Edna Clarke Hall, aged sixteen, ca. 1895. Photograph courtesy of Abbott and Holder Ltd.

The artwork of Edna Clarke Hall was born out of a kind of fixation more often associated with outsider artists, but Hall herself began as something of an insider. Accepted to London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art at just fourteen years old, she studied under the painter Philip Wilson Steer and became the favorite student of the school’s director, the renowned drawing instructor Henry Tonks. Many of her peers would go on to be celebrated artists—the stage designer Albert Rutherston, the painter Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, the sibling portraitists Gwen and Augustus John—and Hall seemed destined for similar success. But her fortunes changed six years later, with her marriage to William Clarke Hall, a lawyer thirteen years her senior with an affinity for young girls. (The poet Ernest Dowson once described him as a “devout follower of the most excellent cult of La Fillette.”) Read More

A Pop creation myth. Photographs courtesy of Erin McKenny.

Mary Ruefle, the poet and essayist, also makes unique hand-altered books: she sources, from thrift shops and used bookstores, secondhand texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then she goes through the pages and deselects words, applying liquid correction fluid, gouache, or other methods of obliteration. What remains is a kind of excavated composition. Her erasure texts range from slapstick to the absurd, from the lyrical to a wry melancholy. Ruefle, who is based in Vermont, has been making erasures, which she illustrates with collages, almost daily since 1998. Usually working on two pages a day, she has completed more than one hundred and twenty-five erasures to date, a selection of which are now on view through September 6 at Poets House in Downtown Manhattan—and several of which we’re presenting here.

—John Vincler

An existential novelization of a bird, M, crashing into his own reflection.

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Marguerite Duras in 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial project after several days of shooting, deciding instead to record the “disaster” it became. What results is an eighty-nine-minute composition of slow, panning shots and zoom-outs on the actors that would have starred (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière), the makeup and wardrobe they would have worn, and the Parisian backdrops and candlelit rooms in which they would have played their roles, overlaid by the voices of Duras and her friend the film director Benoît Jacquot reading directly from the text she had planned for the actors to use as their script. The original text, written in 1978, describes the paranoia and passion of an erotic affair conducted entirely over the telephone by a young man and woman, insomniacs both, the man working a night shift and the woman dying of leukemia, as they pleasure themselves to each other’s voices and make ill-fated plans to meet in person. Below, in a new English translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, is Duras’s account of the making and unmaking of Le navire Night, a film which she would elsewhere call “beautiful and vain.”

—Owen Park, editorial assistant

The story in Le navire Night was told to me in December ’77 by the person who had lived it, J.M., the young man of Les Gobelins. I knew J.M. and I knew the story. There were about ten of us who knew of its existence. But we had never spoken about it together, J.M. and I. It was after three years passed that one day—I had spoken about it with a friend of J.M., who said she had already forgotten certain details—I was afraid that the story would be lost. I asked J.M. to record it on tape. He agreed.

Apart from certain dates and the knot of names in Père Lachaise that he had never managed to disentangle, he remembered. Everything was still there. It was three years after the end of the story, F.’s wedding.

Hearing him tell it, I understood that J.M. had no doubt always hoped to bring this story face to face with a listener, but that he had always feared—when the moment came—that people wouldn’t believe him “if he said everything.”

And that rather than being troubled by it, he was happy to speak about it.

It was based on that tape recording that I wrote Le navire Night—twice over, with six months in between. The first version of the text is from February ’78, it appeared in Minuit journal. The second version of the text is what is published here, it is the final text from the film shoot, July ’78. I gave the first version of the text to J.M. He read it. He said that “everything was true but that he recognized nothing.” I asked him if I could publish it and then perhaps, later on, turn it into a film. He told me that he hoped I would. That day we stopped talking about the story. T o tell the truth, never again. After having read what his own experience became—in the words of another—J.M. remained silent but as if he were always on the verge of speaking. I think he must have realized that other versions of his story were possible—that he had silenced them because he didn’t know that they were possible just as they were possible for any story. I think too that his own version had carried him so far that he had forgotten its sprawl, its banality. Read More

Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale. It looked just like it does in this picture. Most of the papers are an English translation of a sixteenth-century letter written by a French Protestant. I still haven’t read it. What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891.

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