even more breathtakingly revealed on the bus itself, where Julian’s mother is as venal about the black Americans now sitting throughout the cab as she is smitten with a certain young black boy of whom she observes, to the boy’s mother, “Isn’t he cute?” Having completed her unflattering display of the very class and social pretensions that Julian hates so much about her, the mother now embarks on a plan to give the young boy some change money, as they are disembarking from the bus. This is where the trouble starts. When she tries to present the boy with a penny (she has no nickels), the boy’s mother turns on Julian’s poor unnamed progenetrix: “All at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, ‘He don’t take nobody’s pennies!’”

If the violence in this story is so demure, why does it still feel so violent?

The African-American woman’s apoplexy is markedly like the explosion of The Misfit, upon being touched by the grandmother in that story, at least in terms of its language. And yet here the act of violence, such as it is, is of a more human scale. Julian’s mother is simply knocked onto her behind. Yet the bruising of her ego is so immense that her character is wholly changed, wholly altered, in the last paragraphs of “Everything Rises.” If the violence in this story is so demure, why does it still feel so violent? Is it not because the equal and opposite pride of the two mothers is so genuine, so demonstrable, and so perfectly calibrated against the backdrop of Southern manners? The same is true in “Good Country People.” It’s almost the same situation as “Everything Rises,” featuring the same confused yet socially ambitious mother, and the same intellectually astute but miserable child, in this case a philosopher daughter, called Hulga— certainly among the best names ever for a philosopher in modern fiction. Hulga, among other things, has an artificial leg (and the description of it counts as one of O’Connor’s most brutal imaginings: “the leg had been literally blasted off,” and “she never lost consciousness”), but it is her disdain for the safe harbor of marriage and children that is most disappointing to her mother. All this changes with the arrival of a charming, persuasive, and lively Bible salesman. A Bible salesman! her mother seems to think. His talk, of course, when invited that night to dinner, is full of balderdash—“I got this heart condition. I may not live long”—but it is precisely his Christian fervency, which Hulga disdains, that makes him attractive. She is far from persuaded by his seductions: “I like girls that wear glasses.” She wants to force him to submit. Hulga boasts that she doesn’t believe in God, when she is at last sequestered with this Bible salesman: “In my economy, I’m saved and you are damned.” The best part of this sequestration, for me, is how, despite its theological and philosophical undercarriage, the story observes all the peaks and troughs of a traditional romantic scene. The kisses,

when they begin, are just as you would find them in almost any fictional account: “The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him.” You know how this is going to end, correct? The Bible salesman, exhibiting a profound sensitivity to Hulga’s disability, first talks her into showing him her stump, and then he steals the wooden leg. Why? Because he can. Or perhaps because Hulga’s intellectual boasts (“We are all damned, but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see”) are just too much. Once he talked a woman out of a glass eye the same way. He uses a different name in every town. For me, this is among the most violent moments in all of O’Connor, and yet, strictly speaking, nobody is hurt. The description is painless, and yet harrowing in the extreme: “She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends.” Do we know the Bible salesman, beyond his pack of lies? Perhaps we do. I’d suggest that, at the dinner table, when he says that he is the “seventh child of twelve and that his father had been crushed under a tree,” he’s telling some variety of the truth. For me, he is not an emblem of evil, an actual devil, as O’Connor sometimes called them, but a particular guy on a particular bad streak. Just as flawed as Hulga, just as human. And because the seduction proceeds according to such a rigorous social code, it’s hard to see them any other way. The Bible salesman’s theft, therefore, is a violence of restraint and repression, rather than a violence of gore and spilt blood. While it has some of the heavy symbolic freight of The Misfit and the bull, it is more genuine, more believable, and much more morally rich. Sometimes, the best way to suggest a thing is through glancing contact, rather than by direct means, through objective correlative, through withholding. If O’Connor wasn’t intending to write directly about violence, she nonetheless occasionally demonstrates startling insight into both its human origins and its costs. Anything more

would be the province of an essayist, not a writer of imaginative literature, and as O’Connor remarked of fiction writers, “We don’t solve problems, we tell stories.” BLUES TO BE THERE | STANLEY CROUCH

I have a prepared statement, and then there’ll be an improvisation. I hate to do a fully prepared speech in New York, because you never know. This is called “Blues to Be There, or, A Bitch on Bitter Wheels.” Any talk of the South means that we must look at a special region of our nation, one in which we have had many institutions that were the same as those in the North but that have spun out their own variations on the national ethos and the national blues. There was slavery in the North and in the South. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a popular black dance band from Philadelphia that was the talk of the North, and they traveled south to put the happy hotfoot on the plantation owners. There were racists in the North, and in the South, and there were those supposedly above who looked down on those supposedly below, whether for racial or class reasons. But for all the northern rogues and all the race riots and all the crime in the big urban battlefields, where monsters like New York’s Monk Eastman was a Grand General of the bloody night, we tend to think of the South as something special when it comes to violence and hatred. We forget the draft riots of 1863, when the Irish balked at the idea of ducking bullets to free some darkies…. We forget how black people were pushed aside through prejudicial hiring so that European immigrants could come over here during the great tide of immigration and take jobs American Negroes should have gotten. The South seems less complex to us than the North—a dark fairyland in which something called slavery determined its identity for centuries. A dark fairyland in which something called the Civil War was fought, taking 600,000 into the silent world of death. A dark fairyland where plantation owners who set the style of upper-class

manners thought themselves the extensions of Greco-Roman grandeur, and gave their slaves names like Pompey, after the general who preceded Julius Caesar in the grand days of Roman Empire. But the South’s darkness was more extensive than we sometimes know. Think of serial killers like Micajah and Wiley Harpe, known as Big and Little Harpe, who are mentioned in Moby-Dick because they were still famous sixty years later for their murders on the Natchez Trace, where they killed men, women, and children. Flannery O’Connor would have understood them because, as she wrote in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “It’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”

Yet there’s also the Southern light of actual charm: true religious charity, eloquence, and a tragic sense of life forever under threat by the lower sides of the human soul, no matter the social register from which that soul arises. It is out of that context of refinement, pretension, violence, class hatred, resentment, sadism, lyric impulses, and compassion that the writings of Flannery O’Connor arise, fully informed by the freedom that comes out of art. O’Connor had to fight through many things that most of us do not have to, but she was like the blind man in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur who explains that he loves the piano because “it doesn’t do

me any favors.” When she was writing, she was equal to or inferior to others only on the basis of her talent and how well she focused it. That may be why there’s such freedom in her work, even if her characters were caught inside rituals and presumptions and the classic resentments that arrive not only in a Southern context but within the problems unleashed by upward mobility. In fact, one might say that no American writer has done a better job of expressing envy and resentment than O’Connor, who always took into consideration how difficult it was to accept what seemed an unfair fate. She also understood that the question of the spirit is about whether or not a caustic fate, even a brutal victory of evil in the moment of absolute humiliation of death, is ever the point. If we can only understand God when all is well with us, then we do not truly believe. Faith is most difficult to sustain when one who loves the light of the world has been blinded by accident, by genes, or by the hand of another. Now, that’s the written part. I would also like to say that Flannery O’Connor anticipated our period perhaps more than people in her time recognized. See, she didn’t have a Jerry Springer Show, but she did, obviously, because many of her characters would have been on Jerry Springer. I mean, that is the show where the guy who goes to bed with his daughter’s boyfriend ends up impregnating her boyfriend’s sister and comes on the show and says, “Well, we’ve worked it all out.” But at the same time, O’Connor recognized that perhaps the hardest thing to handle in America is the idea that you are not going to get beyond where you are. Maybe that’s not as hard a fate in other countries as it is in this one, because so many people in America have, as they say, come from nothing. But in Flannery O’Connor’s world, if you start off as nothing, and it looks as if that’s how you’re going to end up, then you’re a very resentful person. We in New York of course understand resentment as easily as anybody in the South—resentment is a New York trait. Maybe that makes us the penthouse of the South, spiritually speaking: “Why him, not me? Why didn’t I win that prize instead of her? How come he got that apartment? Who do they think they are?” And on it goes.

O’Connor recognized that perhaps the hardest thing to handle in America is the idea that you are not going to get beyond where you are.

Flannery O’Connor also understood something that all of us in America need to understand as well as we can, which is that bigotry, any form of prejudice one uses to protect oneself from true personal revelation, is the thing out of which the great dangers come. I’ll read the passage in “Revelation” that Maureen Howard referred to, about all those people ending up on a train. The kind of train that Eichmann and his friends made us all remember is not abstract. Anti-Semitism is a term, racism is a term, sexism is a term, homophobia is a term. But in a sense they’re all abstract. What happens to people is specific: someone actually has someone else’s hand put on him or her with not a good intent. And when that happens, it’s often the result of objectifying problems and blaming them on another group of people. This is what Flannery O’Connor says in “Revelation”: Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them. Then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the homeowners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered whiteface cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed together in a boxcar, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.

Now, that’s the real story of the Jews in Europe. No matter how much conflict there was among them, how varied they might have been—that wasn’t what the Nazis were thinking about. You being a poor Jew, you being an upper-class Jew, you being a land-owning Jew, you being an educated Jew, a partially educated one, a magnanimous one, a selfish one, none of that made any difference. You were boxcarred and removed because you had been reduced to an abstraction. This statement from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” says as much about evil as anything I’ve read: “‘ Yes’m,’ the Misfit said as if he agreed. ‘Jesus thrown everything off balance…. I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.’” THE INVISIBLE PARADE | ROY BLOUNT JR.

The pleasure that I get from Flannery O’Connor is so intimate that it’s difficult to share. I’ve been trying to think of how to get at her, and it just occurred to me that I was reading about Carson McCullers the other day and it turns out that Carson was her middle name, and it was Mary Flannery O’Connor, and it’s June Bailey White, too. It could be that there’s an entire Ph.D. thesis to be done about Southern women writers who are funny and go by their middle names. Also, something that Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty had in common was that they lived in the town, in their home states, where the state insane asylum was. Maybe that’s more to the point than the middle-name thing. I thought about mentioning Flannery O’Connor’s influence on contemporary art, and of course the thing that sprang to mind was The Sopranos. They stole a wooden leg on the show not long ago— a lot like “Good Country People,” except in Flannery O’Connor stories you’ve got Paulie Walnuts and Ralphie, but you don’t have anybody as nice as Tony. I therefore think that Flannery O’Connor was tougher than the Mafia. Here’s another way in: by the terms that we rate success in the arts these days—which is to say, how broadly you get your face

before the public—Flannery O’Connor’s career peaked when she was five years old. She had a chicken, described as a frizzled chicken, that walked backwards. Word spread, and the Pathé people, makers of movie newsreels, actually came down to Georgia and filmed Flannery O’Connor and her backward-walking chicken. She said that changed her life. And then she went on to peacocks. I visited her in 1963, the year before she died, and met her peacocks. She gave me three peacock feathers and told me a couple of stories. She said that one of the hired men on the farm was telling her that he had eaten owl the other night, and she said, “What does owl taste like?” And he said, “About like crow.” And she said, “What kind of owl was it?” And he said, “Well, it was a scrooch owl.” And she said, “You mean a screech owl?” And he said, “No, a scrooch owl. One of those owls that will land on a limb next to a bird and scrooch over and scrooch over until he knocks him off and grabs him.” The best way, I think, to appreciate Flannery O’Connor is to say to somebody else who is familiar with her work something like: “The monks of old slept in their coffins.” Or, “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” In context, one of the funniest and most terrible lines in American literature is “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life”—which is the last sentence in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But you have to read the story in order to appreciate how funny it is and how awful it is. There’s a moment in Wise Blood that I love. A guy called Enoch Emory has told Hazel Motes that there’s a mummy in the place they’re going to, and he has to show it to him: He pointed down through the trees. “Muvseevum,” he said. The strange word made him shiver. That was the first time he had ever said it aloud. A piece of gray building was showing where he pointed. It grew larger as they went down the hill, then as they came to the end of the wood and stepped out on the gravel driveway, it seemed to shrink suddenly. It was round and sootcolored. There were columns at the front of it and in between each column there was an eyeless stone woman holding a pot in her hand. A concrete band was over the columns and the

letters, MVSEVM, were cut into it. Enoch was afraid to pronounce the word again. Every time I see a museum I just think “Muvseevum,” and there’s pleasure in that. One thing that the South can be proud of is that our candidates for the greatest American musical figure, Louis Armstrong, and greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, and greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, and greatest American short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, could all write things that make you laugh. The North can come up with some good candidates, but I don’t think they’re funny. Flannery O’Connor’s humor is hard to capture in conversation. In her essay about having peacocks, which is what she went to after backward-walking chickens, she wrote: “Frequently the cock combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eeeooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.” BAD BEHAVIOR | MARY GORDON

Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have seen the light of day because of its parent, journalism. Whatever the novel does, it gives us information. The traditional novelist believes that narrative explains and illumines, that we follow him for the number of hours we do because in tracing the ins and outs of a character’s actions, in learning the inner secrets that constitute his character’s motivations, we will experience the display, the demonstration that we believe we need in order to enable us to know. Most storytellers believe that a story has a line, although in a lecture Flannery O’Connor recalled

this story about Henry James, who would write to someone who had sent him something he didn’t like by saying, “Your subject is very good, and you have dealt with it straightforwardly.” If this line is not a straight one, at least it is a line that seems to be unbroken. However elaborate the logic, there is a logic the writer believes in: something happened to the character because of something that happened before; the character did something related to something he did before and something he may do again. He learns by seeing and doing, and we learn by seeing and doing with him. There is suspense, but this is in the realm of action rather than character. Prose fiction is bourgeois in its origins, and above all the bourgeois temperament believes that life is knowable and if not predictable, at least it is not a series of unpredictable shocks.

For most prose writers before the twentieth century, vision was granted to their characters through a series of enlightening actions, through suffering, through a gradual accrual of wisdom or the full flowering of a good nature or a good heart. Even Dostoevsky’s characters, for all their wild oscillations, learn in ways that are traceable to their early appearances in the fiction. But how do Flannery O’Connor’s characters learn and grow? Who are the teachers, and what is their pedagogy? Flannery O’Connor is not a child of the Enlightenment. Her enemy is always bourgeois respectability, and although she is the opposite of a bohemian, and has not much interest in the aristocracy, it is ordinary law-abidingness and common sense that she sees as

the true death dealers in her world. The Protestant virtues of thrift, temperance, probity, sexual clean living exist in her fiction only to be exploded and destroyed. Good behavior, even good intentions, are in her fiction almost always a blind behind which self-satisfaction grows and prospers, fattening the good behaver until the flesh grows up around his piggy eyes. O’Connor does not believe that in every day and every way we are getting better and better. You can only imagine the kind of scorn she would heap if, walking into a bookstore, she saw a section sign-posted Self-Improvement. For she does not believe that the self can improve the self. She would even reject the term “improvement.” She would say that the self is redeemed. Does this make her a Catholic Writer? Certainly, Catholics have claimed her as a Catholic writer, and she has served as a kind of bogeyman for Catholic women writers who have come after her. A dream that I had about her will illustrate this. I dreamed that Flannery O’Connor and I were speaking together on a panel. Her hair was perfectly coifed; she was wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and a perfectly crisp white blouse, and perfectly shined penny loafers. My hair was filthy, my slip was showing, my stockings were ripped. In the dream she said to me, “Your problem is that you don’t believe in perfection.” And I said to her, because it was my dream, “I do believe in perfection, but you think perfection is flawlessness, and I think it’s completeness.” Well, that just shows how she can scare a Catholic girl, because we do think of her as a Catholic writer. But why is she a Catholic writer? What is the difference between her perception and the perceptions of Protestant Fundamentalism?

For one thing, the terms she uses come to her from a Catholic rather than a Protestant tradition. The most important of these terms are “Mystery” and “Grace.” In her essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she says, “The serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be entirely explained by the adequate motivation of its characters, or by a believable imitation of a way of life, or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story for him to occupy himself with. That is not to say that he doesn’t have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate reference or a right theology; he does; but he has to be concerned with these only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted. The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Whatever beliefs she professed as an orthodox Catholic, her fiction suggests that not only is human fate mysterious, human behavior is as well, and for this reason all notions of reward and punishment are entirely beside the point for her. This, I believe, separates her from Protestant Fundamentalists. Her characters may be deeply moved by the fear of hellfire but she is interested in hellfire only as it interests them. Even the terms of reward and punishment are difficult to discern in her fiction. Many of her characters have soul-expanding experiences that end in death. Are the characters,

then, said to be rewarded or punished? Is Nelson, the fat dull child of the do-gooder social worker father, who is cloaked in a noble mourning invisible to his father, rewarded or punished in “The Lame Shall Enter First” by the death he achieves when he tries to join his dead mother among the stars, urged by the wily Satanic crippled boy who will not take Nelson’s father’s good intentions for what they are? Mrs. May in “Greenleaf” is gored by a bull: is this her comeuppance or a rapture of ecstasy? Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is smacked in the face by the pocketbook of a furious black woman wearing a hat identical to hers: she meets her end, but is it a punishment for racist condescension or the corridor to paradise? The very unanswerability of these questions, and the fact that the characters’ fates are random, disproportionate, and surprising, puts them smack in the corral of mystery and outside the territory of motivation.

