February 14, 2019 Arts & Culture Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block By Tove Jansson Tove Jansson During a recent trip to Stockholm, I came across a new collection of stories and essays by Tove Jansson in a bookstore. Though Jansson is perhaps best known as the creator of the Moomin series, her writing for adults is vast and varied. I have translated two of the essays from that new collection into English for the first time. The first, “The Island,” appeared on this site yesterday. The second, “Once, at a park,” here below, is a beautifully scattered, rhapsodic piece that defies genre conventions. Again, there are torsions in time and tense; again, the syntax can be somewhat shattered—and (again) there is a joyful disregard for the boundaries separating fiction, memoir, and essay. I have tried to retain, for the most part, the slight disquiet and disorientation the original sometimes conveys, because this carefully crumbling prose is directly related to the content of the piece. Written in 1997, toward the end of Jansson’s life, “Once, at a park,” starts out as a classic piece on writer’s block—by writing about the impossibility of writing. But there is much more going on. Despite its conciseness, the story can be read as a reflection on Jansson’s extensive career. It touches on some of her lifelong obsessions (“I can’t understand why I must drag the ocean into everything I write”). It also addresses multilingualism (she screams at the polyglot French clochard in Finnish but writes the story in Swedish). And, at a crucial point in the narrative, it connects writing and painting (Jansson, of course, was a brilliant visual artist as well). It is true that “Once, at a park” offers a bleak reflection on the craft, but the conjunction of candor and artifice at the heart of the piece reveals, I think, an enduring fidelity to literature. —Hernan Diaz A small park behind Saint-Suplice, in Paris I’m sitting comfortably parked on a bench in a little park behind Saint-Sulpice and I’m supposed to find something to write about. It’s very quiet here. Pigeons copulate on a patch of grass, some tourists catch their breath on the benches across from me, an organ plays behind my back, far away. Read More
February 14, 2019 Arts & Culture Sharing Love By Ross Gay Walter Crane, Jack and Jill, 1877. Illustration from Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera. I adore it when I see two people—today it was, from the looks of it, a mother and child here on Canal Street in Chinatown—sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles. It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering, as the uninitiated, or the impatient, will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack, which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter—the good and sole rhythms we might swear we live by—to the one on the other side of the sack. Read More
February 13, 2019 Arts & Culture Pandora in Blue Jeans By Briallen Hopper Grace Metalious. Photo: Larry Smith. The photograph captioned “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is one of the most widely circulated portraits of a woman in history. Like most people, I first saw it on the back of a pulpy paperback book. A black-and-white fifties author photo that seems like a snapshot, it is a side view of a solidly built young woman in a prehipster buffalo plaid shirt and men’s jeans, sitting at a table with a typewriter on it in what looks like a kitchen. She’s not wearing makeup, her hair is pulled back in a lumpy ponytail, and she’s leaning forward with her hands folded anxiously or pensively in front of her face, so we can’t really see what she looks like. There’s a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray next to her typewriter and a messy stack of papers behind it. She is staring at what she’s writing, and she seems not to know or care that the photographer is there. Some author photos develop a life of their own, and those are often the ones that bend a gender or pose a challenge. Perhaps the first of these was the engraved daguerreotype of Walt Whitman from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The book didn’t disclose Whitman’s name on the title page, but it included his full-page frontispiece portrait as a personal welcome, his shirt unbuttoned and his undershirt showing, a hand on his hip, a hand in his pocket, his gaze direct, his head cocked. “I look so damned flamboyant,” he later said about this image, “as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!” Flamboyant, yes, without a doubt, but the direction of the defiance is harder to read. Is he really saying to hell with us, or is he defying us to look away? Does he want his lightning bolt to fatally pierce us, or does he just want to electrify us? For his authorial debut almost a hundred years later, on the dust jacket of the 1947 first edition of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote went Whitman one better by draping himself on his back on a couch, one hand on his stomach and one on his crotch, and looking up at the viewer with a knowing gaze. Hilton Als reads this author photograph as both a metamorphosis and an expression of desire. The image turned Capote into “an American woman of style,” Als writes in White Girls, and “the woman he became in this photograph—itself better written than Other Voices, Other Rooms—wanted to be fucked by you and by any idea of femininity that had fucked you up.” The woman at the kitchen table in “Pandora in Blue Jeans” has undoubtedly been fucked up by femininity, as all women have, but she does not appear to want to be fucked by it or by us. