September 27, 2017 Books Writing a Memoir of Difficult Women By David Plante David Plante and Germaine Greer (center) with friends, in Umbria, 1975. Difficult Women comes, word for word, from my diary. I remember extracting entries about Jean Rhys after she died and pasting them together to form not so much a portrait of Jean but a portrait of my relationship with her. I gave the work to my partner, Nikos Stangos, to whom I gave all my writing for his comments; I recall coming in one evening and finding him in bed, reading, and he immediately said, “This is good!” He did not always say that about my writing. My friendship with Jean had very much to do with writing, about which she had some deeply inspiring insights. Read More
September 11, 2017 Books On the Pleasures of Front Matter By Elisa Gabbert I don’t believe in not believing in guilty pleasures. Guilt is good—it’s part of what keeps me, at least part of the time, from watching YouTube videos when I could be reading. That said, I’m a promiscuous and impatient reader, so one of my literary guilty pleasures is reading the introductions to great books and not the books themselves. My love affair with front matter began in earnest when I read the 1989 Jacob Needleman introduction to the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. At the time, I was compiling a list of hybrid works (part prose, part poetry), and a friend suggested the Tao Te Ching fit the criteria. I admitted to my friend that I’d never read it. I’ve still never finished it, but the introduction I’ve read several times, and heavily underlined—it seems to me a kind of philosophical inquiry into what a book even is: “As with every text that deserves to be called sacred, it is a half-silvered mirror.” I assume Needleman means that we both see through it and see ourselves reflected in it, but I always think, too, of the famous double-slit experiment that used half-silvered mirrors to demonstrate wave-particle duality; perhaps this association with the quantum weirdness of reality is not accidental. Read More
August 1, 2017 Books The Origins of American Noir By Megan Abbott Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “serial killer” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir. Read More
July 28, 2017 Books How a Silent-Film Vamp Nearly Drove Her Ghostwriter Mad By Luisa Zielinski Dagmar Godowsky. What do Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, and Tallulah Bankhead have in common? Dagmar Godowsky. Once a famous beauty, by the late 1950s Dagmar Godowsky found herself subsisting on caviar, cake, and tales of the past. Typecast as a vamp in the silent-screen era of the early 1920s, she had “hissed her way through a thousand scenes.” She had died by blade, bullet, poison, or strangulation. Yet the demise of silent cinema ended her own film career. Now she performed at the dinner tables of New York’s beau monde. Dagmar Godowsky knew how to busy herself. She always had. Born in 1897 as the daughter of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky—known better for his paraphrases of Liszt’s or Schubert’s pieces than his own—Dagmar grew up in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Los Angeles, and New York. Wherever they made their home, her father—a near-maniacal host—collected celebrities. On an ordinary day, Dagmar claimed, she might return home from school to encounter “Jakob Wassermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann. Thomas Mann. Every Mann.” She inherited not only her father’s seductive charm—her conquests numbered, if not “every man,” plenty of men and women, too—but his wit and skill as a raconteur. It was her storytelling that lured Sandford Dody. A struggling playwright, Dody became witness to Dagmar’s spiel one night at a party. In a remarkable error of judgment that launched an entire, regrettable career, Dody offered to ghostwrite Dagmar’s autobiography—an endeavor that, he was sure, would be both profitable and easy. It was neither. Read More
July 11, 2017 Books A Woman with All the Advantages By Daniel Mendelsohn Sybille Bedford in 1989. “Oh, shall we never escape the muddling consequences of our family history?” Luckily for readers of Sybille Bedford’s novels, the answer to that question—asked rather rhetorically by the heroine of A Favourite of the Gods, Bedford’s 1963 novel about a woman who has “all the advantages one would wish for and more,” with the exception of some very difficult relatives—is “no.” All of Bedford’s fiction, including A Favourite and its 1968 sequel A Compass Error, is preoccupied with the muddling consequences of history on whole families and their individual members. One of the epigraphs Bedford chose for A Compass Error is Victor Hugo’s observation that “the past is a part of us, perhaps the most essential.” The inescapability of the past, embodied above all in family histories and family behaviors, leads inexorably to a truth evoked by another epigraph she chose, this one from Middlemarch: “Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves … Ay, truly, but I think it is the world / That brings the iron.” The intersection between our deeds and “the world”—the larger histories of families and nations that often mock our belief in our ability to act freely—is a place to which Bedford returned again and again in her writing. The families in question are always of a given type: European, upper-class, sometimes titled, moneyed (usually as the result of an advantageous marriage to non-upper-class, non-titled outsiders), sophisticated, undogmatic except when their own self-image is concerned. The histories in question are sometimes private—the crucial background drama in A Favourite results from the cultural clash between an American heiress and her charmingly dissolute Italian husband—and sometimes political, even global. In A Legacy, Bedford’s remarkable 1956 debut, the military ambitions and protocols of Wilhelmine Germany set in motion a sequence of events that begins as absurd and ends in a tragedy that engulfs all of the novel’s families. The rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s impinges on the lives of that American heiress and her descendants in both A Favourite of the Gods and, even more strongly, A Compass Error, at whose conclusion the woman with “all the advantages” finally runs out of luck as she flees from Paris in 1940. Read More
June 7, 2017 Books Suicide Blonde at Twenty-Five By Maggie Nelson From the cover of the first edition of Suicide Blonde. “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” so begins Darcey Steinke’s “sensational” second novel, Suicide Blonde. I put the word “sensational” in quotation marks because a host of similar adjectives (“shocking,” “daring,” “scandalous,” and so on) greeted the novel at its publication in 1992. This may have given the book a well-deserved public velocity, but insofar as such adjectives also reflect the prudishness and insularity of many reviewers and readers, it also ran—and to some extent still runs—the risk of occluding some of the novel’s truest achievements, all of which are on display, in miniature, in its unforgettable opening sentence. The swirl of bourbon, blonde hair dye, and vaginal lips is audacious, sure, but it’s also funny, and evidences a fairly rare and delightful phenomenon I might call feminist camp. Feminist camp—which can be practiced by persons of any gender (see John Waters, who regularly identifies as a radical feminist)—doesn’t waste time exhibiting its feminist credentials. It simply moves with invention and forcefulness into a new field, one which both belongs to a canon of outlaw writers (Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Alexander Trocchi, William S. Burroughs, et cetera.), while also creating new ground to stand on (Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick, Virginie Despentes, and more). Suicide Blonde belongs to both of these traditions, as well as to other notable subsets, including noir, queer lit of the eighties and nineties (Michelle Tea, Leslie Feinberg, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles), classic twentieth-century fiction featuring itinerant, urbane women experimenting with dissolution and desire (Jean Rhys, Iris Owens, Renata Adler, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith), maybe even erotica (Steinke remains one of the few writers I know whose writing about sex manages to be both literary and hot). Read More