The following piece is excerpted from Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company next week. Max Jacob was born in 1876 to a nonobservant Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany. After succeeding brilliantly at the lycée, he went to Paris for advanced studies at the École Coloniale and in law. He gravitated quickly, however, to a life in the arts. He met Picasso in 1901, and their intense friendship became the nucleus of the community of modern artists at the ramshackle studios in Montmartre, the Bateau-Lavoir. Jacob experienced a mystical vision of Christ in 1909 and formally converted to Roman Catholicism in 1915. He is most famous for his collection of radical prose poems, Le Cornet à dés (1917) (The Dice Cup), but he published many other collections of poems in verse and prose, novels, short stories, plays, and esthetic meditations. He spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (1921–1928 and 1936–1944). He was arrested by the gestapo in February 1944 and died of pneumonia on March 5, 1944, at the camp at Drancy. His name was on the list for the next transport to Auschwitz.

Max Jacob. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In late December of 1943, Max Jacob went to Orléans and Montargis to buy Christmas gifts for the children of the village of Saint-Benoît. He stayed for five days as a guest in the house of one of his doctor friends in Montargis, where he enjoyed the warmth of a cheerful family. He returned to Saint-Benoît for Christmas—the Mass celebrated in the basilica, the crèche with its plaster figures brought out year after year—followed by days of writing letters of New Year’s greetings and making ceremonial visits in the village. When he reported all this to Jacques Mezure on January 5, 1944, he didn’t yet know that his sister, Mirté-Léa, had been arrested.

Mirté-Léa was seized on January 4 and taken to the internment camp at Drancy. Jacob was beside himself. He threw himself into a campaign to save her, writing to everyone he imagined might have influence with the Germans: Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Misia Sert, Sacha Guitry, the Bishop of Orléans, the Archbishop of Sens. He consulted his friend Julien Lanoë about whether or not to ask Coco Chanel, who had a German lover. His letters were heart-wrenching. He described his little sister, the “companion of his childhood,” her suffering as a widow, her devotion to her mentally handicapped son. “Dear friend, permit me to kiss your hands, the hem of your dress … I beg you, do something,” he implored Misia. Sacha Guitry replied that he couldn’t help “some unknown Jew.” If it were Max, he said, “he could do something.”

Drancy now contained men, women, and children. Transports to Auschwitz were leaving almost every week. Even as her brother sent his desperate appeals, Mirté-Léa was shoved into a train car on January 20; she went immediately to the gas chamber on her arrival. Max Jacob never knew what became of her. Read More

The following is Eileen Myles’s foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, the first anthology of its kind. F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry will be released by isolarii later this month.

Galina Rymbu and Yes Women group (Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber), MY VAGINA, 2020.

Only yesterday I think it was yesterday I drove here to Long Island from New York City and I stopped at a small farm that sells milk and eggs. The name of the farm is welsh—Ty Llwyd.

The language excited me and I couldn’t stop telling the woman there about my trip to Wales same time she had moved to the states—’bout 1970. She showed absolutely no interest. Yeah, yeah. I was in Russia in 1995 and 2017. I digress. I’m queer, and most recently I’m thinking of myself as a they feminist. I was formerly a they lesbian wanting to suture the two groups dykes and transwomen in particular since there’s a growing sense in the trans community that lesbians and trans women are in opposition and I just don’t think it’s true. But I’m becoming more interested in attaching my transness to my feminism not my female body. I think the female body is every body’s business. Yet so much of the pleasure of this book (and my own work historically and today) is all the iterations of the things that happen to a female body. The pussy in time:

Her vulva resembles a large gray rabbit –
large, a bit fat and gray
with long hanging ears, why

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Illustration for a Rebecca paper doll by Jenny Kroik for The Paris Review

“The sexiness of [Rebecca] is maybe the most unsettling part, since it centers on the narrator’s being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the memory and the mystery of her new husband’s dead wife.” —Emily Alford, Jezebel

NB: This essay contains all of the spoilers for Rebecca.

