February 5, 2020 In Memoriam Kamau Brathwaite: 1930–2020 By Vijay Seshadri Photo: repeatingislands.com The early notices of Kamau Brathwaite’s death yesterday emphasized the indisputable fact that he was a Caribbean and West Indian writer. The emphasis says something crucial about Brathwaite as a person and an artist. He wrote over thirty books of an astonishing variety and sophistication—history, anthropology, tracts and polemics, poetry and fiction (the poetry and fiction unique and radical in the way language and the technologies of language are understood and deployed). He ranged over three continents during his tremendous career. He went to college in England and studied with F. R. Leavis. He did not only live and work in Africa, he had an Africanist period in his thinking and took an African first name. He taught in New York. He never, though, separated himself from either his imaginative allegiance to the speech and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean or his physical allegiance to his birthplace, Barbados. The eulogies now pouring out of that island are rich with the kind of grief and pride that are triggered only by the loss of a beloved native son. It’s just as indisputable, though, that unless it is understood the right way, saying Brathwaite was a Caribbean and West Indian writer also obscures something crucial about him as a person and an artist. Brathwaite was born in 1930, only five years after Frantz Fanon and only twelve years after Nelson Mandela. He was one of the last surviving members of the first generation of postcolonial writers and intellectuals, the generation that witnessed Partition, Dien Bien Phu, Sharpeville, the Algerian war of independence, the Mau Mau Uprising, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. No other writer of that remarkable generation was more transparent to the inner process of decolonization; and no other writer among his peers was as committed to making literature align down to its very bones, down to its typefaces and orthographies, with the task of forging a new consciousness. Brathwaite’s experimentalism was never just experimentalism. Brathwaite’s insistence on his local idiom and his theories of “nation language” were as far removed as possible from writing in the vernacular for the sake of the vernacular. These elements in his art and craft were always a response to the largest problem of the postcolonial historical experience: the problem of rehabilitating the colonized mind and restoring it to its equilibrium. His solutions were radical and stunning, in both theory and practice. Those of us who share that history, whether East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, American, are enormously indebted to him for the clear and steady way he confronted and clarified our understanding of ourselves. So are those of us who believe in the power of literature. Read Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Coral” in our Winter 2019 issue. Vijay Seshadri is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.
February 5, 2020 Arts & Culture Notes of a Chronic Rereader By Vivian Gornick It has often been my experience that rereading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character, or this or that plot turn—they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marveling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip? Like most readers, I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. On vacation with family or friends, I am quite capable of settling myself, book in hand, on the living room couch in a beautiful country house and hardly stirring out into the glorious green for which we have all come. Once, on a train going through the Peruvian Andes, with everyone else ooh-ing and aah-ing out the window, I couldn’t lift my eyes from The Woman in White. On a Caribbean beach I sat in the blazing sun, Diane Johnson’s Lesser Lives (an imagined biography of George Meredith’s first wife) propped on my knees, and was surprised when I looked up to see that I wasn’t surrounded by the fog and cold of 1840s England. The companionate-ness of those books! Of all books. Nothing can match it. It’s the longing for coherence inscribed in the work—that extraordinary attempt at shaping the inchoate through words—it brings peace and excitement, comfort and consolation. But above all, it’s the sheer relief from the chaos in the head that reading delivers. Sometimes I think it alone provides me with courage for life, and has from earliest childhood. Read More
February 4, 2020 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. Charles Johnson in his office, with his grandson Emery, 2016. This week at The Paris Review, we’re preoccupied by questions of impermanence and longing. Read on for Charles Johnson’s Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Tricks,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239 Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018) Take Marcus Aurelius—Meditations got me through Stony Brook University. I’m a Ph.D. candidate, with the pressures of teaching undergraduates, passing my own graduate classes, my qualifying exam, and living in 1975 on my four-thousand-dollar assistantship, with a first child on the way, no job yet, and a second philosophical novel to complete that had to be more expansive than the first one. Meditations got me through because Marcus Aurelius understood suffering, impermanence, and death almost as well as a Zen master. And Plato once said that philosophy is really preparation for death. I extend that wisdom to our very notion of the self as an enduring entity. You let go of the things that are simply unnecessary. Read More