The very unanswerability of these questions, and the fact that the characters’ fates are random, disproportionate, and surprising, puts them smack in the corral of mystery and outside the territory of motivation. The idea of human happiness, human prosperity, is untraceable. If we look at the endings of O’Connor’s greatest stories, we see that the characters, most of them miserable and entirely unlikable, are often treated to a bounty that nothing in their lives could have suggested they deserved. And although we have seen and known them as clearly as any character in any fiction written by anyone who has ever held a pen (she reminds us in her essays that a fiction writer’s job is, after all, incarnational and that ideas can only be apprehended through the senses), we follow these characters to a world in which sensory experience is only the first step. For all their joylessness, these characters, broken apart or exploded by shock, violence, and the presence of death, often enter a realm of sheer joy. For all her austere and styptic beauty, O’Connor often grants her characters a lyrical beneficence, their reward for their loss of decency. Mrs. May’s goring is a great love scene: “She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had

no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip…. The entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.” Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” runs to get help for his stricken foolish mother and learns love in the process: “The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into a world of guilt and sorrow.” The child Norton’s death is described in this way: “the child hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space.” And Mrs. Turpin, in “Revelation,” is catapulted into a mystical vision by a girl who throws a book at her in a doctor’s office, outraged by her stupid conversation, calling her an “old warthog from hell.” But her reward for it is this: Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once

as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but unblinking on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. This is not the world of justice, but the realm of Grace, where nothing can be earned or planned. In discussing her own work, O’Connor said: “I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as the story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in a story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” WISE BLOOD | ROBERT GIROUX

As Flannery’s friend, as well as her editor and publisher from the start, I marveled at her excellence as a writer and regretted her early death. I first met her in 1949, when Robert Lowell brought her to Harcourt, Brace and I sensed a tremendous moral and intellectual strength behind her soft-spoken Georgia speech, her clear-eyed gaze and quiet manner. After concluding that she knew exactly what she wanted to do as a writer, I was disappointed to learn that she had signed a contract with another publisher for Wise Blood, which she was awarded because she won first prize in a contest. Fortunately for me, when her would-be editor read her novel’s later chapters, he was so baffled by their strangeness that he told Flannery she would have to abandon “her aloneness” and make the book clearer, at which she wrote him: “I am not writing a conventional novel…. The finished book will be just as odd, if not odder, than what you now have.” At their final meeting the editor came to the conclusion, Flannery said, “that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.” This led him to cancel the contract (she did not have to return the prize money) and she signed up with me. I’ve often been asked how I knew she was a genius. The answer is I really didn’t know, but had a hunch. Her demeanor, her reluctance to theorize about the book, her integrity impressed me. When Elizabeth McKee, her literary agent, sent me the first nine chapters of Wise Blood, I was convinced. Earlier in 1940, when I started at Harcourt, I had become a good friend of Robert Fitzgerald through one his teachers, Dudley Fitts, and I edited his and Fitts’s co-translations of Greek drama, ending with Robert’s fantastic solo rendering of Oedipus at Colonus. The Fitzgeralds, I was delighted to hear from Lowell, had arranged for Flannery to live with them and work on her novel in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where I joined them in 1950 for their daughter Maria’s christening, at which Flannery and I stood up as her godparents. The Fitzgerald family’s contribution to the O’Connor mythos is nothing less than fabulous. On Flannery’s death her will named Robert her literary executor. Then came Mystery and Manners,

Flannery’s essays, which Sally compiled and Robert introduced. Of even greater importance was The Habit of Being, the big collection of letters which Sally compiled and edited, revealing the person behind the work and particularly her sense of humor. Flannery’s letters to “A,” a fellow-Georgian named Elizabeth Hester, whose tragic suicide occurred two years ago, were perhaps the most extraordinary part of the book. In 1979 Michael Fitzgerald persuaded that great film director John Huston to make a movie of Wise Blood. Michael was its producer and his brother Benedict wrote the script. When Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein added Flannery to the roster of the Library of America in 1988, as the third woman writer in the series after Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton, I proposed that Sally edit the volume. She quickly became the preeminent O’Connor scholar here and abroad. Flannery’s mother, Regina, asked Sally to take on the task of writing the authorized biography; it was unfinished at the time of her death last June. The greatest gap in the proceedings tonight is Sally’s absence. Wise Blood was published in 1952 and the reviews were not good, but two critics were perceptive. Caroline Gordon wrote: “I was more impressed by Wise Blood than any novel I have read in a long time. Her picture of the modern world is terrifying. Kafka is the only one of our contemporaries who has achieved such effects.” In the Sunday New York Times, novelist William Goyen wrote: “One cannot take this book lightly, or lightly turn away from it. It introduces the author as a writer of power.” When I moved to FSG, I learned that Wise Blood was out of print in the cloth edition, and we republished it. I persuaded Flannery to write a brief note for the second edition, though she had always refused to characterize the novel. Ten years after writing Wise Blood, she said of it: “It is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such very serious. … That belief in Christ is a matter of life and death to some has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.” Wise Blood is still in print. In the three years following the publication of Wise Blood, Flannery’s development as a writer of stories was amazing. Despite her illness (lupus), her writing became better and better. Catharine

Carver, an admirer of Flannery and a great editor herself, who had come to work with me in this period, brought each new story to my desk with almost the same words: “Wait till you read this one!” It was a magnificent series, one beauty after another, including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” “The Displaced Person,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The River,” and that masterpiece of a story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” When dramatizations of the stories began to appear on TV, Flannery said that locally, especially among her family and relatives, her importance as a writer rose from zero to one hundred overnight. The best TV versions had John Houseman playing the priest in “The Displaced Person,” and Agnes Moorehead and Gene Kelly (whom Flannery called a tap-dancer) starring in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” When dramatizations of the stories began to appear on TV, Flannery said that locally, especially among her family and relatives, her importance as a writer rose from zero to one hundred overnight.

Once on an editorial scouting trip, I journeyed from the Trappist monastery south of Louisville, where I had met with Thomas Merton, to the airport at Atlanta. There I phoned Flannery to tell her I had a present for her from Thomas Merton—an inscribed copy of the limited edition of his meditation, Prometheus. She promptly invited me to spend the weekend with her and Regina at their farm, “Andalusia,” near Milledgeville. When I got there I never saw so many peacocks—forty of them, in all sizes from peachicks to the full splendor of their papas. She told me her love of peacocks dated from her childhood in Savannah at age five when the Pathé Newsreel people sent cameramen to film her Cochin bantam because it walked backwards. At Andalusia I noticed the peacocks were so slow crossing the road that the rear part of their long trains got caught under the taxi wheels, so they waited patiently for release, leaving behind a couple of feathers. When I was taken to my guest room, I found plenty of bookshelves and good books, though none of Flannery’s. The next day we were invited as lunch

guests to Milledgeville, by Regina’s older sister. Mrs. Kline’s whitepillared antebellum mansion stood in the center of town and I was told that Milledgeville had served as the temporary capital of Georgia during the Civil War. Flannery said she was pleased with Merton’s gift and she asked many questions about the monastery routine. Did I, as a guest, follow the prescribed offices of the day. Not the earliest—Lauds, at 3:45 A.M. That was too early for me, but I tried to follow the rest, ending at sundown when the monks, but not necessarily the guests, retired for the day. Flannery told me a new Trappist monastery was being built nearby at Conyers, Georgia and we drove over to meet the young abbot, Father Bourne, whose name I recognized as one of Thomas Merton’s censors, the one Merton preferred to the others, because he was the most understanding. The financing of the new monastery came mostly from the royalties of The Seven Storey Mountain. To my relief, during my visit at Andalusia there was little or no literary or publishing talk, except that Flannery did reveal she was currently reading everything she could find by Lord Acton, the historian who wrote, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” On Monday morning, the last day of my visit, at breakfast with Flannery and her mother, Regina suddenly asked: “Mr. Giroux, why can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?” I was expecting Flannery to laugh, as I was about to, or at least smile, but when I saw her poker-faced look, I realized I was facing something of a crisis. I answered that since in my opinion many of Flannery’s characters were aspects of herself, including the young men, she did write about nice people. Apparently this ended the crisis, since Regina offered no other editorial suggestions. On the whole it was an interesting visit, but I was glad to head home. When Flannery died at age 39, Thomas Merton was not exaggerating his estimate of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good writers like Katherine Anne Porter, Hemingway and Sartre, but rather with “someone like Sophocles…. I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”

These talks were originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Flannery O’Connor, sponsored by PEN American Center and Lincoln Center.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE GROTESQUE IN SOUTHERN FICTION Flannery O’Connor

I

think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about. My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea—she put her finger inside the cup. These are not times when writers in this country can very well speak for one another. In the twenties there were those at Vanderbilt University who felt enough kinship with each other’s ideas to issue a pamphlet called, I’ll Take My Stand, and in the thirties there were writers whose social consciousness set them all going in more or less the same direction; but today there are no good writers, bound even loosely together, who would be so bold as to say that they speak for a generation or for each other. Today each writer speaks for himself, even though he may not be sure that his work is important enough to justify his doing so. I think that every writer, when he speaks of his own approach to fiction, hopes to show that, in some crucial and deep sense, he is a realist; and for some of us, for whom the ordinary aspects of daily life prove to be of no great fictional interest, this is very difficult. I have found that if one’s young hero can’t be identified with the average American boy, or even with the average American delinquent, then his perpetrator will have a good deal of explaining to do.

The first necessity confronting him will be to say what he is not doing; for even if there are no genuine schools in American letters today, there is always some critic who has just invented one and who is ready to put you into it. If you are a Southern writer, that label, and all the misconceptions that go with it, is pasted on you at once, and you are left to get it off as best you can. I have found that no matter for what purpose peculiar to your special dramatic needs you use the Southern scene, you are still thought by the general reader to be writing about the South and are judged by the fidelity your fiction has to typical Southern life. I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs. Every time I heard about The School of Southern Degeneracy, I felt like Br’er Rabbit stuck on the Tarbaby.

The social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction. When I first began to write, my own particular bête noire was that mythical entity, The School of Southern Degeneracy. Every time I heard about The School of Southern Degeneracy, I felt like Br’er Rabbit stuck on the Tarbaby. There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the more limited objectives he now has. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end. Hawthorne knew his own problems and perhaps anticipated ours when he said he did not write novels, he wrote romances. Today many readers and critics have set up for the novel a kind of orthodoxy. They demand a realism of fact which may, in the end, limit rather than broaden the novel’s scope. They associate the only legitimate material for long fiction with the movement of social forces,

with the typical, with fidelity to the way things look and happen in normal life. Along with this usually goes a wholesale treatment of those aspects of existence that the Victorian novelist could not directly deal with. It has only been within the last five or six decades that writers have won this supposed emancipation. This was a license that opened up many possibilities for fiction, but it is always a bad day for culture when any liberty of this kind is assumed to be general. The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable. The writer who writes within what might be called the modern romance tradition may not be writing novels which in all respects partake of a novelistic orthodoxy; but as long as these works have vitality, as long as they present something that is alive, however eccentric its life may seem to the general reader, then they have to be dealt with; and they have to be dealt with on their own terms. When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. But for this occasion, we may leave such misapplications aside and consider the kind of fiction that may be called grotesque with good reason, because of a directed intention that way on the part of the author. In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward

mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider. All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality. Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances. If the novelist is in tune with this spirit, if he believes that actions are predetermined by psychic make-up or the economic situation or some other determinable factor, then he will be concerned above all with an accurate reproduction of the things that most immediately concern man, with the natural forces that he feels control his destiny. Such a writer may produce a great tragic naturalism, for by his responsibility to the things he sees, he may transcend the limitations of his narrow vision. On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves—whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not. To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there. I would not like to suggest that this kind of writer, because his interest is predominantly in mystery, is able in any sense to slight the concrete. Fiction begins where human knowledge begins—with the

senses—and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium. I do believe, however, that the kind of writer I am describing will use the concrete in a more drastic way. His way will much more obviously be the way of distortion. Henry James said that Conrad in his fiction did things in the way that took the most doing. I think the writer of grotesque fiction does them in the way that takes the least, because in his work distances are so great. He’s looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees. It’s not necessary to point out that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine. Even though the writer who produces grotesque fiction may not consider his characters any more freakish than ordinary fallen man usually is, his audience is going to; and it is going to ask him—or more often, tell him—why he has chosen to bring such maimed souls alive. Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is the true antibourgeois style, but I believe that in this country, the general reader has managed to connect the grotesque with the sentimental, for whenever he speaks of it favorably, he seems to associate it with the writer’s compassion. It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything. Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way, the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it will have the ascendency over feeling. In nineteenth-century American writing, there was a good deal of grotesque literature which came from the frontier and was supposed to be funny; but our present grotesque characters, comic though

they may be, are at least not primarily so. They seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I believe that they come about from the prophetic vision peculiar to any novelist whose concerns I have been describing. In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque. Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christcentered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature. There is another reason in the Southern situation that makes for a tendency toward the grotesque and this is the prevalence of good Southern writers. I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn’t just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

The Southern writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets.

The Southern writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets. When Hawthorne said that he wrote romances, he was attempting, in effect, to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinisms and to steer it in the direction of poetry. I think this tradition of the dark and divisive romance-novel has combined with the comic-grotesque tradition, and with the lessons all writers have learned from the naturalists, to preserve our Southern literature for at least a little while from becoming the kind of thing Mr. Van Wyck Brooks desired when he said he hoped that our next literary phase would restore that central literature which combines the great subject matter of the middlebrow writers with the technical expertness bequeathed by the new critics and which would thereby restore literature as a mirror and guide for society. For the kind of writer I have been describing, a literature which mirrors society would be no fit guide for it, and one which did manage, by sheer art, to do both these things would have to have recourse to more violent means than middlebrow subject matter and mere technical expertness. We are not living in times when the realist of distances is understood or well thought of, even though he may be in the dominant tradition of American letters. Whenever the public is heard from, it is heard demanding a literature which is balanced and which will somehow heal the ravages of our times. In the name of social order, liberal thought, and sometimes even Christianity, the novelist is asked to be the handmaid of his age. I have come to think of this handmaid as being very like the Negro porter who set Henry James’s dressing case down in a puddle when James was leaving the hotel in Charleston. James was then obliged to sit in the crowded carriage with the satchel on his knees. All through the South the poor man was ignobly served, and he afterwards wrote that our domestic servants were the last people in

the world who should be employed in the way they were, for they were by nature unfitted for it. The case is the same with the novelist. When he is given the function of domestic, he is going to set the public’s luggage down in puddle after puddle. The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision, and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely affect the way he is able to show what he sees. This is another thing which in these times increases the tendency toward the grotesque in fiction. There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.

Those writers who speak for and with their age are able to do so with a great deal more ease and grace than those who speak counter to prevailing attitudes. I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up. You may say that the serious writer doesn’t have to bother about the tired reader, but he does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club. I used to think it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in Botteghe Oscure, if they are any good at all, you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary or the state insane asylum or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs.

And his need, of course, is to be lifted up. There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence. I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture that it gave in Dante’s. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved in the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself. There is no literary orthodoxy that can be prescribed as settled for the fiction writer, not even that of Henry James, who balanced the elements of traditional realism and romance so admirably within each of his novels. But this much can be said. The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

The problem for such a novelist will be to know how far he can distort without destroying, and in order not to destroy, he will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to his work. This descent into himself will, at the same time, be a descent into his region. It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and I feel it is a vision which we in the South must at least try to understand if we want to participate in the continuance of a vital Southern literature. I hate to think that in twenty years Southern writers too may be writing about men in grayflannel suits and may have lost their ability to see that these gentlemen are even greater freaks than what we are writing about now. I hate to think of the day when the Southern writer will satisfy the tired reader.

On Charlotte Miss Bronte & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing after prayers and walk all three, one after the other, around the table in the parlor till nearly eleven o’clock. Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died, Miss Anne & Miss Bronte took it up—and now my heart aches to hear Miss Bronte walking, walking on alone. —Anne Carson

HOMEMAKING Albert Mobilio and Geoffrey O’Brien

ALBERT MOBILIO:

In a very clever book called Home Rules that was published a few years ago, the authors look at the rules that govern a house. They’re very detailed, very particular: No ball playing in the hallway. Always make sure you shut this cabinet, because if you don’t shut it in a particular way, it hangs open and grandma hits her head. GEOFFREY O’BRIEN:

It’s like the Code of Hammurabi …

MOBILIO:

The Code of Hammurabi for every rickety shack and every McMansion on the block. What you can and can’t do. What you have to do to maintain a home. O’BRIEN:

I know a writer who tries to keep a copy of everything he considers essential to starting civilization over again in case he gets stuck with that job. Is that what we’re unconsciously doing, collecting books and images and pieces of music, attempting to preserve civilization as we know it? Are we afraid nobody else will take on the job? MOBILIO:

I don’t know if that’s the reason. Perhaps we surround ourselves with these cultural artifacts because so many of us now live outside of what used to be called civilization. It’s now possible to have the Great Library at Rhodes in your trailer in Montana. On CD

you can have the great music of any number of cultures, and on your CD-ROM you can have any number of art reproductions as well as several thousand essential books. You can have all of Western culture in a 10 by 12 room, and you can participate in that culture. You no longer have to live in Paris or Berlin or Athens … O’BRIEN:

Tocqueville describes going into a cabin in the American wilderness, and this is for him an emblematic moment: he travels through miles and miles of wilderness, and arrives at the cabin. And inside there’s the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, just a few volumes. This is all that has been brought to the cabin by the cultured and civilized man who lives there. Whereas we now can bring the complete products of several centuries of music and books, and we get to define which ones are worth having. No two people are going to have the same list. MOBILIO:

This idea of home can clearly be broken into two phases: a pre-modern notion, and a post-technological one. And perhaps it also breaks down in the way that you’re suggesting: the European village, to the European capital, to the New World, to America, to the place where, as Gertrude Stein says, “There are more people where no one is than there are people where anyone is”—that is, the place where you have to reconstitute a center, even if it’s very provisional and very personal. O’BRIEN:

Because otherwise you are in the void. So basically you’re decorating your isolation, or your wilderness home, with pictures of some other world. MOBILIO:

Or redefining a pinpoint on the map as the center of this ongoing cultural matrix that we call civilization. You don’t need to be in Paris in 1890, you don’t need to be in New York in 1950 … You can have both those places in Oxnard 2001.

O’BRIEN:

But those cultural artifacts that furnish the new technological home grew out of intense social interaction. Bach wrote cantatas because people were going to church every week; without the occasion there’s no cantata. Without the Globe Theater there’s no Shakespeare. MOBILIO:

Does the lack of such interaction necessarily lead to

sterility? O’BRIEN:

The interaction is still there, very much so. All you have to do is watch young people using the Internet the way only they know how to use it, as a kind of town square. Going out on Saturday night can mean sitting in front of the computer and fielding instant messages from all over in very complex ways that in effect add up to a global conference call. In some ways this is a more perfected interaction than was available in the past. It’s just a bit disembodied. MOBILIO:

Well, it’s more efficient—I don’t know about perfected. I don’t know if it could replace the passeggiata in an Italian village, when everyone goes out and meets for a stroll. O’BRIEN:

Well, you’re not going to get the Canterbury Tales out of this. E-mail doesn’t lend itself to a rich sense of smells and textures. Communication on the Internet tends to become very idea centered. MOBILIO:

It’s efficient; it gets to the point. It allows you to be at the center of an artistic and cultural community while you’re sitting at a terminal at the end of a phone line. Being home used to mean being in a particular house in a particular village or city, and you were defined by where you lived. O’BRIEN: MOBILIO:

To some extent, it also meant being trapped—

Well, the theme of a good bit of the artistic production of the past century has been about leaving home. But now you can

reconstitute the center of the world as yourself. Not to harp on the idea of America, but in this country, home has often been seen as an outpost. You were talking about home as the cabin in the woods, as the fort at the far edge, even if it’s the far edge of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and the fort is a three-story mansion. O’BRIEN:

At the extreme edges you have the home-schooling movement, which is largely a rebellion against urban, secular culture. It’s about cutting the wires and going back to—what?— McGuffey’s Readers … MOBILIO:

Little House on the Prairie—

O’BRIEN:

We can invent our own culture, or we can replicate the culture we want, which is perhaps a culture that went out of existence somewhere around 1910. MOBILIO:

Do you think that this is connected in some way to the increasing assertiveness of regional literatures? Thirty years ago, if you were a poet of the Northwest, you might well have felt the need to be published in New York, or someday come to New York. Now it’s more than sufficient for a poet in Seattle or Portland to be well known there, to be available principally in bookstores there, to teach there, to have a following there, and to really be more or less unknown to similar poets who live elsewhere. O’BRIEN:

You could go back and find analogies. I was just reading about Robert Burns, who came on the scene as very much a local poet, full of rather blasphemous and obscene and politically challenging ideas. But when he became aware that he was in fact popular in London, he edited his earlier work and began to market himself for a larger audience. MOBILIO:

In the eighteenth century, London was something to aspire to. I guess I’m suggesting that New York is no longer the cultural

home for American arts. It’s not the place people feel they must return to or aspire to. O’BRIEN:

If we’re talking about writing, I think it’s doubtful that anything can be called a center anymore. MOBILIO:

That concept of centrality feels very much connected not to the physicality of home but to the idea of home—the faith that causes an individual to believe: “My village is central. This town in Macedonia is the center of the world.” This is a notion that dates back to ancient times. O’BRIEN:

But at the same time you had a culture which was somehow mysteriously disseminated to outlying areas. Charles Chesnutt, the black American novelist who flourished around the end of the nineteenth century, describes an essentially rural world where people were reading Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Robert Burns. This rural, post–Civil War, very troubled, and not infrequently very violent culture was suffused with writing, and writing was one of the things that held the culture together, provided some semblance of what it considered to be civilization. Chesnutt describes a Southern town where the local whites regularly got together to more or less reinvent the world of Walter Scott through a tournament, a big masquerade party. Everybody was thoroughly conversant with the imagery and the script. And there is no real equivalent for that now. Or if there is, it changes from one year to the next.

