Arthur Russell.

There’s a man on the ferry. He’s wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and standing at the stern, his handsome face pitted with acne scars. Everyone else is looking at Manhattan. It’s 1986: the twin towers dominate the view. But this man isn’t looking at the buildings. He’s staring at the swirling water, the confluence of tides, the East River and the Hudson coming together in the harbor of the city.

Out here, everything is expansive. Out here, everything falls away. He has his Walkman in his pocket, his headphones around his ears. The music he’s listening to is a mix he finished late last night. When he was done—though nothing he does is ever done, exactly—he took the cassette and left the studio. Full moon, of course. He has been recording this album every full moon for three years now. Sometimes he curls up in the studio for a nap, waking in the small hours with a new idea, an unprecedented sound bubbling through his mind.

His name is Arthur Russell. He’s thirty-five. He’s a gay man, a Buddhist, a cellist, a country singer, an avant-garde composer, a disco queen; he is the greatest musician you’ve never heard of. The music he’s been making doesn’t sound like any music that’s ever been made before. It’s like music from the bottom of the ocean, it’s like music they play in nightclubs on the moon. The album he’s working on, his first, is called World of Echo. Just his voice and his cello, in a studio in the deserted Financial District, surrounded by empty, glowing offices. One man pushing music to its limits, finding the breaking points, making the most beautiful songs imaginable and then teasing them apart like taffy, amplifying and distorting until they dissolve into lakes of sound. Read More

Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life (detail), 1603, oil on wood, 32 1/2 x 21 1/4″.

With vanishing on my mind, I crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a late autumn morning on a sober errand. Ginkgo leaves, freshly fallen, coated my path. My root-word research on vanishing—which, like vanity, comes from the Latin evanescere (“die away”) and vanus (“empty void”)—had led me to a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century.

The vanitas school of painting takes its name from the Latin version of an Ecclesiastes refrain (“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”) and it involves carefully juxtaposing objects deemed symbolic of life’s brevity and the evanescence of earthly achievements. Objects such as mirrors, broken or tipped glassware, books, decaying flowers, and skulls are meant to encourage viewers to contemplate their own mortality. Jacques de Gheyn’s Vanitas Still Life, the earliest known vanitas painting, hangs in one of the Met’s seemingly less popular galleries. Most visitors pass through this corridor of dark still-life paintings on their way to lighter, more moving pieces. That autumn morning, I had Vanitas Still Life to myself.

A modest-size piece, 32 1/2 by 24 1/4″, it contains a panoply of vanitas symbols. A thin stream of vapor rises from an urn, an orange flower with browning leaves languishes in another. Dutch medals and Spanish coins glitter in the foreground. Two philosophers—Democritus, the “laughing” philosopher, and Heraclitus, the “crying” philosopher—recline in the painting’s top corners, pointing to the objects below. A large transparent bubble hovers above a human skull. From every angle, the viewer confronts images of life’s transience, but it is the skull that serves as the central reminder of human vanishing. The empty eye sockets locked my gaze, making me think—vainly—of my own future. A hollowed head, more than any other bodily remnant, symbolizes death’s totality, an unyielding force that consumes the entire person, even the ability to think. I guess there’s a reason why the sight of Yorick’s skull, not his rib cage or pelvic bone, occasions Hamlet’s famous lament. Read More

Martin Lewis, The Great Shadow, 1925, drypoint on paper, 10″ x 7″. Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of Frank McClure.

Sometime in the early eighties, I began reading a series of mysteries that featured a Swedish homicide detective named Martin Beck. I was living in Berkeley at the time, studying for a Ph.D. in English literature as I worked a variety of part-time jobs, and I knew a lot of people both inside and outside the academy. Being a talkative sort, I started telling everyone around me about this incredible Scandinavian cop series. Soon we were all reading it.

