The Hopkins Review Vol. 14 No. 4 by Johns Hopkins University Press

Fall 2021 New 14.4Series

New 14.4FallSeries2021

The original Hopkins Review was a literary magazine published by the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars from 1947 to 1953. The Hopkins Review (New Series) is a joint venture of The Writing Seminars and Johns Hopkins University Press that brings the magazine back into existence as a quarterly review publishing fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays on literature, drama, film, the visual arts, music, and dance, as well as reviews of books, performances, and exhibits.

HOPKINSTHEREVIEWEDITOR David Yezzi ASSISTANT EDITORS Max Apple Melvin E. Brown J. M. Coetzee Louise Erdrich Rhina P. AngusEspaillatFletcher Shane RosannaHelenErnestDaveWendelMcCraePatrickSmithSuarezVendlerWarren ADVISORY EDITORS Joanne LoganLeedom-AckermanJohnAstinJohnBarthPhyllisBergerD.BrowningBurtonBullardD.N.DeLunaDavidEverett Robert L. Friedman Christine Jowers Edward Perlman Wyatt Prunty John D. Rockefeller V Winston Tabb Susan Weiss Karen Wilkin CONTRIBUTING EDITORS James AndrewBradDanielleArthurEvansLeithauserDoraMalechMotion Katharine Noel Eric GregMaryShannonPuchnerRobinsonJoSalterWilliamson NEW SERIES FOUNDING EDITOR John T. Irwin FACULTY ADVISORY EDITORS David Wyatt Maya SpencerJosiahChesleyCoxHupp Phoebe Oathout Regan Green Kosiso Ugwueze

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Cover image: Temporal Target (2021), by Lisa Corrine Davis, oil on canvas, 28 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis POETRY Robert Archambeau Edmund Addresses Pandæmonium 500 Christopher Bakken Bread Theology 501 Brian Brodeur The Carpenter’s Tale 522 William Brown Late Spring 545 Pietro Federico Nebraska 519 Michelle Lesifko-Bremer Committal 555 Steven Leyva The United Fruit Company 557 Another Incident 558 William Logan Charity in the Negative 574 Richard Michelson Bless You 575 The Torah Scribe’s Riddle 576 Michael Mingo Any Day Now, It Will Come 521 Alexis Sears Luck 487 Vol. 14, No. 4 Fall 2021 (New Series)

Luke Stromberg Hard Hat 488 Will Schutt Faker 485 Italian Square 486 Will Toedtman Brickwork 546 Lullaby 548 Ryan Wilson Windy October Night, Waterside 549 INTERVIEW Jos Charles Interviewed by Gabriella Fee 502 FICTION Joanne Leedom-Ackerman For the Good of the State of Texas 559 Talia Neffson A Nightmare 489 ART PORTFOLIO Lisa Corinne Davis Recent Work, with an Introduction by Karen Wilkin 553 FEATURES Paul Dean Marguerite Duras: Life As a Novel 577 Mark Halliday Dean Young and the Madding Flood 525 NOTEBOOK Michael Autrey In Plain Sight: Watching Michael Haneke’s Caché 593

REVIEWS Leann Davis Alspaugh David Tatham, Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England’s North East 632 Jefferson Hunter Film Chronicle 610 William H. Pritchard Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser, eds., A Whole World; Letters from James Merrill 626 Jay Rogoff Rehearsals for the Real Thing 618 Notes on Contributors 635

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© 2021 Will Schutt Will Schutt FAKER I have a sensitive-looking face, which I use to advantage. At night I take my sensitive-looking face outside where people are gathered at tables, posting pictures and acting out their deaths. What good are they to me who seem so real? My sensitive-looking face glows like a sign for the living. I want them to see my sign, my outside face, through which all this feeling is funneled.

486 Will Schutt ITALIAN SQUARE

Glück studied the moon above it while reinventing Pavese for the first time. As if it were a sore subject nettling a family, the country remains unnamed. Her village any village. Her lettuces plain lettuce.

McHugh found poetry in the silence of its statues, but when Hugo heard Kennedy had been shot, Italians chased him across the square with their “noisy knives of why” and he wept like a “perfect wop.” Wilbur fell in love with the music a wall fountain made, but by the end of the century, Henri Cole found nothing there but bobbing Fanta cans, a kind of poetry dead, and the freedom one feels when things have changed for good.

Hecht saw a hill here. On second thought it turned out to be a vision of Poughkeepsie, half symbol, half childhood memory.

Walcott waited years to touch terrain this raked over. And Howells remarked, in a memorable, near-forgotten phrase chiseled into the side of a building in one of the country’s smaller cities girdling a hill, like a monument to the war dead, here lies the home of human nature.

© 2021 Alexis Sears Alexis Sears LUCK I was a kid. I didn’t hear the gunshot, didn’t dip my fingers in the blood. Only a phone call, Mom on a moss-colored sofa, my brother’s freckled eyes, aging. I was lucky, my therapist said: You didn’t find the body. Your father protected you from that. Finding that missing sock, a wrinkle-free twenty on concrete—luck is funny, isn’t it? My luck comes from the sea, which my father had crossed years before, miles away when he died, when he lived. Some days I grieve what I had, some days I grieve what I didn’t, more haunted by the choppy shots of him—close-ups of his silver car, his teeth—than the shot I can only imagine.

HARD HAT

Because I was thinking, then, of how I’d keep calling you, of the thin, plaintive ringing without answer that summer you left me for another man.

This morning, on the bus, I saw that man again, the guy in the hard hat. I can never figure out why he wears that thing—surely not for any job, not this guy. His eyes have that glassy look, like he’s dazed. You just know his breath stinks. What’s his name? No one asks. Better to just sit back, feel sorry for the girl in the nurse’s scrubs he leans toward, saying, “I like your hair. I like hair.” He sat apart, today, rocking back and forth, scratching at his eyebrows like he was trying to unsee some mistake, and tapping on his hat. A woman sat across from him. She turned to me with this smirk. And it felt like a reprieve.

he knew what she’d told Lizzie was true. Head injuries do produce an alarming and seemingly unaccountable amount of blood. Mira had never seen so much blood in her life. When she was done crying, she washed her face in the downstairs half-bath and dried it on a burgundy hand towel with a big S monogrammed on it. She tried to remember if Lizzie had changed her last name. It seemed strange and embarrassing that she couldn’t remember. Then sheTheremembered.livingroom was strewn with toys, board books, little and big shoes, and fossilized Cheerios, just as it had been every time Mira visited, which wasn’t often. The only time she could remember its being visibly tidied was for Little Man’s first birthday party. She was surprised that Lizzie hadn’t tidied this time, with the other couples coming over, though she wasn’t sure if she was surprised in a good way or a bad way.

Mira couldn’t remember where she’d learned about head injuries bleeding heavily but it made sense—so many blood vessels, and of course from an evolutionary standpoint the priority had to be protect ing the all-important brain. She had asked the EMT guy if wounds like this always bleed a lot and he’d said, “Sometimes.” Otherwise he’d spoken only to Ben, who had been seated on the floor in front of the sink, holding the wadded-up beach towel against his head. Ben’s usual serene manner had seemed transformed by the circum stances into a stunned silence that might’ve been calm or shock. He’d barely said a word. Mira hadn’t seen the exact moment his complex ion turned to a brown-tinged, pallid gray from its usual warm, light bronze (“like Lenny Kravitz,” said Lizzie, when they’d first started

“Marisa Tomei,” said Mira. They went on like that until Lizzie picked up a paper that made her pause. She put bunny ears behind her head. “Hugh Hefner?” guessed Mira. “Mel Blanc?” The other couples laughed unrestrainedly. Lizzie huffed, then their time was up. They won anyway. They always won when they paired up for the name game.

490 Talia Neffson dating). But it was a noticeable change and almost as unnerving as the blood. There was a name for that color. Taupe? Ecru? It made Mira think of the monochrome del Sarto paintings Marco had tried to convince her to like.

“Well, you know I am just a dumb American. I’m probably not sophisticated enough to appreciate it,” she’d said.

Humor, especially sarcasm, had always been a problem with Marco. At first Mira had assumed it was a language problem. Later she realized it was not just a language problem. Three years and eight months. Lizzie refused to refer to him as anything other than “that fucking Italian.”

They’d played the name game after dinner while the two couples with the husbands Ben knew from work were still there. Lizzie and Mira’s team went first. Lizzie put down the first scrap of paper and, without pausing, pulled her cardigan off the back of her chair, draped it over her shoulders and tied the sleeves in a loose knot at her chest. Then she leaned forward and lifted an imaginary pair of glasses to her forehead, as if scrutinizing something up close. “The chiaroscuro!” she said with a rolling, extravagant accent, “Molto bellissimo! You see?”

“But you are not dumb,” Marco had responded seriously, continu ing to examine the painting. “You are a very intelligent woman.”

“That fucking Italian,” Mira answered flatly. The other couples laughed the resentful, strained laughter of people witnessing an inside joke from the outside. Lizzie’s motion for “Polo” looked more like vacuuming than swinging a mallet from horseback, but Mira still got it. Lizzie looked at the next paper and, again without pausing, said in the same exaggerated Canarsie accent she often used to imitate their mothers, “Imagine you’re a deer . . .”

Ben had offered to sit the game out so they wouldn’t have an uneven number. Then he’d gone upstairs to put Little Man to bed. By the time he came back down, the other couples had gone. Mira and Lizzie sat in the living room trying to remember the name of the eighth-grade math teacher neither of them had, the one everyone had a crush on because of his Irish accent, though Lizzie insisted it had been Scottish.

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Ben had kissed Lizzie on the top of the head as he passed them on his way into the kitchen to start doing the dishes. He’d been washing the pasta salad bowl when the light fixture fell. From the other room, it sounded like a brick coming through a window. The dishwasher was alreadyWhenrunning.they’dclosed on the house Lizzie had sent Mira a photo and a message that said, “dishwasher+washer/dryer+1.5 bath+3 bed=we r broke b/c prop taxes 4ever BUT this is now OUR HOUSE!!!” Mira had written back, “u really did it?!! NJ?!!! Do u realize u are living our 16yr old nightmare?!” But before hitting send she had erased everything after “NJ?!!!” In the photo Lizzie stood on the porch holding the baby, who was too thickly swaddled to appear as anything more than a bundle. Lizzie’s cheeks and nose showed pink from the cold. Ben stood next to her, displaying the keys and smiling his mild smile behind his neat beard. The lawn in front of them was covered in fresh snow. Lizzie had replied, “look @ the house # dumbass.” Mira zoomed in on the brass number fixed to the door over Ben’s shoulder—103, her locker number from seventh grade, the year she and Lizzie had started hanging out. Lizzie’s locker had been under hers—102. Mira sent back a row of hearts and left it at that. The silver mixing bowl with the folded scraps of paper left over from the game was still on the coffee table. Mira stood in the living room looking at the mess, and listened. She tilted her head to one side. She heard nothing but the dishwasher, still running. Lizzie had said Little Man probably wouldn’t wake up unless he had a bad dream, which he rarely did. Mira wanted to ask what she should do if this happened, but, given the circumstances, she’d simply said, “We’ll be

492 Talia Neffson fine. Go. Don’t worry.” As Lizzie left, she’d glanced back past Mira and up the stairs with a searching sort of alarm in her face, as if she smelled traces of smoke or gas. “I’ll stay however long you need me,” Mira had said, holding the door open. She wasn’t sure if Lizzie had heard. The noise of the dishwasher shifted from a churning to a whirring. A car went by outside and a narrow trapezoid of light passed over the living room in what Mira thought of as a sad, airport-motel way. When had she started associating headlights on a wall with depressing motels? She remembered the crummy motel in Salsomaggiore, with no AC and the windowless bathroom that smelled like mildew. She remembered the overheated sex, and how small and deep-set Marco’s eyes seemed without his glasses, as he’d squinted searchingly down at her. The room overlooked a muggy central courtyard, so they’d closed the shutters for privacy. The only light was a weak band of yellow from under the bathroom door. No car lights had passed over the walls. He’d held both her hands firmly, interlacing their fingers, and wanted her to look him in the eyes through all of it, even at the end, but in the end, as always, she’d looked away.

Mira took a scrap of paper out of the silver bowl. She unfolded it. “Jessica Rabbit,” said the paper, in a handwriting she didn’t recognize. She put it down on the table next to the bowl and took out another paper. “Sister Wendy,” it said, in Lizzie’s handwriting. She tossed that one back in the bowl. There wasn’t much to clean up in the kitchen, considering all the blood. There were a few shards of the frosted bell-shaped light cover, but Mira had swept up most of it while they’d waited for the EMS. There was a little blood on the cabinet under the sink where Ben had leaned and pressed the towel with the pink and turquoise scallop-shell pattern against his head. But the cabinets were finished with some kind of sealant or varnish, and the blood came off with a few swipes of a sponge. They’d taken the towel with them. After that, there was only the red and white plaid dish towel in the sink, along with one pot and the half-washed bowl. Lizzie had snatched the dish towel off the oven

Mira’s first impulse was to slink away, unseen. She felt as if she’d walked in on someone in a changing room.

493The Hopkins Review handle and pressed it to Ben’s head before running to get the beach towel. Mira could hear her saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” under her breath while she ran out of the room. The dish towel was soaked through with blood and had begun to stiffen into an abstract sculptural object at the bottom of the sink basin. Mira hesitated for a moment, then threw it in the trash. She washed the pot and the bowl. She didn’t know where they kept clean dish towels, so she went back into the half-bath to dry her hands on the burgundy S towel. Still no noise from upstairs. She looked at her phone. Nothing. She checked herself in the mirror. Nothing. She examined her teeth, then took down her loose ponytail and retied it before going upstairs.

“Cam,” he said forthrightly, to his foot. Or it might’ve been “Sam” or “Jam,” or “Bam.”

Hanging near the bed was a framed photo she recognized—a glossy, black-and-white of Ben and Lizzie’s faces, with Little Man as a newborn asleep between them. They’d used that for the birth

“Bam. Clocker shoes,” he said to his foot. Mira knocked on the door and, at the same time, gently pushed it open. Little Man’s eyes flipped to her without registering the surprise or fear or disgust she’d been expecting. His foot stayed in the air. The room, which she’d been in maybe twice before, had light blue walls, a mirrored closet, and one window with cream-colored blinds drawn. The overhead light was off but there was a globe lamp glowing from the top of the dresser. It’s got a rosy feel, Mira thought, though nothing was pink or red, except the boy’s small mouth.

The pale blue runner with the white diamond pattern looked new, or at least Mira didn’t remember it. Lizzie always insisted that “Little Man can sleep through a hurricane—once he’s asleep,” but Mira still tried not to tread too noisily on the stairs. The door had been left ajar and, peering through the crack, she saw him in his little bed, sheets kicked to one side, one leg lifted in the air. He wiggled his toes.

“Hey, Little Man,” said Mira. “How’s it going?”

Isn’t it funny, she thought, studying the smooth, solemn little face, that someday he’ll grow a beard and chest hair, and want someone to look him in the eyes while he screws them.

“I’ve never tasted koala before. What’s it like?” she said. Little Man stared up at her, expression unchanged, still chewing. “Like chicken?” She stepped into the room. “I love your room,” she said. His eyes followed her as she walked to his dresser and pointed at his globe lamp. “This is so cool. I want one.”

He was still on his back, uncovered, in just a diaper and a navyblue T-shirt decorated with a little cartoon sailboat. Under the boat it said “NANTUCKET.” Mira was fairly sure that neither he nor either of his parents had ever been Nantucket. Both his legs were now flat on the bed, and his skin looked warm against the pale bedsheets, like a Bonnard girl floating in a tepid bath. Both hands clutched at the poor koala, whose ear was already dark with saliva.

Under the photo, low enough for the boy to see it close up, they’d tacked the poster Mira had sent for his birthday this year. It showed all the different kinds of bears. Lizzie said he refused to leave for daycare in the morning without kissing the polar bear and the panda. “Sometimes the grizzly too,” she’d added. Over the dresser was a color photo Mira hadn’t seen before of Little Man in the arms of Ben’s mother on a beach. Mira recognized her from the wedding. They were both squinting up into the sun and smiling. In the background, off to one side, was a corner of the pink and turquoise scallop-shell towel. On the towel were pale feet, crossed at the ankles—Lizzie’s feet.

494 Talia Neffson announcement.

Little Man stretched out one hand and picked a koala from the mound of stuffed animals piled between him and the wall. He brought the koala to his mouth, and began to chew one of its ears. He regarded Mira with his father’s tranquil gaze, waiting, and chewing.

“I like your boat shirt,” said Mira. She pointed to the place on her own chest, where there was no boat. Without removing the koala from his mouth, Little Man looked down at his chest and frowned, as if the boat were a stain he’d just discovered.

“Is that where you keep your cash?” she asked. “Money,” he repeated, yanking vainly at the drawer. Mira crossed the room and sat on the carpet next to the dresser. He looked at her, then at the dresser. She opened the drawer and they both peered down into it. Inside were stacks of tiny, folded T-shirts. Little Man reached into the drawer. He pulled out a red T-shirt and tossed it to one side. Then he pulled out a black one that said “BKLYN.” Mira had sent him that one for Christmas.

“How much do you want for it?” said Mira. “Keep in mind, I’m broke.”Little Man tugged at the hem of his boat shirt until he’d raised it up to his neck, exposing his rounded stomach and soft, narrow chest. He looked frankly at her. She looked at him. Mira thought she could see his tiny heart lifting his tiny chest just the slightest bit—up, down, up, down. He tugged at the shirt again and made a noise like someone trying to lift something slightly too heavy.

Little Man rolled over and wormed his way off the edge of the bed.

“Hey,” she said, reaching for the black shirt. He ignored her and, picking a yellow shirt from the pile, held it out to her.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the yellow shirt. “Money,” he insisted.

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Mira crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed near his feet. The sheets smelled faintly sour. “Boat,” Little Man said gravely, letting the koala fall from his mouth. Chin to his chest, he repeated, “Boat.” “Yep,” Mira said. She wondered if she had wine breath and reflex ively pressed her lips shut. Earlier that night, before his father took him upstairs, she’d seen Lizzie pull at the waistband of the boy’s diaper and sniff. Picturing this, she felt embarrassed for all of them. She wiped at the corners of her mouth and sat up straighter.

“Where you headed?” asked Mira. He didn’t answer. Once on his feet, he swayed briefly, then, turning his back to her, ran across the room toward his dresser. “Money,” Little Man said cheerfully. His diaper sagged in the back. He tugged at the bottom drawer of the dresser.

“Don’t judge,” said Mira. “It’s not like that. They have an open marriage.”LittleMan put his thumb in his mouth. His small, soft, terracottacolored nipples looked like they’d been dabbed on to the dusty-brown field of his torso with a soft-bristled brush. Mira pictured the page in Janson with the Kandinsky circles, and Marco’s hand stretched out before her, pointing. She saw the dark hairs on the back of his wrist. He stroked her neck with his other hand.

“Don’t tell your mother,” she said. “I mean about the broker. She’ll just yell at me. You know how she gets.” The boy kept sucking his thumb and looking at her. She was afraid he might start to cry.

“So. What’s the deal with this one?” She picked up the yellow shirt he’d handed her and held it aloft. The shirt had a big Paul Frank logo on the front.

496 Talia Neffson “Want help?” she asked. As soon as her hands were on his shirt, his arms bolted up above his head. She peeled the shirt off him, noting that his face squeezed shut protectively—eyes closed, nose wrinkled—as it came over his head. Then she was sitting with the boat shirt in her hands, and the other shirts in her lap, and Little Man was standing in front of her, naked, except for his diaper. His dark hair swept up like a wave cresting over his forehead. Mira felt flushed. The room was warm.“Money,” repeated Little Man.

“I told you, I’m broke,” said Mira. “Didn’t your mother tell you I got laid off?” His brow creased with something like concern or frustration, maybe“Don’tconfusion.worry,” she said, “I’m fucking a fancy-pants broker. He’s married, and he’s kind of a tool. But he’s loaded. Well, not that loaded, but anyway I’m covered, for the moment.”

“Money,” Little Man muttered, almost shyly. He looked away from her for the first time, scanning the room as if there might be someone else there with more sense who could intervene on his behalf.

Mira’s phone vibrated. It took her a few seconds to find it under the pile of rejected T-shirts on the rug.

“Yellow’s a good color for you,” said Mira. He backed up to admire himself further, placing both hands on his belly, like a satisfied diner pushing back from the table.

Little Man turned and ran back to the dresser. Bending, he fished around in the drawer and took out two more shirts, tossing each onto the rug, before he found a lime green shirt. He handed the lime green shirt to “Thanks,”Mira. she said. The shirt had a big pink hibiscus printed on it and white lettering that said “Someone in Kailua loves me and all I got was this lousy shirt.”

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“Monkey shirt,” he whispered intimately to his face.

“Personally, I try to go the no-logos route,” said Mira. “I don’t like the idea of being a walking billboard for some company, you know?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth and raised both hands over his head. His bare, exposed armpits were so tender, so vulnerable, that they gave her sympathy pains, like looking at an open wound. She had to kneel to get the leverage necessary to fit both sleeves over his arms and pull his head through the neck hole. He opened his eyes, which he’d squeezed shut again as the shirt passed over his face, and ran to the closet on the far side of the room. He stood so close to the mirrored door that his forehead touched the glass.

“Where the hell is Kailua?” she said. “Isn’t that a mixed drink?”

“I bet you can though. You look good in everything.”

“Money,” Little Man said around his thumb. “Ah!” said Mira. “Monkey.”

“You sure about this?” said Mira as she tugged the shirt over his head. “Not everyone can pull off this shade of green.” He didn’t move or speak. She fitted the sleeves of the shirt over each of his little arms.

Little Man lifted the yellow shirt to the top of his torso and, with his stomach and chest exposed as before, waited.

498 Talia Neffson “still waiting in ER,” said the text. “u ok there?!?” Mira sent a thumbs-up, then wrote, “does B need stitches?!” Little Man came back over to her and lifted the green shirt. “Hey!” She looked up at him, then back at her phone. “One sec,” she said, “your mother is texting me.” He stood, unmoving, except for his little chest rising and falling. “yes,” Lizzie texted back. “Dr thinks B might have concussion! waiting to do a scan.” Lizzie was still typing. Mira waited. Lizzie sent a crying face emoji. Mira put her phone down on the rug and smiled at Lizzie’s “Okay,”child.shesaid.

“Where were we?” “Belly,” explained Little Man. Still holding his shirt up with one hand, he slapped appreciatively at his round, bare stomach with the other.“Right on,” said Mira. “Body positivity. Right?” He slapped it again then looked at her shyly, as if he wanted to say more. “Hmmm,” she said. “Is this—” she reached out and lightly brushed her fingers over his stomach. It was as soft and smooth as anything she’d ever touched in her life.

Little Man’s face opened and brightened, and Mira turned a corner and, suddenly, there she was—alone in that room in the Tate with the huge Rothkos on every wall, no one to distract her, no guards, no tour groups, and no one to turn to and say, “Look! Look at this!” She tickled him again, a little more firmly. He laughed a controlled and approving laugh, as if to say, “Good start.” Mira wondered if any of her fingernails were rough or jagged. His skin was so unspeakably soft.The boy wiggled from side to side and, then, without pulling his shirt down, let out a brilliant, wild, artless laugh. Mira’s phone vibrat ed again. She looked down at it.

“Everythng taking 4ever! guy in nxt bed is puking every 10 sec.” This was followed by a green face emoji and another crying emoji.

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“Belly,” said Little Man. His eyes were not calm, but dark and wild, and“Whateager. a nightmare,” Lizzie texted. “We r SOOO grateful yr there w/ LM!!! u r totally saving the day!” “Belly!” cried Lizzie’s son. Mira texted back, “a nightmare for sure but as long as B is ok thats what matters No worries here.” She added a heart, then put her phone in her back pocket. She tickled him again. This time he twisted away and pulled his shirt down. He looked over his shoulder at Mira with his wild eyes, and she raised her eyebrows. “Too much?” she said. He ran back to where she sat and pulled up his shirt again to expose his torso. “Again!” he shrieked. Mira’s phone vibrated, but she didn’t look at the message until later, after they had gone downstairs together—very slowly, one of the boy’s hands in hers, one reaching to grip the banister firmly. He had taken her to find the Cheerios, and they’d both eaten multiple handfuls while watching koala videos on her phone. Little Man had led her back upstairs in the same deliberate manner, and while Mira sat on the edge of his bed, he’d pulled down a book called Panda Kindergarten, handed it to her, climbed up on the bed, and put his thumb in his mouth and his head in her lap. Then Mira looked at the message. It said: “still waiting 4 scan. Did LM wake up?!” “sleeping like an angel,” she wrote, and added a snoring emoji. Then she put her phone face down on the bed and opened the book.

Robert Archambeau EDMUND ADDRESSES PANDÆMONIUM So I was not belovéd, after all. “Stand up for bastards!” I once called out. And oh, they stood me up, but good. Yep. Goneril and Regan, no-shows both. Because they died, of ifcourse,thatexcuses anything. Sometimes even birth is no defense, no matter how much sport lay in your making. Sport! Can you hear him cheering now, Gloucester fat as his sweaty, namesake cheese, “Olé, olé-olé-olé!” And bam! He scores. Then, damned, I’m born, with all a bastard’s troubles, grumbles, insults, hates. It’s not natural! I mean: I’m not. Or am. There’s some debate. I’ve looked around since shuffling off the mortal coil. I’m not alone, you know. Childe mopingHarold, in the mountains, knows my name, my game, has more than my fame—or did, back when moping was the Nowthing.he broods alone, or on some unread yellowed syllabus some where. Heathcliff’s done much better for himself, and lets me shoot out on the moors. That’s where you’ll find the big guy, the hulk without a name: Victor’s stitched-up awkward Franken-son. He talks too much, but give him this: he got it, good, and gets it still. There’s just no forspotour kind at the ball. If sentimental, we can stand with Gatsby, sobbing dockside at that green light in the night. The chump. I’ll take the lake of fire. You folks who fell and landed there make this much darkness visible: our only fairness is to cheat. For all us out-cast rejects—we monsters so misunderstood— stand up and show them, bastards. Show them anything but good.