MOBILIO:

Well, maybe. Certainly popular culture—let’s say the movies of Steven Spielberg, the books of Stephen King, and television shows from Bonanza to Seinfeld—constitutes that kind of cultural home. O’BRIEN:

But it changes so rapidly … What used to be generational change is now almost annual change. MOBILIO:

Micro-generational. Exactly.

O’BRIEN:

Walter Scott was popular culture, too; his influence just lasted a bit longer. MOBILIO:

I think that it lasted a lot longer. It lasted. But however temporary the feeling that might attach itself to a particular popculture object right now, the attachment to pop culture in general, particularly electronic pop culture, is some simulacrum of home. Remember Within the Context of No Context? In it, George Trow introduced the grid of two hundred million, which is another version of the American home. There’s the cabin out in the middle of nowhere with your volume of Shakespeare or the cabin filled with CDROMS of all the great works of literature, and there is the mass experience, the football stadium, or as Trow put it, the grid of two hundred million. You watch a television show like The Super Bowl because everyone else is watching it, not because of anything intrinsic to the performance or the sport. And I think this participation is what passes for home.

O’BRIEN:

It wasn’t possible to have that kind of shared experience before technology made it possible. The kind of shared experience you could have had was much more on the level of local games on the public green. MOBILIO:

I’m suggesting that the mass is no longer abstract—it’s electronically palpable and it may constitute an idea of home. Think about the way the year 2000 was rung in, with simultaneous broadcasts around the world, which created a space on your television that conceptually, theoretically, united all of those particular places in one celebration, in one temporal zone. O’BRIEN:

There’s a line of George Oppen’s—I think it’s, “We will be told at once of anything that happens.” He was registering that something had really changed. MOBILIO:

It seems related to the pre-modern notion of home in the village, where when someone breaks a leg everyone knows within a few minutes. One hesitates to use the expression “global village,” but McLuhan was obviously on to something about electronic media. That village has long since been global, but it’s now even portable. All you have to do is live someplace where you can get a satellite beam. I wonder whether this notion of home—this culturally constituted and electronically fueled notion—is antithetical to the quietness of mind that might be connected to producing culture. As a species we have evolved with a much more limited notion of home—we can only take in so much information about what’s going on in sixteen other time zones. O’BRIEN:

Well, there are two ideas of home. In one sense home is where you go to get away from the world, to screen out everything that’s going on out there. The idea that you come home in order to tune in the world and become aware of everything that’s going on

everywhere, which you’re not necessarily aware of while you’re going about your day, is an inversion. MOBILIO:

Would Tolstoy have been able to reflect in the way that he did on Russian society if he had been aware of everything that was happening in sub-Saharan Africa, as we are almost routinely? O’BRIEN:

If you can call that awareness …

MOBILIO:

We have some knowledge, but I think that knowledge contributes to a vaguely relativistic notion that there are no centralities. Tolstoy believed that the world he was investigating, with some degree of isolation and mental quiet, was a center worthy of contemplation. Eudora Welty spent her entire life in a small Mississippi town—which might sound like a ten-decade prison sentence to some folks. But she had faith that her home was central. So did Flannery O’Connor. O’BRIEN:

And Faulkner.

MOBILIO:

Do you think that our cultural electronic home has outgrown us? Outgrown our ability to live in it? Are we living in homes that are really too big for us? O’BRIEN:

They’re more like hotel rooms.

MOBILIO:

Yes! When we walk into another room, we don’t know how to turn on the lights, we don’t know how to get the temperature set correctly, we’re never really at home. O’BRIEN:

But many people don’t want the kind of home that generated all of those novels of small-town life. I’m thinking of Dawn Powell writing about the quiet tedium and horror of growing up in a little Ohio town. People might want a place in the country, but they don’t want that.

MOBILIO:

They want a satellite dish on the house in Mad River.

O’BRIEN:

They do not want Spoon River Anthology as their lifestyle, and I think that’s true not only in America but everywhere. Perhaps the goal is a place that you can erase at will, or push a button and change the wallpaper. There’s a desire not to be trapped, and maybe a fear of the sort of durable structures which in one sense define civilization. Durability has a somewhat different meaning for me. I’m a lifelong pack rat, and the stuff in my life just keeps piling up. You take this stuff along with you because it does become your home; you put it on your back and move on to the next place. MOBILIO:

I took it to be one of my first intimations of mortality when, around the age of thirty, I realized I had to get rid of some books in my apartment. I got rid of all of the volumes of philosophy that I’d acquired because I thought that someday I really should be reading Hume and Locke. One day I realized that if I ever needed to do this, I could go to a library. O’BRIEN:

For me, home is my books. A new place becomes home when I’ve unpacked the books and put them on the shelf. Of course I make it different every time. I don’t want to just replicate a previous home—I tell myself, “Oh, it’s going to be better this time. We’re going to arrange the books differently, and we’re going to get rid of these, we’re going to get some new ones.” Homes change, but books are the thread. MOBILIO:

For me, home is pedestrian life. I like being able to leave my cabin in the woods, which is my apartment in Brooklyn, and walk into an ongoing world, where there are people I know, people I don’t know, all kinds of possibilities. When we leave here tonight, I will step onto the street and it’s entirely possible I could run into someone I haven’t seen in ten years, it’s entirely possible I could run into someone I saw earlier this afternoon. And I may be walking past

a dozen people that I know of, that I’ve read, and I won’t even recognize them. But I’m in this world of possibility, and mutability, that I found intoxicating when I visited New York at the age of nineteen, and it still feels intoxicating to me. O’BRIEN:

How does that contrast to walking down the street in other cities, in other parts of the world? MOBILIO:

I feel the same thing: being on any city street is participating in something of international dimensions. But for me there is something epic and legendary about New York, and that is why I make it my home. O’BRIEN:

Hey, Whitman.

MOBILIO:

Yes. It is a place where you can be private and you can be as large as it is conceivable to be large. O’BRIEN:

You can’t get that on TV, folks.

MOBILIO:

And you can’t get that on TV.

HOME AND AWAY In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and the woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged. —Lydia Davis There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don’t even recognize my own toothbrush. —Jonathan Lethem

GOING OUT FOR A WALK Max Beerbohm

I

t is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator. When I grew up it seemed to me that the one advantage of living in London was that nobody ever wanted me to come out for a walk. London’s very drawbacks—its endless noise and bustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in it—assured this one immunity. Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say “Come out for a walk!” in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk. Any one thus desirous feels that he has a right to impose his will on whomever he sees comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading. It is easy to say simply “No” to an old friend. In the case of a mere acquaintance one wants some excuse. “I wish I could, but”— nothing ever occurs to me except “I have some letters to write.” This formula is unsatisfactory in three ways. (1) It isn’t believed. (2) It compels you to rise from your chair, go to the writing-table, and sit improvising a letter to somebody until the walkmonger (just not daring to call you liar and hypocrite) shall have lumbered out of the room. (3) It won’t operate on Sunday mornings. “There’s no post out till this evening” clinches the matter; and you may as well go quietly.

Walking for walking’s sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the brain. Many a man has professed to me that his brain never works so well as when he is swinging along the high road or over hill and dale. This boast is not confirmed by my memory of anybody who on a Sunday morning has forced me to partake of his adventure. Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have of power to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting on a chair, or standing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The ideas that came so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they now? where that encyclopaedic knowledge which he bore so lightly? where the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning over any topic that was started? The man’s face that was so mobile is set now; gone is the light from his fine eyes. He says that A. (our host) is a thoroughly good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds that A. is one of the best fellows he has ever met. We tramp another furlong or so, and he says that Mrs. A. is a charming woman. Presently he adds that she is one of the most charming women he has ever known. We pass an inn. He reads vapidly aloud to me: “The King’s Arms. Licensed to sell Ales and Spirits.” I foresee that during the rest of the walk he will read aloud any inscription that occurs. We pass a milestone. He points at it with his stick, and says “Uxminster. 11 Miles.” We turn a sharp corner at the foot of a hill. He points at the wall, and says “Drive Slowly.” I see far ahead, on the other side of the hedge bordering the high road, a small notice-board. He sees it too. He keeps his eye on it. And in due course “Trespassers,” he says, “Will Be Prosecuted.” Poor man!—mentally a wreck. Luncheon at the A.s, however, salves him and floats him in full sail. Behold him once more the life and soul of the party. Surely he will never, after the bitter lesson of this morning, go out for another walk. An hour later, I see him striding forth, with a new companion. I watch him out of sight. I know what he is saying. He is saying that I am rather a dull man to go a walk with. He will presently add that I am one of the dullest men he ever went a walk with. Then he will devote himself to reading out the inscriptions.

How comes it, this immediate deterioration in those who go walking for walking’s sake? Just what happens? I take it that not by his reasoning faculties is a man urged to this enterprise. He is urged, evidently, by something in him that transcends reason; by his soul, I presume. Yes, it must be the soul that raps out the “Quick march!” to the body. —“Halt! Stand at ease!” interposes the brain, and “To what destination,” it suavely asks the soul, “and on what errand, are you sending the body?”—“On no errand whatsoever,” the soul makes answer, “and to no destination at all. It is just like you to be always on the look-out for some subtle ulterior motive. The body is going out because the mere fact of its doing so is a sure indication of nobility, probity, and rugged grandeur of character.”—“Very well, Vagula, have your own wayula! But I,” says the brain, “flatly refuse to be mixed up in this tomfoolery. I shall go to sleep till it is over.” The brain then wraps itself up in its own convolutions, and falls into a dreamless slumber from which nothing can rouse it till the body has been safely deposited indoors again. Even if you go to some definite place, for some definite purpose, the brain would rather you took a vehicle; but it does not make a point of this; it will serve you well enough unless you are going out for a walk. It won’t, while your legs are vying with each other, do any deep thinking for you, nor even any close thinking; but it will do any number of small odd jobs for you willingly—provided that your legs, also, are making themselves useful, not merely bandying you about to gratify the pride of the soul. Such as it is, this essay was composed in the course of a walk, this morning. I am not one of those extremists who must have a vehicle to every destination. I never go out of my way, as it were, to avoid exercise. I take it as it comes, and take it in good part. That valetudinarians are always chattering about it, and indulging in it to excess, is no reason for despising it. I am inclined to think that in moderation it is rather good for one, physically. But, pending a time when no people wish me to go and see them, and I have no wish to go and see any one, and there is nothing whatever for me to do off my own premises, I never will go out for a walk.

[1918]

On Reading Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous? —Anne Carson

TENEBRAE Richard Matthews

for Clare Hogben Matthews, 1925-1999 1. Leaving England When asked she would prefer to tell About her sister’s rescue from Norway: The night after the Germans seized Oslo, The truck ride into Sweden, the long way Home across Siberia, the Pacific, The States, with their father who would write About it all. But pressed she’d recollect The pitch-dark pitching steamer lighting Out of the harbor, blacked-out Liverpool A hulked up null behind, and her mother squeezed Into her bunk, reciting Noyes and de la Mare. Gone now, but ask her anyway: is there ease On your new voyage, or anyone to tell? I’ll listen and say to the dark “The Listeners.” 2. Long Island “The house of unripe figs,” Bethpage, named for The town where Christ procured the ass he rode Into Jerusalem, and once itself known

As Jerusalem, once home to pickle farms And factories on Whitman’s fish-shaped island— A place to leave the city for. She spent the first Week hacking down the firs and hedge out front, Clearing out what would become her garden: Frail narcissi, irises, Stars-of-Holland, Day lilies, glads; each year a nursery tub Of annuals, sweet Williams, pinks, primroses; White peonies against the grey wood siding. Last year I rode the train out there—the house, Now yellow, hooped in a ruin of shrubs. 3. 1969 Summer of miracles, the pennant stretch, Seaver and Koosman all but unhittable; We watched the moon dust breached (Our town where they’d built the lunar module). What was the opposite of miracle? More and more frequent stays in the city, Medics puzzling the muscles’ loss of will; They thought she was dying, and I was sitting In the dark in sunlit rooms. Neither Was given a name for what went wrong, betrayed By something of ourselves, no cures In the offing. We were knit together By unraveling. Dying once, she weighed Her body’s loss; the loss this time I learn. 4. Legerdemain I asked her if it was a sin to abet (Vide Dragnet) a runaway, and she knew There was a runaway (in prep school blues,

As far from Manhattan as he could get With lunch funds on the lirr) in that Omniscient-mother way. In flight herself, She’d sought a quiet life, a faith, apart From the hothouse of intellect, bookshelved Emotions, where she grew but didn’t thrive. Then I in an arc reversing hers, pushing The envelope of what bound us till it stretched To the world’s other side. Still she contrived, In her magician’s repertoire, to ring The globe, her heart in its seven-league boots. 5. A Widow’s Dream Telling him through the half-year courtship Everything she wanted and believed, His quiet taken for assent: she let slip Once she felt she’d been deceived. But long companioned to that vacancy She can not feel slighted or perturbed When, six-months dead, he climbs The cellar stairs and comes without a word Into her room. Newspaper bleeds From the bullet hole in his chest. He rifles through the closet like a thief And hangs an iron chain around her neck. Then leaves. She reaches to him, but her hands Are locked in the middle drawer of the bedstand. 6. St. Clare Bedridden, in her final illness Clare Watched as Christmas midnight mass was said In Francis’s basilica on the far

Side of Assisi; named then the patron saint Of television. In the end the TV’s All that she can manage; even the longed-for Visits are too much. I tried to read her The Coleridge she’d read to me at three (I in the tub for days to cool the fever Penicillin flared), but she could only sleep. Convert out of her father’s house, decades Of obscure sickness, the cloister of the home: Two Clares so wed. In her absence I come Into a vow: this the privilege of perfect poverty. 7. Albany I had been away a year and would be gone Again until the fall. The likelihood That she’d not last that long we left unsaid. “Don’t send books. I can’t read any longer. The tapes are nice, though.” That afternoon we wrote Her letters. “No one’s washed my hair all week. There’s a can of dry shampoo your sister brought Here somewhere. Could you?” A dinner cart squeaked Down the corridor. Her frail head almost bare, I held it like an infant’s, breakable, and combed. “Remember how you used to brush my hair When you were little?” “Yes. Do you know Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Shampoo?’” “No.” “It’s a love poem. I’ll send it to you.” 8. The Woman Who Loved Robert Donat We watched Spellbound and tried hard not to laugh At the Dali dreams and cure in the bat Of an eyelash (even if it were her lash);

Peck and Bergman rushing for their train … This spring they mounted a relic of old Penn Station outside our school: a faceless “Day,” Green-graffitied, salvaged from Jersey fens. We would have passed it often on our way In from the Island, for the gentle dentist She would not give up and appeasements, The hall of dinosaurs, the Met’s steeled knights. Two fugitives, two reluctant spies … Then On our next-to-last night, The 39 Steps— (Tell me, Mr. Memory). More trains. More flight. 9. Leaving The obscenity of funeral eloquence And open casket, the impossible Task of packing her few things in two small Boxes to take home from the home, now distanced By thirty thousand feet and the elsewhere Thrum of jet engines. On pale blue airmail Paper, her last letter, never mailed: “Kelly made the honor roll. I hear Paul and Marge are off to Colorado. A friend of mine has brought me yellow tulips. Your brother wrote this for me, Mom.” Nothing To say My lungs won’t last the week. Below In the sun, the tapered Finger Lakes flare up, Then are extinguished by the airplane’s wing. Richard Matthews is the winner of this year’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, given to an emerging American poet of special promise.

KEN SARO-WIWA: THE HIGH PRICE OF DISSENT Larry Siems

I

n the spring of 1995, Ken Wiwa stood in for his father, Nigerian novelist, playwright, and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, at a ceremony honoring recipients of that year’s Goldman Environmental Prize. I was there, standing in for PEN, which, for the second time since Ken Saro-Wiwa lugged a box of if-somethinghappens-to-me documents into PEN’s London office, was campaigning to win his release from a Nigerian military prison. International pressure had ended the first detention, but now nearly a year had passed since his arrest on trumped-up murder charges. Saro-Wiwa’s son, a British-based journalist in his late twenties, had begun to assume the role of the jailed writer’s chief international spokesperson, and he delivered the acceptance with a polish that suggested events like this were multiplying—which augured well for another release, I thought. But backstage, Ken Wiwa was ill at ease and gloomy, cold to all questions that even approached the personal: he seemed to be saying, how should I know? you know as much as I do about him now. A few months later, a young African-American intern at PEN in Los Angeles received an answer to a reverent letter he’d sent Ken Saro-Wiwa in prison. “I’ve often envied those writers in the Western world who can peacefully practise their craft and earn a living thereby,” wrote Saro-Wiwa, who set aside a successful literary career to found and guide a protest movement against oil

exploitation in his home Ogoni region of the Niger River Delta. “I cannot say that I would not have preferred that to the dangerous paths through which my art is taking me. However, we must go where the spirit moves us, and I can only hope that my travails will have brought pleasure in the future to many more people than my books will probably have done…. On the lighter side, I might add that the goons in authority here do give us freedom to write, knowing full well that only a few people read anyway. What they cannot stand is that a writer should additionally give voice to the voiceless or organize them for action. In short, they do not want literature on the streets! And that is where, in Africa, it must be.” Saro-Wiwa ended the letter with a legacy-conscious, fatherly gesture. “By doing what you did during your internship you have helped a lot in this task, possibly unknown to you. And you have served humanity thereby. I hope the experience will shape your future activity as a writer or critic.” On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People.

