September 2, 2021 Off Menu Sister Sauce By Edward White In Off Menu, Edward White serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Albina Becevello. During a life of astonishing incident and variety, Gabriele D’Annunzio inhabited many guises. In the twenty years before World War I he established himself as a giant of Italian culture: an epochal writer often known simply as “the Poet” in Italy, a nationalist proselytizer, a storied lothario, and a daring aviator of spellbinding charisma. When the war came, D’Annunzio transformed himself into a soldier and a statesman who presaged the rise of Mussolini and the aesthetics of Fascism. A “poet, seducer and prophet of war” is how his biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes him, “an urbane socialite and man of letters,” as well as “a frenzied demagogue” who was “as ruthless and selfish as a baby.” His life intersected with many famous and infamous people, such as his sometime lover and muse Eleonora Duse, one of the most acclaimed actors of her day. But away from the excitement, scandal, and infamy that defined D’Annunzio’s public existence, one curious relationship ran like a steel girder through the last twenty-three years of his life: that with his cook, a much younger woman named Albina Becevello, about whom little is known other than her cooking. At a time when certain thinkers—inspired, to some degree, by D’Annunzio’s ideas about aestheticism, technology, and national identity—were advocating a complete revolution in Italian cuisine, Becevello nourished and indulged her employer with recipes that would have been familiar to the people of the Italian Peninsula even before the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century. Becevello was not a pioneering chef, but one who catered perfectly to her audience. As the authors Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani detail in their book about Becevello, D’Annunzio’s mania for eggs—he would routinely eat five a day—meant his cook became a brilliant exponent of frittata, the Italian variant of the omelet. Often Becevello could send him into raptures with an even more simple creation, such as her re-creation of the egg-and-anchovy dish he remembered from his childhood. “Albina, be praised forever and ever,” he once wrote her, “shine forever in the Constellation of the Egg and the Nebula of the Anchovy! Amen.” Santeroni and Miliani suggest that the relationship between Becevello and D’Annunzio gives the lie to the Poet’s reputation for misogyny. That seems a stretch, to put it kindly. But they’re surely correct in saying that through Becevello and her traditional cooking—her risotto alla Milanese and her spaghetti alla chitarra—a real human emerges beneath the layers of obnoxious and grandiloquent mythmaking in which D’Annunzio swaddled himself for the half-century that he occupied a central place in Italian public life. Read More
September 1, 2021 First Person Motherhood at the End of the World By Julietta Singh Ray Hennessy, Mother Bird Protecting Her Young, 2016, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. In the run-up to Thanksgiving last year, you learned a whitewashed story at school about how the first peoples of this land were happy to give their sacred spaces to the consumptive force of European men in the name of civilization and progress. You came home from school and unzipped your backpack, revealing with artistic pride a picture book you had colored and stapled yourself. Your kindergarten teacher had asked you to color in a little Native American girl, then a Native American boy, followed by a pilgrim girl and boy, each one garbed in their traditional attire. I admired the craft of your book, a swell of parental pride coursing through me as I witnessed the evidence of my progeny doing and making things in the world beyond me. And I relished that you had colored all four children Brown like you. As you flipped through the pages of your book, you narrated a sad story about how much the pilgrims had suffered when they arrived on this land. I felt a surge in my body, an immediate, unstoppable need to explain the other forms of suffering elided by this disturbingly singular narrative. I described some of the impacts of this arrival on Indigenous peoples—the European theft of their autonomies, cultures, languages, and lands. I explained that colonial practices dramatically changed how humans live in relation to this land. And I told you that this historical moment of colonial contact was crucial to understanding how we arrived at the global ecological crisis we face today. I will never forget the way you looked at me then, your head slightly tilted to one side, your eyes wide in bewilderment. We were sitting on the landing at the top of the apartment stairs, the contents of your backpack scattered around us. “This is not what my teacher told us,” you said with unmistakable agitation. I knew that for the first time you were confronting the existence of conflicting worldviews, a vital gulf between your formal education and your maternal one. “That’s okay,” I said. “My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.” I pressed on to explain that history is a story based on a version of the past. “Can you hear the word story in history?” I asked. You nodded slowly, a little body in deep rumination. “These stories need to be told from the perspectives of those who have been most damaged by history. These other stories,” I said, “can teach us how to keep living.” Read More