For us, great loads of oak were split. For us, these patient hours of fire. All we could have needed: even the well-water’s additional grace.

At last, the blackened dome obeyed and the god’s clear eye expanded.

The one now dusted with ashes who brings down these riven tablets.

BREAD THEOLOGY

In time, we harvested breath, then lifted grain beyond itself. Who rose at dawn, took kindling, and commanded the heat to bloom?

GF: I was moved by your write-up on the lyric in Tupelo Quarterly in March of 2020, and I wonder if we might start our conversation with a question about the lyric in relation to feeld.

GF: I like that it’s airborne.

JC: Oh, wow. Thank you. That’s very nice. Very sweet to say.

Gabriella Fee: Hello, hello! Nice to meet you. I love this drawing on your wall.

INTERVIEW

This conversation was conducted virtually by Gabriella Fee on July 22, 2021. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Jos Charles: Hello! Thank you. This is a picture of a cat drawn by my friend Kat. Yeah, the cat’s got a little crown, some stars, a happy sun. It’s very nice.

Jos Charles

GF: Well, I’m excited to talk to you, and I know that everyone at Hopkins is so looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

JC: Sure, yeah.

GF: I was dazzled by feeld’s unprecedented syntax, by the defamiliar ization you achieve not only through orthography but through the juxtaposition of lyric diction and vernacular expression. I think of

Jos Charles

JC: Thank you. Yeah, that’s important.

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JC: Yeah, the easiest answer is, “Yes, sure.” I’m still thinking about that stuff. There’s a lot to go on with that question.

GF: You start the Tupelo Quarterly write-up by saying you don’t know what the lyric is, and I was like, “Yes, I don’t either!” But you connect it to two things, the lyric as language doing something perceived as in excess of itself, and the lyric as an address of attention, a process of attending to the unknowability of the self and the other. I wonder if this gap between the self and the other, between the self and the pos sibility of self-knowledge, is something you’re still thinking about lyri cally, whether it’s something that’s generating new work and whether it relates at all to some of the spatial preoccupations of feeld?

JC: So I guess I can start with saying I don’t know what the lyric is and reaffirm that I, or rather we, can speak of different nodes that appear in places and times that get identified as lyric, by a certain kind of read ing that’s looking for “it,” that I don’t even think is consistent across those nodes, but abstracted from a few of them, and then retroactively applied to all of them. So in one sense, I know materially what people are indicating when they indicate “the lyric,” but I don’t really know what materially or historically is there.

GF: Great—I can revisit pieces of it as needed.

poetry, despite its horizontal line, as operating on a very vertical axis. The orthographic innovation in feeld meant that I received it as espe cially vertical, especially palimpsestic. Layers of meaning are exposed through the clearing of imaginative space and the disruption of the presumed relationship between signifier and signified, revealing all these possibilities for connection. I wonder if you might speak to that— to your concept of the lyric in relation to connections both horizontal and vertical in feeld.

JC: Sure, yeah, definitely.

And there are a lot of people who think and write about that—what precisely the historiography of something of the lyric is. And that wasn’t really what I was thinking about so much as that I know what people mean when they indicate it, that I can start there, that I can just sort of bracket what the lyric is. People say it means something, so then what’s the effect of it and what shape does it take and when do people useSoit?

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I went to music. For instance, Songs Without Words by Mendelssohn, or I think of this history in Western concert music of the art-song, during that same time. Schubert’s Lieder and all that. And then people started thinking through other instrumentations, imitating the art-song, and so then we have this instrumental imitation of voice called “lyrical.” Again, that’s an abstraction, right? Whose voice, what voice? It’s also making presumptions about what constitutes a phrase, when one has to breathe, when one shouldn’t breathe, which words one should or shouldn’t breathe between, where gaps are supposed to go, and things like this. A universalization from a few nodes. This is one thing I’m thinking of, and I think that also extends to the other uses that we have for lyric, like when people say lyric novels or lyric memoirs, I think they’re operating on that kind of meaning: something that relates to the rise and fall of the voice, and something like a phrasing or melody. And so if I start there, then I can maybe think through the lyric a bit. But again, it’s still very empty. Anything could be read that way, right? It’s a way of reading at that point, not something that inheres in the thing. Which isn’t nothing though. It’s not nothing to present something to be read according to a particular trajectory. So that’s what I mean, and I guess if I was to try and connect that to feeld, I would say that I was thinking about the ways that I read poetry and the ways that I read lyrically. Reading lyrically—I’m tak ing this phrase up more from Virginia Jackson than Paul de Man—as something more about transmission than what inheres in a text. When I encounter poems, that’s one of the things I love about them: that kind of capacious reading that gets afforded to the poem. And this

505The Hopkins Review might just be a product of New Criticism, a product of growing up in the United States in the 90s, where one is taught you don’t need biog raphy or historical context for a poem. You just encounter it, and you get some kind of pure experience from it. It’s fallen out of favor, but it appeals to me as a way to read, even as its excesses are really obvious, I hope, and it’s really easy to critique that kind of reading, as one should. But I like it. I like it, and I wanted to prioritize that in my poetics, and I wanted to read a book like that where you provide so many entrances into the work, so many threads into the work that can be followed, that the work starts being able to produce things, starts being able to produce its own thoughts, starts to run ahead of itself a little bit. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I have another work that’s coming out called a Year & other poems, and it’s also a cycle like this, and with serial poems like feeld, and the feeling for me is that of being a child and look ing at everything, looking at the leaves and looking at the ground and the cracks in the ground, and then of my mother pulling me, like, “No, we’ve got to go somewhere; you can’t just look at things the whole time.” That kind of feeling. Like, I can’t quite take everything all in but I really want to reach as far as I can. I want to include everything. I want to observe everything. But this is impossible. So all I can really do is try and give a sense of everything. All I can really do is try and figure out how to prioritize what kind of everything constructs the system by which I’m viewing everything. That kind of feeling. And I don’t think I could have prioritized that as much without an audience that didn’t presume to read in that way. Without an audience that didn’t think close reading was a thing, for instance. I was inter ested in that feeling of being pulled too fast, of not quite being able to grasp, but still being able to reach despite it. And being able to reach but not quite grasp seems to me a lot like reading, seems to me a lot like brain stuff, mental health things. It seems a lot, at times, like transness and things like this, like representation.

GF: Yeah, and just, like, the limits of subjectivity.

506 Jos Charles JC: Exactly, so I guess I say all that to say I think there is a way, hear ing your question, that I can imagine thinking through feeld as a selflyricizing lyric—it’s aware that it’s being read lyrically and it’s trying to utilize that as an engine to produce something or lead somewhere.

When I first started writing feeld, I was thinking of it as phenom enology; I was thinking of it as kind of an antidote to trans memoir or something. I don’t know, that might be too grand. I wanted to lead someone through what it was feeling like for me to be on HRT and engaging in a number of practices that, for the sake of ease, we’ll call transitioning. But to never give that sense of stability, of like, “I was this gender. I moved through it, and I became this one, and here are your neat taxonomies,” you know? But once I started that, then the gestures themselves sort of took over, so I found all these other ways of performing that gesture, that evasion, not just with transition. So then I came into all of the other kinds of instabilities that could lead somewhere outside of themselves. And this is kind of talking around your questions, but maybe that relates to the vertical and horizontal. Kind of like a coil. Coils and how they spiral such that if you’re looking from the top, if you’re looking vertically down at them, all you see is a horizontal extension. You see a circle. And when you see the thing unwind, it just looks like it’s going round and round. But then if you look horizontally, then suddenly you see its verticality. You see that it is, in fact, moving up or down or whatever. Something of that might be transpiring in that kind of lyric reading. Then the thing is to be aware that it’s happening, to be content with it, and to try to “up” it as far as I can, wind it as tightly as I can.

GF: That marvelous image—the shape of the spring, of the coil—raises a question about form, and the ways in which poetic form can be a world-building project. I’m compelled by the way you describe the forms of feeld as a means of resisting a single narrative around your own experience. And I’m curious as to what you think the possibilities of formal poetry are for envisioning new worlds and how you would describe the world that you were building in feeld.

To me, I think my practice is more grounded in perception than in experience. Maybe that’s just because I’m not particularly experienced. But I think that perception shows you all the ways a thing could go and all the ways one might commit to it. When you’re in the present and in the future, you see—and I guess I’ll keep running with the analogy of organizing—you see beautiful people doing beautiful work, and you see hope, and you see possibility, and you see potentiality, and you see all the ways that aspiration can lead you out of experience. All the ways aspiration can say, “Fuck history.” And it’s like the coil, right? Suddenly you see transcendence, insurgence, revolution. These things are Sopossible.Ithink that (and I’m not saying this to shit on experience) in terms of my practice right now, the poetry that excites me and that I like to write is grounded in perception. And maybe that’s what felt like a phenomenology to me at first . . . seeing what is possible with the materials at hand rather than seeing what greedy hands can do to them, you know? And that, at least for me, hope, for lack of a better word—lower-case hope—was possible.

JC: Yeah, that’s good. I think from the perspective of history, from the perspective of experience, to be very bleak about it, things seem so overdetermined. Things are closed, you know? You look at organizing and social justice. If you look at them, especially in the context of the US, sometimes, at least for me, all you can see is the footprints of the CIA. You can see precisely how it’s going to close and the techniques already developed and already overdetermined not only for shutting things down, but for selling them back to the very people who made them, who ought to own them. It’s depressing. I think it’s Eduardo Chillida, the sculptor, who says something like, experience is one foot in the past, one foot in the present, but then perception is one foot in the present, one foot in the future.

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GF: That feels really beautiful and true. It’s also exciting to think about how one might work in “perceived form” as opposed to “received form.” Does the emphasis on perception guide you toward specific

Do you find that it compels you to invent your own forms as opposed to working in those that already exist?

508 Jos Charles formal choices?

JC: Yeah, I don’t think I ever set out to write anything in any given shape or form. Sometimes I get excited by a formal idea. So, for instance, I’ve been into the idea of really thin-columned poems, like maybe no more than a letter, but I’ve never written a poem like it. It’s just really excit ing to me as a possible form. Maybe one day the materials in my life will catch up to that aspiration, and I’ll be able to write it. But just not right now. It would be like an 11-year-old playing King Lear. It’s like, sure, I guess you can, no shame in that, that might be fun and interesting, but it doesn’t feel right for me to do it. It feels like something later or something upcoming. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write that poem. The material that I have and what I’m thinking about, what I’m reading, what’s happening in my life, what this thing can handle [gestures to her brain] and what it can’t, what this body can handle, what it can’t. That’s what determines what I can write. That’s back to experience, I guess. There are all these limitations. So I have aspirations. Yeah, I have where I think I can go. But the material needs to catch up with it. I start from lines, normally. I’m like, “It’d be cool to see that in a poem,” and then I play around with it and see if I can get it to work or not. And usually why it appeals to me is because it’s true to my life and true to the materials of my life. I’m trying to think of an example. Sometimes it’s just a word. I wrote down a word this morning, in fact—let’s see what I wrote down. Orthogonal! Orthogonal is a great word. And right angles are so weird, and they’re hard to escape. And I thought it’d be really cool to use it in a poem because it relates so much to poems and the adjustment of text on the page. And also gram matically, because grammar is a kind of right angle, or the sentence, or the promise of meaning, which the sentence seems to be structured around. Maybe that’s the germ for the poem. The form would have to come after that.

GF: Of the child pulled too fast through the landscape. And that poem ends, “precursor / & remnant of speech, remaining, / as it must, per haps, the least / effective of our music.” What do you think about the music of poetry?

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GF: I’m so glad you mention doodling, having a visual art practice. For me, and I know many other writers for whom this is the case, my other artistic practices are in a sort of dialog with my poetry. I know you have a background in music composition, and I’m curious how that informs your thinking and your work. Poets love to talk about the music of meter and rhyme, the music of poetry. And I guess I wonder, is that conceptual frame compelling to you? As someone who has composed both music and poetry, do you experience poetry as having a music, or is the relationship between poetry and music a purely figurative one?

JC: Is it compelling to me to think of the music of poetry? Sure. I think it’s operating analogically, where it’s like, “It’s almost as if this has achieved music,” which I think is just masking a really fundamental relationship to music that language already has. And if I was to be real ly saucy, I would probably say something like . . . well, what that poem says. I think language is music; I think it’s a specific kind of music. It has a specificity of signification or meaning making. You mentioned

I’m thinking about a poem you have in The Adroit Journal called “A Note on Form” that curiously enough contains an image similar to the one you used a little while ago in our conversation— JC: Oh, of the child, yeah—

After feeld, for instance, I was writing a lot, and I wrote what became this poem “a Year” and then after that I started writing couplets. I wasn’t trying to write couplets, but one day I realized the couplets were, in fact, sonnets. So for me anyway, this is how the practice works. I know other people who very much work the other way around, and it seems to work great for them. It’s all just idiosyncratic.

510 Jos Charles signifier/signified earlier, so maybe that’s a good way in. Let’s think about Saussure and the supposedly arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified—the idea that the relationship between the two is not causal or logical. I just think that’s incorrect. Music is an obvious case in point, right? And that’s back to earlier, when we were talking about the lyric, and the practice of using the lyric as a word to describe music that seems like song, which is itself a kind of music. It’s very strange, and I’m not an ethnomusicologist or anthropologist, but I assume music began as song. I assume it’s very ancient and—this is pure speculating—I would suspect that song precedes language. If we are to say that birds have song, then it seems very primary, very ancient.

But at any rate, at some point language seems to break off and then music became constructed as anterior to it, by which I mean “before it” in both senses. In front of it. Music is this thing language can never be. But then also in some sense before it, like obviously when we say language is like music, we mean language is so much better. We have this presumption that there are forms of specificity and reference that language provides for us that music never could. Again, I think that’s ridiculous. There are so many kinds of signification that don’t just exist in language—it’s simply been naturalized, sedimented. I was on a walk the other day down by the L.A. Riverbank and I heard a bird that was just repeating a fifth. You know, a perfect fifth interval just descending. It sounded like [sings the fifth interval bird song] and was doing it over and over. Maybe it’s kind of weird to read it as a fifth, right? I don’t know what the bird’s thinking or doing. Maybe it’s communicating, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s expressing, maybe it’s not. But at the very least, I know it has a tone, and it has a descending melody, and it has rhythm, and it has all these tools that we use to analyze music that could equally be applied to it. And spo ken language—we talk about rhythm and melody in that abstract way, but there’s a literal way, right, in which indication, not just connota tion, is wrapped up in rhythm and the rise and fall of speech. Even in

GF: Right, and how much space on the page corresponds to what kind of a sonic interval?

JC: Yeah, “corresponds” but not in an external way. In an internal way, right? Like what, within the poem, is already being prioritized to the reader such that they anticipate a formal closure. It’s something that appears to be promised from within the poem itself. It’s something that appears to be easier or clearer when there’s a form like a sonnet where you’re like, “Okay, there’s going to be some kind of turn and a couplet”

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This is all kind of roundabout; I’m not a linguist either. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. These are just things that I’ve felt through, through poems. So it’s all speculation. It’s all on that side of perception and aspiration, I guess. So, intuitively, I don’t see music and language as that different. When I wrote music in the past, and now when I write poems, I’m thinking about the same stuff. I’m using the same tools. And when I read, I’m really thinking about the same stuff. I’m thinking, do I want to read this line going up or down? How fast do I want to read this? How slowly? Especially when I’m reading someone else’s work, that anxiety is even higher than if it’s my own because I feel a commitment to what I’m perceiving the work is doing or what the work could be doing or could be carried to do. With my work I maybe feel a little less anxiety or pressure because, well, if I fuck it up, it’s my doing. But yeah, these are all front-and-center questions, not just reading the poem out loud but then even on the page, they’re the same ques tions just represented in a different medium. What goes where on the page? And then also the intersection—if I put this here on the page, what will that imply about how to read it out loud? That’s obviously a huge part of it too.

English, it’s true. For example, raising the tone at the end of a sentence to indicate a question. We still have shapes that completely change the indicative meaning of the sentence, what it’s referring to or indicating.

512 Jos Charles or whatever. But even without all that, we’re making assumptions about how the thing is going to complete itself or how it will resolve itself. That the promise will be fulfilled or that it won’t be fulfilled or that we’ll be surprised or it’ll turn into something else, or whatever it ends up doing. When I’m reading, I suspect this promise. And that’s exciting! It’s related to what we were talking about, right, about reach ing beyond. The brain starts to reach beyond the fact that it’s reading, starts to reach beyond what’s actually there. It can be so exciting and so GF:beautiful.Andso relational, right? It’s so much about what’s between the text and the reader as opposed to something that’s just signified in the text and transferred in one direction. It accrues in the interval.

JC: Yeah, and that’s something that, again, is clear if we were to think about music and if we were to think of the poem as a score rather than a poem itself, if we were to think of the book not as a performance but as the condition for a performance. It requires a reader. It doesn’t exist without readers. The poem is that ephemeral thing in performance and emerges in the reading, whether vocalized or not. Whether through signification on the page or from the body. That I’m not writing a poem in the sense of an expression—“I’m expressing something about myself” or whatever—but rather, I’m providing someone with the con dition of a performance, which means I have to think about possible readers and how they would perform it and how they would receive it and transmit it. I don’t want to pat myself on the back because I’m sure I’ve failed at this, but I think that’s the start of encounter. I don’t want to say the word empathy, but maybe something like “with.” Not “Being-with,” or something with that history, that width. Just “with.”

GF: Thank you for bringing us to this idea of with-ness, because my next question has to do with how we might think non hierarchically about being together with language across time; specifically in relation to the idea of lineage. Harold Bloom has written about the “anxiety

513The Hopkins Review of influence,” and the idea that artists have an anxious, combative relationship with their forebears, which is obviously a very arelational way of understanding the dynamic between writers and readers and work of art. I’m curious how you think about influence and literary lineage. On the one hand, I’m asking by whom you’ve been most influ enced. On the other hand, I’m more interested in reconceptualizing that question completely and asking about influence more rhizomati cally, inspired by nonhierarchical models of queer kinship and literary JC:friendship.Yeah,I

will say that sometimes I read a book and I’m like, “Yes, I agree with every single thing on every single page.” But I don’t really like reading books like that. Or rather, I like them, but they don’t pro duce anything for me. I don’t end up writing after them. I don’t come back to them. I don’t get led outside of them, and this may just be a question of availability. Maybe I think I’m so experienced, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I get it.” And then maybe five years later I’ll be like, “Oh my, this book was doing all these things that I didn’t understand.” Sometimes I encounter a book like that, and it just doesn’t produce work for me. Not then anyway. It doesn’t produce ideas. And then there are other books that maybe they’re ahead of me in some way. Sometimes I have such an antagonistic relationship to the book, or it has an antagonistic relationship to me. Where it’s like, the game that has been set up in this book, the engine that has been set up in this book, is one that is leading down a path that we should not go, that is not useful. I’ve been reading a lot more Bataille lately and, at times, like, “Fuck this guy.” But I have to say that at times it produces thoughts for me where because of the engine that has been set up, because of the parts that have been put into play, I find out how to use those parts in my own kind of writing. So in cases like that, there’s also a whole politics around it. If the person’s alive and they’re writing this, I don’t want to support it or give them money. So then I have a differ ent relationship to it than if it’s, say, Ezra Pound or something, who’s

Jos Charles everywhere, even if I don’t want him to be everywhere, so I have some kind of relationship to him regardless of whether I want one or not. I have people who I hold close to, who then fall away and come back. There are certain people I can’t bear to read for a while. I haven’t been able to read Emily Dickinson for a while. I don’t know why. Emily was one of the first poets I ever read, and I liked Dickinson’s work so much. Maybe I’ve just been too isolated during quarantine or something. Maybe there’s just something about the poems that doesn’t speak to me now how it spoke to me then. But that may very well change.Édouard

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JC: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know who else. But there are also thinkers, right? I return to Spivak. Spillers. Kind of Marx? Yeah, kind of Marx.

GF:Yeah.You’re doing all this scholarship associated with a PhD, and I wonder how that scholarship informs your creative work. Are these the same thinkers whose material you’re engaging with in your pres ent program?

GF: I appreciate that your answer is a cross-disciplinary one.

GF: You’re at UC Irvine now, right?

Glissant is a more recent favorite. When I say more recent, I mean after high school. I return to Paul Celan, Jean Toomer, Clarise Lispector. I’m really drawn to giovanni singleton’s work. And these are people who I would consider to be people ahead of me, who are not that latter category of people I’m butting heads with. These are all people who have led me places and taught me things, and I suspect will continue to teach me things. Yeah, those are a few poets. Aside from that . . . Etel Adnan’s poems. Alma Thomas’s paintings. Pina Bausch’s choreography.

JC:

GF: I want to ask you a question about time, and maybe this is the time to do it, while we’re on the subject of the medieval. As I mentioned ear lier, I’m so in thrall to the temporal rupture that emerges in feeld at the intersection of different linguistic registers; the way archaic language is pulled into the present and exists alongside a very contemporary kind of online voice, creating this amazing trans-temporality and revealing a fundamental turbulence in time, space, and identity more broadly. Hearing about your scholarly interest in the medieval makes me won der if you might speak to feeld’s evocation of the archaic, to its evoca tion of a kind of medieval language, even if it isn’t explicitly claiming to inhabit that moment in time. How do you contend with the different temporalities you pull into the text?

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JC: In my present program? It’s a little TBD. I’m following the path the research is leading me down, and I keep changing what I’m thinking about and writing about and how I write about it. It will be within a cer tain range, but I keep bouncing around that range a bit, so I can’t quite say. I’m not engaging those people as much in this project because the way I’m conceiving of it, at least right now, is still relatively research heavy. I think there’s the question of whether this thing is going to lead me somewhere new or if I’m going to struggle with what’s there already. I’m struggling because I’m trying to find a line through it or draw a line through it to find and speak to a kind of continuity that’s been covered or elided or sutured and sutured and sutured. It’s some thing to do with sodomy. Something to do with, if not medieval texts, the idea of “the medieval” as the zero point to modernity. Yeah, it goes back to the lyric maybe. A similar structure.

JC: I would say that the past is contemporary. Maybe the future is too. Experience, I guess maybe, again. To reach back and grab something and pull it and say, “Look at this,” is obviously something that hap pens in the present, right? Even if one keeps pulling the same thing and saying, “Look at this, hey, look at this, still look at this same thing.”

JC: Yeah, if that’s all it is. I’m a little hesitant because there’s this idea of the transcendence of pleasure, right? Like, the idea that pleasure is beyond the political, that we do it all for pleasure, and that’s maybe a kind of US exceptionalism, where we’re committed to our pleasure and

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GF: Yes, and maybe the pleasure itself would be enough of a justifica tion. The conjunction of those dissonant registers is so pleasurable.

Salvaged. Even if just scrapped for parts.

That’s doing something different each time, right? By nature, it’s a repetition, sure, but also by nature of what it means to commit to it. So for an example, imagine you were to buy some bougie Marseilles soap.

It’s like, “Oh, it’s been made the same way for 600 years or whatever.” Well, yeah, but this was a really practical way to make soap then, but today, maybe it’s not, right? Now it’s something different. It’s become something different by nature of 600 years passing. Signification, everything, has changed. There are different people doing it. The con tinuity has become virtual. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. It doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. If it’s a craft, like soapmaking, there’s something beautiful about preserving it, something beautiful about continuing to keep the practice alive. How and by whom, sure, but setting that aside, just on its own, aesthetically, it’s doing something different by nature of it being a different time. So, I guess I say all that to say that the pleasure of pulling some thing like the effect of Middle English into dialog with, say, the effect of Internet-speak, is that it shows—to me at least—the mutability of the past. It shows that the past is not fixed, but it’s being affixed. It’s being held up. That things are only continuous like this if one makes them continuous. And if one is making them continuous, it means one can turn them. It means you can mess with the continuity. It means it can be hijacked. It means it can do whatever you think—depending on the vehicle—it should do. And there are many vehicles that need to be destroyed. But there are also ones that maybe can be redirected.

You know, like, “You have one unique voice inside you.” And that’s always stressed me the fuck out as a trans person, right? Like, oh. Dear god, please. No. I would like to think I am heading toward and becom ing my voice. And that it might be multiple. It needn’t be contained in this one kind of thing. So, I think that the voice for feeld emerged again out of the materials that were there. I was reading Middle English stuff. I was tweeting. My number one encounter with text was probably the feed. I was thinking through the politics of the feed more than I was thinking through the politics of, say, early modernity or something. That was my relationship with language on a day-to-day basis. So, like, elements of the feed, elements of other things I was reading or thinking about came together.

With a Year, which I’m more or less done with (it’s coming out March 15, 2022), it’s not like feeld. It’s not written like feeld. I don’t know what the right word is. I almost want to say it’s conservative in its aes thetics, but that’s because it’s taking risks elsewhere. It’s because it’s not being conservative in other ways. There’s not really punctuation,

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GF: I wonder if, having written a book like feeld that breaks and remakes the language in this remarkably innovative way, there’s some external pressure to either keep writing in that mode or to come up with another project that’s, like, an equal number of standard devia tions away from a formal mean. After writing feeld, did you feel a pres sure (or a genuine interest, for that matter) to work in the same mode or in the same set of registers across a series of projects? Or, having finished that, are you more interested in moving into a different kind of voice?

