January 15, 2019 Arts & Culture A Lost Piece of Trans History By Matthew H. Birkhold Images from The Third Sex “A final moment of reluctance overcame me,” Hans Hannah Berg wrote, “as I stepped across the threshold of the house.” Dressed in a custom black dress, white gloves, and fine pearls, Hans Hannah looked impeccable. She cut a fine figure walking down the street, announced by a hint of perfume and the gentle jangling of bangles. But Hans Hannah was anxious: this was her first outing as a woman. Hans Hannah wrote about the occasion for the inaugural issue of The Third Sex (Das 3. Geschlecht), likely the world’s first magazine devoted to trans issues. First published in Berlin in 1930, The Third Sex circulated in the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s democratic experiment between the wars. After the Nazis seized power, they destroyed the publishing house, and the magazine was largely forgotten. As a result, most accounts today name fifties America as the birthplace of trans periodicals. The recent republication of The Third Sex by the Bibliothek rosa Winkel revives lost voices from Germany’s queer past and recovers a remarkable piece of trans history. Read More
January 15, 2019 Listen John Dos Passos at the 92nd Street Y By Lydia Davis JOHN DOS PASSOS “75 at 75: Writers on Recordings,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary and beyond, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Lydia Davis reflects on John Dos Passos’s reading from January 18, 1965, which was introduced by her father, Robert Gorham Davis, Columbia English professor and literary critic. Offered the rich array of events recorded in the decades-spanning Unterberg Poetry Center archive, I was immediately drawn to comment upon John Dos Passos reading at the 92nd Street Y, before knowing what he had read or how interesting the evening was or wasn’t. I was drawn to it because the one who introduced him that evening—January 18, 1965—was my father, Robert Gorham Davis, then a literary critic and professor at Columbia. I had another strong reason to want to revisit Dos Passos, and it was that one of his books, most likely Manhattan Transfer or part of the U.S.A. trilogy, was the first book that appealed to me, at age twelve or fourteen, purely for the quality of the writing. I have tried and tried, without success, to find what I remember as those limpid, incantatory opening paragraphs. It was perhaps my first “grown-up” book (if I don’t count Mazo de la Roche’s rather steamy Jalna series). To be intrigued by more than plot and character, by the language of the writing itself, was the beginning of my slow awakening to the power of writing. And, of course, it changed the way I read a book—no longer mainly for the story, for an escape into another world, but now also for the way the sentences were formed, the kind of language that was used. Read More
January 14, 2019 Arts & Culture How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary By Ismail Muhammad … to be a Negro is—is?— to be a Negro, is. To Be. —from “Toomer,” by Elizabeth Alexander Jean Toomer had a complex relationship to his first and only major publication, the 1923 book Cane. The “novel,” which Penguin Classics has recently reissued with an introduction by the literary scholar George Hutchinson and a foreword by the novelist Zinzi Clemmons, is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, prose vignettes, and poetry that became an unlikely landmark of Harlem Renaissance literature. Its searching fragments dramatize the disappearance of African-American folk culture as black people migrated out of the agrarian Jim Crow South and into Northern industrial cities. It is a haunting and haunted celebration of that culture as it was sacrificed to the machine of modernity. Toomer termed the book a “swan song” for the black folk past. The literary world was then (as it is now, perhaps) hungry for representative black voices; as Hutchinson writes, “Many stressed the ‘authenticity’ of Toomer’s African-Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being.” This act of conjuring lured critics into reflexively accepting the book as a representation of the black South—and Toomer as the voice of that South. As his one-time friend Waldo Frank remarked in a forward to the book’s original edition, “This book is the South.” Cane transformed Toomer into a Negro literary star whose influence would filter down through African-American literary history: his interest in the folk tradition crystallized the Harlem Renaissance’s search for a useable Negro past, and would be instructive for later writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison to Elizabeth Alexander. Read More
