PEN America Issue 4: Fact/Fiction (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers) 0934638217, 0934638411

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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 Issue 4 (Volume 2) PEN American Center 568 Broadway, Suite 401 New York, NY 10012 This issue is made possible in part by the generous funding of The Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust and The Kaplen Foundation. Copyright © 2002 PEN American Center. All rights reserved. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the formal written consent of PEN American Center. Authorization to photocopy items for internal, informational, 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 collective works, or for resale. 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. Printed in the United States of America by McNaughton and Gunn. Postmaster: Send address changes to PEN America, c/o PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012. ISBN: 0-934638-21-7 eBook ISBN: 0-934638-41-1 ISSN: 1536-0261 Fortune Teller / Santa Cruz, California, 1991 (cover); Coaster Painting (detail) / Denver, Colorado, 1990 (p. 8); and Operation Thunderbolt / Santa Cruz,

California, 1992 (p. 211) by Jeff Brouws, from Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (Chronicle Books, 2001). Copyright © 2001 Jeff Brouws. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Because of limited resources, at present we are unable to review unsolicited submissions of writing except from members of PEN American Center. We do, however, seek color photographs for the cover and blackand-white images (single photos as well as photo essays) for the inside. The theme of issue 5 will be “Silence.” See www.pen.org/journal/submit.html for guidelines. No manuscripts, requests, or artwork will be returned without the inclusion of a self-addressed stamped envelope. We do not accept unsolicited submissions of any kind via e-mail; these will be deleted unopened. See page 233 for text acknowledgments.

CONTENTS FORUM Unreliable Narrators In Politics In Literature TRIBUTE John Steinbeck: Fights and Flights A Suffering Conscience Arthur Miller On the Road Again John Steinbeck A Mighty Heart William Kennedy Real People Dorothy Allison The More Things Change Studs Terkel Story Lines Peter Matthiessen Home Grown John Steinbeck Small-Town Tales Michele Serros

Lonesome Animals George Plimpton End of the Road John Steinbeck FICTION Heartless Jeanette Winterson The Truth About Sancho Panza Franz Kafka Cervantes and the Quixote Jorge Luis Borges The Whole Truth Miguel de Cervantes Continuity of Parks Julio Cortázar Strange to Say … W. G. Sebald Who’s Dreaming Whom? Lewis Carroll The Last Days of a Famous Mime Peter Carey A Conversation with My Father Grace Paley What She Wanted Alice Munro A Time to Mourn William Maxwell The Memory of All That

William Maxwell Passion Flowers Penelope Fitzgerald A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Robert Olen Butler Against Interpretation Ismail Kadare True War Stories Tim O’Brien POETRY inside gertrude stein Lynn Emanuel I Have Dreamed of You So Much Robert Desnos Farewell Agha Shahid Ali Lessons in Parsing Rashid Hussein The Colonel Carolyn Forché MEMOIR The Passions of Lalla Michael Ondaatje Foreign Relations Paula Fox ‘Want to Love You’ Sheila Munro

Dear Frere Graham Greene CONVERSATIONS ‘Open Destiny of Life’ Grace Paley Imagined Landscape William Maxwell The Story of the Story Lorrie Moore ‘This Is True’ Tim O’Brien ESSAYS Partial Magic in the Quixote Jorge Luis Borges Sebald’s Uncertainty James Wood Building a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later Philip K. Dick Breezy Stream of Time Simon Schama What Is Real? Alice Munro Better and Sicker Lorrie Moore At the Washington Zoo Randall Jarrell The Deaths of Anton Chekhov

Janet Malcolm The Truth of Lies Mario Vargas Llosa The Shortcomings of History Richard Holmes Last Fragments Novalis Shadowlands Milan Kundera The Allegory of the Cave Plato LAGNIAPPE Charles Simic sees the worlds.

EDITOR’S NOTE

“‘R eality,’” Nabokov wrote, is “one of the few words which mean

nothing without quotes.” Now more than ever, it seems: watching NBC Nightly News has begun to feel a lot like watching Comedy Central’s Daily Show. Terms better suited to comic books and Orwellian dystopias—“Axis of Evil,” “Homeland Security,” “Patriot Act”—have taken root in what most of us call the real world. At my house the line between fact and fiction is further obscured by Harper’s Weekly, an e-mail summary of world news written by Roger D. Hodge. With a poet’s taste for compression and startling juxtaposition, Hodge strings together fragments from stories reported by the media each week. The absurdities in his narrative, and ours, sometimes make me giddy. Here’s a sample: The Department of Justice added Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Armenia to the list of countries whose adult male citizens residing in the U.S. must register with federal authorities but later dropped Armenia after it was pointed out that most Armenians are Christian…. It was reported that the Bush Administration will propose a new centralized system for monitoring all activity on the Internet. White House officials downplayed reports that the Pentagon is planning a propaganda assault on allied countries and emphasized that the president would never condone anything that involved lying…. Lies, both political and literary, preoccupy the writers whose work appears in this issue of PEN America. Some of them ground invented worlds in historical fact; others rely on fictional strategies to create the illusion of factuality; still others use deception to trawl for truer truths. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me,” Jeanette Winterson writes. William Maxwell observes that writers “keep trying to explain

the past even as it makes liars of us all” and quotes Flaubert, who believed that whatever we invent is true, even though we may not understand what the truth of it is. “Your history gets in the way of my memory…. Your memory gets in the way of my memory,” writes Agha Shahid Ali. Charles Simic, who provides our Lagniappe, was born in Belgrade, a city bombed by Austria during World War I, Germany in 1941, the Allies in 1944, and NATO in 1999. Simic, often labeled a surrealist poet, describes himself as a hardnosed realist. “After what we’ve been through,” he once remarked, “the wildest lies seem possible.” —M. Mark

E-MAIL FORUM Subject: Distrust From: [email protected] To: PEN Members When you hear the term “unreliable narrator” these days, who or what comes to mind? Why? ››› EMILY BARTON: George W. Bush comes to mind, of course, because he is doubly unreliable in his narration—nothing he says bears any relationship either to the truth or to what he intends to say. ››› DOROTHY ALLISON: George Bush, for obvious reasons… ››› GENE MIRABELLI: George W. Bush. Who else? ››› MICHAEL LASSELL: George W. Bush, the putative president of the United States. As the narrator of America’s story, he unfolds a tale that is equal parts fact, dream, imagination, rant, legend, personal myth, inherited lore, sampled opinion, emotions concocted in committee, and metaphors not so much mixed as shaken. Self-cast as omnipotent and omniscient if not yet omnipresent, he allows no room in his narrative for dialogue (think of the novels of Beckett), only monologues with the statements or misstatements of others inserted between the

ingenuous (dare we say cynical?) constructions and deconstructions that are quoted without critical comment in the daily press. In his world words are not signs or symbols of something substantial, concrete, or even fanciful. Rather, his idiom, his genre, is verbiage itself. Content, plot, structure have been forsaken in a semiotics of clichés, in which the denoter of an event in the past is simply transposed to an unlike situation in the present without regard to time, place, or sequence, untranslated as if the entire universe of its connotation could be reduced to an aphorism. In tone folksy and confidential, his tactics are in fact pyrotechnical and conspiratorial. Plainspoken by his own account, he is in fact a master of the covert, leading us willy-nilly to places unsubstantiated by character, experience, or humanity. ››› JOYCE JOHNSON: President George W. Bush. As with literary unreliables, his voice is the giveaway—he speaks as if he’s just personally concocted the English language, with a perceptible double take whenever he comes to certain loaded words. ››› BENJAMIN R. BARBER: The archetypical “unreliable narrator” today is of course the president of the United States, followed closely by his secretary of defense and his attorney-general. But this is hardly a surprise since politics and fiction have been difficult to tell apart for at least a couple of decades now. ››› DENNIS BARONE: The White House. ››› SANDRA LANGER: I think immediately of W. and his everchanging manipulations of the English language. He is not as stupid as he makes himself out to be. The thin line between “faith-based” and “religious” has been completely blurred by him and now the Constitution is abridged through his unreliable narrations and redefinitions. Yet no one seems to cry out against

this in an effective way. But that’s rather impossible when other unreliable narrators like the Bush Supremes are only an echoing “core-us” line of conformists for the Bush dynasty script. A stolen election, a wag-the-dog war, a hide-and-seek game with Osama and the Saudi princes made smooth by a lot of oil, and you have the stuff of unreliable narrators leading the masses to the cliff’s edge and talking them over the brink. This is brinkmanship of the first water. ››› JARED CARTER: George W. Bush. Don Rumsfeld. John Ashcroft. Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein. Colin Powell. John Negroponte. Condoleezza Rice. Dick Chaney. Trent Lott. Jesse Jackson. Al Sharpton. Need I continue? ››› DAVID BERGMAN: Ari Fleischer seems to me our most ubiquitous unreliable narrator. There is usually some truth in what he says, but it is almost entirely lost in the spin of the words. Listening to him I wonder not what is the truth—since that is undiscoverable—and not what does he want me to believe— since that’s entirely obvious—but how he thinks I could believe him, what does he really believe about what he’s saying, and what happens when he falls silent. It is, as Ford Madox Ford wrote in what is the greatest work with an unreliable narrator, “the saddest story.” ANDREW HULTKRANS: Ari Fleischer. ››› ROBERT FLYNN: Anyone in the “mainstream media,” more accurately called the “corporate media.” To avoid the party line it’s increasingly necessary to read foreign newspapers and listen to BBC. ››› KAREN KENNERLY: … the press. ›››

AMEENA MEER: It would have to be the news media. I can trust them as far as I can throw a big, fat armload of Sunday New York Times. Even my six-year-old daughter says, eyes wide, “the newspapers lied to us,” after noticing that the events she witnessed were described completely differently in the Times. So does Iraq have “weapons of mass destruction”? Have we or have we not already started a war? And in the American heartland, are we Muslims all a festering bed of bloodthirsty jihadis just waiting for the right moment to blow everyone to kingdom come? Why is there never a story about a Muslim who does anything good? And the real question: Why do all the stories have different facts in the rest of the world? ››› JAYNE LYN STAHL: When I hear the term “unreliable narrator,” I find myself thinking of Poe’s “Black Cat”; however, these days, one can’t help but think of unreliable narrators in terms of the news media, and their coerced distortions. No matter how you slice it, bias is a four-letter word which is as inescapable as language itself. The truth has stretch marks, and those who are savvy recognize fact for the elegant fiction that it is. In the current political climate, fair and responsible reporting is subjugated by those whose cultural lens is twisted. Hence, nowadays it is journalists who find themselves as unwilling narrators faced with the epic struggle to separate fact from fiction. The question thus becomes: Whose truth? Whose lens? The less we acknowledge artifice, the more we fall prey to it. ››› KATHRYN NOCERINO: These days, the term “unreliable narrator” invokes so many possibilities that I cannot make a choice. Do I opt for the realm of finance (Kozlowski, Lay, et al.), politics (our “president,” Dick Cheney, Trent Lott, et al.), religion (Cardinal Law, et al.), my “significant other”? Ooooh, have I got a headache! ›››

KAREN SWENSON: When I hear the term “unreliable narrator,” I think of Kissinger, Cambodia, and the Vietnam War, and only afterwards of Ford Madox Ford, actually long afterwards, because the next thought is of the present American regime, which I suspect is following in the grand and deepthful footsteps of its predecessor during the last war. Probably all wars bring “unreliable narrators” onto their stage. They are the necessary messengers. WALLIS WILDE-MENOZZI: Being asked to assign a person to the term “unreliable narrator” I tend to think of politicians, who create narrations about national interest. The term “war on terror” has begun to be accepted unskeptically. It carries with it a selffulfilling wave of fictions. By linking “terror” and “war,” we are creating a reality more than establishing truth. Why narrate war and weapons as a sign of our superpower status? Is Iraq our greatest enemy? Where are the weapons of statistics and facts that cry out about other daily and more threatening terrors: the terror of hunger, of aids, of drug lords, of pollution, of the selling of arms around the world, of the lack of medical supplies. These wars, too, are being unreliably narrated, and could be solved, on the ground, not with skypower but with the sacrifice and determination required in all battles fighting recalcitrant enemies for worthy causes. ››› HENRY TAYLOR: At the moment Trent Lott comes across as one of the most unreliable narrators I’ve encountered lately. It is perhaps uncharitable to take any literary pleasure in his work, but I confess that I do. ››› ANN HARLEMAN: In a sense, every narrator is unreliable. It’s a question of how much, and how interestingly. Poe’s creepy firstperson narrators (“The Cask of Amontillado,” for instance) stand at one end of the unreliability continuum. At the other, we might put, say, Tolstoy or George Eliot—third-person so-called

omniscient narrators whose view of the human condition, while not boundless, extends farther than anyone else’s. And then there’s Chaucer, who, by an accumulation of passionately unreliable narrators, gives us the whole world, but leaves it up to us to assemble it. ››› TOM BISHOP: Unreliable narrators are the only narrators for whom I have any use. Enough of the good (or bad) old reliable 19th century narrator. Boring—not for then, but for now. Give me the narrators of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Cortázar et al. any time. Who needs reliability when you can have “Then I went into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” (Beckett, Molloy) ››› KAL WAGENHEIM: I suspect that most (perhaps all!) writers are —to one degree or another—“unreliable narrators” because we see the world through our own very subjective lens, even when we are trying our best to be honest. ››› THOMAS BELLER: Alastair Cooke sitting in his armchair, getting ready to introduce “Masterpiece Theater,” but bumbling his lines because he’s had too much to drink. Or maybe he doesn’t bumble his line so much as wander off the plot and make a few things up. Not that Alastair Cook ever bumbled his lines, fabricated, or, as far as I know, drank too much. It’s just that it recently occurred to me that on the list of literary influences which I have imbibed—many of which are inevitably extra-literary —that plummy, after dinner drinkish, vaguely haughty tone of voice made an early and lasting impression. And so when I heard unreliable narrator, that is what sprang to mind. ››› LUCY FERRISS: When we first started bandying that phrase around, midway through the twentieth century, it had a clear

definition: an unreliable narrator was one whose version of things ran counter to the story’s version of things. He or she was not lying, but had a point of view that the story set up as selfdeceived or so prejudiced as to lay bare the real situation in a way the narrator did not intend. The classic example was Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” in which Sister’s indignant version of her family’s ill use of her makes it clear that she, Sister, is a foolish, vengeful, pampered, sour old maid.

I have heard many times since that not only is the unreliable narrator an interesting fictional technique, but it is almost impossible in our current age of half-known truths to have a reliable narrator—that the only narrators worth listening to, in other words, are unreliable. I think this is wrong-headed and comes from a mistaken sense of what most stories are about and what their intentions are. Now, “intentions” is one of those hot-button words. We cannot know the author’s intentions, ought not to probe them, should let the story stand without them, etc. But the presence of the unreliable narrator is entirely dependent on the story’s (and the author’s) intentions, so that excluding one more or less excludes the other. Let me give an example. When F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins corresponded about The Great Gatsby, Perkins praised Fitzgerald’s use of a “spectator, not a participant” as his narrator, Nick Carraway. There is nothing in the correspondence to indicate that either Perkins or Fitzgerald suspected Nick of unreliability— Nick was merely the stand-in, as it were, for the reader, who would then come to feel about Gatsby, and the whole world Gatsby hoped to inhabit, as Nick did. Since then, many readers have begun to feel that the story is about Nick at least as much as it is about Gatsby; that in

fact Nick’s impetus in telling the story has as much to do with his own troubled past and insubstantial present as it does Gatsby’s; that Nick’s pretensions to disinterested judgment are instances of self-deception. That Nick Carraway, in other words, is an unreliable narrator. But where does that leave us? Unlike “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Gatsby offers us no version of events other than Nick’s, no way in which Nick’s story is able to run counter to something else. Why? Because Fitzgerald did not intend it to. If Nick is unreliable, it is an accidental unreliability, one that becomes clear only as readers look at it from the vantage point of a different political sensibility. Within the framework of the story Fitzgerald is telling, Nick is as reliable as you’re going to get. The same goes for Ed in Dickey’s Deliverance, for Luke in Dubus’s “A Father’s Story,” for the narrator of Invisible Man, for Offred in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, for Borowski’s narrators in This Way to the Gas…, for the narrators of so-called “unreliable memoirs” from The Kiss to Liars’ Club. We don’t trust these narrators because we live in a culture of distrust and because we find more critical fodder in these stories if we question the authority of their narrators. But a truly unreliable narrator, it seems to me, is a deliberate creation, one that supports rather than undermines the essential authority of the story itself. And those, especially now, are in very short supply. HORACIO OLIVEIRA: I wonder if I really know what an unreliable narrator might be, since I am sure I don’t know what a reliable one is. Take my friend Ossip Gregorovius, for instance, who has three different mothers from different parts of central Europe depending on what he has had to drink. The first he

mentions when drinking cognac, the second appears with vodka, and the third springs to mind with the help of wine—a cheap Côte du Rhone most times. How am I to know which mother is the real one, which Gregorovius the most reliable narrator? Is it the Ossip full of cognac or vodka or red wine? Or does this inconsistency merely make him an unreliable drunk? With each mother he grows more difficult to believe yet perhaps moves closer to the truth. Unreliable. Whunreliable. As I turn over the idea of Ossip in my mind, narrative reliability begins to resemble a weak bridge that spans dark waters. What is narration but a way of selfishly appropriating what is always uncertain, always unreliable, into a structure, a crystallization of thought and perception that feels as safe and firm as my own hand upon the table. What narrator is ever free enough from himself to be reliable, to tell the story “exactly as it is”? Narration is always unreliable because it is never anything but partial and incomplete. Morelli writes in the notes for one of his projected novels, “If the volume or the tone of the work can lead one to believe that the author is attempting a sum, hasten to point out to him that he is face to face with the opposite attempt, that of an implacable subtraction.” In this subtraction lies the real thing. Remember that with each successive encyclopedic experiment— Flaubert, Joyce, Musil—there was a falling short. Maybe this is why Morelli has more notes than novels, why he only describes projects and people as they might be, not as they are. ››› H. LIPSCOMB: After thirty years as an editor and head of publishing companies and as a journalist, I have become a lot less impressed by the notion that a term like “unreliable narrator” has some kind of fixed meaning beyond the opinions of current literary fashion.

In fiction or drama, an “unreliable narrator” can be intentional and an artistic device. How “reliable” after all is Vidal’s Aaron Burr, or are the asides of Shakespeare’s

Richard III? And yet their very spin helps establish the center of gravity of the work of art itself. But in nonfiction, whether history or journalism, the pretense of objectivity is perhaps the greatest illusion of all. While a Holinshed or a Suetonius may make no secret of their sympathies, nor did the “yellow journalists” of Pulitzer or Hearst for that matter, many contemporary writers from Roger Morris to Bob Woodward seem to actually believe they have achieved some higher standard of objectivity. In every age a “reliable narrator” seems to be one generally in line for the accolades of the critical and academic zeitgeist. And an “unreliable narrator” is one at variance. Unfortunately we are suffering through a particularly sterile period of literary fashion which sees the “reliability” of an artist in notions of a moral catechism as rigid as the doctrines of a medieval cleric. The only thing we can probably rely upon is that the judgment of history is likely to surprise us. ››› JANIS STOUT: When I hear the term “unreliable narrator,” I usually think of Willa Cather. Probably that’s because, given my work the past few years, I usually think of Willa Cather in connection with any literary idea. But truly, her narrators—more often representations of herself than she would have admitted, but not always so— are far less reliable, far less simple, far less transparent than they have usually been made out to be. Probably that’s my favorite kind of writing: writing that seems easy, transparent, maybe even obvious, but then turns out not to be. It keeps us guessing without broadcasting I AM DIFFICULT! I AM AMBIGUOUS! Cather was more a modernist than we have sometimes thought, or even a proto-postmodernist. And talk about mixing fiction and nonfiction…

››› JIM BARNES: What/who comes to mind? Henry James, of course. His Lambert Strether, in particular. Too bad so few writers today can handle a narrative which has an “unreliable narrator.” Back to school might help. ››› GAVAN DAWS: Unreliable narrator—who comes to mind? Everybody in the public, i.e., allegedly nonfiction, arena … In fiction, the narrator can be as unreliable as he/she feels like being, the more unreliable the more interesting/entertaining. In nonfiction, everything should carry a consumer warning on the package: CAVEAT LECTOR—believing this can be damaging to the public health. ››› PATRICK McGILLIGAN: As I get older, and accumulate experience (and books), I can’t shake this feeling that I am the unreliable narrator, fitting a life into a story. Writing biography, the only thing one can really be certain of—when separating fact from fiction—is birth and death, and of course the details and circumstances of those prove to be unreliable, too, upon investigation. My editor is always striking the word “perhaps.” I try to be certain, but certainty feels elusive, and I find that doubt and ambiguity and disparate points of view are more natural— perhaps more truthful. Everything is “Rashomon.” Right up to the end I often have to admit that “I really don’t know.” ››› ROXANA ROBINSON: I have always thought of the unreliable narrator as that most useful of all literary personae, the candid, thoughtful, observant character through whose eyes we watch the action unfold, who experiences the action and who tries to interpret it for us. Her flawed attempts at this reveal the flaws in her understanding: her unreliability is unintentional. Sometimes we can, alarmingly, see the errors of her perception as the action unfolds; sometimes we can’t, until she does, at the denouement.

It doesn’t matter. The point is that this character represents the human condition, which is vulnerable, and awkward, and ignorant, and prone to an unceasing stream of mistakes. This is the way we all experience life: blindly. It’s the fact that this narrator keeps going, keeps trying, keeps making the attempt to understand, keeps struggling against the stream, that she confides her struggle trustingly to us—this is what makes her interesting, makes her real, and breaks our hearts. ››› WALTER JAMES MILLER: Any narrator speaking in the first person is “unreliable.” His/her view of the action, motives, etc. is necessarily subjective. S/he is even, or especially, unreliable about him/herself. A massive series of examples would be all the narrators in Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red. ››› TOM FLEMING: Herodotus comes to mind. But he makes his fake history fascinating! ››› KATHARINE WEBER: When I hear the term “unreliable narrator” these days, what comes to mind, sadly, is the autobiographical first novel which features an earnest narrator who has somehow triumphed over adversity and now tells his story on his own selfserving terms. This narrator discloses a great deal while expressing little insight; frequently this lack of perception is indistinguishable from the author’s own limited understanding of what he is trying to accomplish on the page. I miss the old style of unreliable narrator, a far more controlled and constructed character deployed by writers such as Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark for deliberate effect. ››› CHARLES OYAMO GORDON: An unreliable narrator is someone who writes according to what the dramaturge or editor or publisher or sponsor or general public think proper and correct. Such a narrator is fearful of upsetting people which might

result in her/his being ostracized and rejected, left alone with his/her manuscripts, utterly isolated. An unreliable narrator is an Africamerican writer who is fearful less he/she earn the disapproval of “white” Americans of the literary and nonliterary establishment. An unreliable narrator is someone who is fearful of speaking candidly and truthfully. ››› STEWART O’NAN: O. J. Simpson in I Want to Tell You. He taught me everything I needed for my Marjorie in The Speed Queen. ››› JOAN SCHENKAR: I’ll forgo the obvious answers to this query (i.e., politicians and the authors of memoirs) and concentrate instead on my relatively new literary interest, biography. When I moved—a temporary move, as all American moves are—from writing plays to writing biographies, I had no idea how much further into “fiction” I was advancing. Character, after all, is the business of both playwrights and biographers and I thought I was making a natural progression from one dramatic and literary form to another one; a progression in which I could deploy new counters and techniques to investigate the age-old problem of How to Live by Those Who Have. But anyone who has ever assembled the collection of “partial” truths (in both senses of the term), painstaking researches, anguished conjectures, informed intuitions, and educated guesses which constitute biography (the only modern literary form, by the way, which lacks an aesthetic) knows by heart how close to invention, translation, creation this Tantalus form always falls. And so, these days, when I hear the term “unreliable narrator,” who comes to mind is, well, myself. ››› RICHARD KATROVAS: The term “unreliable narrator” is significant only in fiction. Its shadow in nonfiction is “liar” or “irresponsible narrator.” In fiction, the unreliability of a narrator is a feature of his or her truth value as a representative of the human drama. In nonfiction, the irresponsible narrator is simply

an indication of bad faith. The real issue is where/when a narrative is or is not fiction. “Memoir,” for example, is something other than autobiography, I submit: The former is about remembering, particularly as that activity centers on the transition from adolescence into adulthood, and on into mid-life. The latter is history, and therefore must proceed from the same processes of documentation and verification as all other historical narratives. Memoir is the myth of self, autobiography its history. Memoir, now, is what we used to be comfortable calling the autobiographical novel. What fictions occur in such narrative are usually incidental to its veracity, its emotional truth, as are dreams. ››› ROBERT WECHSLER: When I hear the term “unreliable narrator,” I don’t think of people or lies at all, I think of a literary device. In nonfiction, all narrators are unreliable (except, perhaps, those who tell you right up front they’re unreliable). When I hear the term used in terms of a border between fact and fiction, what I think is that too many readers, and writers, do not understand literary devices, and that people care more about facts than about truths (authenticity is all). Blurring fact and fiction is of little value (except, clearly, entertainment value) unless it is in the service of truths. And it is nothing new. Daniel Defoe did it all back in the eighteenth century, and he knew the commercial value of it as well as anyone does today. ››› DAVID KNOWLES: The first thing that comes to mind is deception. For example, unreliable narrators can either intentionally mislead the reader (as do several of Gordon Lish’s narrators) or do so unwittingly due to some personality flaw (as does Jimmy in William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria). Either way, the author creates a distance between his or her character’s account of events and the (so-called) truth. ››› JONATHAN KALB: Heiner Mueller.

››› PETER D. KRAMER: I am one not naturally drawn to memoir. The Autobiography of Ben Franklin or of Benvenuto Cellini, fine —I might read accounts of actors in or witnesses to great events. But the truly private memoir was a genre I came to only when it was forced upon me. In the aftermath of Listening to Prozac, I found myself immersed in autobiographies of depression, life stories largely by people the public would never have heard from, but for their intimate suffering.

I had admired William Styron’s Darkness Visible, for its spareness. It is less personal account than meditation, on the ineffable nature of pain. Susannah Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted is similarly lean; the subject is the ’60s, and paradoxes in the era’s tolerance for difference. Those books were more or less contemporaneous with my own. After 1993, the deluge. Not a month but contained its memoir of mood disorder. What struck me were the false notes. Doubtless it was that I read with a psychiatrist’s ear. Always I would hear the ring of incomplete confession, withheld detail, masked aggression. Can confessional self-description avoid unreliable narrative? Only with artistry. My model of the honest memoir was Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, a work that succeeds by complicating the genre, admixing fable. And now (in 2002) comes Carol Angier’s biography to demonstrate that in the straightforward, historical chapters, Levi changed names, attributed one relative’s traits to another, embellished memory with legend. Clearly, it is fiction that lends verisimilitude. Might not “autobiographer” be understood implicitly as a form of “unreliable narrator”? The imperatives to shift and shuffle are overwhelming, in memoir. In this realm,

only fiction can be trustworthy. If it is true to itself, true to genre (even the genre of “unreliably narrated” stories), true in voice, true in its time, then it is true, in a limited sense at least. Allow standing to external reality, and no personal narrative will be solidly reliable. ››› MARSHALL BERMAN: Dostoevsky, Henry James, Conrad, early Eliot, FM Ford, Va Woolf, Faulkner…

And then there’s Salinger, Ellison, Berryman, Oscar Lewis, Pynchon, DeLillo, JCOates, RStone, IshReed, TMorrison…. And then there’s Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, Ricky Lee Jones, Eminem. “If they asked me, I cd write a bk” abt how these folks evolve fr a common trad. But I can’t write it yet—gotta grade papers, Sha Na Na. Why aren’t there more girls in the class? Is it just bec I don’t know them? or is there something abt ways “women’s writing” has developed? Is “the unreliable narr” a kind of shadow self that much women’s writing has denied? Is that true in black writing as well? (Hey, it’s probably true in ALL writing. Don’t hit me, Ws & Bs!) Why all the singer-songwriters? (1) These were smart kids who went to college, read the great “Modern Writers Comp Lit 17–18” (those were Trilling’s #s), & carried Mod Trads on as well as any poets or novelists did. (2) If we look back now on the songs of the “We Want The World And We Want It Now” generation, isn’t it interesting how much of their strength is really much more like “Seven Types of Ambiguity”!

››› MARLENE FANTA SHYER: Just about any author of a memoir comes to mind. It’s tough enough remembering who said what yesterday without going back ten, twenty or fifty years. While some signal events remain burned precisely in memory, most backward glances have to be somewhat conjectural. However, the term “unreliable narrator” is disparaging. Why not give us memoir writers a break and call us, “best recollectors” instead? ››› SCOTT DONALDSON: Well, Toby Wolff’s stories come to mind. He invents some of the damnedest self-justifying bastard narrators. ››› SALLIE TISDALE: The “unreliable narrator” has a rich and honorable history. It’s not the narrators I worry about—it’s the many unreliable writers out there that bother me. I don’t trust writers who can flawlessly reconstruct elaborate scenes from early childhood, who conflate events and combine characters without admitting it, who add a little drama to nonfiction because it “could have happened” or “feels true.” Most writers work at the border between fact and fiction to an extent—I do so whenever I write about my own experience and memories. It is my responsibility as the writer to admit that experience is subjective and memory a faulty thing—to admit that all narrators are more or less unreliable. That we are most unreliable about ourselves is itself a great subject. ››› MICHAEL KANDEL: Narrators are storytellers, therefore universally unreliable— in fact as well as in fiction. The phrase seems redundant to me. PATRICK McGRATH: 1. Edgar Allan Poe 2. Ford Madox Ford

3. Patricia Highsmith 4. Patrick McGrath ››› CATHY DAVIDSON: Edgar Allan Poe, “Cask of Amontillado.” ››› SUSAN BROWNMILLER: The term is so overused that it has lost its meaning, but oh, I guess I would have to say Lillian Hellman, damnit. ››› ED HANNIBAL: The Lillian Hellman–Mary McCarthy imbroglio— the intriguing question being, even if McCarthy is correct and Hellman was a totally unreliable narrator, i.e. liar, does that make her writing less compelling, dramatic, and “true” than when we thought we could believe her? ››› DEBORAH HAUTZIG: Lillian Hellman—but I think she was a wonderful writer, as well as a self-aggrandizing liar, and I care more about a good story than I do about the personal ethics of the author. It is very difficult to separate the creator from the creation, and perhaps if I were a better human being, I would not be able to endorse the work of someone who appears to have been so mean as a person, and highly unreliable as a reporter of events. Alas, I am not a better human being; The Children’s Hour remains a marvelous and brave play, and I will forever be touched by Julia, whether or not there is a grain of “truth” to it. On some emotional level, if not a factual one, it is true enough for me. Hellman’s crime was to misrepresent herself. That in no way nullifies the quality of her writing, for me. My dear friend Cherry Jones is currently portraying Mary in Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends, on Broadway, and I will be VERY curious to see if my perceptions are altered after seeing the play. The other writer who comes to mind is Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of Fragments, a purported memoir about his experiences as a child during the Nazi holocaust. Reading it was a shattering

experience. I could only read it in small doses, because it was so upsetting. When it came out that the book is a lie, that, too, was devastating. I felt I’d been made a fool of, along with millions of other readers. My parents actually ARE survivors of the holocaust, which made the book seem like even more of a travesty. And yet I cannot deny that I was affected by the story and some of the writing. I am so interested in knowing what other PEN members have to say about this topic. Is it not okay to admire a work of art which was falsely billed as being factual? I don’t know the answer. In the case of Fragments, I felt too betrayed to allow myself to ever look at it again. In the case of Hellman, I still feel that some of her pieces, while being terrible journalism, are memorable and wonderful all the same. ››› STEVEN G. KELLMAN: In John Dowell, a man who does nothing well, Ford Madox Ford created the paragon of unreliable narrators. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” declares Dowell in the first sentence of The Good Soldier, as though he were not a principal—if feckless—actor in the story he is telling. Ford subtitles his novel A Tale of Passion, yet Dowell is an emotional eunuch, precisely the wrong man to recount his lurid story of adultery, madness, and suicide. Dowell is an American living among Europeans who remain unfathomable to him, a Quaker who is oblivious to the theological chasm separating Catholics and Protestants, and a cuckolded, celibate husband who is ignorant of where babies come from. He claims that he and his wife, Florence, knew Edward and Leonora Ashburnham “as well as it was possible to know anybody.” Yet he acknowledges that, “in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.” A reader can trust nothing of what Dowell has to say except his repeated iterations of ignorance, that all is darkness. A novel of radical aporia, The Good Soldier is a textbook specimen of how point of view shapes fiction. Ford devised the consummate narrator for his turbid tale, because Dowell is so dependably unreliable.

››› MINFONG HO: For me, an “unreliable narrator” is someone who speaks English. Well yes, that’s a rather sweeping statement. I should qualify it by limiting it to those narrators whose mother tongue isn’t English, but who nevertheless write in it. Myself, for one. It’s not that we are necessarily unreliable, nor that our grasp of the language may be a little tenuous, but simply because our relationship to English is so often a strained, self-conscious one. Instead of a mother tongue, we have a stepmother tongue, and how reliable is a stepmother, after all? ››› ALEXIS LEVITIN: Since I am a full-time English Prof., the why question is simple: I teach these books or short stories. The unreliable narrator term brings to mind, immediately, Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, Marlow of Heart of Darkness, the unnamed narrator of Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” all of Poe’s insane, meticulous murderers. Of course buried within a third person narrative lies (hah) the cunningly unreliable narrator of much of The Odyssey. Of course he overtly reveals his unreliability to us, so maybe that does not count. ››› LENORA CHAMPAGNE: Anyone who writes memoir or autobiographically based work, including myself, comes to mind, because memory is notoriously unreliable. For example, in a solo piece I refer to the moment in A Nun’s Story (the movie) when Audrey Hepburn’s character’s father comes to take her to lunch, and she orders oysters. This prompted the child me to think, “hmmm, they must be good.” Yet, when I viewed the movie later, I realized there was no such scene. Instead, the doctor insists that she drink prairie oysters (raw eggs). When I related this anecdote to Holly Hughes, the performance artist, when we were on a panel about autobiographical work, she had a similar story. She’d accompanied friends to an old movie she’d seen before, saying “Wait until you see the color! It’s fantastic!”—only to discover that the film was actually in black and white. These two

incidents have convinced me that memory is not only selective, but marked by substitutions. This in no way invalidates the pleasures of hearing or reading other people’s stories, but shifts the focus (for me) from the details of the story itself to the manner of the telling. ››› JAROSLAV CERVENKA: Unreliable narrators: most of the good people who want to do good, avoiding the facts and truth, those subscribing to political correctness, one of the most repulsive attitudes of our times. Search for truth has no place in their minds and acts. ››› MARILYN AND IRVIN YALOM: “Unreliable narrator” is a term used often by the late Professor Albert Guerard. Think of such writers as Dostoevsky in “Notes from the Underground” or Kafka in many of the stories, or Camus in The Fall. At some point, the reader has to ask him/herself: To what extent is the narrator/protagonist telling a credible story, one that would be “verified” by the perceptions of others? But what if the narrator is paranoid or deranged in other ways, and experiences happenings in a distorted fashion? This doesn’t mean that he or she is duplicitous, only that the recounted events have been skewed by the narrator’s perceptual distortions. ››› MARTHE JOCELYN: I think of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and other books of that era/genre. I love these books precisely because the multiple narrators are unreliable, a fact revealed as essential to the plot. A mystery is enhanced by not knowing the truth. And what is truth anyway, but interpretation? ››› E. M. SCHORB: In The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Ken Patchen becomes one of the earliest of the unreliable narrators, which may or may not be of historical interest to those who find the subject interesting. The book was written in the late ’30s,

long before postmodernism, and yet it reads like today’s metafiction. O taste and see. ››› HELEN DUBERSTEIN: The term “unreliable narrator” brings to my mind writers of memoir, history, social commentary, and so on who present themselves as telling the truth. On the other hand, fiction, by definition, is a lie, a lie that paradoxically is true. It happened. It’s fiction! The disclaimer says so. Since the story plays itself out from the writer’s point of view, not from the characters’ point of view, all the characters, places, and situations are filtered through elements of the author’s deepest self, thus mythic. “How real! How true!” says the reader. “It was not like that. It was like this!” cry those who see themselves and the situation distorted. The writer who takes into account this sort of condemnation begins to doubt his own perceptions. The writer is silenced. ››› ANTONY SHUGAAR: My unreliable narrator is an Italian terrorist named Giorgio. In 1981, a small press in Milan published “Memoirs from Underground,” signed only Giorgio. The publishing house had received the 40,000-word text in an envelope without a return address. The story was gripping, and grim. Giorgio told how he had progressed from an almost frolicsome “proletarian expropriation” of Levi’s jeans from a Milanese jeanseria to carrying—and using—a handgun in a demonstration. It was not long before he was asked to join a fullfledged terrorist organization. This was in a period when Italy was caught in something close to full-fledged guerrilla warfare (there were almost 10,000 terrorist attacks in Italy in the late1970s and the early 1980s). My unreliable narrator opens his account by saying: “Let me make it clear from the outset, what I write here can’t be true, it can only be truthful.” And so, throughout the book, I found myself trying to read everything as straightforward fact, and careful tailoring of details; I hope that my translation rendered the cautious dodginess as well as the

descriptions of violence and grim routine. The ground rules of his account were that the author would be accurate yet untruthful (to my knowledge, he has not yet been apprehended). ››› JAMES VANOOSTING: I’m sorry to say who comes to mind when I hear “unreliable narrator” these days is any corporate ceo and any Roman Catholic bishop. I’m genuinely sad to admit these associations since (1) my own father was a corporate ceo who, many years ago, was convicted and imprisoned for fraud, and (2) I am a devout Roman Catholic. Notwithstanding both personal affliations, ceos and bishops have become unreliable to me because both are stuck in unethical narrative paradigms. ››› DAVID SHIELDS: At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, we know all the moments are “moments”: staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. Still, against the simulacrum of the Academy Awards ceremony, Halle Berry’s crying jag was the one thing that made us cringe and the only thing we’ll remember. At the Winter Olympics, the French judge’s confession that she had been coerced seemed like the one sliver and shiver of reality in Salt Lake. I find I can listen to talk-radio in a way that I can’t abide the network news—the sound of human voices waking before they drown. Who would not query the truthvalue of the rather too conveniently “found” Osama bin Laden tape while at the same time acknowledging that it’s the most compelling footage from the war in Afghanistan? “Elimidate,” “Shipmates,” “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?” and “The Bachelor” tell us more about the state of unions than any romantic comedy could dream of telling us. The Nanny Diaries is a success precisely because of the way in which it ambiguously straddles verifiable and imaginary facts. The appeal of Billy Collins is that, compared to the hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren’t; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of

Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone’s life (even if the author constantly reminded us of how fictionalized that life was). The Blair Witch Project—a fictional documentary whose authenticity was documented on the web and the sequel to which was a dismal failure—is the emblematic artwork of our time.

I like work—self-reflexive documentary film such as Ross McElwee’s, pseudo-confessional poetry such as Tony Hoagland’s, self-consuming performance art such as Sandra Bernhard’s, melancholy stand-up comedy such as Rick Reynolds’—that has the lure of the real, that seems to be gesturing toward some sort of nervousmaking author-self. And yet, just as out-and-out fiction no longer compels my attention, neither does straight-ahead memoir. The moment a book can be generically located, it seems to me for all intents and purposes dead. I want the contingency of life, the unpredictability, the unknowability, the mysteriousness, and this is best conveyed when a narrative can bend at will to what it needs—fiction, fantasy, memoir, meditation, confession, reportage. Why do I so strenuously resist generic boundaries? Because when I stay within them I can’t think. The moment I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts off, in a sort of sit-down strike, saying, “This is boring, so I’m not going to try very hard.” I find it very nearly impossible to read a novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now. Instead, it must constantly be shifting shape, redefining itself, staying open for business way past closing time. “Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between,” my

father would often advise me, but it seems to me that Mr. In-Between is precisely where we all live now. ››› TOM DISCH: I think of you. You can find many more responses at http://www.pen.org/journal/.

In the fourth year of the war, Hermes showed up. He was not much to look at. His mailman’s coat was in tatters; mice ran in and out of its pockets. The broad-brimmed hat he was wearing had bullet holes. He still carried the famous stick that closes the eyes of the dying, but it looked gnawed. Did he let the dying bite on it? Whatever the case, he had no letters for us. “God of thieves!” we shouted behind his back when he could no longer hear us.

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on. The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-bye. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long. —Charles Simic

HEARTLESS Jeanette Winterson

I

t was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy. Odd to be so governed by an appetite. It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Joséphine and he liked her the way he liked chicken. No one over five foot two ever waited on the Emperor. He kept small servants and large horses. The horse he loved was seventeen hands high with a tail that could wrap round a man three times and still make a wig for his mistress. That horse had the evil eye and there’s been almost as many dead grooms in the stable as chickens on the table. The ones the beast didn’t kill itself with an easy kick, its master had disposed of because its coat didn’t shine or the bit was green. “A new government must dazzle and amaze,” he said. Bread and circuses, I think he said….

There is no heat, only degrees of cold. I don’t remember the feeling of a fire against my knees. Even in the kitchen, the warmest place on any camp, the heat is too thin to spread and the copper pans cloud over. I take off my socks once a week to cut my toenails and the others call me a dandy. We’re white with red noses and blue fingers. The tricolor. He does it to keep his chickens fresh. He uses winter like a larder. But that was a long time ago. In Russia. Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris. It was a mess. Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye. I’m telling you stories. Trust me…. July 20th, 1804. Two thousand men were drowned today. In gales so strong that Patrick as lookout had to be tied to barrels of apples, we discovered that our barges are children’s toys after all. Bonaparte stood on the dockside and told his officers that no storm could defeat us. “Why, if the heavens fell down we would hold them up on the points of our lances.” Perhaps. But there’s no will and no weapon that can hold back the sea. I lay next to Patrick, flat and strapped, hardly seeing at all for the spray, but every gap the wind left showed me another gap where a boat had been. The mermaids won’t be lonely anymore. We should have turned on him, should have laughed in his face, should have shook the dead-men-seaweed-hair in his face. But his face was always pleading with us to prove him right.