What I knew at the time was that it was written by a couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who had from the very beginning envisioned it as a sequence of ten books that would portray Swedish society from a distinctly Marxist perspective. Published between 1965 and 1975, the Martin Beck series grew noticeably darker as it moved toward its end—though whether this was because Sweden itself (not to speak of the world beyond it) had worsened during that decade, or because Per Wahlöö had learned in the early seventies that he was dying of cancer, was something no one could answer. Wahlöö died, I later learned, on the exact day in June of 1975 when the tenth volume was published in Sweden, having worked like a maniac to finish it on time. (Sjöwall, who was his equal partner in many ways—they would write their alternating chapters at night, so as not to be interrupted by their small children, and would then exchange chapters for editing—has said that at the very end Wahlöö was pretty much writing everything himself.) At any rate, he left behind exactly what he had intended to produce: ten books containing thirty chapters each, which, taken together, constitute a single continuous social narrative comparable in some ways to a Balzac, Zola, or Dickens project, though clothed in the garments of a police procedural.

It would be a melodramatic exaggeration to say that the Martin Beck series changed my life, but like all such exaggerations, this one would be built on a nugget of truth. Both my idea of Scandinavia and my sense of what a mystery could do were shaped by those books. If I later became a veritable addict of the form, gobbling up hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in Kindle purchases of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian mysteries, that habit could no doubt be attributed to many things besides the Martin Becks: the invention of digital books, for instance, which allowed for impulse buying and virtually infinite storage; the massive and surprising success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, which encouraged American publishers to bring out any and every available Scandinavian thriller; the introduction of the long-cycle police procedural on American television, including such gems as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and ultimately The Wire, all of which cemented my fascination with the form; not to mention dozens if not hundreds of similar behavior-shaping factors that remain, for me, at an unconscious level. We never know for sure why we read what we read. I cannot, at the moment, even call to mind who first recommended the Martin Becks to me (though I know it was a person and not, say, a bookstore display or a newspaper review). Whoever it was, in any case, deserves my eternal gratitude.

What is so special about these ten books? Or—a slightly different question—what was it that so appealed to me back in 1981 or 1982, when I was about to turn thirty and America was on the verge of becoming what it is today? Read More

Standing in the woods of Decatur, Georgia, at the end of 2019, Jericho Brown reads two poems from his most recent collection, The Tradition, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Several poems from The Tradition were first published in the fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. Shared exclusively with The Paris Review, this film is an extract from the pilot effort of “Poets in Space,” directed and produced by Daniel Grossman and Sean Webley in collaboration with the poet Malachi Black.

Frantisek Kupka, The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait), 1907

I’m not ashamed to say that I bought Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature because of the cover: Frantisek Kupka’s The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait) from 1907 is an exhilarating study of the color yellow. Its human subject, slouched in a wicker armchair, a cigarette dangling from one hand while a single, louche finger marks the page of a book, could be the perfect image of Des Esseintes, the dissolute antihero of Huysmans’s novel. Strictly speaking, the painting is a self-portrait of the habitually mustached Kupka, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, who haunts almost every page of Against Nature. This novel, about a dyspeptic aesthete who “took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude,” spends some two hundred pages luxuriating in excess and opulence while the hero cuts himself off from the rest of society.

An old idea that persists about the novel is that it ought to be morally instructive in some way, that it should teach us the correct way to live. Certainly, when Against Nature was published in French in 1884, much of the resultant hand-wringing was because Huysmans’s hero learns nothing new from his misadventures in self-isolation. The problem, according to Émile Zola, was “that Des Esseintes is as mad at the start as he is at the end, that there is no form of progression.” Barbey d’Aurevilly, who, depending on your point of view, was either a minor dandy in the Baudelaire coterie or just a nasty little pornographer, agreed: “Undertaken in despair, the book ends with a despair that is greater than that with which it began.” The reader is informed that in the flower of his youth, Des Esseintes often indulged in the pleasures of the flesh and the card table with his peers, but by the time we meet him in the first chapter, he has already begun dreaming of “a desert hermitage equipped with all the modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.” Page after page, chapter after chapter, Des Esseintes throws more and more money after his ennui and deviant tastes. He flees the crowds of Paris for the country, cuts himself off from outsiders, and attempts to swaddle himself only in objects and experiences that meet his particular aesthetic principles. Decadent literature had its heyday in France in the nineteenth century when the poètes maudits sought to overthrow nature, replacing with it human genius and the pursuit of pleasure, no matter how perverted. But for all Des Esseintes’s extravagance, there is nothing that can stop the rot, there is no escaping his malaise. Eventually, he is ordered back to the city by a pragmatic doctor, where he must abandon his solitary existence and at least try to enjoy the same pleasures as other people. All Des Esseintes can manage, before the doctor strides out the door, is a petulant “But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy!” The novel ends with our hero slumped in a chair.