On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. The death sentences were handed down by a military tribunal appointed by General Sani Abacha after a trial that was universally condemned as violating international standards of justice and due process. News that Abacha had ratified the sentences reached Ken Wiwa on November 8 in Auckland, New Zealand, where he had flown to make a last-ditch personal appeal at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, and where he would discover what his father had long known: that official action, when it came, would be circumscribed by interests beyond justice, and in any case would come too late. Wiwa recounts those final, disillusioning hours in his memoir, In the Shadow of a Saint. The book is both a clear-eyed account of his father’s life and death and a critical, and even more self-critical, examination of the relationships between Great Leaders—

paradoxical figures who seek to parent not only children but also political and social movements—and their sometimes determinedly anti-heroic children. Struggling to reconcile these contradictions after his father’s martyrdom, Ken Wiwa sought the counsel of three children of famous fathers, Zindzi Mandela and Nathi Biko in South Africa, and in the scene that follows, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Of the four, only Aung San Suu Kyi has, as Wiwa puts it, gone into the “family business”—a business that, in her case, has brought permanent separation from her family. She remains largely confined to her compound in Rangoon, and her nearly mythological isolation stands as the supreme illustration of how Power responds to the challenges of great women and men by targeting the most essential human bonds, testing families to the limit of their capacity for separation, estrangement, and loss. Four years after Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged, and six months after Nigerians elected a civilian president, I traveled to Ogoniland to see for myself the cost of the military’s campaign to silence dissent in oil-producing communities. Both the dissent and the campaign continued, despite the transition to democracy: that same day, about an hour’s drive from Saro-Wiwa’s home village of Bonny, troops were mopping up after subduing—which meant almost leveling—an increasingly restive town. Meanwhile in Ogoni, ground zero for what the military prescribed as “wasting operations” in the 1990s but abandoned long ago by oil companies and finally by troops, oilworks stood rusting alongside still-unelectrified villages.

I went to pay my respects to Saro-Wiwa’s parents. With “Papa” heading toward one hundred and “Mama” heading toward ninety, they seemed almost supernaturally old in a country where life expectancy remains stubbornly below sixty. Their ordeal had aged them in opposite ways: she was tiny and frail, and kept vanishing into the periphery; he looked muscular but moved slowly, possessed by a ferocious gravity. With uniformed schoolchildren watching, he recited a list of recent visitors from the international human rights community, fell silent for an uncomfortable while, then roused himself to add that notwithstanding the attention, nothing had happened— nothing could happen—that would begin to justify the loss or make things right. “I’m ninety-six years old,” he said, after a final bitter pause. “I should have my sons at my side to help feed me my soup.”

HOME AND AWAY A year has gone by since I was rudely roused from my bed and clamped into detention. Sixty-five days in chains, weeks of starvation, months of mental torture and, recently, the rides in a steaming, airless Black Maria to appear before a kangaroo court, dubbed a special military tribunal, where the proceedings leave no doubt that the judgment has been written in advance. And a sentence of death against which there is no appeal is a certainty. Fearful odds? Hardly. The men who ordain and supervise this show of shame, this tragic charade, are frightened by the word, the power of ideas, the power of the pen; by the demands of social justice and the rights of man. Nor do they have a sense of history. They are so scared of the power of the word, that they do not read. And that is their funeral. —Ken Saro-Wiwa May 1995

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY Ken Wiwa

W

hen my father said that the greatest gift of life was to die for your people, I took it as a personal challenge. If death was his gift, then what was mine? Did I have what it took to stand up for what I believed in? I thought that going to Burma and interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi might clarify these questions for me. Her father is known as the founder of Burma, and he was martyred for that cause; she herself is carrying the torch, following in her father’s footsteps as the focus of Burma’s opposition to the military junta. Aung San Suu Kyi has lived all my dilemmas, and far, far more. Like her father before her, she has had to make a “choice” between her country and her family. Although she is free to leave Burma and join her family in exile in Britain, she chooses to remain under virtual house arrest, offering herself as a symbol of resistance and opposition to a vicious military regime. There was a time when anyone could go to Burma and walk right up to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house on University Avenue in Rangoon. Those days were gone by the time I flew in. The MIS (Military Intelligence Service) had got wise to the attention she received from the foreign visits, and they were now vetting her visitors carefully. It was difficult to meet Suu, as she is affectionately known, without official approval, but I was determined to do so. My cover wasn’t exactly sophisticated. Amnesty International, with the support of the Body Shop, was running a campaign to mark the fiftieth

anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The object of the campaign was to raise awareness of thirty unknown prisoners of conscience around the world. I volunteered to go to Burma to help publicize the case of two Burmese comedians, U Pa Pa Ley and U Lu Zaw, who had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and hard labour for telling jokes. All I had to do was fly into Burma with a camcorder, pretend I was a tourist, film an interview with Suu, then get the hell out of the country before the MIS got wind of my scam. I returned from South Africa on a Thursday at the end of April 1998. I had a couple of hours of training on a Hi-8 camcorder on the Friday, and flew out to Bangkok on Sunday morning. No one at the Burmese consulate in Bangkok suspected anything when I strolled in to apply for a tourist visa. I got the visa in less than an hour, and I was feeling pretty good until I settled into my hotel room in downtown Bangkok and started acquainting myself with the junta’s appalling human rights record. Until that evening what I knew about Burma was next to useless. I was at university when I saw the famous footage of Aung San Suu Kyi defying the military junta to address crowds of students in 1988, and I knew she had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. I had done some last-minute research by reading her two books, Freedom from Fear and Voice of Hope, while I was in South Africa. But as I lay in my hotel room in Bangkok, brushing up on the reality of life in Burma, it dawned on me that my little trip was going to be far more complicated than I had imagined. The first thing that struck me was that SLORC, the sinistersounding acronym of the military junta (the State Law and Order Restoration Council), had reinvented itself and was now known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC)—the same initials, ironically, as Shell Nigeria. Like SPDC Nigeria, SPDC Burma had gone in for a makeover, renaming the country Myanmar. But all the cosmetic changes couldn’t hide the fact that Myanmar was one of the most repressive, authoritarian regimes in the world. Anyone SPDC didn’t like the look of was carted off to Insein prison, where inmates were routinely tortured, forced to work in chain-gangs in mind-

boggling temperatures, and kept in small cells that were originally intended to be used as dog kennels … I was the only black face in the queue for the Bangkok to Rangoon morning run. All I had were the clothes on my back, a state-of-the-art Hi-8 camcorder, and a change of clothing in my backpack as I joined a line of businessmen, hippies, monks, and diplomats. By the time the aircraft landed at Rangoon airport, I was tense. I kept reassuring myself that the whole foolishness would be over in thirty-six hours and I would be safely back in Bangkok. I had been briefed on how to handle Burmese officials, so I handed a fistful of dollars to the woman behind the customs desk, slipping her a generous tip. Once I was past immigration—again no questions asked—I went over to a kiosk to book a hotel room and hire a taxi. “I want to see all the sights of Rangoon,” I explained to the woman behind the counter. She smiled and snapped her delicate fingers; a young guy scuttled over to me, bowed, and offered me his business card. He told me to wait by the kiosk while he went off to fetch me a taxi. It was unbelievably hot—forty-five degrees in the terminal, and as I waited, I examined the card that had been pressed into my hand with a reassuring smile. It told me that my new friend was Tun Min Oo, a licensed tour guide who would “need your cantact to pay attention to your special and individual interset [sic], time and budget.” Tun Min Oo returned a few minutes later and escorted me to a taxi. “My uncle will show you around,” he beamed as I climbed in. There was a commotion on the pavement as an argument broke out between the local airport hustlers and the taxi drivers. My driver got out of the car and another driver took his place. I glanced at Tun Min Oo. He smiled to reassure me, then disappeared into a huddle on the pavement. Another driver broke out of the huddle and swapped places with driver number two. I looked to Tun Min Oo for an explanation of what was going on, but he had disappeared.

“What happened to Tun Min Oo’s uncle?” I asked driver number three. “Yes,” he replied helpfully. “Do you speak English?” “Yes.” “Are you Tun Min Oo’s uncle?” “Yes, I’m uncle,” driver three said unconvincingly. Later, I learned that everyone in Burma is called uncle. My uncle, driver three, looked harmless enough, with his steel-rimmed glasses, check cotton shirt and longyi—the long sarongs that are one of Burma’s national costumes. “Okay, let’s go and see some sights,” I said. Tun Min Oo’s uncle grunted and we set off. He was a man of few words, which did nothing for my anxiety; my guidebook had suggested I invest some time in the taxi drivers of Rangoon because they are among the most informative people in a country that is generally paranoid about talking to tourists. Whoever wrote the guidebook had obviously not met driver three. I imagined he was an intelligence officer or, more likely, an informant. One in four people in Burma is reputed to be one or the other. My hotel was practically empty. I saw only one other guest, and I was convinced that he was a security agent or an informant. One in four in Burma … I spent most of the day at the two-thousand-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda, with its six-thousand-carat diamond top, which Kipling described as a “beautiful winking wonder.” I spent three hours practicing my camcorder skills, filling the tape with shots of lovely old villas and smiling soldiers…. When we finished sightseeing, I gave my driver a nice tip and he seemed grateful. As he pulled away, it occurred to me that he could have been just an ordinary guy trying to be careful, trying to make an honest living in the kind of society that makes life difficult for honest people. The next morning, I checked out of the hotel and went to the house where I had arranged to meet Aung San Suu Kyi. As I waited on the

veranda at the back, I heard what sounded like a fleet of cars pull into the yard at the front of the house. Next door, dogs started barking furiously; car doors opened and slammed, then I heard voices exchanging greetings. I was straining to pick up the pieces of the conversation when a woman suddenly appeared on the veranda. Someone once described Aung San Suu Kyi as having an “unnerving serenity.” She is tiny, barely an inch over five feet tall, and looks fragile, but she has an enormous presence. She moves quietly, without fuss, seeming almost to glide, yet her demeanour suggests reserves of strength. That morning, she looked like a painted figure on a china vase. She was dressed in a silk Burmese wrap, and was much more beautiful in person than in her photographs. I couldn’t believe she was fifty-three years old and the mother of two grown sons. She could easily have passed for someone half her age. She was accompanied by several older, male figures, who I soon discovered were members of the NLD. I noticed that she bowed reverentially before the men took their seats, and she made sure they were comfortable before she took a seat next to me. There was some banter after the introductions were made. U Tin U, a little wiry old man and the chairman of the NLD, couldn’t contain himself when Suu mentioned that Burma’s leader, General Than Shwe, had just been voted second to General Abacha in a poll of the world’s most brutal dictators. In her book Voice of Hope—which is a transcript of conversations between her and the American writer Alan Clements—Clements at one point asks her whether she thinks about her father every day. “Not every day, no. I’m not obsessed by him as some people think I am,” she replies. I began by explaining to her that I was trying to write a book about my father. “Oh, yes? What is it called?” she asked. I told her. “Was he a saint?” “Well, not exactly,” I said. I explained that I wanted to correct all the misconceptions and lies that had been written about him.

“Hm,” she mused. “I’ve given up talking to journalists about my life. You say one thing, and they go away and write something else.” She spoke in a soft English middle-class accent. Explaining that I was trying to understand my father’s legacy, I said: “I’m doubly cursed—or blessed—because I too am called Ken Saro-Wiwa.” She smiled as I described the various transmutations and reincarnations of my name and identity. “We sing the words,” I explained. “We say Saaaro-Wee-wah. When I saw your name, I assumed it would probably be something like Aaung Saaan SuuuKi.” She complimented me on my pronunciation and wondered whether I was educated in England. “Yes, but I can still speak my language,” I said. “My vocabulary is not all that good, but I float between my two identities.” “It’s probably a useful defense against the racism in England,” she suggested. “I know my sons have had that problem. Alexander found it difficult to fit in. Kim fitted in much more easily because he can just about pass off as English. He is more like his father.” I mentioned that I had seen pictures of her sons collecting awards on her behalf and told her I had done much the same thing for my father. “Yes, I regret asking them to do that for me. If I had the chance, I wouldn’t do that again. They were much too young.” She spoke about her sons and explained that she had taken a decision with her husband to keep the children out of the spotlight. “Alexander has got a nice girlfriend now and is studying in a small university. He doesn’t feel any pressure there and he doesn’t have my name, which is good because he can remain anonymous and do his own thing.” When I told her that I was finding it difficult to resist the temptation to follow in my father’s footsteps, she stared out into the garden again. After a short pause, she turned to me and said something I hope I never forget: “Alexander always refused to believe me whenever I told him I did not expect him to follow in my or his grandfather’s footsteps.”

You have to feel for him. His grandfather is a martyr and his mother won the Nobel Peace Prize. How the hell do you follow that? The struggle that your parents lived and died for has framed your life. It is the family business. It will always be at the back of your mind that you will, one day, have to make a firm decision to pick up the mantle or pass up your birthright. Aung San Suu Kyi had always known that she would have to face her father’s legacy one day. Before she got married, she wrote to her fiancé, advising him that her ultimate destiny was in Burma. “I ask only one thing,” she wrote to Dr. Michael Aris. “That should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.” She lived in England for sixteen years, raising her sons until her time came in 1988. She had returned to Burma to take care of her dying mother when she found herself caught up in her father’s struggle … In Voice of Hope, she explains that her decision to remain in Burma rather than join her family in exile was “a choice, rather than a sacrifice.” I might have suggested that where she saw her decision as a choice, I saw it as pre-determined, conditioned by her sense of duty to her parents and her sense of her own place in their history. But back in March 1998, I hadn’t yet acquired the understanding of how my father had dealt me my choices, of how children choose their parents. We broke for lunch and discussed the logistics and possibility of filming Suu at U Tin U’s house later that afternoon. “Will it be safe to film there?” I wondered. “Oh, they watch my house all the time,” U Tin U said, waving his hands in the air dismissively. “It won’t be a problem.” “So they will know what I’ve been doing.” “Yes,” U Tin U said. A wiry little man, he must have been the original Burmese uncle because everyone called him uncle. He had an impish smile and devil-may-care attitude that did nothing to alleviate my fears about a possible confrontation with the MIS. When I wondered whether the MIS would rough me up at the airport, U Tin U couldn’t see that there would be a problem, but Suu shifted uneasily. “You’ve got a British passport, haven’t you?” she asked. “Yes?” I answered, looking to her for reassurance.

“We’d better be honest with Ken,” Suu said. “Let’s face it—they’re going to give him a hard time because he is black.” We spent the next few minutes making the arrangements to do the filming. U Tin U volunteered to take my backpack and camcorder to his house; I would show up later, just before 5:30 P.M. Suu would come by shortly after, we would do the interview, then she would leave. I would give my future torturers a few minutes to salivate at the prospect of some action, before catching a taxi and racing to the airport. The idea was to get on the 8 P.M. plane and be out of Burma before the MIS cottoned on. When I told the taxi driver where I was headed, he did a double take. U Tin U had warned me that taxi drivers often refused to approach his house for fear of reprisals. He was grinning as he told me this. I soon found out the real reason why taxi drivers were afraid to stop at his house: the MIS rents the house opposite so it can keep tabs on the comings and goings. No taxi driver would risk a spell in Insein for a measly fare, even if it was in U.S. dollars. The taxi driver dropped me a couple of streets away. I had no idea where U Tin U’s house was—all the signs and street names were in a Burmese alphabet. I was about to ask someone when I spotted Suu’s car coming up behind me. I was relieved until I realized that the car following behind hers was a police car crammed full of security agents. Her car did not stop, but instead turned down another side road and into a compound that was obviously U Tin U’s house. The squad car stopped outside the gates. Five plain-clothes security men dressed identically in check cotton shirts and longyis jumped out and started speaking into their mobile phones. One of them came running right up to me and started taking pictures. I kept walking towards U Tin U’s house, trying to ignore him, but the flash on his camera almost blinded me each time it went off. When I finally made it to U Tin U’s house, my heart was racing. Inside, Suu and U Tin U didn’t look concerned. “Did they see you?” Suu asked. “Yes,” I croaked. “Oh, well, too bad,” she said. She was grinning.

I was shaking as I set up the camcorder. Sweat was streaming off my face and my glasses kept sliding down my nose. I glanced up at Suu. She was sitting on a chair, unconcerned by the fuss and commotion outside. There wasn’t even a bead of sweat on her face. When I told her I was ready to start shooting, she calmly took out a purse and dabbed her cheeks and eyebrows, putting on her public face. I began by asking her about human-rights abuses in Burma. She took a deep breath, drew herself up, and ignored my question. She went straight to the point she wanted to get across, explaining that the only way to leverage the military out of power in Burma was to apply sanctions against the regime. I had to ask her to repeat the short interview twice because of the background noise. She didn’t complain. Each time she slipped into her political persona and made her statement while I fussed and fretted behind the camera. Then she had to leave for her next appointment. Her people needed her. As she was about to go, she walked up to me, touched my arm lightly, and whispered some words I will never forget: “Best of luck in everything you do, Ken, because you know, we are one family in all of this.” I froze, stunned at her transformation from political dissident. She had shown me an aspect of martyrs that their children often don’t see. I was moved by the tenderness of the gesture. I stared at my feet, trying to think of something to say in response. When I looked up, she had gone. Adapted from In the Shadow of a Saint

HOME AND AWAY I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working, and the only way I knew him was through the photographs my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned was water-stained: our clothes,

Mami’s Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo’s tools. It was only because of the plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived. When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. I wasn’t even alive then; Mami had been pregnant with my first never-born brother and Abuelo could still see well enough to hold a job. You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color. On the back my mom’s cramped handwriting—the date, his name, even the street, one over from our house. He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own. I do not think of him often. He left for Nueva York when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him, I excused him from all nine years of my life…. —Junot Díaz, from “Aguantando”

AFTER THE WARS C. K. Williams

M

y father dead, I come into the room where he lies and I say aloud, immediately concerned that he might still be able to hear me, What a war we had! To my father’s body I say it, still propped up on its pillows, before the men from the funeral home arrive to put him into their horrid zippered green bag to take him away, before his night table is cleared of the empty bottles of pills he wolfed down when he’d finally been allowed to end the indignity of his suffering, and had found the means to do it. Before my mother comes in to lie down beside him. When my mother dies, I’ll say to her, as unexpectedly, knowing as little that I’m going to, “I love you.” But to my father, again now, my voice, as though of its own accord, blurts, What a war! And I wonder again why I’d say that. It’s been years since my father and I raged at each other the way we once did, violently, rancorously, seeming to loathe, despise, detest one another. Years since we’d learned, perhaps from each other, perhaps each in our struggles with ourselves, that conflict didn’t have to be as it had been for so long the routine state of affairs between us. And yet it was “war” that came out of me now, spontaneously, mindlessly, with such velocity I couldn’t have stopped it no matter what, but, still, I don’t understand why it’s this I’d want to say to my father at the outset of his death. As though memory were as wayward and fractious as dream, as indifferent to emotional reasoning, as resistant to bringing forth meanings or truths,

verifications that might accord with any reasonable system of values. As though memory had its own procedures of belief and purpose that exist outside of and beyond our vision of our lives. With my mother, as I remember again now speaking to her in her death, my memory, capricious as ever, brings her to me on the shore of a lake, in a bathing suit. I’m very young—I don’t even have a brother or sister yet. My mother is sitting beside me speaking to my father. Bathing suits are made of wool then, even mine, and I’m acutely aware of how rough the fabric must be to my mother’s sensitive skin; its abrasiveness is a violation, a desecration: I try to stroke the skin under the straps on her back. My mother smiles at me. My father smiles, too. In the water later, in the shallows, I teach myself to walk on my hands with my body afloat behind me. “Look, I’m swimming!” I cry out in pride to my mother, who, in my memory, breaking off what she was saying then to my father, smiles at me again. And yet that other spurt of speech from the past, to my father lying before me, as though we’d never effected our unspoken reconciliation, as though we’d never embraced, never, after our decades of combat, held one another, our cheeks touching, our chests for a moment pressed together—to my father come words that seem to contain an eruption of still painful feelings, though I know those feelings have been transformed, transfigured; peace for rage, affection for frustration, devotion and compassion for misunderstanding. The first time my father and I kissed each other as adults, the first time we managed to move across and through our old enmities, across and through our thousand reservations, our thousand hesitations; the first time we stood that way together, arms around each other, we seemed to me to be uncannily high from the earth: it was as though I were a child again, suddenly stretched to my father’s height as I held him, gazing dizzily down in disbelief at the world far beneath us. My mother was there, watching, saying nothing, taken surely at least at that moment with relief for us all, yet too caught in her own timidities and her own travails to dare speak it aloud.