At night when the storm had dropped and we were left in sodden tents with steaming bowls of coffee, none of us spoke out. No one said, Let’s leave him, let’s hate him. We held our bowls in both hands and drank our coffee with the brandy ration he’d sent specially to every man. I had to serve him that night and his smile pushed away the madness of arms and legs that pushed in at my ears and mouth. I was covered in dead men. In the morning, two thousand new recruits marched into Boulogne…. “We march on Moscow,” he said when the Czar betrayed him. It was not his intention, he wanted a speedy campaign. A blow to Russia for daring to set herself against him again. He thought he could always win battles the way he had always won battles. Like a circus dog he thought every audience would marvel at his tricks, but the audience was getting used to him. The Russians didn’t even bother to fight the Grande Armée in any serious way, they kept on marching, burning villages behind them, leaving nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. They marched into winter and we followed them. Into the Russian winter in our summer overcoats. Into the snow in our glued-together boots. When our horses died of the cold we slit their bellies and slept with our feet inside the guts…. To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it a while in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse? If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around

your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent. When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly. As the weeks wore on, we talked about going home and home stopped being a place where we quarrel as well as love. It stopped being a place where the fire goes out and there is usually some unpleasant job to be done. Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it. Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn’t believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. Our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war. And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hearts would be waiting behind the door with the dog. Not all men are as fortunate as Ulysses. From The Passion

JOHN STEINBECK: FIGHTS AND FLIGHTS A SUFFERING CONSCIENCE | ARTHUR MILLER

A good writer helps to create other writers, and I can recall the first time, in the ’30s, when I read John Steinbeck’s early books, and his stories. To open those pages was like opening paintings. I remember clearly the challenge I felt to enter into nature, something I had never thought of before, coming from New York City. And I began to look around in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at trees, and animals, and I felt more alive because of his prose. I thought of him as a friend, but our lives ran parallel, and with one or two exceptions they never really crossed. I had read him in college, and by the time we met in the early ’50s, he was a world celebrity whose life was filled with famous friends, and the powers that come with fame. Such was the view from afar. But close up, it was his uncertainty I found surprising, and his shyness and sensitivity, especially when he was so physically large, and so deliberative in his views. We lived in a time distorted by obligatory and defensive patriotism, in the ’50s, an atmosphere which seems to be incubating again. The contest then, however, was with the Russians, and it grew uglier by the week. John had begun as a radical writer, and the guilts inherent in that kind of alienation were compounded by the strident demands of convention in the ’50s and later. It was perhaps inevitable, given the near-hysterical state worship of the hour, that he should have come to feel alien to both past and present ideologies. Filled with feeling, he tended to seek

out the reassurance of goodness in the American world. And to some extent, perhaps, to sentimentalize occasionally the underdog. Steinbeck, utterly American, had a suffering conscience. His moral life was always central in his work, and his daily existence. So at times he would feel compelled to feign a toleration, if not a chuckling sardonic air of acceptance, of almost any kind of repulsive behavior. The alternative was an isolation only an ideologue would cherish. I couldn’t help seeing in John a grownup country boy who saw glamour in the city which a native New Yorker like myself was blind to. He had read philosophy and much classical literature, and enjoyed talking about arcane and mysterious forces affecting human fate. But he seemed to like best sitting and carving wood, and it was when he was talking about farm or small-town life that a certain genuine warmth poured out of him, a kind of easy familiarity and joy. I wondered if he might have been better served as a writer and more accepting of himself as a person had he stayed home, as Faulkner and Welty tried and often enough managed to do. In the last part of his life, Steinbeck sometimes seemed like a displaced person rather than a cosmopolitan at home anywhere. But then it is a very rare thing for an American writer to stay home. We tend to use up the energies of a particular place, then to leave home in the attempt to capture a wider America. But in the end America is perhaps only a lot of little places, the undistinguished streets and neighborhoods and countrysides of native ground. I can’t think of another American writer, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, whose imagination so deeply penetrated the political life of the country. The Grapes of Wrath, as I recall, stopped a deaf congress from babbling on about very little, and turned its attention to the masses of people who had been forced off their native lands by the Depression, then turned into desperately illpaid itinerant farm labor, attacked and often murdered by thugs, employed by harvest contractors who were resolved to squelch protests of any kind. The Joads became more vividly alive than one’s next-door neighbor, and their sufferings emblematic of an age. His picture of America’s humiliation of the poor was Steinbeck’s high

achievement, a picture which for a time challenged the iron American denial of reality. As I say, we were not privy to one another’s private life, but our paths on a few occasions did cross, sometimes in an illuminating way. I had broken off my relation with Elia Kazan after his cooperating testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some weeks or months later—I can’t recall how long exactly—John, who was a friend and sometimes collaborator and intimate of Kazan’s, wrote to say that he felt I ought to resume a friendship that had been so deep and a working relationship as productive as ours had been in the theater. He saw quite correctly that we were both wounded by what had come between us and offered to do what he could to heal the breach. For myself, in the struggle of that time, I could see no way to go over that broken bridge and have never known what Kazan’s reaction was to Steinbeck’s attempt, but within a week or two, a second letter from Steinbeck arrived. This apologized for his having suggested what, on thinking about it, he realized was impossible. Taken together, the letters reflect perhaps the two sides of Steinbeck. Perhaps the two eras of his development: the struggle within him between an overflowing sympathy for suffering, a veritable embrace of those in pain, and a hard-headed grasp of moral dilemmas from which with all the good will in the world there is no escape. But I think Steinbeck’s whole life was a hard struggle. First to achieve recognition, and then to dig in against easy and shallow popularity and the wilds of empty show-business values, which in so many ways have triumphed in our whole culture. Even when mistaken, as in my view he was when declaring support for Lyndon Johnson’s doomed Vietnam policies, the way he chose for himself was far from easy. John Steinbeck was not outside the battle, safely wrapped in his fame, but within it to the end. ON THE ROAD AGAIN | JOHN STEINBECK

My

plan was clear, concise, and reasonable, I think. For years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal…. So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth. One sharp difficulty presented itself. In the intervening twenty-five years my name had become reasonably well known. And it has been my experience that when people have heard of you, favorably or not, they change; they become, through shyness or the other qualities that publicity inspires, something they are not under ordinary circumstances. This being so, my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home. I had to be peripatetic eyes and ears, a kind of moving gelatin plate. I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. Furthermore, two or more people disturb the ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back…. It is some years since I have been alone, nameless, friendless, without any of the safety one gets from family, friends, and accomplices. There is no reality in the danger. It’s just a very lonely, helpless feeling at first—a kind of desolate feeling. For this reason I took one companion on my journey—an old French gentleman poodle known as Charley. Actually his name is Charles le Chien. He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France,

and while he knows a little poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. He is a very big poodle … and he is blue when he is clean. Charley is a born diplomat. He prefers negotiation to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting. Only once in his ten years has he been in trouble—when he met a dog who refused to negotiate. Charley lost a piece of his right ear that time. But he is a good watchdog—has a roar like a lion, designed to conceal from night-wandering strangers the fact that he couldn’t bite his way out of a cornet de papier. He is a good friend and traveling companion, and would rather travel about than anything he can imagine. From Travels with Charley A MIGHTY HEART | WILLIAM KENNEDY

In 1933 John Steinbeck was so poor he couldn’t afford a dog. The literary critic Lewis Gannett uncovered this fact in Steinbeck’s correspondence with his agents during the time he was writing Tortilla Flat. He had published three books of fiction since 1929, but together they hadn’t earned back his wretchedly small advances from his publisher. Of his first novel, Cup of Gold, Steinbeck said, “I rather wish it had never been published.” Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown earned some praise but no money, and a novel called Dissonant Symphony he withdrew from his agents, saying he was ashamed of it. “I need a dog pretty badly,” Steinbeck wrote. “Apparently we are headed for the rocks. The light company is going to turn off the power in a few days …” Then he published Tortilla Flat, and it became a popular success, which he didn’t understand. “Curious,” he wrote, “that this second-rate book, written for relaxation, should cause a fuss. People are taking it seriously.” And he added, “I am scared to death of popularity …”

This is a familiar pattern among some authors—poverty turning overnight into a confusion of success and money—but that isn’t quite my point tonight. Two weeks ago I was in a panel discussion and someone asked about self-doubt. I admitted to self-doubt on the basis of a theory I developed the hard way—that writers don’t really know what they’re doing when they’re doing it. Self-doubt, I suggested, is the price a writer pays for bringing out of his imagination work that is new and original to him, and—he hopes—to readers. Freedom from doubt comes from courting the sure thing— cloning yesterday’s successes, your own or somebody else’s. How can you not have doubt about untested work that seeks to be different from anything that has gone before? The originality Steinbeck was trying for in Of Mice and Men, a short work of fiction, was to write “a play that can be read, or a novel that can be played … to find a new form that will take some of the techniques of both.” By the time he was writing it he had earned enough money to buy a dog—a setter named Toby who, one night, alone with the Of Mice and Men manuscript, made confetti of it. “Two months’ work to do over,” Steinbeck wrote. “There was no other draft. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a manuscript I’m not sure is good at all.” Mice, as Steinbeck called it, was critically acclaimed, became a Book-of-the-Month, and a serious movie, but the suddenly famous Steinbeck still had his doubts. “I’m not sure,” he wrote, that “Toby didn’t know what he was doing when he ate the first draft. I have promoted Toby-dog to lieutenant-colonel in charge of literature.” By this time he was in the first of four stages of creation of The Grapes of Wrath. The first was seven articles for the San Francisco News in October 1936 on the desperation of migrant farm workers and Steinbeck’s plea for change; the second a novel called The Oklahomans, which he destroyed; the third a satirical novel called L’Affaire Lettuceberg, which attacked a cabal of power figures who, through terrorism, destroy a migrant workers’ strike. This novel was announced as forthcoming, but when Steinbeck finished it he wrote to his publisher:

It is a bad book and I must get rid of it … It is bad because it isn’t honest … I’ve written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it …Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well … I had forgotten that I hadn’t learned to write books. A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that … Mice was a thin, brittle book … but at least it was an honest experiment … I think I got to believing critics—thought I could write easily and that anything I touched would be good simply because I did it. Well, any such idea, conscious or unconscious, is exploded for some time to come. Steinbeck then began the manuscript that became The Grapes of Wrath, wrote it in five months, beginning in May and ending in late October 1938. He wrote in longhand, producing two thousand words a day, the equivalent of seven double-spaced typed pages, an enormous output for any writer. But in his diary, published as Working Days, he flagellated himself: “Vacillating and miserable … I’m so lazy, so damned lazy … where has my discipline gone?” This would be his ninth fiction book in ten years and he’d be thirty-seven years old. The diary also shows him choking on self-doubt as he finishes Grapes: No one else knows my lack of ability the way I do … Sometimes I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done, it slides into mediocrity … Got her done. And I’m afraid she’s a little dull … My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads … My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it … I’m slipping … I’ve been slipping all my life … Young man wants to talk, wants to be a writer. What could I tell him? Not a writer myself yet … I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill

book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Grapes is the odyssey of the Joad family of Oklahoma after a great drought causes the loss of the family farm. The landless Joads set out in a dilapidated truck, across the desert, to find work picking fruit in the promised land of California, a pipe dream that turns into a nightmare. Historically the book is the major anthem of the multitudes at the bottom of the world, bereft and drifting outcasts from the hostile society spawned by the Great Depression; in particular it is a hymn to the peon class which one soulless corporate farmer said—and Steinbeck noted this—was necessary to the survival of California agriculture. The book can also stand as a vivid parallel to the homeless on America’s streets since the 1980s; but even more, it illumines a universal theme articulated by Ma Joad, the matriarch, who is the novel’s greatest character: “We ain’t gonna die out,” Ma says. “People is goin’ on— changin’ a little maybe, but goin’ right on.” And Uncle John asks her, “What’s to keep ever’thing from stopping; all the folks from jus’ gittin’ tired an’ layin’ down?” “Hard to say,” says Ma. “Ever’thing we do—seems to me is aimed right at goin’ on … Even getting’ hungry—even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.” I can’t go on, I’ll go on. It’s Beckett’s line before Beckett. And it was John Steinbeck’s theme song as he drove himself like a peon in a lifelong quest to create literature. When the Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath, the novel its author thought was no good, the book became the top bestseller of 1939, won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, still sells more than a hundred thousand copies a year in the United States. Worldwide it has sold close to forty-five million copies, a planetary best-seller.

Six months after it was published, Steinbeck wrote in his diary: “That part of my life that made the Grapes is over … I have to go to new sources and find new roots.” He published another dozen books, but few of them approached the excellence of his best early works. Then he published The Winter of Our Discontent, and in October 1962, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature. An Academy spokesman said the novel was a return to the “towering standard” of Grapes, and called Steinbeck an “independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad.” Later that day Steinbeck answered questions from a roomful of reporters, one of whom asked, “Do you really think you deserve the Nobel Prize?” Pete Hamill, New York columnist and novelist, was a young reporter in that room. He remembers Steinbeck at that moment and what he calls “the wounded look in his eyes.” Steinbeck paused, then said with his usual self-flagellation, “That’s an interesting question. Frankly, no.” And so had begun the chorale of nay-saying which tried then, and is trying still, to dishonor the work of this writer. Not everybody who likes Steinbeck would agree that Discontent and Grapes are of equal weight, and I am one of those. But when I look at his achievements —Of Mice and Men, The Long Valley, Tortilla Flat in spite of itself, Cannery Row, much of East of Eden, and then The Grapes of Wrath —and when I try to name other American writers whose work meant as much to me when I was discovering literature and starting to write seriously, I count only a small handful. John Steinbeck had the power. If at times he lacked the language and the magic that goes with mythic literary achievement and status, he had in their place a mighty conscience and a mighty heart. And sixty-three years ago, that man put pencil to paper, and, in five miraculous months—gorged with the self-doubt that plagued his life —he wrote his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, a mighty book that no amount of nay-saying can diminish. “We ain’t gonna die out,” is what Ma Joad said. And neither is John Steinbeck.

REAL PEOPLE | DOROTHY ALLISON

Can you be personal about John Steinbeck? they asked me. Can you speak personally? I was born into the kind of poverty that John Steinbeck wrote about. I wanted to grow up to be a writer. Oh, I can speak personally about John Steinbeck. I remember the pleasure I took in being told that my stories were not sentimental. No gloss on the real, I told myself. To be true is to be hard-edged and precise about grief, pain, horror, to be matter-offact about rape and cruelty and death. And I’ve always despised whining, that sentimental stuff, those weak sisters pleading through snotty tears. I’m tough stuff, I told myself, I’ll be a tough writer. You write like a man, I was told. No, I write like a dyke. Except— except sometimes I try to write like John Steinbeck. I try to go from everyday conversation: real people stubbornly deciding to make do with what they must, to lift their heads over the cooling bodies of those they love and plan how they’re going to bury them. I make people starve and spit and refuse to go mad when the loss is so great madness is all that makes sense. I make them breathe, take a breath, take another, moment by moment, slow on the page, wrap that baby in baby-powder sheeting, put it in the ground, root it with a rock, do not think about what will come up in the spring, do not think about what is gone, a specific mamma, dirty hands on a muslin scrap, men in an empty landscape. The women, the men, the land. And then I hesitate. I cringe. We’re not supposed to do that, you know, we writers. Can we? Are we allowed to go from the woman to the women, the grave to the land? I have to fight myself to believe we can. To take prose to poetry, narrative to gospel, flesh to spirit, mental hesitation to passionate conviction. I have to try to put on the skin of John Steinbeck. And this is what it feels like. Phrase, break, chorus, stanza, refrain, breaking music, his, or that breaking music Muriel Rukeyser wrote about—and she was called sentimental. Gospel choir, Beethoven choral moment, story lifting for a moment, perspective shifting up, up, and then down again into the skin of someone speaking, someone shoveling dirt on a grave. Old truck

grinding noise and gravel, man wiping dust from under his eyes. Is it Oklahoma, or Bakersfield, or Greenville, South Carolina, on a day without rain? I do not want to be thought to write badly. I do not want to be predictable, mock-poetic, or silly, foolish, romantic. Don’t want to write down or betray my ignorance, don’t want evidence of prejudice to show on the page, or have it seem that I didn’t think deeply enough about what I intended. I want genius. I want genius to descend and erase all petty hesitations, awkward phrases. I want song, I want a cycle of song and glory, the true, absolutely true felt moment on the page. What John Steinbeck wanted, what he did. I am partisan to the common people, he said in his journal. Partisan to the common people. On a radio show in April 1939, he disputed the idea that gods and heroes and kings are the fit subjects for literature. Steinbeck said the writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings, he said, are not very inspiring, and God’s on vacation, and the only heroes left are scientists and the poor. The poor. Is that socially conscious art? Is that advocacy fiction? The Grapes of Wrath has been judged less as a novel than as a sociological event, less as a novel than as a political cause, less as a novel than as a case study. John Steinbeck called what he was doing “participatory.” He wanted the reader to feel the life of the poor. He wanted you to see and feel, be inside the struggle, the loss, the fear, the uncertainty. He wanted the experience to be lived, for the reader to know what his people were feeling almost before they felt it, making right here, right now, not at a distance, not over there, everything right here, holding a stillborn child, looking up at a dangerous man and seeing contempt in his eyes for who you are. Trying not to be afraid, trying not to be ashamed. Immediate. Not cushioned. A novel is not a social document. It ain’t in the same category as a monograph on fathers and sons or migrant workers. But it is, it is. A novel is a social document when it stirs a community to action. A novel is a social event when it provokes change. A novel is more than any damn case study when you feel that its people are part of your family, or better still you are part of theirs, desperate, determined, large-souled and small, fearful, and angry, and doing

just what you got to do. And what you got to do is the point, of course. What you got to do that you never before imagined yourself doing, the novelist imagines it for you and takes you inside it—you feel it, and now the music of another nation sings in you. Why is it people still castigate John Steinbeck after sixty years? He got it wrong, they say. The Joads could not have left Eastern Oklahoma, they had to have been from the western part of the state and, by God, people in those desperate circumstances, they don’t act like no saints, no, by God. No, they don’t. They act like people. People from dry-baked rock-burn pancake, people who pick up and leave. And they would have left just as he writes them leaving. And they might have banded together just as he imagines them doing. They might have been in some moments as strong, as noble as he made them be, and that is what I needed to read as a girl. John Steinbeck set the Joads against all the hatred, contempt, and lies that had been directed at the poor and the lost of this nation. We say, they would never have left Oklahoma, but we know what we mean by “they.” We know who they are. Ma and Tom and Casy and Rosasharn: they live for all that they were the figments of one man’s imagination. The poor’s advocate. The voice of a deliberately impassioned partisan advocacy. You readers, these people suffer and cry out for you to act. Let not another infant be buried by the side of the road. Make it happen not by penalizing the mother, but by feeding her, by giving her hope and work and a place to deliver that child. Let not another man be driven to despair, losing himself and his family. Give him dignity, a place, a share of what you yourself value, give him pride. You are your brother’s keeper, your sister’s salvation. Oh dear. Oh dear, I’ve gone too far, haven’t I? I’ve used the language of the Bible, or a socialist in 1937. Any minute now I’m going to start using phrases like “The workers, the hope of history.” I’m going to go further, I could really embarrass us all. We’re so modern. We think ourselves beyond such things: not caring for those we should care for, caring more for our sense of the appropriate, the inappropriate, what is good writing and what is not sentimental. We

hesitate. We might overreach. The fear of overreaching. Ah, the fear of overreaching. John Steinbeck occasionally overreached. He committed the sin of sentimentalizing suffering, romanticizing poverty, he mixed lyricism and realism, he voiced moral indignation and righteous outrage, he projected worth and purpose onto a people and a nation too often dismissed and held in contempt. He made me and many like me love ourselves, love our families. He made us want to be writers. He made us believe justice could be made on the page, and in his work it was. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE | STUDS TERKEL

Dorothy Allison reminds me of a woman I know in Chicago named Peggy Carey. Peggy came out of the Ozarks and during the tumultuous ’60s she became the voice of the mountain people in Chicago. Peggy had little education, but her eloquence was such that she set all hearts on fire. During one of those gatherings, a student gave her a tattered paperback copy, well-thumbed, of The Grapes of Wrath. And these are Peggy’s words, when she finished reading it: When I was reading Grapes of Wrath it was like reliving my own life, particularly the part when they lived in a government camp. When we were picking fruit in Texas we lived in a government place like that. They showed us how to make mattresses. We didn’t know anything. And every Saturday night we’d have a dance. I think the worst thing our system does to people is take away their pride, prevent them from being human beings. I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we’re the highest development on earth, and put here to be happy and enjoy everything that’s here. I think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of a thing that makes life a joy instead of a sorrow, and takes your heart and

squeezes it, and then it hits you, and like a big hand it just … you don’t know what the next day’s gonna bring— hunger, you don’t know. I was never so proud of poor people as I was after I read Grapes of Wrath. It’s Steinbeck’s prophetic touch, that touch of clairvoyance, which makes his book so pertinent today. In 1989 I found myself on a farm in Iowa, twenty-three miles southeast of Des Moines. Carl Nearmeyer, fourth-generation farmer, was losing the farm. Fifty years earlier, in 1939, Muley Graves, a stubborn little tenant farmer, will not go along Highway 66 to the land of milk and honey the way the Joads did; he’s gonna defend his piece of dirt. Here comes this huge Caterpillar tractor about to bulldoze his shack, and the guy on the tractor pulls up his goggles and Muley says, “Why, you’re Jude Davis’s boy. You’re ours, how can you do it to your own people?” And the guy says, “I got a wife and two kids to feed, out of my way.” Carl Nearmeyer, in 1989: “Here comes the bailiff to take away our stuff. And I recognize him. I say, ‘You’re ours, how can you do this to your own people?’ He says, ‘I’ve got a family to feed. If I don’t do it, someone else will.’” Grapes of Wrath: “‘Sure,’ cried the tenant farmer, ‘but it’s our land. We were born on it, got killed on it, we died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours, being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a piece of paper with numbers on it.’” Iowa, 1989: “There were several times I had a gun to my head…. and then I got damn mad. I got to thinking about it and I got madder. These people don’t have the right to do this to me. I’ve worked the land, I’ve sweated, and I’ve bled. I’ve tried to keep this place going, and they take it away from me.” Grapes of Wrath, 1939: “The men were silent and they did not move often. Women came out of the homes to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men’s faces secretly, because the corn could go as long as something else remained.” In Iowa, fifty years later, I heard: “The women were apt to talk to other farmwives about their problems

rather than sit down and talk with their husbands. If I was to come up with a suggestion, he’d get very upset. It wasn’t that I didn’t know as much as he did, it was just that he was keeping it inside himself.” Grapes of Wrath came out as a result of the New Deal, came out as a result of help from the Farm Security Administration under the aegis of Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture. Those four years, 1936 to 1940, were the glory years of the New Deal. The Farm Security Administration gave us the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks, gave us great documentary films like The Plow That Broke the Plains. And it gave us The Grapes of Wrath, too. Calvin Benham Baldwin, deputy under Rex Tugwell, head of the Farm Security Administration, said this: Almost everything we did became controversial. Harry Hopkins, then head of the wpa, had built a couple of migratory camps in California. They were transferred to us, the fsa. But Grapes of Wrath tells it better than we could. I got a call from John Steinbeck. He wanted some help. He planned to write this book about migrant workers. We were delighted. He said, “I’m writing people who have to live as they live.” He planned to work for seven or eight weeks as a pea picker or something like that. And then, he asked us to assign someone to go along with him, a migrant worker. We chose a little guy named Tom Collins, out of Virginia. I paid Collins’s salary, which was somewhat illegal. He and Steinbeck worked together for seven or eight weeks. Steinbeck insisted that Collins be technical director of the film and get credit, and he also codedicated the book to him. At these camps people ran their own affairs. We had our project manager there to help them. This picture was the most controversial thing we ever did. We built a camp, we held a public hearing, there were lots of oppositions, especially from the Associated Farmers, the big farmers.

In his journal Steinbeck wrote, “Detail, detail, detail. Looks, clothes, gestures, I need all the stuff, it’s got to be exact, because the big growers will use it against me if I’m wrong.” And of course they went crazy when the book came out. As a friendly deputy sheriff said to Steinbeck, “Don’t ever stay in a motel room alone, because a woman is gonna come in, tear her dress off, scratch her own face, and cry rape.” Well, they never got him that way, but they got the book. It was burned, I think, more than any other book in what is now called, ironically enough, Steinbeck Country. I have a hunch that the thing Steinbeck would delight in most of all is that his book gave people like Peggy Carey revelation, self-esteem, and pride. That’s what it was all about, and that’s what it still is. STORY LINES | PETER MATTHIESSEN

John Steinbeck’s admirable early work was an important part of my own formative reading: the grit of his descriptions, his deceptive simplicity, so free of the intrusive style that often bothered me in Hemingway and even Faulkner. The clear feel … I love the clear feel of “The Red Pony,” which is in The Long Valley, even though it betrayed an early tendency toward that sentimentality which would mar the later work but shouldn’t obscure the extraordinary qualities of simplicity and clarity. Here’s the very beginning of “The Red Pony”: At daybreak Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus moustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase of Billy’s middle over a period of years. When he had seen to

the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn…. Now that’s good writing. It’s very precise, very evocative. You instantly know who Billy Buck is, and that’s quite an accomplishment. These days simplicity is out of fashion, but it will come back. Storytelling is always valuable. Indian people in some tribes are not allowed to tell stories in the summertime, during the harvest, in the season of plenty; they save storytelling for winter. That’s how precious stories are in every traditional culture I’ve been exposed to. The books that stick to my ribs even today are Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath, which concerned farm labor, and especially migrant labor in the Sacramento valley. One reason they stay with me is that they evoke my own travels—they’re like the dreams behind all of my travels. I used to hang out with an Indian friend on the east side of the Salinas Valley, where Steinbeck came from; that’s the Long Valley. And again, later in life, I worked with Cesar Chavez in the Sacramento Valley, and went up and down the valley, and of course the Sacramento Valley is the scene of The Grapes of Wrath. And the place names have not changed. I was doing a book on the grape boycott, which was simply a continuation of the conditions that Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. And the organizers who worked with Chavez had known the organizers whom Steinbeck knew. The echoes are still there— powerful echoes. Steinbeck had been so eloquent and empathetic in his chronicles of poor people, working people, that his increasingly conservative politics as life went on were disappointing. And so were those blockbusters, such as East of Eden. As I recall, there was enormous hoopla in the offices of the Viking Press when East of Eden came out: Book-of-the-Month Club, big bestseller, mega-movie sale, James Dean. I’m afraid that was also the first Steinbeck novel I put down unfinished. Tom Ginzburg told me that John Steinbeck was depressed as he and his wife, Elaine, set off on a sea voyage to

celebrate his huge success with East of Eden. He felt he was being honored too late, for the wrong book, and that his best work was behind him. Possibly he was right. And perhaps this is why John Steinbeck’s work, as often happens in the decades after a writer’s death, is now in shadow. Hard-won simplicity, not to speak of story, are out of critical fashion. But I like to believe that the shadow is a cloud over the sun. Even so great a writer as Joseph Conrad, after all, suffered a dimming of his reputation after his death. Now Conrad has returned into the light, where he will stay. It would be wonderful if the centennial of his birth ignited a fresh appraisal of John Steinbeck, a marvelous storyteller whose best fiction will surely stay in the light. HOME GROWN | JOHN STEINBECK

I find it difficult to write about my native place, northern California. It should be the easiest, because I know that strip angled against the Pacific better than any place in the world. But I find it not one thing but many—one printed over another until the whole thing blurs…. This four-lane concrete highway slashed with speeding cars I remember as a narrow, twisting mountain road where the wood teams moved, drawn by steady mules. They signaled their coming with the high, sweet jangle of bells. This was a little little town, a general store under a tree and a blacksmith shop and a bench in front on which to sit and listen to the clang of hammer on anvil. Now little houses, each one like the next, particularly since they try to be different, spread for a mile in all directions. That was a woody hill with live oaks dark green against the parched grass where the coyotes sang on moonlit nights. The top is shaved off and a television relay station lunges at the sky and feeds a nervous picture to thousands of tiny houses clustered like aphids beside the roads. In my flurry of nostalgic spite, I have done the Monterey Peninsula a disservice. It is a beautiful place, clean, well run, and progressive. The beaches are clean where once they festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries which once put up a sickening

stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out. And Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there, but it wouldn’t go that far. They would be instantly picked up as suspicious characters and deported over the city line. The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me…. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory. My departure was flight. But I did do one formal and sentimental thing before I turned my back. I drove up to Fremont’s Peak, the highest point for many miles around. I climbed the last spiky rocks to the top. Here among these blackened granite outcrops General Fremont made his stand against a Mexican army, and defeated it. When I was a boy we occasionally found cannon balls and rusted bayonets in the area. This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth, the great Salinas Valley stretching south for nearly a hundred miles, the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills. Mount Toro, on the brother range to the west, was a rounded benign mountain, and to the north Monterey Bay shone like a blue platter. I felt and smelled and heard the wind blow up from the long valley. It smelled of the brown hills of wild oats. I remembered how once, in that part of youth that is deeply concerned with death, I wanted to be buried on this peak where without eyes I could see everything I knew and loved, for in those days there was no world beyond the mountains. And I remembered how intensely I felt about my interment. It is strange and perhaps fortunate that when one’s time grows nearer, one’s interest in it flags as death becomes a fact rather than a pageantry. Here on these high rocks my memory myth repaired itself. Charley, having explored the area, sat at my feet, his fringed ears blowing like laundry on a line.

His nose, moist with curiosity, sniffed the wind-borne pattern of a hundred miles. “You wouldn’t know, my Charley, that right down there, in that little valley, I fished for trout with your namesake, my Uncle Charley. And over there—see where I’m pointing—my mother shot a wildcat. Straight down there, forty miles away, our family ranch was—old starvation ranch. Can you see that darker place there? Well, that’s a tiny canyon with a clear and lovely stream bordered with wild azaleas and fringed with big oaks. And on one of those oaks my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved. In the long years the bark grew over the burn and covered it. And just a little while ago, a man cut that oak for firewood and his splitting wedge uncovered my father’s name and the man sent it to me. In the spring, Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there’s the smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven.” I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love. From Travels with Charley SMALL-TOWN TALES | MICHELE SERROS

After my mother had a hectic day at work, she’d take some books and go into her bedroom to escape. Her two favorite authors were Danielle Steel and John Steinbeck. I remember her reading John Steinbeck in the evening, and she’d carry the book with her to bed, and she’d be crying or laughing, and my father was jealous. One time he said, “Who is this Steinbeck my wife takes to bed every night, this man with big ears?” And my mother—who worked a day job as a draftsperson, and at night took art courses—would save her money to get early editions of Steinbeck books. I remember seeing them in our home, these

hardcover novels. Way before eBay, she found ways to get those early editions. At that time, we didn’t have a couch in our living room, we needed a new septic tank, and here was my mother purchasing books. She also went to the Steinbeck Festival every August in Salinas, California. Seeing my mother’s passion, seeing her follow that passion, was inspiring to me. What kind of man, what kind of writer, inspired her to do these things? I came to believe that the greatest gift a writer could give was this gift of escape. My mother could go into the bedroom, or take a trip to Salinas, and just escape from the chaos of her life. And that made me want to pursue my own writing. I grew up in Oxnard, California, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles. I tried to glamorize it by saying, “Oh, I grew up between Malibu and Santa Barbara,” which sounded nice. But what could I write about as a young girl in Oxnard, especially a young Chicana, a young Mexican American? In my neighborhood, in my middle school and high school, there were very few books. I don’t remember any by authors with Spanish surnames. What could I possibly write about? One time we took a trip—we were going up to San Francisco— and we drove through Salinas. My mother got excited and said, “This is where John Steinbeck is from.” Soon afterwards she gave me a book that took place in Salinas, and it captured my imagination. I realized that I didn’t have to be a globetrotter and write about the grassy knolls of England or the beaches of Spain. I could write about what I have a passion for. And my passion was Oxnard: the people in my neighborhood, my community, my family members. John Steinbeck gave me a sense of direction. When I relayed the story of The Grapes of Wrath to my father, he shared his own history as a young boy working in the orchards near Gilroy, California. And that was something I’d never known, that was something my parents, my great aunts and uncles had kept from my sisters and me. We were fourth-generation Californians, and they tried to make us very, very acculturated, as comfortable as possible —they didn’t want us to know what a hard history they had. Hearing about that history was a turning point for me—reading Grapes of

Wrath, and then learning about my own family, and their experiences working in day camps, working in orchards and fields. In 1991 my mother asked me to go to the Steinbeck Festival with her. I was excited. I had read Steinbeck’s work, I had driven through Salinas, I knew where we were going. She ordered the two tickets, and we were set to go in August, but my mother died in May of 1991. I took the trip anyhow, and being in Salinas made me feel connected to her again. Coincidentally, as I was getting ready to come here this evening, my father called. He lives in California. I said, “Dad, I’m just leaving, I’m going to do a tribute for John Steinbeck.” And he said, “Who?” And I said, “John Steinbeck, you know, the writer Mom liked.” And he said, “Oh, the guy with the big ears! He still takes away the women from me. He’s still got it.” And I said, “Yeah, Dad, he’s still got it.” LONESOME ANIMALS | GEORGE PLIMPTON

Many years ago, I met John Steinbeck at a party in Sag Harbor and told him that I had writer’s block. And he said something which I’ve always remembered, and which works. He said, “Pretend that you’re writing not to your editor or to an audience or to a readership, but to someone close, like your sister, or your mother, or someone that you like.” And at the time I was enamored of Jean Seberg, the actress, and I had to write an article about taking Marianne Moore to a baseball game, and I started it off, “Dear Jean …,” and wrote this piece with some ease, I must say. And to my astonishment that’s the way it appeared in Harper’s Magazine. “Dear Jean …” Which surprised her, I think, and me, and very likely Marianne Moore. At The Paris Review, where I’m the editor, we wanted very much to publish an interview with John Steinbeck on the craft of writing, a series that’s been running in the magazine since 1953. And Mr. Steinbeck wanted to do this interview, but before we got started on it, he died. He did speak of a diary that he kept when he was preparing East of Eden, and had said if we wanted we could take excerpts

from this diary which related to the craft of writing. And these are some that were published in The Paris Review: I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible, but that they spread out like dye in water, and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the twentieth century, and much better than most. And yet in spite of this lack of a continuing excellence, hundreds of thousands of people are in my shoes, praying feverishly for relief from the word pangs…. An amazing number of pretty girls are passing by my window. I like pretty girls very much, but I am old enough now so that I don’t have to associate with them, and that’s a relief. I think if I were forbidden by some force to work, I should last a very short time. And I don’t say that morbidly at all. I think perhaps I am one of those lucky mortals whose work and whose life are the same thing. It is rare and fortunate…. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable, and sometimes, if he is very fortunate, and the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through, not ever much. A good writer always works at the impossible. Oh, it is a real horse’s ass business. The mountain labors and groans and strains, and the tiniest of rodents comes out. And the great foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, a writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world….

It would be a great joke on the people in my book if I just left them high and dry, waiting for me. If they bully me and do what they choose, I have them over a barrel. They can’t move until I pick up a pencil. They are frozen, turned to ice standing one foot up and with the same smile they had yesterday when I stopped…. I’ve always tried out my material on my dogs first. You know with Angel he sits there and I get the feeling he understands everything. But with Charley, I always felt he was just waiting to get in a word edgewise. Years ago when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of Of Mice and Men, I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic. After the theater we went to Sardi’s and had dinner and saw many friends. It is so long since we have been out that is was fun, but somewhere I picked up a great sadness. I think it was John O’Hara. That is the only thing I can think of which would have caused it. In a short time it will be done and then it will not be mine anymore. Other people will take it over and own it, and it will drift away from me as though I had never been a part of it. I dread that time because no one ever can pull it back. It’s like shouting good-bye to someone going off on a bus, and no one can hear because of the roar of the motor. Steinbeck wrote a letter to Nathaniel Benchley’s son, who wanted to know something about writing. Here’s what he said: A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re

not as alone as you thought.” To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done. A few days before Steinbeck died, Tom Ginzburg, who was the editor of the Viking Press, which published all of Steinbeck’s work, went to see him. And Steinbeck said to Tom that the one achievement he was proudest of was that his success, his huge success, had made it possible for the Viking Press to publish a lot of first novels by a new generation. Indeed, what a man. END OF THE ROAD | JOHN STEINBECK

It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charley, “I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it.” And then it would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy. But what I carried in my head and deeper in my perceptions was a barrel of worms. I discovered long ago in collecting and classifying marine animals that what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all…. In the beginning of this record I tried to explore the nature of journeys, how they are things in themselves, each one an individual and no two alike. I speculated with a kind of wonder on the strength of the individuality of journeys and stopped on the postulate that people don’t take trips—trips take people. That discussion, however, did not go into the life span of journeys. This seems to be variable and unpredictable. Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to

Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu. My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-bye or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. I tried to call it back, to catch it up—a foolish and hopeless matter, because it was definitely and permanently over and finished. The road became an endless stone ribbon, the hills obstructions, the trees green blurs, the people simply moving figures with heads but no faces. All the food along the way tasted like soup, even the soup. My bed was unmade. I slipped into it for naps at long uneven intervals. My stove was unlighted and a loaf of bread gathered mold in my cupboard. The miles rolled under me unacknowledged. I know it was cold, but I didn’t feel it; I know the countryside must have been beautiful, but I didn’t see it. I bulldozed blindly through West Virginia, plunged into Pennsylvania and grooved Rocinante to the great wide turnpike. There was no night, no day, no distance. I must have stopped to fill my gas tank, to walk and feed Charley, to eat, to telephone, but I don’t remember any of it. It is very strange. Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory. After Abingdon—nothing. The way was a gray, timeless, eventless tunnel, but at the end of it was the one shining reality—my own wife, my own house in my own street, my own bed. It was all there, and I lumbered my way toward it. Rocinante could be fleet, but I had not driven her fast. Now she leaped under my heavy relentless foot, and the wind shrieked around the corners of the house. If you think I am indulging in fantasy about the trip, how can you explain that Charley knew it was over too? He at least is no dreamer, no coiner of moods. He went to sleep with his head in my lap, never looked out the window, never said “Ftt,” never urged me to a turn-out. He carried out his functions

like a sleepwalker, ignored whole rows of garbage cans. If that doesn’t prove the truth of my statement, nothing can. New Jersey was another turnpike. My body was in a nerveless, tireless vacuum. The increasing river of traffic for New York carried me along, and suddenly there was the welcoming maw of Holland Tunnel, and at the other end home. A policeman waved me out of the snake of traffic and flagged me to a stop. “You can’t go through the tunnel with that butane,” he said. “But officer, it’s turned off.” “Doesn’t matter. It’s the law. Can’t take gas into the tunnel.” And suddenly I fell apart, collapsed into a jelly of weariness. “But I want to get home,” I wailed. “How am I going to get home?” He was very kind to me, and patient too. Maybe he had a home somewhere. “You can go up and take George Washington Bridge, or you can take a ferry.” It was rush hour, but the gentle-hearted policeman must have seen a potential maniac in me. He held back the savage traffic and got me through and directed me with great care. I think he was strongly tempted to drive me home. Magically I was on the Hoboken ferry and then ashore, far downtown with the daily panic rush of commuters leaping and running and dodging in front, obeying no signals. Every evening is Pamplona in lower New York. I made a turn and then another, entered a one-way street the wrong way and had to back out, got boxed in the middle of a crossing by a swirling rapids of turning people. Suddenly I pulled to the curb in a no-parking area, cut my motor, and leaned back in the seat and laughed, and I couldn’t stop. My hands and arms and shoulders were shaking with road jitters. An old-fashioned cop with a fine red face and a frosty blue eye leaned in toward me. “What’s the matter with you, Mac, drunk?” he asked. I said, “Officer, I’ve driven this thing all over the country— mountains, plains, deserts. And now I’m back in my own town, where I live—and I’m lost.”

He grinned happily. “Think nothing of it, Mac,” he said. “I got lost in Brooklyn only Saturday. Now where is it you were wanting to go?” And that’s how the traveler came home again. From Travels with Charley

These talks and excerpts from Travels with Charley were presented, in slightly different form, at a PEN Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to John Steinbeck.

PARABLES THE TRUTH ABOUT SANCHO PANZA | FRANZ KAFKA

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making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody: A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir CERVANTES AND THE QUIXOTE | JORGE LUIS BORGES

Tired of his Spanish land, an old soldier of the king sought solace in the vast geographies of Ariosto, in that valley of the moon where the time wasted by dreams is contained and in the golden idol of Mohammed stolen by Montalbán. In gentle mockery of himself, he imagined a credulous man who, perturbed by his reading of marvels, decided to seek prowess and enchantment in prosaic places called El Toboso or Montiel. Vanquished by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village in the year 1614. He was survived but a short time by Miguel

de Cervantes. For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed one, the whole scheme of the work consisted in the opposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry, the ordinary everyday world of the seventeenth century. They did not suspect that the years would finally smooth away that discord, they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto. For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well. Translated by James E. Irby

THE WHOLE TRUTH Miguel de Cervantes Translated by Burton Raffel

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ur knight sat in deep thought, while waiting for the young college graduate, Carrasco, from whom he expected to hear whether the history of Don Quixote had indeed been put into a book, as Sancho had said, for he could not convince himself that any such book could really exist, seeing that there had not been time for his enemies’ blood to dry on his sword blade. How could he believe his high and noble doings were already in print? Nevertheless, he thought that some magician—though whether a friend or an enemy he did not yet know—might well have used his magic arts to get the story into print. If it had been a friendly magician, the object would have been to extol our knight’s deeds, raising them higher than those of the very noblest of knights errant. If it had been an enemy, the object would have been to stamp down his deeds, setting them below the lowest, vilest things ever done by the lowest, vilest squire — although, he told himself, the deeds of squires were never recorded at all. In any case, if any such history really did exist, it had to be the story of a knight errant, and so of necessity it had to be grandiloquent, noble, distinguished, magnificent, and—of course— truthful…. Don Quixote received the young man with great politeness. Although his name was Samson, Carrasco was not a big man,

though he had a large reputation as a wit. His complexion was pale, but his brains were very good. He was twenty-four years old, roundfaced, with a flat nose and a large mouth—all of which clearly labeled him a natural trickster, a friend of well-turned phrases and well-pulled legs, as indeed he demonstrated when he caught sight of Don Quixote, for he went down on his knees before our knight, declaring: “Your magnificence, let me kiss your hands, Lord Don Quixote de La Mancha, for by the garments of Saint Peter that I as a university student wear (although I have taken only the first four orders), you are one of the most famous knights errant ever known or that ever will be known, oh your grace, anywhere on the round surface of this earth. Blessings on Sidi Hamid Benengeli, who has left us your magnificence’s history, and even more blessings on the inquiring mind responsible for translating that history from Arabic into our native Castilian, for the universal entertainment of all peoples.” After making him rise, Don Quixote said: “I gather, from what you say, that a history of me really exists, written by a Moorish wise man?” “It is so very true, my lord,” said Samson, “that I think more than twelve thousand copies of the book have been printed, as you may see for yourself in Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where there have been printings, and there is even a rumor that it’s been printed in Antwerp, and I’d guess there will be no nation on earth, and no language spoken, into which it will not have been translated.” At this point, Don Quixote said: “One of the things most pleasant to a virtuous and distinguished man is to see himself, while he is still alive, go out among the nations and languages of the world, printed and bound, and bearing a good reputation. ‘A good reputation,’ I say, because, should it be the opposite, no death can be worse.” “As far as a good reputation and a good name is concerned,” said the college graduate, “you, your grace, carry away the palm in comparison to all other knights errant, because the Moor in his language, and the Christian in his, have been exceedingly careful to vividly depict your grace’s gallantry, the lofty spirit with which you

encounter all dangers, your patience in adversity and when you suffer from such misfortunes as wounds, and the modesty and purity of the infinitely platonic love between your grace and My Lady Doña Dulcinea del Toboso.” And here Sancho Panza put in: “I’ve never heard My Lady Dulcinea called doña, only Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, so the history’s already made one mistake.” “That’s hardly an important objection,” replied Carrasco. “Certainly not,” said Don Quixote. “But tell me, your grace, Señor university graduate, which of my famous exploits are the most impressive, in this history?” “On this score,” answered the college graduate, “there are differences of opinion, just as there are in matters of taste. Some favor the adventure with the windmills, which appeared to your grace to be Briareus and other many-armed giants; others lean toward the episode of the hydraulic hammers; this person favors the account of the two armies which, afterwards, seemed to be two flocks of sheep; while that one praises the encounter with the corpse being brought to Segovia for burial; one says best of all is when the galley slaves were liberated; another says nothing equals the encounter with the two Benedictine giants, followed by the battle with the brave Basque.” “Tell me, Mister college graduate,” said Sancho, “does this book tell about the muledrivers from Yanguas, when our fine friend Rocinante decided to shoot for the moon?” “This wise man,” replied Samson, “left nothing in his inkwell; he tells everything and writes it all out—even Sancho’s jumping around in a blanket.” “I didn’t do any jumping in the blanket,” responded Sancho. “It was all in the air, and more than I wanted.” “As far as I know,” said Don Quixote, “no history of humankind hasn’t had its highs and its lows, especially histories of knighthood, which can’t possibly be filled only with successful adventures.” “All the same,” the college graduate went on, “some who have read the book say they wish the author had quietly forgotten a few of

the endless beatings Señor Don Quixote receives, in various encounters.” “But there’s where historical truth comes in,” said Sancho. “Still, they could in all fairness have stayed silent about such things,” said Don Quixote, “since matters which neither change nor affect a history’s truthfulness do not need to be recorded, if they tarnish the book’s central figure. I dare say Aeneas was not quite so pious as Virgil painted him, nor was Ulysses as wise and cautious as Homer makes him.” “True,” replied Samson, “but it’s one thing to write as a poet, and very different to write as a historian. The poet can show us things not as they actually happened, but as they should have happened, but the historian has to record them not as they ought to have been, but as they actually were, without adding or subtracting anything whatever from the truth.” “To write it any differently,” said Don Quixote, “would be to set down lies, not the truth, and historians who tell lies deserve to be burned, like people who counterfeit money—and I have no idea why the author relied on novellas and irrelevant stories when there was so much to be written about me. He must have been thinking of the old proverb, ‘With straw and with hay, Fill my belly all the way.’ Because, really, all he had to do was show my thoughts, my sighs, my tears, my honest desires, and my battles, and he’d have a big fat book, just as big as, and maybe even bigger than, a book holding all of Tostado’s work. Really, it seems to me, my dear college graduate, that in order to write histories and other such books, no matter of what sort, you have to have a good head and a mature understanding. To write graciously, wittily, you have to be clever: the wisest character in a play is the fool, because he who pretends to be a simpleton must never be one …” From Don Quixote

PARTIAL MAGIC IN THE QUIXOTE Jorge Luis Borges Translated by James E. Irby

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t is plausible that these observations may have been set forth at some time and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less than one of their possible truth. Compared with other classic books (the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Pharsalia, Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies), the Quixote is a realistic work; its realism, however, differs essentially from that practiced by the nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad could write that he excluded the supernatural from his work because to include it would seem a denial that the everyday was marvelous; I do not know if Miguel de Cervantes shared that intuition, but I do know that the form of the Quixote made him counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world. Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of reality because they judged reality to be poetic; for Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies. To the vast and vague geographies of the Amadís, he opposes the dusty roads and sordid wayside inns of Castile; imagine a novelist of our time centering attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations. Cervantes has created for us the poetry of seventeenth-century Spain, but neither that century nor that Spain were poetic for him; men like Unamuno or Azorín or Antonio Machado, who were deeply moved by any evocation of La Mancha,

would have been incomprehensible to him. The plan of his book precluded the marvelous; the latter, however, had to figure in the novel, at least indirectly, just as crimes and a mystery in a parody of a detective story. Cervantes could not resort to talismans or enchantments, but he insinuated the supernatural in a subtle— and therefore more effective—manner. In his intimate being, Cervantes loved the supernatural. Paul Groussac observed in 1924: “With a delible coloring of Latin and Italian, Cervantes’s literary production derived mostly from the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry, soothing fables of captivity.” The Quixote is less an antidote for those fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell. Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality; Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book. In those chapters which argue whether the barber’s basin is a helmet and the donkey’s packsaddle a steed’s fancy regalia, the problem is dealt with explicitly; other passages, as I have noted, insinuate this. In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote’s library; astoundingly, one of the books examined is Cervantes’s own Galatea and it turns out that the barber is a friend of the author and does not admire him very much, and says that he is more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book possesses some inventiveness, proposes a few ideas, and concludes nothing. The barber, a dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgment on Cervantes … It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth chapter, that the entire novel has been translated from the Arabic and that Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the marketplace of Toledo and had it translated by a morisco whom he lodged in his house for more than a month and a half while the job was being finished. We think of Carlyle, who pretended that the Sartor Resartus was the fragmentary version of a work published in Germany by Doctor Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh; we think of the Spanish rabbi Moses of León, who composed the Zohar or Book of Splendor and divulged it as the work of a Palestinian rabbi of the second century.

This play of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the protagonists have read the first part, the protagonists of the Quixote are, at the same time, readers of the Quixote…. An artifice analogous to Cervantes’s, and even more astounding, figures in the Ramayana, the poem of Valmiki, which narrates the deeds of Rama and his war with the demons. In the last book, the sons of Rama, who do not know who their father is, seek shelter in a forest, where an ascetic teaches them to read. This teacher is, strangely enough, Valmiki; the book they study, the Ramayana. Rama orders a sacrifice of horses; Valmiki and his pupils attend this feast. The latter, accompanied by their lute, sing the Ramayana. Rama hears his own story, recognizes his own sons and then rewards the poet … Something similar is created by accident in the Thousand and One Nights. This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian carpet. The opening story of the series is well known: the terrible pledge of the king who every night marries a virgin who is then decapitated at dawn, and the resolution of Scheherazade, who distracts the king with her fables until a thousand and one nights have gone by and she shows him their son. The necessity of completing a thousand and one sections obliged the copyists of the work to make all manner of interpolations. None is more perturbing than that of the six hundred and second night, magical among all the nights. On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also—monstrously—itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular … The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: “Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been leveled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The

job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.” Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious….

He had mixed up the characters in the long novel he was writing. He forgot who they were and what they did. A dead woman reappeared when it was time for dinner. A door-to-door salesman emerged out of a backwoods trailer wearing Chinese robes. The day the murderer was supposed to be electrocuted, he was buying flowers for a certain Rita, who turned out to be a ten-year-old girl with thick glasses and braids … And so it went. He never did anything for me, though. I kept growing older and grumpier, as I was supposed to, in a ratty little town which he always described as “dead” and “near nothing.” —Charles Simic

CONTINUITY OF PARKS Julio Cortázar Translated by Paul L. Blackburn

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e had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it down because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and

took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity. Even to those caresses which writhed about the lover’s body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it; they sketched abominably the frame of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The cold-blooded, twicegone-over reexamination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek. It was beginning to get dark. Not looking at one another now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there. He went up the three porch steps and entered. The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears: first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway. At the top, two doors. No one in the first room, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.

