Fernando Pessoa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

One afternoon while browsing in the English bookstore, located midway between two of the offices where he worked for a few hours nearly every day, Fernando Pessoa spotted a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The scandal generated by its partial publication in The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920, may not have reached Pessoa’s attention, but by 1933 he knew all about its celebrity status as a banned book, judged obscene and still unavailable in the United Kingdom and the United States. The copy he saw—​and purchased—​was of the two-​volume Odyssey Edition, published in December 1932, in Germany. Both volumes have come down to us in pristine condition, without so much as a fleeting pencil mark. The only evidence that Pessoa actually read Ulysses, or enough of it to know that he wanted to read no more, is the laconic commentary he scribbled, in Portuguese, on a scrap of paper:

The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it is made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is oneiric delirium—​the kind treated by psychiatrists—​presented as an end in itself.

A literature on the brink of dawn.

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Edward Hopper, Hotel Window, 1955, oil on canvas, 40 x 55″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. I don’t suppose that sort of gaze is even possible except within the city. You can hear the lonely saxophone-on-fire-escape (in principle, the instrument may vary) cry through Gershwin. Aaron Copland. You remember Sonny Rollins on the bridge (the structure varies, too, of course). So what in the world is that about? That there should be a characteristic thread of melody, a certain sort of mood to sound its way through all that lofty, sooty jumble to convey so clear and, as it seems, eternal a sense of loss and resignation. How in the world do you get “eternal” out of “saxophone” and “fire escape”? It doesn’t make much sense. That it should get to you—to me at least—more sharply, deeply, sadly than the ancient, naturally mournful, not to say eternal, sound of breath through reed or bamboo flute.

Not too many years ago, as I began to wonder about the mournfulness of cities—its expression in this way—I brought a recording of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City concert piece to my then-girlfriend Nancy’s house on a chilly winter evening. She had friends or family staying, so we slept in the front bedroom, which, because of its exposure or some problem with the heater, was quite cold. So I remember all the quilts and blankets and huddling up together as if desperate in some Lower East Side tenement and listening to this music break our hearts about ourselves, our struggling immigrant immersion and confusion in this terrible complexity. The lonely verticality of life. And why should sadness sound so sweet? I guess the sweetness is the resignation part.

I’d like to set up an experiment to chart the sadness—try to find out where it comes from, where it goes—to trace it, in that melody (whichever variation) as it threads across Manhattan from the Lower East Side straight across the river, more or less west, into the suburbs of New Jersey and whatever lies beyond. This would require, I’m guessing, maybe a hundred saxophonists stationed along the route on tops of buildings, water towers, farther out on people’s porches (with permission), empty parking lots, at intervals determined by the limits of their mutual audibility under variable conditions in the middle of the night, so each would strain a bit to pick it up and pass it on in step until they’re going all at once and all strung out along this fraying thread of melody for hours, with relievers in reserve. There’s bound to be some drifting in and out of phase, attenuation of the tempo, of the sadness for that matter, of the waveform, what I think of as the waveform of the whole thing as it comes across the river losing amplitude and sharpness, rounding, flattening, and diffusing into neighborhoods where maybe it just sort of washes over people staying up to hear it or, awakened, wondering what is that out there so faint and faintly echoed, faintly sad but not so sad that you can’t close your eyes again and drift right back to sleep. Read More

Claire Lispector by Maureen Bisilliat, August 1969, IMS Collection. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In an interview with Jùlio Lerner for TV Cultura, Clarice Lispector described her final writing project, the novella The Hour of the Star, as “the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs.” “That’s not the story, though,” she continued. “The story is about a crushed innocence, an ‘anonymous misery.’ ” This idea of a “crushed innocence, an anonymous misery” is the axis upon which all of Lispector’s work revolves. Lispector, a Jewish Ukrainian, was forced to flee with her family. They migrated to Brazil, where they lived in Recife, in the northeast. In Recife, Lispector’s mother died when she was nine and her father struggled to find a means to support the family. In the same TV interview, Lispector is asked, “Clarice, what did your father do professionally?” This is a common question used to determine one’s social class. Lispector’s face in the frame during the interview appears sad: her eyes, turned away, her mouth half-open. The question is a form of wounding: you can answer and remain fixed in your social class or you can lie or, of course, you can answer obliquely. Lispector tells the truth. She responds, “A sales representative, things like that.” Indeed, Lispector was intimate with precarity. In her preface to The Hour of the Star she wrote, “I dedicate it [this book] to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster.”