JC: Yeah! Sometimes people, other people, say, “Poets, find your voice!”

it doesn’t matter who suffers. Don Giovanni or something. Of course, I don’t think you’re saying that. We’re talking about a book of poetry; it’s very different. But pleasure is a vehicle too, right? It can be directed, and it can be navigated.

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JC: Thank you, Gabriella.

I don’t think I felt any pressure to continue to write like feeld. Why would I do the same project again? For me, the form just comes from the materials. Maybe a Year is a little more on the Glissant, Celan side of things. It has a quietness about it compared to feeld. Feeld’s a lot louder or denser. The velocity’s quick. And a Year is thinking about a lot of the same things, about time and language, but from another angle. Maybe it’s sculpture. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe I’m just looking at the same thing from different angles. Sometimes one looks through the heart of it and sees trees in the background behind it, while from another angle one can see the ocean. So very different visuals, but the same object. I suspect I’ll probably be a writer like that, but who knows? Who knows? Maybe I’ll just get too tired to do other stuff.

GF: I’m reminded of the image of the coiled spring, from the beginning of our conversation, perceived one way from above and another way entirely from the side. Whatever you do next, I look forward to it.

Jos Charles but everything’s in a contemporary, spoken English. Sometimes there are compounds or little slips that I think are charming that are similar to feeld. But again, it’s because I do them.

Translated from the Italian by John Poch

I know because he looked out our window too, inside with the whole family, including me. Why, just why! When he looked at me, I felt a shadow come over me. I felt like prey

Whatever passes by the main road is in plain sight, and whoever walks below the fields out back goes through hell, cold or hot, and a celestial light or night dominates him. The road or the fields: you always have this choice in Nebraska. But back when I was a kid, Rudy, the gas station attendant, —it was two miles from town, nothing between it and the wheat but the black skeleton of the old barn— goes off his nut and comes into town on foot from the only road like a gunslinger. He goes into the houses with good tidings: Why! He is not asking, he is saying it as if it were the answer. He reaches out, perhaps he is begging, so you are moved and see he points beyond you.

There are places in Nebraska . . . the barns, the shops, the houses overlooking the road; they all turn their backs to a land too vast. It is as if they fear this vista, an abyss of land, may come true one day and turn into the ocean.

My old man used to say that in Nebraska you can farm the land but you cannot tame it. It is not enough to walk its roads or its abyss. You need to be or not to be its angelic nature.

520 Pietro Federico below the wingspan of a hungry eagle whose full breadth leaned into the wind, revealed in her gliding.

That look he gave me granted me a strange peace, terrible and unforgettable. It must have been Sunday. He disappeared along with his voice into bells ringing. I can’t quite recall if the church was Catholic or Evangelical.

The frontman shouts for all his lungs are worth as the crane camera pulls away from him, a helicopter that’s incapable of taking on survivors, and a family in matching gasmasks rises from the subway. You could have stumbled straight onto the set, but though you know the chorus, you can’t muster the energy to scream. Your body follows the feeble flow of traffic to the exit, passing the shuttered blood donation center, the gallery that’s permanently waiting for the next exhibition to debut.

© 2021 Michael Mingo Michael Mingo ANY DAY NOW, IT WILL COME There’s more than room to breathe: enough to swing your arms like rotor blades, to stretch that yawn from wall to wall. Instead, you pull your jacket tight as a tourniquet, compress yourself until the pressure all but forces you to cough. In normal times, a crowd this light walking the halls of Port Authority would strike you as ominous, would draw your eyes to the dark-camo soldiers by the stairwells, as though their presence promised you a bomb.

Today, you fear the detonation happened while you were on the bus, commuting straight into the sickness that has gripped the city. Searching for anything familiar, your mind calls forth a ’90s alt-rock video, one where the band whose name you can’t remember plays for the suddenly abandoned streets.

Brian Brodeur THE CARPENTER’S TALE There’s going to be an accounting. And it’ll be the weird stats that come out of somewhere. And this is one of the stranger ones.

Most of us laughed at being called “essential” in those first weeks of New York’s quarantine. We’d grease a hinge or patch a rotten sill, replacing sunk beams under a snack machine, painting classrooms. Though it felt like cheating, I’d never seen the schools look so pristine.

On Monday, I show up at this school gym outfitted as a shop. On cinderblocks, beside the bleachers with the lights turned dim, our prototype: a six-foot plywood box standing on its end where the feet would be. Above the prototype and scoreboard clocks,

—Kerry Breen, This American Life, 8/13/2021

Then, in April, at our team meeting, our boss clears his throat and his voice softens. Putting down the cruller he’s been eating, he says, “Next week, we start building coffins.”

One of us laughs. Another spills his coffee. I tell my boss, “Get out of here. Build coffins.” He looks up from his clipboard and glares at me, then gives us all the plans his boss gave him: “We’ll be building coffins for the city.”

a championship banner’s “Victory” had begun to sag where flags of UN nations cling to the ceiling. Under Germany, we set up cutting and assembly stations, a place where we can urethane the boards. Electricians rig fans for ventilation and 10 of us plug in extension cords. We stack up drafts of plywood on the floor— a draft is 50 sheets. Our only words concern the lack of Mets and Yankees scores, how hot the gym gets, who brought Gatorade. We run through 2x4s and they bring more— wash, rinse, repeat. I mean, we’re getting paid, but after so long it occurs to me: My god, they really need this many made? No one gives us an end. We build 150, stacking them from one side of the gym to the other, five coffins high—no one can see above the shrink-wrapped freight pallets of them. I back the forklift into the elevator and drive down Concourse near the stadium and down another street to a tractor trailer. The forklift’s so slow people honk at me. Honk at a guy carrying coffins—or scream at me to move. This goes on three weeks. I find it—I don’t know—bizarre, I guess, not one person ever stops to ask me what I’m doing, everyone obsessed with toilet paper. Then, passing on foot, a guy who speaks Spanish stops to zip his vest

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“Sí,” I say, and he just shakes his head and walks away. I slam the trailer shut.

But now that things are waning, more and more I feel alright, like I can let it out.

No one I tell has ever heard of this. Why would they? Not exactly good PR— Guess what we used schools for. You’ll never guess. . . .

It wasn’t war—if it had been a war we’d know what happened, what it was about, how much we’d lost, what people did out there. I’m sure someone will make a final count, and we’ll deal with each last expenditure, but that’s years off, and this is not a war.

Our team built 450 in the end, and there were other teams in other districts across the whole Department of Ed.

524 Brian Brodeur and says, “Morte,” finger-slicing his throat.

Unlike poets who hope that individual poems can be reinforced and illuminated by other poems in the same book, Young seems to start over from scratch with each new poem. Though I will suggest that the experience of reading many Dean Young poems does help us infer the meaning of each particular one, this is mainly true only as regards rec ognizing Young’s Constant Inescapable Flooding Subject, rather than as regards discerning patterns of relation among metaphors. Young’s oeuvre is designed to hit us as a barrage of hundreds and hundreds of freshFreshstarts.starts on what? On describing—and/or evoking—the essen tial experience of being a living human in seconds and minutes and hours and days. For Dean Young, that is what a poem ought to be about: the overwhelming baffling exciting maddening confusion of being alive. This is his Constant Inescapable Flooding Subject.

DEAN YOUNG AND THE MADDING FLOOD

To describe “and/or” to evoke: the tension between these two verbs may be crucial in considering the action undertaken by any good poem (because the poem both contemplates and gives the sensation of

The poetry of Dean Young stakes almost everything on the excitement of the unexpectedness of its metaphors. Whereas some poets seem to be satisfied if a poem includes just one metaphor that is a bit unpredictable, a bit puzzling, Young wants metaphorical surprises to come as frequently as possible—every two or three lines, or even more frequently. The reader gets used to being disoriented at many junctures in each Young poem. The irony in being accustomed to disorientation presents an issue to anyone who consid ers the cumulative effect of reading an entire book of such poems.

Readers like me feel that we already know too well that life is (mostly!) a 24/7 torrential tempest of bafflements and damages. What we want from art is a raincoat or umbrella or map or compass or windshield wipers: shelter from the storm (but not a windowless, dry palace).

526 Mark Halliday an aspect of life). This fundamental tension is especially noticeable in Dean Young for a double reason—because he is radically suspicious of any poetry that can be viewed as meditation, contemplation, sober reflection; and because he wants each poem to concern not an aspect of life but all of emotional-psychological human life. What is your life like? Does it hit you as a relentless barrage of fresh starts, so that you can never be usefully prepared for the next hour, next day? Insofar as you feel that way—while still wanting to read poetry!—you are Dean Young’s appropriate reader. My own temperamental relation to Young’s project is ambivalent and often skeptical. Yet poems of his have won me over many times. My hope in this essay is to discuss two of his recent poems carefully enough to convince a skeptical reader that they convey coherent mean ing and that they do this charmingly, encouragingly, winningly, with shots of brilliance that help us perceive our lives.

Dean Young has many devoted readers whose affection for his poetry needs no boost from the kind of analytic appreciation I will attempt here. For them, I suppose, analytic appreciation of Young’s work is not only unnecessary but radically inappropriate—because his poems emphatically and constitutionally do not solicit, indeed they repudiate the kind of appreciation we develop for a Well Wrought Urn, a Shakespeare sonnet, or poems by the great Moderns—appreciation supported by reasonable reflection and argument. Young has explic itly and fiercely scorned that kind of appreciation in his book The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf Press, 2010) and in many interviews and in hilariously or disturbingly intense letters to other poets including me. So, in this essay, the reader I imagine is not Dean Young himself nor one of his habitual admirers but rather a reader who (like me) tends to want a poem to “make sense” and “add up” and “get somewhere.”

Poems that can help us are poems that make a kind of sense—poems that can be paraphrased.

For me it is an axiom that a good poem can be paraphrased. If the poem works by way of complicated metaphors or abstruse allusions or ironies and paradoxes, its paraphrase will need to be three or four or five times as long as the poem itself and will (of course) seem awfully clunky and pedestrian compared to the poem’s delicacy and poise. A reader who loves the poem will certainly feel that some lovable motion of spirit or nuance has not been retained in the paraphrase. But still the paraphrasing is not only worthwhile but necessary for appreciation of the poem’s value, necessary for any sharing of that valuing from reader to reader. I’ve never wanted to live among readers who essentially have nothing to say about a poem beyond Ah or Wow or Sheesh or Huh.

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Consider how seldom we read a thorough discussion or analysis of all of a poem (especially a poem longer than a sonnet). Critics of poetry seldom oblige themselves to perform such a painstaking task. Critics like to affirm the integrity and organic completeness and pervasive rightness of a good poem, but they usually rely on generalizations and selective illustrations to support the claim. Of course, there are practi cal reasons why critics high-step above the stream of a whole poem: (1) the poem is apt to include something that doesn’t neatly fit the critic’s argument; (2) thoroughness requires more pages than a journal is likely to afford; (3) the imagined reader is impatient, busy, has other things to do; (4) the reader may prefer not to feel that the critic’s fingerprints are on every line of the poem.

Most good poems, I think, not only tolerate paraphrase but antici pate it, which is to say they want to be understood, despite whatever cost in loss of nuance may come with expressible understanding. But it’s an awkward challenge to paraphrase poems that don’t want to be paraphrased, poems that frequently (though not in every line) athleti cally swerve to evade paraphrasability. It’s a slow sort of task that does not make the critic feel like Zorro or D’Artagnan.

One response to a life of ceaseless bafflement and inescapable, mys terious suffering is despair. Dean Young often writes poems that point in the direction of despair. Despair is fended off only by flurries of dark humor, the laughter of exposing the absurdity of hope. In another mood, though, Young also writes poems of encouragement, often in an imperative mode, advising the reader on how to persist in a frustrating universe. He himself has persisted as a poet, very energetically, never succumbing to the malady of feeling that one’s poems don’t matter; his fifteenth collection appeared in 2021. Thus, when he writes a poem suggesting that a livable persistence is possible, there is honesty in the poem’s impulse—because persistence is more abidingly the central truth of his life than despair.

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I am aware, O reader, of the soundness of those four points. But I also think they can provide camouflage for under-pondered irre sponsible praise or disapproval. A strong case for the value of a poem requires some attention to every line—especially if the poem is pleased to seem wildly impulsive. (Examining whole poems, I hope, will help me achieve something that does not merely duplicate the insights in Tony Hoagland’s smart useful essay on “The Dean Young Effect” in Twenty Poems That Could Save America.) If my effort in this essay has a quixotic and faintly crazy aspect, since the poet I’m writing about will scorn it and his poems will vigorously resist it, then let us notice how brave I am!

“Pep Talk in a Crater” (from Solar Perplexus, 2019) is an example of his poetry of encouragement. Young’s titles are often useful signals about how to interpret the poems. This is a notable tendency, in view of the impassioned disdain he has expressed for innumerable poems whose distinct and specifiable topics seem to him all too obvious. The usefulness of titles as pointers toward meaning is one of the ways in which Young diverges from some of his heroes in anti-narrative and anti-interpretability such as Robert Desnos and John Ashbery and James Tate and Donald Revell. This inclination toward helpful titles is one reflection of the larger truth about Dean Young’s poetry which

is what Hoagland called its “essential earnestness”—that it doesn’t merely have fun befuddling a supposed pedestrian reader, but rather it has an agenda, it wants to convince, it wants to win assent.

That sentence is quite paraphrasable in a broad way: “Even though your life is frustrating and painful on various levels, try not to focus on a nihilistic summation of it all, even if your own observation tends to confirm that view, and notwithstanding intimations of mortality’s obliteration of spirit, and notwithstanding the sensation of chastise ment and repression of desire that each bleak new day brings.” (The paraphrase is clunky; adequate paraphrases of good poems tend to be clunky.) The poem’s first sentence gets going with the piling-up of jumbled complaints that is a Dean Young trademark. What offers to countervail against “the crow’s / opinion”—the view that life is noth ing but animal struggle for meaningless survival—is only the peppy resourcefulness of the voice. Your car needs repair, your bicycle has been stolen, and your romantic life consists of harm that has been inflicted on you or that you’ve inflicted on others. (For Young who underwent a heart trans plant in 2011 the phrase “your heart’s / a mangle” may also have a non-metaphorical meaning.) Car, bicycle, heart—the refusal to confine

Do you live in a crater? If you feel you have been bombarded for ever by illusions, deceptions, inscrutable metamorphoses, the radical unreliability of reality, then traces of those impacts may be said to sur round you like craters made by bombs or asteroids. You might feel like giving up; you might benefit from a pep talk. “Pep Talk in a Crater” begins with this six-line sentence: Even though your engine light’s blinking, your bicycle’s been stolen and your heart’s a mangle, try not to listen to the crow’s opinion no matter your concurrence, no matter the frog’s disquisition in its frog jar or the shalt-nots of dawn.

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As I go along paraphrasing a poem that wants to resist paraphrase, I bump into bits that resist more successfully, maybe too successfully. I

530 Mark Halliday serial items to an obvious category is an inveterate Dean Young strat egy. In his sense of life, practical problems and emotional problems are always simultaneously present and always intermingling in ways that obscure degrees of importance. The effect threatens to be disabling but our poet’s response is as earnest as it is plucky. In the poem’s next five sentences he assures us that he shares in the existential alarm we must feel, and then generalizes (albeit via a series of metaphors)—“Often… Often . . . Thus . . . Thus . . . All we know for sure . . .” —to establish that our condition appears everywhere, it can be seen in other people and inheres in Nature itself. Often I too have been chased barefoot by I know not what. Often a meadow struggles to mention itself. Thus someone can start out a column of flames and be moth-dust by afternoon. Thus another can collapse in on herself like a neutron star. All we know for sure is Mozart took a lot of hammering and all those trees had to be screwed in. To be chased barefoot is to have been caught unprepared in a dan gerous encounter with an indefinable force. Something basic in the universe tends to demolish any assertion of pastoral calm: “Often a meadow / struggles to mention itself.” In such a world we are sub ject to rapid calamitous transformations; versions of human glory (“a column of flames”) deteriorate into the debris of lost vitality (“mothdust”) in a matter of hours. A person’s outward strength may implode leaving nothing but the compacted inertness of psychological disabil ity. Assertions of beautiful creativity (like the music of Mozart, or like trees in a park) can only be achieved through extreme exertions, exer tions which have their violent aspect (hammering, screwing). The same may be said of Nature’s own creativity (trees in a forest).

Having given an overview of our extremely unsatisfying and exhausting world, Young’s next move is to reassure us that our reac tion to this world is not only understandable but in some sense quite acceptable—“it’s ok” is the key phrase in this eight-line sentence: Once the little green wings are smashed from the wedding vessels, it’s ok to feel like you’re watching your own murder with a butterscotch in your mouth, like how laughing makes the coffin easier to carry, the usual rueful decorums masking the Whatthis-ain’t-my-planetwant-my-mommy,wail.areweddingvessels?Arethey

chalices of wine, or could they be the bride and groom themselves? They are containers of hope. Hope is associated with birds (Dickinson: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”) and also with the green blooming of spring. To anticipate the smashing of “the little green wings . . . from the wedding vessels” is to suggest that our hopes are fragile and are apt to shatter. OK, but the hybrid metaphor may be interpretable without being effective. Wedding vessels decorated by, or endowed with, little green wings—this does not call to mind a real-world image. The metaphor has the kind of artificially imposed hybridity that Hart Crane championed when he explained to Harriet Monroe why his sentence “The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath / An embassy” should be admired.

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don’t want to maneuver myself into the position of implying that every move in each Dean Young poem is equally marvelous. So, for instance, I’ve squinted at the sentence “Often a meadow / struggles to mention itself.” When I offered an interpretation of this above, I worried that I might be behaving like all the second-rate English professors who have stifled the skepticism of students by implying that every line in a good poet’s oeuvre is unassailably right. If Dean Young had asked me about the effectiveness of the meadow sentence, I would have expressed skepticism. (But he hated my skeptical suggestions twenty-five years ago, and I’ve tried to resist offering him any since then!)

At the end of that long sentence (from “wings” to “wail”), it is as if Young abruptly senses that the poem has become too paraphras able—whereupon he wants to throw a monkey wrench. Almost all of his poems include monkey-wrench moves—because, for him, when the poem becomes openly (rather than manically and untrackably) a Coherent Statement About Life it has betrayed its fountain source in wild bafflement. The line that follows “wail” in “Pep Talk in a Crater” is: “Dumpster in the front yard yellow.” What shall I do with that? I must paraphrase! To paint a refuse container a bright cheerful color is to disguise the reality of smashing, degradation, waste. So, we have another metaphor for the world’s deceitfulness. Thus we haven’t been wrenched entirely out of understanding. (I realize that what I’m doing

532 Mark Halliday

Young’s wings/vessels metaphor is not a case of the rapid hopping from one metaphor to another that is his typical activity, but of two images being welded together willfully, with hyper-efficient brusque ness, the images having been drawn from, as it were, different pages of a thick file labeled Hope Tropes.

Nevertheless! I confess that the momentum of Young’s eight-line sentence does woo me from skepticism toward the kind of ga-ga accep tance that his poetry induces in some fans.

When you find that your fragile hopes have shattered, the poet says, it is excusable (“ok”) for you to feel as if you’ve been deceived by life. You’ve been distracted from bitter truth by trivial pleasures (“but terscotch”) and by humor (“laughing”) and by social convention (“rue ful decorums”) so that you are not quite aware of your own desperate need to cry out (“wail”) against your plight.

For my taste—or rather, I prefer to say, for my sense of how poetry can help us perceive and appreciate truths of life—a poem whose originality relies on that Crane-esque kind of compacted metaphor tends not to be beguiling or lovable. Such metaphors solicit either an abject stunned acquiescence from the awed reader (as Harriet Monroe sensed) or a lawyer-like busy-bee defense by a professor determined to stay several jumps ahead of an unprofessional quizzical reader.

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Another reverend of alienation soliciting for the latest political roller derby? Spaceman on a snapped cord? Lost dog and his kittens? Go ahead, invite the Witnesses in to poke fun at their weeny leviathan. You call that an apocalypse? Who is at the door? Five guesses are tossed forth—scarecrow, reverend, spaceman, dog, and Jehovah’s Witnesses—the last of these is actually a realistic possibility, even if Jehovah’s Witnesses may seem absurd or even surreal when they appear at your door. There is a perpetual barrage of demands and impositions impinging on us. The barrage may include a brainless or hollow person (scarecrow) who is being destroyed by life (burning) while asking for charity that he won’t be able to benefit from (blood donations). It may include a pious operative campaigning in support of a political cause not seriously distinguish able from a comically brutal sport whose effect is to render citizens more disconnected than ever. It may include someone who is lost in

Life fools us into persisting. The poem notes this while offering us a pep talk aimed at inspiring the same result. This irony is at the heart of the poem at hand and implicitly at the heart of Dean Young’s entire torrential, persistent oeuvre. After the dumpster line, “Pep Talk in a Crater” continues with an eleven-line riff set up by the idea of a joke being told where people (all of us) are in mortal danger (as in an Intensive Care Unit): Knock-knock joke in ICU. No one knows who’s there so keep guessing. How about a burning scarecrow seeking blood donations?

has a parallel in what Helen Vendler used to claim she could always do with Ashbery’s poems; but Ashbery’s poems resisted paraphrase blithely and suavely and uncaringly, whereas Young is, in my reading, caring and anxious and never nonchalant.)

534 Mark Halliday space, untethered to humanity. It may include someone fundamentally confused about his animal nature. . . . OK, I admit that “Lost dog and his kittens” is rather pat and mechanical as evocation of a topsy-turvy universe, but I could argue that the voice of the poem knows this and wants for an exasperated second to parody the poem’s own style. (This is a justification I’d better not resort to too often.) The barrage of life’s impingements goes on—how to react? You can enjoy teasing people who claim to have life all figured out: you can “poke fun at their weeny leviathan.” Their version of catastrophe is hilariously simple in its denial of the effulgent mystery of every minute—“You call that an apocalypse?”Thepoet does not anticipate the evangelist’s literal End of the World, but does anticipate trouble, so he recommends a handy weapon for self-defense, along with sophisticated wine-drinking. Here are the last five lines of “Pep Talk in a Crater”: While we may assume no immediate danger, it can’t hurt but to avail yourself of the hatchet in the hatchery and a good red. Obviously god needs lots of purple streaks in his design. If a hatchery is where chickens lay eggs, why is there a hatchet there? To fend off a fox? In Dean Young’s world, domestic productivity (egg production) will never be safe from violence. (Mozart took a lot of ham mering.)

Hatchet/hatchery is an impulsive play on words—something Young does not often indulge in. I think he senses that too much word play would undermine his governing purpose, which is to express the dire absurdity of our baffled existence on earth. If a poet were to prof fer a bon mot too frequently, then there could be too much implication that being a writer is fun and life is cheerily amusing. Young is a play ful poet, certainly, but he feels his play is for mortal stakes. In his dire world, alcohol may help us persist, and if we sometimes spill our wine we can tell ourselves we are participating in a cosmically ordained pat-

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“Pep Talk in a Crater” is a poem intended to encourage us all in a constantly alarming world. Having worked through it, I’m not sure I’ve persuaded any skeptical reader of the poem’s overall value; but my account of it is meant to support the hypothesis that Dean Young’s poems are not just jumbles of amazing images but artistic wholes. Tony Hoagland wrote that “Young’s poems, as a consequence of their deep integration, sustain a state of vulnerability and openness that anchors their ironic transmogrifications and jokester antics.” Hoagland’s sen tence is noticeably cloudy-abstract, but he’s getting at something true about Young’s style being anchored by a deeply felt sense of life. No matter how much he scorns definitions and aesthetic prescrip tions, Young believes he is creating art, and his prose credo The Art of Recklessness is loaded with prescriptive remarks about how art should jolt us. Young unmistakably wants his poems to be appreciated as art (alongside Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein and Kenneth Koch), and he thinks about this every day, as many of us do. One nearly inevitable result, for Dean Young as for many calmer and more reasonable poets, is poems about poetry—poems that are about (“about”—problematic controversial yet unavoidable preposition in any serious discussion of a poem) some aspect of the life of writing and reading poetry. Of course, we often feel that a poem evoking or dramatizing the activ ity of imagination is implicitly or “in a sense” about poetry. As Allen Grossman memorably remarked in his Summa Lyrica, “I am always about to say that the poem is about poetry.” But Dean Young has many poems that explicitly concern poetry, openly wanting to deepen or intensify our awareness of poems and what poems do. I’ll turn now to one such poem, “My Process” (also in Solar Perplexus).

My way of tuning in to “My Process” was to take the title as the key. Any much-published poet has been asked in too many interviews and Q-and-A sessions to describe the “process” by which the poet manages

tern: “god needs lots of purple / streaks in his design.” Such a notion is a delusion but a more livable and benign illusion than the ominous one marketed by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Those first eight lines of “My Process” are alive with revulsion for the So You Want To Write A Poem tips offered by many poets who have hoped that a guidebook will, unlike their books of poems, earn money.

Real poems, Young feels, come into being through weirdly unpredict able exertions. One’s own mind may feel like an invalid (in a wheel chair) and one’s thoughts may seem to consist of only the fleshless remnant (bones) of what was once vital and inspired. Progress may seem absurdly difficult (as if through sand). What you generate may be ungainly and alien (like an ostrich) and may seem supernaturally peculiar (those glowing antlers). Writing the poem may require defi ance not only of propriety (church) but even of one’s own sense of rightness; you may need to lay claim to language and ideas that don’t officially belong to you. The operations of navigating through the poem and of language production may occur in unforeseen and capri cious ways: “Experimental / turn signal, neurotransmitter’s whim.”