They wheeled out the ash blonde who believes herself already dead into the spike-fenced garden of the hospital for the insane. Her name was Amy or Ann, but she didn’t answer to either one. She kept her eyes tightly shut. She was pushed by a nurse in white. Some of it was told to me by a shivering young man who insisted that it’s been raining for years, even indoors. “Coming down real hard,” he said. —Charles Simic

STRANGE TO SAY … W. G. Sebald Translated by Michael Hulse

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hree or four miles south of Lowestoft the coastline curves gently into the land. From the footpath that runs along the grassy dunes and low cliffs one can see, at any time of the day or night and at any time of the year, as I have often found, all manner of tentlike shelters made of poles and cordage, sailcloth and oilskin, along the pebble beach. They are strung out in a long line on the margin of the sea, at regular intervals. It is as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings. In reality, however, these men camping out under the heavens have not traversed faraway lands and deserts to reach this strand. Rather, they are from the immediate neighborhood, and have long been in the habit of fishing there and gazing out to the sea as it changes before their eyes. Curious to tell, their number almost always remains more or less the same. If one strikes camp, another soon takes his place; so that over the years, or so it appears, this company of fishermen dozing by day and waking by night never changes, and indeed may go back further than memory can reach. They say it is rare for any of the fishermen to establish contact with his neighbor, for, although they all look eastward and see both the

dusk and the dawn coming up over the horizon, and although they are all moved, I imagine, by the same unfathomable feelings, each of them is nonetheless quite alone and dependent on no one but on himself and on the few items of equipment he has with him, such as a penknife, a thermos flask, or the little transistor radio that gives forth a scarcely audible, scratchy sound, as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other. I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise, or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness. The fact is that today it is almost impossible to catch anything fishing from the beach. The boats in which the fishermen once put out from the shore have vanished, now that fishing no longer affords a living, and the fishermen themselves are dying out. No one is interested in their legacy. Here and there one comes across abandoned boats that are falling apart, and the cables with which they were once hauled ashore are rusting in the salt air. Out on the high seas the fishing continues, at least for the present, though even there the catches are growing smaller, quite apart from the fact that the fish that are landed are often useless for anything but fish meal. Every year the rivers bear thousands of tons of mercury, cadmium, and lead, and mountains of fertilizer and pesticides, out into the North Sea. A substantial proportion of the heavy metals and other toxic substances sink into the waters of the Dogger Bank, where a third of the fish are now born with strange deformities and excrescences. Time and again, off the coast, rafts of poisonous algae are sighted covering many square miles and reaching thirty feet into the deep, in which the creatures of the sea die in shoals. In some of the rarer varieties of plaice, crucian, or bream, the females, in a bizarre mutation, are increasingly developing male sexual organs and the ritual patterns of courtship are now no more than a dance of death, the exact opposite of the notion of the wondrous increase and perpetuation of life with which we grew up. It was not without reason that the herring was always a popular didactic model in primary school, the principal emblem, as it

were, of the indestructibility of Nature. I well recall one of those flickering short films that teachers could borrow from local film and slide libraries in the ’50s, which showed a trawler from Wilhelmshaven in almost total darkness riding waves that towered to the top of the screen. By night, it appeared, the nets were cast, and by night they were hauled in again. Everything happened as if in a black void, relieved only by the gleam of the white underbellies of the fish, piled high on the deck, and of the salt they were mixed with. In my memory of that school film I see men in their shining black oilskins working heroically as the angry sea crashes over them time upon time—herring fishing regarded as a supreme example of mankind’s struggle with the power of Nature. Towards the end, as the boat is approaching its home port, the rays of the evening sun break through the clouds, spreading their glow over the now becalmed waters. One of the seamen, washed and combed, plays on a mouth organ. The captain, with the air of a man mindful of his responsibilities, stands at the helm, looking ahead into the distance. At last the catch is unloaded and we see the work in the halls where women’s hands gut the herring, sort them according to size, and pack them in barrels. Then (so says the booklet accompanying the 1936 film), the railway goods wagons take in this restless wanderer of the seas and transport it to those places where its fate on this earth will at last be fulfilled. I have read elsewhere, in a volume on the natural history of the North Sea published in Vienna in 1857, that untold millions of herring rise from the lightless depths in the spring and summer months, to spawn in coastal waters and shallows, where they lie one on top of another in layers. And a statement ending with an exclamation mark informs us that each female herring lays seventy thousand eggs, which, according to Buffon’s calculation, would shortly produce a volume of fish twenty times the size of the earth, if they were all to develop unhindered. Indeed, the records note years in which the entire herring fisheries threatened to go under, beneath a truly catastrophic glut of herring. It is even said that vast shoals of herring were brought in towards the beaches by the wind and the tides and cast ashore, covering miles of the coast to a depth of two feet and more. The local people were able to

salvage only a small portion of these herring harvests in baskets and crates; the remainder rotted within days, affording the terrible sight of Nature suffocating on its own surfeit. On the other hand, there were repeated occasions when the herring avoided their usual grounds and whole stretches of coastline were impoverished as a result. The routes the herring take through the sea have not been ascertained to this day. It has been supposed that variations in the level of light and the prevailing winds influence the course of their wanderings, or geomagnetic fields, or the shifting marine isotherms, but none of these speculations has proved verifiable. For this reason, those who go in pursuit of herring have always relied on their traditional knowledge, which draws upon legend, and is based on their own observation of facts such as the tendency of the fish, swimming in even, wedge-shaped formations, to reflect a pulsating glow skyward when the sunlight falls at a particular angle. One dependable sign that herring are present is said to be myriads of scales floating on the surface of the water, shimmering like tiny silver tiles by day and sometimes at dusk resembling ashes or snow. Once the herring shoal had been sighted, it was fished during the following night, and this was done, according to the natural history of the North Sea already quoted, using nets two hundred feet long that could take almost a quarter of a million fish. These nets were made of coarse Persian silk and dyed black, since experience had shown that a lighter color scared the herring off. The nets do not enclose the catch, but rather present a kind of wall in the water which the fish swim up against in desperation until at length their gills catch in the mesh; they are then throttled during the near-eight-hour process of hauling up and winding in the nets. Because of this, by far the majority of the herrings are lifeless by the time they are hoisted out of the water. Earlier natural historians such as M. de Lacépède therefore tended to suppose that herring die the instant they are removed from water, from some form of infarct or other cause. Since all authorities were soon agreed in ascribing this particular characteristic to the herring, much attention was long paid to eyewitness accounts of herrings remaining alive out of the water. Thus it is recorded that a Canadian missionary by the name of Pierre

Sagard watched a batch of herring thrashing about for some time on the deck of a fishing boat off the Newfoundland coast, and that one Herr Neucrantz of Stralsund meticulously chronicled the final throes of a herring that had been taken from the water one hour and seven minutes before the time of its death. Again, the inspector of the Rouen fish market, a certain Noel de Marinière, one day saw to his astonishment that a pair of herring that had already been out of the water between two and three hours were still moving, a circumstance that prompted him to investigate more closely the fishes’ capacity to survive, which he did by cutting off their fins and mutilating them in other ways. This process, inspired by our thirst for knowledge, might be described as the most extreme of the sufferings undergone by a species always threatened by disaster. What is not eaten at the spawn stage by haddock and sucker fish ends up inside a conger eel, dogfish, cod, or one of the many others that prey on herring, including, not least, ourselves. As early as 1670, more than eight hundred thousand Dutch and Friesians, a not inconsiderable part of the entire population, were employed in herring fishing. A hundred years later, the number of herring caught annually is estimated to have been sixty billion. Given these quantities, the natural historians sought consolation in the idea that humanity was responsible for only a fraction of the endless destruction wrought in the cycle of life, and moreover in the assumption that the peculiar physiology of the fish left them free of the fear and pains that rack the bodies and souls of higher animals in their death throes. But the truth is that we do not know what the herring feels. All we know is that its internal structure is extremely intricate and consists of more than two hundred different bones and cartilages. Among the herring’s most striking external features are its powerful tail fin, the narrow head, the slightly prominent lower mandible, and its large eye, with a black pupil swimming in the silvery-white iris. The herring’s dorsal area is of a bluish-green color. The individual scales on its flanks and belly shimmer a golden orange, but taken together they present a metallic, pure white gleam. Held against the light, the rearward parts of the fish appear a dark green of a beauty one sees nowhere else. Once the life has fled the herring, its colors change.

Its back turns blue, the cheeks and gills red, suffused with blood. An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness. I had long left the beach fishermen behind me when, in the early afternoon, I reached Benacre Broad, a lake of brackish water beyond a bank of shingle halfway between Lowestoft and Southwold. The lake is encircled by deciduous woodland that is now dying, owing to the steady erosion of the coastline by the sea. Doubtless it is only a matter of time before one stormy night the shingle bank is broken, and the appearance of the entire area changes. But that day as I sat on the tranquil shore, it was possible to believe one was gazing into eternity. The veils of mist that drifted inland that morning had cleared, the vault of the sky was empty and blue, not the slightest breeze was stirring, the trees looked painted, and not a single bird flew across the velvet-brown water…. A quarter of an hour’s walk south of Benacre Broad, where the beach narrows and a stretch of sheer coastline begins, a few dozen dead trees lie in a confused heap where they fell years ago from the Covehithe cliffs. Bleached by salt water, wind, and sun, the broken, barkless wood looks like the bones of some extinct species, greater even than the mammoths and dinosaurs, that came to grief long since on this solitary strand. The footpath leads around the tangle, through a bank of gorse, up to the loamy cliff head, and there it continues amidst bracken, the tallest of which stood as high as my

shoulder, not far from the ledge, which is constantly threatening to crumble away…. I was watching the sand martins darting to and fro over the sea. Ceaselessly emitting their tiny cries, they sped along their flight paths faster than my eyes could follow them. At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air. Many years later, in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which was written in 1940 at Salto Oriental in Argentina, I read of how a few birds saved an entire amphitheater. The sand martins, I now saw, were flying solely at the level that extended from the top of the cliff where I was sitting out into empty space. Not one of them climbed higher or dived lower, to the water below them. Whenever they came towards me, fast as bullets, some seemed to vanish right beneath my feet, as if into the very ground. I went to the edge of the cliff and saw that they had dug their nesting holes into the topmost layer of clay, one beside the other. I was thus standing on perforated ground, as it were, which might have given way at any moment. Nevertheless, I laid my head back as far as I could, as I did as a boy for a dare on the flat tin roof of the two-story apiary, fixed my eyes on the zenith, then lowered my gaze till it met the horizon, and drew it in across the water, to the narrow strip of beach some twenty yards below. As I tried to suppress the mounting sense of dizziness, breathing out and taking a step backwards, I thought I saw something of an odd, pallid color move on the shoreline. I crouched down and, overcome by a sudden panic, looked over the edge. A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible but the legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged. Now, though, he lay still, and the woman too was still and motionless. Misshapen, like some great mollusk washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired

through its nostrils. Filled with consternation, I stood up once more, shaking as if it were the first time in my life that I had got to my feet, and left the place, which seemed fearsome to me now, taking the path that descended from the cliff top to where the beach spread out on the southerly side. Far off in front of me lay South-wold, a cluster of distant buildings, clumps of trees, and a snow-white lighthouse, beneath a dark sky. Before I reached the town, the first drops of rain were falling. I turned to look back down the deserted stretch I had come by and could no longer have said whether I had really seen the pale sea monster at the foot of the Covehithe cliffs or whether I had imagined it. Recalling the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the Argentinean tale I have referred to before, a tale which deals with our attempts to invent secondary or tertiary worlds. The narrator describes dining with Adolfo Bioy Casares in a house in Calle Gaona in Ramos Mejía one evening in 1935. He relates that after dinner they had a long and rambling talk about the writing of a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers—very few readers— would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative. At the end of the passage that led to the room where we were sitting, the author continues, hung an oval, half-fogged mirror that had a somewhat disquieting effect. We felt that this dumb witness was keeping a watch on us, and thus we discovered—discoveries of this kind are almost always made in the dead of night—that there is something sinister about mirrors. Bioy Casares then recalled the observation of one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar, that the disturbing thing about mirrors, and also the act of copulation, is that they multiply the number of human beings. I asked Bioy Casares for the source of this memorable remark, the author writes, and he told me that it was in the entry on Uqbar in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. As the story goes on, however, it is revealed that this entry is nowhere to be found in the encyclopedia in question, or rather, it appears uniquely in the copy bought years earlier by Bioy Casares, the twenty-sixth volume of which contains four pages that are not in any other copy of the edition in question, that of 1917. It thus remains unclear whether

Uqbar ever existed or whether the description of this unknown country might not be a case similar to that of Tlön, the encyclopedists’ project to which the main portion of the narrative in question is devoted and which aimed at creating a new reality, in the course of time, by way of the unreal. The labyrinthine construction of Tlön, reads a note added to the text in 1947, is on the point of blotting out the known world. The language of Tlön, which hitherto no one had mastered, has now invaded the academies; already the history of Tlön has superseded all that we formerly knew or thought we knew; in historiography the indisputable advantages of a fictitious past have become apparent. Almost every branch of learning has been reformed. A ramified dynasty of hermits, the dynasty of the Tlön inventors, encyclopedists and lexicographers, has changed the face of the earth. Every language, even Spanish, French, and English, will disappear from the planet. The world will be Tlön…. From The Rings of Saturn

The hundred-year-old china doll’s head the sea washes up on its gray beach. One would like to know the story. One would like to make it up, make up many stories. It’s been so long in the sea, the eyes and nose have been erased, its faint smile is even fainter. With the night coming, one would like to see oneself walking the empty beach and bending down to it. —Charles Simic

SEBALD’S UNCERTAINTY James Wood

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nxious, daring, extreme, muted—only an annulling wash of contradictory adjectives can approach the agitated density of W. G. Sebald’s writing. For this German who lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary European writers. When his book The Emigrants appeared, one immediately recalled Walter Benjamin’s remark, in his essay on Proust, that all great works establish a new genre or dissolve an old one. Here was the first contemporary writer since Beckett to have found a way to protest the good government of the conventional novel form and to harass realism into a state of selfexamination. His book The Rings of Saturn is yet more uncanny than The Emigrants. In it, a man who might be Sebald walks around the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The book is curlingly set in the present, but this man is something of an old-fashioned journeyman, a turnpike pounder, as if from a nineteenth-century tale. The book is divided into ten bending and opaque chapters. The narrator alights upon certain natural and manmade features: a town here, a village there, a strange piece of the coast, a church, and several country houses. Like The Emigrants, it is amphibiously slippery, neither quite fiction nor travelogue…. In The Emigrants, Sebald told the stories of four men, each of whom had been menaced by twentieth-century history. The book

was not really about the Holocaust, as American readers have claimed, and it was most certainly not about Nazism. Sebald’s subjects were victims of slightly different kinds of upheaval or catastrophe: two were casualties of Nazism, and two of exile, and all, like nineteenth-century fictional characters, had had their lives eaten at by sadness, by a kind of internal wasting sickness, which Sebald superbly evoked. The two exiles furnished, perhaps, the most mysterious tales: Dr. Henry Selwyn was a Lithuanian Jew who arrived in England as a child at the turn of the century. When Sebald met him in the 1970s, Selwyn was at the end of his life, and was quietly demented. He had retreated from his country house to live in a stone folly of his own making in his garden. He shot himself dead a few years after telling Sebald his story. The other exile, Sebald’s great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, left Germany in the early years of the century, and worked for a long time as a butler for a Long Island family called the Solomons. Ambros went mad, and died in an Ithaca asylum in the early 1960s. Three of these characters actually existed, and one was partly based on the British painter Frank Auerbach, yet The Emigrants reads like fiction—and is fiction— because of the care and patterning of Sebald’s narration, because of its anguished interiority, and because Sebald so mixes established fact with unstable invention that the two categories copulate and produce a kind of truth which lies just beyond verification: that is, fictional truth. On its own, this would not be remarkable, of course. What is remarkable about The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn is the reticent artificiality of Sebald’s narration, whereby fact is taken from the real world, and made fictional. This is the opposite of the trivial “factional” breeziness of writers such as Julian Barnes or Umberto Eco,… who make facts quiver a little, but whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact. Such writers do not believe deeply enough in the fictional to abandon the actual world; they toy with accuracy, are indeed obsessed with questions of accuracy and inaccuracy, for even inaccurate facts, to such writers, have a kind of empirical electricity, since they connect us to a larger informational zealousness. This informational neurosis makes their

fiction buzzingly unaffecting. Facts are a sport for such writers, a semiotic superfluity, ultimately quite readable. For Sebald, however, facts are indecipherable, and therefore tragic…. Though his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of their narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world, and seem only to have found their proper life within Sebald’s prose. This, of course, is the movement of any powerful fiction, however realistic: the real world gains a harsher, stronger life within a fiction because it receives a concentrated patterning which actual life does not exert. It is not that facts merely seem fictive in Sebald’s work…. They become fictive not in the sense that they become untrue or are distorted, but in the sense that they become newly real, in a way parasitical of, yet rivalrous to, the real world. In addition to the delicacy of his patterning, Sebald invests his narrations with a scrupulous uncertainty. Again, although Sebald wants us to reflect on this uncertainty, his self-reflexive procedures differ from much postmodernism in important respects. Sebald’s reticence is more than teasing; it is the sound of anguish. Sebald’s narrators, in both The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, are somewhat proximate to Sebald: they are German men who live in England, and who teach. Yet they are also voices in pain, and their pain is that they do not seem to know themselves, and cannot be known by the reader because they are apparently incapable of revealing themselves. In The Rings of Saturn, for instance, the narrator appears to be half mad, wandering around Suffolk and Norfolk collecting stray information. An uneasy comedy is never far away. When this narrator stops in Southwold, he tells us: “Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailors’ Reading Room is by far my favorite haunt.” Beckett is the most obvious influence here, and in both writers uncertainty is always raised to a metaphysical power. Selfreflection in such writers is the text pinching itself to see if it actually exists…. Sebald’s language is an extraordinary, almost antiquarian edifice, full of the daintiest lusters. He is helped in this by an English poet,

Michael Hulse, who renders Sebald’s German into English. Sebald then powerfully treads his own English into Hulse’s, sometimes rewriting entire passages. One of the oddest effects of this prose is a quality of melodrama and extremism running alongside a soft mutedness. Sebald’s melodramatic side, one suspects, comes from the mid-nineteenth-century German tale, such as was written by Adalbert Stifter. Often, in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator finds himself on a desolate heath, or caught in a storm, like the narrator of Stifter’s tale “Limestone.” (Often, Sebald’s English prose is almost indistinguishable in diction from Stifter’s in English translation.) There is a quality of the Gothic about Sebald, written up in dementedly patient locutions: “I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before …” Speaking of Belgium, Sebald’s narrator notes that that country seems physically scarred by the memory of its vicious colonialism in the Congo; he allows himself a rant, which sounds deliberately antiquarian: And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere. At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One notes again the desperate comedy, and the strongly artificial, even dumbfounding, prose. A sentence like “the macabre atmosphere of certain salons” exists in its own register of rhetorical excess; it does not really refer to anything outside language. What salons are these? Indeed, for all the apparent quietness of Sebald’s prose, exaggeration is its principle, an exaggeration he undoubtedly learned in part from Thomas Bernhard. Sebald’s pessimism is

Bernhard-like, too; as the narrator puts it here: “In reality of course, whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.” Bernhard exaggerates the grotesque; Sebald, by contrast, exaggerates the elegiac. But where Bernhard uses a Nietzschean hammer, Sebald’s exaggeration is squeezed through a dreamlike reticence. This effect does not resemble any other writer. On the one hand, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn tells us often that the world is dwindling, that nothing is as it used to be: there are fewer herring in the sea; all the elms that used to sway in England’s woods and gardens have died, victims of the terrible Dutch elm disease…. Yet on the other hand, the narrator donates this information narrowly, slipping it to us by way of the dreamiest indirections…. We know nothing about this narrator. He has, so far, revealed little about his childhood, about its location; we assume it to be roughly contiguous with Sebald’s (Germany in the 1950s; Sebald was born in 1944). But suddenly, this man, who has told us nothing about himself, delivers this: “At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley …” He speaks of these “earlier times” as if they were already familiar to us, as if we had dreamed them. And then follows this mysterious, utterly unfounded lament: “as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days …” But why would the swallows have disappeared? Why would they have been so abundant in “earlier times,” whenever exactly those times were? Slowly the reader gathers the complexity of Sebald’s elegy. This narrator mourns not only for what is lost (the swallows), but for what he has had to leave out of his own narrative. All that has disappeared from his life is what has also disappeared from the narrative. This is why neither we, nor he, can make sense of these backward glances. Reticence becomes the very stutter of mourning. This resembles a careful attenuation, almost a reversal, of Proustian retrospect: in Sebald, we are defined by the terrible abundance of our lacunae. And so the narrator, who tells us that as a child he believed that the world was held together by the courses the birds took through the air, is now simply holding his life together by the strange courses his sentences take.

Rather than other books, it is a film that most resembles Sebald’s combination of opacity and extremity: Werner Herzog’s Caspar Hauser, to which Sebald silently alludes in The Emigrants (his work is saturated in reference). In that film, Caspar is asked by his mentor why nothing has been going right since he escaped from the prison he was kept in for the first twenty years of his life. “I have the feeling,” says Caspar—dreamily, modestly, but also grandiloquently —“that my life since that moment has been a great fall.” All of Sebald’s characters have experienced some kind of “great fall,” beginning with the narrators of his books. Like Caspar Hauser, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn dreams of the desert, and is something of a brilliant child, wandering around a landscape both real and imagined, at a finely bemused angle to all knowledge. As he tramps through East Anglia, he communicates with the dead, and ponders the strangest information, with which he is insanely profligate—the destruction of trees, the habits of the silkworm. He communicates to the reader in a language of exceptional beauty, whose diction is also imprisoned, as if only just escaped from the nineteenth century: “The day was dull and oppressive, and there was so little breeze that not even the ears of the delicate quaking grass were nodding.” Or: “The water in the gutter gurgled like a mountain stream.” Always, an alienated dreaminess pervades everything. The narrator visits a family called the Ashburys in Ireland. They live in a crumbling mansion: “The curtains had gone and the paper had been stripped off the walls, which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body, and reminded me of one of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked.” He is attracted again and again to all that is dwindling and passing. At Somerleyton Hall, he sees nothing but grasses and weeds where once was a thriving estate: “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes.” It is just the same at Sudbourne Hall, where the flamboyant Sir Cuthbert Quilter once held sway. At Dunwich, on the coast, Sebald tells us, one of the most important ports in Europe during the Middle Ages now lies underwater: “All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now below the sea.” …

The true subject of The Rings of Saturn is death. In the first section of the book, Sebald writes about (and incorporates passages from) Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial, which is about the complicated artifacts that human beings surround themselves with in death. The country houses which Sebald describes again and again in this book are like the pyramids and pagan graves that Browne described: they are mausolea. But Sebald is always deeply selfexamining, and he feels the need to include his own book among these mausolea. The silkworm is Sebald’s emblem for this, and it appears throughout the book. The artist is like the silkworm, suggests Sebald, killing himself as he produces his fine thread of silk. The book ends with a moving passage in which Sebald compares the worker at a loom to the writer or scholar. Both, he writes, are manacled to their work. An old loom, he writes, resembles a cage, and reminds us that “we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we have invented.” Writers and scholars, like weavers, tend to suffer from “melancholy and all the evils associated with it.” And this is understandable, writes Sebald, “given the nature of their work, which force[s] them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eyes on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.” In this sense, we are all artists, or death-artists. In a plane from Amsterdam to Norwich, the narrator looks down and notes that one never sees people on the ground, only buildings, cars, objects: “It is as if there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.” Sebald is hiding in this book, of course. All of us create edifices in which to hide; these then become our mausolea. Elegy, in England, is easy to buy, especially of the country-house kind. But what distinguishes Sebald from most English elegists is the deep unease of his elegy—its metaphysical, Germanic insistence. Sebald does not just see a Romantic-political decline in England, as

say Larkin did; he sees a decline of which we are not just the inheritors but the creators, too. This, I think, is because he believes in a kind of eternal recurrence. He does not say exactly this; but his book suggests that in every historical moment we have already been here. Standing in a camera obscura on the fields of Waterloo, he looks down on the old battlefield, and remarks that history is always falsely seen: “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” Now, “survivors” is an odd word. How can we be the “survivors” of Waterloo? We were not there. Typically opaque, Sebald proceeds in mournfully shuffled sentences touched with comedy, never underlining anything. But I take him to be suggesting that we are always the survivors of a history that we attended in a previous incarnation. Sebald’s subjects, in both this book and The Emigrants, can escape nothing; they are always “survivors,” even of events which they never directly experienced. The virus of history infects even the inoculated. This is why the two exiles in The Emigrants and the two direct victims of Nazism suffer in similar ways. They are all survivors of a kind. In Sebald’s world, one can be a refugee by birth, born under the sign of Saturn. This explains why so many of Sebald’s characters feel like Mrs. Ashbury and her daughters, the eccentric Anglo-Irish family who have escaped from life, who live in their rotting mansion and consider breeding silkworms. About them, Sebald writes that they “lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up.” Mrs. Ashbury, sounding just like Caspar Hauser, tells the narrator: “It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.” Sebald’s pessimism is not really metaphysical, despite being touched by the wing of eternal recurrence. It is aesthetic. In the same way that Sebald’s facts appear to exist only in the fictional form that Sebald gives them, so Sebald’s pessimism is a mood that can express itself only in the forms of his own books. That is to say, in patterned fragments, haltingly, uncertainly. This mood is a kind of nineteenth-century melancholia, a tendency rather than a system.

Outside Sebald’s books, in précis, this mood would amount to little. Inside these pages, it lives vividly; and so each book by Sebald becomes a test case of itself, and of the artistic, for each book is indescribable except in its own terms. Sebald’s quality of elegy is quietistic. Life is a “blunder” partly because it also seems a dream, and it seems a dream because it is dreaming us, not the other way around. The special beauty of Sebald’s peroration on how the weaver and the writer are haunted by the idea that they have got hold of the wrong thread is that Sebald admits into his own books the condition of being beautifully mistaken. Sebald and his characters are haunted by the incomprehensible, the indecipherable, the wrong turn. And Sebald includes his own thread, his own course, in this category. These intensely patterned books might, after all, be in search of the wrong pattern. They are themselves silken errors. But how will we know?

Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I’m coming! I’m coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can’t see inside the station master’s window because of the grime. We don’t even know if there’s a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so e=aced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret. —Charles Simic

WHO’S DREAMING WHOM? Lewis Carroll

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ere she checked herself in some alarm, at hearing something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large steam engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. “Are there any lions or tigers about here?” she asked timidly. “It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee. “Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping. “Isn’t he a lovely sight?” said Tweedledum. Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was. He had a tall red nightcap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud—“fit to snore his head off!” as Tweedledum remarked. “I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl. “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?” Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.” “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”1 “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out— bang!—just like a candle!”2 “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?” “Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee. He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.” “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.” “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry. “You wo’n’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.” “If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.” “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. “I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on, as cheerfully as she could, “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to rain?” From The Annotated Alice Edited by Martin Gardner 1. This well-known, much-quoted discussion of the Red King’s dream (the monarch is snoring on a square directly east of the square currently occupied by Alice) plunges poor Alice into grim metaphysical waters. The Tweedle

brothers defend Bishop Berkeley’s view that all material objects, including ourselves, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of God. Alice takes the common-sense position of Samuel Johnson, who supposed that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone. “A very instructive discussion from a philosophical point of view,” Bertrand Russell remarked, commenting on the Red King’s dream in a radio panel discussion of Alice. “But if it were not put humorously, we should find it too painful.” The Berkeleyan theme troubled Carroll as it troubles all Platonists. Both Alice adventures are dreams, and in Sylvie and Bruno the narrator shuttles back and forth mysteriously between real and dream worlds. “So, either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself early in the novel, “and this is the reality. Or else I’ve really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?” In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll returns to the question in the first paragraph of Chapter 8, in the closing lines of the book, and in the last line of the book’s terminal poem. An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other, or that preposterous cartoon of Saul Steinberg’s in which a fat lady paints a picture of a thin lady who is painting a picture of the fat lady who is painting a picture of the thin lady, and so on deeper into the two canvases…. The Red King sleeps throughout the entire narrative until he is checkmated at the close of chapter 9 by Queen Alice when she captures the Red Queen. No chess player needs reminding that kings tend to sleep throughout most chess games, sometimes not moving after castling. Tournament games are occasionally played in which a king remains on its starting square throughout the entire game.

2. This remark of Tweedledum’s was anticipated by Alice in the first chapter of the previous book where she wonders if her shrinking size might result in her “going out altogether, like a candle.”

My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he’s not, sends me ahead, tells me he’ll be along in a moment. Pretty soon I can’t see a thing. “This must be the darkest corner of heaven,” someone whispers behind my back. It turns out her guardian angel is missing too. “It’s an outrage,” I tell her. “The dirty little cowards leaving us all alone,” she whispers. And of course, for all we know, I might be a hundred years old already, and she just a sleepy little girl with glasses. —Charles Simic

BUILDING A UNIVERSE THAT DOESN’T FALL APART TWO DAYS LATER Philip K. Dick

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hat does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority? I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics that fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated those two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world? In 1951, when I sold my first story [“Roog”], I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food that the family had stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me to wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication … and there is the real illness. I once wrote a story [“The Electric Ant” (1969)] about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story … which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question “What is reality?” to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly. But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, by political groups— and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudoworlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe— and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts.

But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new. Of course, I would say this because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum and finally it began to die and they had to regretfully retire it. The simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things that never change … and the preSocratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right—let’s not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus’s philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real. I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin to talk nonsense. By the time of Zeno, they knew they were talking nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; he lacked what technically is called the “theory of limits”). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume’s point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren’t taking what they said seriously.

But the matter of defining what is real—that’s a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

A week-long holiday in a glass paperweight bought at Coney Island. The old lady wipes off the dust every day. I call her an “old lady,” but actually she looks like a monkey when she peers into the glass. We wear no clothes, of course. I’m getting a fantastic tan and so is my wife. At night there’s a bit of light coming from the aquarium. We turn green. My wife is a wild fern with voluptuously trembling leaves. In goldfish heaven there’s peace and calm.

Lots of people around here have been taken for rides in UFOs. You wouldn’t think that possible with all the pretty white churches in sight so well-attended on Sundays. “The round square doesn’t exist,” says the teacher to the dull-witted boy. His mother was abducted only last night. All expectations to the contrary, she sits in the corner grinning to herself. The sky is vast and blue. “They’re so small, they can sleep inside their own ears,” says one eighty-year-old twin to the other.

—Charles Simic

INSIDE GERTRUDE STEIN Lynn Emanuel

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ight now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a monument made of a cloud which is always moving across the sky which is also always moving. Gertrude is a huge galleon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes, I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the tackboard of the landscape? That is alice. So, I am inside gertrude; we belong to each other, she and I, and it is so wonderful because I have always been a thin woman inside of whom a big woman is screaming to get out, and she’s out now and if a river could type this is how it would sound, pure and complicated and enormous. Now we are lilting across the countryside, and we are talking, and if the wind could type it would sound like this, ongoing and repetitious, abstracting and stylizing everything, like our famous haircut painted by Picasso. Because when you are inside our haircut you understand that all the flotsam and jetsam of hairdo have been cleared away (like the forests from the New World) so that the skull can show through

grinning and feasting on the alarm it has created. I am now, alarmingly, inside gertrude’s head and I am thinking that I may only be a thought she has had when she imagined that she and alice were dead and gone and someone had to carry on the work of being gertrude stein, and so I am receiving, from beyond the grave, radioactive isotopes of her genius saying, take up my work, become gertrude stein. Because someone must be gertrude stein, someone must save us from the literalists and realists, and narratives of the beginning and end, someone must be a river that can type. And why not I? Gertrude is insisting on the fact that while I am a subgenius, weighing one hundred five pounds, and living in a small town with an enormous furry male husband who is always in his Cadillac Eldorado driving off to sell something to people who do not deserve the bad luck of this merchandise in their lives—that these facts would not be a problem for gertrude stein. Gertrude and I feel that, for instance, in Patriarchal Poetry when (like an avalanche that can type) she is burying the patriarchy, still there persists a sense of condescending affection. So, while I’m a thin, heterosexual subgenius, nevertheless gertrude has chosen me as her tool, just as she chose the patriarchy as a tool for ending the patriarchy. And because I have become her tool, now, in a sense, gertrude is inside me. It’s tough. Having gertrude inside me is like having swallowed an ocean liner that can type, and, while I feel like a very small coat closet with a bear in it, gertrude and I feel that I must tell you that gertrude does not care. She is using me to get her message across, to say, I am lost, I am beset by literalists and narratives of the beginning and middle and end, help me. And so, yes, I say, yes, I am here, gertrude, because we feel, gertrude and I, that there is real urgency in our voice (like a sob that can type) and that things are very bad for her because she is lost, beset by the literalists and realists, her own enormousness crushing her, and we must find her and take her into ourselves, even though I am the least likely of saviors and have been chosen perhaps as a last resort, yes, definitely, gertrude is saying to me, you

are the least likely of saviors, you are my last choice and my last resort.

Margaret was copying a recipe for “saints roasted with onions” from an old cook book. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratchings of her pen. The saint was asleep in the bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails. —Charles Simic

I HAVE DREAMED OF YOU SO MUCH Robert Desnos Translated by Paul Auster

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real. Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again? I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body. For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many days and years, I would surely become a shadow. O scales of feeling. I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up. I sleep on my feet, prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and face of some passerby. I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

FAREWELL Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point I lost track of you. They make a desolation and call it peace. When you left even the stones were buried: The defenseless would have no weapons. When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks, who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes? O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished, who weighs the hairs on the jeweler’s balance? They make a desolation and call it peace. Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise? My memory is again in the way of your history. Army convoys all night like desert caravans: In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved—all winter—its crushed fennel. We can’t ask them: Are you done with the world? In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other’s reflections. Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this centuries later in this country

I have stitched to your shadow? In this country we step out with doors in our arms. Children run out with windows in their arms. You drag it behind you in lit corridors. If the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything. At a certain point I lost track of you. You needed me. You needed to perfect me: In your absence you polished me into the Enemy. Your history gets in the way of my memory. I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me. I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy. Your memory gets in the way of my memory: I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell: Exquisite ghost, it is night. The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves: It is still night. The paddle is a lotus: I am rowed—as it withers—toward the breeze which is soft as if it had pity on me. If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn’t have happened in this world? I’m everything you lost. You won’t forgive me. My memory keeps getting in the way of your history. There is nothing to forgive. You won’t forgive me. I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself. There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me. If only somehow you could have been mine, what would not have been possible in the world? for Patricia O’Neill

THE LAST DAYS OF A FAMOUS MIME Peter Carey

1 The Mime arrives on Alitalia with very little luggage: a brown paper parcel and what looked like a woman’s handbag. Asked the contents of the brown paper parcel he said, “String.” Asked what the string was for he replied: “Tying up bigger parcels.” It had not been intended as a joke, but the Mime was pleased when the reporters laughed. Inducing laughter was not his forte. He was famous for terror. Although his state of despair was famous throughout Europe, few guessed at his hope for the future. “The string,” he explained, “is a prayer that I am always praying.” Reluctantly he untied his parcel and showed them the string. It was blue and when extended measured exactly fifty-three meters. The Mime and the string appeared on the front pages of the evening papers. 2 The first audiences panicked easily. They had not been prepared for his ability to mime terror. They fled their seats continually. Only to

return again. Like snorkel divers they appeared at the doors outside the concert hall with red faces and were puzzled to find the world as they had left it. 3 Books had been written about him. He was the subject of an awardwinning film. But in his first morning in a provincial town he was distressed to find that his performance had not been liked by the newspaper’s one critic. “I cannot see,” the critic wrote, “the use of invoking terror in an audience.” The Mime sat on his bed, pondering ways to make his performance more light-hearted. 4 As usual, he attracted women who wished to still the raging storms of the heart. They attended his bed like highly paid surgeons operating on a difficult case. They were both passionate and intelligent. They did not suffer defeat lightly. 5 Wrongly accused of merely miming love in his private life he was somewhat surprised to be confronted with hatred. “Surely,” he said, “if you now hate me, it was you who were imitating love, not I.” “You always were a slimy bastard,” she said. “What’s in that parcel?” “I told you before,” he said helplessly, “string.”

“You’re a liar,” she said. But later when he untied the parcel he found that she had opened it to check on his story. Her understanding of the string had been perfect. She had cut it into small pieces like spaghetti in a lousy restaurant. 6 Against the advice of the tour organizers he devoted two concerts entirely to love and laughter. They were disasters. It was felt that love and laughter were not, in his case, as instructive as terror. The next performance was quickly announced. TWO HOURS OF REGRET. Tickets sold quickly. He began with a brief interpretation of love using it merely as a prelude to regret which he elaborated on in a complex and moving performance which left the audience pale and shaken. In a final flourish he passed from regret to loneliness to terror. The audience devoured the terror like brave tourists eating the hottest curry in an Indian restaurant. 7 “What you are doing,” she said, “is capitalizing on your neuroses. Personally I find it disgusting, like someone exhibiting their club foot, or Turkish beggars with strange deformities.” He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought of this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly. 8

The story of the blue string touched the public imagination. Small brown paper packages were sold at the doors of his concerts. Standing on stage he could hear the packages being noisily unwrapped. He thought of American matrons buying Muslim prayer rugs. 9 Exhausted and weakened by the heavy schedule he fell prey to the doubts that had pricked at him insistently for years. He lost all sense of direction and spent many listless hours by himself, sitting in a motel room listening to the air conditioner. He had lost confidence in the social uses of controlled terror. He no longer understood the audience’s need to experience the very things he so desperately wished to escape from. He emptied the ashtrays fastidiously. He opened his brown paper parcel and threw the small pieces of string down the cistern. When the torrent of white water subsided they remained floating there like flotsam from a disaster at sea. 10 The Mime called a press conference to announce that there would be no more concerts. He seemed small and foreign and smelt of garlic. The press regarded him without enthusiasm. He watched their hovering pens anxiously, unsuccessfully willing them to write down his words. Briefly, he announced that he wished to throw his talent open to broader influences. His skills would be at the disposal of the people, who would be free to request his services for any purpose at any time. His skin seemed sallow but his eyes seemed as bright as those on a nodding fur mascot on the back window ledge of an American car.

11 Asked to describe death he busied himself taking Polaroid photographs of his questioners. 12 Asked to describe marriage he handed out small cheap mirrors with made in tunisia written on the back. 13 His popularity declined. It was felt that he had become obscure and beyond the understanding of ordinary people. In response he requested easier questions. He held back nothing of himself in his effort to please his audience. 14 Asked to describe an aeroplane he flew three times around the city, only injuring himself slightly on landing. 15 Asked to describe a river, he drowned himself. 16 It is unfortunate that this, his last and least typical performance, is the only one which has been recorded on film. There is only a small crowd by the river bank, no more than thirty people. A small, neat man dressed in a gray suit picks his way

through some children who seem more interested in the large plastic toy dog they are playing with. He steps into the river, which, at the bank, is already quite deep. His head is only visible above the water for a second or two. And then he is gone. A policeman looks expectantly over the edge, as if waiting for him to reappear. Then the film stops. Watching this last performance it is difficult to imagine how this man stirred such emotions in the hearts of those who saw him.

THE PASSIONS OF LALLA Michael Ondaatje

M

y Grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder. She claimed to have been born outdoors, abruptly, during a picnic, though there is little evidence for this. Her father—who came from a subdued line of Keyts—had thrown caution to the winds and married a Dickman. The bloodline was considered eccentric (one Dickman had set herself on fire) and rumors about the family often percolated across Colombo in hushed tones. “People who married the Dickmans were afraid.” There is no information about Lalla growing up. Perhaps she was a shy child, for those who are magical break from silent structures after years of chrysalis. By the time she was twenty she was living in Colombo and tentatively engaged to Shelton de Saram—a very good-looking and utterly selfish man. He desired the good life, and when Frieda Donhorst arrived from England “with a thin English varnish and the Donhorst checkbook” he promptly married her. Lalla was heartbroken. She went into fits of rage, threw herself on and pounded various beds belonging to her immediate family, and married Willie Gratiaen—a champion cricketer—on the rebound. Willie was also a broker, and being one of the first Ceylonese to work for the English firm of E. John and Co. brought them most of their local business. The married couple bought a large house called “Palm Lodge” in the heart of Colombo and here, in the three acres

that came with the house, they began a dairy. The dairy was Willie’s second attempt at raising livestock. Fond of eggs, he had decided earlier to import and raise a breed of black chicken from Australia. At great expense the prize Australorp eggs arrived by ship, ready for hatching, but Lalla accidentally cooked them all while preparing for a dinner party. Shortly after Willie began the dairy he fell seriously ill. Lalla, unable to cope, would run into neighbors’ homes, pound on their beds, and promise to become a Catholic if Willie recovered. He never did and Lalla was left to bring up their two children. She was not yet thirty, and for the next few years her closest friend was her neighbor, Rene de Saram, who also ran a dairy. Rene’s husband disliked Lalla and disliked his wife’s chickens. Lalla and the chickens would wake him before dawn every morning, especially Lalla with her loud laughter filtering across the garden as she organized the milkers. One morning Rene woke to silence and, stepping into the garden, discovered her husband tying the beaks of all the chickens with little pieces of string, or in some cases with rubber bands. She protested, but he prevailed and soon they saw their chickens perform a dance of death, dying of exhaustion and hunger, a few managing to escape along Inner Flower Road, some kidnapped by a furious Lalla in the folds of her large brown dress and taken to Palm Lodge where she had them cooked. A year later the husband lapsed into total silence and the only sounds which could be heard from his quarters were barkings and later on the cluck of hens. It is believed he was the victim of someone’s charm. For several weeks he clucked, barked, and chirped, tearing his feather pillows into snowstorms, scratching at the expensive parquet floors, leaping from first-story windows onto the lawn. After he shot himself, Rene was left at the age of thirty-two to bring up their children. So both Rene and Lalla, after years of excessive high living, were to have difficult times—surviving on their wits and character and beauty. Both widows became the focus of the attention of numerous bored husbands. Neither of them was to marry again.

Each had thirty-five cows. Milking began at four-thirty in the morning and by six their milkmen would be cycling all over town to deliver fresh milk to customers. Lalla and Rene took the law into their own hands whenever necessary. When one of their cows caught Rinderpest Fever—a disease which could make government officials close down a dairy for months—Rene took the army pistol which had already killed her husband and personally shot it dead. With Lalla’s help she burnt it and buried it in her garden. The milk went out that morning as usual, the tin vessels clanking against the handlebars of several bicycles. Lalla’s head milkman at this time was named Brumphy, and when a Scot named McKay made a pass at a servant girl Brumphy stabbed him to death. By the time the police arrived Lalla had hidden him in one of her sheds, and when they came back a second time she had taken Brumphy over to a neighbor named Lillian Bevan. For some reason Mrs. Bevan approved of everything Lalla did. She was sick when Lalla stormed in to hide Brumphy under the bed, whose counterpane had wide lace edges that came down to the floor. Lalla explained that it was only a minor crime; when the police came to the Bevan household and described the brutal stabbing in graphic detail Lillian was terrified, as the murderer was just a few feet away from her. But she could never disappoint Lalla and kept quiet. The police watched the house for two days and Lillian dutifully halved her meals and passed a share under the bed. “I’m proud of you, darling!” said Lalla when she eventually spirited Brumphy away to another location. However, there was a hearing in court presided over by Judge E. W. Jayawardene—one of Lalla’s favorite bridge partners. When she was called to give evidence she kept referring to him as “My Lord My God.” E. W. was probably one of the ugliest men in Ceylon at the time. When he asked Lalla if Brumphy was good-looking—trying humorously to suggest some motive for her protecting him—she replied, “Good looking? Who can say, My Lord My God, some people may find you good looking.” She was thrown out of court while the gallery hooted with laughter and gave her a standing ovation. This dialogue is still in the judicial records in the Buller’s

Road Court Museum. In any case she continued to play bridge with E. W. Jayawardene and their sons would remain close friends. Apart from rare appearances in court (sometimes to watch other friends give evidence), Lalla’s day was carefully planned. She would be up at four with the milkers, oversee the dairy, look after the books, and be finished by 9 A.M. The rest of the day would be given over to gallivanting—social calls, lunch parties, visits from admirers, and bridge. She also brought up her two children. It was in the garden at Palm Lodge that my mother and Dorothy Clementi-Smith would practice their dances, quite often surrounded by cattle. For years Palm Lodge attracted a constant group—first as children, then teenagers, and then young adults. For most of her life children flocked to Lalla, for she was the most casual and irresponsible of chaperones, being far too busy with her own life to oversee them all. Behind Palm Lodge was a paddy field which separated her house from “Royden,” where the Daniels lived. When there were complaints that hordes of children ran into Royden with muddy feet, Lalla bought ten pairs of stilts and taught them to walk across the paddy fields on these “borukakuls” or “lying legs.” Lalla would say yes to any request if she was busy at bridge so they knew when to ask her for permission to do the most outrageous things. Every child had to be part of the group. She particularly objected to children being sent for extra tuition on Saturdays and would hire a Wallace Carriage and go searching for children like Peggy Peiris. She swept into the school at noon yelling “peggy!!!,” fluttering down the halls in her long black clothes loose at the edges like a rooster dragging its tail, and Peggy’s friends would lean over the banisters and say, “Look, look, your mad aunt has arrived.” As these children grew older they discovered that Lalla had very little money. She would take groups out for meals and be refused service as she hadn’t paid her previous bills. Everyone went with her anyway, though they could never be sure of eating. It was the same with adults. During one of her grand dinner parties she asked Lionel Wendt, who was very shy, to carve the meat. A big pot was placed in

front of him. As he removed the lid a baby goat jumped out and skittered down the table. Lalla had been so involved with the joke— buying the kid that morning and finding a big enough pot—that she had forgotten about the real dinner and there was nothing to eat once the shock and laughter had subsided. In the early years her two children, Noel and Doris, could hardly move without being used as part of Lalla’s daily theater. She was constantly dreaming up costumes for my mother to wear to fancy dress parties, which were the rage at the time. Because of Lalla, my mother won every fancy dress competition for three years while in her late teens. Lalla tended to go in for animals or sea creatures. The crowning achievement was my mother’s appearance at the Galle Face Dance as a lobster—the outfit bright red and covered with crustaceans and claws which grew out of her shoulder blades and seemed to move of their own accord. The problem was that she could not sit down for the whole evening but had to walk or waltz stiffly from side to side with her various beaux who, although respecting the imagination behind the outfit, found her beautiful frame almost unapproachable. Who knows, this may have been Lalla’s ulterior motive. For years my mother tended to be admired from a distance. On the ballroom floor she stood out in her animal or shellfish beauty, but claws and caterpillar bulges tended to deflect suitors from thoughts of seduction. When couples paired off to walk along Galle Face Green under the moonlight it would, after all, be embarrassing to be seen escorting a lobster. When my mother eventually announced her engagement to my father, Lalla turned to friends and said, “What do you think, darling, she’s going to marry an Ondaatje … she’s going to marry a Tamil!” Years later, when I sent my mother my first book of poems, she met my sister at the door with a shocked face and in exactly the same tone and phrasing said, “What do you think, Janet,” (her hand holding her cheek to emphasize the tragedy) “Michael has become a poet!” Lalla continued to stress the Tamil element in my father’s background, which pleased him enormously. For the wedding ceremony she had two marriage chairs decorated in a Hindu style

and laughed all through the ceremony. The incident was, however, the beginning of a war with my father. Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely, never spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved most by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm. She did love children, or at least loved company of any kind— cows, adults, babies, dogs. She always had to be surrounded. But being “grabbed” or “contained” by anyone drove her mad. She would be compassionate to the character of children but tended to avoid holding them on her lap. And she could not abide having grandchildren hold her hands when she took them for walks. She would quickly divert them into the entrance of the frightening maze in the Nuwara Eliya Park and leave them there, lost, while she went off to steal flowers. She was always determined to be physically selfish. Into her sixties she would still complain of how she used to be “pinned down” to breast-feed her son before she could leave for dances. With children grown up and out of the way, Lalla busied herself with her sisters and brothers. “Dickie” seemed to be marrying constantly; after David Grenier drowned she married a de Vos, a Wombeck, and then an Englishman. Lalla’s brother Vere attempted to remain a bachelor all his life. When she was flirting with Catholicism she decided that Vere should marry her priest’s sister—a woman who had planned on becoming a nun. The sister also had a dowry of thirty thousand rupees, and both Lalla and Vere were short of money at the time, for both enjoyed expensive drinking sessions. Lalla masterminded the marriage, even though the woman wasn’t goodlooking and Vere liked good-looking women. On the wedding night the bride prayed for half an hour beside the bed and then started singing hymns, so Vere departed, foregoing nuptial bliss, and for the rest of her life the poor woman had a sign above her door which read “Unloved. Unloved. Unloved.” Lalla went to mass the following week, having eaten a huge meal. When refused mass she said, “Then I’ll resign,” and avoided the Church for the rest of her life.

