May 6, 2019 Arts & Culture A Space for Bette Howland By Honor Moore Bette Howland. Photo courtesy of Howland’s estate. In nice chairs, on a stage, sit five North American writers born in the thirties—three are dead, but only one was lost: Bette Howland, born in 1937. They’re seated younger to older, which has Howland next to Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, both born in 1938, and further down, Margaret Atwood and Toni Cade Bambara, born in 1939. Neither of the two others dead is as out of print as Bette Howland has been until the publication tomorrow of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. I love the very literary story: In 2015, Brigid Hughes, editor of the magazine A Public Space, finds W-3, Howland’s 1974 memoir, in a sale bin at a used bookstore, reads everything she wrote, and plans for Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage as a result. A press is founded, A Public Space Books. Publication of W-3 will be next—placing Howland next to Maxine Hong Kingston and Vivian Gornick as progenitors of the resurgence of memoir. Wherever you position Bette Howland’s absence, the vacancy is glaring—she has the kind of large presence on the page that reconfigures the literary history of its moment, as, for instance, the revival of Jean Rhys did in the sixties. Both were mentored by an A-list great male novelist—Rhys by Ford Madox Ford; Howland by Saul Bellow, whom she met at a writers’ conference on Staten Island in the early sixties. Like Rhys and Ford, Howland and Bellow were “lovers for a time.” He continued as her friend until the end of his life, giving her advice that’s solid gold for a blocked, often depressed writer lacking in self-confidence: “I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.” That Howland is being revived now makes her a member of a cohort who have benefited from the forty-year gap between the end of a woman’s youth and beauty when, at say forty, one’s reputation goes dark, until eighty or so, when one becomes a discovery. Think Marie Ponsot, American poet, the above-mentioned Rhys, or the recently deceased Diana Athill, “discovered” in her late nineties. When Howland came into this company, she was some years into dementia and multiple sclerosis; but the likenesses reproduced were of a sixties babe in bathing suit and sunglasses, a seventies beauty in a fedora. Not recognizing her in the photos, I was drawn to that exhausting formulaic epithet, “a lost woman writer”—then I saw the name. So it’s finally happened, I said to myself, I actually knew one of them. Read More
May 6, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: To the One I Love the Best By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. “She weighed about ninety pounds without her jewels, and when I met her she was ninety years old.” So Ludwig Bemelmans’s introduces Lady Mendl, Elsie de Wolfe in his 1955 memoir To the One I Love the Best. De Wolfe seems almost too eccentric to be true, a “wonderful living objet d’art,” her “crepy throat” festooned with jewels and her “arthritic hands” encased in her trademark spotless white gloves. Bemelmans—a celebrated illustrator and writer—first encountered de Wolfe in Los Angeles in 1945, a city in which they’re each more unmoored than most. He’d been working for MGM but the “elegant world of Hollywood” had left him feeling jaded, longing to take to the road as an “itinerant painter,” while de Wolfe had been living out the war in Beverley Hills after having fled her beloved Villa Trianon in France. Bemelmans is best known today either as an illustrator—some readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, decorated with murals he painted in the forties, or recognize his work from vintage New Yorker covers—or as the author of the Madeline books, the first of which was published in 1939 and has sold over 14 million copies to date. Less well known, however, is the fact that he was actually the author of over forty books, and although he began his writing life by penning volumes for children in the mid-‘30s, he went on to also write books for adult readers, too, many of which are now out of print, including To the One I Love the Best. Read More
May 3, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Color, Crags, and Croatia By The Paris Review Daša Drndić. Photo: Mavric Pivk. Daša Drndić’s EEG is a sequel of sorts to her novel Belladonna, also translated by Celia Hawkesworth and also published by New Directions. Like Belladonna, EEG is narrated by the retired psychologist and academic Andreas Ban, and its plot consists mainly of Ban sifting through documents, photographs, ephemera, and memories related to Croatian complicity with Nazism and the Yugoslav ethnic conflicts of the nineties. A traditional plot, though, isn’t necessarily what’s important to this story; truth is. “Autobiographical books don’t exist,” Ban observes near the novel’s beginning, “autobiographies don’t exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole melange of a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, remnants, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own.” “Little