536 Mark Halliday to produce poems. The question is likely to be sweetly naive (do you use a pencil or ballpoint?), but it can also be exasperating if it seems to expect an orderly ten-step procedure that extrudes a poem in its final stage. Mr. Young, how do your poems get done?

Sometimes it’s like pushing a wheelchair of bones through high-tide sand. Like giving birth to an ostrich, an ostrich with antlers that glow. The sense there’s something wrong and not giving a hoot like going to church to see what you can steal. Experimental turn signal, neurotransmitter’s whim.

As readers, we feel sure that Dean Young could continue this series of metaphors indefinitely. Why should this poem about the oce anic mystery of poetic creation not flood onward for a hundred lines? Why indeed should every Young poem not go on for six hundred lines, or until the poet’s dinnertime? Well, six hundred lines would make a poem less publishable. But apart from that practical consider

537The Hopkins Review ation, the question of the size of a poem, when the poem comes from a poet gripped by one Constant Inescapable Flooding Subject, is a real question. (Ashbery’s Flow Chart can be seen as a diabolically tedious response to the question.)

One answer is that Young intuitively knows that if a poem is to convey our radical overwhelmedness, it would be anathema for the reader to get used to the poem, and even manic unpredictability can begin to feel routine after sixty lines or more. “My Process” has twenty-seven lines; very few of Young’s poems run past sixty lines. This enables the reader to catch breath and eat a little yogurt before the next metaphorical rollercoaster. More importantly, though, the size of the poems can be justified with the thought that even if our overwhelmedness is all-day-every-day, the truth of it rises into con sciousness in bursts, and the scope of a burst is aptly represented by a poem of fewer than sixty lines.

When we receive divine inspiration it comes deceptively, as when Hermes arranges for Orpheus to find in the underworld an illusion that only seems to be Eurydice. (Is that a convincing paraphrase of the first sentence just quoted? Hermes, who serves as guide for Orpheus in one version of the myth, has traditionally been referred to as a trickster, although Hades and Persephone are the gods who dictate the agreement that Orpheus fails to abide by when he looks back to see his beloved. Young’s quick summary of the myth is a bit hazy.) Young

Young’s next move in “My Process” is to suggest that what he is characterizing is not merely his own artistic process but the archetypal experience of true poets who dare to take on the challenges of worldmystery:Mythologically, by the time Orpheus gets the message, it’s obscured by radiance having been delivered by a trickster god. Of course, the operatic head floats down the river, decapitation making for a better singer as with a praying mantis.

Mark Halliday wants to imply that any message that is clear and reliable and useful, rather than obscured by radiance, must be a falsehood about reality, since reality is controlled by maniacally unreliable forces, trickster gods.

When you try to track your inspiration as it eludes you amid the jumble of notions in your head, is it like having to move zigzag across

Most poets enjoy the idea that the severed head of Orpheus continues to sing beautifully as it floats down the Hebrus (Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI)—poets want to believe in their posthumous appeal—but Young enjoys emphasizing that the magical singing comes from a severed head, detached from ordinary human functioning. His kind of poetry has a better chance of arising from someone with a blown mind than from someone whose head is too firmly on his shoulders.

What about the praying mantis? Some entomologists tell us that the female insect eats the head of the male during copulation so as to ensure that the convulsions causing egg fertilization will be more intense and decisive—less inhibited! It’s a fact or factoid that would appeal to a poet who feels that calmness and rational mindfulness pull us away from interesting creativity. The decapitations are unsettling, and as we ride bravely into the remaining lines of “My Process” there will be further difficulties in paraphrasing metaphors that are sprayed at us like shrapnel as we continue to hear the poet responding to the question of how his poems come into being: Zigzag in a plaid forest, it’s like lying fully clothed under motel covers. Lavender spit, amniotic gin. It’s like trying to be a cube of light undissolved in a bigger cube of light, like holding your own brain and wringing it out. The heart has nothing to do with it.

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Having evoked the necessity of a dangerous cerebral operation, he next momentarily wants to slap away (as if it came from a naive interviewer) the proposition that a poem need only pour out feelings, feelings, feelings: “The heart has nothing / to do with it.” But he knows that declaration is untenable, so he immediately contradicts it and charges ahead to a sudden ending for “My Process”: The heart has everything to do with it, floating like a jellyfish all bioluminescent sting, monkeys ripping the car chrome off while we tour the ruins.

To be writing a poem in a Youngian spirit is to be so open to the world’s constant cascade of phenomena that the border between self and world is very tenuous—after all, there’s a constant cascade within you, too. So, the attempt to sustain a coherent self-enclosed illumination of the world is naive: “It’s like trying to be a cube of light / undis solved in a bigger cube of light.” And what else is it like, when you try to write a living poem? It’s “like holding your own brain and / wring ing it out.” You try to extract something vital from your mental life, but this might be dangerous. We murder to dissect, Wordsworth said; Young goes farther, implying that we murder even to express.

a wilderness of lines that run in other directions? You know it is! And if you reach a resting place—a momentary stay against confusion (like a motel)—you can’t relax in your underwear, because you will need to be on the road again so soon. Your alcoholic beverage will seem as cru cial to your survival as the fluid that protects an embryo. And will your saliva be pale purple? Probably not. But spittle bugs secrete a foamy substance on lavender plants in the spring. (The Internet—a source of information not available to my forerunners Matthew Arnold and Yvor Winters—tells me this.)

To confirm that “lavender spit” metaphorically refers to the way experience uncontrollably soils or obscures the beau ties cultivated by poetry, please write to Professor Dean Young at the University of Texas. He is a poet with some knowledge of horticulture.

Reader, when I planned this essay I thought I would go on from here to paraphrase, line by line, at least two more of Dean Young’s many poems-sort-of-about-poetry.

For instance, “Wheelbarrow with Wings” (about teaching poetry) and “Dear Decoration Committee” (about

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Why should those wild monkeys end the poem? The metaphor is strikingly pessimistic about the chance for success in poetic composi tion, but the pessimism has pervaded all of the poem. It’s hard to argue that the monkeys metaphor has structural significance beyond simply being the sixteenth (or so) metaphor in a shapeless series. But it leaves us with a memorable picture of the psychological mayhem inherent in Young’s version of authentic poetry.

The jellyfish simile, with its vivid reminder that the human heart is a source of harm, whether you think of it as the engine of animal vitality or more specifically of libido, could have sufficed as an ending for “My Process.”

I feel I’ve had to bob and weave in trying to interpret “My Process”—of course I have, since the poem seems to have originated in a bubbling rage against facile interpretation and reductive accounts of poems as products of “craft.” I don’t have the sensation of having built an irrefutable case for the exquisite architectural shapeliness or organic vitality of the poem. That sensation is more possible for critics of Milton, Keats, Dickinson, Frost. . . . Still, I do hope to have stimu lated appreciation of “My Process” as a poem about the mysterious difficulty of creating vital art.

But Young perhaps sensed that it was a shade too familiar, since we’ve all written and read so much about the heart; allowing only a comma for transition, he hits us with those wrenching mon keys. At some point during the poetic process, we may wax reflective and elegiac, we may muse rather placidly on the relation between the poem at hand and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (or another work of the past)—like tourists on safari visiting a prehistoric temple. Meanwhile monkeys are ravaging our vehicle: we return to the poetic task to find it wrecked by wild truths that have sprung from the jungle of oneself.

541The Hopkins Review judging poetry). There’s also one called “Die, English Department, Die.” There would be pleasures in presenting these, as their titles sug gest. But how many times in a row do we want to arrive at the idea that life is maddeningly confusing and that poetry should express this? What I have to acknowledge is that Young’s poems force any critical reader to say extremely similar things over and over, paraphrasing his monkey swarms of metaphors all campaigning for wild liberty of imagination to express life’s maddening confusion.

Indeed, it is an amazing thing about Young’s huge oeuvre that he never gets tired of expressing that same outlook. The fabulous variety of his metaphors can’t conceal the fact that he is essentially saying— meaning—the same thing over and over: life is a crazing chaos and the only adequate artistic response to it must be dazzlingly unreasonable and unpredictable. To theorize or to argue logically obviously goes against the grain of that outlook, but so intense is Young’s commit ment to it, so intense is his desire to make it emotionally (not logically) persuasive that he loves to mock-theorize and to hector imagined conventional skeptics. This happens not only in poems but in The Art of Recklessness which is loaded with riffs combatively recommending surprise and impulse as against design and reflection. Here is a pas sage in favor of what he calls “the irreverent”: It doesn’t observe the separations that pieties and sacred ritual insist on. The irreverent mixes. What we need is recklessness and an owl-shit outburst and a good smack upside the head every now and then. I, too, am a creature of electrified lint; give me a doily and I’ll blow my nose on it, and I mean that in the best possible way. The poem is here to be defied. I almost typed “deified.” When I typed “goof student” instead of “good stu dent” in a letter of recommendation, it was very very hard to change. The irreverent welcomes its own desecration; it has no obligation to the truth (because there are too many to be obli gated to), only to clear a possible space where new truth may appear. Sweeping, sweeping the temple steps is all you can do when hoping the god will appear.

Such riffs want to be charismatic; the voice wants to carry us in its cur rent. When I step back, though, I squint at (for example) “desecration.”

Suppose someone were to scramble and re-publish Young’s poems as the work of Araki Yasusada or Miasmo Strumazz or Joshua Clover or Conrad Aiken III: that would be desecration. Would Young welcome that? Also, we notice an ambivalence about “truth” in the passage quoted. Young wants poetry that doesn’t bother about being true (“no obligation”), yet apparently it should create conditions “where new truth may appear.” But falsehood could appear instead, couldn’t it? If so, and if that would be regrettable, then in a dodgy way Young actu ally does imply an obligation to express or reveal truth about life. Do we or don’t we have to think carefully, in writing poems, about what is true in human life? The metaphor about sweeping the temple steps seems to have followed from the phrase “clear a possible space,” but what it calls to mind is an abject mindless menial ritual with a broom— a pious rote activity describable by adjectives Young would prefer to attach to the composition of dutifully controlled traditional offerings such as sonnets or villanelles. As I hope to have shown in examining two poems closely, Young actually does a lot of thinking in his poems, behind their insistently (or someone could say programmatically!) wild surfaces, but his congenital antipathy to intellectual analysis (“Die, English Department, Die”) attracts him to images of admirable thoughtless activity, free from the agitation of intelligence—like sweep ing the steps of a temple. When you think about it, that’s an odd meta phor for the work of an artist of irreverence. Irreverence can be not only charming but psychologically and spiritually beneficial—as Dean Young’s poetry cornucopically demon strates in its reception by readers who have found it exciting and liber ating. But irreverence is only seriously interesting when it has a serious relation to reverence; irreverence for conventional faith or propriety (or literary tradition) can be combined with reverence for human kindness, human love, human imagination, the human spirit. Though he is very

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wary of declaring such reverence except in hazy ways (“hoping the god will appear”), Young’s poetry does evince it; this is why he wants to give us pep talks in our craters. He likes to adopt the attitude of the madcap anarchist whose only goals are to smash idols, épater la bour geoisie, and amuse the jaded, but he is more centrally a counselor and encourager. This is much more visible and palpable in Young’s work than in the work of playfully puzzling poets he admires like Ashbery, Tomaz Salamun, or James Tate. Sympathetic awareness that our lives are strangely difficult—not only when we are trying to write, but every hour—shows up in flashes of comic-but-sincere lamentation every where in Young’s books. “Pep Talk in a Crater” and “My Process” thus have many forerunners. For an example I’ll go back to Strike Anywhere (1995), his third book, the book in which he decisively became the Dean Young of metaphorical zigzag who has flourished ever since. “Errata” is a poem about how we keep making mistakes, our lives are rivers of error but we persist—our courage funny but lovable—in trying to stay afloat. Instead of settling for mockery, instead of listening too long to the crow’s opinion, we keep trying to be clever in building a viable raft or boat for our voyage. To say so on this level of generaliza tion sounds sweet-trite but the poem lives in its dance from metaphor to metaphor; we can feel the poet trying to fortify our courage as well as his own. I’ll quote just the last two of the eleven stanzas of “Errata”: Still, one tries to go on making, following instructions. It is best to assemble first without glue as practice, then disassemble, glue and reassemble but who has patience for that? One fucks up and regrets but sometimes not too terribly because they’ve included extra screw blocks, extra screws. Plethoras of putties. Everyone will understand why you arrive so late, so barehanded. The swans are back on the lake.

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544 Mark Halliday

Since that ending comes from this poet devoted to surprise, the reader won’t be surprised to hear that those swans and that lake have not appeared anywhere earlier in “Errata.” The swans arrive unforesee ably and beautifully, like good poems, like our chances to thrive in the purple-streaked design (or un-design) of the world. The encouraging sensation being offered to us belongs in the tradition of encourage ment that includes Yeats’s swans at Coole Park and Hardy’s darkling thrush. But the particular shot of bemused hope delivered by Dean Young depends on the way it seems to have surprised him while writ ing, as much as it surprises us. Now and then, I’m grateful for a shot of Vitamin Y, it has helped me persist.

That night on the beach, a glistening of rain masks the father’s tears. He lies to the sand, he’s fine alone.

The man and woman have left their bikes by the beach when she tells him that marriage is life’s graveyard. Like the woman, I have called weddings “funerals” many times, even my own once to my ex-fiancée, though we never made it quite that far. My eyes are too untrained to know what shade the sky becomes, what black and white would make of sunset, or if the lead’s wedding kimono is blue, green, even red.

The camera struggles to make sense of what little light remains. Cherry blossoms muddle to gray as the woman tucks her wedding fan into her sash, climbs into a car, and looks at her widowed father a last time.

“Again,” it seems to say as it Footprintsaccumulates.blotthe way like a mind that ruminates beside a perfect blank of whosenow-becoming-then,rumplededgeis a bank of snow heaped over when the walk was shoveled and swept. Just up ahead I find (where someone ran and leapt and, sliding, left behind)

© 2021 Will Toedtman Will Toedtman BRICKWORK As I walk home, the snow keeps coming. Everything it covers is aglow, and it covers everything, black limbs of trees and dense ligatures of itObliterative,hedges.intense,makeswhitegranite ledges of buildings and the white sycamores along the walk look gray; birds light or linger without a song.

547The Hopkins Review two dark red streaks in the snow already thick upon the walk again, and now they too will soon be gone. As I walk home, the snow keeps coming. Everything it covers is aglow, and it covers everything.

Sick again: too many cigarettes, late nights and early mornings. Now, post-nasal drip and a deep cough that blooms in phlegm flecked brown with tar—the jetsam of a losing fight, hocked up and hoisted overboard. I flush it down. There. I, like some small god, my hand on the handle of the maelstrom, make my stand, though it reminds me what the match says: “Hush.” I’ve got to quit, but first I need a light. Admitted: all my charms are overthrown. Enough, for now, to obviate the causal in a smolder of desires and regrets. Searching in the mirror for what once was, tomorrow I’ll eradicate the cause.

548 Will Toedtman LULLABY

On a poor excuse for a wave

And give a hollow knock, a wooden sound, The thud of a man in his grave Awakening and pounding on his coffin Uselessly. Think of the drowned Anchors that smile now in the sediment

WINDY OCTOBER NIGHT, WATERSIDE Lève l’ancre pour une exotique nature!

Tonight, and sometimes, like age’s vague what-ifs, Rise toward the rickety dock (Which holds them restless captives far too often)

Of pleasure’s swift excesses, The steel-toe boots, their laces undulating Like Ophelia’s loosened tresses, The grace of slow decomposition, skulls Of lovers done debating

Of what’s forever lost. Think of the toilet-seats the hydrophytes Have purfled and embossed With Byzantine designs, the fortune spent, In coins, on wishes, nights Like this, the rods fish caught, the rusting hulls

MallarméAbandoned yachts, and less immoderate skiffs, Resigned in their rope webbing

To the harbor’s sulfide reek, still softly rock In starlit flooding and ebbing

550 Ryan Wilson Hope’s chance, the jetsam of our sunlit days All gathered, now, together In a realm where the celestial bodies seem, Themselves, tenants, and weather Means nothing. All that is eternally sways

In the green dark of a dream. . . .

The creaks of straining ropes, Like old doors opening or closing, augur The coming of fresh hopes.

The night-wind lifts. With wavelets’ supple plashes

In that subaqueous glow the deep world must Think rises and illumines The vacant moon, perhaps the skeletons Wish peace upon us humans, Who fog our world with hopeful clouds of dust, Us wild-eyed, anxious ones,

So why should food forever smack of ashes? You swig your trendy lager. If loss, like logic, holds as axiom That life is misery, The membrane separating you from God’s The present tense of be So why trudge through the decades yet to come, The bleak Iditarods Of your tomorrows, glacial grind of years, When their brute apparatus Of frostbite, wolves, snow-blindness, and despair Conspires to keep, as status Quo, your face bejeweled with frozen tears? To leave, to go out there, To enter the eternal world of myth Is simple. Just stop being. As soon as your few friends lose their last thought Of you (which will prove freeing For them) you’ll find yourself among, forthwith, The Deathless Things you’ve sought.

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The whirling silken vortex Tomorrow promises is easier Than passing through life’s portal, Somehow. Two deaths diverge in every wood, And you, you must be mortal, And die the slow death others would prefer.

Let’s call that love. Yeah? Good. (Of course, we’re kept alive by cowardice, But let’s not say such things.

Think of the sufferings That, missing you, shattered some stranger’s bliss. Now, turn to the glittering city Behind you. Walk back down the dock (and note That you’re so fortunate To walk) and see, with your own blessèd vision, The world you might have quit, That sloping bank, dark tree-line, those remote Skyscrapers. Make the decision To walk the streets again, to be distracted. There, lovers flirt, non-stop, And money’s made. Don’t notice the lamp-post (Filigreed iron, its top Flowering) to which the moths are so attracted Houses an eager host

For God’s sake, there are children: grow some pity!)

Perhaps, if one may posit A bold conjecture, we must learn to kill Ourselves, or kill, at least, What ties us to the world, that we may know The peace of innocence, Cool as a breeze through a hole in the smoky cortex.

Who hear our deathless parts, souls if you will, Like children locked in a closet, Pounding the door, pleading to be released.

It’s starting to make some sense… (Jump off the dock. Jump. Jump!. . . .) No, not yet. No.

552 Ryan Wilson Who’s tidying his home, making exquisite Baroque designs for all The wingèd things whose maddened little flight Might lead them, soon, to call On him by chance, or error. Don’t ask, Is it For all who seek the light?

Karen Wilkin LISA CORINNE DAVIS: RECENT WORK Lisa Corinne Davis’s paintings seduce us with their complexity and unexpectedness, at the same time that they disconcert. Like many serious, engaged artists working today, Davis explores, she says, “themes of racial, social, and psychological identity.” But where many of her colleagues investigate this terrain through literal images that can verge on illustration and invite narrow readings, Davis courts ambiguity and multivalent associations with an inventive, abstract language, at once personal and informed by a broad under standing of the history of art. Some years ago, in an essay, Toward a more fluid definition of Blackness, published in the online magazine Artcritical, Davis wrote “Many African American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self—my black self—as an expression of selfdetermination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance.”

Self-determined and free as Davis obviously is, as an admired art ist with a distinguished career, represented in significant public and private collections, currently Head of Painting and Co-Director of the MFA program at Hunter College, her paintings seem to be about contingency (among many other things), which could be read as a distillation of the instability of perception and the inequalities of the society we live in. Or not. Whatever motivations we assign to them, her complex, layered abstractions, with their warped grids, luminous hues, and syncopated rhythms, keep us off-balance. They can provoke often contradictory associations—from the natural to the man-made, the ephemeral to the mechanical, the organic to the technological, even the mass produced to the tribal—associations that could be interpreted

Karen Wilkin

Davis superimposes tangled, knotted, irregular grids of different kinds—delicate and coarse, angular and curvilinear, frayed and con tinuous, suave and staccato—punctuating them with nodes of more intense hues and patterns or zones of more concentrated “drawing,” now widely dispersed, now concentrated, now rhythmic, now dense. We alternate between seeing a pulsing whole and focusing—or trying to focus—on individual layers, somewhat disoriented and tossing on the accumulated grids, as if floating in the ocean. We follow the irregu lar paths suggested by the most substantial drawing or the scattered solid fragments, always aware of how the grids, even the most geomet ric, refuse to respond to the vertical and horizontal edges of the support. The result? Animation and invigorating tension. And, no matter what else the paintings trigger in us, no matter how rich or provocative the ideas they call up, our attention is ultimately held by the alluring, often syncopated rhythms of the grids and patches, the sense of light, and the clear, fresh color.

If some works, the varied scales and configurations of the layered grids suggest fictive depths and heights, as if we were staring into moving water or hovering over a landscape. In others, geometric grids of different sizes suggest the built environment, seen from afar. In just about all works, discontinuities and overlappings destabilize the space and enrich the oblique allusions. It’s often impossible to decide what is on top of what. We are fascinated and slightly discomfited, compelled and made uncomfortable. Davis’s abstractions, for all their accomplishment and beauty, also prove to be powerful metaphors not only for her particular experience, which we glimpse, imperfectly, by implication, but also for the troubled, uncertain times we live in. But we can embrace that accomplishment and beauty as signs of hope.

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And, of course, there are those playful, alliterative titles.

Karen Wilkin as visual, wordless equivalents for the different ways that we see each other and ourselves. Even our relationship to the object before us can shift, through the paintings’ various evocations of the long views inherent in mapping and the intimacy of textiles, as well the more extreme polarities of the microscopic and the cosmic, and more.

Conclusive Concoction (2021), oil on canvas, 56 x 46 inches. Private col lection. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Deductive Data (2021), oil on canvas, 56 x 48.5 inches. Sheldon Museum of Art. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Exact Ersatz (2021), oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Quizzical Quantum (2021), oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Foundational Flim Flam (2021), oil on canvas, 26 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Miraculous Measure (2020), oil on panel, 40 x 35 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Illusive Locale (2020), acrylic and oil on paper, 14 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

Schematic Sham (2020), acrylic and oil on paper, 14 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. © Lisa Corinne Davis

COMMITTAL For Steve Dixon

Michelle Lesifko-Bremer

Sweaty, rushing from my fourth-floor battle with the albatross copier, I spill coffee down my skirt taking the stairs and remember you, rushing into our basement workshop, tea sloshing and having sloshed, all right, we’re all here, might as well start— I use dashes to punctuate dialogue often now and to stretch the limits of a conventional sentence, you’d be glad to know, or probably indifferent, given that you approached teaching with the same weary resignation as a waiter or cab driver or beat reporter, probably because you’d gotten used to those kinds of jobs before you told me, bluntly, that my love story wasn’t believable and no one serious writes the phrase like diamonds in the rain, not even a poet, and probably I shouldn’t write about marriage until I’d been in one— and wonder if my disheveled teaching persona can possibly be as charming as yours, deciding no, probably not, since ours is a dry campus, no magnums of Yellow Tail to end the semester, no pound cake, no typewritten comments on the backs of old drafts—and even though you were dying

556 Michelle Lesifko-Bremer of Parkinson’s, I imagine you writing every day, stories interrupted by phone calls, still typing in the rundown house with the scrappy black cat who seemed as exhausted to be alive as you were— just sentimental nonsense, like the fiction I wrote when I was eighteen, a girl’s dream of a man they call a writer’s writer, but who seemed to me too sad to be anything more than honest, shaking his head saying just write the damn thing.

Steven Leyva

THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY Dawn, bright as teeth biting night’s black tongue lifts the bloodshot eyes of the shift boss, hung over and sore as a thigh after a night of bachata on rum.

Steven Leyva

Suavemente across the shoulders a morena’s kiss – every kind of digression –clears his eyes enough to see my grandfather harvesting bananas with a shotgun and a song that refuses to go limp in the air. Don Miguel the boss shouts confusing two different honorifics. Granddad just keeps singing and shooting. By midday he has out sung the morning insects and the shift boss has given up, written a discharge note and small pension acheck—littleseed money, a little insanity, a little uneaten fruit.

The marrow of chimneys still lifts an incense her mother would call the musk of the cross burning. She lets an infection have her finger – swollen like a styed eye. This is all she well remember of her time in old Baltimore, in December, before the first frost had grown into her cerebellum, before we began to account for what we’d lost to a season of gout.

558 Steven Leyva ANOTHER INCIDENT For my mother After Countee Cullen My mother visits Baltimore to help us remember why she will never move here. The cold & blood pressure. Her mother who we buried last fall is summoned in small talk and feckless hush over stone grits sitting in a sauce pan. No one will bother to clean it for weeks. She grabs a whole fist of salt and throws it like a last rite into the pan. Not enough, she half hums through a knitted muffler. She pokes out her tongue and drums the dusted hardwood floors. Her mother was determined to leave nothing to inherit. Took her yellow-bone into the ground with her keen sense of smell. Her mother let the termites have the house, let the banks have the rest, except the expired medication in the cabinets— God only knows where that’s gone.

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Baxter again offered the Senator his arm as the elevator doors opened. He knew Baxter considered him a liability. He filibustered when he didn’t get his way, and he could prevent bills Baxter wanted from getting out this session. Yet he was a fixture, over thirty years at

“Ihate to lose, son. Makes me feel like the air I’m breathing is on loan.” The senior Senator limped down the corridor hung with photographs of his bewhiskered forefathers in the State Capitol. “But a bill’s not dead till it’s been killed three times… stabbed in the Senate, shot in the House and hung on a nail at the Governor’s desk.”

Senator Charles Windsor put his hand on the arm of the bearded lobbyist, leaning on the young man as they made their way along the hall. “What we’re dealing with here is a serious hemorrhage, but we’re not dead yet. I can still strap on the urine bag.”