A good many of my relatives from this generation seem to have tormented the Church sexually. Italian monks who became enamored of certain aunts would return to Italy to discard their robes and return to find the women already married. Jesuit fathers too were falling out of the Church and into love with the de Sarams with the regularity of mangoes thudding onto dry lawns during a drought. Vere became the concern of various religious groups that tried to save him. And during the last months of his life he was “held captive” by a group of Roman Catholic nuns in Galle so that no one knew where he was until the announcement of his death. Vere was known as “a sweet drunk” and he and Lalla always drank together. While Lalla grew loud and cheerful, Vere became excessively courteous. Drink was hazardous for him, however, as he came to believe he escaped the laws of gravity while under the influence. He kept trying to hang his hat on walls where there was no hook and often stepped out of boats to walk home. But drink quietened him except for these few excesses. His close friend, the lawyer Cox Sproule, was a different matter. Cox was charming when sober and brilliant when drunk. He would appear in court stumbling over chairs with a mind clear as a bell, winning cases under a judge who had pleaded with him just that morning not to appear in court in such a condition. He hated the English. Unlike Cox, Vere had no profession to focus whatever talents he had. He did try to become an auctioneer but being both shy and drunk he was a failure. The only job that came his way was supervising Italian prisoners during the war. Once a week he would ride to Colombo on his motorcycle, bringing as many bottles of alcohol as he could manage for his friends and his sister. He had encouraged the prisoners to set up a brewery, so that there was a distillery in every hut in the prison camp. He remained drunk with the prisoners for most of the war years. Even Cox Sproule joined him for six months when he was jailed for helping three German spies escape from the country. What happened to Lalla’s other brother, Evan, no one knows. But all through her life, when the children sent her money, Lalla would immediately forward it on to Evan. He was supposedly a thief and Lalla loved him. “Jesus died to save sinners,” she said, “and I will die

for Evan.” Evan manages to escape family memory, appearing only now and then to offer blocs of votes to any friend running for public office by bringing along all his illegitimate children. By the mid-’30s both Lalla’s and Rene’s dairies had been wiped out by Rinderpest. Both were drinking heavily and both were broke. We now enter the phase when Lalla is best remembered. Her children were married and out of the way. Most of her social life had been based at Palm Lodge but now she had to sell the house, and she burst loose on the country and her friends like an ancient monarch who had lost all her possessions. She was free to move wherever she wished, to do whatever she wanted. She took thorough advantage of everyone and had bases all over the country. Her schemes for organizing parties and bridge games exaggerated themselves. She was full of the “passions,” whether drunk or not. She had always loved flowers but in her last decade couldn’t be bothered to grow them. Still, whenever she arrived on a visit she would be carrying an armful of flowers and announce, “Darling, I’ve just been to church and I’ve stolen some flowers for you. These are from Mrs. Abeysekare’s, the lilies are from Mrs. Ratnayake’s, the agapanthus is from Violet Meedeniya, and the rest are from your garden.” She stole flowers compulsively, even in the owner’s presence. As she spoke with someone her straying left hand would pull up a prize rose along with the roots, all so that she could appreciate it for that one moment, gaze into it with complete pleasure, swallow its qualities whole, and then hand the flower, discarding it, to the owner. She ravaged some of the best gardens in Colombo and Nuwara Eliya. For some years she was barred from the Hakgalle Public Gardens. Property was there to be taken or given away. When she was rich she had given parties for all the poor children in the neighborhood and handed out gifts. When she was poor she still organized them but now would go out to the Pettah market on the morning of the party and steal toys. All her life she had given away everything she owned to whoever wanted it and so now felt free to take whatever

she wanted. She was a lyrical socialist. Having no home in her last years, she breezed into houses for weekends or even weeks, cheated at bridge with her closest friends, calling them “damn thieves,” “bloody rogues.” She only played cards for money and if faced with a difficult contract would throw down her hand, gather the others up, and proclaim “the rest are mine.” Everyone knew she was lying but it didn’t matter. Once when my brother and two sisters, who were very young, were playing a game of “beggar-my-neighbor” on the porch, Lalla came to watch. She walked up and down beside them, seemingly very irritated. After ten minutes she could stand it no longer, opened her purse, gave them each two rupees, and said, “Never, never play cards for love.” She was in her prime. During the war she opened up a boarding house in Nuwara Eliya with Muriel Potger, a chain-smoker who did all the work while Lalla breezed through the rooms saying, “Muriel, for godsake, we can’t breathe in this place!”—being more of a pest than a help. If she had to go out she would say, “I’ll just freshen up” and disappear into her room for a stiff drink. If there was none she took a quick swig of eau de cologne to snap her awake. Old flames visited her constantly throughout her life. She refused to lose friends; even her first beau, Shelton de Saram, would arrive after breakfast to escort her for walks. His unfortunate wife, Frieda, would always telephone Lalla first and would spend most afternoons riding in her trap through the Cinnamon Gardens or the park searching for them. Lalla’s great claim to fame was that she was the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy. It turned out to be unnecessary but she always claimed to support modern science, throwing herself into new causes. (Even in death her generosity exceeded the physically possible—she had donated her body to six hospitals.) The false breast would never be still for long. She was an energetic person. It would crawl over to join its twin on the right hand side or sometimes appear on her back, “for dancing,” she smirked. She called it her Wandering Jew and would yell at the grandchildren in the middle of a formal dinner to fetch her tit as she had forgotten to put it on. She kept losing the contraption to servants who were mystified by it as well as to the dog, Chindit, who would be found gnawing at the foam

as if it were tender chicken. She went through four breasts in her lifetime. One she left on a branch of a tree in Hakgalle Gardens to dry out after a rainstorm, one flew off when she was riding behind Vere on his motorbike, and the third she was very mysterious about, almost embarrassed though Lalla was never embarrassed. Most believed it had been forgotten after a romantic assignation in Trincomalee with a man who may or may not have been in the Cabinet. Children tell little more than animals, said Kipling. When Lalla came to Bishop’s College Girls School on Parents’ Day and pissed behind bushes—or when in Nuwara Eliya she simply stood with her legs apart and urinated—my sisters were so embarrassed and ashamed they did not admit or speak of this to each other for over fifteen years. Lalla’s son Noel was most appalled by her. She, however, was immensely proud of his success, and my Aunt Nedra recalls seeing Lalla sitting on a sack of rice in the fish market surrounded by workers and fishermen, with whom she was having one of her long daily chats, pointing to a picture of a bewigged judge in The Daily News and saying in Sinhalese that this was her son. But Lalla could never be just a mother; that seemed to be only one muscle in her chameleon nature, which had too many other things to reflect. And I am not sure what my mother’s relationship was to her. Maybe they were too similar to even recognize much of a problem, both having huge compassionate hearts that never even considered revenge or small-mindedness, both howling and wheezing with laughter over the frailest joke, both carrying their own theater on their backs. Lalla remained the center of the world she moved through. She had been beautiful when young but most free after her husband died and her children grew up. There was some sense of divine right she felt she and everyone else had, even if she had to beg for it or steal it. This overbearing charmed flower. In her last years she was searching for the great death. She never found, looking under leaves, the giant snake, the fang which would

brush against the ankle like a whisper. A whole generation grew old or died around her. Prime Ministers fell off horses, a jellyfish slid down the throat of a famous swimmer. During the ’40s she moved with the rest of the country towards Independence and the twentieth century. Her freedom accelerated. Her arms still flagged down strange cars for a lift to the Pettah market, where she could trade gossip with her friends and place bets in the “bucket shops.” She carried everything she really needed with her, and a friend meeting her once at a train station was appalled to be given as a gift a huge fish that Lalla had carried doubled up in her handbag. She could be silent as a snake or flower. She loved the thunder; it spoke to her like a king. As if her mild dead husband had been transformed into a cosmic umpire, given the megaphone of nature. Sky noises and the abrupt light told her details of careers, incidental wisdom, allowing her to risk everything because the thunder would warn her along with the snake of lightning. She would stop the car and swim in the Mahaveli, serene among currents, still wearing her hat. Would step out of the river, dry in the sun for five minutes and climb back into the car among her shocked companions, her huge handbag once more on her lap carrying four packs of cards, possibly a fish. In August 1947, she received a small inheritance, called her brother Vere, and they drove off to Nuwara Eliya on his motorcycle. She was sixty-eight years old. These were to be her last days. The boarding house she had looked after during the war was empty and so they bought food and booze and moved in to play “Ajoutha”—a card game that normally takes at least eight hours. It was a game the Portuguese had taught the Sinhalese in the fifteenth century to keep them quiet and preoccupied while they invaded the country. Lalla opened the bottles of Rocklands Gin (the same brand that was destroying her son-in-law) and Vere prepared the Italian menus, which he had learned from his prisoners of war. In her earlier days in Nuwara Eliya, Lalla would have been up at dawn to walk through the park—inhabited at that hour only by nuns and monkeys— walk round the golf course where gardeners would stagger under the weight of giant python-like hoses as they watered the greens. But

now she slept till noon, and in the early evening rode up to Moon Plains, her arms spread out like a crucifix behind Vere. Moon Plains. Drowned in blue and gold flowers whose names she had never bothered to learn, tugged by the wind, leaning in angles for miles and miles against the hills five thousand feet above sea level. They watched the exit of the sun and the sudden appearance of the moon halfway up the sky. Those lovely accidental moons—a horn a chalice a thumbnail—and then they would climb onto the motorcycle, the sixty-year-old brother and the sixty-eightyear-old sister, who was his best friend forever. Riding back on August 13, 1947, they heard the wild thunder and she knew someone was going to die. Death, however, not to be read out there. She gazed and listened but there seemed to be no victim or parabola end beyond her. It rained hard during the last mile to the house and they went indoors to drink for the rest of the evening. The next day the rains continued and she refused Vere’s offer of a ride knowing there would be death soon. “Cannot wreck this perfect body, Vere. The police will spend hours searching for my breast thinking it was lost in the crash.” So they played two-handed Ajoutha and drank. But now she could not sleep at all, and they talked as they never had about husbands, lovers, his various possible marriages. She did not mention her readings of the thunder to Vere, who was now almost comatose on the bluebird print sofa. But she could not keep her eyes closed like him and at 5 A.M. on August 15, 1947, she wanted fresh air, needed to walk, a walk to Moon Plains, no motorcycle, no danger, and she stepped out towards the still dark night of almost dawn and straight into the floods. For two days and nights they had been oblivious to the destruction outside their home. The whole country was mauled by the rains that year. Ratmalana, Bentota, Chilaw, Anuradhapura, were all under water. The forty-foot-high Peredeniya Bridge had been swept away. In Nuwara Eliya, Galways’s Land Bird Sanctuary and the Golf Course were ten feet under water. Snakes and fish from the lake swam into the windows of the Golf Club, into the bar, and around the indoor badminton court. Fish were found captured in the badminton nets when the flood receded a week later. Lalla took one

step off the front porch and was immediately hauled away by an arm of water, her handbag bursting open. Two hundred eight cards moved ahead of her like a disturbed nest as she was thrown downhill still comfortable and drunk, snagged for a few moments on the railings of the Good Shepherd Convent and then lifted away towards the town of Nuwara Eliya. It was her last perfect journey. The new river in the street moved her right across the race course and park towards the bus station. As the light came up slowly she was being swirled fast, “floating” (as ever confident of surviving this too) alongside branches and leaves, the dawn starting to hit flamboyant trees as she slipped past them like a dark log, shoes lost, false breast lost. She was free as a fish, traveling faster than she had in years, fast as Vere’s motorcycle, only now there was this roar around her. She overtook Jesus lizards that swam and ran in bursts over the water, she was surrounded by tired half-drowned flycatchers screaming tack tack tack tack, frogmouths, nightjars forced to keep awake, brain-fever birds and their irritating ascending scales, snake eagles, scimitar-babblers, they rode the air around Lalla wishing to perch on her, unable to alight on anything except what was moving. What was moving was rushing flood. In the park she floated over the intricate fir tree hedges of the maze—which would always continue to terrify her grandchildren—its secret spread out naked as a skeleton for her. The symmetrical flower beds also began to receive the day’s light and Lalla gazed down at them with wonder, moving as lazily as that long dark scarf which trailed off her neck brushing the branches and never catching. She would always wear silk, as she showed us, her grandchildren, would pull the scarf like a fluid through the ring removed from her finger, pulled sleepily through, as she moved now, awake to the new angle of her favorite trees, the Syzygium, the Araucaria Pine, over the now unnecessary iron gates of the park, and through the town of Nuwara Eliya itself and its shops and stalls where she had haggled for guavas, now six feet under water, windows smashed in by the weight of all this collected rain.

Drifting slower she tried to hold onto things. A bicycle hit her across the knees. She saw the dead body of a human. She began to see the drowned dogs of the town. Cattle. She saw men on roofs fighting with each other, looting, almost surprised by the quick dawn in the mountains revealing them, not even watching her magic ride, the alcohol still in her—serene and relaxed. Below the main street of Nuwara Eliya the land drops suddenly and Lalla fell into deeper waters, past the houses of “Cranleigh” and “Ferncliff.” They were homes she knew well, where she had played and argued over cards. The water here was rougher and she went under for longer and longer moments coming up with a gasp and then pulled down like bait, pulled under by something not comfortable any more, and then there was the great blue ahead of her, like a sheaf of blue wheat, like a large eye that peered towards her, and she hit it and was dead.

Everything’s foreseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too…. My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there’s no god, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch.

My thumb is embarking on a great adventure. “Don’t go, please,” say the fingers. They try to hold him down. Here comes a black limousine with a veiled woman in the back seat, but no one at the wheel. When it stops, she takes a pair of gold scissors out of her purse and snips the thumb

off. We are off to Chicago with her using the bloody stump of my thumb to paint her lips. —Charles Simic

BREEZY STREAM OF TIME Simon Schama

I

t was only when I got to secondary school that I realized I wasn’t supposed to like Rudyard Kipling. This was a blow. Not that I much minded leaving Kim and Mowgli behind. But Puck of Pook’s Hill was a different story—my favorite story, in fact, ever since I had been given the book for my eighth birthday. For a small boy with his head in the past, Kipling’s fantasy was potent magic. Apparently, there were some places in England where, if you were a child (in this case Dan or Una), people who had stood on the same spot centuries before would suddenly and inexplicably materialize. With Puck’s help you could time-travel by standing still. On Pook’s Hill, lucky Dan and Una got to chat with Viking warriors, Roman centurions, Norman knights, and then went home for tea. I had no hill, but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. Nor was it even the wide, olive-drab road dividing London. It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. On most days the winds brought us a mixed draught of aroma, olfactory messages from both the city and the sea: heavy traffic and fresh fish. And between them hung the smell of the

old man himself: sharp and moldy as if it exuded from some vast subfluvial fungus growing in the primeval sludge. Ten miles further downstream was the gloriously lurid seaside town of Southend, developed at the end of the last century as “the lungs of London.” The pier was strung with colored lights and loud with the blare of band music, cracklingly amplified over the black water. The promenades were littered with flaccid, vinegar-saturated chips and you could, literally, get your teeth stuck into cylinders of Day-Glo-pink rock candy, the letters bleeding as you gnawed optimistically through the stick. Closer to home, the little port of Leigh still had shrimp boats in its harbor and cockle sheds on the dock. In St. Clements were buried its fishy fathers: not merely Richard Haddock (died 1453) but Robert Salmon (died 1641), whose epitaph claimed he was the “restorer of English navigation.” Beyond the sheds, grimy sand, littered with discarded mussel shells and hard strings of black-blistered seaweed, stretched down to the gray water. When the tide went out, exposing an expanse of rusty mud, I could walk for what seemed miles from the shore, testing the depth of the ooze, paddling my feet among the scuttling crabs and the winkles, and staring intensely at the exact point where, I imagined, the river met the sea. For it was there that my maritime Puck, perhaps an imp of Mercury, would meet me. He filled the horizon of my boyish imagination with yards of canvas and creaking timber; rope and tar and anchors and pigtails. Broad galleys entered the river with rows of grunting oarsmen. Long boats with dragon heads at the prow and dull iron shields nailed to the side slid menacingly upstream. Galliots and caravels gently rose and fell with the estuary tides, sporting on their bowsprits beaming cherubs or turbaned corsairs with goggling eyes and dangerous whiskers. Great tea clippers, their sails billowing like sheets on our washing line, beat their way before the breeze to the London docks. In my watery daydreams the shoreline itself mysteriously dissolved its ratty pubs and rusting cranes into a somber riverbank woodland where the tops of trees emerged from an ancient, funereal fog. When I took a boat trip with my father from Gravesend to Tower Bridge, the docks at Wapping and Rotherhithe

still had big cargo ships at berth rather than upmarket grillrooms and corporate headquarters. But my mind’s eye saw the generations of the wharves, bristling with masts and cranes as if in a print by Hollar, the bridges top-heavy and overhung across their whole span with rickety timber houses, alive with the great antswarm of the imperial city. I had not yet read the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, and years would pass before I discovered that Joseph Conrad had anticipated this Thames-side vision of English history bobbing on the roadstead tides. When I did eventually encounter Charlie Marlow and his somber colleagues aboard the yawl Nellie, moored in the estuary, the “venerable stream” bathed in “the august light of abiding memories,” I was as much reassured as disappointed. For it seemed that the idea of the Thames as a line of time as well as space was itself a shared tradition. Had I reached back further in the literature of river argosies, I would have discovered that Conrad’s imperial stream, the road of commercial penetration that ends in disorientation, dementia, and death, was an ancient obsession. Before the Victorian steamboats pushed their way through the scummy waterweed of the Upper Nile and the Gambia, there had been Spanish, Elizabethan, and even German craft, adrift up the Orinoco basin, pulled by the tantalizing mirage of El Dorado, the golden paradise, just around the next bend. Tragic futility, though, has a hard time lodging in the imagination of boys in short trousers. I had never seen the light over the Essex marshes as the “gauzy and radiant fabric” of Conrad’s description, nor perceived the air upriver “condensed into a mournful gloom.” To go upstream was, I knew, to go backward: from metropolitan din to ancient silence; westward toward the source of the waters, the beginnings of Britain in the Celtic limestone. But I would have been hard put to share Marlow’s ominous vision of the ancient Thames, with proconsuls in togas shivering in the fearful damp, out at the very end of the world: “one of the dark places of the earth.” I was too busy watching the ships move purposefully out to sea toward all those places colored pink on our wall map at school, where bales of kapok or sisal or cocoa beans waited on some tropical dock so that the

Commonwealth (as we had been told to call it) might pretend to live up to its name. After the coronation of the young queen we were told that we were all “new Elizabethans.” So it seemed right to daydream of our connections with the original version: with Drake and Frobisher at Greenwich, and with the Virgin Queen herself (looking amazingly like Dame Flora Robson) smiting her armored breast at the Tilbury encampment and rallying the troops against the Armada. Without a trace of Conradian blackness on my horizon, I wrote “A History of the Royal Navy” in twelve pages, illustrated with cigarette cards of galleons and dreadnoughts, courtesy of the Imperial Tobacco Corporation…. THE POLITICAL THEORY OF WHITEBAIT It was one of my father’s firmest beliefs that no one could know real happiness who had not, at some time, gorged on a plate of crisply fried whitebait. The fact that this excluded much of the world’s population was unfortunate, but merely another sign of the elect position of those wise enough, or blessed enough, to live by the Thames. For the poor fools who deluded themselves into imagining the flabby sprat or the bony smelt an approximation of whitebait, he had only mirthful pity. As for the oleaginous jaw-working scrapings passed off in the primitive London trattorie of the 1950s as “fritto misto,” these were barely worthy of contempt. Only the herring fry that appeared in huge silver shoals in the springtime estuary between Woolwich and Gravesend could be accorded the proper veneration due to whitebait. And as the auspicious day when it would be featured on the menus of the riverside restaurants and pubs approached, he would become noticeably restive, telephoning their kitchens or interrogating knowledgeable porters at the Billingsgate Fish Market for communiqués on the progress toward the deep fryer. On some brilliant day in May his prayers (and his telephone calls) would be answered. Trains and black sedans would speed us to the Trocadero or (business permitting) the Savoy for our appointment with fishy bliss…. The aroma came first: a mighty wave of salt-

toasted, pungent splendor advancing toward the expectant table. Then followed, in short order, the spectacle of a mountain of tiny fish, rising conically from a glittering charger, hundreds upon hundreds of them, a vast baroque tower of coiled, curled fry, an entire corps de ballet of fish suspended in batter; agonized in oil. The first time I saw them, when I was five or six, I couldn’t help flinching at the myriad tiny black eyes in the elegant silver heads that still seemed to be darting desperately about for directions. But even then, I impaled a trio on my fork with greedy brutality. We would gobble every last one up in a kind of silent trance of pleasure, slowing down as our plates began to show through the layers of fish and reaching for slices of heavily buttered bread to postpone the inevitable. We never ordered more. We never came back until the next spring. “Dayenu [It suffices],” my father would decree, sacrilegiously borrowing a phrase from the Passover Haggadah. Had the Pharaohs only leavened our servitude with whitebait, some of us might still be living by the Nile. But my father knew there was a long historical alliance between the British constitution and the humble whitebait. Sitting on the Fenchurch Street train he would jab an angry finger at the Dagenham gasworks and splutter, “There, right there, not so long ago there were whitebait.” “Not so long ago” meant, in fact, the reign of the Hanoverian Georges, but Arthur Schama had this happy habit of tacking anecdotally up and down the Thames as if it were indeed a breezy stream of time. So he told me about the great flood defenses of Dagenham, built in the first decade of the eighteenth century to protect the Essex coastal lowlands; the first native hydraulic engineering which replaced the mud-and-reed dikes of the Dutch. To celebrate the achievement, the king’s commissioners of works had, it seems, held a great whitebait dinner every spring as if somehow the appearance of the fish were a sign that God would indeed Save the Hanoverian King and his fishermen from the tides of flood and war. During one of the many wars with France, the feast was dignified by a visit from the prime minister, William Pitt. Thereafter, it became an obligatory ritual of government for the entire cabinet to descend on Dagenham to celebrate the impregnable security of the Thames.

Predictably, ministers eventually tired of the tedious journey by coach along the north bank, and moved the feast to Greenwich. Uprooted from its original parochial home and transferred to the Ship Tavern, the whitebait dinner now became a ritual attached to the parliamentary calendar, rather than a rite of hydraulic thanksgiving. At the end of the parliamentary term the grandees of the currently ascendant political party would assemble and celebrate their fortune in mountains of little fish. Inevitably, the whitebait dinners evolved into more grandiose occasions, involving eels and crab and cutlets, duck and beans. Home-brewed Essex ale gave way to champagne and Moselle…. Yet, by definition, it was impossible for a whitebait dinner to be an act of aristocratic self-congratulation; nor was it ever so intended. By gorging on the common food of the river, the politicians were demonstrating their virtual community with the People, even while they were obstinately resisting giving them the vote! As the constituency of representation expanded with succeeding reform acts, so did the availability of the Greenwich Dinner, famous by mid-century for its gargantuan gluttony. The Dictionary of the Thames, written by Dickens’s son (also named Charles), comments that “the effect at the moment [of consumption] was eminently delightful. The sensation experienced when the bill was produced was not so pleasurable and it has been said that there was no ‘next morning headache’ like that which followed a Greenwich dinner.” … Yet in its gluttonous heyday, from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, the annual whitebait feast in the week of recess remained a celebration of the immemorial virtues of the British constitution. It was a parliamentary rite of spring, a Pentecostal affirmation of political continuity. As a member of the Whig government that had passed the great parliamentary reform bill of 1832, Thomas Babington Macaulay shoveled down trenchers-full of the little fish. And when he came to write the history of what was claimed to be the uniquely successful evolutionism of British politics, Macaulay saw in the river Thames itself a blessed alliance between abundance, liberty, and moderation….

Ever since the days of the Tudor poets, the Thames was supposed to have been unique among rivers for being suited to commerce as well as courts, for combining along its course pastoral innocence and imperial power. James Thomson, who was born exactly a century before Macaulay, in 1700, in his long poem The Seasons, looked down at the “silver Thames … calmly magnificent,” and saw vistas of a “vale of bliss.” … A hundred years of war and revolution did nothing to dissuade the British panegyrists of the Thames from this convention of extolling the temperate harmonies of the river. In the midst of the war with Napoleon, Thomas Love Peacock’s Genius of the Thames took pains to contrast the “polluted stream” of the Seine, stained with “the blood-red hours of frantic freedom’s transient dream,” with the Thames, Where peace, with freedom hand-in-hand, Walks forth along the sparkling strand, And cheerful toil and glowing health Proclaim a patriot nation’s wealth. In the hands of the most shameless celebrants of Hanoverian imperialism, the Thames was not only a balm for political friction; it was also a winding ribbon that bound together all ranks and conditions, mean and mighty, plebeian and patrician, in a single, indivisible community. A poetic cruise along its course supplied scene after scene of perfect social concordance: The fisher’s boat, the peasant’s home, The woodland seat, the regal dome In quick succession rise to charm The mind with virtuous feelings warm Till, where thy widening current glides To mingle with the turbid tides, Thy spacious breast displays unfurled The ensigns of the assembled world Throned in Augusta’s port

Imperial commerce holds her court. Needless to say, there was no place “in Augusta’s port” for any view of the gin rookeries and verminous hovels of Shadwell and Wapping that lay just behind the “unnumberd vessels” crowding its quays. The Thames seemed to have absorbed the challenges of commercial modernity with perfect ease, swelling with power as it pushed its fleets downstream and out into the world, their sails filled with breezy imperial confidence…. From Landscape and Memory

FOREIGN RELATIONS Paula Fox

M

y parents returned from Europe after a sojourn of three or four years, when I was eleven. They slid into my sight standing on the deck of a small passenger ship out of Marseille that docked in New York City on the Hudson River alongside a cavernous shed. They were returning home after their adventures, the most recent being their flight a few weeks earlier from the Balearic Island of Ibiza during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. My mother had draped a polo coat over her shoulders—I suppose because it was a cool spring day—and she smiled down at my grandmother and me as we waited in the shadowed darkness of the shed. Sunlight fell in daggers through holes in the roof high above us. It had been years since I’d seen them. They were as handsome as movie stars. Smoke trailed like a festive streamer from the cigarette my mother held between two fingers of her right hand. When she realized we’d spotted her, she waved once and her head was momentarily wreathed in smoke. The gangplank was lowered thunderously across the abyss between the deck and the pier. Passengers began to trickle across it. Suddenly my parents were standing before us, a steamer trunk like a third presence between them. I knew that trunk; I’d seen it in Provincetown years earlier. “Hello … hello … hello,” they called to us, as if we were far away. They pointed out their luggage for porters, speaking to my

grandmother and me in voices that were deep, melodious—not everyday voices like those I heard in Kew Gardens, but of an unbroken suavity, as though they’d memorized whole pages written for them on this occasion of their homecoming. They spoke of shipboard life; about a cave in Ibiza outside of which my father had crouched for hours—embarrassed by a fit of claustrophobia that had paralyzed him not two feet from the entrance, while my mother hid inside along with other refugees— before escaping the next day to the ship that carried them to Marseille; about the fact, ruefully acknowledged by both of them with charming smiles, that no troops from either side especially wanted to capture them; about the demeanor and somewhat hostile behavior of the French in the port; with seriocomic emphasis, they warned us both about the pitfalls of British filmmaking—as though either of us might be about to launch ourselves into it—and such a myriad of subjects that although I stood there motionless and listening ravenously, I felt I was tumbling down a mountainside, an avalanche a few yards behind me. Unlike her brother Fermin, my mother had not a trace of a foreign accent, although as I learned over the next few months, she spoke English with a foreigner’s extreme caution, as though entering an unexplored forest full of dangers. She wanted, I guessed, to speak impeccably, and she would often pause in the middle of a sentence to make a kind of grammar drama. “Is it sort or kind?” “Is it were or was?” “Is it me or I?” she would ask, pondering the perilous choices and looking up at the ceiling as though it might contain the answer. Now, in mid-sentence, she switched to Spanish and bent suddenly to embrace my grandmother with nearly human warmth as if she’d all at once recalled that the elderly woman standing so submissively behind her, a stunned smile on her face, was her own mother, who, with her poor grasp of English, would not have understood even a part of what had been said. My mother’s eyes stared at me over my grandmother’s shoulder. Her mouth formed a cold radiant smile. My soul shivered. My father leaned toward me at that moment, reaching out a hand to push a clump of hair behind my ear. The tips of his fingers were

damp. He laughed. He murmured, “Well, pal. Well, well…. Here we all are.” I had been told by some relative that my father wrote for the movies. During the month that followed their return from Europe, he sold a script to a Hollywood studio for $10,000, a sum beyond my comprehension. It was titled The Last Tram from Madrid. When I visited my mother, decades later, a few months before she died, she reported to me with a roguish smile that Graham Greene had said it was “the worst movie I ever saw.” She chuckled—if a Spaniard can ever be said to chuckle. After two days, they left the small Manhattan hotel that they had gone to directly from the ship and took a room at the Half-Moon Hotel on the boardwalk at Coney Island, a ramshackle pile at the best of times that burned down long ago. My father said they were too “broke” to afford the first hotel. Something about his tone of voice suggested to me that being “broke” was a temporary condition and that it was different from being poor. He told me he’d written the entire movie in a week while Elsie, my mother, handed him Benzedrine tablets from the bed upon which she lay, doing crossword puzzles and lighting cigarette after cigarette. My grandmother and I visited them one afternoon. During the hour or so we spent with them, my father presented me with a typewriter, a Hermès baby featherweight, saying, “Don’t hock it, I may want it back.” Only a few days later, he did just that, taking it back with a muttered explanation I couldn’t quite make out. During that same visit, he said he had heard about a bequest of fifty dollars made me by “La Señora Ponvert” of Olmiguero. I didn’t look at my grandmother. Who else could have told him? He asked to borrow it, swearing he would repay me—spoken as though we both, he and I, understood that money was nothing…. When my father sold the movie in a week or so—it was easier in those days, simpler —he didn’t offer either to pay back the fifty dollars or to return the typewriter. And I, feeling that both “loans” would be judged by my

parents as trivial, never mentioned them. I hadn’t cared about the money, but I had liked the typewriter. Once my father had been paid for the movie, he bought his own father an enormous radio that he had delivered to the house in Yonkers on Warburton Avenue. And he arranged for me to meet Elsie at De Pinna’s department store on Fifth Avenue to buy me some clothes. There was little danger in the subways and the streets in those days. A child was safer, except for the occasional flasher lurking at the dark end of a station platform who might emerge like the spirit of an abandoned cave, exposing his genitals with a glazed look on his face. Yet as I rode into the city from Kew Gardens, I felt an alarm pervading me I couldn’t put a name to. I saw Elsie before she saw me. She was moving indolently toward the glove counter close to the store entrance. She looked so isolated yet so complete in herself. It was as though someone using a brushful of black paint had blocked out all the figures walking around her. She appeared to sense my presence, or perhaps the presence of a person staring at her intently. She turned toward me as I drew nearer. “Oh. There you are,” she said formally. Her smile was meant for great things. The shoe department was on another floor, and I guessed we were to begin there. We went to the elevator, my mother keeping a certain distance between us. From time to time, she glanced at my footwear. I felt ashamed, as though it were I who had made it unfit for her eyes. She bought me two pairs of handsome shoes, one black kidskin, the other green suede. During the time we were together, it felt as if we were being continually introduced to each other. I was conscious of an immense strain, as though a large limp animal hung from my neck, its fur impeding my speech. Each time, each sentence, I had to start anew. I could hear effort in her voice, too. The whole transaction, selecting, fitting, paying, wrapping, took less than twenty-five minutes. She smiled brilliantly at

me in the elevator descending; the smile lasted a few seconds too long. “Can you get home by yourself?” she asked me, as though I had suddenly strayed into the path of her vision. I nodded wordlessly. The shopping was over. I watched her walk away up Fifth Avenue with her peculiar stride, so characteristic that in the few weeks she’d been back in the United States, I’d learned to imitate it. Half the time she would tiptoe as though she were ready to fly off the earth. For years afterward, I thought about that stride of hers, and now and then, when I was alone, I found myself using it as I crossed the floor of the apartment. It was an expression of her strangeness, her singularity—even, if remotely, of her glamour…. Several months after my parents had returned from Europe, I found myself alone with them in the bedroom my grandmother and I shared…. It was late afternoon. My mother lay down on the bed on her side, holding her head with palm pressed against cheek. My father was lying on his back, his head on a pillow, and I was half reclining between them. They looked at me gravely as I spoke about music I had heard. I wanted to speak to them about what I imagined they loved. It was a long moment, lasting a few minutes or an hour. I don’t know which. Some sort of sympathy flowed among us. I wanted to keep it forever. Later, I regretted I had spoken so adoringly of a tenor of that period, Nino Martini, and claimed to have heard whole operas when I knew only arias from them. Yet for years I thought about this moment with my parents, an intimacy out of time, larger than language. In December of that year, my grandmother and I took a train to Cape Cod and then a boat to Martha’s Vineyard, where my parents had rented a house in Edgartown. We were to spend the long Christmas weekend with them. It would be their first holiday season in the United States in years. My

father met our ferry. He stood on a pier, his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out at the stormy waters of the bay. He looked a heroic figure, and there was a statuelike quality about his stance that gave me the impression he knew it. As he was stowing our luggage in the trunk of the car, I stole a glance at his jacket, the most dashing one I had ever seen. Of course I knew very little about jackets. He caught my look. It was a Norfolk jacket, he said, one he’d bought in London during the years he had lived in England and worked for a British movie studio, writing screenplays. He said it was named after the Duke of Norfolk, a hereditary peer. I was overwhelmed by all that I didn’t know, my bottomless ignorance. Words slipped from his mouth laden with meaning: silent explosions lighting up worlds that had been dark before he spoke. In an upstairs room of the small weathered shingle house, he was writing a novel…. My father introduced me to Jimmy Cagney, who was sitting in his idling car on the main street of Edgartown. His clump of a hand, covered with reddish freckles, rested on the window rim. A minute earlier, Daddy had said loudly, “There’s Cagney!” “Do you know him?” I asked. “Of course not,” he replied, walking ahead of me to cross the street. “Come on. Don’t go all maidenly and shy, for crissakes …” Cagney was small and compact. I could see he was thinking of something else as he exchanged greetings with my father. Daddy’s voice was nervy, boastful. I kept my eyes on Cagney’s hand, which hadn’t moved from the window. I thought I saw the skin tighten. I heard my father say, as we walked away from the car, “He has a house on the island.” He seemed apologetic, weakened, and I thought of how the notability of a man turns everyone around him into beggars…. Daddy and I took a long walk along an ocean beach a few miles from Edgartown. It was a winter sea, the air damp, the water the color of

gunmetal. As the mild surf broke at our feet, Daddy talked. Unlike the last time when he had spoken of books, he was sober. The interior of the country was abhorrent to him. He feared those vast stretches of prairie and mountain, those flat plains, the towns and cities populated by characters out of Main Street, those Babbitts — “What are they?” I interrupted. “Sinclair Lewis wrote novels about them,” he replied, with a broad gesture of his arm that took in the whole beach and the bluffs above it. He had wanted to be a teacher, he said. But he had sold a story to Smart Set. A few days later, the telephone rang in the Morningside house he lived in then with his family. He was nineteen and dazed by the call from H. L. Mencken, the editor of the magazine. Mencken invited him to lunch at Delmonico’s. He had been so overwhelmed he couldn’t even glance at the menu and ordered scrambled eggs. In the late ’20s and early ’30s, my father was writing screenplays for a Hollywood studio, along with other scriptwriters. He was drinking a good deal. So was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he knew. “A minor poet,” he said dismissively. One of the people he was close to … was an English playwright, Benn Levy, temporarily a screenwriter too. Benn Levy had put him in a car when he had passed out from liquor, driven him to the Mojave desert and a shack he had rented in advance, and left him there with a typewriter, a cot, groceries for a week, and a table. Benn had had the foresight to hire an ex-sailor, a grizzled elderly man, to bring him a barrel of fresh water once a week. After my father sobered up, cursing Benn for a couple of days, he began to write his first novel, Sailor Town. “Were there snakes?” I asked. “Yes. One morning I discovered an enormous rattlesnake curled in a corner,” he answered. I gasped. He had run to his cot, he told me. The snake wriggled out of the shack while Daddy stared at it over the edge of a thin blanket he’d covered himself with.

“Snakes can bite through thin blankets,” I said, consulting my imagination. “I know,” Daddy replied. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t think he was lying. Or rather, I believed in the power of stories. Perhaps he didn’t tell them all to me that day on the beach. Perhaps the stories were told over several days and evenings of that visit, and in later meetings with my father. They struck me as a way of thinking, of finding out the weakness of given attitudes and so-called truths inherited by the generations. There was no final truth. There were two English brothers, the Stokers, and they bet on the question of who could write the most frightening story. Bram Stoker won when he wrote Dracula. Until then, he had written books for children. There was a South American ant that carried a leaf over its head; there were other ants, called army ants, which could destroy a plantation house. The French Revolution had begun because cooks in aristocratic households made côtelettes à la victime; three lamb chops on a skewer held over a fire. The cooks threw away the top and bottom chops for the benefit of the remaining one. He’d been a play fixer as well as a playwright. Play fixing was emergency help for ailing plays. One had opened in Boston, Louis Calhern in the lead role. When Calhern saw that the audience consisted of five people, he stepped forward and invited them on stage to join the cast. Among our ancestors was Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who had given a young surveyor employment. The young surveyor was George Washington. He had been “thrown out” of five colleges because “rules were made to be broken.” I listened desperately, time-haunted, rapt. Now and then I asked a question. Daddy would preface his answer with the assertion, “I hear what you’re saying beneath that!” It gratified me with its implication that there was a deeper meaning to my words than even I understood. If only I could discover what I really meant! I worked like

a mole, tunneling always deeper for meaning, attributing nuance where there was none. When it was too windy for the beach, we walked through the streets of Edgartown. He knew people everywhere, I thought to myself, as we went into a real estate agent’s office, where a black stove sent out the fragrance of woodsmoke. I began to feel nostalgic for a past that wasn’t mine. During that visit, on a late afternoon, I heard him singing “Smile” to himself. His voice was light and filled with a kind of random tenderness. But his mood changed when he began to amuse himself by replacing “All who love are blind” in the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” with “You and who else besides …?” He prolonged “besides” until his voice gave out. When my grandmother and I boarded the ferry in Vineyard Haven to leave the island, my parents stood on the pier. As the boat made its ungainly turn, my mother walked away, but my father stayed until he was a shadow on the horizon….

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon. It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird. —Charles Simic

Paula Fox’s Borrowed Finery won the 2002 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.

A CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER Grace Paley

M

y father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs any more. It still floods his head with brainy light. But it won’t let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house. Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage. Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” I say, “Yes, why not? That’s possible.” I want to please him, though I don’t remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: “There was a woman …” followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life. Finally I thought of a story that had been happening for a couple of years right across the street. I wrote it down, then read it aloud. “Pa,” I said, “how about this? Do you mean something like this?”

Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely in a small apartment in Manhattan. This boy at about fifteen became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt very much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her. “OK, Pa, that’s it,” I said, “an unadorned and miserable tale.” “But that’s not what I mean,” my father said. “You misunderstood me on purpose. You know there’s a lot more to it. You know that. You left everything out. Turgenev wouldn’t do that. Chekhov wouldn’t do that. There are in fact Russian writers you never heard of, you don’t have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can write a plain ordinary story, who would not leave out what you have left out. I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where …” “Forget that one, Pa, what have I left out now? In this one?” “Her looks, for instance.” “Oh. Quite handsome, I think. Yes.” “Her hair?” “Dark, with heavy braids, as though she were a girl or a foreigner.” “What were her parents like, her stock? That she became such a person. It’s interesting, you know.” “From out of town. Professional people. The first to be divorced in their county. How’s that? Enough?” I asked. “With you, it’s all a joke,” he said. “What about the boy’s father? Why didn’t you mention him? Who was he? Or was the boy born out of wedlock?” “Yes,” I said. “He was born out of wedlock.” “For Godsakes, doesn’t anyone in your stories get married? Doesn’t anyone have the time to run down to City Hall before they

jump into bed?” “No,” I said. “In real life, yes. But in my stories, no.” “Why do you answer me like that?” “Oh, Pa, this is a simple story about a smart woman who came to NYC full of interest love trust excitement very up to date, and about her son, what a hard time she had in this world. Married or not, it’s of small consequence.” “It is of great consequence,” he said. “OK,” I said. “OK OK yourself,” he said, “but listen. I believe you that she’s goodlooking, but I don’t think she was so smart.” “That’s true,” I said. “Actually that’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person’s a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can’t even think of an ending good enough.” “What do you do then?” he asked. He had been a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of decades and he’s still interested in details, craft, technique. “Well, you just have to let the story lie around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn hero.” “Aren’t you talking silly now?” he asked. “Start again,” he said. “It so happens I’m not going out this evening. Tell the story again. See what you can do this time.” “OK,” I said. “But it’s not a five-minute job.” Second attempt: Once, across the street from us, there was a fine handsome woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later). This boy, when he fell into the fist of adolescence, became a junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote persuasive articles for his high-school

newspaper. Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand distribution a periodical called Oh! Golden Horse! In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad habits room at home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie. Her kitchen was famous for a while—a center for intellectual addicts who knew what they were doing. A few felt artistic like Coleridge and others were scientific and revolutionary like Leary. Although she was often high herself, certain good mothering reflexes remained, and she saw to it that there was lots of orange juice around and honey and milk and vitamin pills. However, she never cooked anything but chili, and that no more than once a week. She explained, when we talked to her, seriously, with neighborly concern, that it was her part in the youth culture and she would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her own generation. One week, while nodding through an Antonioni film, this boy was severely jabbed by the elbow of a stern and proselytizing girl, sitting beside him. She offered immediate apricots and nuts for his sugar level, spoke to him sharply, and took him home. She had heard of him and his work and she herself published, edited, and wrote a competitive journal called Man Does Live by Bread Alone. In the organic heat of her continuous presence he could not help but become interested once more in his muscles, his arteries, and nerve connections. In fact he began to love them, treasure them, praise them with funny little songs in Man Does Live … the fingers of my flesh transcend my transcendental soul the tightness in my shoulders end my teeth have made me whole

To the mouth of his head (that glory of will and determination) he brought hard apples, nuts, wheat germ, and soybean oil. He said to his old friends, From now on, I guess I’ll keep my wits about me. I’m going on the natch. He said he was about to begin a spiritual deep-breathing journey. How about you too, Mom? he asked kindly. His conversion was so radiant, splendid, that neighborhood kids his age began to say that he had never been a real addict at all, only a journalist along for the smell of the story. The mother tried several times to give up what had become without her son and his friends a lonely habit. This effort only brought it to supportable levels. The boy and his girl took their electronic mimeograph and moved to the bushy edge of another borough. They were very strict. They said they would not see her again until she had been off drugs for sixty days. At home alone in the evening, weeping, the mother read and reread the seven issues of Oh! Golden Horse! They seemed to her as truthful as ever. We often crossed the street to visit and console. But if we mentioned any of our children who were at college or in the hospital or dropouts at home, she would cry out, My baby! My baby! and burst into terrible, face-scarring, time-consuming tears. The End. First my father was silent, then he said, “Number One: You have a nice sense of humor. Number Two: I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time.” Then he said sadly, “Number Three: I suppose that means she was alone, she was left like that, his mother. Alone. Probably sick?” I said, “Yes.” “Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.” I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa.” “Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.”