January 14, 2019 Mess With a Classic Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s new column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). Sylvia Plath in April 1954, as a student at Smith College (Photo: JUDY SNOW DENISON) When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it. I love Plath’s poetry, but what if I didn’t like this story? I read The Bell Jar so long ago, when I was fourteen or so, that I couldn’t remember anything about it. But I read The Catcher in the Rye at around the same time, and I remember that book clearly. Had I only meant to read The Bell Jar, and never finished it? Oh God, I thought, what if none of Plath’s fiction is good? I decided to read The Bell Jar again before addressing the new old short story. The first, striking sentence—already suffused with death—gave me hope: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” By the end of the first paragraph, I was nervous again: “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” Then, a hard return and a single-sentence paragraph: “I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” Plath’s journals and letters are often unintentionally funny in their absurd dramatics—in 1956, after lending some books to a friend who returned them with underlining in pencil, she wrote in her journal, “I was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien.” (I actually threw back my head laughing, alone on my couch.) The silliness of calling being executed “the worst thing in the world,” a kind of understatement by overstatement, is rendered sillier by giving it its own paragraph. Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work. Read More
January 11, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Broccoli Puzzles, Bot Poetry, and Banana Pudding By The Paris Review Emily Ruskovich. I spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family in Hudson, New York. Among other goodies, my stocking was stuffed with books, and I squirreled Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho over to the wood-burning stove and ate through page after page as log after log went up in smoke and the iron became too hot to touch. The stove was etched with a MADE IN BELGIUM label, but it said America to me, like Idaho did: both anesthetizing in their beauty, dangerous and commonplace. Ever since reading Ruskovich’s essay about Watership Down, I wanted more. In that piece, she writes about those rabbits like she knows the insides of their den from long personal experience. And Idaho does bring us the dear interiors of the animal world, the musky quiet and the secrecy, but Ruskovich also brings human imperfection right to the surface of the novel without the tedium of other contemporary realism. I drove through Idaho, nine years ago now, with the same boyfriend on the way to California. It was beautiful and vast, and we quarreled there for the first time on our cross-country trip. As we rounded the switchback of a pitch-dark park-service road and saw the headlights of a lone pickup, I was terrified again of the land that could kill me quick and of the people who made their home there, who knew it and persisted. —Julia Berick Read More
January 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Salka Viertel’s Forgotten Account of Old Hollywood By Lawrence Weschler Salka Viertel with Greta Garbo. Back in the day (the late thirties and early forties), many of the Central European cultural émigrés in flight from Hitler’s depredations back home who’d found themselves improbably beached on the West Coast of the United States used to entertain themselves with the melancholy joke about the two dachshunds who meet on the palisade in Santa Monica. “Here it’s true I’m a dachshund,” the one admits to the other, “but in the old country I was a Saint Bernard.” The west side of Los Angeles was rife with erstwhile Saint Bernards in those days, and in her splendidly evocative (if somewhat lamely titled) 1968 memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (being reissued this month by New York Review Books), the onetime Max Reinhardt actress turned Greta Garbo scenarist Salka Viertel regales her readers with countless representative tales of fish decidedly out of water, to vary the metaphor slightly—Sergei Eisenstein, for instance (though he had come to Hollywood and signed a yearlong contract at Paramount for reasons somewhat different from those of his German and Austrian counterparts). Salka, who through much of that time served as the Russian master’s closest local support and confidant, begins her account of that bollixed year with a typically priceless sentence: “As soon as Eisenstein arrived, Upton Sinclair, who had most impressive friends, gave a picnic lunch for him at the ranch of Mr. Gillette, the razorblade millionaire.” From there, she goes on to detail the story of how Sinclair’s wife mobilized a group of idle Pasadena millionaire wives to sponsor Eisenstein’s filming expedition to Mexico, with patrons and director soon falling out catastrophically. Before long, the whole project went down in flames, leaving a heartbroken Eisenstein to return to his Stalinist homeland. Salka likewise tells stories of Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg at ludicrous cross-purposes over a possible score for the latter’s production of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and of Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas and author back in Germany of massive historical novels as well as the tale upon which the Emil Jannings–Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel had been based) and Bertolt Brecht (arguably the greatest playwright of his era)—all of them utterly squandered by a studio system that had no idea what to do with them. Read More