When my father died, it was difficult to comprehend what my mother felt. She threw herself down on the bed next to my father, and lay there quietly for a long time. She said his name several times; she seemed to want to cry, but didn’t. The week before, when she’d first realized he really was going to die, and soon, she’d said, “Now I’ll have to go live with all the other widows.” She was saying that after he was gone she’d move to a swank apartment house in a nearby town where many of her friends lived. She meant what she said to sound sorrowful, and certainly something like sorrow did bend her voice, but anyone who knew her well would know too that she was excited by the prospect of buying and decorating a new place to live in, of having so much to do, so much to think about. She had almost cried when my father first started to become aphasic, when his speech deteriorated so that his words were inappropriate or wildly wrong. She must have been frightened that someone who’d lived so much by his gift for language could sound foolish, or mad. Her eyes reddened when she spoke of those first dreadful weeks when the aphasia was manifesting itself, but still, she didn’t quite cry. Several years later, in another context, she happened to mention to me how, when my father had their last dog put away, a clumsy, affectionate hound who’d become hopelessly ill, she’d surprised herself, because she’d sobbed like a baby; she couldn’t understand why, she said; the dog had been my father’s more than hers. Does my mother not crying when my father died say something about her character, or their marriage, or the fact that my father had long periods over the last decades of his life when he wasn’t a very nice man, and that perhaps she’d never come to terms with it? That’s what she’d said to him once, You used to be such a nice man. It’s what I hear her saying again, perhaps near tears, her voice breaking perhaps in anger or sadness or most likely in surprise at her audacity in speaking aloud what sounded so much like a repudiation. No one will ever know now whether she’d cried, or spoken in a torn or angry or infinitely regretful tone when she said it; she was alone with my father, they’re both gone now, and, though

she reported to me the words she said to my father, it still seems unlikely that she would have done so, no matter how she said them: it wasn’t in her character to share very much that went on between my father and her in their very opaque relationship.

Those were the years of my father’s most maddening insensitivity and harshness, when he dealt with all of us, even my mother, as though we were his employees, or worse. He tormented all of us, sometimes by his criticism, by the way he had of letting you know you weren’t meeting his expectations, sometimes by his inscrutability and unpredictability—you had no idea from one day to the next how he’d respond to you—and sometimes by his indifference, an indifference which by then had begun to invade his entire character, although he himself wasn’t yet suffering from it as he would later. They’re the long years, which if I’m not careful can entirely determine my memory of my relation to him, even now, even long after we’d made peace and long after I’d understand at his deathbed how complex that peace was. My mother’s remark about his no longer being a nice man ostensibly had to do with how badly my father was dealing with my brother, who’d recently gone to work in one of my father’s businesses, but the state of relations between my father and my sister and me and his ever increasing distance from my mother would also have to have been a part of her plaint.

I can imagine my father and mother lying there as my mother speaks. Their bed was very wide, and had been made especially long, because my father was so tall. The fact that it was one bed rather than two implied a union between them, but in those last years, glancing in at them at night when I was visiting and came in late, I never saw them—they always left their bedroom door open— in any sort of contact, bodies wound together or hands touching. They slept back to back; when she spoke those words, my mother might have been facing my father, but I imagine him already turned away from her. He had to have registered her words, though. If there was a break in her voice, he would have had to be aware of it. Would her distress have caused him to search himself to try to find some justice in what she’d said, would it have made him entertain the least possibility that she might be right, and that he might have to do something about it? Such a grievous accusation to hear from one’s own wife. His arms complicatedly folded under his head as they always were when he slept, would he have felt in himself some sadness, some loss, some possible need for repentance or change? My father had long before sworn that he’d never again say he was sorry, for anything, to anyone. No one ever knew what had brought him to such a resolve, nor did we ever know either what had made him tell my mother about his promise to himself, but she was aware of it, so she would have known not to expect anything like an excuse, or a vow to do better, or any sort of evasion or deflection which could have been interpreted as an apology. Might he have taken what she said as simply an attack, something in the struggle between them, which might have made her words easier to deflect? My father didn’t suffer slights easily; if he thought my mother meant merely to assail him, he’d have slashed back. Would he have allowed her remark to hurt him? Was there still enough feeling in him in those days, enough vital, active, living emotion connecting him to his wife, to any of us, so that what she said would have mattered to him in any deep way? If it had, what then? If he had absorbed her words, and taken into himself what she had said, then he probably would at first have irritably demanded of

the void of the night whether she really wanted him to recast the character he’d spent his whole life hammering into existence; “spent” in the sense of paid, paid out, soul and body, conscience and emotion, until he was often in a state of physical and spiritual exhaustion. And what would the night have dared reply? This was the room in which my father would die. For me now, anything that ever happened in that room can seem to have already present in it those two events: my mother saying what she did to my father, and his death, the death he would will for himself in that same bed; his death rests off to one side, silent, patient, so that my father as my mother speaks to him seems to be lying alongside himself, and the likelihood of his replying seems as slight as if my mother were speaking to that future ghost. I don’t really know if her words hurt him, and yet they hurt me, even now. Whenever they come to mind, they arrive with a shock, of shame, of remorse, as though I had to feel for my father what he was incapable of feeling, or of knowing he was feeling. I can still sense, too, as though I were there with them, how the tiny corner of the night their bedroom contained goes utterly still with my mother’s waiting for my father to reply or not reply, and with his deciding whether he will or won’t. Or not deciding: it would have to have been something so deep within him that replied that there couldn’t have been any actual decision on his part; anything he said would have had to have come out of him spontaneously, without his thinking it first, and he would immediately have had to make clear to both my mother and himself that there was no surrender or submission, even a surrender to whatever in himself had caused him to speak, to be inferred from his response. Submission was an act, a phenomenon, it would have been unthinkable for him to let anyone, even himself, inflict upon him. An upsurging, then, perhaps of a connection long forgotten, long ago put aside so it wouldn’t interfere with his crucial interchanges with himself, with the reality he’d shaped to contain those interchanges.

Meanwhile, he still hasn’t spoken. I can tell even from here how much he would have wanted to be asleep by then; how much he wishes to be left alone. Can he ever be alone again with her there waiting beside him, having said that? Could he bring himself to ask her to explain, or elaborate on what she’d said? “You used to be such a nice man.” Certainly it would have needed explication. Certainly he must have been abashed at having his life so compressed, condensed into what was, after all, considering how circumspect my mother normally was with him, a devastating accusation. Yet I can’t find in my memory any evidence to show that what she said changed in any way how he acted during those years. I can’t imagine either any reply he might have made to her. There’s only the silence, and for me, that image of his death waiting beside him, already beginning to absorb him.

HOME AND AWAY Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swann’s Way set in London, or The Magic Mountain in Spain … It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all trace of places as we know them, in life and through art, could also destroy all feelings as we know them, so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, bound up in place…. I think the sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind; surely they are somewhat related. It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest attention, it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it. It perseveres in bringing us back to earth when we fly too high. It never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself. One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is a sense of direction too. Carried off we might be in spirit, and should

be, when we are reading or writing something good; but it is the sense of place going with us still that is the ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home…. There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes—closer to us even in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we should carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed. —Eudora Welty, from “Place in Fiction”

Excerpted from Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, winner of this year’s PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.

HOUSEKEEPING Pramoedya Ananta Toer

T

he penal colony was originally planned to be fifteen units. When I arrived, there were only three, each with ten barracks, some of them holding five hundred or more prisoners apiece. After we had finished building the additional twelve units, three more—the “R,” “S,” and “T” units as they were called—were established. Their barracks were built for “only” two hundred and fifty prisoners…. The barracks were little more than frames made of tree trunks, which served as both supports and cross beams. The roofs and walls were made of sago palm leaves. The floors were packed earth. There were no walls or dividers; it was just one large open space with a long pallet, stretching the length of the building, on which the prisoners slept…. My family home, the house where I grew up, was in fact two houses joined with a common steeped roof. Its supports and beams were teak; the floors and walls were stone. In the central part of the house was a long room, stretching the length of the house, divided into a front room that functioned as a parlor, and a back room where the dining table sat….

In 1950, when my father was critically ill, I made a promise to him that after he was gone I would renovate the family home; over the years, it had fallen into disrepair. And after he had died, I kept my promise, doing up the house in a new, more modern style. But the years passed and I was imprisoned. Today my family home, that fragment of my life, is in the same condition it was in before my father died. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how much energy it takes to keep one’s home in good repair and how easily it can be torn down? Adapted from The Mute’s Soliloquy Translated by Willem Samuels

PORTABLE CULTURE, GLOBAL IDENTITIES Kelefa Sanneh, Coco Fusco, Martin Roberts, Kwame Anthony Appiah

KELEFA SANNEH:

I’m an editor of Transition magazine—which is, I suppose, both global and portable. Transition is a diasporic project, founded by an ethnic Indian in Uganda in 1961, exiled to Ghana in the 1970s, and then brought back to life by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1991, in America. A few years ago, a Burundian journalist wrote in the magazine about coming to America to discover what the blacks thought about Africa. In the story he explained how his own interest arose: “In Africa there is—and it is hard to admit this—a reverence for whiteness. Africans have been brainwashed into believing that anything white is better, anything American is better. Even their black people are better. In the slums of Africa, young people worship successful American ‘niggers’: actors, athletes, rappers…. As a boy, I, too, adored American blacks. When Muhammad Ali came to Zaire to fight George Foreman in 1975, I was nine years old. Zairians my age appropriated the hero Ali, claiming he was the descendent of slaves taken from Zaire. I wanted Ali to be a descendent of slaves taken from Burundi, but my Zairian friends reminded me that Burundi never gave up slaves. I knew my friends were right: in school I had learned about my ancestors’ bravery, about how they fought the

slave trade successfully. But I hated this history. I wanted Ali to be Burundian. I felt it was unfair that Ali’s ancestors were from Zaire.” This journalist arrived in America full of reverence for AfricanAmerican culture; he grabbed a tape recorder, went to inner-city neighborhoods on the East Coast, and said, “Hi, I’m from Africa. What do you think of Africa?” And many of the African-American people he met said things like, “All I know is it’s a place where people eat from the ground.” One person pointed and said: “You African Nappy Head.” He’d originally planned to put his story on Burundian radio, to foster bonds of continuity between Burundians and African Americans, but decided that broadcasting it would create too much ill will. Another example goes in the opposite direction. A young writer named Faith Adiele, who grew up in America but whose father is Nigerian, went back to Lagos, as a homecoming, or, perhaps, a vacation. And this is the Nigeria she finds in downtown Lagos: “I’m convinced that everyone who sees me stares, laughs, cries out. Soon a procession of small children attaches itself to me, marching down the winding road, giggling and shouting, brown arms swinging, stopping when I stop. Is it my tan skin? My short hair? My American clothes? My diamond-shaped glasses? My look of terror? At the end of the cul-de-sac I see the highway that runs from the airport to downtown Lagos. People throng the road, impossibly spotless in their white robes and embroidered caps, running alongside rickety buses and taxis already packed to bursting…. ‘Oyinbo!’ the children following me shout. ‘White!’ The model of endless free play and disassociation and post-colonial slippage can lead you to forget that there are some real barriers …

“So this is coming home. One group joyfully gathering me into their arms, crying, Daughter, you are welcome! Ndo, we’ve been waiting for you! another shouting, Oyinbo! at me—twenty-six years a nigger.”

COCO FUSCO:

Coming home—whatever that means—can be pretty complicated these days. My friends and I spend a lot of time talking about feeling disassociated from our “homelands,” whether they be New York, or Havana, or Mexico, or here or there. But the model of endless free play and disassociation and post-colonial slippage can lead you to forget that there are some real barriers, and some real borders, and some real issues, and some real modes of subjugation that happen to some people, and not to others. For some, it’s easier to travel. For some it’s impossible. The journalist from Burundi could easily have found African Americans who know a lot about Africa, and who are very interested. And he also could have found white people who would have said the same things as the African Americans he met. I don’t think it’s a black problem that he’s uncovering—Americans in general can be quite xenophobic. We all have a bit of otherness in our lives right now; this happens to be a moment when it’s very easy to consume multiple cultures—if you have money. Here in New York we can buy things from everywhere. And we can buy people from everywhere. And we can even buy interpersonal experiences from everywhere for short periods of time. I wrote a performance about sex tourism in Cuba a few years ago—about tourists who want to buy sex and romance. Today there’s otherness and exoticism visible everywhere and available everywhere as a consumption possibility. But that’s very different as a model of intercultural interaction from being subjected to forces that are beyond your control as an individual—being turned into an object of consumption, for example, or having the trajectories in your life determined by what a particular institution thinks you are, whether that institution comes in the form of a government, or a school, or a border patrol agent, or a customs official, or a theater. With all this euphoric talk about the global community, we tend to forget that only 5 percent of the world travels for leisure; most poor people in the world experience tourism only because they provide a service for tourists—and that kind of intercultural interaction doesn’t allow a lot of freedom.

MARTIN ROBERTS:

I’d like to follow up on Coco’s point about what might be called the topography of consumption, and agree with her that we shouldn’t be too euphoric about defining cultural identities in an age of globalization. One of the dominant metaphors that we use these days is hybridization, cultural hybridity—what Salman Rushdie likes to call “our mongrel selves.” But rather than seeing everything in a kind of happy ethnographic surrealist way, we need to take into account the power relations, both political and economic, that structure these hybrid global identities we’re talking about. From an instrumental point of view, it’s interesting to consider the role of communications technologies and transportation in the process of constructing cultural identities. Technology makes it possible to have ties with a home culture, wherever that homeland might be. Arguably, it’s possible to be Filipino in the U.S. in a way that’s much more intense than was possible earlier in the century, simply because you can easily phone home or hop on a plane—if you can afford to pay the fare. For some people, technologies can lift cultural identities out of a particular geographical location. Another way to look at this question is to think about how we draw on a repertoire of global cultural forms that touch down in a particular local context, get adapted in different ways, but collectively can be seen, and in fact have been seen by a lot of cultural critics, as symptomatic of the homogenization of culture. These are not necessarily cultural forms associated specifically with America, or with Americans. Certainly a form like the soap opera is part of the global media culture which takes in things like telenovelas. And the same is true of beauty pageants—Thailand has been hosting them since the 1930s, as a nation-building exercise. So we are talking about global cultural forms. But if everything comes from somewhere else, what can we say is our own? Those of you who have seen the play Jessica Hagedorn adapted from her novel Dogeaters are familiar with the geepney coffee shop. The geepney is a transcultural adaptation of American Army jeeps, which were left over from the American occupation after the Second World War. There is a range of similar adaptations in other parts of the world. People take something which is from

outside and appropriate it, customize it, adapt it to their own local context. Filipinos might well say the geepney is a classic symbol of Filipino identity. And yet what more hybridized symbol could you wish for? There’s a nice line in The Perfumed Nightmare: “An old geepney never dies. It finds its way into a hundred new geepneys.” So you have the idea of something that’s claimed by another culture, recycled, then recycled again. I think this serves as an apt cultural metaphor for the way identities are continually recycled as well. People take something which is from outside and appropriate it, customize it, adapt it to their own local context. SANNEH:

The geepney is an interesting corrective to the narrative of homogenization. I mean, people arrive with their technologies—or for that matter, their Bibles—but they can’t always control what happens to these technologies afterwards. What at first might appear to be globally ubiquitous often turns out to be a specific adaptation in a specific locality, and a wonderfully idiosyncratic one at that. ANTHONY APPIAH: And of course people are moving about the planet in increasing numbers. And all of them drag traces of one place to other places. Airplanes may be less important to migrants who travel out of economic or political necessity rather than for pleasure—they save up their money and they may occasionally return home, but they don’t fly back and forth. They do use the telephone, though; telephones are now a mass commodity. And they send faxes and communicate through the Internet. There is some sort of deterritorialization going on. But in the end, of course, everyone is an alien somewhere on the planet. This exchange was part of a panel discussion presented by the Public Theater in association with PEN American Center and the PEN Open Book Committee.