“No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.” “Jokes,” he said. “As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to recognize it. Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end.” “Oh, Pa,” I said. “She could change.” “In your own life, too, you have to look it in the face.” He took a couple of nitroglycerin. “Turn to five,” he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank. He inserted the tubes into his nostrils and breathed deep. He closed his eyes and said, “No.” I had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing, but in this case I had a different responsibility. That woman lives across the street. She’s my knowledge and my invention. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.) Therefore: She did change. Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village. Most of the customers are young people, some old friends. The head doctor has said to her, “If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences …” “The doctor said that?” My father took the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils and said, “Jokes. Jokes again.” “No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it’s a funny world nowadays.” “No,” he said. “Truth first. She will slide back. A person must have character. She does not.” “No, Pa,” I said. “That’s it. She’s got a job. Forget it. She’s in that storefront working.” “How long will it be?” he asked. “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”

‘OPEN DESTINY OF LIFE’ Some literary critics think that short stories are more closely related to poetry than to the novel. Would you agree? ANN CHARTERS:

I would say that stories are closer to poetry than they are to the novel because first they are shorter, and second they are more concentrated, more economical, and that kind of economy, the pulling together of all the information and making leaps across the information, is really close to poetry. By leaps I mean thought leaps and feeling leaps. Also, when short stories are working right, you pay more attention to language than most novelists do. GRACE PALEY:

Poe said unity was an essential factor of short stories. Do you have any ideas about this in your own work? CHARTERS:

I suppose there has to be some kind of unity, but that’s true in a novel too. It seems to me that unity is form. Form is really the vessel in which the story or poem or novel exists. The reason I don’t have an answer for you is that there’s really no telling—sometimes I like to start a story with one thing and end it with another. I don’t know where the unity is in that case. I see the word unity meaning that something has to be whole, even if it ends in an open way. PALEY:

You mean, as you wrote in “A Conversation with My Father,” that “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” CHARTERS:

PALEY:

Yes….

You started out writing poetry…. Why did you start writing stories instead? CHARTERS:

First of all, I began to think of certain subject matter, women’s lives specifically, and what was happening around me. I was in my PALEY:

thirties, which I guess is the time people start to notice these things, women’s and men’s lives and what their relationship is. I knew lots of women with small kids, and I was developing very close relationships with a variety of women. All sorts of things began to worry me, and I began to think about them a lot. I couldn’t deal with any of this subject matter in poetry; I just didn’t know how. I didn’t have the technique. Other people can, but I didn’t want to write poems saying “I feel this” and “I feel that.” That was the last thing I wanted to do. I can give you a definition that can be proven wrong in many ways, but for me it was that in writing poetry I wanted to talk to the world, I wanted to address the world, so to speak. But writing stories, I wanted to get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me. And for me that was the essential difference between writing poetry and stories, and it still is, in many ways. So I had to get that world to talk to me. I had to reach out to it, a very different thing than writing poems. I had to reach out to the world and get it to tell me what it was all about, because I didn’t understand it. I just didn’t understand. Also, I’d always been very interested in people and told funny stories, and I didn’t have any room for doing that in poems, again because of my own self. My poems were too literary; that’s the real reason. What do you mean, you had to get the world to tell you what it was all about? CHARTERS:

In the first story I ever wrote, “The Contest,” I did exactly what I just told you—I got this guy to talk. That’s what I did. I had a certain guy in mind. In fact, I stuck pretty close to my notion of what he was, and the story was about a contest he had told me about. The second story I wrote was about Aunt Rose in “Goodbye and Good Luck.” That began with my husband’s aunt visiting us, and saying exactly the sentence I used to start the story: “I was popular in certain circles.” But the rest has nothing to do with her life at all. She looked at us, this aunt of his, and she felt we didn’t appreciate her. “Listen,” PALEY:

she said. “I was popular in certain circles.” That statement really began that particular story. That story was about lots of older women I knew who didn’t get married, and I was thinking about them. These are two examples of how I began, how I got to my own voice by hearing and using all these other voices. I suppose “A Conversation with My Father” isn’t typical of your work, because the story you make up for him isn’t what he wants, the old-fashioned Chekhov or Maupassant story, and it’s not really one of your “voice” stories either, is it? CHARTERS:

PALEY:

No. I’m just trying to oblige him.

CHARTERS: PALEY:

So that may be one of the jokes of the story?

It could be, but I never thought of it that way….

Did you make up the plot of “A Conversation with My Father,” or did it actually happen when you were visiting him before he died? CHARTERS:

My father was eighty-six years old and in bed. I spent a lot of time with him. He was an artist, and he painted pictures after he retired from being a doctor. I visited him at least once a week, and we were very close. We would have discussions. I never wrote a story for him about this neighbor, but he did say to me once, “Why can’t you write a regular story, for God’s sake?” something like that. So that particular story is both about literature and about that particular discussion, but it’s also about generational differences, about different ways of looking at life. What my father thought could be done in the world was due to his own history. What I thought could be done in the world was different, not because I was a more open person, because he was also a very open person, but because I lived in a particularly open time, the late 1960s. The story I wrote for him was about all these druggies. It was made up, but it was PALEY:

certainly true. I could point out people on my block whose kids became junkies. Many of them have recovered from being junkies and are in good shape now. Did you know any mothers in Greenwich Village who became junkies to keep their kids company? CHARTERS:

Sure. It was a very open neighborhood then, with lots of freedom. But my father was born into a very different time. He was born in Czarist Russia and came over to America when he was twenty and worked hard and studied medicine and had a profession. PALEY:

When you were growing up did you read the writers your father admired—Maupassant and Chekhov? CHARTERS:

Actually, he had never mentioned Maupassant to me before. He did mention him in that conversation. He did read a lot, he loved Chekhov. And when he came to this country he taught himself English by reading Dickens. PALEY:

So the idea for the story came to you when he mentioned Maupassant? CHARTERS:

Well, not really. He had just read my story “Faith in a Tree,” and there are a lot of voices coming from all over in that story. And so he asked me, “What is this? All those voices? Voices from who knows where?” He wasn’t actually that heavy. But when I wrote about our conversation it became a fiction, and it’s different from what really happened…. He did tend to say that I wouldn’t look things in the face. That things were hard, and I wasn’t looking at it. I didn’t see certain problems with my kids when they were small, and he was in some degree right. In “The Immigrant Story” a man says, “You have a rotten rosy temperament.” But then he says, “Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.” They’re both just prisms to look through. PALEY:

CHARTERS: PALEY:

Is that what you still believe?

Well, I do believe it, but I also believe that things are bad.

A theme that some students find when reading “A Conversation with My Father” is that one of the things you don’t want to look in the face that your father is trying to prepare you for is his own death. Were you conscious of that when you wrote the story? CHARTERS:

PALEY:

No.

CHARTERS:

Can you see that theme in it now?

No. But maybe you’re right. As I said, that’s not up to me to say. Maybe the reader of a particular story knows better than the writer what it means. But I know I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote it. I wasn’t thinking of his death at all. I was thinking of him being sick and trying not to get him excited. PALEY:

On one level metaphor is naming, however provisional and temporary the name is. Metaphor has interested me more as a way of knowledge, a way of grasping something. I like to take a metaphor and look at it, then do something like what I do with idiomatic expressions—discover a kind of mythic structure, use the metaphor as a way to discover something about the nature of reality. You have to accept the metaphor’s premises and follow its logic. Take the expression, “a bladeless knife without a handle,” where you have a figurative proposition which doesn’t mean anything. Yet by simply saying the expression, it exists somehow. Looking at the expression, you realize it is possible to construct a poem around it, but a poem that would follow the logic of a world where there

are bladeless knives without handles. You couldn’t have ordinary tables and chairs around it. The other objects would have to have some distortion to accommodate themselves to that new world. So the poem becomes a statement about a kind of reality with a logic of its own. That little cosmos is there and yet it isn’t. It almost seems to cancel itself. That brings us back to Heidegger and the suspicion of utterance. You really can say anything and make it exist; existence is saying, speaking. —Charles Simic

from The Uncertain Certainty

THE WRITING LIFE ‘WANT TO LOVE YOU’ | SHEILA MUNRO I’m just so terribly glad that I had my children when I did. I’m terribly grateful that I had them. Yet, I have to realize, I probably wouldn’t have had them if I had the choice. —ALICE MUNRO, INTERVIEW IN THE LONDON FREE PRESS, JUNE 22, 1974

By the time she was twenty-five years old, an age when I was not even contemplating marriage, let alone having children, my mother had already been through three pregnancies…. She kept working, but as time went on found the balancing act of writing and mothering more difficult. When I got to be a little older, after the euphoria of having produced a baby had worn off, my mother began to have second thoughts about how she would manage. She had to write— not only to write, but to write a masterpiece—and how could she possibly write a masterpiece with me dragging her fingers off the typewriter keys or pulling the pencil out of her hand. “Come and see,” I would command, “come and see,” and she would fend me off with one hand while keeping her other hand on the typewriter keys, the fragile thread of her narrative slipping from her grasp…. The stories my mother told about me. It is lunch time. My mother puts a cup of milk in front of me in my high chair and I fling it in her face. She lifts me out of the high chair, carries me into the bedroom, and throws me onto the bed so hard that I bounce onto the floor. (She now says I didn’t really bounce onto the floor but that is how I

remember the story being told.) This incident takes place after she has brought me downtown on three different buses and we’ve had to wait in line at Eaton’s so I could have my picture taken. I was tired and cranky by then and she wouldn’t buy me the toy that I wanted. We’re about to go for a walk. I run outside and bring the stroller around to the sidewalk and seat myself in it. But I’m too big for the stroller. I’m old enough to walk. A little older, I do agree to walk, but I won’t hold her hand crossing the street. I go limp and lie down on the road and have to be dragged across. The point about these stories, at least the way I have interpreted them, is that they are about my particular character, rather than just being a rueful description of the exasperating way two-year-olds normally behave. The picture I have is of a mother who should still have been at university, the way I was at that age, who was impatient, withholding, “emotionally tight” as she put it, towards her strong-willed and demanding toddler, not only because her writing was of such overwhelming importance to her, which it was, but more because of her youth and inexperience. I see her like the young mother in “Tell Me Yes or No” in the 1974 collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, weighed down by adult responsibilities and domestic drudgery. “I was sleepily rinsing diapers, clad in a red corduroy dressing gown, wet across the stomach; I was pushing a baby carriage or a stroller along the side of the road to the store …” I see my mother and me engaged in a power struggle, a struggle which I lost eventually, capitulating after many battles, emerging from the crucible of those first years compliant, eager to please, good…. Most of the time I was good, but then there were the times when she got the wooden spoon out of the kitchen drawer and spanked me, whack, whack, whack, on my bare bottom. She has since told me that I would cry out, “Want to love you, want to love you” when the punishment was about to be administered. Afterwards I would lie in tears on the bed, feeling utterly dejected, thinking my mother was never, ever going to come to console me. The last time she spanked me I remember well. She had taken my sister Jenny and me to an exclusive dress shop in the Village, the main shopping district of West Van, and we were roaring around the change rooms while she

was trying on clothes until finally Jenny knocked down a glass display case. All the way home on the bus, she did not speak to us. I knew what was coming, but this time I thought of a subterfuge and cried a little harder than I had to when the wooden spoon came down, and, miraculously, the spanking stopped after only two or three whacks. Until then I had not known I could deceive her…. My mother has spoken of her need to hold back so she could give what she needed to give to her writing. I think I was a threat to her more than either of my sisters ever were, partly because of being the firstborn and partly because of my temperament. She told me once that she did not hold me or touch me much unless she was dressing me or changing me, and she couldn’t believe that my father wanted to play with me all day long on his days off. The family life she lived with us was not her real, true life. That was the solitary life she led at her writing desk. My mother has talked about wanting to be the opposite kind of mother from her own mother, whom she saw as moralistic, demanding, smothering, and emotionally manipulative. I asked her if she had chosen her hands-off approach as a way of protecting us from what she had gone through with her mother. “I wasn’t so much protecting you, let’s say, I wasn’t thinking of you so much as myself, and the image of myself as a mother, as totally different. I was going to be a mother who didn’t enforce a great big generation gap, I was going to be a mother who valued you for your idiosyncrasies, for your real selves as I thought them. Let’s say I was thinking of the kind of mother I would be, not what it would do to you.”… SISTERS It seems to me now that we invented characters for our children. We had them firmly set to play their parts. Cynthia was bright and diligent, sensitive, courteous, watchful. Sometimes we teased her for being too conscientious, too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be.

Any reproach or failure, any rebuff, went terribly deep with her. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, easily showing the effects of the sun, raw winds, pride, or humiliation. Meg was more solidly built, more reticent— not rebellious but stubborn sometimes, mysterious. Her silences seemed to us to show her strength of character, and her negatives were taken as signs of an imperturbable independence. Her hair was brown, and we cut it in straight bangs. Her eyes were a light hazel, clear and dazzling. We were entirely pleased with these characters, enjoying their contradictions as well as the confirmations of them. We disliked the heavy, the uninventive, approach to being parents. I had a dread of turning into a certain kind of mother—the kind whose body sagged, who moved in a woolly-smelling, milky-smelling fog, solemn with trivial burdens. I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma. I favored another approach—the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines. In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable. So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable. The real-life mothers I warmed to were the sort who would phone up and say, “Is my embryo Hitler by any chance over at your house?” They cackled clear above the milky fog. —ALICE MUNRO, FROM “MILES CITY, MONTANA”

One of the most autobiographical of my mother’s stories, “Miles City, Montana” is based on a true incident that was legendary in our family history. It was about the time Jenny nearly drowned when we were driving back east to see our grandparents in 1961, when I was seven and Jenny was four. “Remember the time Jenny nearly drowned,” we would say and I’d see myself throwing up my hands and saying “DISAP-PEARED” when my parents asked me where she was, just as Cynthia does in the story, and in slow motion I’d see my father leaping over the wire fence, striding through the water and running out on the pier to where the pink ruffles of Jenny’s bathing-suit bottom stuck out of the water. She had seen a comb in the deep end and jumped in after it thinking the water was shallow. She was dog-

paddling when my father got to her and she’d hardly swallowed any water. When I first read the story I marveled at my mother’s ability to capture my character. Yes, that was me; except for physical appearances I felt I was Cynthia and Jenny was Meg. And I thought, how could she know I was like that, “too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be,” and so terribly sensitive to criticism, and how could she not want to change that? It is hard to accept that she could recreate me in fiction exactly the way I really was, without understanding the psychological angle, without knowing how I felt. She must have known. In families we all create characters for our children. We can’t help it, it’s just a dynamic that evolves, one I see with my own two boys, who are so different from one another—James, the intense, inventive, scientific one, and Thomas, who is intuitive, physical, social. Even to ascribe adjectives is to typecast them. Perhaps in our family our characters were more delineated than in most; my mother went as far as to say that Jenny defined herself against me. While my role was to be conscientious and good, Jenny got to be rebellious, strong-willed, independent. We had a book of fairy tales in our house we always called “The Big Beautiful Book,” and on the cover was a picture of a princess with wavy blonde hair. My mother saw me as the girl on the cover, while Jenny reminded her of another character in the book, named Thumbkin, an endearing urchin who wore ragged, patchwork clothes and a funny cap. Jenny had lovely dresses too, but when she didn’t want to wear one of them, she might haul out some discarded item of clothing smelling of lemon oil from the ragbag and put that on instead. At two Jenny could name the countries on the globe, at four she played chess with my grandfather Laidlaw. Her favorite color was black (“dark black,” she reminds me). When she grew up she wanted to be a train. She did not even like ice cream. These preferences were repeated in our family with something approaching awe. And while I was admirable, Jenny was adorable and cuddly, though she didn’t always like being cuddled. “I did like being cuddled,” she told me. “Remember when Dad played ‘Storm at Sea’ with us?” Yes, I do

remember, I remember the howling whistling sounds he made as he rocked us to and fro on the bed. Why is it that I persist in making her into a character? It is hard for me not to see us as a study in contrasts. While I was busy trying to please, Jenny didn’t seem to care a bit about what people thought of her. I ate everything on my plate—“Think of the starving children in Korea” was my father’s standard line—while Jenny refused to eat what was on her plate and subsisted mostly on milk, the one thing I loathed. While I hated being late, Jenny seemed unconcerned about getting to places on time. In the mornings before school she would stand on the dining-room table with her arms languidly outstretched as my mother dressed her, while I would be in a mad panic to get out the door. I was bright and precocious around adults; she, on the other hand, refused to speak to them at all on some occasions, and I would have to act as her translator. It could be that I expressed the drive toward the conventional in the family and Jenny stood for the unconventional, nonconformist, rebellious undercurrents, the same conflict that is reflected in so many of my mother’s stories…. From Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro WHAT SHE WANTED | ALICE MUNRO know about that, don’t “Y ou happened to my mother?”

you?” Alfrida said. “You know what

Of course I knew. Alfrida’s mother had died when a lamp exploded in her hands—that is, she died of burns she got when a lamp exploded in her hands—and my aunts and my mother had spoken of this regularly. Nothing could be said about Alfrida’s mother or about Alfrida’s father, and very little about Alfrida herself— without that death being dragged in and tacked onto it. It was the reason that Alfrida’s father left the farm (always somewhat of a downward step morally if not financially). It was a reason to be desperately careful

with coal oil, and a reason to be grateful for electricity, whatever the cost. And it was a dreadful thing for a child of Alfrida’s age, whatever. (That is—whatever she had done with herself since.) If it hadn’t’ve been for the thunderstorm she wouldn’t ever have been lighting a lamp in the middle of the afternoon. She lived all that night and the next day and the next night and it would have been the best thing in the world for her if she hadn’t’ve. And just the year after that the Hydro came down their road, and they didn’t have need of the lamps anymore. The aunts and my mother seldom felt the same way about anything, but they shared a feeling about this story. The feeling was in their voices whenever they said Alfrida’s mother’s name. The story seemed to be a horrible treasure to them, something our family could claim that nobody else could, a distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made me feel as if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering of whatever was grisly or disastrous. Their voices were like worms slithering around in my insides. Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up. So if Alfrida was going to talk about it, I thought, it was a good thing that my fiancé had not come. A good thing that he didn’t have to hear about Alfrida’s mother, on top of finding out about my mother and my family’s relative or maybe considerable poverty. He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy —for the squalor of tragedy—in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly sunny circumstances. Failures in life— failures of luck, of health, of finances—all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background.

“They wouldn’t let me in to see her, at the hospital,” Alfrida said, and at least she was saying this in her normal voice, not preparing the way with any special piety, or greasy excitement. “Well, I probably wouldn’t have let me in either, if I’d been in their shoes. I’ve no idea what she looked like. Probably all bound up like a mummy. Or if she wasn’t she should have been. I wasn’t there when it happened, I was at school. It got very dark and the teacher turned the lights on—we had the lights, at school—and we all had to stay till the thunderstorm was over. Then my Aunt Lily—well, your grandmother—she came to meet me and took me to her place. And I never got to see my mother again.” I thought that was all she was going to say but in a moment she continued, in a voice that had actually brightened up a bit, as if she was preparing for a laugh. “I yelled and yelled my fool head off that I wanted to see her. I carried on and carried on, and finally when they couldn’t shut me up your grandmother said to me, ‘You’re just better off not to see her. You would not want to see her, if you knew what she looks like now. You wouldn’t want to remember her this way.’ “But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me.” Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful. “I must’ve thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me.” This was a part of the story I had never heard. And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself, She would want to see me. The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place….

Alfrida did not come to my father’s funeral. I wondered if that was because she did not want to meet me. As far as I knew she had never made public what she held against me; nobody else would know about it. But my father had known. When I was home visiting him and learned that Alfrida was living not far away—in my grandmother’s house, in fact, which she had finally inherited—I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose. My father said, “Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.” He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started? I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her. “It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.” But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child. “Well,” my father said. He was in general quite pleased that I had become a writer, but there were reservations he had about what might be called my character. About the fact that I had ended my marriage for personal—that is, wanton—reasons, and the way I went around justifying myself—or perhaps, as he would have said, weaseling out of things. He would not say so—it was not his business anymore. I asked him how he knew that Alfrida felt this way. He said, “A letter.” A letter, though they lived not far apart. I did feel sorry to think that he had had to bear the brunt of what could be taken as my thoughtlessness, or even my wrongdoing. Also that he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out. Had he felt compelled to defend me to Alfrida, as he had to defend my writing to other people? He would do that now, though

it was never easy for him. In his uneasy defense he might have said something harsh. Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him. There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble. Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s? From “Family Furnishings” WHAT IS REAL? | ALICE MUNRO

Whenever people get an opportunity to ask me questions about my writing, I can be sure that some of the questions asked will be these: “Do you write about real people?” “Did those things really happen?” “When you write about a small town are you really writing about Wingham?” (Wingham is the small town in Ontario where I was born and grew up, and it has often been assumed, by people who should know better, that I have simply “fictionalized” this place in my work. Indeed, the local newspaper has taken me to task for making it the “butt of a soured and cruel introspection.”) The usual thing, for writers, is to regard these either as very naive questions, asked by people who really don’t understand the difference between autobiography and fiction, who can’t recognize the device of the first-person narrator, or else as catch-you-out questions posed by journalists who hope to stir up exactly the sort of dreary (and to outsiders, slightly comic) indignation voiced by my hometown paper. Writers answer such questions patiently or crossly according to temperament and the mood they’re in. They say, no, you must understand, my characters are composites; no, those

things didn’t happen the way I wrote about them; no, of course not, that isn’t Wingham (or whatever other place it may be that has had the queer unsought-after distinction of hatching a writer). Or the writer may, riskily, ask the questioners what is real, anyway? None of this seems to be very satisfactory. People go on asking these same questions because the subject really does interest and bewilder them. It would seem to be quite true that they don’t actually know what fiction is. And how could they know, when what it is, is changing all the time, and we differ among ourselves, and we don’t really try to explain because it is too difficult? What I would like to do here is what I can’t do in two or three sentences at the end of a reading. I won’t try to explain what fiction is, and what short stories are (assuming, which we can’t, that there is any fixed thing that it is and they are), but what short stories are to me, and how I write them, and how I use things that are “real.” I will start by explaining how I read stories written by other people. For one thing, I can start reading them anywhere: from beginning to end, from end to beginning, from any point in between in either direction. So obviously I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house. Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people. So when I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure. This is the hard part of the explanation, where I have to use a word like “feeling,” which is not very precise, because if I attempt to be more intellectually respectable I will have to be dishonest. “Feeling” will have to do. There is no blueprint for the structure. It’s not a question of, “I’ll make this kind of house because if I do it right it will have this effect.” I’ve got to make, I’ve got to build up, a house, a story, to fit around

the indescribable “feeling” that is like the soul of the story, and which I must insist upon in a dogged, embarrassed way, as being no more definable than that. And I don’t know where it comes from. It seems to be already there, and some unlikely clue, such as a shop window or a bit of conversation, makes me aware of it. Then I start accumulating the material and putting it together. Some of the material I may have lying around already, in memories and observations, and some I invent, and some I have to go diligently looking for (factual details), while some is dumped in my lap (anecdotes, bits of speech). I see how this material might go together to make the shape I need, and I try it. I keep trying and seeing where I went wrong and trying again. I suppose this is the place where I should talk about technical problems and how I solve them. The main reason I can’t is that I’m never sure I do solve anything. Even when I say that I see where I went wrong, I’m being misleading. I never figure out how I’m going to change things, I never say to myself, “That page is heavy going, that paragraph’s clumsy. I need some dialogue and shorter sentences.” I feel a part that’s wrong, like a soggy weight; then I pay attention to the story, as if it were really happening somewhere, not just in my head, and in its own way, not mine. As a result, the sentences may indeed get shorter, there may be more dialogue, and so on. But though I’ve tried to pay attention to the story, I may not have got it right; those shorter sentences may be an evasion, a mistake. Every final draft, every published story, is still only an attempt, an approach, to the story. I did promise to talk about using reality. “Why, if Jubilee isn’t Wingham, has it got Shuter Street in it?” people want to know. Why have I described somebody’s real ceramic elephant sitting on the mantelpiece? I could say I get momentum from doing things like this. The fictional room, town, world, needs a bit of starter dough from the real world. It’s a device to help the writer—at least it helps me—but it arouses a certain balked fury in the people who really do live on Shuter Street and the lady who owns the ceramic elephant. “Why do you put in something true and then go and tell lies?” they say, and

anybody who has been on the receiving end of this kind of thing knows how they feel. “I do it for the sake of my art and to make this structure that encloses the soul of my story, which I’ve been telling you about,” says the writer. “That is more important than anything.” Not to everybody, it isn’t. So I can see there might be a case, once you’ve written the story and got the momentum, for going back and changing the elephant to a camel (though there’s always a chance the lady might complain that you made a nasty camel out of a beautiful elephant), and changing Shuter Street to Blank Street. But what about the big chunks of reality, without which your story can’t exist? In the story “Royal Beatings,” I use a big chunk of reality: the story of the butcher, and of the young men who may have been egged on to “get” him. This is a story out of an old newspaper; it really did happen in a town I know. There is no legal difficulty about using it because it has been printed in a newspaper, and besides, the people who figure in it are all long dead. But there is a difficulty about offending people in that town who would feel that use of this story is a deliberate exposure, taunt, and insult. Other people who have no connection with the real happening would say, “Why write about anything so hideous?” … There are ways I can defend myself against such objections. I can say, “I do it in the interests of historical reality. That is what the old days were really like.” Or, “I do it to show the dark side of human nature, the beast let loose, the evil we can run up against in communities and families.” … But the fact is, the minute I say to show I am telling a lie. I don’t do it to show anything. I put this story at the heart of my story because I need it there and it belongs there. It is the black room at the center of the house with all other rooms leading to and away from it. That is all. A strange defense. Who told me to write this story? Who feels any need of it before it is written? I do. I do, so that I might grab off this piece of horrid reality and install it where I see fit, even if Hat Nettleton and his friends were still around to make me sorry.

The answer seems to be as confusing as ever. Lots of true answers are. Yes and no. Yes, I use bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world, as most people see it, and I transform it into something that is really there and really happening, in my story. No, I am not concerned with using what is real to make any sort of record or prove any sort of point, and I am not concerned with any methods of selection but my own, which I can’t fully explain. This is quite presumptuous, and if writers are not allowed to be so—and quite often, in many places, they are not—I see no point in the writing of fiction.

Scaliger turns deadly pale at the sight of watercress. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, passes out at the sight of a caged fox. Maria de Medici feels instantly giddy on seeing a rose, even in a painting. My ancestors, meanwhile, are eating cabbage. They keep stirring the pot looking for a pigfoot which isn’t there. The sky is blue. The nightingale sings in a Renaissance sonnet, and immediately someone goes to bed with a toothache. —Charles Simic

THE LONG GOOD-BYE A TIME TO MOURN | WILLIAM MAXWELL

When my father was getting along in years and the past began to figure more in his conversation, I asked him one day what my mother was like. I knew what she was like as my mother but I thought it was time somebody told me what she was like as a person. To my surprise he said, “That’s water over the dam,” shutting me up but also leaving me in doubt, because of his abrupt tone of voice, whether he didn’t after all this time have any feeling about her much, or did have but didn’t think he ought to. In any case he didn’t feel like talking about her to me. Very few families escape disasters of one kind or another, but in the years between 1909 and 1919 my mother’s family had more than its share of them. My grandfather, spending the night in a farmhouse, was bitten on the ear by a rat or a ferret and died three months later of blood poisoning. My mother’s only brother was in an automobile accident and lost his right arm. My mother’s younger sister poured kerosene on a grate fire that wouldn’t burn and set fire to her clothing and bore the scars of this all the rest of her life. My older brother, when he was five years old, got his foot caught in a turning carriage wheel. I was so small when these things happened that either I did not know about them or else I didn’t feel them because they took place at one remove, so to speak. When my brother undressed at night he left his artificial leg leaning against a chair. It was as familiar to me, since we slept in the same room, as his cap or his baseball glove.

He was not given to feeling sorry for himself, and older people were always careful not to show their sorrow over what had happened to him. What I felt about his “affliction” was tucked away in my unconscious mind (assuming there is such a thing) where I couldn’t get at it. My younger brother was born on New Year’s Day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything. Disbelieving, we endured the wreath on the door, and the undertaker coming and going, the influx of food, the overpowering odor of white flowers, and all the rest of it, including the first of a series of housekeepers, who took care of the baby and sat in my mother’s place at mealtime. Looking back I think it more than likely that long before she ever laid eyes on us that sallow-faced, flatchested woman had got the short end of the stick. She came from a world we knew nothing about, and I don’t remember that she ever had any days off. She may have made a stab at being a mother to my older brother and me, but it would have taken a good deal more than that to break through our resistance. We knew what we had had, and were not going to be taken in by any form of counterfeit affection. My mother’s sisters and my father’s sisters and my grandmother all watched over us. If they hadn’t, I don’t know what would have become of us, in that sad house, where nothing ever changed, where life had come to a standstill. My father was all but undone by my mother’s death. In the evening after supper he walked the floor and I walked with him, with my arm around his waist. I was ten years old. He would walk from the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather’s clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. Or he would walk from the library into the dining room and then into the living room by another doorway, and back to the front hall. Because he didn’t say anything, I didn’t either. I only tried to sense, as he was about to turn, which room he was going to next so we wouldn’t bump into each other. His eyes were focused on things not in those rooms, and his face was the

color of ashes. From conversations that had taken place in front of me I knew he was tormented by the belief that he was responsible for what had happened. If he had only taken this or that precaution … It wasn’t true, any of it. At a time when the epidemic was raging and people were told to avoid crowds, he and my mother got on a crowded train in order to go to Bloomington, thirty miles away, where the hospital facilities were better than in Lincoln. But even if she had had the baby at home, she still would have caught the flu. My older brother or my father or I would have given it to her. We all came down with it. I had to guess what my older brother was thinking. It was not something he cared to share with me. I studied the look in his hazel eyes and was startled: If I hadn’t known, I would have thought that he’d had his feelings hurt by something he was too proud to talk about. It was the most he could manage in the way of concealment. At night we undressed and got into bed and fell asleep without taking advantage of the dark to unburden our hearts to each other. It strikes me as strange now. It didn’t then. Though we were very different, he knew me inside out—that is to say, he knew my weaknesses and how to play on them, and this had made me leery about exposing my feelings to him. I also suspect that I had told on him once too often. I have no way of knowing what he might have said. What I didn’t say, across the few feet that separated our two beds, was that I couldn’t understand how it had happened to us. It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way round: I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.

When I got home from school I did what I had always done, which was to read, curled up in the window seat in the library or lying flat on my back on the floor with my feet in a chair, in the darkest corner I could find. The house was full of places to read that fitted me like a glove, and I read the same books over and over. Children tend to derive comfort and support from the totally familiar—an umbrella stand, a glass ashtray backed with brightly colored cigar bands, the fire tongs, anything. With the help of these and other commonplace objects—with the help also of the two big elm trees that shaded the house from the heat of the sun, and the trumpet vine by the back door, and the white lilac bush by the dining-room window, and the comfortable wicker porch furniture and the porch swing that contributed its creak … creak … to the sounds of the summer night —I got from one day to the next. My father got from one day to the next by attending faithfully to his job. He was the state agent for a small fire insurance company and traveled from one end of Illinois to the other, inspecting risks and cultivating the friendship of local agents so they would give more business to his company. On Saturday morning, sitting in the library, he would put a check on each inspection slip as he finished glancing over it, and when he had a pile of them he would hand them to me and I would sit on the floor and arrange them around me alphabetically, by towns, proud that I could be of use to him. He left on Tuesday morning, carrying a grip that was heavy with printed forms, and came home Friday afternoon to a household that was seething with problems he was not accustomed to dealing with. His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope. He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was. He gave away her jewelry, and more important to me, her clothes, so I could no longer open her closet door and look at them. I overheard one family friend after another assuring him that there was no cure but time, and though he said, “Yes, I know,” I could tell he didn’t believe them. Once a week he would wind all the clocks in the house, beginning with the grandfather’s clock in the front hall.

Their minute and hour hands went round dependably and the light outside corroborated what they said: it was breakfast time, it was late afternoon, it was night, with the darkness pressing against the windowpanes. What the family friends said is true. For some people. For others the hands of the clock can go round till kingdom come and not cure anything. I don’t know by what means my father came to terms with his grief. All I know is that it was more than a year before the color came back into his face and he could smile when somebody said something funny. When people spoke about my mother it was always in generalities—her wonderful qualities, her gift for making those around her happy, and so on—that didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know before. It was as if they couldn’t see her clearly for what had happened to her. And to us. She didn’t like having her picture taken and all we had was a few snapshots and one formal photograph, taken when she was in her early twenties, with her hair piled on top of her head and a black velvet ribbon around her throat. She was only thirty-eight when she died, but she had grown heavy, as women of that period tended to do. There was no question about the mouth or the soft brown eyes. The rest I did not recognize, though I was willing to believe that she had once looked like that. This picture didn’t satisfy my father either, and he got the photographer who had taken it to touch it up so she would look more like a mature woman. The result was something I was quite sure my mother had never looked like—vague and idealized and as if she might not even remember who we were. My mother sometimes got excited and flew off the handle, but not this woman, who died before her time, leaving a grief-stricken husband and three motherless children. The retouched photograph came between me and the face I remembered, and it got harder and harder to recall my mother as she really was. After I couldn’t remember any more except in a general way what she looked like, I could still remember the sound of her voice, and I clung to that. I also clung to the idea that if things remained exactly the way they were, if we were careful not to take a step in any direction from the place where we were now, we would somehow get back to the way it was before she died. I knew that this

was not a rational belief, but the alternative— that when people die they are really gone and I would never see her again—was more than I could manage then or for a long time afterward. When my father was an old man, he surprised me by remarking that he understood what my mother’s death meant to me but had no idea what to do about it. I think it would have been something if he had just said this. If he didn’t, it was possibly because he thought there was nothing he or anybody else could do. Or he may have thought I would reject any help he tried to give me. As a small child I sometimes had the earache, and I would go to him and ask him to blow cigar smoke in my ear. He would stop talking and draw me toward him and with his lips almost touching my ear breathe warm smoke into it. It was as good a remedy as any, and it was physically intimate. One night—I don’t know how old I was, five or six, maybe— bedtime came and I kissed my mother good night as usual and then went over to my father and as I leaned toward him he said I was too old for that any more. By the standards of that time and that place I expect I was, but I had wanted to anyway. And how was I to express the feeling I had for him? He didn’t say, then or ever. In that moment my feeling for him changed and became wary and unconfident…. Children simply feel what they feel, and I knew I was not the apple of my father’s eye. We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavybusiness-manfather-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists any more. Fathers have become sympathetic and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to…. From So Long, See You Tomorrow THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT | WILLIAM MAXWELL

If James Morison had come upon himself on the street, he would have thought That poor fellow is done for … But he walked past the

mirror in the front hall without seeing it and did not know how gray his face was, and how, all in a few days, sickness and suffering and grief and despair had aged him. It was a shock to step across the threshold of the library and find everything unchanged. The chairs, the white bookcases, the rugs and curtains—even his pipe cleaners on the mantel behind the clock. He had left them there before he went away. He crossed the room and heard his own footsteps echoing. And knew that, now that he was alone, he would go on hearing them as long as he lived. Sophie followed him when she had hung his coat and hat in the hall closet. “There’s some letters for you,” she said. “Some what?” “There’s some letters for you and some bills. They come while you were gone.” “Oh,” James said. “I put them on the table.” He looked at Sophie for the first time and saw that her eyes were red from weeping. “I thought I’d tell you,” she said. “Yes.” “In case there might be something important.” “Yes, I’ll look at them”—he realized suddenly why she looked so different. It was because she had no teeth. And with her mouth sunken in, Sophie had become an old woman—“after a while.” “I turned the spread back in your room so you can lay down if you want to, Mr. Morison.” She saw that he didn’t hear her…. James took the stack of letters and sat down. Mr. James B. Morison …Mr. James Morison, 553 W. Elm Street, Logan, Illinois … Mr. and Mrs. James B. Morison…. He read the envelopes again and again, without having the strength or the will to open them. Mr. and Mrs. James B. Morison…. When he closed his eyes for a moment and sank back, it was more than he could do to raise his head from the cushions. “It’s like being drunk,” he said. To his surprise, Sophie was still there and answered him. “Once when I was a girl in the old country—”

James did not hear the end of her sentence. If he listened to Sophie, he would have to look at her. He would have to open his eyes. When he relaxed, when he sat too long in one place, he invariably found himself on the railway platform downtown, with her. The train was coming in—the one they were going to take to Decatur. And there were people walking up and down the platform, waiting to get on. He shoved forward, knowing each time that if he’d only waited—but he didn’t wait. That was the whole trouble. He was trying to get seats for the two of them before all the others got on. If he’d stepped back, he’d have seen the interurban draw up alongside the train. On the other tracks … The interurban had a parlor car that was almost empty. It would have been ever so much better to take that, don’t you see? And turn their train tickets in later. That way they wouldn’t have been exposed. But they had suitcases and all the people were pushing them forward and the train was crowded already. There was nothing to do but go up the steps and onto the train. “You must take care of yourself, Mr. Morison,” Sophie said. “You’ve got those three young children to think about. If anything happened to you now—” “Yes,” James said, “you’re quite right.” And sprang up suddenly and began tearing the envelopes open, one after another. He read the letters while he walked back and forth between the fireplace and the windows—read them over and over without retaining what he read. Then he threw envelopes and letters upon the library table and stood perfectly still, pressing his shoulder against the mantel. For two days now (ever since they came into his room at daybreak to tell him) he had been getting on that train. And there was no way, apparently, that he could stop…. At five-thirty Robert came in. He had a book under one arm and the box of soldiers under the other, and he limped more noticeably than usual. When Robert was tired, he did not care how he walked, but led with his good leg, in spite of all that James had told him, and dragged his artificial leg behind.

Robert shook hands with his father solemnly and put the soldiers and the book on the library table. Then he went over to the windows and sat down. “How are you feeling, son?” “All right,” Robert said. “Weak?” “Yes.” “So am I. We’ll have to be careful for a while. Both of us.” Their eyes met and they agreed that there was something in the house which was not to be talked about. The best and possibly the only solution, so far as James could see, was for Clara to take the baby. And the boys, too. For he couldn’t keep the house going—that was certain. He’d have to store what furniture he wanted. That wasn’t much. He had never cared for antiques the way Elizabeth did. And sell all the rest. Sell the house, too, for what he could get. Wilfred had not offered to take the boys, but it would be all right, probably. James would give Clara so much a month for boarding them and for their clothes—because he would not have Wilfred or anybody else paying for the support of his children. And he’d get a room near by. Clara’s wasn’t the kind of home they were used to, perhaps. But it would do until such time as he was able to make a better arrangement. In the long run it was a mistake to have children. James did not understand them. He never knew what was going on in their minds. But that was Elizabeth’s doing, after all. It was she who had wanted them. There were some men who had a natural way with children. Tom Macgregor, for instance. They came to him in a room full of people, and pestered the life out of him. When Bunny and Robert were little, they would come to their father sometimes to have cigar smoke blown into their ears—Bunny did still—when they had the earache. But not very often. If they had been girls it might have been different. James felt more at ease with little girls. They came and sat on his lap and played with his watch fob. And they seemed to like very much the riddles he told them. Robert and Bunny were forever arguing, contending with each other like Cain and Abel. So that it was mostly

a matter of keeping them separated, and making each one play with his own toys. And without her … James went into the front hall and stared for a long time at the umbrella stand. Without Elizabeth it was more than he could manage. On the second trip into the front hall he went through the white columns and into the living room. Then into the library by the door at the farther end. If he could only go back, if he could remember everything during the last ten days, why then he might—it was foolish of course, but the same idea occurred to him over and over— he might be able to change what had already happened…. From They Came Like Swallows IMAGINED LANDSCAPE INTERVIEWERS:

Much of your work seems to some extent autobiographical. Is autobiography just the raw material for fiction, or does it have a place in a novel or a story as a finished product? True autobiography is very different from anything I’ve ever written. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son has a candor which comes from the intention of the writer to hand over his life. If the writer is really candid then it’s good autobiography, and if he’s not, then it’s nothing at all. I don’t feel that my stories, though they may appear to be autobiographical, represent an intention to hand over the whole of my life. They are fragments in which I am a character along with all the others. They’re written from a considerable distance. I never feel exposed by them in any way. As I get older I put more trust in what happened, which has a profound meaning if you can get at it. But what you invent is important too. Flaubert said that whatever you invent is true, even though you may not understand what the truth of it is. When I reread The Folded Leaf, the parts I invented seem so real to me that I have quite a lot of trouble convincing myself they never actually happened. WILLIAM

MAXWELL:

INTERVIEWERS:

How do you apply that to character? What is the process involved in making a real person into a fictional one? MAXWELL:

In The Folded Leaf the man who owned the antique shop bore a considerable resemblance to John Mosher, who was the movie critic at The New Yorker. He was a terribly amusing man whom I was very fond of. Nothing that John ever said is in that book, but I felt a certain security at the beginning in the identification. Then I forgot about Mosher entirely, because the person in the book sprang to life. I knew what he would do in a given situation, and what he would say … that sudden confidence that makes the characters suddenly belong to you, and not just be borrowed from real life. Then you reach a further point where the character doesn’t belong to you any longer, because he’s taken off; there’s nothing you can do but put down what he does and says. That’s the best of all. INTERVIEWERS:

Virginia Woolf was an influence in your early work,

wasn’t she? MAXWELL:

Oh yes. She’s there. Everybody’s there. My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bellow said something that describes it to perfection. He said, “A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.” What I wrote when I was very young had some of the characteristic qualities of every writer I had any feeling for. It takes a while before that admiration sinks back and becomes unconscious. The writers stay with you for the rest of your life. But at least they don’t intrude and become visible to the reader. INTERVIEWERS:

Well, all young writers have to come to terms with their literary fathers and mothers. MAXWELL:

And think what To the Lighthouse meant to me, how close Mrs. Ramsay is to my own idea of my mother … both of them gone,

both leaving the family unable to navigate very well. It couldn’t have failed to have a profound effect on me. INTERVIEWERS:

What exactly is the force that makes you a writer?

MAXWELL:

Your question reminds me of something. I was having lunch with Pete Lemay, who was the publicity director at Knopf, and he said that he had known Willa Cather when he was a young man. I asked what she was like and he told me at some length. It wasn’t what I had assumed and because I was surprised I said, “Whatever made her a writer, do you suppose?” and he said, “Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.” And then he begged my pardon. But I do think it’s deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer. With Ancestors I thought I was writing an account of my Campbellite forebears and the deprivation didn’t even show up in the first draft, but the high point of the book emotionally turned out to be the two chapters dealing with our family life before and after my mother’s death in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. I had written about this before, in They Came Like Swallows and again in The Folded Leaf, where it is fictionalized out of recognition, but there was always something untold, something I remembered from that time. I meant So Long, See You Tomorrow to be the story of somebody else’s tragedy but the narrative weight is evenly distributed between the rifle shot on the first page and my mother’s absence. Now I have nothing more to say about the death of my mother, I think, forever. But it was a motivating force in four books. If my mother turns up again I will be astonished. I may even tell her to go away. But I do not think it will be necessary. INTERVIEWERS:

But to what extent can writing recover what you lose

in life? MAXWELL:

If you get it all down there’s a serenity that is marvelous. I don’t mean just getting the facts down, but the degree of imagination you bring to it. Autobiography is simply the facts, but imagination is

the landscape in which the facts take place, and the way that everything moves…. Interviewed by John Seabrook & George Plimpton

Things were not as black as somebody painted them. There was a pretty child dressed in black and playing with two black apples. It was either a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. Whatever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside its window had been blackened with a heavy and coarse paint brush. It was all very teleological, except when the child stuck out its red tongue.

The clouds told him their names in the quiet of the summer afternoon. But when he asked the evening clouds, “Have you seen Mary and Priscilla?” he got no reply. This was a dour and mute bunch. They turned their gray backs on him and drifted over toward Sturgis, where a farmer had just shot a sick horse. —Charles Simic

BETTER AND SICKER Lorrie Moore

R

ecently I received a letter from an acquaintance in which he said, “By the way, I’ve been following and enjoying your work. It’s getting better: deeper and sicker.” Because the letter was handwritten, I convinced myself, for a portion of the day, that perhaps the last word was richer. But then I picked up the letter and looked at the word again: there was the s, there was the k. There was no denying it. Even though denial had been my tendency of late. I had convinced myself that a note I’d received from an ex-beau (in what was a response to my announcement that I’d gotten married) had read “Best Wishes for Oz.” I considered this an expression of bitterness on my ex-beau’s part, a snide lapse, a doomed man’s view of marriage, and it gave me great satisfaction. Best Wishes for Oz. Eat your heart out, I thought. You had your chance. Cry me a river. Later a friend, looking at the note, pointed out that, “Look: This isn’t an O. This is a nine— see the tail? And this isn’t a Z. This is a 2. This says 92. ‘Best Wishes for 92.’” It hadn’t been cryptic bitterness at all—only an indifferent little New Year’s greeting. How unsatisfying! So now when I looked at deeper and richer, I knew I had to be careful not to misread wishfully. The phrase wasn’t, finally, deeper and richer; it was deeper and sicker. My work was deeper and sicker.