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to want anything from us at all. If Capote’s photo is famously seductive and come-hither, “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is famously unsexy, telling us to go away. Circulating on the back of one of the most sexual and successful books of the decade, Grace Metalious’s scandalous 1956 mega–best seller Peyton Place, “Pandora in Blue Jeans” represents a white girl’s rejection of white-girl conventions, an unprecedented opting out of mainstream commercial feminine iconography that still managed to be wildly popular (if rarely imitated) and made an unlikely icon of a woman whose life seemed to consist of unglamorous obliviousness, unremarkable domesticity, and totally depraved thoughts. Read More
February 13, 2019 Arts & Culture Tove Jansson’s “The Island” By Tove Jansson Growing up in Sweden, I read the whole Astrid Lindgren canon from Pippi Longstocking to Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter, but my fascination with Tove Jansson, the equally beloved creator of the Moomins series, only began in New York, as an adult, after I discovered her novel The Summer Book. That book remains one of the most beautiful meditations on the beginning and the end of life I have ever read. During a recent trip to Stockholm, I noticed Bulevarden och Andra Texter, a new collection of stories and essays by Jansson, in the basement of Hedengrens, a venerable bookstore in a posh part of town. The texts, never reprinted before this compilation, span from 1934 to 1997 and cover a wide array of topics and genres, including tableaux of Jansson’s bohemian days in Paris, a humorous account of the indignities of house-hunting, a short story about a botched honeymoon in Fascist Capri, and a gentle manifesto on children’s literature. “The Island,” which I have translated here for the first time into English, was originally published in 1961 in a travel magazine, Turistliv i Finland. At once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem, the piece reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s. This text seems to change following mysterious tides. There are sudden shifts in point of view and tense—from an impersonal voice that can have the impassivity of nature to a profoundly physical first person, from a timeless present to an urgent past. The punctuation is quite peculiar. Several verbless fragments. Many sentences never really coalesce—they form, rather, a syntactical archipelago. —Hernan Diaz The island of Klovharu There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island. Sometimes deliberate people look for their island and conquer it, and sometimes the dream of the island can be a passive symbol for what is one step beyond reach. The island—at last, privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences. Read More
February 12, 2019 Arts & Culture The Racy Jazz Age Best Seller You’ve Never Heard Of By Michael LaPointe Ursula Parrott was accused of promoting a dangerous sexual freedom. In her best-selling novels, the controversial author chronicled “life in the era of the one-night stand” during the twenties and thirties. Parrott’s extraordinary life took her to the heights of literary New York and pre-Code Hollywood, then left her jailed, penniless, and alone. Today, her books are out of print, and her name is all but forgotten. I stumbled across her name in an advertisement at the back of a copy of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy from the early nineties. One of Parrott’s novels was sandwiched between works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison in a series of classics by “American Women Writers.” Eminent company, to be sure, but that was the last time one of her books was reissued—thirty years ago. Pursuing Parrott through the scant archives, I discovered an author whose work and life were exemplary of her time, yet strangely stranded there. Read More
February 12, 2019 Arts & Culture Lynne Tillman and the Illusion of Realism By Lucy Ives Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod. Realism disturbs me. For indeed fiction, if realistic, is a manufactured veil through which we train our gaze in order to obtain a pattern that organizes dots and squiggles into something legible, “an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop,” as Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books. Realism is paradoxical: a lie that reads true. We take two pet rocks, name one “Reality,” the other “My (Mimetic) Attempts to Write About It,” and smash them enthusiastically together. What survives is combed into a neat pile, carefully labeled, set out as a sort of snack. Figure 1. Mimesis is imitation, and when Aristotle talks about it in his Poetics, he means for it to do one thing: Imitation isn’t a faculty poets deploy to represent the world solely for the sake of skillfully representing the world. Imitation is deployed with the specific aim of inspiring recognition—of evoking, in a somewhat distant audience, a feeling of pity. (Aristotle: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ ”) We are brought to tears when someone on stage pokes out his eyes; safe in our chairs, we’ve confused him with ourselves. We’re deceived, yet in awe. Perhaps we resolve not to kill or have sex with our parents (or, failing this, not to get married—regarding which topic, more later). Read More