THE NEW NOMADS Eva Hoffman

the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to “T herefore till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Thus Genesis, on humankind’s first exiles. Since then, is there anyone who does not—in some way, on some level—feel that they are in exile? We feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from childhood, from our first family romance, from our authentic self. We feel there is an ideal sense of belonging, of community, of attunement with others and at-homeness with ourselves, that keeps eluding us. The tree of life is barred to us by a flaming sword, turning this way and that to confound us and make the task of approaching it harder. On one level, exile is a universal experience. But, of course, exile also refers to a specific social and political condition—although even in that sense, it was never a unitary category, and we tend to compress too many situations under its heading. The different circumstances surrounding individual migration, and the wider political or cultural contexts within which it takes place, can have enormous practical and psychic repercussions, reflected in the various words we use for those who leave one country for another. There are refugees, émigrés, emigrants, and expatriates, designations that point to distinct kinds of social, but also internal, experience. It matters enormously, for starters, whether you choose

to leave or are forced to; it matters also whether you’re coming to a new land unprotected and unprovided for or whether you can expect, or transport, some kind of safety net. When my family came from Poland to Canada, we were immigrants, a term that has connotations of class—lower than émigrés, higher perhaps than refugees—and degree of choice—more than is given to refugees, less than to expatriates. Historically, too, the symbolic meaning and therefore the experience of exile has changed. In medieval Europe, exile was the worst punishment that could be inflicted. This was because one’s identity was defined by one’s role and place in society; to lose that was to lose a large portion of one’s self. After being banished from Florence, Dante lived less than a hundred miles from his city-state— and yet he felt that his expulsion was a kind of psychic and social death, and his dream was either of return or of revenge (which he certainly executed very effectively in the Inferno). Real life, for Dante, was in Florence; it could not exist fully anywhere else. Joseph Conrad’s father wrote to his infant son, who had been born during a time when Poland was erased from the map, “Tell yourself that you are without land, without love, without Fatherland, without humanity —as long as Poland, our Mother, is enslaved.” In other words, for a patriot of an occupied nation, it was possible to feel radically exiled within that country, as long as it did not possess the crucial aspect of national sovereignty. All of these forms of exile implied a highly charged concept of home—although that home was not necessarily coeval with one’s birthplace. For the medieval clerics and church functionaries who traveled from monastery to monastery, the center of gravity was the city that housed the papal seat. The Jews have had the most prolonged historical experience of collective exile; but they survived their Diaspora—in the sense of preserving and maintaining their identity—by nurturing a powerful idea of home. That home existed on two levels: there were the real communities that Jews inhabited in various countries; but on the symbolic and perhaps the more important plane, home consisted of the entity “Israel,” which increasingly became less a geographic and more a spiritual territory,

with Jerusalem at its heart. While living in dispersion, Jews oriented themselves toward this imaginative center of the world, from which they derived their essential identity. In our own century, the two great totalitarianisms, Nazi and Soviet, produced the most potent forms of exile, although the Soviet expulsions proved more permanent. The refugees from Nazi Germany, with their bright galaxy of artists and intellectuals— Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others—were pushed from their country by a vile regime, but once the war was over, they could go back, and some chose to do so. The exiles from Eastern Europe—Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, Joseph Brodsky, and others—thought that their banishment was for life, though history reversed it for some of them in the end. But in recent years, in Europe most markedly, great tectonic shifts in the political and social landscape have taken place, which I think are affecting the very notion of exile—and of home. For what is happening today is that cross-cultural movement has become the norm rather than the exception, which in turn means that leaving one’s native country is simply not as dramatic or traumatic as it used to be. The ease of travel and communication, combined with the loosening of borders following the changes of 1989, give rise to endless crisscrossing streams of wanderers and guest workers, nomadic adventurers and international drifters. Many are driven by harsh circumstance, but the element of voluntarism, of choice, is there for most. The people who leave the former Soviet Union nowadays are likely to be economic migrants or mafia tax dodgers buying up elegant real estate in London rather than dissidents expelled by ruthless state power. In one Bengali village there is a tradition of long seasonal migration, or sojourning. Many of the village’s men leave for several years or even decades, but always with the intention of returning. These are hardly privileged émigrés or expatriates, but neither are they powerless victims of globalization. Instead, they are people with agency and intentionality, playing the system. Smart young men choose different countries for the timely economic advantages they offer—better wages, better interest rates.

Almost all go back, a bit richer and a bit more important in the eyes of their fellow villagers. Theirs are migrations divested of tragedy if not of adversity. Of course, there are still parts of the world where political dissidents are expelled by demagogic dictatorships and cannot return while those dictatorships endure. There are still refugees whose return is barred by the sword of violence. I do not mean to underestimate for a moment their hardships, but I would think that even in their case, the vastly increased mobility and communicative possibilities of our world change the premises of their banishment: friends can visit or phone; they know that if the government of their country changes—and political arrangements, along with everything else, have become susceptible to quicker change—they can go back, or travel back and forth. The Herald Tribune recently characterized the increasing numbers of American expatriates in Europe: “They are the Americans abroad, and their number is soaring in a time when travel is unblinkingly routine, communications easy and instant, and telecommuting a serious option. They are abroad in a world where they can watch the Super Bowl live from a Moscow sports bar or send an e-mail from an Internet cafe in Prague.” Well, exactly. We all recognize these basic features of our new, fast-changing social landscape. Whether we have left or not, we know how easy it is to leave. We know that we live in a global village, although the village is very virtual indeed—a village dependent not on locality or the soil but on what some theorists call deterritorialization—that is, the detachment of knowledge, action, information, and identity from specific place or physical source. We have become less space-bound, if not yet free of time. Simultaneously there has grown up a vast body of commentary and theory that is rethinking and revising the concept of exile and the related contrapuntal concept of home. The basic revision has been to attach a positive sign to exile and the cluster of mental and emotional experiences associated with it. Exile used to be thought of as a difficult condition. It involves dislocation, disorientation, selfdivision. But today, at least within the framework of postmodern

theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse. What is at stake is not only, or not even primarily, actual exile but our preferred psychic positioning, so to speak, how we situate ourselves in the world. And these days we think the exilic position has precisely the virtues of instability, marginality, absence, and outsiderness. This privileging of exile compresses two things: first, a real description of our world, which indeed has become more decentered, fragmented, and unstable, and second, an approbation of these qualities, which is more problematic, because it underestimates the human cost of actual exile as well as some of its psychic implications, and perhaps even lessons. My emigration took place during the Cold War, though not in the worst Stalinist years. My parents chose to leave, though that choice was so overdetermined that it could hardly have been called “free.” But I happened to be a young and unwilling emigrant, yanked from my childhood, which I had believed to be happy. Therefore, I felt the loss of my first homeland acutely, fueled by the sense (the certain knowledge, it seemed then) that this departure was irrevocable. Poland was abruptly sundered from me by an unbridgeable gap; it was suddenly elsewhere, unreachable, on the other side, and I felt, indeed, as if I were being taken out of life itself. This kind of abrupt rupture breeds its own set of symptoms and syndromes. It is, first of all, a powerful narrative shaper; it creates chiaroscuro contrasts, a stark sense of biographical drama. The stories that emerged from the Cold War are legion, but one certain outcome of exile that takes place in a bipolar world is the creation of a bipolar personal world. Spatially, the world becomes riven into two parts, divided by an uncrossable barrier. Temporally, the past is all of a sudden on one side of a divide, the present on the other. Flash-forward to 1994, and a rather ordinary trip I took to Kraków that year with an English friend. The Westernization of my native town was everywhere evident. Where previously there had been no

market, there was now commerce. Where before there was the great Eastern European nada, now there were boutiques, Krups coffee machines, Armani suits. It was perhaps the presence of my Western friend, who kept saying that Kraków looked like any small European city with a well-preserved historical center, that made me realize palpably what I had known in principle: that the differences between East and West were blurring pretty completely and that simultaneously the various divisions and oppositions I had set up in my inner landscape were shifting and blurring, too. When I came upon a lone shop window featuring a display familiar from the days of yore—a dry loaf of bread, an apple, and a desultory can of Coke— I pointed it out to my friend excitedly. Look! This was how it used to be! But this was not the way things were now. The dusty little vitrine was a trace, a remaining mark of a world that, for all its misery, had the appeal of familiarity and, most saliently, of clarity. Now I would have to live in a world in which the bipolar structure was gone, in which everything is intermingled and no site is more privileged— either in its deprivation or in its pleasures—than anywhere else. I would have to change my narrative.

At this vanishing of contrasts I confess that I felt not only relief but regret. It was a regret, undoubtedly perverse, for the waning of clarity. But I also felt the loss of the very sense of loss I had experienced on my emigration. For the paroxysm I experienced on leaving Poland was, for all the pain, an index of the significance I attached to what I left behind.

For a while, like so many emigrants, I was in effect without language, and from the bleakness of that condition, I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us.

Still, what had I mourned in 1959? What was it that stood for home? Though I was too young to know it, the fervor of my feelings was produced by the Cold War. And yet my response had nothing of geopolitics about it. As a bare adolescent, I was too politically innocent to be a budding nationalist; in any case, as a daughter of Jewish parents recently transplanted from the Ukraine and not fully engaged in the body politic, I was in a poor position to become a patriot. So it was not the nation I felt exiled from, not Conrad’s father’s Poland; my homeland was made of something much earlier, more primary than ideology. Landscapes, certainly, and cityscapes, a sense of place. I was lucky enough to grow up in a city that really is quite enchanting and that escaped the ravages of the war. There was the webwork of friendships and other relationships, for example with my teachers. But there were also elements less palpable that nevertheless constituted my psychic home. For the great first lessons of my uprooting were in the enormous importance of language and of culture. My first recognition, as I was prized out of familiar speech and social environment, was that these entities are not luxuries or even external necessities but the medium in which we live, the stuff of which we are made. In other words, they constitute us in a way of which we perhaps remain unconscious if we stay safely ensconced within one culture. For a while, like so many emigrants, I was in effect without language, and from the bleakness of that condition, I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us. To lose an internal language is to subside into an inarticulate darkness in which we become alien to ourselves; to lose the ability to describe the world is to render that world a bit less vivid, a bit less lucid. And yet the richness of articulation gives the hues of subtlety and nuance to our perceptions and thought. To me, one of the most moving passages in Nabokov’s writing is his invocation of Russian at the end of Lolita. There he summons not only the melodiousness or euphony of Russian sounds, compelling

though these may be, but the depth and wholeness with which the original language exists within us. It is that relationship to language, rather than any more superficial mastery, that is so difficult to duplicate in languages one learns subsequently. In more religious times, certain languages were considered sacred; that is, they were thought, in the words of a wonderful social historian, Benedict Anderson, to have “ontological reality inseparable from a single system of representation.” Arabic, for example, was considered to be the only language in which the Koran could be written; the sacred texts could not be translated into any other language. So with Latin for the medieval Catholic church and Hebrew for Orthodox Jews. Some premodern people today still have the sense that their language is the true language, that it corresponds to reality in a way other languages don’t. And it may be that one’s first language has, for the child, this aura of sacrality. Because we learn it unconsciously, at the same time as we are learning the world, the words in one’s first language seem to be equivalent to the things they name. They seem to express us and the world directly. When we learn a language in adulthood, we know that the words in it “stand for” the things they describe; that the signs on the page are only signs—arbitrary, replaceable by others. It takes time before a new language begins to inhabit us deeply, to enter the fabric of the psyche and express who we are. As with language, so with culture: what the period of first, radical dislocation brought home was how much we are creatures of culture, how much we are constructed and shaped by it—and how much incoherence we risk if we fall out of its matrix. We know that cultures differ in customs, food, religions, social arrangements. What takes longer to understand is that each culture has subliminal values, predispositions, and beliefs that inform our most intimate assumptions and perceptions, our sense of beauty, for example, or of acceptable distances between people or notions of pleasure and pain. On that fundamental level, a culture does not exist independently of us but within us. It is inscribed in the psyche, and it gives form and focus to our mental and emotional lives. We could hardly acquire a human identity outside it, just as we could hardly

think or perceive outside language. In a way, we are nothing more— or less—than an encoded memory of our heritage. It is because these things go so deep, because they are not only passed on to us but are us, that one’s original home is a potent structure and force and that being uprooted from it is so painful. Real dislocation, the loss of all familiar external and internal parameters, is not glamorous, and it is not cool. It is a matter not of willful psychic positioning but of an upheaval in the deep material of the self. Is it then all pain and no gain? Of course not. Being deframed, so to speak, from everything familiar, makes for a certain fertile detachment and gives one new ways of observing and seeing. It brings you up against certain questions that otherwise could easily remain unasked and quiescent, and brings to the fore fundamental problems that might otherwise simmer inaudibly in the background. This perhaps is the great advantage, for a writer, of exile, the compensation for the loss and the formal bonus—that it gives you a perspective, a vantage point. The distancing from the past, combined with the sense of loss and yearning, can be a wonderful stimulus to writing. Joyce Carol Oates, in a striking formulation, has written that “for most novelists, the art of writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness. So powerful is the instinct to memorialize in prose—one’s region, one’s family, one’s past—that many writers, shorn of such subjects, would be rendered paralyzed and mute.” In exile, the impulse to memorialize is magnified, and much glorious literature has emerged from it. Native Realm by Milosz or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, some of Brodsky’s essays in Less Than One, or even Kundera’s much cooler take on transplantation in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—these are works of lyrical commemoration informed by a tenderness for what is lost and by the need, even the obligation, to remember. Joyce Carol Oates, in a striking formulation, has written that “for most novelists, the art of writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness.”

But the perspective one gains from dislocation is, of course, not only retrospective but prospective. Exile places one at an oblique angle to one’s new world and makes every emigrant, willy-nilly, into an anthropologist and relativist; for to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute—it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seemingly natural aspects of our identities and social reality are constructed rather than given and that they could be arranged, shaped, articulated in quite another way. For this reason, too, exile can be a great impetus to thought and to creativity, which is why so many artists have actively chosen it: James Joyce, with his motto of “Silence, exile, and cunning”; Samuel Beckett with his decision to write in French rather than English, precisely for the advantages of defamiliarization. And for the nonwriter, too, biculturalism can have its bracing pleasures—the relish of sharpened insight, the savviness of skepticism—which can become positively addictive. But I have come to believe that these virtues have their serious defects, that in the long term, the addiction may be too seductive, that as a psychological choice, the exilic position may become not only too arduous but too easy. Perhaps the chief risk of privileging the exilic narrative is a psychic split—living in a story in which one’s past becomes radically different from the present and in which the lost homeland becomes sequestered in the imagination as a mythic, static realm. That realm can be idealized or demonized, but the past can all too easily become not only “another country” but a space of projections and fantasies. Some people decide to abandon the past, never to look back. For others, the great lure is nostalgia—an excess of memory. One of the most extreme examples of “living in the past” I’ve come across is the history of Polish refugee camps in England, which had been set up during World War II for people who had come there with the Polish army. These camps remained until the late 1950s, their inhabitants existing in virtual isolation, many never learning English and always hoping that the magic moment of redemption—the moment of return—was around the corner. But the actual Poland was no longer the one they remembered; it had

changed in ways they would surely have found unpalatable, or at least highly perplexing, had they actually been able to go back. For Jews in their long Diaspora, the need to preserve the symbolic center in an indifferent world—to keep intact a vision of a lost paradise and a promised land—often led them to insulate themselves from their surroundings, to retreat to their community as a place of refuge and spiritual fortress. I have written a book about the history of a shtetl in Poland, a small town whose population was half-Jewish, half-Polish. The shtetl, for Eastern European Jews, was home in its most secure—internally secure, that is—form. In these small, rural enclaves, everyone knew everyone else, and everyone followed the same rules of behavior and spiritual life. No one was allowed to fall out of the communal net; no one needed to suffer from the modern malaise of uncertainty and alienation. The shtetl was a highly resilient, highly organized microsociety, and for many of its members, its strict codes and protective arrangements provided the satisfactions of warmth, safety, and certainty. But for others, the regulation of everyday life became oppressive, the avoidance of the larger world stifling. Even before World War II, the metaphoric walls of the shtetl were beginning to break down. Many of its inhabitants, for various reasons, chose to leave literally; others began to question the structures of belief, causing heated conflicts within the shtetl itself. Of course, the insulation of the shtetl was not only self-inflicted. But my point is that exile, and the pain of radical change, do not necessarily lead to a more radical personality structure or greater openness to the world. On the contrary, upheaval and dislocation can sometimes produce rather more conservative impulses of selfdefense and self-preservation. My own tendency was certainly to nostalgia and idealization—perhaps because I was ejected before my loss of innocence … In the later phases, the potential rigidity of the exilic posture may inhere not so much in a fixation on the past as in habitual detachment from the present. Such detachment can of course be a psychic, or even moral, luxury—but it comes at a price. In his fascinating, provocative essay “Exile as a Neurotic Solution,” A. B.

Yehoshua, a leading Israeli writer, makes the startling observation that during the eighteen hundred years of the Diaspora, there were many intervals when Jews could have settled in Palestine easily, or more easily, than in the countries where they chose to live, but that in fact, Palestine was the one place they consistently avoided. It was as if, he suggests, they were afraid precisely of reaching their promised land and the responsibilities and conflicts involved in turning the mythical Israel into an actual, ordinary home. Whatever the historical accuracy of Yehoshua’s thesis, it does remind us of certain hazardous syndromes of the exiled stance: that this posture, if maintained too long, allows people to conceive of themselves as perpetually Other, and therefore unimplicated in the mundane, compromised, conflict-ridden locality that they inhabit; it allows them to imagine the sources and causes of predicaments as located outside, in a hostile or oppressive environment, rather than within. In our current, habitually diasporic, habitually nomadic world, the oppositional, bipolar model no longer holds. The goalposts have shifted—indeed, the whole playing field has changed—in ways that remain elusive and hard to define. When all borders are crossable and all boundaries permeable, it is harder to project conflict outward, to imagine an idyllic realm or a permanent enemy. This is initially confusing, but it is surely to the good. Indeed, the merits of the new situation are easily discernible. They are the benefits available to those American expatriates who can leave America without ever really leaving. We move not only between places but between cultures with more grace and ease. We are less shocked by the varied assumptions prevailing among different peoples, less prone to absolutist assertions of our rightness. We have become tangibly aware of the plurality of values that such liberal thinkers as Isaiah Berlin have tried to teach us. In the political sphere, the ease of movement across borders should surely work to counter dogmatic or fanatical nationalism, although given the rise of national conflicts, this result may not be self-evident. But for those who move freely among countries and cultures, it becomes difficult to maintain the notion of any one nation’s superiority or special destiny. The

literature of this new nomadism or diasporism, of which Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most prominent representative, is a transnational literature in which multiple cultural references collide and collude and in which their interplay is seen as exactly that— robust, vital play. This is a vision of exile, if it can still be called that, as comedy, rather than despair.

The goalposts have shifted—indeed, the whole playing field has changed—in ways that remain elusive and hard to define. When all borders are crossable and all boundaries permeable, it is harder to project conflict outward, to imagine an idyllic realm or a permanent enemy.