But what did that mean, sicker, and why or how might this adjective be applied in a friendly manner? I wasn’t sure. But it brought me to thinking of the things that I had supposed fiction was supposed to be, what art was supposed to be, what writers and artists were supposed to do, and whether it could possibly include some aesthetics of sickness. I think it’s a common thing for working writers to go a little blank when asking themselves too many fundamental questions about what it is they’re doing. Some of this has to do with the lost perspective that goes with being so immersed. And some of it has to do with just plain not having a clue. Of course, this is the curse of the grant application, for instance, which includes that hilarious part called the project description (describe in detail the book you are going to write), wherein you are asked to know the unknowable, and if not to know it then just to say it anyway for cash. That a grantgiving agency would trust a specific and detailed description from a fiction writer seems sweetly naive—though fiction writers are also allowed to file their own taxes, write their own parents, sign their own checks, raise their own children—so it is a tolerant and generous or at least innocent world here and there. What writers do is workmanlike: tenacious, skilled labor. That we know. But it is also mysterious. And the mystery involved in the act of creating a narrative is attached to the mysteries of life itself, and the creation of life itself: that we are; that there is something rather than nothing. Though I wonder whether it sounds preposterous in this day and age to say such a thing. No one who has ever looked back upon a book she or he has written, only to find the thing foreign and alienating, unrecallable, would ever deny this mysteriousness. One can’t help but think that in some way this surprise reflects the appalled senility of God herself, or himself, though maybe it’s the weirdly paired egotism and humility of artists that leads them over and over again to this creational cliché: that we are God’s dream, God’s characters; that literary fiction is God’s compulsion handed down to us, an echo, a diminishment, but something we are made to

do in imitation, perhaps even in honor, of that original creation, and made to do in understanding of what flimsy vapors we all are— though also how heartbreaking and amusing. In more scientific terms, the compulsion to read and write—and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion— is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves. For it’s crucial to keep ourselves, as a species, interested in ourselves. When that goes, we tip into the void, we harden to rock, we blow away and disappear. Art has been given to us to keep us interested and engaged—rather than distracted by materialism or sated with boredom—so that we can attach to this life, a life that might, otherwise, be an unbearable one. And so, perhaps, it is this compulsion to keep ourselves interested that can make the work seem, well, a little sick. (I’m determined, you see, if not to read sicker as richer then at least to read sicker as ok.) Certainly so much of art originates and locates itself within the margins, that is, the contours, of the human self, as a form of locating and defining that self. And certainly art, and the life of the artist, requires a goodly amount of shamelessness. The route to truth and beauty is a toll road—tricky and unpretty in and of itself. But are the impulses toward that journey pathological ones? I took inventory of my own life. Certainly as a child, I had done things that now seem like clues indicating I was headed for a life that was not quite normal—one that was perhaps “artistic.” I detached things: the charms from bracelets, the bows from dresses. This was a time—the early ’60s, an outpost, really, of the ’50s—when little girls’ dresses had lots of decorations: badly stitched appliqué, or little plastic berries, lace flowers, satin bows. I liked to remove them and would often then reattach them— on a sleeve or a mitten. I liked to recontextualize even then—one of the symptoms. Other times, I would just collect these little detached things and play with them, keeping them in a little bowl in a dresser drawer in my room. If my dresses had been denuded, made homely,

it didn’t matter to me: I had a supply of lovely little gewgaws in a bowl. I had begun a secret life. A secret harvest. I had begun perhaps a kind of literary life—one that would continue to wreak havoc on my wardrobe, but, alas, those are the dues. I had become a magpie, collecting shiny objects. I was a starling in reverse: building a nest under eggs gathered from here and there. When I was a little older, say eleven or twelve, I used to sit on my bed with a sketch pad, listening to songs on the radio. Each song would last three to four minutes, and during that time, I would draw the song: I would draw the character I imagined was singing the song, and the setting that character was in—usually there were a lot of waves and seagulls, docks and coastlines. I lived in the mountains, away from the oceans, but a babysitter I’d had when I was nine had taught me how to draw lighthouses, so I liked to stick in a lighthouse whenever possible. After one song was over, I’d turn the page and draw the next one, filling notebooks this way. I was obsessed with songs—songs and letters (I had a pen pal in Canada) —and I often think that that is what I tried to find later in literature: the feeling of a song; the friendly, confiding voice of a letter but the cadence and feeling of a song. When a piece of prose hit rhythms older, more familiar and enduring than itself, it seemed then briefly to belong to nature, or at least to the world of music, and that’s when it seemed to me “artistic” and good. I exhibited other signs of a sick life—a strange, elaborate crush on Bill Bixby, a belief in a fairy godmother, also a bit of journalism my brother and I embarked on called Mad Man Magazine, which consisted of our writing on notebook paper a lot of articles we’d make up about crazy people, especially crazy people in haunted houses, then tying the pages together with ribbon and selling them to family members for a nickel. But it was a life of the imagination. When I was older, I suppose there were other signs of sickness. I preferred hearing about parties to actually going to them. I liked to phone the next day and get the news from a friend. I wanted gossip, third-handedness; narrative. My reading was scattered, random, unsystematic. I wasn’t one of these nice teenaged girls who spent their summers reading all of Jane Austen. My favorite books were

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Such Good Friends by Lois Gould. Later, like so many (of the “afflicted”), I discovered the Brontës. One enters these truly great, truly embarrassing books like a fever dream—in fact, fever dreams figure prominently in them. They are situated in sickness, and unafraid of that. And that’s what made them wonderful to me. They were at the center of something messy. But they didn’t seem foreign in the least. In fact, very little written by a woman seemed foreign to me. Books by women came as great friends, a relief. They showed up on the front lawn and waved. Books by men one had to walk a distance to get to, take a hike to arrive at, though as readers we girls were all well trained for the hike and we didn’t learn to begrudge and resent it until later. A book by a woman, a book that began up close, on the heart’s porch, was a treat, an exhilaration, and finally, I think, that is why women who became writers did so: to create more books in the world by women; to give themselves something more to read. When I first started writing, I often felt sorry for men, especially white men, for it seemed the reasons for their becoming writers was not so readily apparent, or compelling, but had to be searched for, even made excuses for. Though their quote-unquote tradition was so much more celebrated and available, it was also more filled up. It was ablaze. What did a young male writer feel he was adding? As a woman, I never felt that. There seemed to be a few guiding lights (I, of course, liked the more demented ones—Sexton, Plath, McCullers), but that was enough. Admiration and enthusiasm and a sense of scarcity: inspiration without the anxiety of influence. I feel a little less like that now, in part because I know the main struggle for every writer is with the dance and limitations of language —to honor the texture of it but also to make it unafraid. One must throw all that one is into language, like a Christmas tree hurled into a pool. One must listen and proceed, sentence to sentence, hearing what comes next in one’s story—which can be a little maddening. It can be like trying to understand a whisper in a foreign accent: did she say Je t’adore or Shut the door? To make the language sing while it works is a task to one side of gender. How often I’ve tried to shake from my own storytelling the

phrase And then suddenly, as if I could wake up a story with the false drama of those three words. It’s usually how I know my writing’s going badly; I begin every sentence that way: And then suddenly he went to the store. And then suddenly the store was brick. And then suddenly he had been asleep for eight hours. The writer marries the language, said Auden, and out of this marriage writing is born. But what if the language feels inadequate, timid, recalcitrant, afraid? I often think of the Albert Goldbarth poem “Alien Tongue” wherein the poet thinks wistfully, adulterously of an imagined language parsed to such a thinness that there is a tense that means “I would have if I’d been my twin.” What an exquisite, precision tool such a tense would be for a writer! Whole rooms could be added to scenes; whole paragraphs to pages; books to books; sequels where at first there were no sequels…. But then excessive literary production, George Eliot reminds us, is a social offense. As far as language goes we have to live contentedly, and discontentedly, with our own, making it do what it can, and also, a little of what it can’t. And this contradiction brings one back, I suppose, to a makeshift aesthetics of sickness. Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one’s life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is both an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable. Even in the luckiest life, for example, one loves someone and then that someone dies. This is not acceptable. This is a major design flaw! To say nothing of the world’s truly calamitous lives. The imagination is meant outwardly to console us with all that is interesting, not so much to subtract but to add to our lives. It reminds me of a progressive Italian elementary school I read of once in which the classrooms had two dress-up areas with trunks of costumes— just in case, while studying math or plants, a child wanted to be in disguise that day. But the imagination also forces us inward. It constructs inwardly from what has entered our inwardness. The best art, especially literary art, embraces the very idea of paradox: it sees opposites, antitheses, coexisting. It sees the blues and violets in a painting of

an orange; it sees the scarlets and the yellows in a bunch of Concord grapes. In narrative, tones share space—often queasily, the ironies quivering. Consider these lines from the Alice Munro story, “A Real Life”: “Albert’s heart had given out—he had only had time to pull to the side of the road and stop the truck. He died in a lovely spot, where black oaks grew in a bottomland, and a sweet, clear creek ran beside the road.” Or these lines from a Garrison Keillor monologue: “And so he tasted it, and a look of pleasure came over him, and then he died. Ah, life is good. Life is good.” What constitutes tragedy and what constitutes comedy may be a fuzzy matter. The comedienne Joan Rivers has said that there isn’t any suffering that’s one’s own that isn’t also potentially very funny. Delmore Schwartz claimed that the only way anyone could understand Hamlet was to assume right from the start that all the characters were roaring drunk. I often think of an acquaintance of mine who is also a writer and whom I ran into once in a bookstore. We exchanged hellos, and when I asked her what she was working on these days, she said, “Well, I was working on a long comic novel, but then in the middle of the summer my husband had a terrible accident with an electric saw and lost three of his fingers. It left us so sad and shaken that when I returned to writing, my comic novel kept getting droopier, darker and sadder and depressing. So I scrapped it, and started writing a novel about a man who loses three fingers in an accident with a saw, and that,” she said, “that’s turning out to be really funny.” A lesson in comedy. Which leads one also to that paradox, or at least that paradoxical term, “autobiographical fiction.” Fiction writers are constantly asked, is this autobiographical? Book reviewers aren’t asked this; and neither are concert violinists, though, in my opinion, there is nothing more autobiographical than a book review or a violin solo. But because literature has always functioned as a means by which to figure out what is happening to us, as well as what we think about it, fiction writers do get asked: “What is the relationship of this story/novel/ play to the events of your own life (whatever they may be)?”

I do think that the proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What that cook makes from what’s in the cupboard is not the same thing as what’s in the cupboard—and of course, everyone understands that. Even in the most autobiographical fiction there is a kind of paraphrase going on, which is Katherine Anne Porter’s word, and which is a good one for use in connection with her, but also for general use. I personally have never written autobiographically in the sense of using and transcribing events from my life. None—or at least very few—of the things that have happened to my characters have ever happened to me. But one’s life is there, constantly collecting and providing, and it will creep into one’s work regardless—in emotional ways. I often think of a writing student I had once who was blind. He never once wrote about a blind person—never wrote about blindness at all. But he wrote about characters who constantly bumped into things, who tripped, who got bruised; and that seemed to me a very true and very characteristic transformation of life into art. He wanted to imagine a person other than himself; but his journey toward that person was paradoxically and necessarily through his own life. Like a parent with children, he gave his characters a little of what he knew —but not everything. He nurtured rather than replicated or transcribed. Autobiography can be a useful tool: it coaxes out the invention— actually invention and autobiography coax out each other; the pen takes refuge from one in the other, looking for moral dignity and purpose in each, and then flying to the arms of the other. All the energy that goes into the work, the force of imagination and concentration, is a kind of autobiographical energy, no matter what one is actually writing about. One has to give to one’s work like a lover. One must give of oneself, and try not to pick fights. Perhaps it is something of a sickness—halfway between “quarantine and operetta” (to steal a phrase from Celine)—to write intensely, closely —not with one’s pen at arm’s length, but perhaps with one’s arm out of the way entirely, one’s hand up under one’s arm, near the heart, thrashing out like a flipper, one’s face hovering close above the page, listening with ear and cheek, lips forming the words. Martha

Graham speaks of the Icelandic term “doom eager” to denote that ordeal of isolation, restlessness, caughtness an artist experiences when he or she is sick with an idea. When a writer is doom eager, the writing won’t be sludge on the page; it will give readers—and the writer, of course, is the very first reader—an experience they’ve never had before, or perhaps a little and at last the words for an experience they have. The writing will disclose a world; it will be that Heideggerean “setting-itself-into-work of the truth of what it is.” But it will not have lost the detail; detail, on its own, contains the universe. As Flannery O’Connor said, “It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas … than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.” One must think of the craft—that impulse to make an object from the materials lying about, as much as the spiritual longing, the philosophical sweep. “It is impossible to experience one’s own death objectively,” Woody Allen once said, “and still carry a tune.” Obviously one must keep a certain amount of literary faith, and not be afraid to travel with one’s work into margins and jungles and danger zones, and one should also live with someone who can cook and who will both be with one and leave one alone. But there is no formula, to the life or to the work, and all any writer finally knows are the little decisions he or she has been forced to make, given the particular choices. There’s no golden recipe. Most things literary are stubborn as colds; they resist all formulas—a chemist’s, a wet nurse’s, a magician’s. Finally, there is no formula outside the sick devotion to the work. Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer—for there’s something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity—to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing. William Carlos Williams said, “Catch an eyeful, catch an earful, and don’t drop what you’ve caught.” He was a doctor. So presumably he knew about sicker and better and how they are often quite close.

THE STORY OF THE STORY What in your childhood do you believe contributed to your becoming a writer? ELIZABETH

GAFFNEY:

LORRIE MOORE:

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me—and others—to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page, and a habit is born. In addition to the predictable love of books, I was also quite captivated by the theater when I was a child—as much as I could be, given where I was growing up, a tiny town in the Adirondack foothills. My parents were members of an amateur operetta club, which put on musicals as well as straight plays, and from a very early age I was brought to watch the rehearsals on Sunday afternoons (the actual evening productions were past my bedtime). And when I think about it now, those Sunday afternoons of watching grown-ups put on plays—watching them fall in and out of character, or burst into song or laughter—were probably the most enchanted and culturally formative moments of my childhood. (I attempted to use a bit of this in one of the stories in Self-Help.) I would sit there, fantastically engaged—gripped, really—while someone who was ordinarily the postman, say, or the office manager at ge, came out and danced something wild from Pajama Game. And watching it all—from the time I was about three or four—I became if not stagestruck, then theaterstruck, or art-struck. Somethingstruck. For my parents it may all have been a cheap form of baby-sitting, I don’t know, but it was enthralling for me. Looking back I now suspect that bit of early theatergoing is still at the heart of what I think is interesting and powerful narratively. I suspect that love of theater—and that condition, however thrilling, of forever being in the audience—is part of the pulse of everything I’ve written….

GAFFNEY:

That story in Self-Help, “What Is Seized,” explores a very dark kind of split between art and life. The main character learns from her dying mother that her funny, charming, amateur-actor father was actually a cold, even cruel, husband. “Bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors,” you write. Do you share that view? MOORE:

It’s probably less a view than a mood. It’s difficult, anyway, to share entirely the view of a fictional character. An author’s life is different, complex and ongoing, while a character’s remains frozen in one little story. I can certainly understand that view—of bitterness and art—even if it is a little crudely put (I was twenty-four when I wrote it, and the character is even younger, I think), but it is not wholly true outside of the story. Its truth is only within the story. It is true for the character saying it. Certainly bitter emotions can fuel art —all kinds of emotions do. But one is probably best left assembling a narrative in a state of dispassion; the passion is, paradoxically, better communicated that way. GAFFNEY:

Could you say a little more about the relationship of your fictional characters to you, their author? The usual prurient question, about how autobiographical an author’s fiction is, is especially tempting in your case. A lot of your lead characters have names that mirror yours metrically—Berie Carr, for example. And then there’s the way The New Yorker presented “People Like That Are the Only People Here”—with a photograph of you, almost as if it were nonfiction. MOORE:

Why is the usual prurient question especially tempting in my case? Is it really? But yes, that photograph. It made me very unhappy. I was told the magazine wanted only “an author photograph” and was assured it would not be using any shot as an “illustration” of the story, though of course a magazine is often assembled in a rush, and by an assortment of people, and at the end a photographic “illustration” is apparently exactly what was desired and attempted. I won’t say anything more about that particular event,

though God knows it gratifies something in me to complain about it in print. As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world, or what one has experienced oneself, or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. Perhaps it’s even diagnostic, though now I’ve got to lose this completely repellent medical imagery. And as for metric similarities!? Okay: there’s only Berie Carr, I think, whose metric similarities I noticed but didn’t plan. But there’s no one else, is there? I’m feeling falsely accused, but perhaps I’ve forgotten. I do have one Elizabeth, you know. I’ve also got a Bill, a Harry, a Mack, an Adrienne, a Zoë, an Odette (!) (what was I thinking? of Swan Lake or just Swann? neither, I think), a Gerard, a Benna, a Mary, a Riva and for some unknown reason a couple of Marjories. There. Have I become sufficiently defensive? GAFFNEY:

Why do you think people are so curious about this kind of thing? Is it a preference for gossip over literature?

MOORE:

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure. Certainly literature has been written about and taught in this manner for a long time; it’s not new. It is sometimes, however, like so many things that are natural, unfortunate….

We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar. —Charles Simic

DEAR FRERE, When you were the head of a great publishing firm I was one of your most devoted authors, and, when you ceased to be a publisher, I like many other writers on your list, felt it was time to find another home. This is the first novel I have written since then, and I want to offer it to you in memory of more than thirty years of association—a cold word to represent all the advice (which you never expected me to take), all the encouragement (which you never realized I needed), all the affection and fun of the years we shared. A word about the characters of The Comedians. I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume—I know it from experience— that “I” is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant’s wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don’t wish to add to my chameleon-nature the characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth, and an education by the Jesuits. Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene…. It is often forgotten that, even in the case of a novel laid in England, the story, when it contains more than ten characters, would lack verisimilitude if at least one of them were not a Catholic. Ignorance of this fact of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a provincial air. “I” is not the only imaginary character: none of the others, from such minor players as the British chargé to the principals, has ever existed. A physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote—

they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases. Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier’s rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night. The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur; the interrupted funeral is drawn from fact; many a Joseph limps the streets of Port-au-Prince after his spell of torture, and, though I have never met the young Philipot, I have met guerrillas as courageous and as ill-trained in that former lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo. Only in Santo Domingo have things changed since I began the book—for the worse. Affectionately, Graham Greene

A. S. Frere was Greene’s editor at Doubleday, then at The Bodley Head.

AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO Randall Jarrell

fairly often write essays about how some poem was written; C ritics the poet who wrote it seldom does. When Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks were making a new edition of Understanding Poetry, they asked several poets to write such essays. I no longer remembered much about writing “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”—a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it—but I had almost all the sheets of paper on which it was written, starting with a paper napkin from the Methodist Cafeteria. If you had asked me where I had begun the poem I’d have said, “Why, Sir, at the beginning”; it was a surprise to me to see that I hadn’t. As I read, arranged, and remembered the pages, it all came back to me. I went over them for several days, copying down most of the lines and phrases and mentioning some of the sights and circumstances they came out of; I tried to give a fairly good idea of the objective process of writing the poem. You may say, “But isn’t a poem a kind of subjective process, like a dream? Doesn’t it come out of unconscious wishes of yours, childhood memories, parts of your own private emotional life?” It certainly does: part of them I don’t know about and the rest I didn’t write about. Nor did I write about or copy down something that begins to appear on the last two or three pages: lines and phrases from a kind of counterpoem, named “Jerome,” in which Saint Jerome is a psychoanalyst and his lion is at the zoo.

If after reading this essay the reader should say, “You did all that you could to the things, but the things just came,” he would feel about it as I do. Late in the summer of 1956 my wife and I moved to Washington. We lived with two daughters, a cat, and a dog in Chevy Chase; every day I would drive to work through Rock Creek Park, past the zoo. I worked across the street from the Capitol, at the Library of Congress. I knew Washington fairly well but had never lived there; I had been in the army, but except for that had never worked for the government. Some of the new and some of the old things there—I was often reminded of the army—had a good deal of effect on me: after a few weeks I began to write a poem. I have most of what I wrote, though the first page is gone; the earliest lines are any color My print, that has clung to its old colors Through many washings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so And so to bed To bed With no complaint, no comment—neither from my chief, nor The Deputy Chief Assistant, from his chief, Nor nor From Congressmen, from their constituents— thin Only I complain; this poor worn serviceable … The woman talking is a near relation of women I was seeing there in Washington—some at close range, at the Library—and a distant relation of women I had written about before, in “The End of the Rainbow” and “Cinderella” and “Seele im Raum.” She is a kind of aging machine part. I wrote, as they say in suits, “acting as next friend”; I had for her the sympathy of an aging machine part. (If I was

also something else, that was just personal; and she also was something else.) I felt that one of these hundreds of thousands of government clerks might feel all her dresses one dress, a faded navy blue print, and that dress her body. This work- or life-uniform of hers excites neither complaint, nor comment, nor the mechanically protective No comment of the civil servant; excites them neither from her “chief,” the Deputy Chief Assistant, nor from his, nor from any being on any level of that many-leveled machine: all the system is silent, except for her own cry, which goes unnoticed just as she herself goes unnoticed. (I had met a Deputy Chief Assistant, who saw nothing remarkable in the title.) The woman’s days seem to her the going-up-to-work and coming-down-from-work of a worker; each ends in And so to bed, the diarist’s conclusive unvarying entry in the daybook of his life. These abruptly opening lines are full of duplications and echoes, like what they describe. And they are wrong in the way in which beginnings are wrong: either there is too much of something or it is not yet there. The lines break off with this worn serviceable—the words can apply either to her dress or to her body, but anything so obviously suitable to the dress must be intended for the body. Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses, the page written the next day goes on; then after a space there is Dome-shadowed, withering among columns, / Wavy upon the pools of fountains, small beside statues … No sun colors, no hand suffuses with its touch, this used, still-useful body. It is subdued to the element it works in; is shadowed by the domes, grows old and small and dry among the columns, of the buildings of the capital; becomes a reflection, its material identity lost, upon the pools of the fountains of the capital; is dwarfed beside the statues of the capital—as year by year it passes among the public places of this city of space and trees and light, city sinking beneath the weight of its marble, city of graded, voteless workers. The word small, as it joins the reflections in the pools, the trips to the public places, brings the poem to its real place and subject—to its title, even: next, there is small and shining, then (with the star beside it that means “use, don’t lose”) small, far-off, shining in the eyes of animals; the woman ends at the zoo, looking so intently into

its cages that she sees her own reflection in the eyes of animals, these wild ones trapped / As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap … The lines have written above them “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” The next page has the title and twelve lines: This print, that has kept the memory of color Alive through many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To bed (with no complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor her chief, Nor his, nor Congressmen, nor their constituents wan —Only I complain); this plain, worn, serviceable sunlight Body that no sunset dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns, Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining wild In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap … Written underneath this, in the rapid, ugly, disorganized handwriting of most of the pages, is bars of my body burst blood breath breathing—lives aging but without knowledge of age / Waiting in their safe prisons for death, knowing not of death. Immediately, this is changed into two lines: Aging, but without knowledge of their age, / Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—and out at the side, scrawled heavily, is O bars of my own body, open, open! She recognizes herself in the animals—and recognizes herself, also, in the cages…. Rock Creek Park, with its miles of heavily wooded hills and valleys, its rocky stream, is like some National Forest dropped into Washington by mistake. Many of the animals of the zoo are in unroofed cages back in its ravines. My wife and I had often visited

the zoo, and now that we were living in Washington we went to it a great deal. We had made friends with a lynx that was very like our cat that had died the spring before, at the age of sixteen. We would feed the lynx pieces of liver or scraps of chicken and turkey; we fed liver, sometimes, to two enormous white timber wolves that lived at the end of one ravine. Eager for the meat, they would stand up against the bars on their hind legs, taller than a man, and stare into our eyes; they reminded me of Akela, white with age, in The Jungle Books, and of the wolves who fawn at the man Mowgli’s brown feet in In the Rukh. In one of the buildings of the zoo there was a lioness with two big cubs; when the keeper came she would come over, purring her bass purr, to rub her head against the bars, almost as our lynx would rub his head against the turkey-skin, in rapture, before he finally gulped it down. In the lions’ building there were two black leopards; when you got close to them you saw they had not lost the spots of the ordinary leopards—were the ordinary leopards, but spotted black on black, dingy somehow. On the way to the wolves one went by a big unroofed cage of foxes curled up asleep; on the concrete floor of the enclosure there would be scattered two or three white rats—stiff, quite untouched— that the foxes had left. (The wolves left their meat, too—big slabs of horse meat, glazing, covered with flies.) Twice when I came to the foxes’ cage there was a turkey-buzzard that had come down for the rats; startled at me, he flapped up heavily, with a rat dangling underneath. (There are usually vultures circling over the zoo; nearby, at the tennis courts of the Sheraton Park, I used to see vultures perched on the tower of wttg, above the court on which Defense Secretary McElroy was playing doubles—so that I would say to myself, like Peer Gynt, “Nature is witty.”) As a child, coming around the bend of a country road, I had often seen a turkey-buzzard, with its black wings and naked red head, flap heavily up from the mashed body of a skunk or possum or rabbit. A good deal of this writes itself on the next page, almost too rapidly for line endings or punctuation: to be and never know I am when the vulture buzzard comes for the white rat that the foxes left May he take off his black wings, the red flesh of his head, and step

to me as man—a man at whose brown feet the white wolves fawn— to whose hand of power / The lioness stalks, leaving her cubs playing / and rubs her head along the bars as he strokes it. Along the side of the page, between these lines, two or three words to a line, is written the animals who are trapped but are not themselves the trap black leopards spots, light and darkened, hidden except to the close eyes of love, in their life-long darkness, so I in decent black, navy blue. As soon as the zoo came into the poem, everything else settled into it and was at home there; on this page it is plain even to the writer that all the things in the poem come out of, and are divided between, color and colorlessness. Colored women and colored animals and colored cloth—all that the woman sees as her own opposite—come into the poem to begin it. Beside the typed lines are many hurried phrases, most of them crossed out: red and yellow as October maples rosy, blood seen through flesh in summer colors wild and easy natural leaf-yellow cloud-rose leopard-yellow, cloth from another planet the leopards look back at their wearers, hue for hue the women look back at the leopard. And on the back of the vulture’s page there is a flight of ideas, almost a daydream, coming out of these last phrases: we have never mistaken you for the others among the legations one of a different architecture women, saris of a different color envoy impassive clear bullet-proof glass lips, through the clear glass of a rose sedan color of blood you too are represented on this earth … One often sees on the streets of Washington—fairly often sees at the zoo— what seem beings of a different species: women from the embassies of India and Pakistan, their sallow skin and black hair leopardlike, their yellow or rose or green saris exactly as one imagines the robes of Greek statues before the statues had lost their colors. It was easy for me to see the saris as cloth from another planet or satellite; I have written about a sick child who wants “a ship from some near star / To land in the yard and beings to come out / And think to me: ‘So this is where you are!’” and about an old man who says that it is his ambition to be the pet of visitors from another planet; as an old reader of science fiction, I am used to looking at the

sun red over the hills, the moon white over the ocean, and saying to my wife in a sober voice, “It’s like another planet.” After I had worked a little longer, the poem began as it begins now. The saris go by me from the embassies. Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. They look back at the leopard like the leopard. And I … This print of mine, that has kept its color Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief— Only I complain; this serviceable Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns, Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap, Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death —Oh, bars of my own body, open, open! It is almost as if, once all the materials of the poem were there, the middle and end of the poem made themselves, as the beginning seemed to make itself. After the imperative open, open! there is a space, and the middle of the poem begins evenly—since her despair is beyond expression—in a statement of accomplished fact: The world goes by my cage and never sees me. Inside the mechanical official cage of her life, her body, she lives invisibly; no one feeds this animal, reads out its name, pokes a stick through the bars at it—the cage is empty. She feels that she is even worse off than the other animals of the zoo: they are still wild animals—since they do not

know how to change into domesticated animals, beings that are their own cages—and they are surrounded by a world that does not know how to surrender them, still thinks them part of itself. This natural world comes through or over the bars of the cages, on its continual visits to those within: to those who are not machine parts, convicts behind the bars of their penitentiary, but wild animals—the free beasts come to their imprisoned brothers and never know that they are not also free. Written on the back of one page, crossed out, is Come still, you free; on the next page this becomes The world goes by my cage and never sees me. And there come not to me, as come to these, The wild ones beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain, Pigeons fluttering to settling on the bear’s bread, turkey buzzards Coming with grace first, then with horror Vulture seizing Tearing the meat the flies have clouded … In saying mournfully that the wild animals do not come to her as they come to the animals of the zoo, she is wishing for their human equivalent to come to her. But she is right in believing that she has become her own cage—she has changed so much, in her manless, childless, fleshless existence, that her longing wish has inside it an increasing repugnance and horror: the innocent sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain become larger in the pigeons settling on (not fluttering to) the bears’ bread; and these grow larger and larger, come (with grace first, far off in the sky, but at last with horror) as turkey buzzards seizing, no, tearing the meat the flies have clouded. She herself is that stale leftover flesh, nauseating just as what comes to it is horrible and nauseating. The series pecking, settling on, and tearing has inside it a sexual metaphor: the stale flesh that no one would have is taken at last by the turkey buzzard with his naked red neck and head. Her own life is so terrible to her that, to change, she is willing to accept even this, changing it as best she can. She says: Vulture [it is a euphemism that gives him distance and solemnity], when you

come for the white rat that the foxes left [to her the rat is so plainly herself that she does not need to say so; the small, white, untouched thing is more accurately what she is than was the clouded meat— but, also, it is euphemistic, more nearly bearable], take off the red helmet of your head [the bestiality, the obscene sexuality of the flesh-eating death bird is really—she hopes or pretends or desperately is sure—merely external, clothes, an intentionally frightening war garment like a Greek or Roman helmet], the black wings that have shadowed me [she feels that their inhuman colorless darkness has always, like the domes of the inhuman city, shadowed her; the wings are like a black parody of the wings the Swan Brothers wear in the fairy tale, just as the whole costume is like that of the Frog Prince or the other beast-princes of the stories] and step [as a human being, not fly as an animal] to me as [what you really are under the disguising clothing of red flesh and black feathers] man—not the machine part, the domesticated animal that is its own cage, but man as he was first, still must be, is: the animals’ natural lord, The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn, To whose hand of power the great lioness Stalks, purring … And she ends the poem when she says to him You know what I was, You see what I am: change me, change me! Here is the whole poem: THE WOMAN AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO The saris go by me from the embassies. Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.

They look back at the leopard like the leopard. And I … This print of mine, that has kept its color Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief— Only I complain; this serviceable Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns, Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap, Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death —Oh, bars of my own body, open, open! The world goes by my cage and never sees me. And there come not to me, as come to these, The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain, Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards Tearing the meat the flies have clouded … Vulture, When you come for the white rat that the foxes left, Take off the red helmet of your head, the black Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man, The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn, To whose hand of power the great lioness Stalks, purring … You know what I was, You see what I am: change me, change me!

THE DEATHS OF ANTON CHEKHOV Janet Malcolm

say that Olga refused to sleep with Chekhov because she “T hey was afraid of catching his tb,” Nina says as we walk back to the car along the footpath above the sea in Oreanda. “I’ve never heard that,” I say. “From their correspondence it seems clear that they did sleep together.” “Don’t you remember at Gurzuv, when you asked about the narrow bed in Chekhov’s room?” I do remember. The day before, we had visited the seaside cottage, twelve miles outside of Yalta, that Chekhov bought soon after building his villa…. Nina, having grown up in a society where five families lived in a single room, was perhaps unaware that it was customary for pre-Revolution bourgeois married couples to sleep in separate bedrooms. But her dark comment reflected a larger negative feeling about Olga. Russians have not taken Olga to their hearts as they have Chekhov. Harvey Pitcher, the author of a sympathetic book about Olga called Chekhov’s Leading Lady (1979), writes that the marriage of Chekhov and Olga “was the subject of a controversy that has never died down. Olga Knipper might be recognized as the Moscow Art Theater’s leading actress and interpreter of Chekhov’s heroines … but how had she succeeded in marrying Russia’s most elusive literary bachelor when he was already past forty? Could she be anything but one of those predatory females often described by Chekhov himself in his fiction? And what

sort of wife was it who for more than half the year continued to pursue her acting career in Moscow while her husband was confined for health reasons to the Crimean resort of Yalta, more than two days’ journey from Moscow by train?” But the enforced separation may have been crucial to the marriage’s success—perhaps even to its very being. In 1895 (three years before he met Olga) Chekhov wrote to Suvorin: Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before; in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I’ll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me…. I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. [In “A Dreary Story” (1889) Chekhov writes mordantly of a wife who says exactly the same thing to her husband every morning.] The separation had another benefit—the correspondence it generated. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion. The letters between Olga and Anton—available in an English translation by Jean Benedetti in a volume entitled Dear Writer, Dear Actress (1996) —make wonderful reading. One marvels at the almost uncanny similarity of style between writer and actress, until one stops to remember that actors are mimics. Olga performs on paper as she performed on the stage and in life. What she does, of course—what the actors among our friends do—is only an exaggerated version of the unconscious mimicry of the other we all engage in when we are making ourselves agreeable….

The Russians’ perception of Olga as an ambitious, cold, ruthless, unkind woman, not worthy of the gentle, delicate Anton Paviovich, is not borne out by her letters, which are consistently gentle and delicate. But Olga’s German background—she came from an assimilated German family, like that of Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits’s husband—may have some bearing on the dislike and resentment she has attracted, as may her post-Revolution career as a leading People’s Artist. (She lived until the 1950s and never stopped acting.) … The anecdote raises a question: What if Chekhov had lived into the Soviet period? Would he have passed the test that no man or woman should be forced to take? Would he (like Gorky) have bowed to the dictatorship or would he have resisted and been crushed? One can never predict how anyone will behave—but everything in Chekhov’s life and work expresses an exceptionally strong hatred of force and violence. In all probability, the libertarian Chekhov would have fared badly under the Soviets. Almost surely he would not have died in a posh German hotel room after drinking a glass of champagne. Chekhov’s death is one of the great set pieces of literary history. According to an account written by Olga in 1908 (and translated by Benedetti), on the night of July 2, 1904, Chekhov went to sleep and woke up around one. “He was in pain, which made it difficult to lie down,” Olga wrote, and continued: He felt sick with pain, he was “in torment” and for the first time in his life he asked for a doctor…. It was eerie. But the feeling that something positive had to be done, and quickly, made me gather all my strength. I woke up Lev Rabenek, a Russian student living in the hotel, and asked him to go for the doctor. Dr. Schwörer came and gently, caringly started to say something, cradling Anton in his arms. Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe. The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: “It’s

a long time since I drank champagne.” He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed, and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child. In another memoir, written in 1922, Olga refined and expanded the death scene thus: The doctor arrived and ordered champagne. Anton Pavlovich sat up and loudly informed the doctor in German (he spoke very little German), “Ich sterbe.” He then took a glass, turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne,” calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterwards fell silent forever. The dreadful silence of the night was disturbed only by a large moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind, beat tormentedly against the burning electric lamps, and flew confusedly around the room. The doctor left, and in the silence and heat of the night the cork suddenly jumped out of the unfinished bottle of champagne with a terrifying bang. It began to grow light, and as nature awoke, the gentle, melodious song of the birds came like the first song of mourning, and the sound of an organ came from a nearby church. There was no human voice, no bustle of human life, only the beauty, calm, and majesty of death. Awareness of grief, of the loss of such a man as Anton Pavlovich, came only with the first sounds of awakening life, with the arrival of people; and what I experienced and felt, standing on the balcony and looking now at the rising sun, now at nature melodiously awakening, now at the fine, peaceful face of Anton Pavlovich, which seemed to be smiling as if he had just understood something—that, I repeat, still remains for me an unresolved mystery. There had never been such moments as those before in my life, and there never will be again.

Leo Rabeneck set down his own account of the night of July 2, 1904, though he waited fifty-four years to do so. Predictably, it differed in some details from Olga’s. In an article called “The Last Minutes of Chekhov,” published in Paris in a Russian émigré journal, he recalled that the doctor had asked him to buy oxygen at a pharmacy and had briefly administered it to the dying man. After quoting Chekhov’s (or Olga’s, as the case may be) “It’s a long time since I’ve drunk champagne,” and reporting on the draining of the glass, Rabeneck writes: At that moment I heard a strange sound coming from his throat. I saw him lie back on the cushions and thought he did so to breathe more easily. Everything was silent in the room and the lamp grew dimmer. The doctor took Anton Pavlovich’s hand and said nothing. After several minutes of silence I thought things were improving and that Anton Pavlovich was out of danger. Then the doctor dropped Anton Pavlovich’s hand, and took me to a corner of the room. “It’s finished,” he said. “Herr Chekhov has died. Will you tell Frau Chekhov?” … I went to her…. “Olga Leonardovna, the doctor said that Anton Pavlovich has died.” She stood like a stone. Then she started to shout in German at the doctor: “It is not true, Doctor, tell me it is not true.” The third eyewitness, Dr. Schwöhrer, left no account, but is quoted in an article dated July 5, 1904, which appeared the following day in the Moscow newspaper Novostia Dnia. Its author, an unidentified correspondent (he wrote under the initials S.S.), reported from Badenweiler: “I talked to the doctor who treated A. P. Chekhov here…. He was, the doctor said, until the last minute, stoically calm, like a hero…. ‘When I approached him, he told me peacefully: “Soon, doctor, I am going to die.” I wanted to bring him a new supply of oxygen. Chekhov stopped me, saying, “There is no need for more. Before they brought the oxygen, I would be dead.”’” Another on-thescene Russian journalist, Grigori Borisovich Iollos (the Berlin correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Russkie Vedemosti, who

had become friendly with Chekhov and Olga in Badenweiler and interviewed Olga the day after Chekhov’s death), wrote on July 3, 1904: “At one o’clock at night, Anton Pavlovich began to rave, talked of some sailor, then asked something about the Japanese, and after that came back to his senses and with a sad smile told his wife, who was putting an ice pack on his chest, ‘You don’t put ice on an empty heart.’” Iollos went on: “His last words were, ‘I am dying,’ and then, quietly, in German to his doctor, ‘Ich sterbe.’ His pulse became very weak … dying, he sat in bed, bending, supported by pillows; then suddenly he turned on his side and without a sign, without any apparent external sign, his life stopped. An unusually peaceful, almost happy expression appeared on his suddenly youthful-looking face. Through the wide-open window came a fresh breeze, smelling of hay; a light appeared above the forest. No sound anywhere—the small spa town was asleep, the doctor left, a deadly silence filled the house; only the singing of birds could be heard in the room, where, lying on his side, freed from difficulties, a remarkable man and a hard worker, rested on the shoulder of a woman who covered him with tears and kisses.” How Chekhov’s biographers have handled the eyewitness testimony (both primary and secondary) in their various renderings of the death scene offers an instructive glimpse into the workings of biographical method. In Anton Chekhov: A Life (1952), David Magarshack writes: When the doctor arrived, Chekhov said to him in German: “Tod?” “Oh, no,” the doctor replied. “Please calm yourself.” Chekhov was still finding it difficult to breathe and ice was placed on his heart. The doctor sent one of the students for oxygen. “Don’t bother,” Chekhov said. “I shall be dead before they bring it.”

The doctor then ordered some champagne. Chekhov took the glass, turned to Olga Knipper and said with a smile, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” He had a few sips and fell back on the pillow. Soon he began to ramble. “Has the sailor gone? Which sailor?” He was apparently thinking of the RussoJapanese war. That went on for several minutes. His last words were “I’m dying”; then in a very low voice to the doctor in German: “Ich sterbe.” His pulse was getting weaker. He sat doubled up on his bed, propped up by pillows. Suddenly, without uttering a sound, he fell sideways. He was dead. His face looked very young, contented and almost happy. The doctor went away. A fresh breeze blew into the room, bringing with it the smell of newly mown hay. The sun was rising slowly from behind the woods. Outside, the birds began to stir and twitter, and in the room the silence was broken by the loud buzzing of a huge black moth, which was whirling round the electric light, and by the soft sobbing of Olga Knipper as she leaned with her head against Chekhov’s body. Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova in Anton Chekhov: The Voice of Twilight Russia (1937) writes: Soon Dr. Schwöhrer arrived accompanied by his assistant. They sent for oxygen. Chekhov smiled: It will come too late. A few moments later he became delirious. He spoke about the war and Russian sailors in Japan. This great humanitarian remained true to himself to the end. It was not his family or his friends on whom his last thoughts were centered: it was on Russia and her people…. The physicians gave him some champagne. Chekhov smiled again, and then in a distant whisper said: “Ich sterbe.” (I am dying.) He sank on his left side. All was ended. Two silent men bent over the motionless form, and, in the stillness of the July night, one could hear only the sobs of a lonely woman.

Daniel Gilles in Chekhov: Observer Without Illusion (1967): Chekhov’s fever was so high that he was half delirious: he was raving about some unknown sailor and expressing fear of the Japanese. But when Olga came to put an ice bag on his chest, he abruptly came to himself and gently pushed it away. With a sad smile, he explained: “One doesn’t put ice on an empty heart.” Henri Troyat, in Chekhov (1984): Fever had made Chekhov delirious. He went on about a sailor or asked about the Japanese, his eyes shining. But when Olga tried to place an ice bag on his chest, he suddenly regained consciousness and said, “Don’t put ice on an empty stomach.” Irene Nemirovsky, in A Life of Chekhov (1950): A huge black moth entered the room. It flew from wall to wall, hurling itself against the lighted lamps, thudded painfully down with scorched wings, then fluttered up again in its blind, impulsive flight. Then it found the open window, and disappeared into the soft, dark night. Chekhov, meanwhile, had ceased speaking and breathing: his life was ended. V. S. Pritchett, in Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (1988): They were going to send for oxygen, but Chekhov said he would be dead before it came, so a bottle of champagne was brought. He sipped it and soon began to ramble and he evidently had one of those odd visions that he had evoked in Ward 6. “Has the sailor gone?” he asked. What sailor? Perhaps his sailor in Gusev? Then he said in Russian, “I am dying,” then in German, “Ich sterbe,” and died at once.