Rebecca had good taste—or maybe she just had the same taste as me, and that’s why I thought it was good. She loved a particular shade of vintage minty turquoise. The kitchen cabinets were all this color. As were the plates inside. The cups and bowls were white with dainty black dots on them. Not polka dots—a smaller, more charming print.

I loved them. I might have picked them out myself. It made me feel sick that I loved them.

I imagined Rebecca had picked out these cups and plates when she moved into this house, but the cupboards I was investigating, and the very lovely dishes inside them, now belonged to her ex-husband, my boyfriend. Rebecca lived fifteen minutes away.

Of course, her name wasn’t really Rebecca. But grant me a theme. We’ll call him Maxim.

*

Every once in a while, a book will pass through my writers’ group, all of us swept up in reading the same novel. In the early days of my dating Maxim, that book was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My friend Emily was rereading it to write an essay for Jezebel called “The Nihilistic Horniness of a Good Gothic Read: Ranking the Genre’s Sexiest and Scariest Secrets.” Rebecca ranks number one. Emily’s love for the novel was so persuasive the rest of us soon joined in.

The basic premise of Rebecca is that our narrator, a naive young woman, marries an older, brooding widower and goes to live in his strange and beautiful house, where it rapidly becomes clear that the legacy of his dead wife, the titular Rebecca, is … potent. The narrator constantly worries over whether she can run the house as well as Rebecca did.

At one point, Emily was in the bathtub with a scotch and the novel and somehow still had enough hands to text us:  THIS WOMAN’S ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE SERVANTS ARE MEAN TO HER AND I WANT THAT LIFE.

The servants do not like the narrator for the very good reason that she is not Rebecca. Beyond the servants, of course, the narrator is also concerned that she’ll never live up to Rebecca in Maxim’s heart, that in the wake of his great and tragic love, she stands no chance.

Again, from Emily’s bath: EVEN THE DOGS DON’T LIKE HER.

*

I had never read Rebecca before. About fifty pages in I felt stupid because I hadn’t retained the narrator’s name. I flipped back through the opening and still couldn’t find it. Maxim was the husband. Rebecca was his dead wife. Mrs. Danvers was the housekeeper. Jasper was the dog.

WTF, I texted Emily, THE DOG HAS A NAME BUT NOT THE NARRATOR?

HE’S A VERY GOOD DOG, Emily said.

For 410 pages, the narrator of Rebecca is only ever known as The Second Mrs. de Winter—and isn’t that just the whole story?

CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING HORRIBLE? I asked Emily.

OF COURSE

I’VE BEEN FEELING A LOT LIKE THE SMDW LATELY

OH GIRL

*

The little white house in New York where my Maxim lived was no Manderley, but like Manderley, the house was an issue. The house with Rebecca’s lovely dishes in the cupboard. The house with art on the walls no man would ever pick. The red, floral, calico curtains, which Maxim eventually took down because, despite having sewn them himself, he had never liked the print Rebecca picked (I did) and after that there were no curtains at all. The kitchen where I cooked us dinner and accidentally used a special salt Rebecca had favored but left behind, which made Maxim look up from his meal and ask, What did you put in here?

One afternoon I was working at a desk in the office and, playing with the drawer, found inside Rebecca’s birth certificate. I’d already known we were born a week apart because on our second date Maxim had asked my birthday and blanched when I’d said October.

More than once Maxim returned an article of women’s clothing to me that was not mine.

There were notes in Rebecca’s handwriting on the fridge and photos of her in the house, and this was right and good, because she and Maxim had a daughter, an eight-year-old girl who was funny and sweet and who I was very lucky to know for those nearly two years. I must leave her out of this—she is a still-becoming person—but of course she remains an invisible source of gravity in this story. There were photos of them at Disney World. Photos of them holding their daughter the day she was born.

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