The two men stepped into the wood-paneled elevator up to the Senate offices. “Won’t you make enemies that way, Senator?” Baxter asked.Senator Windsor’s eyes lit up, and the creases in his tough tanned face fanned out as he laughed. “I’m too old for new enemies, Bob, and the old ones have as much trouble walking these days as I do. They won’t come after me.”

FOR THE GOOD OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

“Can a cow give milk? Dunford knows once I get the floor, I can hold it too. He still has three bills of his own he wants passed before the session ends next week.”

“But can you get recognized?” Bob Baxter asked.

560 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman his desk in the back row, his silver armadillo-headed cane hooked on the rail. Baxter would have to work with him or around him.

“I work all ways at once, Bob, to accomplish what’s right.” He opened his office door. “Now come on in. I want you to tell Earl what you told me so he can work that into what I say this afternoon.”

“I didn’t call about Robert, Daddy.” Her deep voice always sur prised him. For some reason he never quite recognized it as his daugh ter’s.“I’ve been asking around among my friends, honey. I have friends in the movie business too, you know.”

“Samantha?” Senator Windsor’s hard blue eyes momentarily lost focus, then abruptly he drilled his cane into the floor and moved towards his private office. “Earl, talk to Bob; he has information I want to use.” He shut the door behind him. Settling at his desk, he pulled the picture of his daughter from the clutter of photographs of himself shaking hands with dignitaries. His daughter’s picture was a publicity shot taken when she first landed in Los Angeles over twenty years ago to begin her acting career. She was leaning against a boulder on a beach in a billowy skirt and halter-top, her dark hair blowing about her face. She was smiling, the smile of an innocent teenager from Texas who’d just discovered the ocean. In fact, she was not a teenager, but 21, and he didn’t know how innocent she was, and by then she wasn’t even from Texas. Seven years earlier she’d moved to New York with her mother. He lifted the phone. “Sam…? You heard anything from that hus band of yours?” He began talking before she could. “If I live long enough to see him again, he’ll have more than Hollywood to worry about; he’ll have the whole state of Texas after him.”

“Daddy, please. I called to talk about Mother. I want to go see her… tomorrow, but I don’t want to take Emily, and I don’t want to leave her here. Is there any chance she could visit you for a few days?”

As the two men entered, the bespangled arm of his assistant Beth Ann Johnson shot up at her desk. “Your daughter’s on the phone, sir.”

“Daddy…I need…Emily needs to know there is one man she can count on.”

“I’m sure she’s doing the best she can.”

“I know you’re in session. Marjorie can take her into Houston dur ing the week. She has an attorney’s conference over the weekend in Austin, and she could drop Emily off. I thought maybe you could take her for the weekend.”

“Shall I say anything to Mother for you?” she asked. “Yes, tell her I said to get better.”

They both knew his wife/her mother might be dying, but he’d never been able to face what he couldn’t control, and at the top of that list was his wife. Death only came in second.

“Well, honey…well…sure. I could take her to the armadillo farm. Remember, how you always liked that?”

“Daddy, please. No one has heard from Robert.”

“I’m sure that would be fine.”

“Emily?” He glanced at the picture of the light-haired child on a pony taken when she visited last spring. He’d never taken care of her alone. “Why I’d love to see Emily, but we’re at the end of session right now. I’m probably going to have to filibuster against this damn legal ized gambling they’re trying to ram down our throats.”

“Has Marjorie heard from Robert? You’d think a son would get in touch with his own mother.”

He knew his daughter was trying to act brave since her husband left her, but he heard the pain in her voice, though he didn’t know what to do about it.

“Honey, I may have to take the floor as early as Friday. They’ve turned down my bill and got this gambling bill instead. If it passes, they’ll turn the whole state of Texas into a goddamn Las Vegas.”

“I’ll try to get back to Austin by Monday,” Samantha said. “Maybe Beth Ann can help out.”

“Daddy, Beth Ann doesn’t know the first thing about children.”

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562 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman “Honey…” he pleaded. He knew her complaint had always been that he’d had some bill, some fight or filibuster that took priority over her, then she’d married a man who did the same. She’d quit demand ing for herself, but for Emily, she was demanding. “Okay,” he relented, “I’ll do my best. Goddamn it, I’d much rather be out on the armadillo farm with Emily. Maybe I can get Harvey Landau to filibuster. He’s been looking to make a name for himself, God help him. I don’t know if he even knows enough about anything to talk for an hour; he can’t give a speech without note cards…”

“Thank you. I’ll tell Mother you send regards.” “Yes. You tell her to drink lots of water…bottled water, not that tap water in New York. Tap water in New York has ruined the minds and bodies of New Yorkers for years. You get her some Spring Valley water.”Hehung up the phone. He set the pictures of his daughter and granddaughter back in the center of his desk. As he rose to gather his speech for the afternoon session, he walked without his cane into the outer office. “We’re going to have some company this weekend,” he announced. “Beth Ann, I want you to go to the toy store and get the best toy they’ve got. Emily’s coming to town.”

When Senator Windsor stepped in the doorway of the Senate lounge, Senator Charles Dunford from Tyler raised his arm and waved. Leaving his cane at the door, Senator Windsor approached his old friend and nemesis who had led the forces to bring a lottery to the state. How like him to recruit others to his own vice, Windsor thought. Dunford had turned so bad over the years, gambling, drink ing, marrying three times, this last time to a woman one third his age. In their youth they’d been called the two Charlies. They’d gone to the University of Texas Law School together, started together at the same law firm and been freshmen in the State House of Representatives the same year. Now they were the elder statesmen of the Senate, only they represented opposing parties.

“So Charlie, I guess we’re going head to head again,” Senator Windsor“Whensaid.are you going to learn to go with the majority?” Dunford answered, wiping his thin, pink mouth with a napkin. At the table with him were four other Senators and the Lieutenant Governor. “It must be lonely always out there by yourself.”

“I’ll exercise whatever rights as a Senator I feel are in the public interest.” Windsor stretched his 5’7” frame and held erect his full head of gray hair. He wished he had his cane to balance him.

“The Governor wants this bill, Charles,” the Lieutenant Governor said. “I’m sure he’ll not forget those who help him achieve his vision.”

Senator Windsor smiled and leaned slightly on the table. No one invited him to sit down. “Only the discontent are lonely.”

“Hog manure,” Dunford countered. “You want the press, and we all know it. Your bill lost, and you’re playing spoiled sport. Wouldn’t you rather take your little granddaughter out to the armadillo farm than piss in your pants on the Senate floor? You should spend more time with your family.”

“Rumor has it you’re thinking of filibustering.” Dunford, who’d grown bald over the years, wiped his forehead with his napkin.

“Hog manure, Frank,” Windsor answered. He smiled, but his brows knitted into the look of a disapproving parent. “You want this bill because you don’t know how to balance the budget without it. If you’d followed my advice, you could balance the budget without rais ing taxes or turning the state into a gambling casino.”

The light in Windsor’s eyes flattened though his smile remained. How did Dunford know Emily was visiting? “I’ve pissed in my pants before, Charlie, to keep you from squandering the funds of the state of Texas.” He said the words “state of Texas” as if he were pledging alle giance or saying a prayer. “I tell you what: you don’t give me advice about my family, and I’ll refrain from mentioning yours when I discuss expenditure of public funds.”

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Senator Windsor turned and moved off to a single chair by the window, picking up his cane as he went. His knuckles pressed white upon the silver head of the armadillo. He sank into the chair with his back to Senator Dunford’s table. He would not let them look at his face. Who, he wondered, had betrayed his private life to his chief oppo nent? Was there a spy in his office? Or had Beth Ann simply gabbed with Dunford’s secretary? He often asked Beth Ann to listen to his calls and record their content. Bob Baxter had also been in the office. He was never sure if Baxter really wished him well. The truth was, he was never sure if anyone wished him well. That was why he had to be vigilant. If he didn’t insist and declare what was right, the Charlie Dunfords of the world would take over.

In the afternoon, Senator Windsor attended the general session, where he opposed funds for highway beautification, opposed funds for highway tollbooth operators, and for the highway improvement fund itself, which he declared was a boondoggle, allowing local politicians to pass out jobs. He issued three points of order, raising his cane when he wanted to be recognized. He spoke in opposition to an increase in school recreation funds, insisting that more swimming pools did not constitute an educational expense. He was the self-appointed watcher of the budget, and was once an influential member of the Finance Committee. However, because he’d too often opposed the Governor, he’d been taken off the committee. The lottery debate wasn’t sched uled until Friday, but he didn’t put it past Dunford and the Lieutenant Governor to slip it in when no one was there to oppose them.

564 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman Rumor was that the new 28-year-old Mrs. Dunford considered her husband’s state-salaried staff as her own personal assistants and had them running all over town picking up cleaning and groceries and fetching her cabs.

“The Governor will call a special session if we don’t get these bills out, you know,” the Lieutenant Governor interrupted. “There are going to be a lot of angry legislators if we have to work into the summer.”

“That’s your problem, Frank, not mine. I trust my colleagues will lay blame where blame is due. I’ll see you on the floor.”

“I’d be honored to take the lottery issue on the floor, but this Friday, this weekend…it’s a bad time for me.” Harvey’s plump, child like mouth offered an embarrassed smile. The pale skin on his cheeks was as smooth as an eyelid. His washed-out blue eyes couldn’t hold a gaze. They were darting around the walls looking at the pictures of Senator Windsor shaking hands with every politician who’d ever passed through the state, including seven U.S. Presidents, even Jack Kennedy on the fated trip to Texas which ended his life, even Dwight Eisenhower.

By the time he returned to his office in the afternoon, Beth Ann had already left for the toy store. He planned to talk with her first thing in the morning about the leak to Senator Dunford. If the slip had only been her excessive talk, he wouldn’t worry, but if larger forces were undermining his position, he’d have to take to the Senate floor himself rather than trust the likes of Harvey Landau. He decided to at least approach Harvey.

“Roxanne’s planned a big hunting weekend. We’ve got 25 people coming to the ranch. Do you hunt, Senator? I’d be pleased to have you join us.” Senator Windsor saw Harvey’s eyes dart to a picture of his own father flanking Lyndon Johnson, along with Senator Windsor. He stood halfway up to look at it. “It’s going to be a real bipartisan weekend,” Harvey added, settling back down on the sofa. “Senator Dunford, Clara, his new wife, Brian Patterson, Tower Jones, my dad, a lot of folks you know. If I’d known you hunted, I would have invited you.”

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“I’m honored, Senator.” The moon-faced Harvey Landau sat for ward on the rim of the leather sofa in Senator Windsor’s office. Son of Porter Landau, former U.S. Senator from Texas, Harvey carried politi cal credibility he hadn’t earned, and in Windsor’s view, never would, for he wasn’t the man his father was. Porter Landau had mentored them all. Because the name Landau was gold in Texas. Harvey would move up even if he did nothing—and as far as Windsor could see that was what he was doing. The risk for him was in doing something. At 36, he’d yet to make an impact anywhere.

“I don’t hunt,” Senator Windsor rejoined, irritated that he hadn’t been invited though he wouldn’t have gone. Hunting was a waste of time and wildlife, a judgment not shared by many of his colleagues who would get up before dawn to trek into the brush and sit on the cold ground waiting for a bird or deer or whatever they were kill ing that day. If they would exert half the effort on legislation, get up before dawn once a month to study the budget, the state might be in better shape. These judgments made him unpopular. He knew Harvey Landau didn’t really want him to join the party. “I’m afraid this week end I have a pressing Senate agenda,” he said. “Of course.” Harvey smiled. Senator Windsor suspected his genial ity concealed what a puritanical goat he thought Windsor was. But he also knew Porter Landau would have told his son to heed him. As senior senator, he could act as a benefactor; he had a measure of power.

566 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

On repeating the invitation, he stood. “Don’t get up.” He gestured to the Senator, who’d concluded Harvey Landau was just like the others, no spine. He’d been convinced that the lottery was inevitable—the future of state government—and would pass if not in this session, then in the next, in spite of the Baptists. He might oppose it this session for the sake of his party position and his own career, but Harvey Landau wouldn’t go up publicly against the Governor on this one.

Senator Windsor perched on his tiptoes and ferreted about on the top shelf of his private closet. He pulled down a black shoe box.

Standing among the hangers, he considered the plastic urine bag inside. If he were to take to the Senate floor tomorrow, he’d have to strap this clammy bulge around his body again. The thought of stand

“Let me know if you change your mind about the weekend,” he said. “Roxanne can always rustle up another steak. You know where the ranch is, right?” he asked though Senator Windsor had never been to the ranch. “Just before Enchanted Rock.”

“You know how Roxanne is,” Harvey added though Windsor had never met his wife. “She’d kill me if I left her with a house full of guests. She’s been cooking for days. I really wish you would join us.”

“Ah, Senator, you’re not really going to put that old thing on again, are you?” Beth Ann startled him from behind. Senator Windsor closed the lid of the box. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re not getting anyHeyounger.”turnedand drew his shoulders erect to face her. “I do mind your saying so. And have you forgotten how to knock?”

“Not if they try to ram the lottery bill through. I’m not letting that bill get railroaded in just because we’re at the end of session. Frank’s known the schedule of the Senate for months. He’s trying to catch the Senators in a hurry to adjourn; he figures they’ll pass anything.”

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“I did very well last session,” Senator Windsor said. “And if I must, I’ll go again. I’m not too old, and you must stop saying that.”

“You’re not going to win a million dollars, Beth Ann.” He returned to his desk. “You’re like everyone else. You chase the rabbit, but the

“I was only suggesting you don’t need that old bag this term. After all, the session’s almost over. Some say the business may end as early as Friday.”

Senator Windsor often caught her reading fashion and hair magazines at her desk. She wasn’t as serious as he would have liked, but she was a whiz of a secretary, and the other Senators liked her so in a way were friendlier to him. She also made him laugh.

ing made his knees ache. The last time he’d filibustered, he’d had to stand and talk for twelve hours. He doubted if he could last that long this time. After he’d finally hobbled off the floor two years ago, he’d spent the next days in bed.

“Well, I for one wouldn’t mind winning a million dollars in a lot tery,” Beth Ann said. “If I won though, I’d quit on you.” She smiled a bright, pink-lipped smile. She was in her early thirties, divorced, with frosted hair, too much make up, but attractive in an imitative way.

Beth Ann took the box from him and examined the bag. She’d worked as his assistant for eight years, and at times treated him more like a grandfather she must care for than the senior state senator. “Well, let’s at least make sure it doesn’t have any leaks.”

“Oh, Senator, I’d love to, but I’ve got a big date this weekend.” Beth Ann sat down opposite him. “All weekend,” she added significantly. “I see.”

568 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman powers that be send out the hounds, and you lose. The rabbit always loses. Remember that before you buy any lottery tickets. The rabbit and the fox always lose. That is the game.”

“I thought you were going to take her out. I got her the cutest doll. It walks and then falls down and cries and then you pick it up and make it feel better.”

An hour later Porter Landau announced himself. “I was walking down the hall on my way to visit Harv when I said to myself, I haven’t seen Charles Windsor for a hound’s age. How you doing?” Porter Landau stooped slightly as he passed under the doorway. He was well over six feet with white hair and freckled ears that stuck out like a heifer’s.

“I don’t want to presume, Senator…I mean I do presume a lot, I know, but I really don’t think you should filibuster. You should go out with your Senatorgranddaughter.”Windsorstirred at his desk. He reached for his cane. “Well, you do presume, Beth Ann. You presume far too much. Now, send in Earl. I want to go over the speaking agenda for the floor.”

As Beth Ann left, he heard her tell Earl it was his turn in the lion’s den, then she picked up the phone. He wondered who she was calling, but before he could pick up to listen, Earl walked in carrying a stack of law books.

Beth Ann shrugged. Rabbits and foxes? Sometimes she thought Senator Windsor was going senile. The Senator sat down at his desk. “If I have to go to the floor tomor row and into the weekend, could you take Emily to a movie or some where?” he asked.

“Yes…well…that sounds fine. I am going to take her out. I just need to make sure if I get tied up, someone can help.”

Porter Landau picked up a copy of Texas Monthly from the side table. “No, Charles, I don’t remember. What do you say about the middle?”“Politics is like horse breeding. You’re either a mare or a stallion. If you don’t know which you are, then you better eat hay out in the pasture with the geldings.”

“I see…I’ll have to remember that. Speaking of children, how’s your daughter?” The edge to Porter’s question was subtle so that Senator Windsor wasn’t sure if he was being challenged. It occurred to him maybe he’d insulted Porter’s son, but Harvey was in politics; he better toughen up. “Still no word about that son-in-law of yours?”

“No. I just got off the plane from Washington. I was on my way to see Harv. How’s he getting on?” Porter sat down.

Windsor rose to shake hands with his old friend. He’d been Porter’s campaign manager when Porter first ran for Congress, then Porter had supported his bid for the state House and then the state Senate. “Did your son tell you I tried to give him a chance to make a name for him self?” Senator Windsor asked.

“He doesn’t like to work too hard, does he?” Windsor said. “He likes to play the middle too. You know what I’ve always said about those who play the middle.”

Senator Windsor’s eyes lost their focus for a moment as he thought about Samantha. He didn’t know how to help her. He didn’t know how to help her mother either, his wife of fifty years, though they hadn’t lived together for the last thirty. He’d never understood how to help either of them. He only knew how to help the state of Texas.

“I’m afraid her husband ran with the hounds,” he answered. “But the hounds decided he was a fox. The fox is smarter, but there are more hounds.”“Soyou haven’t heard from him?” Porter Landau translated. “I hear your granddaughter’s coming to visit. Why don’t you bring her out to Harv’s ranch this weekend? A few of us are getting together.

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Senator Windsor laughed. His small grey eyes blinked; his face softened. “Do you trust them, Porter?”

Senator Windsor picked up the law book he planned to read from if he filibustered. He wondered how Porter knew about his granddaugh ter’s visit. “I assume Harv’s told you I’m planning to speak against the lottery bill this weekend if necessary.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t embarrass the Governor on this one. My information is he’s going to withdraw the bill and announce a Commission to study a lottery system for the state.”

“I haven’t been told that.” “No one has.” “How do you know?”

“Not with my wife or my money, but I don’t think they have a choice. There are too many bills they need to get out. You got them corralled, but you may have to stay in the corral with them for a time.”

Porter smiled. “I still have some sources, Charles. I’ve been requested to ask if you’ll agree to send the Governor’s bill back to commit tee pending the appointment of the Commission and serve on the Commission if you like.”

“I hear that from others. I also hear the bill doesn’t have the votes, so you needn’t ruin your weekend.” “My count is that the vote could go either way.”

570 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

There’ll be hunting and swimming and riding. Harv’s girls are prob ably about your granddaughter’s age.”

“I’ve been trying to get my bill back to committee.” “I know.” Landau closed the magazine. “Your bill’s dead; you can reintroduce it next session.”

Senator Windsor was quiet for a moment. “Why wasn’t I con sulted?”Porter Landau set the magazine back on the table. He was emeri tus now in Texas politics but kept his hand in. “Maybe you’re just too much of a stallion for them, Charles.”

Senator Windsor held tightly to his granddaughter Emily’s hand as he hobbled down the dirt road towards a corral where a large roan stallion circled inside. A group was gathered at the fence.

Porter’s wife, a small, tanned, gray-haired woman, waved from the fence. Also gathered to look at Martha Landau’s birthday present were

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“They haven’t broken him yet,” he explained, observing the horse’s frantic circling. “That’s why he’s so restless. He still carries the wide, open spaces in his head.”

* * *

“So I can tell the Governor you’ll stay in your seat tomorrow.” “Tell him I’m thinking about it. As long as Frank and Dunford stay in theirs.”PorterLandau stretched out his hand. “Bring that granddaughter of yours out to Harv’s, okay? I’d like to meet Samantha’s child.”

“Why do they want to break him?” Emily’s dark eyes widened at the image of a broken horse.

The Senator smiled. “No, sweetheart. It doesn’t hurt. But he doesn’t like it. He wants his life the way it was, but he’ll give in because he has to.”From the other side of the corral, Porter Landau waved. Dressed in jeans and boots and a wide Stetson hat covering his head in the afternoon sun, Porter straddled the white fence. “What do you think of little Tex here?” he called. “I bought him for Martha’s birthday.”

* * *

Senator Windsor placed the law book on the shelf behind him. He knew he’d been maneuvered around. He didn’t like the resolution, but he thought he could live with it for now. “Well, Porter, I don’t know who to trust if I can’t trust you.”

“He’s not used to people. There’s still too much difference between him and “Doesus.”ithurt?”

Emily stepped into the well of her grandfather’s body. “And what did a squirrel or a jack rabbit ever do to you, Beth Ann?” the Senator asked.Beth Ann laughed. She reached up and touched a spit curl on her cheek. “Don’t worry, Senator, I probably won’t hit anything.”

A voice chimed from the path behind. “Why, Senator, I didn’t know you were coming.” Beth Ann caught up with him. She patted Emily on the head. “Hi, hon.” At her side Bob Baxter stood holding her hand. In his other hand he carried a rifle, barrel to the ground.

the Lieutenant Governor and his wife, Senator Dunford and a young woman dressed in black jeans with a rhinestone belt and rhinestones on her boots, along with several other Representatives and Senators.

Senator Windsor stared at the two of them, hands entwined. He looked confused, then his eyebrows lifted and his eyes acknowledged what he saw. He’d never confronted Beth Ann about passing on infor mation, but now he admitted what he’d suspected: that she was the leak. He wondered if she knew Bob Baxter was married; he wondered if she cared. “Bob, put that rifle away in front of a child.” Beth Ann responded to the look on the Senator’s face; she slipped her hand out of Bob’s. “You know Bob of course,” she went on. “He’s going to teach me to shoot jack rabbits. Are you going to hunt, Senator? I guess not with Emily though you know, hon, my nephew, who’s only seven, can shoot a squirrel at twenty feet.”

Harvey Landau stepped into the circle. He offered the Senator a beer. “Roxanne’s dying to meet you,” he said. The breeze was beginning to pick up on the range, and the dust formed small brown storms in the center of their group. Emily’s hair flew into her eyes, and she tried to part it with her hands. The senator hadn’t known how to put it in a ponytail or braids this morning, so Emily had tried to fix it herself.

“You want to come watch us break the roan?” Harvey Landau asked.

572 Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Emily squeezed her grandfather’s hand. “No, thank you,” he answered. “We just stopped by to say hello. We’re on our way to the armadillo farm. I hear they have a new baby ‘dillo, hasn’t even grown its armor Senatoryet.”Windsor waved to the constituency at the fence. “Give my best to your mother and wish her a happy birthday,” he said. “Just came by to say howdy,” he shouted to Porter. “Happy birthday, Martha!”Thenhe turned around. Holding to his granddaughter’s hand, he trudged slowly back up the dirt road. Harvey Landau shook his head, popping open the beer. Beth Ann adjusted the scarf at her neck. Bob Baxter shifted his rifle under his arm. They all watched the peculiar Senator Windsor leave almost before he came. No one understood why he left, but no one really understood why he came. He didn’t like hunting or parties, and the armadillo farm was in the opposite direction.

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2021 William Logan William Logan

The stringency of the air, callow featherings of regret or opinion? Dogeared journals flared on the fire dogs, Grandmother’s memory that, fading, faded more rapidly when news was ash. Corruptions took the horse chestnuts and elms, the windowpanes rattling in their sashes.

The Confidence-Man

CHARITY IN THE NEGATIVE He . . . came here from the West, a young misanthrope from the other side of the Alleghenies, less to make his fortune, than to flee man.

As fast as the old was restored, the new decayed, pasteboard sky passing in disarray. There came a day when looking back was no longer looking forward, when the past had been uprooted like a dried stalk. Then there was the matter of love.

BLESS YOU since sneezing was the first sign of falling ill with the plague, Pope Gregory ordered prayer for divine intercession. Gesundheit, great-aunt Frida calls out, each sneeze another occasion for my soul to abandon my body. I hurry my index finger under my nose horizontally blocking both nostrils as tutored, so evil can’t seize an inhale to fill the void. Denying the devil his due, Frida dubs it, she who, at sixty to my six, reflexively worries her brow, reaches toward a box of Kleenex, and spits over her shoulder. I mimic ptui, ptui, ptui.

Richard Michelson

Tonight, eight years older than she was at her death, and dining curbside to curtail the coronavirus, I hear, two tables over, ah-choo, and for the first time in years measure the distance between superstition and truth. Around me, panic, as mid forkful, everyone freezes. May God keep us up-wind from all airborne diseases.

Shall we pray to a ceramic bird head or to The Great Unknown? he asks me, who stopped by for neither idle nor idol chatter, but to see the parchments sewn and to learn to mix the ink. I ask how animal veins are dried for thread, but he is undeterred. Absurd, your attempt to learn the skill without loving the matter, he scolds. Do we not create ourselves as we transcribe, think, and debate? Now I ask you which came first: God or The Word?

576 Richard Michelson THE TORAH SCRIBE’S RIDDLE

Plucked from a chicken, the left-wing flight feathered quill will be his fingers’ first partner for this dance of survival, this bi-millennial perfectly choreographed dip, spin, and swivel, till all three hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and five letters are complete; a trot and tango of statutes, stories and begats. Let the metal forgers, the woodworkers, the carvers of limestone compete with their statues of this lower-case deity, or that.