“My truest life is unrecognizable,” Lispector writes in The Hour of the Star, “extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.” This sentiment, of being inexplicable to others, speaks directly to Lispector’s own experience. Though she was the child of immigrants raised in poverty, when Lispector became a recognized writer, she appeared to the Brazilian middle class as a member of their class. And yet, at the same time, she appeared mysterious, an enigma. This seeming strangeness is due to the middle class’s blindness to the working class. They are unable to comprehend Lispector because they are unable to see beyond the confines of their own social class. Like Barbara Loden, who appears incomprehensible to middle-class women, Lispector, excised from her social class, with her melancholia, her alienation from middle-class society, and her removal from the literary world, appears incomprehensible, too. Read More

Frederick Walker, A.R.A., Rochester and Jane Eyre, 1899. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The summer that I did my chaplaincy internship was a wildly full twelve weeks. I was thirty-two years old and living in the haze of the end of an engagement as I walked the hospital corridors carrying around my Bible and visiting patients. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m from the spiritual care department. How are you today?”

It was a surreal summer full of new experiences hitting like a tsunami: you saw them coming but that didn’t mean you could outrun them. But the thing that never felt weird was that the Bible I carried around with me as I went to visit patient after patient, that I turned to in the guest room at David and Suzanne’s or on my parents’ couch to sustain me, was a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel. The Bible I carried around that busy summer was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Read More

Virginia Woolf, 1902. Photo: George Charles Beresford. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out begins, Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose are making their way from the Strand to the Thames Embankment, where a rowboat will take them to a steamer that will take them across the Atlantic to South America. Helen Ambrose—fortyish, beautiful, hard to please—is quietly weeping. “Mournfully” she regards the old man who rows the boat and the anchored ship he rows them to, for they are “putting water between her and her children.” They are joined on this journey aboard the Euphrosyne—the first voyage out—by Mr. Pepper, a prickly scholar who went to Cambridge with Ridley Ambrose, and twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace, the Ambroses’ niece, whose mother is dead. She’s been raised (to unsatisfactory fashion, in Helen’s eyes) by her father, Willoughby Vinrace, upon whose ship they travel, and her other aunts. Among this group on the ship, Helen fears she’ll be “considerably bored.” (The specter of boredom is important in Woolf’s work; Orlando strikes me as a novel about life’s infinite richness, and how life is still somehow a bore.)

The ship drops anchor again in Lisbon, where they collect two additional passengers for part of the journey, none other than Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, characters Woolf would go on to write several stories and another novel about. The Dalloways’ snobbishness puts Helen off, but they connect on the subject of children. “Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?” Clarissa asks. “It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool,” Woolf writes. “Their eyes became deeper.” Their talk makes moody Rachel feel excluded, “outside their world and motherless.” Helen is consumed with thoughts of her children now, but soon she will seem to forget them almost entirely. It is just one example of the book’s most prevalent theme: the limiting nature of perspective. The people in England and the people on ships are unreal to each other. “But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm … For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water,” Woolf writes. “The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.” Much as it’s nearly impossible to imagine being hot when one is freezing cold, or happy when one is miserable, the passengers on the Euphrosyne can hardly imagine what life is like in London, or that it goes on at all. Read More

Georg Pencz, Samson and Delilah, ca. 1500–1550, engraving, 1 7/8 × 3 1/8’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I

The ships landed on the beaches of Normandy before dawn. Along eighty kilometers of coastline, amphibious vessels slid out of the water like sea monsters and shook themselves dry, flinging off their damp bodies thousands of men smeared with the same euphoria of war. Insatiable, the beach seemed to de­vour the troops. Aircrafts helped feed the assault from the sky: one by one, the soldiers surrendered themselves to flight, to the allure of the fall. Their jellyfish silhouettes—ephemeral but perfect for slipping through the air—negotiated gravity until the feel of the sand returned to them the animal weight of their bodies.

The landings lasted more than a month and with them the war was near its end. No seaborne invasion has ever equaled that of the Allies on the coast of France. Following the tides of the English Channel, armies from all over the world gathered to free France from Nazi occupation and to contain Nazi control of Western Europe. Besides soldiers, the crew also included spies, nurses, and correspondents. Among them were Robert Capa, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway—their eyes wide open.

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Thanks to the work of Robert Capa, there is now a large photographic archive of the Allies’ expedition in France. Many of his photographs capture in detail the textured expressions of civilians and soldiers, whose faces convey everything from the meekness of subjugation to the ecstasy of liberation, from the understanding of survival to the sheen of fear.

Among these images that bear witness to the Allies’ victory over the Nazis and shed light on the jubilation that flooded the streets of French towns is a series of photographs taken in Chartres just two months after the Normandy landings. The series is a visual record of the violence deployed against women accused of carrying on relationships with German soldiers or collaborating with them. While men convicted of the same crime were killed, the women were subjected to a different kind of punishment: in a public place, as everyone watched, their hair was shorn down to their scalps. The purpose of their shaved heads was not only to provoke disgust in those who saw them but also to serve as a protracted reminder of the betrayals they were accused of. Read More