Donald Rayfield, in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997): He raved of a sailor in danger: his nephew Kolia. Olga sent one of the Russian students to fetch the doctor and ordered ice from the porter. She chopped up a block of ice and placed it on Anton’s heart. Dr. Schwörer came and sent the two students for oxygen. Anton protested that an empty heart needed no ice and that he would die before the oxygen came. Schworer gave him an injection of camphor. And, finally, here is Philip Callow, writing in Chekhov: The Hidden Ground (1998): Chekhov was hallucinating, his eyes glittery, talking gibberish about a sailor, about some Japanese. She tried to put an ice bag on his chest and he was suddenly lucid, fully conscious. “You don’t put ice on an empty stomach,” he told her, like a doctor supervising a nurse…. Then the doctor, one of those Germans who according to Chekhov followed every rule to the letter, did something astonishing. He went to the telephone in the alcove and ordered a bottle of the hotel’s best champagne. He was asked how many glasses. “Three,” he shouted, “and hurry, d’you hear?” In a final effort of courtesy Chekhov sat up, said “Ich sterbe,” and fell back against the pillows. The champagne arrived, brought to the door by a young porter who looked as if he’d been sleeping. His fair hair stood up, his uniform was creased, his jacket half-buttoned. He entered the room with a silver tray and three cut-crystal glasses and carried in a silver ice bucket containing the champagne. Everything was now in slow motion. The young man, ignorant of the occasion, could hear someone laboring dreadfully for breath in the other room. He found a place for the tray and glasses and tried discreetly to find somewhere to put the ice bucket. The doctor, a big ponderous man with a dense

moustache, gave him a tip and he went through the door as if dazed. Schwöhrer, not given to displays of emotion, opened the champagne bottle with his usual quiet efficiency. And perhaps because he thought it unseemly he eased the cork out so as to minimize the loud pop. He poured three glasses and replaced the cork. Olga freed her fingers for a moment from Chekhov’s burning hand. She rearranged his pillow and put the cool glass of champagne against his palm. As I read these paragraphs, I marveled at the specificity of the new details— the telephone in the alcove, the doctor’s “quiet efficiency,” the cut-crystal glasses, the sleepy young porter with the half-buttoned jacket. Could Callow have stumbled upon a cache of new primary material in a Moscow attic? I looked for notes at the back of his book and found none. Then something stirred in my memory. I began to feel that I had met the sleepy young porter before. I went to the bookcase and got out a collection of Raymond Carver’s stories, Where I’m Calling From (1989). In a story entitled “Errand” I read: Chekhov was hallucinating, talking about sailors, and there were snatches of something about the Japanese. “You don’t put ice on an empty stomach,” he said when she tried to place an ice pack on his chest…. [Dr. Schwöhrer] went over to an alcove where there was a telephone on the wall. He read the instructions for using the device…. He picked up the receiver, held it to his ear, and did as the instructions told him. When someone finally answered, Dr. Schwöhrer ordered a bottle of the hotel’s best champagne. “How many glasses?” he was asked. “Three glasses!” the doctor shouted into the mouthpiece. “And hurry, do you hear?” … The champagne was brought to the door by a tired-looking young man whose blond hair was standing up. The trousers of

his uniform were wrinkled, the creases gone, and in his haste he’d missed a loop while buttoning his jacket…. The young man entered the room carrying a silver ice bucket with the champagne in it and a silver tray with three cut-crystal glasses. He found a place on the table for the bucket and glasses, all the while craning his neck, trying to see into the other room, where someone panted ferociously for breath. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound…. Methodically, the way he did everything, the doctor went about the business of working the cork out of the bottle. He did it in such a way as to minimize, as much as possible, the festive explosion. He poured three glasses and, out of habit, pushed the cork back into the neck of the bottle…. Olga momentarily released her grip on Chekhov’s hand—a hand, she said later, that burned her fingers. She arranged another pillow behind his head. Then she put the cool glass of champagne against Chekhov’s palm…. “Errand” is one of those hybrid works in which real historical figures and events are combined with invented ones, so that the nonspecialist reader has no way of knowing which is which. In this case, the expert on Chekhov’s death that the reader of these pages has become will be able to sort out what Carver invented and what he took from the primary and secondary sources. And he may well conclude that Carver has sinned as greatly against the spirit of fiction as Callow has sinned against the spirit of fact. As Callow does not inform us of what he lifted from Carver, so Carver does not inform us of what he lifted from Olga and the biographers. The young porter is his invention, but Schwöhrer, Rabeneck, Olga, and Anton are not. Nor is he the author of the “plot” of the death scene. The author is Olga. Her powerful narrative is the skeleton on which all the subsequent death scenes hang, Carver’s included. Callow’s appropriations of Carver’s fictionalizations—which are only a degree more imaginative than those of Magarshack, Toumanova, Gilles, et al.—provide a Gogolian twist to the chronicle of the writing of

Chekhov’s death scene. It is all so dizzyingly mixed up that the moral is a little hard to make out. “Don’t put ice on an empty stomach!” may be the one we will have to settle for. From Reading Chekhov

Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. “The soul is a mirage,” I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway. “Like a superb confit of duck, or like a sparkling littleneck clam still in its native brine?” I inquired. But she just rubbed her belly and smiled at me from across the table. —Charles Simic

THE TRUTH OF LIES Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by John King

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ver since I wrote my first story, people have asked me if what I write is “true.” Although my replies sometimes satisfy the questioners, every time that I answer that particular enquiry, however sincerely, I am left with the uncomfortable feeling of having said something that never gets to the heart of the matter. The question as to whether novels are true or false matters as much to certain people as whether they are good or bad, and many readers judge the latter by the former. The Spanish inquisitors, for example, banned the publication and importation of novels in the Spanish American colonies with the argument that these absurd and nonsensical—that is, lying—works could be bad for the spiritual health of the Indians. For that reason, the Spanish Americans only read contraband fiction for three hundred years and the first novel to be published under that name in Spanish America appeared only after Independence (in Mexico in 1816). By banning not particular works, but a literary genre in the abstract, the Inquisition established something that, in its eyes, was a law without exceptions: that novels always lie, that they all offer a false vision of the world. Years ago, I wrote a study ridiculing these dogmatic men who were capable of making such a generalization. Now I think that the Spanish inquisitors were perhaps the first people to understand—before the

critics and the novelists themselves—the nature of fiction and its seditious tendencies. In effect, novels lie—they can do nothing else—but that is only part of the story. The other part is that, by lying, they express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised as something that it is not. Put this way, it seems something of a rigmarole, but, in fact, it is really very simple. Men are not content with their lot and almost all of them—rich and poor, brilliant and ordinary, famous and unknown—would like a life different from the one that they are leading. Novels were born to placate this hunger, albeit in a distorted way. They are written and read so that human beings may have the lives that they are not prepared to do without. Within each novel, there stirs a rebellion, there beats a desire. Does this mean that the novel is synonymous with unreality? That the introspective buccaneers of Conrad, the languid Proustian aristocrats, the anonymous little men punished by adversity of Franz Kafka and the erudite metaphysicians of Borges’s stories excite us or move us because they have nothing to do with us, because it is impossible for us to identify our experiences with theirs? Of course not. One must tread carefully because this road—of truth and lies in the world of fiction—is strewn with traps, and the inviting oases that appear on the horizon are usually mirages. What does it mean that a novel always lies? Not what the officials and cadets thought at the Leoncio Prado Military School, where my first novel, Time of the Hero, takes place—supposedly at least— when they burned the book for being slanderous to their institution. Or what my first wife thought when she read another of my novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Feeling that she had been wrongly portrayed in it, she published a book seeking to restore the truth altered by the fiction. Of course, in both stories there are more inventions, distortions, and exaggerations than memories and, when I wrote them, I never intended to be anecdotally faithful to events and people that preceded or were outside the novel. In both cases, as in everything that I have written, I started out from some experiences that were still vivid in my memory and stimulated my

imagination, and I imagined something that reflects these working materials in a very unfaithful way. One does not write novels to recount life, but rather to transform it, by adding something. In the slim novels by the Frenchman Restif de la Bretonne, reality could not be more photographic; they are a catalogue of French eighteenthcentury customs. In these laborious sketches, in which everything approximates real life, we find, however, something different, minimal but revolutionary. That in this world, men do not fall in love with women because of the purity of their features, the elegance of their bodies, their spiritual virtues and the like, but exclusively because of the beauty of their feet (this has been called, for that reason, bretonisme, the fetishism of the shoe). In a less crude and explicit, and also in a less conscious way, all novels remake reality— embellishing or making it worse—just as the extravagant Restif did with such delicious ingenuousness. In these subtle or gross additions to life—in which the novelist gives form to his secret obsessions—lies the originality of a fiction. This originality is more profound the more it expresses a general need and the more readers there are, through time and space, who can identify in this contraband smuggled into life the obscure demons that disturb them. Could I, in the novels that I mentioned, have tried to be scrupulously exact with my memories? Of course. But even if I had achieved the boring feat of only narrating true facts, my novels would not have been, for all this, any less lying and any more true than they are now. Because it is not the story which in essence decides the truth or lies of a work of fiction, but the fact that this story is written rather than lived, that it is made of words and not concrete experiences. Facts suffer a profound change when they are transformed into words. The real fact—the bloody battle that I took part in, the Gothic silhouette of the young woman that I loved—is one, while the signs that could describe it are innumerable. By choosing some and discounting others, the novelist kills off a thousand other possibilities. This, then, is altered: what is described becomes what has been described…. Accompanying this first transformation—that words impose upon deeds— there is another which is no less radical: that of time. Real

life flows and does not stop; it is incommensurable, a chaos in which each story mingles with all the other stories and thus it never begins or ends. Fictional life is a simulacrum in which that dizzying disorder becomes order: organization, cause and effect, beginning and end…. Novelistic time is an artifice fabricated to achieve certain psychological effects. In it, the past can come after the present—the effect precedes the cause—as in that story by Alejo Carpentier, “Journey to the Source,” which begins with the death of an old man and continues up to his gestation in his mother’s womb; or it can be just a remote past which never manages to dissolve into the near past from which the narrator is narrating, as occurs in most classic novels; or an eternal present without a past or a future, as in the fictions of Samuel Beckett; or a labyrinth in which past, present, and future coexist and cancel each other out, as in The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. Novels have a beginning and an end and even in the most formless and intermittent of them, life takes on a meaning that we can perceive because they give us a perspective that real life, in which we are immersed, always denies us. This order is an invention, an addition by the novelist, a simulator who seems to recreate life whereas in truth he is amending it. Sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, fiction betrays life, encapsulating it in a weft of words which reduces its scale and makes it accessible to the reader. This reader can therefore judge it, understand it, and above all live it, with an impunity that real life does not allow. What is the difference, then, between fiction and a newspaper article or a history book? Are they not all composed of words? Do they not imprison within the artificial time of the tale that boundless torrent that is real time? My answer is that they are opposing systems for approximating reality. While the novel rebels and transgresses life, those other genres can only be its slave. For journalism or history, truth depends on the comparison between what is written and the reality that inspires it. The closer the one is to the other, the more truthful it is; the further away, the more deceitful. To say that The History of the French Revolution by Michelet or The Conquest of Peru by Prescott are “novelistic” is to scoff at them, to

insinuate that they lack seriousness. On the other hand, to document the historical errors in the depiction of the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace would be a waste of time: the truth of a novel does not depend on that. On what, then? On its own capacity for persuasion, on the communicative force of its fantasy, on the skill of its magic. Every good novel tells the truth and every bad novel lies. Because to “tell the truth” for a novel means making the reader live an illusion and “to lie” means being incapable of achieving this trick. The novel, then, is an amoral genre, or rather it has its own particular ethics in which truth and lies are exclusively aesthetic terms. Brecht’s argument that works of art should strive to achieve “critical objectivity” misses the mark: without “illusion” there is no novel. A recurrent theme in the history of fiction is the risk that is implied in taking novels literally, in believing that life is how novels describe it to be. The romances of chivalry befuddle the brain of Alonso Quijano and propel him along roads where he battles with windmills, and the tragedy of Emma Bovary would not have occurred if Flaubert’s character had not tried to be like the heroines of the romantic novels that she reads. Alonso Quijano and Emma suffer terrible damage. Do we condemn them for this? No, their stories move us and we admire them: their impossible attempt to live the fiction seems to us to personify an idealist attitude which honors the species. Because the human aspiration par excellence is to want to be different from what we are. This desire has been the cause of the best and worst moments in history. It has also led to the birth of fiction. When we read novels, we are not just ourselves but we are also those conjured-up characters into whose midst the novelist transports us. This transportation is a metamorphosis: the asphyxiating enclosure of our real life opens up…. This space between our real life and the desires and fantasies that demand that it be richer and more diverse is the terrain of fiction. In the heart of all these fictions, protest is ablaze. The person who imagined them did so because he could not live them and whoever reads them (and creates them through reading) finds in their phantoms the faces and adventures that he needed to add to his life. This is the truth that the lies of fiction express: the lies that

we are, the lies that console us and compensate for our nostalgia and frustrations…. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater but only rarely great novels. Fiction is an art of societies where faith is experiencing a certain crisis, where one needs to believe in something, where the unitary, trusted, and absolute vision has been replaced by a fractured vision and a growing uncertainty about the world in which one lives and the afterlife. In the guts of novels we find not just amorality, then, but also a certain skepticism. When religious culture comes into crisis, life seems to slide away from the structures, dogmas, and rules that bound them and reverts to chaos; this is the privileged moment for fiction. Its artificial orders give refuge and security and also allow the free display of those appetites and fears that real life provokes but cannot satisfy or exorcize. Fiction is a temporary substitute for life. The return to reality is always a brutal impoverishment: the realization that we are less than what we dream. This means that just as fictions temporarily placate human dissatisfaction, they also fuel it by stirring up desires and imagination. The Spanish inquisitors understood the danger. To live lives that one does not live is a source of anxiety, a disagreement with existence that can become a rebellion, an insubordinate attitude towards what is established. It is understandable, then, why regimes that aspire to control life totally mistrust novels and subject them to censorship. To go out of oneself, to be another, in however illusory a fashion, is a way of becoming less of a slave and experiencing the risks of freedom. 2 “Things are not how we see them but how we remember them,” wrote Valle Inclán…. For almost every writer, memory is the starting point for fantasy, the springboard that launches the imagination on its unpredictable flight towards fiction. Memories and inventions mix in creative literature in an often inextricable way for the author himself

who, although he might pretend the contrary, knows that the recovery of past time to which literature can lead is always a simulacrum, a fiction in which what is remembered dissolves into what is dreamed and vice versa. For that reason literature is the realm of ambiguity par excellence. Its truths are always subjective, half-truths, literary truths which are often flagrant inaccuracies or historical lies. Although the cinematic battle of Waterloo which appears in Les Misérables excites us, we know that this was a contest that Victor Hugo fought and won and not one that Napoleon lost. Or, to quote a classic medieval Valencian romance, the conquest of England by the Arabs described in Tirant lo Blanc is totally convincing and nobody would dare deny its verisimilitude with the petty argument that in real history an Arab army never crossed the Channel. The reconstruction of the past in literature is almost always false in terms of historical objectivity. Literary truth is one thing, historical truth another. But although it is full of lies—or rather, because of this fact—literature recounts the history that the history written by the historians would not know how, or be able, to write, because the deceptions, tricks, and exaggerations of narrative literature are used to express profound and unsettling truths which can only see the light of day in this oblique way. When Joanot Martorell tells us in Tirant lo Blanc that the French princess was so white that one could see wine going down her throat, he is telling us something technically impossible which, however, under the spell of reading, seems to us an undying truth, because in the false reality of the novel, unlike what happens in our own reality, excess is never the exception, but always the rule. And nothing is excessive if everything is. In Tirant, excess is to be found in the apocalyptic battles with their punctilious rituals and in the deeds of the hero who, alone, defeats multitudes and literally devastates half of Christendom and all of Islam. It is to be found in the comic rituals like those of the pious and libidinous character who kisses women on the mouth three times in honor of the Holy Trinity. And love, in its pages, like war, is always excessive and is likely to lead to cataclysmic results. Thus, when Tirant sees for the first time

in the darkness of a funeral chamber the insurgent breasts of Princess Carmesina, he falls into an almost cataleptic state and stays stretched out on a bed without eating, sleeping, or uttering a word for several days. When he finally recovers, it is as if he is learning to speak once again. His first stammered words are “I love.” These lies do not describe what Valencians were like at the end of the fifteenth century, but what they would have liked to have been and done; they do not describe the flesh and blood beings of this terrible time, but their phantoms. Their appetites, their fears, their desires, their resentments are given form. Successful fiction embodies the subjectivity of an epoch and for that reason, although compared to history novels lie, they communicate to us fleeting and evanescent truths which always escape scientific descriptions of reality. Only literature has the techniques and powers to distill this delicate elixir of life: the truth hidden in the heart of human lies. Well-defined boundaries between literature and history—between literary truths and historic truths—are a prerogative of open societies. In these societies, both coexist, independent and sovereign, although complementing each other in their utopian desire to include all of society. And perhaps the greatest demonstration that a society is open, in the meaning that Karl Popper gave to this term, is that fiction and history coexist, autonomous and different, without invading or usurping each other’s domains and functions. In closed societies, the reverse is true. And, for that reason, perhaps the best way to define a closed society is by saying that in it fiction and history are no longer different things and have started to become confused and to supplant each other, changing identities as in a masked ball. In a closed society, power not only takes upon itself the privilege of controlling the actions of men—what they do and what they say— but also aspires to govern their fantasy, their dreams and, of course, their memory. In a closed society, the past is, sooner or later, subject to manipulation with a view to justifying the present…. This is a practice that modern totalitarianism has perfected but not invented;

its origins are lost in the dawn of civilizations which, until relatively recently, were always vertical and despotic. To organize collective memory, to change history into an instrument of government for the purpose of legitimating the ruling powers and providing alibis for their misdeeds, is a temptation inherent in all forms of power. Totalitarian states can make this temptation a reality. In the past, innumerable civilizations behaved in this way. My ancient compatriots, the Incas, for example. They carried out this policy in a powerful and theatrical way. When the emperor died, there died with him not only his wives and concubines, but also his intellectuals, who were called amautas, wise men. Their wisdom was fundamentally applied to the trick of turning fiction into history. The new Inca assumed power with a new court of amautas whose mission was to reform official memory, correct the past—modernizing it one might say—in such a way that all the achievements, conquests, and buildings that were formally attributed to his forebear, were from that moment transferred to the curriculum vitae of the new emperor. His predecessors were gradually swallowed up by forgetfulness. The Incas knew how to make use of the past, transforming it into literature, so that it could help to immobilize the present, the supreme aspiration of every dictatorship. They banned individual truths, which are always contradictory, in favor of an official truth which was coherent and not subject to appeal. (The result is that the Inca empire is a society without history, at least without narrative history, because no one has been able to reconstruct in a reliable way this past that has been so systematically dressed and undressed like a striptease artist.) In a closed society, history is imbued with fiction, becomes fiction, because it is invented and reinvented in accordance with contemporary religious or political orthodoxy, or more crudely, according to the whims of the controllers of power. At the same time, a strict system of censorship is usually set up whereby literature must also fantasize within strict limits, so that its subjective truths do not contradict or cast a shadow over official history, but rather serve to disseminate and illustrate it. The

difference between historical truth and literary truth disappears and they become fused in a hybrid which bathes history in unreality and empties fiction of mystery, initiative, and rebelliousness toward the established order. To condemn history to lie, and literature to propagate the truths manufactured by the powers that be, does not hinder the scientific and technological development of a country or the establishment of certain basic forms of social justice. It has been proved that the Inca system—an extraordinary achievement for its time or for our own— ended hunger and managed to feed all its subjects. And the modern totalitarian states have given a great impetus to education, health, sport, and work, putting them within the reach of all, something that open societies, despite their prosperity, have not achieved, because the price of the freedom that they enjoy is often paid for by tremendous inequalities in wealth and—what is worse—in opportunities for its members. But when a state wrests from human beings the right to invent and believe whatever lies they please, appropriates this right and exercises it through historians and censors—like the Incas through the amautas—a great center of social life is abolished. And men and women suffer a loss that impoverishes their existence, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Because real life, true life, has never been, nor will ever be, sufficient to fulfill human desires. And because, without this vital dissatisfaction that the lies of fiction both incite and assuage, there is never authentic progress. The fantasy that we are endowed with is a demonic gift. It is continually opening up a gulf between what we are and what we would like to be, between what we have and what we desire. But the imagination has conceived of a clever and subtle palliative for this inevitable divorce between our limited reality and our boundless desires: fiction. Thanks to fiction we are more and we are others without ceasing to be the same. In it we can lose ourselves and multiply, living many more lives than the ones we have and could live if we were confined to the truth, without escaping from the prison of history.

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve. When it freely produces its alternative life, without any other constraint than that of the limitations of its own creator, literature extends human life, adding the dimension that fuels the life deep within us—that impalpable and fleeting but precious life that we only live through lies. This is a right that we should defend without shame. Because to play with lies, as the author and reader of fiction do, the lies that they themselves fabricate under the rule of their personal demons, is a way of affirming individual sovereignty and defending it when it is threatened; of preserving one’s own free space, a citadel outside the control of power and of the interference of others, where we are truly in charge of our destiny. Other freedoms are born from this freedom. These private refuges, the subjective truths of literature, bequeath to historical truth, which is complementary to them, a possible existence and a particular function: that of regaining an important part—but only a part—of our memory, that greatness and poverty that we share with others as gregarious beings. This historical truth is indispensable and irreplaceable for us to know what we were and perhaps what we will be as human collectivities. But what we are as individuals and what we wanted to be and could not really be and had therefore to be through fantasy and invention—our secret history—only literature can tell. This is why Balzac wrote that fiction was “the private history of nations.” By itself, literature is a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology: a blazing testimony of its insufficiencies, its inability to satisfy us. And, for that reason, it is a permanent corroder of all power structures that would like to see men satisfied and contented. The lies of literature, if they germinate in freedom, prove to us that this was never the case. And these lies

are also a permanent conspiracy to prevent this happening in the future.

The dog went to dancing school. The dog’s owner sniffed vials of Viennese air. One day the two heard the new Master of the Universe pass their door with a heavy step. After that, the man exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger. —Charles Simic

Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2002 PEN/Nabokov Award for a lifetime of achievement in letters.

ISN’T IT ROMANTIC? THE SHORTCOMINGS OF HISTORY | RICHARD HOLMES

The sensibility of early German Romanticism seems infinitely distant to us now. The very name Novalis, the pseudonym of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), sounds like an astronomical explosion on the edge of some remote galaxy. The symbol of the Blue Flower, which he created in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, was never successfully transplanted into the Englishspeaking world. As the epitome of German Romantic longing, it was naturalized most convincingly in a delphic entry in one of Coleridge’s Notebooks. If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke— Aye! and what then? Novalis’s whole life seems something like that dream. A member of the minor German aristocracy in Thuringia, he fell in love with a twelve-year-old girl (like Dante falling for Beatrice or Petrarch for Laura) who died shortly after their engagement, and having written a mass of philosophic and poetic fragments partly inspired by her (notably the “Hymns to the Night,” 1800), he himself died from consumption at the age of twenty-nine. The five volumes of his Letters and Works (edited by Richard Samuel and Paul Kluckhohn, 1988) have never been fully translated, and it is characteristic that

perhaps the most beautiful version of the “Hymns to the Night,” by the 1890s poet James Thomson, was only issued in a limited edition in 1995. His Fragments, some of them collected in Pollen, give a glimpse into a visionary world, strongly influenced by the extreme idealism of Fichte, and the poetic science or Naturphilosophie of Schelling. “Philosophy is really Homesickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.” “The Sciences must all be made Poetic.” “Man is metaphor.” “Poetry heals the wounds given by Reason.” “Space spills over into Time, like the Body into the Soul.” “Death is the Romantic principle in our lives.” “The World must be romanticized, only thus will we discover its original meaning.” When Thomas Carlyle first introduced Novalis to English readers in a famous essay of 1829, he excused him as a “Mystic,” and remarked that though his writings showed wonderful depth and originality, Novalis’s mind was “of a nature or habit so abstruse, and altogether different from anything we ourselves have notice or experience of, that to penetrate fairly into its essential character, much more to picture it forth in visual distinctness, would be an extremely difficult task….” The attempt to bring back Novalis—or rather young “Fritz” von Hardenberg—into a world of recognizable human feelings and “visual distinctness,” across that great gap of historical time and sensibility, is the subject of a truly remarkable novel by the British writer Penelope Fitzgerald. She puts as her epigraph another of Novalis’s aphorisms: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” And she steps back into that lost, transcendental, German world…. PASSION FLOWERS | PENELOPE FITZGERALD

The Freiherr thought it best for his eldest son to be educated in the German manner, at as many universities as possible: Jena for a year, Leipzig for a year, then a year at Wittenberg to study law, so that he would be able, if occasion arose, to protect whatever

property the family had left through the courts. He was also to begin on theology, and on the constitution of the Electorate of Saxony. Instead of these subjects, Fritz registered for history and philosophy. As a result he attended on his very first morning in Jena a lecture by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly. Kant believed in the external world. Even though it is only known to us through our senses and our own experience, still, it is there. This, Fichte was saying, was nothing but an old man’s weakness. We are all free to imagine what the world is like, and since we probably all imagine it differently, there is no reason at all to believe in the fixed reality of things. Before Fichte’s gooseberry eyes the students, who had the worst reputation for unruliness in Germany, cowered, transformed into frightened schoolboys. “Gentlemen! Withdraw into yourselves! Withdraw into your own mind!” Arrogant and drunken in their free time, they waited, submissive. Each unhooked the little penny inkwell on a spike from behind a lapel of his jacket. Some straightened up, some bowed themselves over, closing their eyes. A few trembled with eagerness. “Gentlemen, let your thought be the wall.” All were intent. “Have you thought the wall?” asked Fichte. “Now, then, gentlemen, let your thought be that that thought the wall.” Fichte was the son of a linen weaver, and in politics a Jacobin. His voice carried without effort. “The gentleman in the fourth seat from the left at the back, who has the air of being in discomfort …” A wretched youth rose to his feet. “Herr Professor, that is because the chairs in the lecture rooms of Jena are made for those with short legs.” “My appointment as Professor will not be confirmed until next May. You are permitted to ask one question.” “Why …” “Speak up!” “Why do we imagine that the wall is as we see it, and not as something other?” Fichte replied, “We create the world not out of our imagination, but out of our sense of duty. We need the world so that we may have

the greatest possible number of opportunities to do our duty. That is what justifies philosophy, and German philosophy in particular.” Late into the windy lamp-lit autumn night Jena’s students met to fichtisieren, to talk about Fichte and his system. They appeared to be driving themselves mad. At two o’clock in the morning Fritz suddenly stood still in the middle of the Unterer Markt, letting the others stagger on in ragged groups without him, and said aloud to the stars, “I see the fault in Fichte’s system. There is no place in it for love.” “You are outside his house,” said a passing student, sitting down on the cobblestones. “His house is 12a. 12a is where Professor Fichte lives.” “He is not a professor until May,” said Fritz. “We can serenade him until then. We can sing beneath his window, ‘We know what is wrong with your system. There is no place in it, no place in it for love.’”… Karoline Just saw, when she looked in her glass, the face of a woman of twenty-seven, uniformly smooth and pale, with noticeably dark eyebrows. She had been housekeeping for her Uncle Coelestin Just at his house in Tennstedt for four years. It had not been thought that her uncle would ever marry, but only six months ago he had done so. “My dear, you will be glad for me and for yourself,” he had said. “If at any time now the question arises of your making a home of your own, you will be able to be sure that you are not deserting me.” “The question has not arisen,” said Karoline. That Karoline had nowhere else to go, except back to Merseburg (where her father was pronotary of the Cathedral Seminary) did not strike Just as a difficulty. In either place she was truly welcome. Meanwhile he congratulated himself that his Rahel was not only that most eligible of German women, a professor’s widow, but also, at thirty-nine, most likely past the age of childbearing. The three of them could live peaceably together without unwelcome change or disturbance.

In Tennstedt they said—Now he has two women under one roof. Well, there’s a proverb … Who, then, is going to give the orders and spend the Kreisamtmann’s money?—About the expected lodger— expected because the servants were talking about him, and because an extra bedstead had been purchased—they knew that he was said to be twenty-two years of age…. Fritz arrived on foot, a day after he was expected, and at a time when Coelestin Just was at his office. “The Long-Expected is here,” said Rahel to Karoline. She herself remembered him very well from Wittenberg, but was distressed to see him so dishevelled. “You find the exercise healthy, Hardenberg?” she asked anxiously as she brought him into the house. Fritz looked at her vaguely, but with a radiant smile. “I don’t know, Frau Rahel. I hadn’t thought about it, but I will think about it.” Once in the parlor, he looked round him as though at a revelation. “It is beautiful, beautiful.” “It’s not beautiful at all,” said Rahel. “You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlor is not beautiful.” Fritz continued to gaze around him. “This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.” Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron. “You are beautiful, gracious Fräulein,” said Fritz. “We expected you yesterday,” said Rahel, dryly, “but you see, we are patient people.” When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, “I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.” “But I did mean it,” said Fritz. “When I came into your home, everything, the wine decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.” “They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but—”

Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul. Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedtime as a sedative, if his mind was too active—only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains…. Karoline was in charge (Rahel having divided up the responsibilities with watchful tact) of the household accounts, which included collecting Fritz’s weekly payment for board and lodging, also for stabling the Gaul, who had arrived from Weissenfels. On the very first Saturday, however, there was confusion. “Fräulein Karoline, my father’s cashier is due at Tennstedt to bring me my allowance from now until the end of November, but he has perhaps made a mistake and gone straight to Oberwiederstadt. I shall have to ask you I am afraid to wait for what is owing.” “I don’t think we can wait,” Karoline told him, “but I will make it up, for the time being, from the housekeeping.” She had changed color —which she scarcely ever did—at the idea of his embarrassment. “How will he manage?” she asked Rahel. Rahel said, “I dare say that in spite of attending three universities he has not been taught how to manage. He is the eldest son, and has not been protected from himself.” Although the cashier arrived the next day, Karoline felt as if she had made some kind of a stand, but in reality she had no defenses against Hardenberg. … He gave her his entire confidence, he laid the weight of it upon her. She was his friend—Karoline did not contradict this—and although he could live without love, he told her, he could not live without friendship. All was confessed, he talked perpetually. Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping

deterred him. As she chopped, Karoline learned that the world is tending day by day not towards destruction, but towards infinity. She was told where Fichte’s philosophy fell short, and that Hardenberg had a demon of a little brother of whom he was fond, and a monstrous uncle who disputed with his father, but then, so did they all. “Your mother also?” “No, no.” “I am sorry you are not happy at home,” said Karoline. Fritz was startled. “I have given you the wrong idea, there is love in our home, we would give our lives for each other.” His mother was young enough too, he added, to bear more children; it was his absolute duty to start earning as soon as possible. Then he returned to the subject of Fichte, fetching his lecture notes to show to Karoline—page after page of triadic patterns. “Yes, these are some of Fichte’s triads, but I will tell you what has suddenly struck me since I came to Tennstedt. You might look at them as representing the two of us. You are the thesis, tranquil, pale, finite, self-contained. I am the antithesis, uneasy, contradictory, passionate, reaching out beyond myself. Now we must question whether the synthesis will be harmony between us or whether it will lead to a new impossibility which we have never dreamed of.” Karoline replied that she did not dream very much. About Dr. Brown, whom he spoke of next, she did know something, but she had not realized that Brownismus was an improvement on all previous medical systems, or that Dr. Brown himself had lectured with a glass of whisky and a glass of laudanum in front of him, sipping from each in turn, to demonstrate the perfect balance. She did not even know what whisky was. Fritz also told her that women are children of nature, so that nature, in a sense, is their art. “Karoline, you must read Wilhelm Meister.” “Of course I have read Wilhelm Meister,” she said. Fritz was disconcerted for a few seconds, so that she had time to add, “I found Mignon very irritating.”

“She is only a child,” cried Fritz, “a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.” “She dies because Goethe couldn’t think what to do with her next. If he had made her marry Wilhelm Meister, that would have served both of them right!” “You are very severe in your judgments,” said Fritz. He sat down to write a few verses on the subject. Karoline, with the kitchen maid, was putting lengths of string through dried rings of apple. “But Hardenberg, you have written about my eyebrows!” Karoline Just has dark eyebrows And from the movements of her eyebrows I can gather good advice. “I shall give you a pet name,” he said. “You haven’t got one?” Most Carolines and Karolines (and it was the commonest name in North Germany) were called Line, Lili, Lollie, or Karolinchen. She shook her head. “No, I have never had one.” “I shall call you Justen,” he said…. “But there is something else which I have written and which I want to read to you while I still have time,” Fritz told Karoline. “It will not truly exist until you have heard it.” “Is it then poetry?” “It is poetry, but not verse.” “Then it is a story?” asked Karoline, who dreaded the reappearance of Fichte’s triads. “It is the beginning of a story.” “Well, we will wait until my Aunt Rahel comes back from the evening service.” “No, it is for you only,” said Fritz. “His father and mother were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall ticked with a monotonous beat, the wind whistled outside the rattling windowpane. From time to time the room grew brighter

when the moonlight shone in. The young man lay restlessly on his bed and remembered the stranger and his stories. ‘It was not the thought of the treasure which stirred up such unspeakable longings in me,’ he said to himself. ‘I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower, it lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there. But where could this stranger have come from? None of us had ever seen such a man before. And yet I don’t know how it was that I alone was truly caught and held by what he told us. Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention.’” “Have you read this to anyone else, Hardenberg?” “Never to anyone else. How could I? It is only just written, but what does that matter?” He added, “What is the meaning of the blue flower?” Karoline saw that he was not going to answer this himself. She said, “The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in his home.” The unlooked-for privilege of the reading was fading and Karoline, still outwardly as calm as she was pale, felt chilled with anxiety. She would rather cut off one of her hands than disappoint him, as he sat looking at her, trusting and intent, with his large lightbrown eyes, impatient for a sign of comprehension. What distressed her most was that after waiting a little, he showed not a hint of resentment or even surprise, but gently shut the notebook. “Liebe Justen, it doesn’t matter.” From The Blue Flower

LAST FRAGMENTS | NOVALIS 1. Elements of the Romantic. Objects must exist at once, like the sounds of the Aeolian harp, without cause—without betraying their instrument. 2. Physics is nothing but the theory of the imagination. 3. A novel must be poetry through and through. For poetry, like philosophy, must be a harmonious mood of our mind, where everything is made beautiful, where everything finds its proper aspect—everything finds an accompaniment and surroundings that suit it. Everything in a truly poetic book seems so natural— and yet so marvelous. We think it could not be otherwise, and as if we had only been asleep in the world before now— and now for the first time the right meaning for the world dawns on us. All memory and intimation seems to come from just this source—so too that present where we are caught up in illusion. Single hours where we find ourselves as it were in all the objects that we are contemplating, and we feel the infinite, incomprehensible simultaneous sensations of a plurality in agreement. 4. Fichte’s whole philosophy follows necessarily from his presupposition of logic—and his assumption of one generally valid thought. The theory of scientific knowledge is applied logic —nothing more. Philosophy begins with such pusillanimity, a trivial thought—that belongs to its being. It begins with a breath. 5. Death is the Romanticizing principle of our life. Death is minus, life is plus. Life is strengthened through death. 6. One urge seems to me to be generally widespread in our time— to hide the external world under artificial covers—to be ashamed of open nature and to endow it with a dark, ghostly force through making sensuous beings secret and hidden. This urge is

assuredly Romantic—but not favorable to childlike innocence and transparency. This is particularly noticeable in sexual relations. 7. Sound seems to be nothing but a broken movement, in the sense that color is broken light. Dance is most closely connected with music and like its other half. Sound is connected with movement as if of itself. Color is like a neutral condition of matter and light—a striving of matter to become light—and a contrary striving of light…. 8. Successive construction through speech, and resonance. The effect of speech rests on the memory—oratory teaches the rules of the sequence of thoughts to achieve a certain intention. Every speech first sets the thoughts in motion and is organized in such a way that one can place the fingers of thought in the easiest order on certain spots. 9. The art of creative writing is probably only—the arbitrary, active, productive use of our organs—and perhaps thinking itself might be not much else—and thinking and writing are therefore the same thing. For in thinking the senses apply the richness of their impressions to a new kind of impression—and what arises from that we call thoughts. 10. Musical relations seem to me to be actually the basic relations of nature. Crystallizations: acoustic figures of chemical oscillations…. Brilliant, noble, divinatory, miracle-working, clever, stupid etc. plants, animals, stones, elements, etc. Infinite individuality of these beings— their musical sense, and sense of individuality— their character—their inclinations etc.

They are past, historical beings. Nature is a magic city turned to stone.

“Tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul,” writes Nietzsche. I always felt that, too, Friedrich! The Amazon jungle with its brightly colored birds squawking, squawking, but its depths dark and hushed. The beautiful lost girl is giving suck to a little monkey. The lizards in attendance wear ecclesiastical robes and speak French to her: “La Reine des Reines,” they intone. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous. —Charles Simic

A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN Robert Olen Butler

H

ô Chí Minh came to me again last night, his hands covered with confectioners’ sugar. This was something of a surprise to me, the first time I saw him beside my bed, in the dim light from the open shade. My oldest daughter leaves my shades open, I think so that I will not forget that the sun has risen again in the morning. I am a very old man. She seems to expect that one morning I will simply forget to keep living. This is very foolish. I will one night rise up from my bed and slip into her room and open the shade there. Let her see the sun in the morning. She is sixty-four years old and she should worry for herself. I could never die from forgetting. But the light from the street was enough to let me recognize Hô when I woke, and he said to me, “Dao, my old friend, I have heard it is time to visit you.” Already on that first night there was a sweet smell about him, very strong in the dark, even before I could see his hands. I said nothing, but I stretched to the nightstand beside me and I turned on the light to see if he would go away. And he did not. He stood there beside the bed—I could even see him reflected in the window—and I knew it was real because he did not appear as he was when I’d known him but as he was when he’d died. This was Uncle Hô before me, the thin old man with the dewlap beard wearing the dark clothes of a peasant and the rubber sandals, just like in the news pictures I studied with such a strange feeling for all those

years. Strange because when I knew him, he was not yet Hô Chí Minh. It was 1917 and he was Nguyên Aí Quôc and we were both young men with clean-shaven faces, the best of friends, and we worked at the Carlton Hotel in London, where I was a dishwasher and he was a pastry cook under the great Escoffier. We were the best of friends and we saw snow for the first time together. This was before we began to work at the hotel. We shoveled snow and Hô would stop for a moment and blow his breath out before him and it would make him smile, to see what was inside him, as if it was the casting of bones to tell the future. On that first night when he came to me in my house in New Orleans, I finally saw what it was that smelled so sweet and I said to him, “Your hands are covered with sugar.” He looked at them with a kind of sadness. I have received that look myself in the past week. It is time now for me to see my family, and the friends I have made who are still alive. This is our custom from Vietnam. When you are very old, you put aside a week or two to receive the people of your life so that you can tell one another your feelings, or try at last to understand one another, or simply say good-bye. It is a formal leave-taking, and with good luck you can do this before you have your final illness. I have lived almost a century and perhaps I should have called them all to me sooner, but at last I felt a deep weariness and I said to my oldest daughter that it was time. They look at me with sadness, some of them. Usually the dullwitted ones, or the insincere ones. But Hô’s look was, of course, not dull-witted or insincere. He considered his hands and said, “The glaze. Maestro’s glaze.” There was the soft edge of yearning in his voice and I had the thought that perhaps he had come to me for some sort of help. I said to him, “I don’t remember. I only washed dishes.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I decided it was foolish for me to think he had come to ask me about the glaze. But Hô did not treat me as foolish. He looked at me and shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said. “I remember the temperature now. Two hundred and thirty degrees, when the sugar is between the large

thread stage and the small orb stage. The Maestro was very clear about that and I remember.” I knew from his eyes, however, that there was much more that still eluded him. His eyes did not seem to move at all from my face, but there was some little shifting of them, a restlessness that perhaps only I could see, since I was his close friend from the days when the world did not know him. I am nearly one hundred years old, but I can still read a man’s face. Perhaps better than I ever have. I sit in the overstuffed chair in my living room and I receive my visitors and I want these people, even the dull-witted and insincere ones—please excuse an old man’s ill temper for calling them that—I want them all to be good with one another. A Vietnamese family is extended as far as the bloodline strings us together, like so many paper lanterns around a village square. And we all give off light together. That’s the way it has always been in our culture. But these people who come to visit me have been in America for a long time and there are very strange things going on that I can see in their faces. None stranger than this morning. I was in my overstuffed chair and with me there were four of the many members of my family: my son-in-law Tháng, a former colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and one of the insincere ones, sitting on my Castro convertible couch; his youngest son, Loi, who had come in late, just a few minutes earlier, and had thrown himself down on the couch as well, youngest but a man old enough to have served as a lieutenant under his father as our country fell to the Communists more than a decade ago; my daughter Lâm, who is Tháng’s wife, hovering behind the both of them and refusing all invitations to sit down; and my oldest daughter, leaning against the door frame, having no doubt just returned from my room, where she had opened the shade that I had closed when I awoke. It was Tháng who gave me the sad look I have grown accustomed to, and I perhaps seemed to him at that moment a little weak, a little distant. I had stopped listening to the small talk of these people and I had let my eyes half close, though I could still see them clearly and I was very alert. Tháng has a steady face and the quick eyes of a man who is ready to come under fire, but I have always

read much more there, in spite of his efforts to show nothing. So after he thought I’d faded from the room, it was with slow eyes, not quick, that he moved to his son and began to speak of the killing. You should understand that Mr. Nguyên Bích Lê had been shot dead in our community here in New Orleans just last week. There are many of us Vietnamese living in New Orleans and one man, Mr. Lê, published a little newspaper for all of us. He had recently made the fatal error—though it should not be that in America—of writing that it was time to accept the reality of the communist government in Vietnam and begin to talk with them. We had to work now with those who controlled our country. He said that he remained a patriot to the Republic of Vietnam, and I believed him. If anyone had asked an old man’s opinion on this whole matter, I would not have been afraid to say that Mr. Lê was right. But he was shot dead last week. He was forty-five years old and he had a wife and three children and he was shot as he sat behind the wheel of his Chevrolet pickup truck. I find a detail like that especially moving, that this man was killed in his Chevrolet, which I understand is a strongly American thing. We knew this in Saigon. In Saigon it was very American to own a Chevrolet, just as it was French to own a Citroën. And Mr. Lê had taken one more step in his trusting embrace of this new culture. He had bought not only a Chevrolet but a Chevrolet pickup truck, which made him not only American but also a man of Louisiana, where there are many pickup trucks. He did not, however, also purchase a gun rack for the back window, another sign of this place. Perhaps it would have been well if he had, for it was through the back window that the bullet was fired. Someone had hidden in the bed of his truck and had killed him from behind in his Chevrolet and the reason for this act was made very clear in a phone call to the newspaper office by a nameless representative of the Vietnamese Party for the Annihilation of Communism and for the National Restoration. And Tháng, my son-in-law, said to his youngest son, Loi, “There is no murder weapon.” What I saw was a faint lift of his eyebrows as he said this, like he was inviting his son to listen beneath his words.

Then he said it again, more slowly, like it was code. “There is no weapon.” My grandson nodded his head once, a crisp little snap. Then my daughter Lâm said in a very loud voice, with her eyes on me, “That was a terrible thing, the death of Mr. Lê.” She nudged her husband and son, and both men turned their faces sharply to me and they looked at me squarely and said, also in very loud voices, “Yes, it was terrible.” I am not deaf, and I closed my eyes further, having seen enough and wanting them to think that their loud talk had not only failed to awaken me but had put me more completely to sleep. I did not like to deceive them, however, even though I have already spoken critically of these members of my family. I am a Hòa Hao Buddhist and I believe in harmony among all living things, especially the members of a Vietnamese family. After Hô had reassured me, on that first visit, about the temperature needed to heat Maestro Escoffier’s glaze, he said, “Dao, my old friend, do you still follow the path you chose in Paris?” He meant by this my religion. It was in Paris that I embraced the Buddha and disappointed Hô. We went to France in early 1918, with the war still on, and we lived in the poorest street of the poorest part of the Seventeenth Arrondissement. Number nine, Impasse Compoint, a blind alley with a few crumbling houses, all but ours rented out for storage. The cobblestones were littered with fallen roof tiles and Quôc and I each had a tiny single room with only an iron bedstead and a crate to sit on. I could see my friend Quôc in the light of the tallow candle and he was dressed in a dark suit and a bowler hat and he looked very foolish. I did not say so, but he knew it himself and he kept seating and reseating the hat and shaking his head very slowly, with a loudly silent anger. This was near the end of our time together, for I was visiting daily with a Buddhist monk and he was drawing me back to the religion of my father. I had run from my father, gone to sea, and that was where I had met Nguyên Aí Quôc and we had gone to London and to Paris and now my father was calling me back, through a Vietnamese monk I met in the Tuileries.

Quôc, on the other hand, was being called not from his past but from his future. He had rented the dark suit and bowler, and he would spend the following weeks in Versailles, walking up and down the mirrored corridors of the Palace trying to gain an audience with Woodrow Wilson. Quôc had eight requests for the Western world concerning Indochina. Simple things. Equal rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. The essential things that he knew Wilson would understand, based as they were on Wilson’s own Fourteen Points. And Quôc did not even intend to ask for independence. He wanted Vietnamese representatives in the French Parliament. That was all he would ask. But his bowler made him angry. He wrenched out of the puddle of candlelight, both his hands clutching the bowler, and I heard him muttering in the darkness and I felt that this was a bad sign already, even before he had set foot in Versailles. And as it turned out, he never saw Wilson, or Lloyd George either, or even Clemenceau. But somehow his frustration with his hat was what made me sad, even now, and I reached out from my bedside and said “Uncle Hô, it’s all right.” He was still beside me. This was not an awakening, as you might expect, this was not a dream ending with the bowler in Paris and I awaking to find that Hô was never there. He was still beside my bed, though he was just beyond my outstretched hand and he did not move to me. He smiled on one side of his mouth, a smile full of irony, as if he, too, was thinking about the night he’d tried on his rented clothes. He said, “Do you remember how I worked in Paris?” I thought about this and I did remember, with the words of his advertisement in the newspaper “La Vie Ouvrière”: “If you would like a lifelong memento of your family, have your photos retouched at Nguyên Aí Quôc’s.” This was his work in Paris; he retouched photos with a very delicate hand, the same fine hand that Monsieur Escoffier had admired in London. I said, “Yes, I remember.” Hô nodded gravely. “I painted the blush into the cheeks of Frenchmen.” I said, “A lovely portrait in a lovely frame for forty francs,” another phrase from his advertisement. “Forty-five,” Hô said.

I thought now of his question that I had not answered. I motioned to the far corner of the room where the prayer table stood. “I still follow the path.” He looked and said, “At least you became a Hòa Hao.” He could tell this from the simplicity of the table. There was only a red cloth upon it and four Chinese characters: Bao So’n Ky Hu’o’ng. This is the saying of the Hòa Haos. We follow the teachings of a monk who broke away from the fancy rituals of the other Buddhists. We do not need elaborate pagodas or rituals. The Hòa Hao believes that the maintenance of our spirits is very simple, and the mystery of joy is simple, too. The four characters mean “A good scent from a strange mountain.” I had always admired the sense of humor of my friend Quôc, so I said, “You never did stop painting the blush into the faces of Westerners.” Hô looked back to me but he did not smile. I was surprised at this but more surprised at my little joke seeming to remind him of his hands. He raised them and studied them and said, “After the heating, what was the surface for the glaze?” “My old friend,” I said, “you worry me now.” But Hô did not seem to hear. He turned away and crossed the room and I knew he was real because he did not vanish from my sight but opened the door and went out and closed the door behind him with a loud click. I rang for my daughter. She had given me a porcelain bell, and after allowing Hô enough time to go down the stairs and out the front door, if that was where he was headed, I rang the bell, and my daughter, who is a very light sleeper, soon appeared. “What is it, Father?” she asked with great patience in her voice. She is a good girl. She understands about Vietnamese families and she is a smart girl. “Please feel the doorknob,” I said. She did so without the slightest hesitation and this was a lovely gesture on her part, a thing that made me wish to rise up and embrace her, though I was very tired and did not move. “Yes?” she asked after touching the knob.

“Is it sticky?” She touched it again. “Ever so slightly,” she said. “Would you like me to clean it?” “In the morning,” I said. She smiled and crossed the room and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled of lavender and fresh bedclothes and there are so many who have gone on before me into the world of spirits and I yearn for them all, yearn to find them all together in a village square, my wife there smelling of lavender and our own sweat, like on a night in Saigon soon after the terrible fighting in 1968 when we finally opened the windows onto the night and there were sounds of bombs falling on the horizon and there was no breeze at all, just the heavy stillness of the time between the dry season and the wet, and Saigon smelled of tar and motorcycle exhaust and cordite but when I opened the window and turned to my wife, the room was full of a wonderful scent, a sweet smell that made her sit up, for she sensed it, too. This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers but instead reminded us that flowers were always ready to fall into dust, while this smell was as if a gemstone had begun to give off a scent, as if a mountain of emerald had found its own scent. I crossed the room to my wife and we were already old, we had already buried children and grandchildren that we prayed waited for us in that village square at the foot of the strange mountain, but when I came near the bed, she lifted her silk gown and threw it aside and I pressed close to her and our own sweat smelled sweet on that night. I want to be with her in that square and with the rest of those we’d buried, the tiny limbs and the sullen eyes and the gray faces of the puzzled children and the surprised adults and the weary old people who have gone before us, who know the secrets now. And the sweet smell of the glaze on Hô’s hands reminds me of others that I would want in the square, the people from the ship, too, the Vietnamese boy from a village near my own who died of a fever in the Indian Ocean and the natives in Dakar who were forced by colonial officials to swim out to our ship in shark-infested waters to secure the moorings and two were killed before our eyes without a French regret. Hô was very moved by this, and I want those men in our

square and I want the Frenchman, too, who called Hô “monsieur” for the first time. A man on the dock in Marseilles. Hô spoke of him twice more during our years together and I want that Frenchman there. And, of course, Hô. Was he in the village square even now, waiting? Heating his glaze fondant? My daughter was smoothing my covers around me and the smell of lavender on her was still strong. “He was in this room,” I said to her to explain the sticky doorknob. “Who was?” But I was very sleepy and I could say no more, though perhaps she would not have understood anyway, in spite of being the smart girl that she is. The next night I left my light on to watch for Hô’s arrival, but I dozed off and he had to wake me. He was sitting in a chair that he’d brought from across the room. He said to me, “Dao. Wake up, my old friend.” I must have awakened when he pulled the chair near to me, for I heard each of these words. “I am awake,” I said. “I was thinking of the poor men who had to swim out to our ship.” “They are already among those I have served,” Hô said. “Before I forgot.” And he raised his hands and they were still covered with sugar. I said, “Wasn’t it a marble slab?” I had a memory, strangely clear after these many years, as strange as my memory of Hô’s Paris business card. “A marble slab,” Hô repeated, puzzled. “That you poured the heated sugar on.” “Yes.” Hô’s sweet-smelling hands came forward but they did not quite touch me. I thought to reach out from beneath the covers and take them in my own hands, but Hô leaped up and paced about the room. “The marble slab, moderately oiled. Of course. I am to let the sugar half cool and then use the spatula to move it about in all directions, every bit of it, so that it doesn’t harden and form lumps.” I asked, “Have you seen my wife?” Hô had wandered to the far side of the room, but he turned and crossed back to me at this. “I’m sorry, my friend. I never knew her.”

I must have shown some disappointment in my face, for Hô sat down and brought his own face near mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There are many other people that I must find here.” “Are you very disappointed in me?” I asked. “For not having traveled the road with you?” “It’s very complicated,” Hô said softly. “You felt that you’d taken action. I am no longer in a position to question another soul’s choice.” “Are you at peace, where you are?” I asked this knowing of his worry over the recipe for the glaze, but I hoped that this was only a minor difficulty in the afterlife, like the natural anticipation of the good cook expecting guests when everything always turns out fine in the end. But Hô said, “I am not at peace.” “Is Monsieur Escoffier over there?” “I have not seen him. This has nothing to do with him, directly.” “What is it about?” “I don’t know.” “You won the country. You know that, don’t you?” Hô shrugged. “There are no countries here.” I should have remembered Hô’s shrug when I began to see things in the faces of my son-in-law and grandson this morning. But something quickened in me, a suspicion. I kept my eyes shut and laid my head to the side, as if I was fast asleep, encouraging them to talk more. My daughter said, “This is not the place to speak.” But the men did not regard her. “How?” Loi asked his father, referring to the missing murder weapon. “It’s best not to know too much,” Tháng said. Then there was a silence. For all the quickness I’d felt at the first suspicion, I was very slow now. In fact, I did think of Hô from that second night. Not his shrug. He had fallen silent for a long time and I had closed my eyes, for the light seemed very bright. I listened to his silence just as I listened to the silence of these two conspirators before me.

