Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Belle Boggs revisits Joy Williams’s novel Breaking and Entering.

Vintage postcard from the Florida Keys

In college, I lived in thrall to a professor named Sally Doud, who taught my first fiction workshop classes. Sally—that’s what we called her—was tall and angular, with coarse blonde hair, an unfussy stylishness, and a husky laugh that resounded out of her office, where I went as often as I thought reasonable. The office was tiny—smaller than any of my other professors’ offices—and windowless, with off-white cinder-block walls. It may well have been a closet before Sally wedged her desk inside. There was a vent with a fan, and she would blow cigarette smoke so carefully in the direction of the fan that the fire alarm never went off.

I probably went to Sally’s office more than was reasonable—I thought that once every two weeks was okay—because her office was the place where I most believed that I could one day become a writer, and because I loved every book she recommended. She introduced me to Andrea Barrett and Ron Hansen and Jayne Anne Phillips, and would often pass along Vintage paperbacks that I hope I returned. I know there is at least one I did not return, because I still have it. The familiar white cover shows an unsmiling blonde woman in a blue string bikini, standing behind a stately white dog. She’s opening French doors, just a crack, and in the  spotless glass you can see palm trees, a pelican, the beach. The scene is cool and vaguely menacing. Read More

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica.

Picasso, HEAD OF A HORSE, SKETCH FOR GUERNICA, 1937

When I was eleven years old, my mother took me into the city from our suburban Long Island enclave. It was 1981, and we were on our way to MoMA. We were going to say goodbye to Guernica, Picasso’s giant antiwar mural from 1937. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso lent the painting to MoMA, stipulating that it not be sent to Spain until liberty was restored. More than forty years after its creation, it was headed off to its Spanish home.

It was an impressive thing to see. I can remember how that painting loomed. But it was the horse in the center—set under that giant, all-seeing eye—that drew my attention. Because that image and I, we already went back a long way. Out in suburbia, I’d stared endlessly at the version of it that Picasso had painted as a study for the mural.

In the study, we see only the screaming gray horse’s head. The horse’s eyes, as in the larger painting, are tiny. But the head is set at a sharper angle, aimed up toward the heavens, as if seeking help that’s never going to come. The horse’s mouth is wide open, its nostrils flared. And between seven ground-down teeth, a horrible spear of a tongue sticks out. You can see the hair on the edges of the horse’s muzzle, which feels almost doglike, giving the face a domesticated warmth that makes the expression of fear all the worse.

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John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778

We were brought to the museum, as children often are, to look at ancient things from Egypt. Elsewhere in the galleries were ancient things from Rome and China and Greece, but only in the Egyptian collection was there the threat of seeing a dead body. The promise. We were ten. Of course we wanted to see one, even if it was the teachers’ idea. Perhaps they thought: if you satisfy the bloodthirstiness of children in an art museum they will be less likely to stab each other with compasses during math class.

This was 1975, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was the era of disaster movies: ships upside down, towering infernos, earthquakes. I liked disasters. The year before, in fourth grade, I had written a paper on the immolation of the Hindenburg. Mummies weren’t a disaster: so many dead, so little interest in how they died.

On the way to the mummies we happened upon Watson and the Shark.

It’s an odd painting, awful and hilarious, charged, inexplicable, literal. A disaster movie, an eighteenth-century one. There’s Watson, a naked figure fallen into a city harbor, hair streaming behind him. There’s the shark, rising up with its awful mouth, getting ready to bite off the swimmer’s head.

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