Is it then, in this blithe new world, all gain and no pain? I don’t quite think so. The new nomadism is different from other Diasporas. It exists in a decentered world, one in which the wanderers no longer trace and retrace a given territory or look to any one symbolic locus of meaning. If we take such radical decentering as a metaphor for a way of being and of selfhood, if we rewrite displacement as the favored position (which it holds in postmodern theory), then the model is not without its own, sometimes high, costs. In the Bengali village people have a suggestive way of talking about this: they say that their land has lost some of its strength because its inhabitants are dispersed—as if the land draws power from the loyalty and attachment of the humans who live on it. But I wonder if, in our world of easy come, easy go, of traveling light and sliding among places and meanings without alighting on any of them for long, we don’t risk

a dispersion of internal focus and perhaps even of certain strengths —strengths that come from the gathering of experiences so that they add up to memories, from the accumulation of understanding, from placing ourselves squarely where we are and living in a framework shared with others. I wonder if, in trying to exist in liminal spaces, or conceiving of experience as movement between discrete dots on a horizontal map, we don’t risk what Kundera calls the “unbearable lightness of being,” the illness that comes upon people unanchored in any place or structure, the Don Juans of experience who travel perpetually to new moments and sensations and to whom no internal site—of attachment, need, desire—is more important than any other. In the “bipolar” mentality, the idea of home may become too dramatized or sentimentalized. In the “nomadic” configuration, exile loses its charge, since there is no place from which one can be expelled, no powerful notion of home. Indeed, these days we are wont to say not so much that all fiction is homesickness as that all homesickness is fiction—that home never was what it was cracked up to be, the haven of safety and affection we dream of and imagine. Instead, home is conceived of mostly as a conservative site of enclosure and closure, of narrow-mindedness, patriarchal attitudes, and dissemination of nationalism. And, indeed, the notion of “home” may have been, in recent times, peculiarly overcharged, as the concepts of “country” and “nation” have been superimposed on each other with a seeming inevitability. “France,” for the French, is both la belle France and la patrie. Such overlapping is not a necessary one. We have seen, for example, in the unhappy case of the former Yugoslavia, that a geographic territory can abruptly change its national identity. But the nostalgia of exiles for their birthplace has undoubtedly often been augmented by this conjunction of geographic and patriotic longing. The transports of patriotism, narrowness of provincial perspectives, and confinements of parochial traditions are not plausible solutions to the dilemmas of our time. And yet continual dislocation, or dispersion, is both facile and, in the long run, arid. Can anything be rescued from the notion of home, or at-homeness, that is sufficient to our condition?

One of the most subtle meditations on home I know of is found in V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. The place at which he was trying to arrive was a small cottage attached to a large house on a historic estate in England. For Naipaul, this entails multiple ironies; he grew up in an Indian community in Trinidad and understands all too well that his very presence on the estate is the end result of long imperial relations. He also knows that the cottage, the manor, the ancient plain correspond for him to some fantasy of England that he developed precisely when growing up in Trinidad and that included some dream of permanence, dignity, beauty. It takes a while before Naipaul squares these preconceptions with the realities of the place where he lives—realities that include change, modernization, conflict. Slowly he begins to see the landscape before him through other eyes. He imagines how the estate looks to the temporary workers, to whom a cottage with a thatched roof is simply temporary shelter, not a home, “a place to which you could transfer (or risk transferring) emotion or hopes.” He begins to imagine how the estate looks and feels to its owner, who suffers from accidie, a melancholic withdrawal from the world; Naipaul interprets this malaise as a symptom of the landlord’s excessive at-homeness, a security that has become a stasis. He understands that the power relations of today are complex enough to confer on him some advantages unavailable to his aristocratic landlord—the advantages of dynamism, of ambition, even of need. Slowly Naipaul learns to read the landscape in a less romantic and more complex way. He comes to love the place from the position not of fantasy but of knowledge. The slowness of this process is crucial; in Naipaul’s book, that ruminative leisureliness makes the act of creating a home akin to the process of writing. It is through gradual accretion of details, of knowledge, of relationships that he comes to imaginative possession of the place, as he comes to imaginative possession of his subject. Naipaul’s understated allegory suggests that there are two kinds of homes: the home of our childhood and origin, which is a given, a fate, for better or for worse, and the home of our adulthood, which is achieved only through an act of possession, hard-earned, patient,

imbued with time, a possession made of our choice, agency, the labor of understanding, and gradual arrival. The experience of enforced exile paradoxically accentuates the potency of what is given, of the forces that have shaped us before we could shape ourselves. This is what Brodsky says about the magnetic pull of one’s parental home and the exile’s dilemma of having wandered away—or having been forced to wander—too far: For a while, he is absorbed with new vistas, absorbed with building his own nest, with manufacturing his own reality. Then one day, when the new reality is mastered, when his own terms are implemented, he suddenly learns that his old nest is gone, that those who gave him life are dead. On that day he feels like an effect suddenly without a cause…. What he can’t blame on nature is the discovery that his achievement, the reality of his own manufacture, is less valid than the reality of his abandoned nest. That if there ever was anything real in his life, it was precisely that nest, oppressive and suffocating, from which he so badly wanted to flee. He knows how willful, how intended and premeditated everything that he has manufactured is. How, in the end, all of it is provisional. I agree and sympathize, even empathize, with this almost entirely. The acute loss I felt on emigrating was commensurate with the depth of my attachment—and there is something about that that I don’t want to disavow, and which can be a source of later perceptions and affections. After leaving Russia, Nabokov wrote in several languages masterfully, but he was transposing the love of his first language to his subsequent ones. We need to develop a model in which the force of our first legacy can be transposed or brought into dialogue with our later experiences, in which we can build new meanings as valid as the first ones. This can be done only through a deepening investigation, through familiarization. It is fine, and illuminating, to see all the structures that construct us for what they are and to see through them; but we must acknowledge the need for frameworks that contain us, for sites that are more than temporary

shelters. And we need to see that in our world it may be insufficient to define ourselves as Other in opposition to some archetypal oppressor or hypothetical insider. Our societies are too fragmented to have an easily discernible inside or permanent centers of power. At the same time, we need a conception of a shared world, a world in which we exist by virtue of shared interests rather than mutual alienation, to which we can bring our chosen commitments and hopes. There is a Hasidic parable about the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. In the parable, thieves come to the Baal Shem Tov and tell him of a network of underground corridors and tunnels that leads directly from Poland to Palestine. They offer to take him there, and he agrees. They walk through the tunnels with great difficulty. At one point, they come to a murky bog, which almost stops them. But they persist. They get more than halfway to their destination. Then, suddenly, the Baal Shem Tov sees before him “a flaming sword, turning this way and that,” and decides to go no farther. He turns back to the place from which he started. The psychological or mythological meaning of this parable has had many interpretations. Perhaps on one level it says something about the Baal Shem Tov’s ambivalence about going to Palestine, his own neurotic solution. But I think that the parable’s unconscious, compressed message may be that you can’t steal into paradise. You can’t approach the tree of life by a shortcut. Of course, the parable also suggests something about the fearsomeness of approaching our object of desire and finding ourselves in paradise—which may then turn out to be an ordinary garden, needing weeding, tilling, and watering.

To be sure, in our human condition, it takes long, strenuous work to find the wished-for terrains of safety or significance or love. And it may often be easier to live in exile with a fantasy of paradise than to suffer the inevitable ambiguities and compromises of cultivating actual, earthly places. And yet, without some move of creating homing structures for ourselves, we risk a condition of exile that we do not even recognize as banishment. And paradoxically, if we do not acknowledge the possibility and the real pain of expulsion, then we will not know that somewhere there is a tree of life that, if we labor hard enough to approach it, can yield fruits of meaning after all.

HOME AND AWAY I wandered lonely as a cloud … I’d seemingly lost the crowd I’d come with, family—father, mother, sister and brothers—fact of common blood. Now there was no one, just my face in the mirror, coat on a single hook, a bed I could make getting out of. Where had they gone?

… My friends, hands on each other’s shoulders, holding on, keeping the pledge to be for one, for all, a securing center, no matter up or down, or right or left— to keep the faith, keep happy, keep together, keep at it, so keep on despite the fact of necessary drift. Home might be still the happiest place on earth? —Robert Creeley, from “En Famille”

On Ovid I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read. —Anne Carson

CAPICHE? Bernard Cooper

I

n Italy, the dogs say bow-bow instead of bow-wow, and my Italian teacher, Signora Marra, is not quite sure why this should be. When we tell her that here in America the roosters say cock-adoodle-do, she throws back her head like a hen drinking raindrops and laughs uncontrollably, as if we were fools to believe what our native red rooster says, or ignoramuses not to know that Italian roosters scratch and clear their gullets before reciting Dante to the sun. In Venice there is a conspicuous absence of dogs and roosters, but all the pigeons on the planet seem to roost there, and their conversations are deafening. When the city finally sinks, only a thick dark cloud of birds will be left to undulate over the ocean, birds kept alive by pure nostalgia and a longing to land. And circulating among them will be stories, reminiscences, anecdotes of all kinds to help pass the interminable days. Even when this voluble cloud dissipates, the old exhausted birds drowning in the sea, the young bereft birds flying away, the sublime and untranslatable tale of the City of Canals will echo off the oily water, the walls of vapor, the nimbus clouds. There were so many birds in front of Café Florian’s, and mosquitoes sang a piercing song as I drank my glass of wine. Waving them away, I inadvertently beckoned Sandro, a total stranger. With great determination, anxious to know me, he bounded around tables of tourists.

The Piazza San Marco holds many noises within its light-bathed walls, sounds that clash, are superimposed or densely layered like torte. Within that cacophony of words and violins, Sandro and I struggled to communicate. Something unspoken suffered between us. We were, I think, instantly in love, and when he offered me, with his hard brown arms, a blown glass ashtray shaped like a gondola, all I could say, all I could recall of Signora Marra’s incanting and chanting (she believed in saturating students in rhyme), was “No capiche.” I tried to inflect into that phrase every modulation of meaning, the way different tonalities of light had changed the meaning of that city. But suddenly this adventure is over. Everything I have told you is a lie. Almost everything. There is no lithe and handsome Sandro. I’ve never learned Italian or been to Venice. Signora Marra is a feisty fiction. But lies are filled with modulations of untranslatable truth, and early this morning when I awoke, birds were restless in the olive trees. Dogs tramped through the grass and growled. The local rooster crowed fluently. The Chianti sun was coming up, intoxicating, and I was so moved by the strange, abstract trajectories of sound that I wanted to take you with me somewhere, somewhere old and beautiful, and I honestly wanted to offer you something, something like the prospect of sudden love, or color postcards of chaotic piazzas, and I wanted you to listen to me as if you were hearing a rare recording by Enrico Caruso. All I had was the glass of language to blow into a souvenir.

ON TRANSLATION Robert Kelly

T

ranslation is of course conspiracy. Whatever else it is or may intend, translation represents a concerted move of the few against the many, the foreign against the domestic, there against here. It is the paradox of the solitary army, taking orders from a distant text, parlez-vous’ing these commands into some semblance of the speech heard round about the place where the translating is going on. Translators are much-traveled characters, close kin to spies and pioneers—two other occupations with a range of acceptation from the most honorable to the detestably covert. But all are cunning. So when we hear that a translation has been undertaken or published, cherchez the plot. Now if a trove of unknown Inspector Maigret novels should come to light in the attic of one of Simenon’s innumerable mistresses, we might expect the resultant flurry of translations to be cued by no more veiled an agenda than Dives at his gilded door—Get more, get more. Things sell. When, on the other hand, PEN America’s editor invites us to reflect on what translations are needed, what is being kept from us, what are they (over there, back then, far away) hiding from us now, there is a gratifying whiff of the conspiracy theory and it seems to me exactly right. We are invited (indicted?) to become coconspirators in a huge project of subverting the way things are so far.

And what a grand business it would be if from our various cranky or overparticular or generous responses to the question, a permanent forum could be established, under the aegis of PEN, to maintain a continuing archive of titles and authors we need to have translated. A needy and querulous voice (like the voice Socrates assigns to Love itself) that might lift up from time to time and demand Cyprian Norwid or Quirinus Kuhlmann (two poets who happen to be on the top of my oldtimers list of those needing translation). Such a forum might also remind us that we lose whole bodies of work when translations lose currency, since the language of the translator seldom has the intimate and obsessive presence that the original has in its tongue. Writers whose names we know vanish from our reading tables when their translations age or grow vague. For example, I think we need to hear Quevedo again in our own lingo, and Gautier, and Mörike, and Lermontov, and Strindberg, and Lautréamont, and Platen, and Tyuchev, and … Imagine what our sense of literature would be like if no one had bothered to translate Proust and Dostoevsky and Kafka.

It is a fertile and exciting gesture, this PEN America idea of opening up the whole issue of what we’re missing by being monoglot. Or, most of us, sesquilingual—I mean most of us read Anglo-Indo-Afro-Carib-Australo-American pretty well, even natively, plus a heavy smattering of some other tongue, typically French or Spanish. So we’ll call the usual American reader mono-and-a-halfglot. Nevertheless, since that half tongue is seldom up to allowing us to loll in a hammock with Musil’s notebooks or Lacan’s jokes or Lezama Lima’s original paradise, we rightly clamor for the artful interpreter to tell us what those geniuses have been saying. But in a lifetime of buying original texts and then reading translations (at times performing the religious duties of comparing the texts en face), I have come to believe that translation, as an enterprise and a business, is just as much part of the sinister

Military-Industrial-Complex (what we now call the Entertainment Industry) as the hexing of the Kyoto Treaty. So we need to invent a conspiracy, a confederation of spies who bring us the news, from then or there. What are they keeping from us (whoever they are)? What is out there that we need to hear about, read, come home to? Imagine what our sense of literature would be like if no one had bothered to translate Proust and Dostoevsky and Kafka. When Bellow sneers at some putative Zulu Tolstoy, I fancy I hear the voice that could never have predicted Gilgamesh or Bobrowski or Rushdie or Lessing (Rhodesia, for crissakes!) or Meddeb or Diop or any other of the humane texts and geniuses that had the temerity to arise in regions off the A-list. But Bellow’s prejudice is accurate enough in one sense—there is a worldwide plot against our business as usual, a plot of eternity against the comforts of time. Translation, whether translations of new texts, or new translations of old texts, or deviant translations of traditional texts (like Gavin Douglas’s Scots version of the Aeneid that thrilled Pound so much, or William Arrowsmith’s Petronius— that satirized Pound), all translations betoken a conspiracy against the mind-at-present. We sleep in language, if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness. So the bringers of the strange are our appeal, the writers we need now. I’m going to offer a brief list of titles, in case some idle dragomans are itching for work. • Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis, his big utopian novel. Several decades ago a very small press published a version I’ve never found—Jünger’s most ambitious book needs a good literary translation, one that considers the precise and lapidary nature of Jünger’s style, likely the most selfconsciously focused of twentieth-century German writers. • Boris Vian, L’herbe rouge. A sequel of sorts to his L’écume des jours, which was a sensational million-seller in France

(and once a Penguin paperback in English). Vian’s perennially fresh sensibility makes him such a sweet alarmist. • E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brotherhood. A nineteenthcentury translation once was to be found in Bohn’s Library, I think. Certainly needs recasting. Hoffmann’s neuroses are precise and vivid, and fraternal with our own. He can talk now, if we let him. (Look at the incredible story “The Fermata” if you think he’s all goblins.) • Novalis, The Apprentices of Sais. A short initiatory novel, a real challenge to a translator’s double sense of style (highly formal) and agenda (deeply poetic, aesthetic, almost spiritual). Beyond such easily named masterworks needing Green Cards, I can’t quite stop myself from reeling off some more names. Jean Paulhan, Gertrud Kolmar, René-Guy Cadou, Louis-René des Forêts, scarcely translated at all into English though celebrated in their own terrains and in international criticism. I need to read them now in my own demotic. It’s not just the aesthete and experimentalist readers who need help. Even the bourgeoisie is deprived of its own international comfy classics: what about finally getting Jules Verne and Eugène Sue and C. F. Meyer and Theodor Fontane into English complete at last? And even Balzac is still not fully translated into unbowdlerized English versions. (My original plan of attack in this note was voided by a timely compliance on the part of Penguin, that cunning press, which gave us a translation, I still haven’t seen it, of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, Tomcat Murr, we’d say, which long struck me as close to the top of the list of books we need englished, Hoffmann’s masterpiece of the talking cat, the stories interwoven, the hangover that lasts a whole life. So perhaps even as I write or you read, someone is translating Fijman and de Chazal and Suhrawardi or the complete journals of the Goncourt brothers.) And then there are the poets. Not just the famous ones like the great Max Jacob and Georg Heym of whom we hear much, but so

little of whose work has ever been put into circulation in English. There are others, the ones whose very success has obscured them. They are the ones we are taught to think of as Thinkers, but who are really poets, who thought in language and embodied thinking in the grace of words—I mean for instance the superpoets Nietzsche and Marx, who have always been presented for their Ideas, as if their texts existed just to notate conclusions. Strip away their working-in-language (which is the revelatory gesture of poetry, soulmaking, revelation), and all you have left is opinion. Take the poetry away from Dante and you have a quaint Fodor’s Guide to Purgatory, as we could imagine a humdrum translator taking away the epochal transformative poetry of James Merrill’s Divine Comedies and leaving us with a scuffed old ouija board.