pieces” make up much of the book, as seen in one section concerned entirely with listing chess players who committed suicide or who collaborated with totalitarian regimes. EEG frequently stretches the definition of the novel to devastating effect, akin to Thomas Bernhard or Elfriede Jelinek, two writers Drndić has cited as influences. “Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue,” she told Dustin Illingworth in a 2017 interview featured on The Paris Review Daily, “be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Sadly, Drndić passed away last June at the age of seventy-two, but her books—concerned as they are with the crimes of the twentieth century—offer a blueprint as to what the novel in the twenty-first century could look like. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
May 3, 2019 First Person Love in the Time of Trump By Laura Kipnis A few months before the election, when eleven six-foot-five effigies of a naked Donald Trump, then the 2016 Republican presidential nominee—bulging paunch, saggy ass, mottled limbs, constipated visage, and puny dick—popped up around the country, I briefly liked being an American. We were tragic absurdists, a nation of disgusted pranksters. The statue had no balls. Like most women, I’ve never been entirely clear on what balls are for, or why they’re meant to symbolize traits like courage and daring. Aren’t they actually the most vulnerable spot on a man—is that how men conquered the world, by costuming their vulnerabilities as mettle? (Something I wish I were better capable of, for the record.) The country’s disgusted fascination with Trump’s body united us, or so I briefly thought. We were riveted: by the shameless comb-over, the Orangina skin, the stubby fingers, the clown-car neckties. It was a sick pleasure—you couldn’t take your eyes off him, no matter how much you despised him. Trump made it seem right-minded to despise him for his aged, saggy ass, and by extension all male bodies, aged and saggy or not, because that’s where their privilege resides—in their anus mouths and the gross stuff that came out of them, and where their sweaty hands traveled, and making every last thing about their all-important dicks. At some level, you sort of knew that bodily aesthetics shouldn’t bear the burden of moral judgments or political animus, but as far as Trump, we were going to hand him his saggy ass and send him on his way. Read More
May 3, 2019 Arts & Culture On The Importance of Not Writing By Mesha Maren HENRI GERVEX, “ROLLA,” 1878 We stalked the town in a posse, chigger-bitten skin exposed against the night heat. Most of us weren’t old enough for bars so we pooled our money and drank in the living room of the two-bedroom on Henrietta Street. We invented games. The best one was Confession. To take a shot you had to reveal something. The biggest secrets we had back then were crushes. I want to kiss her, don’t tell. In a journal entry dated September 20, 2003, I wrote, “I’m sitting on the tiny balcony with a book and a beer. I don’t want to read though. I don’t want to write either. Everything is good. Perfect warm night buzz. I haven’t found a job yet but that’s okay. There’s cumbia playing on the stereo in the living room, the smell of cooking beans. I have crushes on half my roommates: José, two months up from Mexico, who watches Mulholland Drive on repeat to learn English; Lara who’s studying to be a car mechanic (I think she likes girls but she’s so awkward when I try to flirt); Angela who’s married to a guy in Mexico but also has a girlfriend here. My life is so full up. It feels stupid to even try and write about it. I’ll never capture it. Even my best effort would still be like that guy I saw downtown last week, a man sitting on the sidewalk, playing the guitar with his feet. Everyone clapped and threw coins not because he was making incredible music but because he had managed a facsimile of a song with such a primitive appendage. My writing is to life what that’s man toe-song is to music.” Read More
May 2, 2019 Pinakothek Arcade By Lucy Sante In his new biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. People visited the arcade to stage a play for themselves and a select audience of their family and friends. The photographer supplied flats and props and the shallow space between them, and the subjects reserved the option of creating a performance in that setting. Most people did no such thing, of course, but just sat there like stumps, overwhelmed and maybe intimidated by the lights, the camera, the photographer who in those circumstances was likely to be a seasoned carny. The photographer might be spieling at them, three hundred words a minute, while the pikers would be struggling to follow along, finally giving in to whatever that last thing he said was. Which usually meant stuffing an extended family into a prop canoe or charabanc, snap, snap, and outta there. The ideal way to treat drunks was to stick their heads in those holes—in boards that supplied the rest of their pictured body: boxer, beauty queen, infant—effectively immobilizing them. Read More