October 22, 2020 Arts & Culture The Lesbian Partnership That Changed Literature By Emma Garman Jane Heap and Margaret C. Anderson, 1927 In the early thirties, for a certain clique of Left Bank–dwelling American lesbians, the place to be was not an expat haunt like the Café de Flore or Le Deux Magots. Nor was it Le Monocle, the wildly popular nightclub owned by tuxedoed butch Lulu du Montparnasse and named for the accessory worn to signal one’s orientation. According to the writer Solita Solano, the “only important thing in Paris” was a study group on the philosophies of the Greek-Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, held at Jane Heap’s apartment. Heap, a Kansas-born artist, writer, and gallerist, was Gurdjieff’s official emissary, a rare honor. Under her supervision, the group engaged in intense self-revelation, narrating the stories of their lives without censoring or embellishing. As the author Kathryn Hulme explained in her memoir, Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure, the goal was to uncover the real I and thus escape being “a helpless slave to circumstances, to whatever chameleon personality took the initiative.” Among those who gathered in Heap’s small sitting room were Janet Flanner, the New Yorker Paris correspondent and Solano’s lifelong partner; the journalist and author Djuna Barnes; and the actress Louise Davidson. One attendee, Hulme noted, would enter the room “like a Valkyrie” and “knew how to load the questions she fired at Jane, how to bait her to reveal more than perhaps was intended for beginners.” The Valkyrie was Margaret Caroline Anderson, founder of the trailblazing Little Review, with whom Heap had first encountered Gurdjieff in New York in the early twenties. Heap and Anderson, whose friendship outlasted a love affair and a professional partnership, were kindred geniuses with an exclusive affinity. When Barnes, after a fling with Heap, marveled at her “deep personal madness,” Anderson replied: “Deep personal knowledge—a supreme sanity.” Heap called Anderson “my blessed antagonistic complement.” Via their shared endeavors and the cross-pollination of their ideas—artistic, literary, and spiritual—these two remarkable women left an indelible imprint on avant-garde culture between the wars. Margaret C. Anderson They first met one afternoon in February 1916, when Heap dropped by the The Little Review’s office in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. She was thirty-two, with cropped dark hair, a long straight nose, strong cheekbones, and a strikingly androgynous style. A typical outfit was a men’s frock coat, a high-necked shirt, and a tie. In winter, she added a Russian fur hat, and she always wore bright red lipstick. Anderson, three years her junior, had gone through a tomboy phase but was now exquisitely feminine, with a knack for projecting flawless chic despite never having any money. “Her profile was delicious,” Flanner recalled in a posthumous tribute for The New Yorker, “her hair blond and wavy, her a laughter a soprano ripple, her gait undulating beneath her snug tailleur.” Anderson set great store by looks and charm, and believed her conversation improved when she felt attractive. To an earnest young short-story writer who came to her for advice, she said: “Use a little lip rouge, to begin with. Beauty may bring you experiences to write about.” Heap’s handsome face, Anderson wrote in her memoir The Fiery Fountains, resembled Oscar Wilde’s “in his only beautiful photograph.” And yet, “when Jane talked you were conscious of only one feature—her soft deep eyes, in which you could watch thought take form … thought that was always clearest when she talked of the indefinable, the vast, or the unknown.” An unusual childhood had cultivated Heap’s questing, expansive mind. Her English father was a warden at the Topeka State Hospital, and he lived with his family in the hospital grounds. Young Jane roamed the place, lonely and thirsty for knowledge. Adults were poor sources of enlightenment, she found, except for the patients, who seemed to possess an authentic truth and authority that others lacked. The asylum, Heap wrote in a 1917 Little Review piece, “was a world outside of the world, where realities had to be imagined…Very early I had given up everyone except the Insane.” She dreamed of one day meeting those ultimate imaginers of reality, artists. “Who had made the pictures,” she wondered, “the books, and the music in the world?” Man Ray, Jane Heap, c.1926 Heap studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and she returned to the city after spending a year in Germany with her first serious girlfriend. During her twenties she taught art, designed theatrical sets, acted in plays, and fell in and out of love. “I believe in living a little more than necessary,” she wrote at age twenty-four, “seeing and believing life to be as one wished it to be, creating beauty where it doesn’t happen to exist.” When she met Anderson, she was nursing a broken heart and craving a grander conduit for her ambitions. At a stroke both problems were solved: she became coeditor of the two-year-old Little Review and moved with Anderson to California. They rented a ranch house