Subject: What are we missing? From: [email protected] To: PEN members “What great books have never been translated into English?” we asked, and received about eighty responses. Here are some of them. All of the responses—as well as longer versions of several that appear here—can be found at www.pen.org/journal/translation. If you’re a PEN member who didn’t receive our query and you’d like to participate in future forums, please send your e-mail address to [email protected]. Dan Bellm: Castigo divino (“Divine Punishment”)—by far the best novel by Sergio Ramírez, former vice-president of Nicaragua, and one of my favorite novels, period. Set in the Nicaraguan city of León in the 1930s, and based on a true story, it concerns the case of Oliverio Castaneda, a young charmer and social climber accused of killing neighbors, patrons, and lovers by poisoning. The convoluted affair (still used as a case study in Central American law schools) was never solved, and Ramírez himself cagily leaves it open-ended. Hilarious, riveting, beautifully constructed and written. John Oliver Simon: Sergio Ramírez, Castigo divino, Nicaragua, 1988. A companion to the author’s later Margarita, Está Linda la Mar, to be published in English by Curbstone Press next year, Castigo divino is a darkly comic detective novel set in León in 1932. A stranger comes to town with all the latest fox-trot records and is welcomed into the hearts and beds of the mother and two daughters of the most respectable family in town. Soon

the young wife and the paterfamilias drop dead, apparently poisoned. Justice has nothing to do with power, as the young investigative judge sent from the capital soon finds out. A ripping good read, set in the author’s hometown ten years before his birth. Tim Crouse: Two great peaks, one of fiction, the other of poetry, are still invisible to the English-speaking world, but it seems to me that once translations scatter the mist, the literary landscape will never look the same. (1) The novels of Hans Henny Jahnn (German, 1894-1959). So far as I know, only the first volume of his great “Fluss Ohne Ufer” trilogy has found its way into English: Das Holzschiff (“The Ship,” trans. Catherine Hutter, Scribners, 1961). That leaves the other two volumes still to go, plus Perrudja, Ugrino und Ingrabanien, and 13 Nicht Geheren Geschichten (“Thirteen Unreassuring Stories”)—all treasures. I know them from the French versions (see www.josecorti.fr/Jahnn.html). (2) The poems of David Rosenmann-Taub (Chilean, b. 1927). Cortejo y Epinicio (“Cortege and Epinicion”), Los despojos del sol (“The Spoils of the Sun”), and El cielo en la fuente (“The Sky in the Fountain”) are among the most original, profound, and wrenching books of poetry I’ve read. Gwyneth Cravens: My vote goes to the works of David Rosenmann-Taub, recently named by El Mercurio, the leading newspaper of Chile, “the most important and profound living poet of the entire Spanish language.” El cielo en la fuente is my favorite of his books; it changed the way I perceive the world. His voice is unique, fresh, timeless, and powerful. Of his writing one critic aptly says: “You feel that you are in the middle of a jungle, in the good company of invisible voices—modern, classical, archaic and revolutionary—always in lush foliage and deep terrain.” According to www.davidrosenmanntaub.com, he left Chile “in the early 1980s, during the political repression there, and has since lived mostly in the United States, dedicating himself to his artistic endeavors. Working out of the spotlight of public life, he has become a mythical figure in the world of Latin American letters.” I’d also like to see a better translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s extraordinary novel of the backlands of Brazil, Grande Sertão: Veredas (there’s a long out-of-print English version titled, wrongly, “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands”). Alice Kaplan: Louis Guilloux’s novella, “Ok, Joe” (1976), narrated by a young French interpreter for an American military tribunal in occupied Brittany in 1944. I’m struck by the way Guilloux gets across the flavor of casual American English with a few perfectly placed phrases, and I admire his clear-eyed view of the American liberators—friendly and charming, with undertones of calculated indifference and racist cruelty toward the black GIs on trial. The perceptions of a narrator who is also a translator are brilliant. I’d like to see how this story would read if English were the main language and not the exotic one. Ariel Dorfman: Try as I may, I have been unable to get anyone to translate into English and publish any of the works of the great contemporary Mexican novelist Hector Aguilar Camin. Aguilar Camin has many major books, but his two best-known novels are Morir en el Golfo and La guerra de Galio. Without hesitation, I would call either of these a classic of Latinamerican fiction. La guerra de Galio centers on the battle over a dissident newspaper in Mexico City and shows how an idealistic generation self-destroys under the manipulation of the PRI government—it is also one of the most amazing meditations on the themes of violence and civilization in the last 20 years. Morir en el Golfo is a mystery that

deals with the corrupt politics surrounding oil and trade unions. These books are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of Mexico, but also who simply wants to be thrilled by extraordinary narrative power. Geoffrey O’Brien: (1) The Hikayat Hang Tuah, a 17th-century Malay picaresque novel. (2) La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, a 13th-century Occitan chanson de geste on the Albigensian crusade (by a pro-Catholic poet). (3) On a similar note: Agrippa d’Aubigne’s Les Tragiques, a long polemical/historical/ theological poem on the Wars of Religion in France from the Huguenot perspective. (4) On another note: the putatively amazing (I haven’t yet ventured into them) early 20th-century fantasy novels of Gustave Le Rouge, such as The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius, The Prisoner of the Planet Mars, and The War of the Vampires. Harry Mathews: As far as I know, Tinyanov’s novel entitled (I translate) The Death of the Vizhir Muktar has never been translated; if this is the case I would strongly recommend it for your list. Lily Tuck: La Vie de Marianne by Marivaux has never been translated. It is the first epistolary novel. Josh Cohen: In 1764, Rousseau wrote Lettres écrites de la montagne, in response to the condemnation of his Emile and Social Contract in Geneva. It is a substantial book, filled with interesting material about censorship, politics, toleration, and religion. So far as I know the only English translation now available was done in 1767: it is contained in a Rousseau collection published by Burt Franklin. The translation is as good as useless…so while it is not literally true that it has “never” been translated, it is probably the most important book by a major political theorist with a nearly useless translation (meaning: if you can’t read French well enough to check the translation, then you can’t rely on the translation). Jesse Kornbluth: MOST of Alberto Moravia, as far as I can tell. I read a few of his novels when I was 14, and learned a great deal about style and sex. Now even those books are out of print… Michael Kandel: A great book that has never been translated into English (there is a German translation, and a Russian one) is Summa technologiae by Stanislaw Lem, a Polish essay (quite a large volume) written in the late 1960s that reflects, with wit and subtlety, on some moral-ethical and philosophical consequences of future technology. In this work Lem was prescient: for one example, predicting virtual reality technology 30 years before it came about. His Summa makes one realize how superficial most futurologists are. Jonathan Rosenbaum: (1) Satantango, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Hungarian novel, published in 1985, is the source of Bela Tarr’s 415-minute black and white masterpiece of the same title, adapted with the author and released about a decade later—perhaps the greatest Hungarian film I’ve seen. We already have a subsequent novel by the same author in English, The Melancholy of Resistance, pointing to a stylistic similarity between

Krasznahorkai and Thomas Bernhard, but something tells me that Satantango is even better: a ferocious piece of sarcasm, traversing the same day from various viewpoints like a Faulkner novel while recounting the last bitter gasps of a failed farm collective and everything its members do to betray one another. (2) Carl Th. Dreyer ne Nilsson, by Maurice Drouzy, published in both Danish and French, is the only full biography of the man I would call the greatest narrative filmmaker. It’s as obsessive in its own way as a Dreyer film, and throws up so much fresh information as well as speculation about the man that it’s an essential work for anyone who wants to understand Dreyer’s films better. Pablo Medina: El Monte by the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera is one of the great works of literature ever produced in the Caribbean. A compilation of Afrocuban lore and practice, it is both a serious book of ethnography and an eminently readable literary text. To my knowledge it has never been translated into English. Lydia Cabrera died in penury in Miami. Roger Greenwald: Det har ventet på deg (literally, “It’s Been Waiting for You”), 1988, a short novel by the Norwegian Nils Johan Rud, written when the author was in his eighties. A widower returns to his home village to decide what to do with the family farm. There he encounters the woman he loved as a young man but could not marry because of her father’s opposition—and the father is still alive! A story of universal appeal, economically told and beautifully written. Matthew Stadler: Titantjes and De Uitvreter, by Nescio. These two long stories by the 20th-century Dutch writer detail the minor victories and defeats that make Dutch middleclass life so bleak and comical. The details are all tiny, exquisitely understated and dry, much like Emanuel Bove´s My Friends, with the same silent undercurrent of hope. Joan Schenkar: Most of the works of Francoise Mallet-Joris, who holds Colette’s chair on the Academie Goncourt in Paris. She has written novels, biographies, memoirs, and is a highly respected writer in France. Joanna Bankier: I have a book in mind which could be as interesting for a non-Swedish audience as the Gunnar Myrdal book in the ’50s. Samhället som teater, estetik och politik i Tredje Riket by Ingemar Karlsson and Arne Ruth (in English, “The Staged Society: Aesthetics & Politics in the Third Reich”). Arne Ruth: one of Sweden’s true intellectuals, head of the PEN Club Sweden, for many years Editor in Chief of the Cultural Section of Sweden’s major newspaper. Ingemar Karlsson, writer, editor, for many years second in command, Institute for Future Studies. The book was published in the mid-’80s and has been reissued regularly since then. Suzanne J. Levine: Some of Juan Carlos Onetti’s novels have been translated but others remain to be done. Robert Bononno: Many of Balzac’s works either have not been translated into English at all or need to be retranslated.

Grace Schulman: Hebrew and Arabic poets writing primarily in the Renaissance. Also, some works that have been translated but that require new translations, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer (from Old English), Sor Juana (Spanish). Joan Mellen: Mario Vargas Llosa’s biography of Gabriel García Márquez has never been translated into English….it’s a work of literature. Rika Lesser: You ask about great books that have never been translated into English. As a poet and a translator (primarily) of poetry, I can only respond that we must talk about oeuvres, about bodies of work. If the poet is truly of “great” stature, readers are best advised to read their Complete Poems. Serious translators of poetry—whether or not time and life allow them to translate entire oeuvres—should be translating out of a deep center of familiarity with each poet’s oeuvre…. Nowadays I translate from Swedish and have three candidates whose Complete Poems I believe should or eventually will be in English: (1) Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), the Swedish poet and musician known chiefly for selections (that must be singable) from Fredman’s Epistles (1790) and Fredman’s Songs (1791); (2) Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-1968), regarded as the greatest Swedish lyric poet of the 20th century; and (3) Göran Sonnevi (b. 1939), regarded as one of Sweden’s great living poets, whose increasingly meditative work can be seen as a single long poem that continues from book to book (14 to date). Michael Scammell: Silver Dove, a superb example of symbolist prose by Andrei Bely that prepared the way for Bely’s masterpiece, Petersburg, badly needs a new translation. Alexander Griboyedov, a friend of Pushkin, wrote a masterly satirical comedy, Woe from Wit (a better title would be “’Tis Pity to Be Wise”), that rivals Onegin for wit and eloquence. It has been translated but not into anything that resembles the original. Edna McCown: Fritz H. Landshoff’s Amsterdam, Keizersgracht 333: Ouerido Verlag (Aufbau Verlag, 1991), his history of the last years of German publishing in the Weimar Republic and of the exile publishing house, Querido Verlag, he established in Amsterdam in 1933. With documents, photos and a wealth of letters exchanged between Landshoff and his exiled authors, among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth, Heinrich Mann, and Ernst Toller. Joan Downs: A friend who is an expert on Eastern European literature is always bemoaning the fact that his Anglophone literati friends cannot read My Time with Gombrowicz by the Hungarian writer Istvan Eorsi.

CONTRIBUTORS André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, and a co-author and editor of Letters of Transit. A professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, he is a contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Commentary. Hilton Als’s first book is The Women. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and editor-at-large at Vibe magazine. He has written scripts for the movies Swoon and Looking for Langston, and was the winner of the 1997 New York Association of Black Journalists Awards for magazine critique/review and magazine arts and entertainment. Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, and studied at the University of Ibadan. He has written collections of short stories, poetry, and the novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah. His essays have been collected in Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and Impediments. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) published several collections of poetry, including Alcools and Calligrammes. He is credited with establishing cubism as a school of painting with his book Les Peintres cubistes. His only play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, was staged the year before his death. He called it surrealist, using the term for what is believed to be the first time. James Baldwin (1924-1987) was born in Harlem and lived for many years in France. His essays have been collected in Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time. His novels include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Another Country. He also wrote two plays, The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie. Russell Banks has written fourteen works of fiction, including Continental Drift, Book of Jamaica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. His most recent novel, Cloudsplitter, chronicles the life and times of the abolitionist John Brown.

Amiri Baraka is the author of the poetry collections Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer and the nonfiction works Blues People and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. His plays include The Slave, The Toilet, and Dutchman, which won an Obie in 1964 and was later made into a film. Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was an English essayist, caricaturist, and parodist. His works include A Christmas Garland, a novel entitled Zuleika Dobson, and the essay collections And Even Now and Mainly on the Air. He also published several volumes of caricatures, including The Poet’s Corner and Rossetti and His Circle. Roy Blount Jr. is the author of sixteen books, including Be Sweet, Crackers, and Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and The Oxford American and a panelist on National Public Radio’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me. Laura Bohannon, a cultural anthropologist, has published a number of works on the ethnography and religion of the Tiv people of West Africa. Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature, was a passionate advocate for persecuted fellow writers, civil rights activists, and political prisoners. His novels include The Clown, The Bread of Those Early Years, and The Train Was on Time. He served as President of International PEN from 1971 to 1974. Anne Carson is the author of numerous works of poetry and prose, including Eros the Bittersweet, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Autobiography of Red, Economy of the Unlost, Men in the Off Hours, and Glass, Irony and God. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Angela Carter (1940-1992) wrote nine novels, including The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children. Her stories are collected in three books, The Bloody Chamber, Fireworks, and Saints and Strangers. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1984 film The Company of Wolves, based on her short story. William C. Carter is the author of The Proustian Quest and, most recently, Marcel Proust: A Life, and co-produced the award-winning documentary

Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life. He received a Palmes Académiques award in 1991 for his service to French culture. Bernard Cooper is the author of A Year of Rhymes, Truth Serum, and Maps to Anywhere, which won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award in 1991. His most recent book is the collection of short stories Guess Again. He is currently the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine. Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was born in Brussels of Argentine parents. He worked as a literary translator for Argentine publishing houses, translating the complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as works by André Gide, Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton, Daniel Defoe, and Jean Giono. His books include Rayuela, Hopscotch, and A Manual for Manuel, which won the Prix Médicis. In 1951 he moved to France, where he lived until his death. Stanley Crouch’s writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Vogue, and The Amsterdam News. He is the author of the essay collection Notes of a Hanging Judge, and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Foundation grant. Lydia Davis is a noted translator from the French, and has recently completed a translation of Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann. She has written six books of fiction, including Break It Down, The End of the Story, and Almost No Memory. Thulani Davis’s most recent works include the opera Amistad and the plays Miss Ruby’s Blues: The Story of a Murder in Florida and Ava & Cat in Mexico. She is the author of the novel 1959, and two volumes of poetry, Playing the Changes and All the Renegade Ghosts Rise. She wrote the libretto for the opera X: The Life of Malcolm X, by Anthony Davis. Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist whose performances and videos have been included in The Whitney Biennial, The Johannesburg Biennial, and The Bienal Barro de America in Caracas. She edited Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and is the author of English Is Broken Here and the forthcoming The Bodies That Were Not Ours (Routledge). William H. Gass is the author of Habitations of the Word: Essays and Finding a Form, winners, respectively, of the 1985 and 1996 National Book

Critics Circle awards for criticism, and The Tunnel, which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995. He received a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 and the first PEN/Nabokov Award in 1999. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, and most recently, The Glass Palace. He writes regularly for The New Yorker magazine. Nikki Giovanni is the author of the poetry collections Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, Love Poems, Blues: For All the Changes, several children’s books, and collections of essays and conversations. She received the NAACP Image Award for Literature in 1998 and 2000, and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters in 1996. Robert Giroux has devoted his life to the writing, editing, and publishing of books. During forty years as a partner at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he has worked with T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor. The author of three books himself, Mr. Giroux has been honored with a National Book Critics Circle Award for editing and publishing, and the Elmer Bobst Award. Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel laureate in literature, is the author of The Conservationist (which won the Booker Prize), Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me, and The House Gun, ten collections of short stories, and two books of literary and political essays. She is a Vice President of International PEN, an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers, and a member of the African National Congress. Mary Gordon is the author of five novels: Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending: A Utopian Divertimento. She has also published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity; the memoir The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father; and a biography of Joan of Arc.

Amy Hempel’s stories have been collected in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Tumble Home. She has edited, with Jim Shepard, Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs. Eva Hoffman was born in Kraków, Poland, and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, at the age of thirteen. She is the author of the memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe, and Shtetl. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book is a novel, The Secret. Maureen Howard is the author of Before My Time, Grace Abounding, and Expensive Habits, each of which have been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her memoir Facts of Life won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She has taught at Amherst, Yale, and Princeton, and is currently a professor at Columbia. Her latest book is Big As Life: Three Tales for Spring (Viking). Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. He has published more than fifty volumes of fiction, poetry, and prosepoems. His books include The Scorpion, Kill the Messenger, and A Transparent Tree, which received the Academy-Institute Award from the American Institute of Arts. David Leeming is emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of James Baldwin: A Biography, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, and several books on mythology. Richard Matthews was awarded the 2001 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Prize for Poetry for his first collection of poems, The Mill Is Burning, which will be published by Grove Press in April 2002. His work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Drunken Boat, and Newsday. He lives in New York City. Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His books of poetry include The Geographics and Me with Animal Towering. Rick Moody is the author of the novels Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America, and two collections of stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology. He is the coeditor (with Darcey Steinke) of

an anthology of essays, Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited. His short work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Village Voice. He is currently at work on a nonfiction genealogical narrative, The Black Veil. Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, and The Times Square Story. He is Editor-in-Chief of Library of America. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1965) was born in Savannah, Georgia. Her novels are Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Her stories have been collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and her essays in Mystery and Manners. Christa Parravani’s photography will appear in the forthcoming premier issue of Crowd. She is a second-year MFA student at Columbia University. Martin Roberts teaches courses on mass media and globalization at New York University. His research focuses on cultural dimensions of globalization, and his publications include articles on world music, ethnographic documentary film, and nationalism and cinema in Indonesia. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel. Her book Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution was nominated for a National Book Award in 1989. Carl Hancock Rux has written a collection of poetry and prose, Pagan Operetta; the verse drama Song of Sad Young Men; and poetry, fiction, and experimental drama that have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies internationally. His debut album is entitled Rux Revue. Kelefa Sanneh is deputy editor of Transition, a journal of culture and ethnicity around the world. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. W. G. Sebald was born in Germany and lives in England. His novels are The Emigrants, Vertigo, and The Rings of Saturn, which was chosen as the Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of 1998.

Roger Shattuck has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and taught for many years at Boston University. He is the author of The Banquet Years, Marcel Proust (National Book Award winner, 1974), The Innocent Eye, Forbidden Knowledge, Candor and Perversion, and most recently, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. Larry Siems is the director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center. His book Between the Lines: Letters Between Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans and their Families and Friends was a finalist for the PEN West award for nonfiction in 1993. His poems have appeared in Epoch, Agni, Ironwood, and The Southern Poetry Review. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who has received the PEN Freedom to Write Award among many other accolades, was imprisoned by the Indonesian government for eleven years on the island of Buru. Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet —This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass —grew out of stories he told his fellow prisoners.

Among Eleanor Traylor’s publications are Broad Sympathy: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader, The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Tradition, and The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production, a multimedia piece. She is a graduate professor of English and chair of the English department in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Edmund White’s fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, and Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, The Married Man, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet and a short life of Proust. John Edgar Wideman is the author of nearly twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Sent for You Yesterday, Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society. He has received the Lannan Award for fiction, two PEN/Faulkner Awards for fiction, and a MacArthur Foundation grant. C. K. Williams is the author of eight collections of poems, including Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and

Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. Ken Wiwa was born in Nigeria and educated in England. He contributes to newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent. In the Shadow of a Saint is his first book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” From Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin. Copyright © 1955, renewed 1983, by James Baldwin. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Böll, Heinrich. “Skeleton of a Human Habitation.” From Irish Journal, by Heinrich Böll. Copyright © 1967 by Heinrich Böll. Permission to reprint here is granted by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch via Writer’s House Agency of New York and by Leila Vennewitz. Ghosh, Amitav. “Walls.” From In an Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh. Copyright © 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Gordon, Mary. “Ghosts of Ellis Island.” From Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays, by Mary Gordon. Copyright © 1991 by Mary Gordon. Printed by permission. Hempel, Amy. “The New Lodger.” From Tumble Home, by Amy Hempel. Copyright © 1997 by Amy Hempel. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Hoffman, Eva. “The New Nomads.” First published in the Yale Review. Copyright © 1998 by Eva Hoffman. Reprinted by permission of the author. O’Connor, Flannery. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” From Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor. Copyright © 1969 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Sebald, W. G. “Memory’s Defeat.” From Vertigo, by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse. Copyright © 1990 by Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, English translation © 1999 by Michael Hulse. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Williams, C. K. “After the Wars.” From Misgivings, by C. K. Williams. Copyright © 2000 by C. K. Williams. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Wiwa, Ken. “Running in the Family.” From In the Shadow of a Saint, by Ken Wiwa. Copyright © 2001 by Ken Wiwa. Reprinted by permission of Steerforth Press.