Joe Russell and Ernest Hemingway with a marlin, Havana Harbor, 1932 (young man at left not identified). Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Public domain.

On March 4, 1960, the French freighter La Coubre, delivering Belgian arms to Havana Harbor, exploded, killing 101 people. Fidel Castro immediately denounced the United States for “sabotage.” To protest the “heinous act,” commanders Che Guevara, Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, William Morgan, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado (who would remain the president of Cuba until 1976), and Fidel Castro walked arm in arm down Calle Neptuno, forming a dramatic contrast between the street’s garish neon signs and the plain green of their uniforms—and the sobriety of their mission.

In a photo taken on March 5, 1960, by Alberto Korda at a ceremony for the victims of the tragedy, Che appears full of sorrow, anger, and determination. That image would become ubiquitous across the world, a trademark, appearing on T-shirts and countless other commodities. Che transcended his personhood and became a symbol for both the struggle against tyranny and of tyranny itself. His spirit seemed to impress even nihilist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who, with Simone de Beauvoir, was there that mournful day when Che’s picture was taken.

One of Che’s first questions in taking over as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba in November was where Cuba had deposited its gold reserves and dollars. When he was told Fort Knox, he said that the gold would have to be sold and converted into currency in Canadian and Swiss accounts. During a speaking engagement at the bank two months later, Che apologized “because my talk has been much more fiery than you would expect for the post I occupy; I ask once more for forgiveness, but I am still much more of a guerrilla than President of the National Bank.” As if to prove it, he signed banknotes with his nom de guerre: “Che.” The agenda was the struggle, and so it would remain, and La Coubre only confirmed the necessity of his resolve and commitment to the bitter end. Read More

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Paris, 1935.

There are few books for those of us on the other side of fertility. There’s a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that details with wonder and reverence the moment in which girls become sexual, and yet both male and female writers have been reluctant to take on menopausal characters. As I entered my own transition, I began reading the whole tiny canon of menopause literature. In Edith Wharton’s book Twilight Sleep, fifty-year-old Pauline Manford is so obsessed with staying thin and avoiding wrinkles that even her daughter compares her to a “deserted house.” Menopausal Rosalie Van Tümmler in Thomas Mann’s The Black Swan thinks her period has come back because of her infatuation with a younger man. On the night of their rendezvous, Rosalie begins to hemorrhage from her vagina, eventually slipping into a coma on a bed soaked with her own blood. The original German title of Black Swan was Die Betrogene, “the betrayed.”

Pathetic. Depressed. Doomed. These examples may seem extreme, but I could not find a single story that did not equate menopause with disease and death. I’m all for darkness, but these stories made me feel hopeless. I’d just about given up trying to find a book that would honor both the physical struggles and the spiritual complexity of the change when I came across Break of Day, by the French writer Colette.

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I had her diary in the top left drawer of my desk, held together by the cutout bottom of a paper grocery sack. She’d been eighty-six years old in 1968—the first of the five full years she recorded. I didn’t know her. I had her diary because the person who’d previously possessed it passed away, and when their effects were sold at public auction, the diary—discarded, unwanted—ended up in my hands.

I searched for her online in 2004 or 2005 or 2006. I may have searched again in 2007 or 2008 or 2009. I couldn’t find her—not even an obituary. I wanted to know more, but when I was not able to find it, I stopped wondering. This was a life not retrievable by search engine, I thought. There was something pleasing in that.

The diary became something I took out often to look through, to read, to think about. It had none of the posturing I’ve seen in other diaristic endeavors, none of the tortured self-evaluation. Instead, the diarist wrote about bodily dailiness: weather, meals, sleep, hobbies, housework. Fire whistle in night. Steady rain at 8. He brought us some mush to fry. She wrote about the people she knew: their comings and goings, their physical and emotional states, their deaths. Maude ate good breakfast, oatmeal, poached eggs, little sausage. Maude ate her dinner pretty good. Had letter from Bertha she better and contented out there.

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Creative Commons License: alexanderward12

Every writer has a carburetor, unique to herself, that measures out a mist of fuel for the volume of flowing air in the cylinder of her imagination. A plug provides the spark, the fuel ignites, and off she goes.

The spark is an idea; the fuel is effort; the air is grace. She needs them all, and all in balance. If the cylinder contains too much fuel, it won’t ignite. She sits in an old car on a winter morning and twists the key while she pumps the pedal: the engine makes a cranking wheeze, not the whoosh of ignition. She pumps the pedal again, adding still more fuel, to no avail. She has flooded the cylinder. She has tried too hard.

For three years, I sat at my desk, about six mornings a week, and nothing happened. A strenuous nothing. With great force, I looked at the wall. Or I wrote a few paragraphs, revised, typed, extended, retyped, over a number of months, then threw it all away. Advice from Kafka hung from a thumbtack in the bulletin board over my desk: Wait.

Vehemently, I waited.

I was trying to write a second novel. The first had taken ten years, but I had spent most of that time writing my way into mistakes and cutting my way back out of them. Experience should have counted for something. Next to Kafka on the bulletin board hung instructions from Nina Simone to her band during a recording session: “Y’all pushing … Just relax, relax. You’re pushing it. It’ll go up by itself.”

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