February 4, 2020 At Work The Body Is a Place: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch By Cornelia Channing Two pages into Lidia Yuknavitch’s story “The Pull,” a young girl recalls her childhood as “the kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” This would be a fitting description for most of the stories in Yuknavitch’s new collection, Verge, a bracing and frequently brutal book that explores the darkest margins of human desire in hybrid, fragmentary prose. As the title suggests, Verge is a book full of precipices. The protagonists include a child trafficking organs through an Eastern European black market, a teenage girl fantasizing about the men at a prison near her house, and a boxer with a threatening heart condition. Despite their differences, Yuknavitch’s characters share a certain precariousness. They are at moments of transition, standing on ledges of various kinds—emotional, societal, ethical and, in one case, literal—grappling with whether or not to jump. I first encountered Yuknavitch’s writing in college, when a friend thrust her memoir The Chronology of Water into my hands at a party. “You have to read this,” she insisted. “It broke my brain.” The book, which has developed something of a cult following, opens with Yuknavitch standing in the shower after the stillbirth of her daughter. The intimate account of sexual abuse and drug addiction is as formally innovative as it is harrowing. It broke my brain (and my heart), too. In addition to her memoir, Yuknavitch is the author of four novels, including the best sellers The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan. Verge is her first collection of stories. Yuknavitch writes about the body, particularly the ways bodies function as sites of emotional experience, intelligence, and memory. In an essay in The New Yorker, Garth Greenwell writes: “Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.” Whether depicting sex or trauma or splendor, her writing is visceral. At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin. For this interview, Yuknavitch spoke with me over the phone from her writing studio in Portland, Oregon, a room she describes as “a big mess full of all sorts of trinkets and talismans—bones, rocks, hair, weird shells, and other witchy things.” She was generous and precise, frequently pausing midsentence to clarify her use of a particular word or phrase. “The way we say things matters a great deal,” she explained. “But I’m longing for the day when we invent beautiful and agitating new words for all of it.” Read More
February 4, 2020 Dice Roll The Edison of the Slot Machines By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen Tommy saw the solution in a dream. “I’m seeing myself from behind,” he recalled, “and I have [the tool] in my hand.” All through 1990, he’d been searching for a way to cheat the latest slot machines. He needed a new tool, something to replace the clumsy old instrument that had landed him in the penitentiary. Night and day in his Vegas apartment, he toiled on a Fortune One video poker machine. But no matter what he tried, some riddle in the guts of the unit would thwart him. Then, in the recess of sleep, the solution appeared in all its brilliant simplicity: a flexible piece of metal, wedged at the top, and some piano wire. “I woke up,” he told the History Channel, “actually got out of bed, and went and built it.” Tommy had found his answer: The Monkey Paw. * When a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was just an unremarkable repairman who moonlighted as a pool hustler. He had minor drug convictions and some juvenile mischief on his criminal record, but nothing about the thirty-year-old suggested that he’d one day stand among the most inventive cheats in gambling history. Carmichael’s friend had brought along some toys to tinker with: a Bally’s slot machine and a cheating device called the top-bottom joint. Of how his multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise got started that day, Carmichael simply said, “We got to playing around.” Triggering a payout with a top-bottom joint was a crude operation. A piece of guitar string comprised the “bottom” part of the tool. It went into the left corner of the machine, up against the circuitboard, and sent low-wattage electricity coursing through the unit. The “top” part was a piece of metal curved like the number nine. When inserted into the coin slot, it completed a circuit powerful enough to hot-wire the hopper, where the coins are kept. Jackpot. Read More
February 3, 2020 Arts & Culture The Closeting of Carson McCullers By Jenn Shapland Carson McCullers, 1959. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.” Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. So Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina. She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” her original title for The Member of the Wedding. Shortly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first from Charlotte to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?) Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times, T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.” Read More