in the redwood forests of Marin County and talked, nonstop, about art. “My mind was inflamed by Jane’s ideas,” Anderson reminisced in her memoir My Thirty Years’ War, “because of her uncanny knowledge about the human composition, her unfailing clairvoyance about human motivation. This is what I had been waiting for, searching for, all my life.” Anderson grew up in Indiana, one of three sisters in a middle-class family. At age twenty-one she dropped out of a women’s college in Ohio, where she studied piano, to move to Chicago. Her bemused parents, who expected her to marry and settle down in their “country clubs and bridge” milieu, wanted to know what on earth she was seeking. Self-expression, she said, which meant “being able to think, say, and do what you believed in.” Her father retorted: “Seems to me you do nothing else.” In Chicago, Anderson became a magazine journalist and a prolific book critic. But she was always restless for her next big adventure. The Little Review was conceived when she attributed a depressed mood to “nothing inspired” happening in her life. The remedy came to her: she would launch the most interesting magazine of all time. “I knew that someone would give the money,” she wrote in My Thirty Years’ War. “This is one kind of natural law I always see in operation. Someone would have to. Of course someone did.” She had just turned twenty-seven. Read More
October 21, 2020 Arts & Culture The Digital Face By Namwali Serpell As I was finishing my book Stranger Faces, a new app took social media by storm. It was called FaceApp and it allowed you to age your face, to see what you would look like at fifty or at eighty years old. I never downloaded it, but from the screenshots that appeared on my timeline, the versions of one’s face it spat forth seemed startlingly vivid, without falling on either side of the uncanny valley—neither too cartoonish nor too realistic. Within days, conspiracy theories cropped up. The company was Russian; the app was a cover; nobody was reading the terms and conditions; FaceApp was collecting faces. These fears may have been exaggerated, but they were not unfounded. The problem of the twenty-first century may well be the problem of the digital face. It began with Facebook, founded in 2004 and named for the analog paper book that Harvard students used to identify one another, ostensibly to put together study groups, but actually for dating or, more likely, hooking up. The first version of the app, Facemash, was a “Hot or Not” ranking system for photos scanned from a set of online “face books” from different Harvard residential houses. This binary hot/not, yes/no model has continued to pervade the sociality of internet technology, from the thumbs up/thumbs down to the swipe left/swipe right. Facebook’s relationship to the book has faded—the visual logic of photographs and videos has taken over the site—but its relationship to the face seems to have intensified. Over the last couple of years, users have reported being asked to “upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face,” purportedly to prove that you’re not a bot. Many suspect that there is, again, data harvesting afoot here, as facial recognition programs are being tested by companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM. The worry is that this data will be used to surveil or target specific people. We have already seen facial recognition technology being used this way—in China, for example. News about the protests in Hong Kong that began in 2019 emphasized the various measures protestors are taking to prevent being identified—from scattering lasers to knocking down cameras. Read More
October 20, 2020 Arts & Culture Death’s Traffic Light Blinks Red By Cathy Park Hong Choi Seungja. Photo: Sinyong Kim. Courtesy of Action Books. Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea. Born in 1952, Choi emerged as a poet during the eighties, a turbulent and violent decade that saw nationwide democracy movements against the authoritarian government. During that era, South Korean poets were predominantly populist, writing “people’s poetry” that protested authoritarian rule. These poets were also mostly men. But during that time, a new wave of feminist poets emerged, such as Kim Hyesoon, Ko Jung-hee, Kim Seung-hee, and Choi herself. When Choi first started publishing in 1979, her provocative poetry was dismissed by the male literary establishment who expected women to write quiet, domestic poems. As the translator and poet Don Mee Choi writes in the anthology Anxiety of Words, Choi’s language and content were “attacked for being too rough and vulgar for a female poet.” Born in the small rural town of Yeonki, Choi Seungja attended Korea University, devoting her studies to German literature, and afterward made a living as a translator of German- and English-language books. In 1979, she was the first woman poet to publish in the prestigious journal Literature and Intellect. Despite her growing success as a poet over the following decades, Choi mostly lived alone in near poverty. In 2001, she experienced a mental illness that kept her in and out of hospitals. A community of poets came to her financial aid; the poet Kim Hyesoon, for instance, collected money each month to support Choi, and the press Munhakdongne gave her a writing space in their office so she had a place to write and translate. Read More