And then Hô said, “They were fools, but I can’t bring myself to grow angry anymore.” I opened my eyes in the bedroom and the light was off. Hô had turned it off, knowing that it was bothering me. “Who were fools?” I asked. “We had fought together to throw out the Japanese. I had very good friends among them. I smoked their lovely Salem cigarettes. They had been repressed by colonialists themselves. Did they not know their own history?” “Do you mean the Americans?” “There are a million souls here with me, the young men of our country, and they are all dressed in black suits and bowler hats. In the mirrors they are made ten million, a hundred million.” “I chose my path, my dear friend Quôc, so that there might be harmony.” And even with that yearning for harmony I could not overlook what my mind made of what my ears had heard this morning. Tháng was telling Loi that the murder weapon had been disposed of. Tháng and Loi both knew the killers, were in sympathy with them, perhaps were part of the killing. The father and son had been airborne rangers and I had several times heard them talk bitterly of the exile of our people. We were fools for trusting the Americans all along, they said. We should have taken matters forward and disposed of the infinitely corrupt Thiêu and done what needed to be done. Whenever they spoke like this in front of me, there was soon a quick exchange of sideways glances at me and then a turn and an apology. “We’re sorry, Grandfather. Old times often bring old anger. We are happy our family is living a new life.” I would wave my hand at this, glad to have the peace of the family restored. Glad to turn my face and smell the dogwood tree or even smell the coffee plant across the highway. These things had come to be the new smells of our family. But then a weakness often came upon me. The others would drift away, the men, and perhaps one of my daughters would come to me and stroke my head and not say a word and none of them ever would ask why I was weeping. I would smell the rich blood smells of the afterbirth and I would hold

our first son, still slippery in my arms, and there was the smell of dust from the square and the smell of the South China Sea just over the rise of the hill and there was the smell of the blood and of the inner flesh from my wife as my son’s own private sea flowed from this woman that I loved, flowed and carried him into the life that would disappear from him so soon. In the afterlife would he stand before me on unsteady child’s legs? Would I have to bend low to greet him or would he be a man now? My grandson said, after the silence had nearly carried me into real sleep, troubled sleep, my grandson Loi said to his father, “I would be a coward not to know.” Tháng laughed and said, “You have proved yourself no coward.” And I wished then to sleep, I wished to fall asleep and let go of life somewhere in my dreams and seek my village square. I have lived too long, I thought. My daughter was saying, “Are you both mad?” And then she changed her voice, making the words very precise. “Let Grandfather sleep.” So when Hô came tonight for the third time, I wanted to ask his advice. His hands were still covered with sugar and his mind was, as it had been for the past two nights, very much distracted. “There’s something still wrong with the glaze,” he said to me in the dark, and I pulled back the covers and swung my legs around to get up. He did not try to stop me, but he did draw back quietly into the shadows. “I want to pace the room with you,” I said. “As we did in Paris, those tiny rooms of ours. We would talk about Marx and about Buddha and I must pace with you now.” “Very well,” he said. “Perhaps it will help me remember.” I slipped on my sandals and I stood up and Hô’s shadow moved past me, through the spill of streetlight and into the dark near the door. I followed him, smelling the sugar on his hands, first before me and then moving past me as I went on into the darkness he’d just left. I stopped as I turned and I could see Hô outlined before the window and I said, “I believe my son-in-law and grandson are involved in the killing of a man. A political killing.” Hô stayed where he was, a dark shape against the light, and he said nothing and I could not smell his hands from across the room

and I smelled only the sourness of Loi as he laid his head on my shoulder. He was a baby and my daughter Lâm retreated to our balcony window after handing him to me and the boy turned his head and I turned mine to him and I could smell his mother’s milk, sour on his breath, he had a sour smell and there was incense burning in the room, jasmine, the smoke of souls, and the boy sighed on my shoulder, and I turned my face away from the smell of him. Tháng was across the room and his eyes were quick to find his wife and he was waiting for her to take the child from me. “You have never done the political thing,” Hô said. “Is this true?” “Of course.” I asked, “Are there politics where you are now, my friend?” I did not see him moving toward me, but the smell of the sugar on his hands grew stronger, very strong, and I felt Hô Chí Minh very close to me, though I could not see him. He was very close and the smell was strong and sweet and it was filling my lungs as if from the inside, as if Hô was passing through my very body, and I heard the door open behind me and then close softly shut. I moved across the room to the bed. I turned to sit down but I was facing the window, the scattering of a streetlamp on the window like a nova in some far part of the universe. I stepped to the window and touched the reflected light there, wondering if there was a great smell when a star explodes, a great burning smell of gas and dust. Then I closed the shade and slipped into bed, quite gracefully, I felt, I was quite wonderfully graceful, and I lie here now waiting for sleep. Hô is right, of course. I will never say a word about my grandson. And perhaps I will be as restless as Hô when I join him. But that will be all right. He and I will be together again and perhaps we can help each other. I know now what it is that he has forgotten. He has used confectioners’ sugar for his glaze fondant and he should be using granulated sugar. I was only a washer of dishes but I did listen carefully when Monsieur Escoffier spoke. I wanted to understand everything. His kitchen was full of such smells that you knew you had to understand everything or you would be incomplete forever.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION Ismail Kadare Translated by Jusuf Vrioni and Barbara Bray

H

e’d been working in Interpretation for nearly three weeks. For the first fortnight he’d been attached to some of the older hands, to be initiated into the secrets of the department. Then one day his boss came and said, “You’ve learned enough now. From tomorrow on you’ll be given a file of your own.” “So soon?” said Mark-Alem. “Am I really up to working all on my own?” The boss smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s how everyone feels at first. But the room supervisor’s over there—if you have any doubts about anything you can consult him.” Mark-Alem had been working on his file for four days, and his brain had never felt so confused. His work in Selection had been harassing enough, but compared with this it was child’s play. He’d never have dreamed the work in Interpretation could be so diabolical. He’d been given a file that was supposed to be an easy one—it was marked Law and Order: Corruption. But he sometimes thought: My God, if I lose my head with a file like this, what shall I do when I get one that deals with conspiracies against the State?

The file was stuffed with dreams. Mark-Alem had read about sixty of them, and had set aside a score or so that at first sight he thought he might be able to decipher. But when he went back to them, instead of looking the easiest, they looked the most difficult. So then he selected a few others, but after an hour or two they also had come to seem utterly confused and impenetrable. It’s quite impossible! he kept telling himself. I shall go mad! Four whole days and I haven’t managed to unscramble one dream. Every time some elements of a dream began to make sense he would be struck by a doubt, and what had seemed intelligible a moment before became inexplicable again. The whole thing is pure folly! he thought, burying his face in his hands. He was obsessed with the fear of making a mistake. Sometimes he was convinced it was impossible to do anything else, and that if anyone got anything right it was purely by chance. Sometimes he would get frantic with worry. He still hadn’t submitted one decoded dream to his superiors. They probably thought him either incompetent or else excessively timid. How did the others manage? He could see them filling whole pages with their comments. How could they look so calm? As a matter of fact, every decoder was allowed to leave aside some dreams that he couldn’t unravel himself, and these were sent to the decoders par excellence, the real masters of Interpretation; but of course not everything could be sent to them. Mark-Alem rubbed at his temples to disperse the blood that seemed to have accumulated there. His head was a flurry of symbols: Hermes’s staff, smoke, the limping bride, snow … They all whirled around in a wild saraband, displacing every perception of the ordinary world. To hell with it, thought Mark-Alem, taking up pen and paper, I’ll give this dream the first explanation that comes into my head, and hope for the best! It had been dreamed by a pupil at a religious school in the capital. In it two men had found a fallen rainbow. With some difficulty they raised it up and dusted it off, and one of the men repainted it; but the

rainbow absolutely refused to come to life again. So the men dropped it and ran away. Hmmm, thought Mark-Alem, fiddling with his pen. His resolution had already evaporated. But he made himself go on. Without thinking, or rather, rapidly abandoning his first explanation of the dream, he wrote underneath it: “Warning of …” Warning of … “God, what can this nightmare possibly mean?” he almost cried out. “It’s enough to drive you crazy!” He crossed out what he’d written, and tossed the sheet of paper angrily onto the heap with the other uninterpretable dreams. No, he’d sooner be sacked straightaway than have to be bothered with such drivel! He propped his head in his hands and sat with his eyes half shut. After a while he heard the reedy voice of the room supervisor: “What’s the matter, Mark-Alem? Have you got a headache?” “Yes, a slight one.” “Never mind—it happens to everyone at first. Do you need anything?” “No, thanks. But I’ll ask you to explain some things to me in a little while.” “Oh? Good. I’ve been waiting for you to do that for the past few days.” “I didn’t want to bother you for nothing.” “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s what I’m here for.” “I’ll have something for you in an hour or so,” said Mark-Alem. “Only …” “Only what?” “Only I’m not quite sure … My explanations may be quite wrong, or may not make any sense at all.” The supervisor smiled. “I’ll be waiting for you,” he said, and moved away. Now I’ve got no escape, thought Mark-Alem…. And he looked for the piece of paper recording a dream in which a group of men in black crossed a ditch and disappeared into a snow-covered plain. Suddenly the meaning of the dream seemed quite clear to him: A group of officials who’d committed some fraud against the State had

overcome the obstacles ranged against them and reached the safety of the white plain; this meant the fall of the government. Mark-Alem swiftly wrote down this explanation, but hadn’t completed the last few words before he thought to himself: But this is practically tantamount to a plot against the State! He reread his interpretation and was confirmed in the thought that the dream really did relate to some kind of conspiracy. But the file he’d been given was the one concerning law and order and corruption! He was in such despair the pen fell from his hand. For once he thought he’d managed to produce something, and it turned out to be no good again! But wait a minute, he reflected. Perhaps it isn’t quite as bad as that. After all, there’s not all that much difference between corruption and a conspiracy against the State, since officials are involved in both cases. Then again—how stupid of him not to have thought of it before!— the classification of the files wasn’t as rigid as all that, and there was no reason why the file on law and order shouldn’t also contain dreams concerning important affairs of State. And hadn’t the staff often been told it was considered commendable for them to search for signs of special significance in places where at first sight there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary? Yes, he could remember being told that quite plainly. It was even said that many MasterDreams had come from the most undistinguished of files. Mark-Alem felt much better now. Before the impulse had time to weaken, he took up four dreams that he’d read several times already and added his own explanation of each of them. He was feeling quite pleased with himself, and getting ready to deal with a fifth dream, when he looked at the first dream again, and reread the explanation he’d appended to it. He was immediately overcome with doubt. Could I be mistaken? Could the dream have another explanation? he thought. A moment later he was quite sure he’d got it wrong. Beads of cold perspiration broke out on his forehead; he sat staring at the lines he’d written with so much alacrity, which now seemed alien and hostile. What ought he to do? Then he said to himself, Dash it all, who’s going to attach any importance to this one dream out of all the tens of thousands that are

dealt with here? And he was just about to leave it as it was when at the last moment his hand dropped away again. What if someone discovered his mistake? Especially as the dream involved State officials! Government circles might get to know of it somehow, and the worst of it was everybody might think the accusation applied to themselves or their associates. A search would be made for the person who’d supplied the explanation of the dream, and when they found out they’d say: “Well, well, a fellow called Mark-Alem, a new boy who’s only just started in the Tabir Sarrail, and as soon as he starts decoding his first dream he tries to sling mud at the senior servants of the State. Better keep an eye on that snake in the grass!” Mark-Alem hastily snatched the page up as if to prevent anyone from reading what he’d written. He absolutely must repair his blunder before it was too late. But how? It occurred to him that he might simply do away with the dream altogether, but then he remembered that the cover of each file indicated the number of dreams it contained. To abstract one of them would be enough to get you sent straight to prison as a common thief. Something else, something else—he must think of something else! If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, if he hadn’t dashed the words off so madly, he could now have given the dream a completely different explanation. It was some diabolical impulse that had made him hurl himself upon his own destruction. It was all up with him now. But not so fast, he thought, still gazing at his own writing; perhaps all is not lost yet. His eyes flew over the words again, and concluded there was still a possible way out. When he’d reread the page for the third time, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. An unexpected sense of relief spread from his temples to his throat and lungs. After all, it was quite usual to make corrections. He would do his in such a way that they wouldn’t call attention to themselves; they’d just look like improvements in accuracy, refinements of style. It would be enough if he merely altered one word. For the umpteenth time he reread the phrase “a group of officials who’d committed some fraud against the State.” Finally, with a shaky hand, he altered it to read “a group of officials who’d prevented some fraud against the State.” He checked it a couple of times. It seemed all right. You could scarcely see the

alteration. And even if anyone did notice it they might put it down as the correction of a slip. He breathed a sigh of relief. The business was settled at last…. Mark-Alem, who’d committed a fraud against the State … He looked about him in terror. What if someone had noticed what he was doing? Nonsense, he told himself. The clerk who was nearest to him, and worked at the same table, was too far away to read the name of his file, let alone what he’d written. A good thing my writing’s so spidery, he thought. Now, after all this agitation, he could take a bit of a rest. What a beastly job! He cast a covert glance around the rest of the room. The clerks were working peacefully away, crouching over their files. You couldn’t even hear the sound of their pens. Every so often one of them would leave his desk and slip away as quietly as possible. No doubt he was going down to the Archives to consult relevant interpretations made in the past—ages ago, some of them, and by decoders eminent in their art. God! he thought, looking at those dozens of heads bent over their files. In those files was all the sleep in the world, an ocean of terror on the vast surface of which they tried to find some tiny signs or signals. Hapless wretches that we are! thought Mark-Alem. From The Palace of Dreams

“Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud,” says my grandfather. “We were in love with the same pair of black shoes in the window of the same shoe store. The store, unfortunately, was always closed. There’d be a sign: DEATH IN THE FAMILY OR BACK AFTER LUNCH, but no matter how long I waited, no one would come to open.

“Once I caught Dr. Freud there shamelessly admiring the shoes. We glared at each other before going our separate ways, never to meet again.”

Ghost stories written as algebraic equations. Little Emily at the blackboard is very frightened. The X’s look like a graveyard at night. The teacher wants her to poke among them with a piece of chalk. All the children hold their breath. The white chalk squeaks once among the plus and minus signs, and then it’s quiet again. —Charles Simic

SHADOWLANDS Milan Kundera

1

In one of his books, my friend Josef Skvorecky tells this true story: An engineer from Prague is invited to a professional conference in London. So he goes, takes part in the proceedings, and returns to Prague. Some hours after his return, sitting in his office, he picks up Rude Pravo—the official daily paper of the Party—and reads: A Czech engineer, attending a conference in London, has made a slanderous statement about his socialist homeland to the Western press and has decided to stay in the West. Illegal emigration combined with a statement of that kind is no trifle. It would be worth twenty years in prison. Our engineer can’t believe his eyes. But there’s no doubt about it, the article refers to him. His secretary, coming into his office, is shocked to see him: My God, she says, you’re back! I don’t understand—did you see what they wrote about you? The engineer sees fear in his secretary’s eyes. What can he do? He rushes to the Rude Pravo office. He finds the editor responsible for the story. The editor apologizes; yes, it really is an awkward business, but he, the editor, has nothing to do with it, he got the text of the article direct from the Ministry of the Interior. So the engineer goes off to the Ministry. There they say yes, of course, it’s all a mistake, but they, the Ministry, have nothing to do

with it, they got the report on the engineer from the intelligence people at the London embassy. The engineer asks for a retraction. No, he’s told, they never retract, but nothing can happen to him, he has nothing to worry about. But the engineer does worry. He realizes that all of a sudden he’s being closely watched, that his telephone is tapped, and that he’s being followed in the street. He sleeps poorly and has nightmares until, unable to bear the pressure any longer, he takes a lot of real risks to leave the country illegally. And so he actually becomes an émigré. 2

The story I’ve just told is one that we would immediately call Kafkan. This term, drawn from an artist’s work, determined solely by a novelist’s images, stands as the only common denominator in situations (literary or real) that no other word allows us to grasp and to which neither political nor social nor psychological theory gives us any key. But what is the Kafkan? Let’s try to describe some of its aspects: One: The engineer is confronted by a power that has the character of a boundless labyrinth. He can never get to the end of its interminable corridors and will never succeed in finding out who issued the fateful verdict. He is therefore in the same situation as Joseph K. before the Court, or the Land Surveyor K. before the Castle. All three are in a world that is nothing but a single, huge labyrinthine institution they cannot escape and cannot understand. Novelists before Kafka often exposed institutions as arenas where conflicts between different personal and public interests were played out. In Kafka the institution is a mechanism that obeys its own laws; no one knows now who programmed those laws or when; they have nothing to do with human concerns and are thus unintelligible. Two:

In Chapter Five of The Castle, the village Mayor explains in detail to K. the long history of his file. Briefly: Years earlier, a proposal to engage a land surveyor came down to the village from the Castle. The Mayor wrote a negative response (there was no need for any land surveyor), but his reply went to the wrong office, and so after an intricate series of bureaucratic misunderstandings, stretching over many years, the job offer was inadvertently sent to K., at the very moment when all the offices involved were in the process of canceling the old obsolete proposal. After a long journey, K. thus arrived in the village by mistake. Still more: Given that for him there is no possible world other than the Castle and its village, his entire existence is a mistake. In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man’s physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. Indeed, both the Land Surveyor K. and the Prague engineer are but the shadows of their file cards; and they are even much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right to exist as shadows. But if man’s life is only a shadow and true reality lies elsewhere, in the inaccessible, in the inhuman or the suprahuman, then we suddenly enter the domain of theology. Indeed, Kafka’s first commentators explained his novels as religious parables. Such an interpretation seems to me wrong (because it sees allegory where Kafka grasped concrete situations of human life) but also revealing: wherever power deifies itself, it automatically produces its own theology; wherever it behaves like God, it awakens religious feelings toward itself; such a world can be described in theological terms. Kafka did not write religious allegories, but the Kafkan (both in reality and in fiction) is inseparable from its theological (or rather: pseudotheological) dimension. Three: Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he consents to his punishment of his own free will. It’s the wellknown situation where the offense seeks the punishment.

In Kafka the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense. The Prague engineer is punished by intensive police surveillance. This punishment demands the crime that was not committed, and the engineer accused of emigrating ends up emigrating in fact. The punishment has finally found the offense. Not knowing what the charges against him are, K. decides, in Chapter Seven of The Trial, to examine his whole life, his entire past “down to the smallest details.” The “autoculpabilization” machine goes into motion. The accused seeks his offense. One day, Amalia receives an obscene letter from a Castle official. Outraged, she tears it up. The Castle doesn’t even need to criticize Amalia’s rash behavior. Fear (the same fear our engineer saw in his secretary’s eyes) acts all by itself. With no order, no perceptible sign from the Castle, everyone avoids Amalia’s family like the plague. Amalia’s father tries to defend his family. But there is a problem: Not only is the source of the verdict impossible to find, but the verdict itself does not exist! To appeal, to request a pardon, you have to be convicted first! The father begs the Castle to proclaim the crime. So it’s not enough to say that the punishment seeks the offense. In this pseudotheological world, the punished beg for recognition of their guilt! Four: The tale of the Prague engineer is in the nature of a funny story, a joke: it provokes laughter. Two gentlemen, perfectly ordinary fellows (not “inspectors,” as in the French translation), surprise Joseph K. in bed one morning, tell him he is under arrest, and eat up his breakfast. K. is a welldisciplined civil servant: instead of throwing the men out of his flat, he stands in his nightshirt and gives a lengthy self-defense. When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, everyone laughed, including the author. Philip Roth’s imagined film version of The Castle: Groucho Marx plays the Land Surveyor K., with Chico and Harpo as the two

assistants. Yes, Roth is quite right: The comic is inseparable from the very essence of the Kafkan. But it’s small comfort to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn’t find it funny. Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you’re outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of a joke, into the horror of the comic. In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic (the tragicomic) as in Shakespeare; it’s not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for: the consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer loses his homeland, and everyone laughs.

The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. “I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one’s heart’s content.” —Charles Simic

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE Plato Translated by B. Jowett

A

nd now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. I see. And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows? Yes, he said. And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? Very true. And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? No question, he replied. To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain. And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? Far truer. And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True, he said. And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. Not all in a moment, he said. He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day. Certainly. Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. Certainly. He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold? Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him. And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them? Certainly, he would. And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

“Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,” and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? To be sure, he said. And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending…. From The Republic

LESSONS IN PARSING Rashid Hussein Translated by Abdallah al-Udhari

THE FIRST LESSON He was sixty … Still teaching. Once he came into the class and said: “Parse: ‘The teacher came.’” We thought he was joking So we laughed and answered: “‘came’ :verb ‘teacher’ :…?” Suddenly we understood … in a flash We fell silent, And heard him muttering: “‘came’ : verb ‘teacher’ : He didn’t come! The police brought him … but he will teach.” THE SECOND LESSON We grew up together until He was nearly seventy but

Still teaching. For example the teacher said: “‘My master dreams of the revolution but won’t fight’ A sentence complete in itself—a thousand times. Parse that and you’ll become a fighter!” We were silent. We said nothing but Our silence in itself was fighting Our silence was … but: In the class there was a boy who nourished the earth with his hands Its olives ran over his mouth. His name was Adnan … a peasant with no land but He was not silent … no, he was every inch a fighter. That day he disregarded the rules of grammar And went on teaching: “‘My master’ : is not a subject ‘dreams’ : is not a verb ‘of ’ : governed by a preposition ‘revolution’ : is not governed by a preposition ‘but won’t fight’ : that is correct.” THE LESSON BEFORE THE LAST A day later the teacher came into the class As cheerful and as lively as the zest of an orange. Although seventy, still a child … he greeted us and said: “‘They put Adnan in prison.’ Parse that, girls, Parse that, boys.” We were thrilled … we wept … and we cried out: “‘Adnan’: subject ‘prison’: object.” We set grammar and its rules on fire

And became fighters.

THE DEAD TRUE WAR STORIES | TIM O’BRIEN

The dead guy’s name was Curt Lemon. What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle. Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn’t understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn’t know. A nature hike, they thought, not even a war, so they went off into the shade of some giant trees—quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all—and they were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they’d invented. The game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did stupid things, and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of those huge trees. Whoever chickened out was a yellow mother. And if nobody chickened out, the grenade would make a light popping sound and they’d be covered with smoke and they’d laugh and dance around and then do it again. It’s all exactly true. It happened, to me, nearly twenty years ago, and I still remember that trail junction and those giant trees and a soft dripping sound somewhere beyond the trees. I remember the smell of moss. Up in the canopy there were tiny white blossoms, but no sunlight at all, and I remember the shadows spreading out under the trees where Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley were playing catch with smoke grenades. Mitchell Sanders sat flipping his yo-yo. Norman Bowker and Kiowa

and Dave Jensen were dozing, or half dozing, and all around us were those ragged green mountains. Except for the laughter things were quiet. At one point, I remember, Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something, as if he already knew, then after a while he rolled up his yo-yo and moved away. It’s hard to tell you what happened next. They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must’ve been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms. In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.

I heard this one, for example, from Mitchell Sanders. It was near dusk and we were sitting at my foxhole along a wide muddy river north of Quang Ngai. I remember how peaceful the twilight was. A deep pinkish red spilled out on the river, which moved without sound, and in the morning we would cross the river and march west into the mountains. The occasion was right for a good story. “God’s truth,” Mitchell Sanders said. “A six-man patrol goes up into the mountains on a basic listening-post operation. The idea’s to spend a week up there, just lie low and listen for enemy movement. They’ve got a radio along, so if they hear anything suspicious— anything—they’re supposed to call in artillery or gunships, whatever it takes. Otherwise they keep strict field discipline. Absolute silence. They just listen.” Sanders glanced at me to make sure I had the scenario. He was playing with his yo-yo, dancing it with short, tight little strokes of the wrist. His face was blank in the dusk. “We’re talking regulation, by-the-book lp. These six guys, they don’t say boo for a solid week. They don’t got tongues. All ears.” “Right,” I said. “Understand me?” “Invisible.” Sanders nodded. “Affirm,” he said. “Invisible. So what happens is, these guys get themselves deep in the bush, all camouflaged up, and they lie down and wait and that’s all they do, nothing else, they lie there for seven straight days and just listen. And man, I’ll tell you—it’s spooky. This is mountains. You don’t know spooky till you been there. Jungle, sort of, except it’s way up in the clouds and there’s always this fog—like rain, except it’s not raining—everything’s all wet and swirly and tangled up and you can’t see jack, you can’t find your own pecker to piss with. Like you don’t even have a body. Serious spooky. You just go with the vapors—the fog sort of takes you in … And the sounds, man. The sounds carry forever. You hear stuff nobody should ever hear.”

Sanders was quiet for a second, just working the yo-yo, then he smiled at me. “So after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft, kind of wackedout music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks. Faraway, sort of, but right up close, too. They try to ignore it. But it’s a listening post, right? So they listen. And every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook concert. All kinds of chimes and xylophones. I mean, this is wilderness—no way, it can’t be real—but there it is, like the mountains are tuned in to Radio fucking Hanoi. Naturally they get nervous. One guy sticks Juicy Fruit in his ears. Another guy almost flips. Thing is, though, they can’t report music. They can’t get on the horn and call back to base and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need some firepower, we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band.’ They can’t do that. It wouldn’t go down. So they lie there in the fog and keep their mouths shut. And what makes it extra bad, see, is the poor dudes can’t horse around like normal. Can’t joke it away. Can’t even talk to each other except maybe in whispers, all hush-hush, and that just revs up the willies. All they do is listen.” Again there was some silence as Mitchell Sanders looked out on the river. The dark was coming on hard now, and off to the west I could see the mountains rising in silhouette, all the mysteries and unknowns. “This next part,” Sanders said quietly, “you won’t believe.” “Probably not,” I said. “You won’t. And you know why?” He gave me a long, tired smile. “Because it happened. Because every word is absolutely dead-on true.” Sanders made a sound in his throat, like a sigh, as if to say he didn’t care if I believed him or not. But he did care. He wanted me to feel the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling. He seemed sad, in a way. “These six guys,” he said, “they’re pretty fried out by now, and one night they start hearing voices. Like at a cocktail party. That’s what it sounds like, this big swank gook cocktail party somewhere

out there in the fog. Music and chitchat and stuff. It’s crazy, I know, but they hear the champagne corks. They hear the actual martini glasses. Real hoity-toity, all very civilized, except this isn’t civilization. This is Nam. “Anyway, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing—you won’t believe this—they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of weird chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. And the whole time, in the background, there’s still that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it’s the mountains. Follow me? The rock—it’s talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam—it truly talks. “The guys can’t cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report enemy movement—a whole army, they say—and they order up the firepower. They get arty and gunships. They call in air strikes. And I’ll tell you, they fuckin’ crash that cocktail party. All night long, they just smoke those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away. Scorch time. They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and f-4s, they use Willie Peter and he and incendiaries. It’s all fire. They make those mountains burn. “Around dawn things finally get quiet. Like you never even heard quiet before. One of those real thick, real misty days—just clouds and fog, they’re off in this special zone—and the mountains are absolutely dead-flat silent. Like Brigadoon—pure vapor, you know? Everything’s all sucked up inside the fog. Not a single sound, except they still hear it. “So they pack up and start humping. They head down the mountain, back to base camp, and when they get there they don’t say diddly. They don’t talk. Not a word, like they’re deaf and dumb. Later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell

happened out there. What’d they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man’s ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin’ story is. “But the guys don’t say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can’t ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you’ll never know—wrong frequency—you don’t even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don’t ever tell.” You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. Not when Mitchell Sanders stood up and moved off into the dark. It all happened. Even now, at this instant, I remember that yo-yo. In a way, I suppose, you had to be there, you had to hear it, but I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth. And I remember sitting at my foxhole that night, watching the shadows of Quang Ngai, thinking about the coming day and how we would cross the river and march west into the mountains, all the ways I might die, all the things I did not understand. Late in the night Mitchell Sanders touched my shoulder. “Just came to me,” he whispered. “The moral, I mean. Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin’. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody’s sweet little virgin girlfriend. What they need is to go out on lp. The vapors, man. Trees and rocks—you got to listen to your enemy.” And then again, in the morning, Sanders came up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out, checking weapons, going through all the little rituals that preceded a day’s march. Already the lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west.

“I got a confession to make,” Sanders said. “Last night, man, I had to make up a few things.” “I know that.” “The glee club. There wasn’t any glee club.” “Right.” “No opera.” “Forget it, I understand.” “Yeah, but listen, it’s still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won’t believe.” Sanders pulled on his rucksack, closed his eyes for a moment, then almost smiled at me. I knew what was coming. “All right,” I said, “what’s the moral?” “Forget it.” “No, go ahead.” For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day. “Hear that quiet, man?” he said. “That quiet—just listen. There’s your moral.” In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.” True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe…. How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil— everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all

that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not. Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point? This one wakes me up. In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the boobytrapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin

and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts. You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer. For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened. Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow re-create the fatal

whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the final truth…. From “How to Tell a True War Story” ‘THIS IS TRUE’ You talk generally in your stories about death, but your images are also specifically violent. Some of the most memorable passages in The Things They Carried involve really horrific violence: Curt Lemon, scattered in pieces up in the tree; the face of the Viet Cong warrior who has a star-shaped hole where his eye should be. How do you avoid turning those images, that material, into a sort of pornography? Do you worry about that? DANIEL BOURNE:

No. I think that violence itself is pornographic in a way, and this pornography has to be described in raw, physical, truthful terms. If one’s subject matter, as mine often is, has to do with the taking of life, it would be an act of obscenity and pornography even more to try to describe it in anything but the most horrific, detailed, and graphic terms. For me, one of the objects among many in writing about violence has to do with reaffirming the truth of the clichés that “war is hell,” or “death is horrible,” something we all so often tend to forget. Body counts, casualty rates, our politicians have made it all so abstract. And this isn’t to say that I’m trying to prevent war exactly, though I’d love to do that, but I know I never will, I don’t think any writer will, at least not any one writer. But my writing is a reminder that war is hell for a particular reason. That star-shaped hole where an eye ought to have been is something pretty ugly, and the image shows that ugliness ought to be, by and large, in our lives avoided. And I also think that this detailed portrayal of the horrors of violence is a reaction to the myths I grew up with as a kid: John Wayne movies and Audie Murphy movies and the little G. I. Joe comic books I used to read where death was inconsequential because it didn’t seem very horrible at all. No blood, they’d all just TIM O’BRIEN:

“drop” dead. War and violence didn’t seem all that horrible as it was portrayed back then. My object is not to wallow in blood and gore. The object is to display it in terms so that you want to stay away from it if possible. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” you describe Rat Kiley, an inveterate liar, as a man for whom “facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around.” Do you work like that? DEBRA SHOSTAK:

O’BRIEN:

Yes.

SHOSTAK:

Are there aesthetic risks?

No, but I’m willing to hear what they may be. In general, though, for me one of the fundamental things to be accomplished in fiction is to convince. That is, to convince the reader of the stuff that is happening in the now that it’s occurring, whether it’s a fairy tale, something fabulous, or something realistic. No matter what it is, fiction requires a sense of underlying credibility. And so when one’s inventing fact, and the so-called invented facts aren’t convincing, then there’s a problem. But, when you’re inventing things, what you try to do is to make them seem as if they are truly occurring. I guess every fictional writer runs the risk of invention all the time. I’m sure Mark Twain ran into it, writing about trout or a kid going on a raft down the Mississippi. Much, almost all, of that story is invented, though Twain does draw on remembered images, remembered dialogue. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? That stuff can’t happen at all. You can’t go back in time that way. Here especially you have to develop this sense of things happening, and that requires good technique, that requires keeping the dream alive, the way dreams are alive when we’re truly dreaming, a state that we’re constantly at risk of disrupting if we lose the sense of credibility. This disruption can be done in a million ways. You can lose your readers’ faith by putting a stone here rather than there, or by having a comma in the wrong place. You can do it by melodrama, by making your stuff O’BRIEN:

seem too cartoonish. You can lose the sense of credibility in all kinds of ways. And what one tries to do is not to make those kinds of mistakes. Speaking of credibility, in The Things They Carried there are numerous devices—come-ons, enticements, snares for the reader—such as starting out stories with “It’s time to be blunt” or “This is true,” having one story supposedly give the facts about the evolution of another story, or naming the narrator after yourself. It seems to me that an appropriate metaphor for talking about this aspect of the book would be that you’re seducing the reader, and that obviously the reader can have ambivalent feelings toward such a seduction. Do you see that? SHOSTAK:

I’d say that maybe it is an appropriate metaphor, probably not one I would use, but it’s certainly appropriate. I guess that’s what I was trying to do, to make the reader feel those sorts of ambivalences. Hearing a story, being seduced, then having the seducer say, “by the way, I don’t love you, it isn’t true.” And then doing it again. And then saying, “that also isn’t true, just kidding,” and doing it again. It’s not just a game, though. It’s not what that “Good Form” chapter is about. It’s form. This whole book is about fiction, about why we do fiction. Every reader is always seduced by a good work of fiction. That is, by a lie, seduced by a lie. Huckleberry Finn did not happen, but if you’re reading Huckleberry Finn you’re made to believe that it is happening. If you didn’t believe it, then it would be a lousy work of fiction. One wouldn’t be seduced. And I’m trying to write about the way in which fiction takes place. I’m like a seducer, yet beneath all the acts of seduction there’s a kind of love going on, a kind of trust you’re trying to establish with the reader, saying, “here’s who I am, here’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. And in fact I do truly love you, I’m not just tricking you, I’m letting you in on my game, letting you in on who I am, what I am, and why I am doing what I am doing.” All these lies are the surface of something. I have to lie to you and explain why I am lying to you, why I’m making these O’BRIEN:

things up, in order to get you to know me and to know fiction, to know what art is about. And it’s going to hurt now and then, and you’re going to get angry now and then, but I want to do it to you anyway—and for you. It strikes me as interesting that your first book is a real memoir, while your last is a pseudo-memoir. How do you see that development, the relation between the way you want to accomplish those seductions in nonfiction and in fiction? Would you write nonfiction again? SHOSTAK:

There are all kinds of things that occur to me in answer to your question. One is that I don’t form my career, my writerly interests, consciously. I don’t outline a novel and say, “Here’s where I’m going next” in terms of form and so on. The language just takes me there. A scrap of language will occur to me that seems interesting. And one of the first scraps of language that occurred to me in writing The Things They Carried was the line, “This is true.” When that line was written, the form of the book wasn’t present by any means, but the thematic “aboutness” of the book was there in those three words. “This is true.” O’BRIEN:

THE COLONEL Carolyn Forché

W

hat you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the

ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

CONTRIBUTORS Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) was born in New Delhi and grew up in Kashmir. His volumes of poetry include Rooms Are Never Finished, The Country Without a Post Office, and The Beloved Witness. He received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A posthumous collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, will be published this year. Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her other books include the novel Cavedweller, the short story collection Trash, and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) published many collections of poems, essays, and fiction. Director of the National Library of Buenos Aires from 1955 to 1973, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from both Columbia and Oxford. He received the International Publishers’ Prize (which he shared with Samuel Beckett in 1961), the Jerusalem Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize. Robert Olen Butler is the author of the novels The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, and The Deep Green Sea, as well as collections of short fiction: Tabloid Dreams and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, for which he won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Peter Carey is the author of the novels The Tax Inspector, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang, which won the

Booker Prize in 2001. His stories are collected in The Fat Man in History. Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) is a pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in Daresbury, Cheshire. He was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford, and the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, written to entertain Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church. His other works include Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, Sylvie and Bruno, and many mathematical treatises. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) was born in Alcalá de Henares. He became a soldier, lost the use of his left hand in the Battle of Lepanto, and was imprisoned in Algiers from 1575 to 1580. He was the author of Galatea, The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, and Don Quixote. Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) was born in Brussels of Argentine parents. He worked as a translator for Argentine publishing houses, translating the complete prose 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 Hopscotch, and A Manual for Manuel, which won the Prix Médicis. Robert Desnos (1900–1945), French poet, was one of the foremost Surrealists. Texts from his early period appeared in the magazine Littérature and in his book Liberty or Love!. Later he abandoned Surrealistic verse with the poetry collections The Wakeful State and Country, among others. Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was born in Chicago but lived most of his life in California. His dozens of novels include The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted for film as Blade Runner), and The Man in the High Castle, which won a Hugo Award in 1962. Among his numerous story collections are A Handful of

Darkness, The Variable Man and Other Stories, and The Preserving Machine. Lynn Emanuel is the author of three books of poetry: Then, Suddenly—, The Dig, and Hotel Fiesta. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two Pushcart prizes. She is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the Writing Program. Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was the author of the novel Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979. Her other books include Human Voices, The Bookshop, Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, the short fiction collection The Means of Escape, and the novel The Blue Flower, which won a National Books Critics Circle Award in 1997. In 1996, she was awarded the Heywood Hill Prize in recognition of her contribution to literature. Carolyn Forché is the author of the poetry collections Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, and The Angel of History. She has translated the work of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Her fourth book of poetry, Blue Hour, will be published this spring. Paula Fox is the author of the novels Poor George, Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The Western Coast, and The God of Nightmares, the memoir Borrowed Finery, and several books for children. Graham Greene (1904–1991) was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He traveled widely as a freelance journalist, and was the author of the novels The Man Within, Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, and The Quiet American.

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit, Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, a two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the books Footsteps and Sidetracks, which document his biographical method. He has won many awards, including a Somerset Maugham Award and the Whitbread Book of the Year award. In 2001, he was appointed first Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. Rashid Hussein (1936–1977), a Palestinian poet from a village near Haifa, was an editor of the journal Al-Fajr, banned in 1962. He translated Hayyim Bialik’s poetry from Hebrew into Arabic, and Palestinian folk songs into Hebrew. He was the author of the poetry collection I Am the Land, Don’t Deprive Me of the Rain. Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the author of several volumes of poetry, including Blood for a Stranger, Losses, The Seven-League Crutches, and Little Friend, Little Friend. The Woman at the Washington Zoo won a National Book Award in 1960. His criticism has been collected in Poetry and the Age, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, and The Third Book of Criticism. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1947 until his death. Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, Albania. He studied at the University of Tiranë and later at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow until 1960. Upon returning to Albania, he became a journalist and wrote a number of novels, including The General of the Dead Army, The Wedding, Chronicle in Stone, Broken April, and The Pyramid, as well as collections of poetry and essays. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague, and from 1907 to 1922 worked in the insurance business. Some of his short fiction, including Meditation, The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, and The Metamorphosis, was published during his lifetime. Among the best known of his posthumous works are the fragmentary novels The Trial and The Castle.

William Kennedy is the author of seven novels—Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe—all of which evoke life in his home city of Albany, New York. Ironweed won a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner Award. He also wrote the screenplays for The Cotton Club and Ironweed. Milan Kundera, Czech novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet, participated in the liberalization of Czechoslovakia in 1967–68. After the Soviet occupation of the country, he was fired from his teaching positions and all his works were banned. In 1975 he emigrated to France. He is the author of the novels The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and a collection of essays, The Art of the Novel. Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. Her books include In the Freud Archives, Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She lives in New York. Peter Matthiessen is the author of the novels Race Rock, Partisans, Raditzer, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga, and Killing Mister Watson, as well as numerous nonfiction books, including Wildlife in America, The Cloud Forest, In Sand Rivers, East of Lo Monthang, and The Snow Leopard, which won a National Book Award. William Maxwell (1908–2000) was the author of seven novels, including Bright Center of Heaven, They Came Lke Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, which won the American Book Award. His stories were collected in Over by the River. He was an editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1976.

Arthur Miller is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, and The Price, as well as many other plays, screenplays, and works of prose. His accolades include a George Foster Peabody Award, a Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a John F. Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Lorrie Moore’s publications include Self-Help, Anagrams, The Forgotten Helper, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, and Birds of America. Her work frequently appears in Fiction International, Ms., The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Alice Munro, born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, is the author of a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and ten collections of short fiction, including Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, Who Do You Think You Are?, Friend of My Youth, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, and The Love of a Good Woman. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sheila Munro, whose first book is entitled Lives of Mothers and Daughters, is the eldest daughter of James and Alice Munro. She lives with her husband and two sons in British Columbia. Novalis (1772–1801) is the pseudonym of Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg, the German poet who greatly influenced later Romantic thought. He was the author of Hymns to the Night, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and The Novices of Saïs. His philosophical and literary aphorisms, some of which first appeared in Friedrich von Schlegel’s journal Athenäum, were collected under the title Blütenstaub. Tim O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods, and The Things They Carried, which was a finalist for

both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among other magazines. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, moved to England with his mother in 1954, and then to Canada in 1962. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992. He is the author of several collections of poetry and a memoir, Running in the Family. His other books include In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and Anil’s Ghost. Grace Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922. Her short fiction has been collected in several volumes, including The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was one of the founders of the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961, and serves as a trustee of PEN American Center. In 1987, she was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature. Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE), among the most important thinkers of the ancient world, was born of a distinguished Athenian family, and after the execution of Socrates in 399 spent several years traveling in Greece, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily. About 387 he founded the Academy in Athens and presided over it for the rest of his life. He wrote some twenty-six dramatic dialogues on philosophical themes, including the Theaetetus, the Symposium, and the Republic. George Plimpton, the editor and a co-founder of The Paris Review, has been a contributing editor to several publications, including Harper’s and Esquire. He is the author of a number of books, including Out of My League, Edie, and Truman Capote. He

writes regularly for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and The Gentleman’s Quarterly, and is an offcer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Simon Schama has taught history at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard, and is now University Professor at Columbia. He is the prize-winning author of The Embarrassment of Riches, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt’s Eyes, and a three-volume history of Britain. He is also the writer-presenter of historical and arthistorical documentaries for BBC television. W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Center for Literary Translation. He was the author of Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Michele Serros was born in Oxnard, California. An award-winning poet and commentator for National Public Radio, she has released a spoken-word CD and toured with Lollapalooza as one of their “road poets.” Her books include the poetry and short story collection Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard and the fiction collection How to Be a Chicana Role Model. Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In 1953 he left Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. He has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, among them What the Grass Says, Jackstraws, Walking the Black Cat, A Wedding in Hell, Hotel Insomnia, and The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. His many other awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California. He was the author of Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Travels with

Charley, and The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Studs Terkel is a journalist and author who has traveled America for nearly half a century interviewing people about a variety of subjects, creating oral histories and books. My American Century is a collection of interviews from his eight works, which include Division Street, Hard Times, Working, The Great Divide, Race, and The Good War, which won a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels include The Feast of the Goat, The Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. He has also written criticism, including The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary and A Writer’s Reality. He was a candidate for president of Peru in 1990. Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England. She is the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, The PowerBook, Gut Symmetries, and The World and Other Places. A children’s book, King of Capri, will be published in the summer of 2003. James Wood, who was for several years The Guardian’s chief literary critic in London, has been senior editor at The New Republic since 1995, and writes regularly for that magazine and for The London Review of Books. He is the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. His first novel will be published in the spring of 2003.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Farewell” from The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali, copyright © 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. “Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from Labyrinths, copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp. “Partial Magic in the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from Labyrinths, copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” by Robert Olen Butler, from A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, copyright © 1992 by Robert Olen Butler. “The Last Days of a Famous Mime” from The Fat Man in History and Other Stories by Peter Carey, copyright © 1980 by Peter Carey. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, from The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner, copyright © 2000 by Martin Gardner. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpt from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Burton Raffel, translation copyright © 1995 by Burton Raffel. W. W. Norton & Company. “Continuity of Parks” from Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn, copyright © 1985 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpt from “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” by Philip K. Dick, from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, copyright © 1996 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “inside gertrude stein” from Then, Suddenly– by Lynn Emanuel, copyright © 1999 by Lynn Emanuel. University of Pittsburgh Press. Excerpt from The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, copyright © 1995 by Penelope Fitzgerald. Houghton Mifflin. “The Colonel” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, copyright © 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Harper & Row. Excerpt from Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox, copyright © 2001 by Paula Fox. Henry Holt and Co. Excerpt from The Comedians by Graham Greene, copyright © 1966 by Graham Greene. Penguin Books.

Excerpt from “Paradise in a Dream” by Richard Holmes, review of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, from The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997. “Lessons in Parsing” by Rashid Hussein from Modern Poetry of the Arab World, translated by Abdallah al-Udhari, copyright © 1986 by Penguin Books. “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket by Randall Jarrell, copyright 1962 © by Randall Jarrell. MacMillan Publishing Company. Excerpt from The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, translated by Jusuf Vrioni, copyright © 1990 by Librarie Arthème Fayard, translation copyright © 1993 by HarperCollins Publishers. “The Truth About Sancho Panza” by Franz Kafka, from Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, copyright © 1971 by Shocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpt from The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher, copyright © 1986 by Milan Kundera, translation copyright © 1988 by Grove Press. Harper & Row. Excerpt from Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey by Janet Malcolm, copyright © 2002 by Random House, Inc. Excerpt from So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, copyright © 1980 by William Maxwell. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpt from They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell, copyright © 1964 by William Maxwell. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “Better and Sicker” by Lorrie Moore from The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored, edited by Clare Boylan, copyright © 1994 by Penguin Books. Excerpt from “Family Furnishings” by Alice Munro, from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, copyright © 2001 by Alice Munro. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “What is Real?” by Alice Munro, from Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stoies, copyright © 1983 by Methuen Drama. Excerpt from Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro by Sheila Munro, copyright © 2002 by McClelland & Stewart. “Last Fragments” by Novalis, from Novalis: Philosophical Writings by Novalis, translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, copyright © 1997 by State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of State University of New York Press. Excerpt from “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried, copyright © 1990 by Tim O’Brien. Broadway Books.

Excerpt from Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, copyright © 1982 by Michael Ondaatje. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “A Converation with My Father” by Grace Paley, from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, copyright © 1994 by Grace Paley. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, copyright © 1995 by Simon Schama. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse, copyright © 1995 by Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG, © 1998 by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Interview excerpt (p. 109) from The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, copyright © 1986 by Charles Simic. University of Michigan Press. Lagniappe poems from The World Doesn’t End, copyright © 1989 by Charles Simic. Harvest Books, Harcourt Brace & Company. Excerpts from Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, copyright © 1990 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV. Penguin Books. “The Truth of Lies” by Mario Vargas Llosa, from Making Waves: Essays, edited and translated by John King, copyright © 1994 by Mario Vargas Llosa, translation copyright © 1996 by John King. Penguin Books. Excerpt from The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, copyright © 1987 by Jeanette Winterson. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. “W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty” by James Wood, from The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, copyright © 1999 by James Wood. Random House, Inc.