The Goncourt episode is revealing in several ways. It emphasises Duras’ capacity for self-renewal, her persistence in working while battling against alcoholism and emphysema, above all her exalted estimate of her own position. She held court at a post-Goncourt recep tion, and began referring to herself as “la Duras.” According to her biographer, Laure Adler, “Henceforth she would believe only in the myth she had created. . . . Marguerite had given up the story of her life

© 2021 Paul Dean Paul Dean MARGUERITE DURAS: LIFE AS A NOVEL When Marguerite Duras won the Prix Goncourt for her novel L’Amant in 1984, there were several reasons for surprise. The Goncourt had been established in 1903 as a way of recognising new young talent, and not only was Duras seventy years old in 1984, but L’Amant, far from being her début, was the lat est item in a literary career stretching back to 1943. The award could thus be seen as a homage to a body of work. Yet the judges may also have been acknowledging a return to form by a writer whose recent output—a miscellany of plays, films and journalism—had been of dis tinctly variable quality. L’Amant was already a publishing sensation; the initial print run of 25,000 copies sold out in a single day, and 10,000 further copies in a single day were required after Duras had given a follow-up television interview. In another sense, too, the novel was a return; it revisited what, for many readers, remained Duras’ bestknown work, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, which had been short-listed for the Goncourt in 1950, when it received only one vote. Duras never forgot a slight, and there were rumours that she would refuse the prize if offered it this time. Her publisher sounded her out. “Well, Proust got it!” was her reply.

578 Paul Dean in favour of the novel of her life.” This is a brilliant insight; one can’t help feeling that Duras went on living, even when life had become a burden, in order to have something to write about. The distinction between fact and fiction is more than usually blurred in her case. Jean Vallier, in his monumental C’était Marguerite Duras (2006, 2010), did sterling service by uncovering the truth beneath Duras’ misleading, often contradictory accounts of her past. Shorter biographies, by Adler (1998, translated 2000 by Anne-Marie Glasheen) and Romane Fostier (2018), make easier, if dispiriting, reading. Here was a huge talent increasingly thrown away, energy dissipated in vanity projects, health wrecked, psychological and emotional damage inflicted on herself and others, not least her numerous lovers. One can’t sign up to the myth of “la Duras” when one sees what it did to Duras—or indeed to Yann Lemée, her companion for the last sixteen years of her life, whom she renamed Yann Andréa. We shall hear more of his sad story. *** Perhaps appropriately, “Duras” was a pseudonym. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu in 1914, in French colonial Indochina where her parents, both teachers, had been drawn by dreams of prosperity which were unfulfilled. They were both dogged by ill-health and made fre quent return visits to France; eventually her father was repatriated and died when she was six, leaving her with her mother and two brothers.

Pierre, the elder, was an exploitative criminal and violent bully, and Paul, the younger, a sensitive, vulnerable soul whom she adored and for whom she harboured incestuous feelings, which were echoed in many brother/sister relationships in her novels. His early death in 1942 devastated her. Her mother struggled to hold down teaching posts, but failed to hold back the China Sea, which repeatedly inun dated the uncultivable rice fields she had bought from corrupt local officials who knew a dupe when they saw one. It was money down the drain—except that there was no drain. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique immortalised this part of the family’s story, and gave the first fictional

treatment of a liaison which the young Marguerite had, when still at the lycée in Saigon, with an older Chinese man, a story which was later twice re-worked in L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991).

Marguerite finished her education in Paris. She settled in France from 1933, graduating in law and political economy and working for the Colonial Office. Her marriage to a fellow student, Robert Antelme, in 1937 was disrupted by the outbreak of war; together with her new lover, Dionys Mascolo, she and Antelme joined the Resistance in 1944 and worked in a cell headed by François Mitterand, who remained a lifelong friend. All three were also briefly members of the Communist Party before their expulsion in 1950. Antelme was soon arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau, returning barely alive in 1945; his book L’Espèce humaine (1947), together with Duras’ La Douleur (1985, based on rediscovered wartime writings), constitute a searing account of this period. The affair with Mascolo resulted in the birth of Duras’ only child, Jean, in 1947, the same year in which she and Antelme divorced. The post-war success of Duras’ novels brought independence and money; henceforth her life revolved around writing, film-making, media appearances, sex and, increasingly, drink. Mascolo was succeed ed in her affections by Gérard Jarlot, and then by Yann, thirty-eight years her junior, whose life she effectively took over. Their relationship lasted from 1980 until her death in 1996 and was marked by violent quarrels, her spells in hospitals and drying-out clinics, alcoholic stupor and emotional anguish. Her struggle to accept that he was homosexu al, and therefore could not return her physical passion, is reflected in La Maladie de la Mort (1982) and Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs (1986), while Yann Andréa Steiner (1992) combines their story with that of Theodora Kats, a Jewish prisoner-of-war about whom Duras had tried to write a novel years earlier. Yann guarded her literary heritage after her death, falling out with her son Jean in the process, until his own death in 2014—her centenary year.

***

579The Hopkins Review

Duras’ most important innovation in her films, first apparent in La Femme du Gange (1974), was to decouple the screen image from the soundtrack, so that the viewer was effectively watching a silent film with voice-over. What we hear may be the dialogue belonging to the scene we are watching, but at other times it may have no connection with it, promoting effects of alienation, ambiguity, irony or counter

580 Paul Dean Duras wrote far too much, and a great deal of it was bad. Nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. Her Oeuvres complètes occupy four bulky volumes in the Pléiade edition; even a one-volume selection runs to 1750 pages! Fostier’s bibliography lists 78 separate works: novels, short stories, plays, film scripts, journalism, memoirs and interviews. In addition, the volume of critical commentary continues to burgeon, much of it in France and America from a theorised feminist perspec tive. My interest here is in the development of her narrative technique, and I shall deal only briefly with later works, which tend to repeat formulas from their predecessors. I shall also have to pass over suc cessful work with a more traditional sequential structure, such as the Maupassant-like “Madame Dodin” in the collection Des Journées entières dans les arbres (1954), a comic-grotesque story about a Parisian concierge, and the beautiful, enigmatic late novel La Pluie d’été (1990), written at a time when she was becoming engrossed in Judaism and the Holocaust, with strong overtones of mysticism and the apocalyptic. Duras’ experience of the cinema had an increasing influence on her fiction, not always for the best. Gérard Jarlot advised her on her first film, Hiroshima mon amour (1960), and collaborated with her on three others. Never happy with her directors, who she felt made too many concessions to realism and commercial clichés, she decided to produce and direct herself after Jarlot’s death in 1966, shrugging off the fact that she had no technical knowledge. Of her twenty-odd films, only India Song (1975) was a commercial success. She was a compulsive recycler of her own work; a novel might be filmed, a film novelised; shots and soundtrack would re-appear from one film to another. Laure Adler puts it brutally: “she had a few obsessions and little imagina tion.”

With Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, everything suddenly jumps into

581The Hopkins Review point. Such a disjunction between narrative modes, or their fracture, can be traced to the beginning of her career as a novelist, but then it was more firmly under control. ***

These first two novels, which play variations on a template of domestic life based on Duras’ own background, depict all human rela tionships, especially sexual ones, as struggles for power, between the urge to move in, to possess, to subjugate, to exploit, on the one hand, and on the other to resist, to bargain, to compromise, to treat, and per haps now and then to submit for the sake of expediency or long-term self-interest. There’s a hesitant feel to them, a sense of the writer trying on different modes and tones, unsure of her stance or her authority.

Her first two novels, Les Impudents (1943, not republished until 1992) and La Vie tranquille (1944), were prentice-work, belonging to a literary milieu dominated by Mauriac on the one hand and by Existentialism on the other, with external influence from American writers such as Dos Passos and Hemingway. The family as a nest of vipers is a Mauriac trademark but there was little he could teach Duras about that, while his Catholic morality is completely absent from her imaginative world, formed as it was in a non-Christian country. Existentialism leaves its mark on the early story “Les Feuilles” (1945), and on La Vie tranquille in the pervasive sense of ennui experienced by its characters, and for its aloof indifference to conventional moral values. At this stage the fashionable cinematic technique appropriated from the Americans, visible for instance in Sartre’s Le Sursis (1945) with its abrupt shifts and “cuts” between voices and viewpoints, is absent. Instead, we find a tripartite structure most familiar to us from Shakespeare’s comedies and romances: the first and third parts are set in one location and the second part in another, where the protagonists come to a new under standing of themselves and their situation, which they take with them on their return to their original location.

The two locations are far more closely integrated than in the pre vious novels, with parallelisms and echoes between them. Each main area is subdivided: the plain into the cultivated fields, the forest, the clearing, and the small villages, the town into the colonial quarter where the wealthy French expatriates live out their leisured fantasies, the central commercial and financial district where the less successful whites live, and the lowest suburb containing the indigenous popu lation. Suzanne and Joseph manage to penetrate the upper echelon of the city, the mother stays in the Hotel Central (itself divided into riverside rooms and cheaper, because noisier, tram-side rooms).

At the heart of Part I is the failed courtship of Suzanne by Mr Jo (not yet depicted as the Chinese man he actually was), whose gift of the diamond ring gives the cue for the family’s excursion to the city at the opening of Part II; Joseph’s recapture of the ring precipitates their return to the plain. The ring, like the pearl in Steinbeck’s novella, is a curse disguised as a treasure; instead of solving the family’s problems

582 Paul Dean focus. It is divided into two rather than three parts, but the same threephase structure appears: the narrative moves from the plain to the city (a thinly-veiled Saigon) and back again. The question is not how accurate the novel is as autobiography (Duras’ mother hated it, just as Sartre’s mother hated Les Mots), but how it gives a brilliant analysis of domestic, socio-cultural and ethnic tensions.

The Eden Cinema (where the mother formerly played the piano for ten years, only actually seeing a film once by a subterfuge) is the setting for Joseph’s meeting with the woman who will give him his escape route from the family: the cinema, foreshadowing Duras’ later obsessions, is the symbol for all the glamorous dreams of those who cannot escape: “it was the oasis, the dark room of the afternoon, the night of the soli tary folk, the artificial and democratic night, the great egalitarian night of the cinema, more beautiful, more consoling than all the real nights. . . . the night where all shames are healed, where all despairs dissolve.” Notably, the word “séance,” which means a screening of a film, also suggests communication with another world.

583The Hopkins Review it makes them worse. It is Mr Jo’s failed bribe for sex, his estimate of Suzanne’s “worth”; in the city, “this colossal brothel” as the street walker Carmen calls it, everything and everyone becomes a medium of exchange, just as in the plain the hunt (la chasse) can be both for animal and human prey. Just as the Pacific destroyed the mother’s rice fields, so the debased, commercial urban ethos subverts the family’s attempts to live a respectable life. So, too, on a political reading, French colonial power overwhelmed the indigenous population. *** Duras’ next two novels were chamber works by comparison with Un Barrage. Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952) again divides into two parts, the first of which depicts in acutely-observed detail a relationship which is running its course, featuring mutual irritation, non-comprehension, and boredom. Both parties know this, and also know that there is no point in discussing it anymore. The possibility of a homosexual attrac tion between the husband and a local sailor is jettisoned as the charac ter of the mysterious yacht millionairess is developed in Part II. Here we are in the world of Conrad, whose work Duras adored, rather than of Hemingway, despite the narrator’s dream of writing an “American” novel about his experiences. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the sailor becomes a quasi-mythical figure who is assimilated to the culture he initially resists. He embodies an unattainable ideal of romance, mascu linity, and adventure. However, portentousness is avoided by comic/ absurdist touches such as the schoolteacher’s narrative, and by irony: the yacht-owner, Ann, half knows that her quest for the sailor is hope lessly quixotic, and her liaisons are a way of avoiding boredom and frustration as well as hiding the truth from herself. The status of the narrator is equivocal: beginning as her lover, he becomes a surrogate searcher. There is an almost insolent casualness about the ending. Ann and the narrator fail to find the sailor, the yacht catches fire, they buy another (Ann’s fabulous wealth comes from the world of fairytale) and off they go again, the narrator explaining that that’s all he can tell us.

Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) marks a shift of technique away from description towards scenic presentation, relationships emerging through implication rather than statement. We are reminded of Duras’ love for Racine in the classical construction of the book, with its small number of thematically linked protagonists—balanced in terms of age and gender—and confined spatio-temporal organisation. Here again there are contrasting locations, the beach and the mountain, embody ing different values. The couple in Part I of Le Marin has developed into the two couples but with the same simmering discontent below the surface. The anonymous sailor is like the marin, the fantasy-fulfilment for the jaded woman whose love life is going nowhere. Ultimately this is rejected—pragmatism and the needs of her child win at the expense of the impossible dream. The bleak reality has to be faced: “You can’t take a vacation from love”. That remark acquires extra significance, given that it was Les Petits Chevaux which later came as a coup de foudre to Yann when he read it as a young philosophy student. After meeting Duras at a screening of India Song in 1975, and obtaining her address, he wrote her hundreds of letters, to which she eventually replied. Then, in 1980, she invited him to meet her for a drink—which lasted sixteen years. *** Moderato cantabile (1958), one of Duras’ best novels, evolved from a short story with the same title, published in 1956 and then forgotten until its rediscovery and last-minute inclusion in volume IV of the

It would be too solemn to say that the sailor is the Holy Grail, or Godot as matelot, but he nonetheless stands for whatever we are searching for to make sense and shape of our lives. Inevitably, he will elude us. The tone and mode of this novel are flexible. The further it moves from realism the more comic it becomes, even farcical at times, but with an almost Queneau-like melancholy underneath it all. (Indeed, Queneau could have written much of Part II, the long bar scene in Leopoldville for example.)

584 Paul Dean

Anne and Chauvin’s relationship is conducted by narrative (punc tuated by the urgent repetitions of “parlez-moi”)—the third person narrative (but not omniscient), and the narrative of the two characters speaking on behalf of the dead woman and her lover. They pass from the reconstruction of the others’ relationship to their own present situ ation without transition, so that everything appears to be happening on the same plane, in the same timeframe. The line between actuality and mental construction begins to be elided, insubstantial, preparing the way for the more radical later texts where we are thrown off bal ance completely. For instance, Chauvin claims that he was once at a reception given by Anne’s husband, the director of the import/export company, at their house. He recounts his memory in the past tense

Pléiade edition (2014). The novel partly glances back at Le Square (1955) in its nucleus of characters, a man, a woman, and a boy. But whereas, in Le Square, the two “blocks” of narrative—a man’s and a woman’s, exchanging fantasies of future wish-fulfilment—remained separate, in Moderato they mesh. In the short story, which corresponds to the nov el’s opening chapter, the focus had switched back and forth between Anne’s son having his piano lesson, and the suicide (not a murder at this point). In the novel, more elaborately, Anne and Chauvin (whose name indicates his attitude to women) use their imaginative recon struction of the background to a crime of passion to conduct a love affair of their own. The novel is close to early Robbe-Grillet, as its first reviewers sensed, with its combination of an enigmatic murder, voyeurism and adultery—Les Gommes, Le Voyeur and La Jalousie had all appeared by this time. (Indeed, it was Robbe-Grillet who admired the original story and suggested it be reworked into a novel.) Shifts of style, especially grammatical tense, become crucial. Sometimes we have the imperfect, sometimes the conditional; sometimes “factual” statements, sometimes sentences hedged about by “possibly,” “it seems to me,” “I believe.” This keeps the characters’ motivations in suspense; they both know, and don’t know, what has happened or what is now going on, and we are in a similar state of uncertainty.

585The Hopkins Review

586 Paul Dean initially, then in the present. We can’t tell whether he is recalling or inventing. Initially watching the house, he is suddenly inside, even into Anne’s bedroom, using details she supplies for him to work on. They become characters in each other’s narratives, resuming the story each day until the blast of the factory siren warns them that time for the current instalment is nearly up, in a bourgeois rewrite of the legend of Scheherazade. Increasingly they become the doubles of the original couple, the murderer and his victim. The tone of the novel darkens, taking on aspects of a Racinian tragedy (we note the confined setting, which will recur, with the café patronne and the other customers forming a kind of chorus). Routines hem the protagonists in: the factory work-shifts, the boy’s piano les sons, the comings and goings of the ships in the port. This is most bril liantly conveyed by the dinner party in chapter VII, where we observe society women like possessions covered with jewels, devouring the salmon as though they were beasts of prey, while their men look on, smug in the sense of possession. The bourgeois carapace is unbreak able; Anne, the clearly drunk, incoherent woman in the middle of it all, is an embarrassment to be politely ignored. There is no escape from her boredom and loneliness. The offstage husband (impersonally suggest ed by “on” as in La Jalousie), infuriated by her desecration of the social ritual, brings her daily outings to an end, and her final meeting with Chauvin is a metaphorical re-enactment of the murder with which the story opened. Chauvin tells the story of the other couple as though he knew it, stopping at the point where the man knew there was nothing for it but to murder the woman. Then he tells Anne to go. “I wish you were dead” he says, and she replies, “C’est fait.” Her marriage has effectively killed her. By the time Moderato cantabile was published, with a dedication to Gérard Jarlot, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique had been made into an unsatisfactory film, The Sea-Wall. Duras and Jarlot themselves made a film of Moderato in 1960. The novel, with its scenic structure, temporal shifts and taut dialogue, might seem to lend itself to this, but its effects

*** In Dix Heures et demi du soir en été (1960), a café features again, and the plot is catalysed by a murder, but this time the motive is known: Rodgrio Paestra murders his recent bride and her lover. As in Moderato, there is a mirror image of this relationship in Pierre, his wife Maria, and their friend Claire who becomes (or perhaps does not yet become) his mistress. The holiday time of licence and freedom from conven tion re-appears from Le Marin de Gibraltar, and the child whose needs forms an extra complication reappears from that novel, Le Square and Moderato. Prostrating heat combines with drink to produce a tense, brooding atmosphere; life drifts between hotels and along roads, with no anchorage. Maria helps Paestra to escape but he then commits sui cide. She helps because she identifies with him; she knows what it is like to lose one’s spouse to someone else. He has killed on her behalf, for she won’t put up a fight; she admits at the end of the story that her marriage, or at least the romance of it, is over. After Paestra has died, Maria fantasises about the relationship they might have had; she and the others could have got him away, they might have become friends. Now she has no one with whom she can feel kinship, except her daughter, and possibly Pierre, although this is ambiguous, because

587The Hopkins Review remain unique to prose narrative; the ways in which the two couples mirror one another are mediated by stylistic devices which cannot have a visual equivalent. (This distinction would gradually dissolve as Duras’ career developed.) The interwoven motifs have a quasi-musical effect (hinted at in the title)—the critic Claude Roy described the novel as “Madame Bovary rewritten by Bela Bartok”! Duras herself saw it as a landmark in her work. “In the early books,” she explained, “I was attached above all to the narrative function of writing. From Moderato cantabile onwards. . . . I started to write anything at all in a given direc tion.” The Pléiade editors welcome the “greater spontaneity” and “greater freedom as regards syntactic or literary rules” this afforded her, but there was a price to pay in terms of quality.

In technical terms, Dix Heures moves a step further from Moderato. In the earlier novel, the alternative story (the background to the murder) was woven into the conversation of Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin. Here, the alternative story (the Pierre/Claire affair) invades the narrative framework itself, so that we can’t detach ourselves from it; the distinction between events and their narration begins to col lapse. This process becomes even more pronounced in the next phase of Duras’ work, which opens with Le Ravissement de Lol C. Stein (1964).

In this novel, place names such as S. Thala, T. Beach, and U. Bridge indicate that we are less concerned with realistic locations—although they are described with a degree of topographical detail—but rather with a geography of the mind. Instead of movements from place to place catalysing increased self-awareness by the characters, they accentuate uncertainty and enigma. The Conradian narrative method depends on conjecture, second-hand report, self-confessedly unreli able witnesses. Lol’s mental paralysis, dislocation of personality, and compulsive replaying of the traumatic event which shattered her life— her desertion by her fiancé for an older woman—are communicated directly to the reader by the disjunctions and elisions of the text. The construction of the self resembles a jigsaw from which crucial pieces are missing, and where there is no picture on the box lid. Duras’ own image, in a celebrated passage, is of a missing word which, if only it could be found, would make the whole story intelligible. At the heart of this novel and its heroine, in Wittgensteinian fashion, there is the silence of what can’t be spoken.

588 Paul Dean when Maria is drunk and somnolent, there’s a hallucinatory feel about what is related; we aren’t clear whether or not she is imagining it. The main point, however, is that she believes the affair with Pierre has begun, and that we are convinced on other evidence from the story that it will do so at some point.

***

589The Hopkins Review

The years between Le Ravissement and L’Amant were filled with mis cellaneous work, including eighteen films, eleven plays, and other fiction, notably Le Vice-consul (1965), in which one character is writing a story about another character, and L’Amante anglaise (1967), an inge nious reworking of an earlier play, in which the history of a murder is pieced together from transcripts of taped interviews. During this period, Duras’ hold on her public wavered, and she grew increasingly narcissistic, an “administrator of her own talent” as Laure Adler puts it. So one turns with relief to L’Amant, which deserves all the plaudits it won. It is swift, economical, trenchant, but in formal terms relatively conventional; little difficulty is caused to the reader by the switches between first and third person, or the lack of chronological continu ity, underlined by the virtually exclusive use of the present tense. However, there are major revisions of perspective. The family dynamic is explored at greater depth, and with greater directness, than in Un Barrage. The depiction of Pierre, the elder brother, is both harsher and sadder; the incestuous attraction to Paulo is actually consummated, the breadth of interest is wider, taking in the narrator’s lesbian attrac tion to Hélène Lagonelle, and the wartime friendship with Ramon and Betty Fernandez, among other things. The passages describing lovemaking are more tender and sensual than before, and there is greater pathos in the hopelessness of the lover’s situation, trapped by his father’s demand that he follow the traditional marital customs of Chinese society. The final version of the story, L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991), is more radical still, as we shall see. *** In Duras’ last phase, from the late 1980s to 1995, “the novel of her life” is in full flow, as clearly shown by the dialogue between her and Yann (both unnamed) at the opening of Emily L (1987). In response to his complaint that their relationship has become little more than material for her novels, in which he himself is reduced to a character, she explains her compulsion to write about it in order to ease the suf

***

590 Paul Dean fering it brings: “to write…is to efface. To replace.” Yet no definitive version can be written, she adds; some stories can’t be pinned down, being composed of unrelated episodes. These are the most terrifying kind, never yielding up their secrets, never affording any certainty. She speaks at length of the fear of writing, the fear of being unable to write. Yann says, “What we like best is to write books about each other,” and they laugh. This, of course, is exactly what happened; Emily L. followed La Maladie de la mort (1982) and Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs (1986), in which Duras voiced her anguish at loving someone who could not fulfill her physically, while Yann’s book about her detoxifica tion cure, M.D., had appeared in 1983, and Cet Amour-là, his memoir of their time together, would be published in 1999, after her death.

The other couple in Emily L., the English captain and his wife, are not only characters in Duras’ novel, but also characters in a narrative imagined by Yann and Marguerite from overheard snatches of conver sation. In this story, the wife is a gifted poet whose work is resented by her husband because it excludes him; his destruction of one of her drafts (which, strangely, is an actual poem by Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain slant of light”) causes her creativity to dry up, and propels her into alcoholic grief, while he, racked with guilt, vainly attempts to palliate the situation by taking her on endless cruises in their yacht. There are echoes here of Le Marin de Gibraltar and Moderato cantabile, but the dominant note is despair. They are running away from something which accompanies them all the time. There is no forced parallel between the two couples, but an equivalence; by imagining together the story of the captain and his wife, Yann and Marguerite are able to reflect on their own roles, and on the act of writing in any genre (“real novels are poems”, Duras would say). In the final paragraph, she cries out to him that to write well or badly, to write with an intellectual ambition or a moral purpose, is not only inadequate but pointless: what matters is to write spontaneously, without thought of correction, to hurl the writing brutally out of oneself, and leave it in the raw state in which it emerges.

To ask which is the “true” version of the three Duras wrote is thus irrelevant: what matters is how a given way of telling the story changes it. Like Lol V. Stein trying to understand her crisis, Duras turns her life round and round like a prism which reflects different facets with the changing falling of the light. *** After Duras’ death, Yann’s only purpose in life was to keep her memory alive. Following the painful vividness of M.D., Cet Amour-là was disturbing in a different way, the work of a man who had spent sixteen years ministering to Duras’ colossal ego, enduring humiliation,

591The Hopkins Review

L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, as already mentioned, is the final “remake” of the Chinese lover narrative, and the work which most clearly mixes fictional and cinematic procedures— in fact, the novel began as a film scenario. At the start, we seem to be reading a director’s notes, in the present tense, for the film crew, and later there are such phrases as “the voice speaking here is the written one of the book” or “In the film [but] here in the book. . . . ” There are suggestions for possible camera shots, casting notes, reflections on the events with hindsight. We are also assumed to know the previous incarnations of the story in what are simply called “the books”—never “my books.” We read that “she, the girl, is made up and dressed like the young girl in the books”, or are reminded that “In the first book, she said. . . .” We are advised that the lover is “a different man from the one in the book,” and indeed what we are told about him differs. Characters from L’Amant, notably Hélène Lagonelle and Thanh, the mother’s chauffeur, reappear in expanded roles. In some footnotes, Duras explores differences between the effects of a written and a visual treatment—for instance, regarding a dance scene in a bar, the book can give a sense of the crowd, whereas “the camera cancels out the give-and-take; it only films people, that’s to say people in their solitariness.” The generic cross-over is destabilis ing, as Duras doubtless intended—a kind of alienation device which never allows us to forget that we are experiencing a fabulation. At one startling moment, the lovers imagine themselves when dead, their cof fins surrounded by the books that tell their story.

The two books about Duras were followed by two novels, both com mercial failures, after which Yann, disappointed and depressed, retired from public view. He was found dead in his flat in Paris a few months after Duras’ centenary celebrations in 2014, in which he had played no part, and was buried in her tomb in the Montparnasse cemetery.

“It turns out that I have genius”, she remarked to Yann shortly before she died. “I’m used to it now.” Without going that far, one can claim major status for the “Chinese trilogy” (Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Amant, L’Amant de la Chine du Nord) and Moderato cantabile. (Most of her admirers would add Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, although I have never felt totally convinced by that.) Her experiments with narrative are quite distinct from those of the nouveau roman or the autofiction, with both of which she has been somewhat carelessly associated. Jacques-Pierre Amette did her no favours in comparing Yann Andréa Steiner to Virgil—that simply invites ridicule: yet she did make her life into a kind of epic, with its own Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise Lost.