October 19, 2020 Arts & Culture The Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton By Marina Magloire LUCILLE CLIFTON. PHOTO: RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS. It all began one night in 1976, when the poet Lucille Clifton was lightheartedly using a Ouija board with two of her daughters. The board began to spell out the name of Clifton’s mother, Thelma. At first, Clifton was incredulous, but as she received more messages, she came to believe that they were truly from her mother’s spirit. Later, Clifton wrote that “There was no point, no single statement that said unequivocally ‘this is she.’ It was/is the accumulation of things, the pattern of her self. Which is how we know anyone.” According to Clifton’s first-born daughter Sidney, over the years Clifton “evolved from the Ouija board” to automatic writing to, eventually, a spiritual state in which she could directly access the spirits without the need for writing. In the seventies and eighties, the Clifton’s Baltimore home became a spiritual way station through which a wide assortment of spirits apparently passed. Despite her fame as a poet, Clifton’s trajectory as a self-described “two-headed woman” is a little-known part of her legacy. “Two-headed woman” is a traditional African American term used to describe women gifted with access to the spirit world as well as to the material world. Clifton’s unpublished spirit writing is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. These materials range from past life regressions to treatises on Black astrology to pages of unbroken cursive detailing the histories of Atlantis and Egypt. In many of Clifton’s documents, Blackness and the Black body are decentered by the concept of reincarnation. When she asks her spirit interlocutors about her previous incarnations, she is surprised to learn that in many of them, she was not a woman at all. Clifton’s spirit writing, while ostensibly fitting into a race- and gender-blind New Age tradition, should be read as an important contribution to Black feminist theories of embodiment. Clifton’s spirit communications foreshadow contemporary global issues like climate change and the rise of the far right, and they position Black women at the vanguard of addressing these issues. In August and September of 1978, for example, Clifton received a series of dire warnings about the fate of the human world from a mysterious group of spirits she called “the Ones.” The Ones did not assume the personality of a departed human, and they did not weigh in on day-to-day affairs. They spoke of things of cosmic importance: the deep past of human civilization (for instance, the origins of Atlantis and demystifications of ancient Egyptian civilization) and its tenuous future. They returned “to remind human beings that they are more than flesh,” and in 1978 they warned Clifton: If the world continues on its way without the possibility of God which is the same as saying without Light Love Truth then what does this mean? It means that perhaps a thousand years of mans life on this planet will be without Light Love Truth It is what we were saying indeed that there will be on Earth that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirits Hell Now there is yet time but not very much your generation Lucille is the beginning of the possibility and your girls generation is the middle etc. The Ones, characterized by their mythic tone and liberal use of a royal we, peppered their messages with a line they repeated like a refrain: “There are so many confusions so many potential dangers in the world of the Americas.” It was a strange way of phrasing it, given that the fate of the entire world, not just the Americas, seemed to be in the balance. These spirits seemed to espouse a kind of post-racial universalism, yet they located “the Americas,” and their increasing globalization, as a place of unique evil. The spirits tell Clifton, “America is not a country where things sounding right are taken as right,” and say that this resistance to the truth is destroying the world. According to the Ones, the generation born at the end of the twentieth century would be the last to have the possibility to avoid an earth turned to Hell, making now the time to act on their message. In the loneliness of the two-headed woman, the burden of saving the world falls disproportionately on Black women. In popular culture, the figure of the Black woman medium fulfills a deep social need for white people to see Black people as channels to a past they otherwise pretend to ignore. In the 1990 film Ghost, the psychic character played by Whoopi Goldberg asks, in dismay, when the ghost of Patrick Swayze’s character first speaks to her, “Are you white?” She already knows her body will be used as a surrogate for white people to connect with the afterlife they otherwise pretend not to believe in. In a society that consumes yet ridicules the supernatural abilities of Black women, Clifton sidesteps these narratives by emphasizing her own Blackness as a