August 31, 2021 Redux Redux: Knowing It Would End By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photo: Angela Radulescu. This week at The Paris Review, as summer winds down, we’re thinking about endings. Read on for Toni Morrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Steven Millhauser’s short story “Flying Carpets,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, take advantage of this last week of our summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99. Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) INTERVIEWER What about plot? Do you always know where you’re going? Would you write the end before you got there? MORRISON When I really know what it is about, then I can write that end scene. I wrote the end of Beloved about a quarter of the way in. I wrote the end of Jazz very early and the end of Song of Solomon very early on. What I really want is for the plot to be how it happened. It is like a detective story in a sense. You know who is dead and you want to find out who did it. Read More
August 31, 2021 Re-Covered The Madame Bovary of North-East London By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In the final months of 1922, people all across the United Kingdom were gripped by a cause célèbre. In the early hours of October 4, Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, and his wife, Edith, a twenty-eight-year-old bookkeeper and buyer for a millinery business, were making their way home after a trip to the theater in the West End. About a hundred yards from their house in Ilford, a lower-middle-class suburb in North-East London, a man suddenly appeared, stabbed Percy multiple times in the face, neck, and body, and then raced off into the night. Percy died almost instantly. Reporting on the event the following day, the Times declared that the details were still “a mystery,” and that the police were waiting for Edith to recover enough to be able to “give a coherent account of the incidents preceding her husband’s death.” Then, only twenty-four hours later, the case took an unexpected twist when the police announced that they’d charged two persons: Edith and a twenty-year-old ship’s steward named Frederick Bywaters, who had for a short time been the Thompsons’ lodger. Edith and Bywaters had been conducting an illicit affair for the previous eighteen months. Their correspondence, written while Bywaters was away at sea, had been found by the police and was being used as evidence for the prosecution. By the time the trial began—two months later, on December 6, at the Old Bailey—much of the content of these letters was already all over the press. Every day the court’s public gallery was packed. The enterprising unemployed began queuing outside as early as 4 A.M., selling their spots to those with money in their pockets who arrived later in the day. For those unable to afford these escalating prices—in his book Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, René Weis reports that by the final day of the trial a seat in the gallery was going for more than the average weekly wage—the Times reproduced verbatim transcripts from each day’s proceedings. On Monday, December 11, the jury announced their verdict: both defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As he was removed from the dock, Bywaters was still protesting that Edith was innocent, as he had done throughout the trial—a refrain that she herself loudly took up as the reality of her fate sunk in. Sobbing and screaming, she was half dragged, half carried back to the cells to await her execution. Read More
August 30, 2021 First Person Tree Time By Sumana Roy Livingston, Neem Tree Crow, 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras. Then it had to do with the specter of violence. I loved the way in which trees coped with dark and lonely places while sunlessness decided curfew hours for me. I liked, too, how trees thrived on things that were still freely available—water, air, and sunlight; and no mortgage in spite of their lifelong occupation of land. My amorphous fancies about trees began to coalesce when I entered middle age and began to weigh the benefits of a freelancer’s life against that of a salaried professional. An epiphany wrapped me like a tendril—were trees freelancers or salaried employees? A tree was a daily wage laborer, its life of work bound to the cycle of sunlight. Holidays, vacations, weekends, the salaried life, pension, loans—all of these were recent inventions, nothing more than consolations offered to employees like myself. So, when I look back at the reasons for my disaffection with being human, and my desire to become a tree, I can see that at root lay the feeling that I was being bulldozed by time. As I removed my watch from my wrist, and clocks from my walls, I realized that all my flaws—and this I now discover I share with many others—came from my failure to be a good slave to time. I began envying the tree, its disobedience to human time. All around me were estate developers sending their fleets of workers to construct skyscrapers to tight schedules.The trees they planted in the gated communities annoyed them—they would grow at their natural pace. It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to “hurry up.” In envy, in admiration and with ambition, I began to call that pace “tree time.” (Was it this that Salvador Dalí wanted to invoke when he placed so many of his melting clocks on trees in his paintings?) Read More
August 27, 2021 Document Notes on Chuck Close in Rome By Henri Cole A page from Henri Cole’s 1995-96 notebook In 1995, the poet Henri Cole traveled to Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. While there, he spent time with the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, who died last week, aged eighty-one. Recently, Cole came across a notebook in which he had recorded his impressions. Read More