592 Paul Dean exploitation, and contempt, deprived of his freedom, forbidden to make decisions, taking dictation in every sense of the phrase. He was completely besotted; from the age of eighteen he had read no books by any other author. Just as she had “created” him, by re-baptising him and turning him into a fictional character, he conducts a dialogue with her, taking on her voice from beyond the grave. When Cet Amour-là was published, he ill-advisedly agreed to appear on a chat show. The interview, if it can be called that, can be seen on the internet. Yann, then in his mid-forties, comes across as a helpless child. The interviewer, the other guests, and the studio audience find his inarticulacy, his shyness, and his obvious dismay at the whole experience, hilarious. It is like watching bearbaiting.

IN PLAIN SIGHT: WATCHING MICHAEL HANEKE’S CACHÉ

While my father spent a decade dying, my habit acquired a new purpose; there was something definite to escape: my father, who had always inspired fear, and little else, unless it was pity. When close to suffering it is hard, but not impossible, to deny pity. I learned that then. In my twenties and home from college, friends from way back confided in me, over beers, that while they had enjoyed coming over to play and goof off back in the day, they always made sure to leave before my father returned home. They had feared him as much as I had; and I couldn’t get away from him, not then and not now; and age, which had done so much to him, had done little for him. He had not mellowed. He remained committed to violence and self-pity, and to intimidation when unable to do violence. Here was a man who, a little less than two years before he died, in the middle of a six-week stretch in a rehab center, on oxygen while recovering from a lung infection that

Ihad been going to the movies alone since I was fifteen, hoping to meet a film that would save me from myself, and make me interesting. For as long as I could remember I had been trying to get away from something, and to be interesting would be a means of escape, though from what I could never say, not exactly, except bore dom. At sixteen I was obsessed, briefly, passionately, with Nathalie Baye. I saw J’ai epousé une ombre (I Married a Shadow) four times in three days, and came to school Monday to tell my friends I was in love with her. En masse, they trooped to Cinema 21, to investigate, and they were not impressed. They had seen right through me; I was the boy who cried Art!

594 Michael Autrey nearly killed him, said, while sitting on the edge of the bed, in reference to the cane I had not hopped to get him: If I was a younger man, I’d beat you with it. At least I knew he wasn’t lying; at least he had never said, This hurts me more than it hurts you. Dying embarrassed him; he griped and sighed. With him I waited in waiting rooms, for him I took notes while the doctors talked around his curiously smooth torso, so hard to look at: his organs just so much soft fruit in a skin bag. To spare him I read the dry, dire pamphlets— Lymphomas: A Guide for Patients and Their Families, Understanding Drug Therapy and Managing Side Effects (for Leukemia, Lymphoma, Myeloma) scattered on the sick like propaganda dropped from planes behind enemy lines. Hospitalized with his second pulmonary embolism in a month I organized and brought, from the nearby bistro, a half bottle of Gigondas, a Spiegelau wineglass, and pappardelle with morels in port wine sauce, steaming in a porcelain tureen. While I was returning the dish the nurse slipped him two sleeping pills, contraindicated for his condition (his doctor had written No Sleeping Aids in his chart). He was convinced she was trying to kill him. For him I dozed all that night in a chair with my feet against the door, not to prevent her from coming in but to make sure I was awake when she was in the room. During the years he was dying I went, alone, to the movies more than ever. To escape, and to accelerate the arrival of whatever it was that was coming for him and for me. For me: some consequence for my terminal ambivalence; for him: some consequence for his inveter ate violence. On the evening I went to Michael Haneke’s Caché (titled Hidden in the UK) at the Fox Tower 10, a corporate art house, I’m sure I went with the hope that I would emerge interesting. I took a seat in the back row, right under the projection window, and only an elderly couple, distinguished and expensively coiffed, sat nearby, keeping one tasteful, empty seat between us.

And something did happen to me, there in the dark. I still can’t say just what it was. What follows is an exercise in telling what happened on the screen and in me, as plainly as I can. Probably you will not

Finding a video in a plastic bag on one’s doorstep—the film assumes one will be unable to resist the desire to watch it, as if a camera really does know and can show us things we don’t know about ourselves.

Only after the narrative camera “interrupts” do we realize we have been watching a surveillance video. The Laurents’ conversation con tinues over it, and then creases appear, accompanied by the diegetic sound of a tape in a VCR. “How come,” the man asks, looking at himself looking towards the surveillance camera, “I didn’t see him? It’ll remain a mystery.” He might be talking about himself. Finally—it comes as a kind of relief—a conventional setting: an open-plan liv ing room. For the first time we see the famous faces clearly. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) holds the remote, his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) standing in the foreground, the television set amongst packed shelves, custom made to accommodate and center it. At that first sight of the interior of the Laurents’ tasteful home, an interior never subjected to surveillance, except by the “narrative” camera, the woman sitting near me leaned over to her partner, or husband—I cherish the thought, without evidence, that they were on their second marriage—and whis pered: “That’s what I want to do with the den.”

The first shot, the credits superimposed as if typed, as if that static shot were a page, taxed me. To begin a film called Caché with what appears to be a plain sight, is to demand what few are prepared to give.

The review on rogerebert.com claims the shot lasts more than five min utes. It lasts less than four, but demands more than patience. A terse conversation begins in the second minute, and in the third the static shot is interrupted. A man comes out of the gate of the house into the street, as if to look for the camera (if we recognize French film actors, we will recognize him). We soon learn that first shot, captured from a camera set up to surveil the Laurents, an outwardly comfortable, suc cessful family, reveals only that surveillance doesn’t reveal what can’t be seen: that what’s in plain sight is only suspect if we have suspicions.

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be able to follow along if you have seen the film, or imagine it if you haven’t. This is about what it is like to try to account for what happens to an obsession born years ago, out of lifelong ambivalence.

596 Michael Autrey In

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Sixth Edition), David Thomson observes, about this German-born auteur who considers himself Austrian and has lately done most of his work in France, “Haneke is known for his unblinking attention to desperate situations, without any attempt or need to explain or justify his characters, and for his realization that these harsh realities are plays we are watch ing, so that sometimes the film itself may wink at us.” To me it seems the opposite force is exerted: we are the ones who must blink, or look away. We console ourselves if we think the film winks so that we might dismiss it, or digest it as entertainment.

Caché is a film about the vicissitudes of being filmed. The Laurents receive VCR cassettes; each tape moves the plot it may or may not be a part of. Most are accompanied by a crude, violent drawing. Similar crude drawings are sent on postcards to their son care of his school, drawings and tapes are sent to Georges, care of his employer, and directly to his employer. Soon it becomes clear that Georges is the target, and he acts as if he has something to hide, and someone to be afraid of, maybe himself. It’s never clear what the sender wants from Georges, since there’s no unambiguous evidence the sender ever learns Georges is revealed as a weak, petty, self-pitying liar. And we never learn for certain who sends the tapes, or if the sender has a motive other than discord. As the film proceeds an abyss opens between what surveillance tells and what the film’s “narrative” camera shows. Or do the verbs operate the opposite way? Perhaps it is surveillance that shows and the “narrative” camera that tells. When I say “narrative” camera I imagine scare quotes or air quotes. I think the “narrative” camera should be bracketed in some way because isn’t surveillance better understood than narrative? To paraphrase William James, everybody knows what surveillance is. Surveillance cameras observe us every day—never mind the surveillance and capture of our data. And if surveillance deters it also objectifies—objectifies because, ideally, it deters?

I want to distinguish between these two types of looking, even though, as we watch Caché, the difference between them blurs. We view the images of the “narrative” and the surveillance cameras the same way, and learn only when the characters learn that what we have been watching is a surveillance tape. Only after we know that the surveillance camera has shot what we have been shown can we consider if it might mean something other than what it shows. But to interrogate the meaning of the surveillance footage is not a pretext or an excuse to trust the “narrative” camera more. The surveillance means to raise suspicions about and sow distrust of and among the Laurents. If the surveillance catches only Georges in a lie, it doesn’t prove other characters aren’t lying too. The point is made in the first shot, when nothing happens. People come and go. Under scrutiny, the prosaic acquires unseemly significance. Or is our interest in their discomfort unseemly? Haneke suspects our innocence. As he says in the interview accompanying the film: “Behavior is always a moral question.” The Laurents are tastemakers; they might be called influencers, unless they are too old for that dubious honorific. Georges hosts a salon on French public television, and the set of his show resembles his living room at home, except on the set the books are wrapped in paper, rendering them anonymous, innocuous, book-shaped props arrayed on shelves. Anne works in publishing, as an editor who does some promotions: we see her briefly, looking fabulous in a white suit, in a crowded bookstore, talking on her cellphone about the crowd she’s in the midst of at the book launch she may have organized. I think the subtitles translate only her words and yet at this moment another person, a bore/boor, another famous French actor is talking. Their conversations overlap. This brief scene prompts the question: which conversation are we hearing, and which are we overhearing?

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Skipping ahead: Georges stands at a Formica counter drinking “espresso” from a plastic cup, the counter littered with stained plastic cups. Anyone who has traveled has been in such a place and knows the

598 Michael Autrey taste of this stuff, reminiscent of grape juice mixed with salsa and ciga rette ash. He lingers, sipping bitter liquid courage, preparing to enter the labyrinth this latest surveillance tape has led him to, where he will meet his long-lost “brother.” This joint where he kills time is less wel coming than a rest stop, and nothing like the chic café we see in a brief, emotional scene, its compliment and opposite. Anne, in tears, tries to explain to Pierre, who is also a friend of Georges, how, suddenly, so little makes sense. How Georges, inexplicably, is exhibiting that infu riating opacity of a person at or beyond their own limits (and Georges is terribly limited). Pierre kisses the inside of her wrist, and this kiss suggests they have a relationship more intimate than boss and subor dinate—but I can’t find again the evidence that Pierre is Anne’s boss. It’s maddening; I’m almost certain of it, and can’t say why. During this scene there’s a young man in the background who keeps looking up from his book to glance at Anne. He, like us, is eavesdropping, conducting the benign—is it benign?—surveillance we all conduct in public places, when the lives of others become more interesting or titil lating than our own lives. Does she have something to hide? Only Pierrot, the twelve-yearold son of Anne and Georges, accuses his mother of having an affair. Pierrot, the name of a clown. Pierrot, the name a kissing cousin of Pierre, her boss’s or colleague’s name. We are not inclined to believe a twelve-year-old: too old to be an innocent, too young to be a credible witness. And Anne’s denials are credible. We believe her just as we believe Majid when he denies any knowledge of the tapes. Later we believe the boy who may, might, must be Majid’s son, when he denies any knowledge of the tapes.

Majid, no last name: before we learn his identity, we have seen flashes or flashbacks of a young boy of color with blood on his hands and face. Georges is led—led back—to Majid by a tape. One of just two not shot from a stationary camera, it is shot from the dashboard of a car. The car rolls to a stop at an intersection and turns right. Then the video cuts to a traveling shot of a dreary hallway, the camera apparent

ly at eye-level but steadier than a handheld camera. The camera travels to a door, number 047, and stops. Georges and Anne spend some time rewinding the tape to learn the name of the street. Avenue Lénine: the film might be winking at us. Yet this is not a simple story of the rage of the proletariat or the return of the repressed. To settle for such an explanation would be to succumb to anesthetizing dramatic irony: ah, now that I know what this is about, I can start paying attention to my feelings about what I see rather than to what I’m seeing.

On this first visit to Majid’s apartment Georges does not immedi ately recognize him, and yet this is a classic recognition scene. Majid has wanted to forget Georges as completely as Georges appears to have forgotten him. No matter if Georges successfully engineered Majid’s removal from his family with his lies, they remain broth ers long lost and implacably estranged. The sight of Majid shatters Georges’ outwardly bland exterior (his cultivated blandness empha sized by his wardrobe). He feels more strongly about Majid than anyone else he interacts with in the film. His hatred is deep-seated: the ancient, preening hatred of brothers. Majid’s replies to Georges are bemused, and principled. Which doesn’t hinder Georges from offering Majid money to leave his family in peace. Majid, calm, resigned, can’t believe Georges takes him for a blackmailer. Majid asks, according to the subtitle, “what wouldn’t we do not to lose what’s ours?” A more accurate translation: “What would we not do not to lose anything?”

A curious question, meaningless unless rhetorical, since no life can be lived without loss, and generous from a man who has lost so much. At the end of this first face-to-face encounter in decades Georges threatens Majid, and his menacing attitude seems to reveal what kind of person Georges is, a person who relies on intimidation because it is cleaner, easier to deny, than violence. Majid claims to know nothing of any tapes, and yet the surveillance tape that captures Georges menacing Majid, and proves to Anne that Georges has been lying, is shot inside Majid’s apartment. So: either Majid is a spectacularly good liar, far better than Georges, or Majid

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600 Michael Autrey isn’t lying because he doesn’t know that he, too, is under surveil lance. This is, I think, the only scene we are shown two versions of: the “narrative” camera shows us a shot/reverse-shot sequence of their confrontation, while the “surveillance” footage that haunts Georges is shot from behind him, and continues after Georges leaves, and shows Majid breaking down in tears. We are shown only a few moments of Majid’s grief. According to Anne, “it runs for one hour if you want to watch how he feels.”

Having been caught lying, Georges explains to Anne how Majid’s parents, valued workers on Georges’ parents’ estate, traveled to Paris to protest the Algerian war on October 17th, 1961, and were never seen again. We learn, at the same time he tells her, of the killing, in 1961, of at least 200 Algerian protestors in Paris, and for most of us, including the French audience, this is the first we’ve ever heard of this atroc ity. Many were drowned, tossed into the Seine with their hands tied behind their backs. Maurice Papon was chief of the French National Police at the time, and appears to have ordered the attack. Papon had served in Algeria before receiving this promotion on the home front—the same Papon convicted in 1998 for crimes against human ity for his service in the Vichy government. Are we to believe this is a secret France has kept from itself? “A secret,” as Haneke puts it in the interview that accompanies the film, “hidden by the ‘common sense’ of that country.” (The interview is conducted in French but he uses the English phrase “common sense.”)

According to Georges’ confession to Anne, his parents then went to Paris to learn the fate of Majid’s parents, and were rudely rebuffed. As a consequence, his parents moved to adopt Majid, and Georges lied to his parents to prevent this orphan from joining the family. But who’s to say Majid’s parents didn’t abandon their son? Their disappearance coincides with the massacre of FLN protestors: the connection is estab lished, not confirmed. The situation is perfectly credible, the conclu sions easy to draw. But inferences aren’t facts. If I am to do more than watch and nod, I must doubt whether plain sights are as easy to believe

Just after the footage a map appears on which Israel is plainly visible. The bleeding boy could be Iraqi too, as the news just before the image appears has been about the occupation of Nasiriyah by coalition forces. This news segment dates the film. What we have been watching is set not long after 9/11, which means something different to a French audi ence than it does to an American one. Hard to remember the interna tional sympathy for America in those days; it seems an age ago. Undoubtedly the bleeding boy does resemble one of Georges’ flashbacks—and superficially resembles the crude two-tone—black for outline, red for blood—child’s drawings—or are they sophisticated imitations of child’s drawings?—that accompany most but not all of the videos (there’s at least one drawing of a beheaded chicken). Yet

601The Hopkins Review in as to see. I must reject my assumptions the moment they precipitate into preconception; I must check myself repeatedly. I cannot trust what I think see; even less: what I think of what I see.

According to several reviewers, Caché’s “smoking gun,” is an image visible for a few seconds in the final third of the film. In the back ground, on the TV that has so often been the center of Georges and Anne’s attention while they watch the videos that prove they are being filmed, the news shows a boy, his face bloody, in the arms of two adults running from right to left. Natural to assume the boy is Palestinian.

Not long after this first visit to Majid Georges, on the way to Aix to interview an author, stops overnight at his childhood home. He doesn’t visit often; he is surprised by his mother’s decline. Sitting on her bed, he asks her about Majid, and in answer to her asking, Why now? After all these years? Georges doesn’t give her the whole story. Yet I’m not prepared to say Georges lies to his mother. Must we tell our parents, every time we call or visit, why? When his mother at first denies knowing anyone named Majid, she might, must, could be lying too. I don’t know why I stuck by my father while he was dying, and I don’t believe I was lying to myself about why. To have been lying I would have had to know the truth. I know I didn’t have anything bet ter to do at the time; and, anyway, he was the devil I knew.

602 Michael Autrey to call this image of a bleeding youth, who just happens to be another person of color, a “smoking gun” tells us little. As the characters don’t remark on the image—don’t appear to see it—what are we to know about what we have seen, other than that it’s another atrocity? Is a secret really a secret if it’s not kept from someone?

A survey of reviews of and commentary about Caché reveal basic errors, as if each commentator and reviewer had watched a different film (and some who wrote about it don’t appear to have watched it even once).

In her study of the film for the BFI Film Classics series, Catherine Wheatley makes mistakes that, for a writer who claims to have watched the film “tens of times,” can only be called embarrassing. For instance: she claims that after Georges confronts Majid for the first time, he calls Anne “from a phone box.” (He pulls a cellphone from his pocket.) She claims Georges only reveals his history with Majid to Anne after Majid’s suicide (he tells her after the tape that exposes his lie about his first encounter with Majid). More than one writer claims Pierrot is a teenager. (Georges’ mother asks if Pierrot is twelve, and Georges confirms.) One commentator is certain Majid’s son is named Hashem. Majid’s son remains nameless. (According to Georges’ mother, Hashem was the name of Majid’s father.) The same writer mis identifies the name of the street in Romainville as Rue de Lenine, and makes this spurious claim about the books on set of Georges’ show: “Illuminated behind the show’s pompous interlocutors, rows of books signify erudition [. . .] in spite of the fact that they are merely illusory projections of light.” The books, wrapped in paper, are backlit, not “illusory projections” (even a glance at the film still that illustrates the article makes this perfectly clear). Not surprising so many would mis remember. What’s surprising is that they would trust their memories, about a film for which the dubiousness of memory is about all that can be trusted? It is tempting, when judging someone as smug and shallow as Georges, and as insulated from reality as the Laurents, to overlook facts, to see what one wants to see, to settle for what proves the film a scathing indictment of the bourgeoisie.

Wood’s confused and confusing summary highlights just how confusing the film is. One hopes another viewing, or another viewing without preconceptions (or maybe just better copyediting) would cor rect these mistakes. Yet these mistakes are bound up with what can’t be decided about what and how the film gives us the facts. At every turn the film raises doubts about what we see and hear: whether we are complicit as voyeurs or called upon as witnesses. The honest answer to more questions than I can think of about this film must be: I don’t know, I’m not sure, I can’t say. The honest answer to the question about what the film has to do with my unbearably mixed feelings about my father is: if I could say it plainly, I would, but I can’t. I can’t say for certain even if I was, of his dying, a voyeur or a witness.

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The respected film critic Robin Wood, in an otherwise excellent discussion, offers this at best confusing and at worst mistaken sum mary of one type of difficulty the viewer faces while puzzling over the film:

To leave us with questions, this seems to be Haneke’s intention as an auteur of “realist” films. As he said to the Paris Review: “Of course, ‘reality’ is nonexistent anyway [. . .]. Filmic reality works through illu sion, and it is an illusion for which the viewer pays at the ticket booth.

“some things shown as memories, which may have happened (memories can be false), though not necessarily quite as depicted in the flashbacks to childhood—the boy Majid with blood on his face (who appears twice, first as a memory, later as a nightmare, the setting of which is the home of the grandmother [Anne Girardot], where the boy can never have been), the beheading of the rooster.” It is Georges who visits his mother, who had wanted to adopt Majid (she is grandmother to Pierrot, and would have been Majid’s adopted mother). Georges has the nightmare while staying in this childhood home, which the “narra tive” camera shows is the same house he and Majid lived in together, for a brief time, as hypothetical brothers; and the chopping block, where Majid may or may not have decapitated the rooster, is in the foreground of a later shot of this same house.

The blurbs on the cover of the DVD of Caché, a gift from my wife, make the film sound more entertaining, conventional, more easeful and winking, than it is: “Suspense has a new master.” “Like Hitchcock, only creepier.” “Grade A. Be prepared to gasp.” And everyone in the theatre the first night I saw it did gasp when Majid slit his own throat, ejecting a single gestural abstraction of arterial blood onto the gray wall of his apartment. It stains the front of the DVD, the poster of the film, and signifies the film is “art.” It is unexpected, the sort of scene nothing can prepare one for. But to call Majid’s suicide the climactic scene is too easy.

Majid telephones Georges at work, inviting him back to his apartment, and Georges comes. When Georges is inside in a single motion Majid takes a straight razor from his pocket, slits his throat and falls, blocking the door Georges must exit. We see Georges from the back, from the same point of view as the surveillance footage that caught him threatening Majid on his first visit. We are not shown Georges witnessing Majid’s suicide so much as we, along with Georges, witness it. Moments before Majid pronounces, in his quiet way, his last words: “I asked you here because I wanted you to be present.” (The subtitles have his last sentence beginning “I called . . .”) His words are curiously neutral, not unlike those spoken by a guru speaking before the begin ning of a seated meditation. The next shot, which again might be sur veillance, shows Georges, hours later, coming out of a movie theatre. Majid slits his throat on Georges’ fourth visit. Majid isn’t home the second time Georges goes to the door and pounds. On the third, Georges arrives with the police. If the film were a tragedy this third visit would come at the beginning of the third act. Anne comes home and finds Georges at his desk pushing papers. By this point Anne dis

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It endows him with the opportunity to experience—in the comfort of a cozy chair—all the adventures that he cannot and does not want to experience.” I wonder if that woman, gasping with the rest of us when Majid slits his own throat, left thinking that her idea for the den was worth the assault on her senses and sensibility.

605The Hopkins Review trusts Georges, and he is preoccupied. In a loose, digressive conversa tion, they realize they don’t know where their son is. Perhaps he’s with Yves, a school friend. When Anne calls Yves’ home, she learns Pierrot has lied to Yves, and no one knows where he is. Yet we are not shown Pierrot telling the lie Anne tells Georges he has told. It might be Anne who lies to Georges about what she learned in her conversation with Yves or Yves’ parents. Whoever is lying, with Pierrot missing Georges and Anne react—or overreact. Georges and Anne have gone once already to the police to report the tapes, to no avail. This second time they arrive at the station armed with a report that gets the attention of authorities, a possible kidnapping, and with a suspect, an Algerian man. When the police hear of this missing boy, and that an Algerian might be involved they act, and overreact. Next, we have the police, with Georges, at Majid’s door. The police pound and a tall youth, who might or must be Majid’s son, answers (this is the first we have seen of him). The police shout, Where’s the boy! It is a question and an exclamation, and one thinks, dreamily, that it might be Majid-as-a-boy they are looking for, or Majidas-a-boy who opens, and who the police push past. Not long after we see Georges call Anne to tell her, among other things, that it must be this boy who has made the tapes. The police haul Majid and this youth to the station where they both end up spending the night in jail. In her book-length study Wheatley makes this excellent point: “Haneke’s decision to shoot the whole film in high definition [mini mizes] any textural distinctions between the covertly filmed video tapes” and the rest of the film. This adds to the difficulty of the most puzzling scene of all, the last. It is an end that does not offer a conclu sion, much less resolution. One hopes the final scene might unlock the secret of the film, yet I remain convinced the film ridicules the idea that secrets are “hidden” things that can simply be revealed. As if the truth were a simple thing with which we might play hide and seek. The first time I saw the film, I saw nothing in the final shot. I was moved and unsettled by what had come before, and frustrated when the lights

606 Michael Autrey came up. The final shot might have been from the point of view of the “narrative” camera, or surveillance footage; and it does look like sur veillance, like the banal stuff detectives fast forward through in the cop shows before someone off-screen interrupts: Stop. Go back. Print that. I’m ashamed—why ashamed?—to admit that only on my second or third viewing I noticed Majid’s son approach Pierrot on the crowded front steps outside a building we assume is Pierrot’s school (he comes out of the open doors). They descend the steps and talk, then go their separate ways. The scene has some ambient noise, muffled diegetic sounds, and no audible dialogue. Writing in The New York Times, A.O. Scott offers a succinct and satisfying explanation: “The initial shot of the movie is answered by the last, which demands close attention and contains the intriguing suggestion that the real story has been hid den all along—that it has been driven not by the noisy public conflict between Arabs and Frenchmen, but rather by the quiet, perpetual war between fathers and sons.” Others argue the film is a closed loop, that the last shot is in fact the first, and shows Majid’s son and Pierrot cook ing up the whole thing. This seems far-fetched, while Scott’s interpre tation is valid whether the last shot is last in a sequence or first. If A. O. Scott is right, and the film is about intergenerational con flict, the costs are obscenely distributed: Majid’s son spends a night in jail with his father while Pierrot has spent that night without parental supervision, at the home of a friend whose mother was on the night shift at the hospital. Unless the woman who brings Pierrot home is lying too. Whether Pierrot has lied, or he and Majid’s son have con spired, the surly white boy escapes punishment. If this is a film about sons conspiring in the never-ending war against their fathers, the sons of the fathers of color must be the casualties because they, like their fathers before them, are casualties in the forever war waged against them by the state and its white supremacist allies.