gift both linked to and on par with her supernatural abilities. Despite the heaviness of her role as a medium, Clifton regards it as a privilege of her present incarnation as a Black woman. An untitled poem in Clifton’s 1980 poetry collection Two-Headed Woman reads: the once and future dead who learn they will be white men weep for their history. we call it rain. To be born a white man, despite its material benefits, is here represented as a kind of cosmic misfortune, a sullying of the soul with all the dirty deeds of white men’s history. If a soul’s incarnation as a white man is cause for weeping, then it follows that a soul’s incarnation as “both nonwhite and woman” should be cause for something akin to celebration. Two-Headed Woman is her first published work to narrate her spirit communication. It begins, however, not with the story of Clifton’s spirit visitations, but with a series of oft-quoted homages to various aspects of her body: “homage to my hair,” “homage to my hips,” and “what the mirror said.” The latter poem ends with the exhortation: listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl; mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body! This poem both reveals the interchangeability of the Black woman’s body and challenges it. The anonymity of “somebody” is interrupted by the emphatic imposition of an admonitory “damn.” Clifton’s emphasis on her body in a poetry collection that describes the demands of the spirits is not accidental. Clifton asserts the preciousness and integrity of her body in the draining work of spirit communication. In an untitled poem in her 2004 collection Mercy, Clifton describes the Ones chiding her with, “your tongue / is useful / not unique.” Her embodied poetry is itself a rejoinder to the spirits’ insistence that she is “not unique.” Just as Frantz Fanon famously ends his philosophical meditation in Black Skin, White Masks with an appeal to his body—“O my body, make of me always a man who questions”—Clifton similarly enshrines the importance of the body in questions of the spirit. When read together, Clifton’s poetry and her spirit writing represent a both/and reality, one in which race is merely earthly, profane, and temporary, and yet the racialized body matters in this realm. Clifton’s spirit interlocutors view race in interesting ways, neither disavowing its existence nor inflating its importance in the afterlife. They are post-body but not post-racial. In 1977, Clifton put out an open call to the spirit world for celebrity spirits who would like to take part in an anthology of sorts, which she titled “Lives/Visits/Illuminations.” By asking the spirits questions like “What was the experience of death like for you?” and “Would you like to clarify anything about your life for our world?”, Clifton hoped to bring them peace and closure through a discussion of the lessons they had learned since their deaths, and sought to serve spirits and humankind by allowing them to share their experiences in their own words. The resulting replies were a strange, rollicking, and deeply moving compilation of voices, often speaking against racism and the human tendency to hierarchize physical differences. Of the twenty spirits who volunteered, many of them would today be recognizable as important historical figures, but Sidney Clifton emphasizes that the lessons of the afterlife made their messages more important than their worldly identities and accomplishments. The spirits seem to have learned a gentle disregard for human markers of difference. For instance, when Clifton interviews one spirit, who was a religious leader in his life, and asks what he looked like, he replies somewhat dismissively, “Shall we deal in statistics?” But he concedes that he had brown hair, brown eyes, and was of medium height. A spirit who lived in eighteenth-century Germany, when asked whether it was true that he was of African descent, replies, “Yes. Yes, Grandfather, yes. Of course in the old days in my country we would never admit it. Silly.” Another spirit insists that she does not want to be reincarnated, “Not for awhile, till things get better. I want to come back when I can go anywhere and be a Negro and nobody notices.” Spirits who had been secretly queer in their previous incarnations returned to say that they “didn’t hurt a soul and didn’t corrupt no children” and to warn the living that in their time to be queer was to be “like a [sic] animal, a dog, worse than a dog – DON’T BE LIKE THAT PEOPLE. Don’t make somebody miserable.” All of these answers strip back class, race, gender, and sexuality, revealing them as the changing weather of a soul’s journey, not the journey itself. Certainly, these were not the most valued aspects of the spirits’ incarnations on earth. When asked what things still attract them to our world, the spirits’ answers are simple: trees, autumn, “sparkly places,” children, happy families, laughter, singing, running around. In her writing, Clifton adopts an ethereal stance in which “the soul survives bodily death, has survived numerous bodily deaths, will survive more. There is some One in each of us greater than the personality we manifest in any life. The soul does not merely select her