So, what, if anything, do we stand to learn about self-isolation from an ailing aristocrat at the tail end of the nineteenth century? Des Esseintes is based loosely on Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, the dandy par excellence who was also the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Proust’s roman-fleuve, and Huysmans’s Against Nature, like so many great novels, are concerned with the twilight of a once-golden age.

The dandy was an important figure in decadent literature, a visible manifestation of a society infected by its own opulence. Things rarely ended well for the dandy, whether fictional or historical: they tended to die in poverty and obscurity, their witticisms forgotten, their fashions surpassed. But for a few blazing decades of the nineteenth century, in fiction and in society, they were the absolute arbiters of taste, and Jean des Esseintes might just have been their high priest.

Curated from the pages of Against Nature, the following is a decadent guide to staying home in style. Quarantine, but make it “fun”-de-siècle.

VÊTEMENTS

A disastrous place to start. The array of “iso-outfits” and work-from-home ensembles that have been bandied about the internet would surely have pushed Des Esseintes to the brink. It goes without saying that you should not be wearing sweats; you probably should not even own any. Your wardrobe should be seasonal and thematic; you may wear your tweeds to an English-style tavern, but not along the boulevards. A workaround for the effort of daily dressing is to invest in a silk dressing gown, or a velvet smoking jacket, and simply throw it over whatever you are or are not wearing. Remember, though, that for a dandy, the primary aim of dressing is one’s own pleasure; impressing the petite bourgeoisie at the opera is just a secondary thrill. In the current climate, the “quarantini” hour is probably your best opportunity to earn a reputation as an eccentric. Try wearing “suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats” or “sticking a bunch of Parma violets down [your] shirt-front in lieu of a cravat.” Read More

© Jeff McCollough (AdobeStock)

“It’s an elegy for New York,” my friend texts me. She’s just finished my book. It’s the end of February. We find barstools at a packed restaurant bar before a reading at St. Mark’s Church. “We’re ordering months of medication in case the supply chain fails,” she says, “and hand sanitizer—and masks. Masks, can you believe it.” Like me, she and her husbands are journalists, they’re hearing things from some of our friends in the field. She tells me she thinks people will still read the book, words of reassurance that only provoke anxiety. I think she sounds paranoid, like she’s speaking from a place of some dark cultish extremism.

The next two weeks change the world. Schools close. We need to rush the audiobook recording into three days, taping over the weekend. I take the subway for the last time, without knowing it, one of only three people in the entire car. Days before, I’d waited on a crammed platform for a train so jammed with bodies we couldn’t all press aboard. Now it feels like a late night in the early nineties, a city of emptiness and dread. It’s warm out, but I wear gloves, tiny red ones that belonged to a friend’s grandmother, calfskin from a different century that had known different fear and trauma and loss. The sound engineer lets me into the building, squeezes nervously into the far corner of the elevator on the way up to the studio. We finish the recording Sunday evening. I wait in a supermarket line for an hour and a half and hoist home whatever I can carry. I write an article about homeless college students who have nowhere to go.

The book couldn’t come out in the fall; the fall news cycle would be too busy, the election too much of a distraction. April would be perfect. We would publish in time to do university events, but still close enough to the Democratic National Convention, when social issues, like the ones my book explores, would be on the forefront of discourse. The safety net. Housing. Childcare. The minimum wage. The cost of college. Race. Gender. My book follows Camilla, a young criminal justice student, through her first year of single motherhood, and the entire constellation of factors that keep her homeless, despite her tenacity, her ambition, her blade-sharp mind. I wrote this book like a zealous missionary, to grab people by their lapels, to make them feel the irreversible curse of being born poor in America. April was worth the abbreviated marketing schedule, worth the last-minute squeeze into the catalogue.

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