own society, the soul is her own society. And love is eternal, is God. Is.” And yet, while impermanent, she does not view the Black woman’s body as a halfway house on the way to more fortuitous incarnations. Like the soul, the body is its own society with its own values, lessons, and codes. Although the spirits admonish Clifton for her fixation on earthly matters of race and gender—“you wish to speak of / black and white […] have we not talked of human”—she maintains a delicate balance between the idea of a raceless soul and her incarnation as a Black woman. In her view, it is no accident that her body and its specificities became a channel for the spirits. In her writing, being a Black woman is a way of listening, a radical form of receptiveness to the lessons that history teaches. And as her daughter Sidney puts it, “I think her actual gift was her openness and ability to hear.” Clifton’s theory of spirit does not succumb to fatalism. When one considers the trials Clifton’s mother Thelma faced —poverty, epilepsy, a philandering husband, death at forty-four years old—there is some comfort in this expansive view of the soul. Thelma’s spectral return represents a Black woman’s soul unbound by the structural misfortunes of her life. She bears witness to these trials but is not erased by them. Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing makes the pangs of my own embodiment as a Black woman easier to bear amid constant reminders of the perils of Black embodiment. There is solace in the idea that this brown skin and these wide hips were made for listening to the voices that could not be erased by time, history, or death. Oh my body, make of me always a woman who listens. Read Lucille Clifton’s poetry in our archives. Marina Magloire is an assistant professor of English at University of Miami and a Public Voices fellow with the Op-Ed Project. She is currently writing a spiritual history of Black feminism and Afro-diasporic religion. Sidney Clifton, whose help was invaluable in writing this essay, is an Emmy-nominated producer and the president of the Clifton House, an artists’ and writers’ workshop project designed to honor the legacy of Lucille and Fred Clifton. Inquiries about the Clifton House can be directed to [email protected]
October 19, 2020 Arts & Culture William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno By Joy Williams William Gaddis. Photo: Jerry Bauer. Courtesy of New York Review Books. Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him … —William Gaddis on writing a novel A magnificent example of rant. A perfect example really. The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, was seven years in construction. J R, his second, took more than twice that long. In each case the invalid miraculously arose and, with commanding vigor, transformed and transforming, entered the realm of great literature. Back in 1957, Malcolm Lowry kept trying to deliver his enthusiasm for The R through a mutual friend, David Markson. “It is a truly fabulous creation, a superbyzantine gazebo and secret missile of the soul.” Mr. Gaddis did not respond. He had not read Under the Volcano (“It was both too close and too far away from what I was doing … ”). On the other hand, he wrote a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer and even sent him a copy of The R and never received a reply. Read More
October 15, 2020 Arts & Culture The View Where I Write By John Lee Clark Read John Lee Clark’s poem “Line of Descent” in our Fall issue. Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up, scribbling on index cards while snacking on molasses. Lucille Clifton said that she wrote such short poems because that’s how long she could hustle during her children’s naps. Truman Capote famously described himself as a “completely horizontal author,” writing longhand in bed or on a couch, with cigarettes and coffee handy. Maya Angelou often rented a room at a nearby hotel, by the month, and had the staff take out the paintings and any bric-a-brac. Charles Dickens liked changing venues but required that his traveling desk and the same ornaments be arranged just so. Agatha Christie puzzled out her murder stories in the bathtub while munching on apples. Victor Hugo abolished distractions by locking himself in a room without any clothes, for fear they would tempt him to go out. What he did permit himself was what many writers have: a view. I am no different. Where I write, on the twenty-fifth floor of an apartment building in downtown Saint Paul, I possess a most breathtaking view. Directly below me is a thick circular grove of—what shall I say?—soft-branched willow trees. A short distance due west lies a pond in the shape of a bear claw. I can see the reeds at its bottom and the cattails dancing around it. Due east across a field of tall grass, warm sunlight bathes over a series of clumps—perhaps houses?—and a long knoll crammed with fuzzy flowers. I never tire of tracking the snaking strip of beach that frames my vista. To the far west is a cape, the northeast a bay, and farther east swells out a peninsula. Strangely, there are no boats. Neither are there any cars. Not as far as I am able to observe, at any rate. Read More