Before the mysterious, mystifying final shot, on which so much ink has been spilled, the primal scene, the expulsion: a static long take of the boy we suppose is the young Majid at the moment the wards of

We see all this from so far away we cannot distinguish any faces. Is this, as the writer on rogerebert.com claims, an objective view, because static cameras are objective? If so, that would make much of the film objective, whatever that means, and almost all the surveillance footage. The only unambiguous feelings in the scene are Majid’s—if it is Majid who kicks and screams. Is this distance the distance at which Georges sees his past? Is this the distance at which we observe Georges observ ing his past? Can any of us view our past “objectively,” as we move away from it? ***

Early in Caché, a reprieve. The Laurents host a small dinner party of the sort one assumes they host all the time: plentiful wine, rich food, repartee, Pierrot out of sight and out of mind. A man we see just this once, who remains nameless, tells a story. The guests are accustomed to hear him out. An old woman he has never seen before spies him in a bistro, and he notices her noticing him. She motions, he joins her. This old woman is overcome as she tells him that he reminds her of

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the state come for him. A car bumps into the yard, discomposing a line of hens inclining toward a dusty pothole in a spacious courtyard. Two in the car: a woman gets out, strides to the door, enters the chateau. A man gets out, lights a smoke (Wheatley claims that three adults have come for Majid.) The woman emerges from the house with a suitcase. Georges’ parents—if they are Georges’ parents—accompany the young Majid—if it is the young Majid—out the door. Majid runs for it, towards the camera, and disappears behind a wall. The wards of the state give chase. Off screen they catch him, and carry him, kicking and screaming, back to the car. The parents—if they are this boy’s sec ond set of parents, who tried or gave up trying to adopt him—retreat inside. The woman follows them in while the man secures his charge in the back seat. The business-like woman re-emerges, gets in, the man returns to the driver’s seat, and the car stutters forward, disturbing the hens again as it leaves.

608 Michael Autrey someone. He doesn’t think so. She’s old and emotional so he decides to humor her, to hear her out. Turns out he reminds her of her beloved pet, a dog run down by a van on April 17th, 1964. He was born in ’64: April 17th is his birthday. The bumper struck the dog, gashed its neck. The raconteur pauses, takes Anne’s soft, white hand, lifts it towards his neck while saying, I have a scar just here . . .Then he cracks up. Laughter. Merriment. The woman sitting on his right, a woman of color who, given how he looks at her and she at him, she might, could, must be his partner, asks, “Come on, Is it true or not?” They seem to laugh both with her and at her. To wonder if such a story is true is to suggest that someone, the teller or the person of whom he speaks, could be lying. I know my obsession with Caché has something to do with my father’s dying: it is more than just a coincidence, but I can’t say exactly how. Georges’ comeuppance, his exposure as base, venal, petty, violent, may be the comeuppance I wished for my father. Yet anyone paying the slightest attention knew these things about my father already. Writing this, I wonder if, for that decade I took care of him I was pretending a truce had been called in the never-ending war between us. He was by then less a father than a pitiful, self-pitying old man. I know that I was never on the offensive in this long war, not in the conventional sense. My cousins, who met him for the first time in more than twenty years at a memorial for my mother’s mother, remember seeing him dangle me by my ankles off a second-story balcony because I had become too rambunctious while building a jigsaw puzzle with visiting extended family. I must have been five or six, no more than eight. I have no memory of this, which is not the same as saying I don’t believe it hap pened. Why would they lie about a thing like that? I’ve lived my whole life with the suffocating desire to escape. But where did and do I think I might I escape to? Did his actions disqualify him from love? Maybe I felt his prolonged dying was what he deserved. Yet no one deserves suffering. Only lies might reconcile these irreconcilables. This need to

My father spent the last few days of his life in an ICU, his last min utes in a private room reserved for the dying in the hospital’s cancer ward. His last nurse in the ICU, assisted by another, moved him from the ICU up to the cancer ward for his last minutes of life. I recall seeing them at the end of a hall reserved for hospital employees, waiting for an elevator in which patients were moved. They were talking quietly, sharing a joke, or a bit of gossip, my father dying on a gurney between them. Both had fought in the Battle of Fallujah; how much worse than his death had they seen. For a moment I longed to be one of the guys, join their conversation and escape the inevitable.

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lie I’ve often felt, lying—rhymes with dying—might be inseparable from the need the forget. To forget so completely that I can’t know the truth even if it’s in plain sight, right in front of my face. Looking in the mirror, the truth might be as simple as how much I resemble him, and how little I can do about it.

To me he had said his last word hours before. It might be the best advice he ever gave me, if ever I manage to take it. In answer to my question, Are you afraid? No! he replied, with surprising force. I don’t think he was lying about what he was going through. For once I was convinced he knew the truth, and was willing to share it. For once he wasn’t trying to tell me what to do or how to be. Instead, he was try ing to do what we all have to do once, with the little conviction and dignity he could muster, trying to live up to something while dying. His last moments were a terrible spectacle. By then he breathed with the muscles of his neck, they stood out like taut rigging from his pur plish skin, the whites of his eyes a bloody red from the strain. I sup pose he was blind by then, he probably didn’t know it was me he was answering; quite possibly he was talking to himself one last time, and I was overhearing. Perhaps for once I was the voice in his head, as he has been so often, too often, in mine. It was not the time to reflect. I couldn’t think. He was suffering. How could I want anything then but the end of it, and of him.

Many Saturday afternoons of my childhood were spent in the balcony of the Fox or the Paramount, watching the main feature and maybe a B-pic ture, but always trailers for coming attractions, a newsreel, and a cartoon or travelogue. The last would be a short subject about a far-off and scenic part of the world, photographed in color and featuring a commentary by Lowell Thomas or some other sonorous-voiced authority. Historically speaking, the travelogues of the 1950s derived from the illustrated-withlantern-slides lectures that nineteenth-century explorers delivered to audiences in provincial lyceums, and in turn they have led to the count less travel programs of 21st-century television—for example all of those nowadays broadcast on the Travel Channel. Ethnographic and touristic in equal measure, like articles in National Geographic magazine, travelogues catered to the interests of a middle-class American public that, in fact, had not yet done much traveling itself. The Fox or the Paramount revealed a larger world, and introduced all of us to the thrills and occasionally the perils of getting out into that world.

REVIEWS Film chronicle: This Is Cinerama, directed by Merian C. Cooper (streaming on Kanopy); The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles (streaming on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube); Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper (streaming on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube); Two for the Road, directed by Stanley Donen (streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube); The Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (streaming on Kanopy and the Criterion Channel); Tracks, directed by John Curran (streaming on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube); Finding Nemo, directed by Andrew Stanton (stream ing on Disney+, Apple TV, and Amazon); Finding Dory, directed by Andrew Stanton (streaming on Disney+, Apple TV, and Amazon); Baraka, directed by Ron Fricke (streaming on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube).

Travelogues cannot easily be seen today, but their general style, com bining breathless excitement with straightforward reporting, escapism with a geography lesson, and exoticism with the occasional touch of good old American humor, is well captured by This Is Cinerama, a full-length travel documentary released in 1952 and now available for streaming on Kanopy. It was co-produced and directed by the adventurer, aviator, and all-around cinema whiz-kid Merian C. Cooper, who, two decades earlier, had been the moving force behind King Kong—a film, it will be remem © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

611The Hopkins Review bered, that begins with the making of a travelogue. I saw This Is Cinerama a few years after its initial release and was suitably thrilled when the com pere (inevitably, Lowell Thomas) introduced the new cinematic process. He had been giving a potted lecture on film history in a sequence shot in black-and-white and employing the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, but then he declaimed, “This is Cinerama!” and the image suddenly widened across the huge theater screen, turned from black-and-white to Technicolor, and started us off on the first of our travels, a ride on a New Jersey roller-coast er car crawling up high on its tracks, then vertiginously speeding down.

The widescreen images of This Is Cinerama were produced by three cameras simultaneously shooting a scene from slightly different angles, then by three synchronized projectors casting the footage onto a huge curved screen. On a small screen at home you will see only a letterboxed simulacrum of the original effect, but in truth the technical achievement of the film is the least interesting thing about it (and Cinerama itself has long been superseded by other and less distorting widescreen processes). It is This Is Cinerama’s take on travel that makes the film worth seeing. After that roller-coaster ride, a series of vignettes transports us to places the pro ducers deemed vaut le voyage for mid-20th-century Americans: the La Scala opera house in Milan where a performance of Aida is taking place; Niagara Falls photographed from a helicopter; a church with a gowned choir sing ing Bach and Handel; the Piazza San Marco in Venice (with pigeons) and Venetian canals (with gondolas); the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle for a military tattoo with drums and kilted bagpipers; the garden of Schönbrunn Palace for an informal concert by the lederhosen-clad Vienna Boys’ Choir; Zaragoza and a bullfight (and folk dancing); La Scala again; and Cypress Gardens in Florida, for languorous shots of antebellum-costumed belles posing next to bayous followed by an elaborate water-skiing show—an Aquacade, in the parlance of the period. Last of all comes an airborne tour of the United States from East to West, accompanied by orchestral-choral renditions of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “America the Beau tiful.” Home and abroad (“abroad” being represented solely by Europe), low and high culture, art and nature, wonderment and uplift, all are there on the Cinerama itinerary. I find the film’s concluding triumphalism hard to take, whether about scenery or Cinerama (“the greatness and beauty of America captured with a splendor never seen before”), but some shots are undeniably impressive, as when the converted B-25 bomber carrying the cameras flies low over a nondescript cedar-dotted plain, then suddenly arrives at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

In the aftermath of the pandemic lockdown, all of us are like the 1952 audience for This Is Cinerama—eager to get out into the larger world. While our individual trips are being planned, our tickets purchased and vaccination certificates procured, there will still be time to pursue travel via a screen. What could be better than motion pictures as a medium for capturing the exhilaration of travel, of moving from place to interesting place? Exhilaration is certainly on the agenda of The Motorcycle Diaries, a

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2004 coming-of-age film directed by the Brazilian Walter Salles. The film chronicles the youthful Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s trip across South Amer ica with a friend. Its screenplay is based on the diary Che actually kept on the trip, which took place, by coincidence, in 1952, the year of This Is Cinerama. A beaten-up and frequently breaking-down motorcycle (dubbed “The Mighty One”) is the first mode of transport for the two exhilarated adventurers on their way from Buenos Aires to Venezuela in the far north of the continent; in time, they employ other modes, hitchhiking via farm truck, Amazonian river boat, raft, and finally airplane. On the journey, Che’s friend Alberto (an excellent Rodrigo de la Serna) fulfills the conventional role of sidekick by eyeing pretty girls and bringing a certain practical savvy to the vicissitudes of the trip, while the idealistic Che (Gael García Bernal, also excellent) grows more and more troubled by what he witnesses: poverty among indigenous peoples, suffering from disease and hunger, the exploitative behavior of landlords and interna tional mining corporations. In short, he receives the education of a rev olutionary-to-be, but The Motorcycle Diaries makes the education a subtle and slow-developing process. This is less a political film than one about what it feels like to be young and see before you a dusty road unrolling towards the Andes in the distance. Walking across the Atacama Desert in Chile, Che and Alberto encounter a bedraggled couple, Communists pur sued by the police and hoping to find work in the copper mines, who ask them if they too are traveling to find work. “We travel just to travel,” Che answers a little lamely but with frank honesty, frankness being one of his most salient characteristics. The Atacama is beautifully photographed (by the French cinematographer Éric Gautier), as are the Andes and the Ama zon River, the latter, especially, in a magnificent sunset shot. Throughout, Salles and his collaborators create a completely convincing 1950s look for their film: the empty plains, the Andes, the shabby towns with beaten-up old cars, the beauty of an as-yet-untouristed Machu Picchu, and not least the dignity of descendants of the Incas contemplating the terrain which once was theirs.

The best-known American romance-of-the-road film must be Easy Rider, from 1969. It shares much with The Motorcycle Diaries—an episodic structure, settings on long, lonely stretches of asphalt, and, of course, travel over that asphalt via motorcycle—in Easy Rider’s case, two extravagantly chromium-plated choppers for Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda) to ride on their way from L.A to New Orleans and Mardi Gras. The two have stashed the profits from a cocaine deal in the gas tank of Wyatt’s machine; they smoke a lot of marijuana around their campfires; they make mischief by crashing a hick-town parade and consequently get thrown in jail; but despite these things, they have a kind of feckless innocence in their hearts. Even a skinny-dipping episode taking place when Billy and Wyatt visit a commune somewhere in New Mexico seems innocent—a childlike rather than a sensual experience.

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Note in particular Nicholson’s ecstatic calling out of a tribute to “old D. H. Lawrence,” accompanied by the triune exclamation “Nick! Nick! Nick!”— not actions that make much sense, but then sense is a relatively valueless commodity in the world of Easy Rider. As Wyatt, the more thoughtful of the two bikers, Peter Fonda is just as excellent as Nicholson, though in a different, less flamboyant style. Late in the film he says, mostly to himself, “We blew it,” a bitter acknowledgment—but an acknowledgment of what, exactly?—which since 1969 has intrigued exegetes of the film.

The more conventional travels in Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road (1967) are conducted very largely by car, or indeed by a succession of cars, since the film examines the marriage between the architect Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) and his wife Jo (Audrey Hepburn) by way of examining the very different French driving vacations they take over a period of

The film’s cinematographer was the Hungarian Laszlo Kovacs, by 1969 a veteran of low-budget biker movies. Much of his best photography tracks Billy and Wyatt heading east through spectacular Western scenery while rock music of the period (by Steppenwolf and the Byrds, among other groups) wails on the soundtrack. Such scenes alternate with flash backs and flash-forwards, continuity broken up into fragments. Later, all sorts of fancy cinematic tricks are deployed when the two travelers hole up in a New Orleans cemetery with a couple of hookers to drop some acid and embark on a different kind of trip, but I think the film’s finest single effect is something much simpler: a sustained, single-take, slow tracking shot around the circle of commune members solemnly ceremonializing their breaking of bread together. Face after face comes into view, bearded, long-haired, sunburned, cantankerous or blissed out, sometimes a little afraid; the members are always desperately eager to be true to their own confused purposes and to their rejection of conventional life. There is innocence aplenty in this shot. In fact, there is innocence or perhaps mere ignorance all through Easy Rider, in its depiction of an America that does not yet know what is about to happen to it, culturally. One square charac ter needs to have the word “dude” explained and the smoking of a joint demonstrated to him. The mere sight of long hair on a male, anywhere but in California, is enough to bring out amusement, derision, and, ultimately, violence from redneck locals. The film captures almost perfectly the abruptness of the transition from the Age of Nixon to the Age of Aquarius.

Peter Fonda is credited as the producer of Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper as the film’s director, and these two together, along with Terry Southern, as co-writers of the script, though it seems that dialogue was largely improvised by the actors. Certainly a lot of the lines spoken by George Hanson sound improvised, Hanson being a hard-drinking young lawyer who joins the escapade. He springs Billy and Wyatt from jail, then dons an old football helmet in order to bike down the highway with them. Hanson was a breakout role for the young Jack Nicholson, whose megawatt smile and sardonic charm are much in evidence and furnish another reason, should one be needed, for watching Easy Rider 50 years after its release.

I am summarizing a linear story, which Two for the Road itself emphati cally refuses to provide, being broken up instead into out-of-chronolog ical-sequence episodes. This takes a little getting used to, but ultimately proves an interesting and rewarding anti-structure, a series of back-andforth moves between the couple’s poverty and their affluence, their bliss and their petulance, the absolute freedom they enjoy when young and the multiple responsibilities burdening them in middle age. In effect, the film consists of randomly assorted memories, a traveling in time as well as space. Sometimes one of Mark and Jo’s cars enters a French intersection only for a completely different car of theirs to exit it. You have to sharpen your wits to follow the itinerary. In this effort it is a major help to keep track of Jo’s evolving hairstyles and especially her outfits, which range from hitchhiker casual to resort couture suitable for the plage at Cannes and featuring impossibly oversized sunglasses. Audrey Hepburn wears each costume with great chic, and each tells us something about what she has become on her travels.

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twelve years. The couple meet by chance in France, and being strapped for funds, eager for adventure, and ready for love, they go off hitchhiking together. Later, married, they tour the country in their own MG, which gives them even more mechanical problems than The Mighty One gave Che and Alberto in The Motorcycle Diaries. Then, year by year, Mark and Jo return to France, always in different vehicles. As time goes by, these grow steadily more expensive, while Mark and Jo steadily grow further apart. There are comic interludes, especially early on—as Mark, Finney has great charm and an impressive store of chat-up lines—but, generally, the picture Donen and the screenwriter Frederic Raphael give is of bicker ing or lengthening silences inside the Mercedes or the Alfa Romeo while, outside, beautiful French scenery goes by. The womanizing Mark has a casual one-night stand with a seductive Frenchwoman, while Jo, possibly in response, goes off for a more serious affair with a debonair French man, but in the end they seem willing to return to their marriage, to make accommodations to each other, accept what they have for what it is worth. Perhaps they just need new roads to explore? The last sequence shows them crossing the border into Italy.

A motor trip can be exciting even when conducted at 20 miles per hour. That is approximately the speed of the two trucks crawling across a terrible mountain road in the 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear, the win ner of both a Golden Bear at Berlin and a Palme d’Or at Cannes for its French director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, who had made the estimable police-procedural Quai des Orfèvres in 1947 and would make the big hit Les Diaboliques in 1955. In The Wages of Fear, the trucks are crawling because they are transporting jerricans of the nitroglycerin needed to blow out a raging oilfield fire. The film falls into two distinct halves, both excellent. The first portrays Las Piedras, a sweltering and desperately poor South American hell-hole dependent on and simultaneously ruined by the Southern Oil Company, a ruthless American corporation. In its way, The

Wages of Fear indicts oil imperialism no less forcefully than The Motorcycle Diaries indicts endemic poverty. In Las Piedras, degradation is visited on everyone, the native inhabitants, the European riffraff stuck there for lack of funds and listlessly trying to get out, and especially the pigtailed bargirl Linda, played by Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife. Linda is the prey both of the bar-owner with whom she resignedly sleeps and, more pain fully, of Mario (Yves Montand) the tough, self-centered ex-Parisian whom she loves and who treats her with casual cruelty. Together with three other roughnecks, Mario accepts a big cash offer to drive the nitro to its destination, thus beginning the second half of the film: an extremely suspenseful narrative of their trip over 300 miles of washboarded gravel roads, with a barely manageable hairpin turn and a pool of stinking crude oil thrown in for good measure. What generates suspense is of course the basic situation—we constantly dread a flash of light and a shattering explosion and the utter disappearance of at least some of the drivers—but also Clouzot’s pacing and shot selection. Watch for the sequence when the road is blocked by a huge fallen boulder, and the drivers siphon off a little of their cargo to blow the obstacle away. Here a rapid montage of extreme close-ups on small things—a fidgeting hand, a trembling mouth in a sweaty face—greatly heightens the suspense. But then The Wages of Fear is dedicated throughout to small things with large meanings: one truck driver’s cigarette holder, a single wire cable stretched and stretched to its breaking point, a ticket from the Paris Métro that Mario has nostalgically preserved through the dreary years of his exile from Pigalle. Mario and his pal Jo, another ex-Parisian, bond over the ticket. It is a sign of the film’s complexity and its interest in characterization as well as suspense that “pal” (or the French word the characters employ, copain), comes to seem grossly inadequate for the complicated and evolving rela tion between them. Mario grows stronger and stronger, while Jo, initially a seeming tough guy, is slowly revealed, even to himself, as a coward and a failure. I will not disclose the culmination of their relationship, nor what happens with the jerricans of nitro, but I will gladly commend the film’s final sequence, an absolute masterpiece of incongruous musical accompaniment and ironic crosscutting. The Blue Danube Waltz plays on the soundtrack, a high-spirited Mario drives the empty truck home with a lot of cash in his pockets, Linda dances away in the Las Piedras cantina, innocently awaiting his arrival . . .

Sometimes it seems that the cinema is always on the move, over and over again depicting travel by roller coaster, motorcycle, boat, airplane, car, and truck; by train (as in The Lady Vanishes, Snowpiercer, and number less other films, trains having proved inherently photogenic); by longdistance bus (as in It Happened One Night and Midnight Cowboy); by hot air balloon (as in Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts and in all the versions, cinematic or televisual, of Around the World in 80 Days); by riding on a cannonball fired from an 18th-century gun (as in the 1943 German fantasy Münchhausen); and, finally, by that most basic of all transportation modes,

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Tracks employs many shots of tiny moving figures, human and animal, set against a great dusty void, and in a complementary way its soundtrack sets tiny sounds—say, Davidson’s fork scraping across a tin plate, or the splash of water in a tank where she bathes, washing off a lot of accumu lated Australian dust—against silence. Meanwhile, Wasikowska makes believable the character’s oddity, her vulnerabilities, her painful recollec tions of her mother’s death, and her capacity to survive. In all this, she closely resembles the Cheryl Strayed character in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild, from 2013, but that film, a presentation of long-distance mountain hiking as redemptive, a kind of therapy for a wounded soul, finally seems quite different from Tracks. However interesting the Australian outback may be, it is not redemptive or therapeutic for Robyn Davidson, who appears much the same person at the start and at the finish, when she coaxes her balky camels into the surf of the Indian Ocean. She might attest, like Che Guevara, that she has been traveling just to travel. That most famous of ancient travelers, Odysseus, escaped from Poly phemus partly by cunningly identifying himself as Outis, “No One,” so that when the newly blinded monster called for help, bellowing “No One has tricked me! No One has ruined me!” none of his fellow Cyclopians came to his aid. I know of no film of The Odyssey that does justice to this episode (or to any other episode in the epic, for that matter), but what about works starring Odysseus’s avatar Captain Nemo, another great traveler and one who has apparently adopted the Greek’s onomastic tactic (Nemo is Latin for “No One”)? There are two well-known adaptations of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a silent melodrama from 1916 and a Disney version from 1954, but I do not find either of these works

shank’s mare. Che and Alberto sometimes journey on foot in The Motor cycle Diaries, but one recent film is devoted exclusively to that kind of trek king. In 1978, National Geographic published an article by Robyn Davidson about her 1,700-mile, nine-month-long walking trip across Australia, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. She was accompanied only by four equipment-carrying camels, by her dog Diggity, and intermittently by the photographer Rick Smolan. Two years later, Davidson brought out a book, Tracks, about the experience, and 2013 saw the release of a film adaptation, also called Tracks, directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska as the traveler and Adam Driver as Smolan, the photographer whose rela tionship with her, though affectionate, is never really intimate. Davidson’s intimacies are reserved for her dromedary beasts of burden and Diggity.

The epitome of independent filmmaking—quirky, idiosyncratic, made on the (relative) cheap, uninterested in pleasing a large audience—Tracks seems well suited to its highly independent heroine, who goes her own way in nearly all things and only occasionally accepts help from Smolan, from an older couple at a lonely station in the outback, and especially from an aboriginal “old fella,” Mr. Eddy, who guides her on detours around the sacred places a woman must not enter and generally keeps her com pany. The places she does enter are extraordinarily empty and beautiful.

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watchable, despite the presence in the latter of James Mason as a driven, Ahab-like Nemo. On the other hand, I can recommend without reserva tion the Pixar Animation Studio’s big 2003 hit Finding Nemo, in which Nemo the ruthless submarine captain is replaced by Nemo the errant clownfish (voiced by the eight-year-old Alexander Gould). Lost in the vast ocean depths off Australia, Nemo is pursued by his anxious father Marlin (Albert Brooks); this is the reverse of the situation in the Odyssey, where Telemachus goes in pursuit of his father Odysseus. Marlin’s sidekick on his travels is a memory-challenged blue tang named Dory (Ellen DeGe neres).

Finding Nemo is the kind of children’s film capable of giving great plea sure to the adult or adults sitting beside the children on the sofa. It is very beautiful to look at, vibrantly colored and imaginatively designed, like all of Pixar’s features. The tropical fish of the film, whether finning through the anemones on the reef or trapped like prisoners in a fish tank set in the waiting room of a Sydney dentist, are identifiably real species, a Moorish idol, a yellow tang, a porcupine fish, and so on, and they are all voiced with great skill and wit. Especially witty is the voice work of DeGeneres, of Andrew Stanton (the film’s director) as a surfer-dude sea turtle, and of the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush as Nigel the pelican, who at a crucial moment helps Marlin and Dory avoid being eaten by a flock of seagulls chasing them and hungrily screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” In a brilliant comic image, the birds get their beaks impaled on the sail of a boat in the harbor: that shuts them up. I also liked the earlier sequence when Marlin happens upon a consciousness-raising session for sharks. In this parody of an AA meeting, a sudden bloodlust weakens the sharks’ determination to be kinder, gentler, sea creatures, and the film becomes momentarily frightening, possibly a little too frightening for the youngest viewers, who might instead be treated to Finding Nemo’s kinder, gentler sequel, Finding Dory. I conclude with a film more purely about the different places of the world than any I have been discussing in this chronicle. Baraka, a 1992 documentary directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson, travels to many countries on several continents to record scenes of natu ral beauty and intriguing human activity, beginning among Himalayan peaks, with every detail of rock and snow clear in the extreme foreground, every wisp of cloud clear in the extreme background. There follow sequences showing volcanoes smoking or in eruption, natural rock arches, and clouds spilling over mountain ridges in fast motion. Migrating birds are photographed by plane or helicopter from above. In the darkening sky stars wheel from horizon to horizon, also in fast motion. Is all this in the mode of old-fashioned travelogues or This Is Cinerama? Yes, in a way, though Baraka is more ambitious than those works, more vari ous in what it depicts (“abroad” is the whole wide world, not just Europe), accompanied by more sophisticated music (a New Age-y score by Michael Stearns takes the place of “America the Beautiful” and “The Battle Hymn

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In the end, Baraka does not seem a film to watch in one sitting. Better to see it in spaced-out increments (as I have done), perhaps fifteen-minute increments analogous to meditations in a Zen practice. The point of doing this would be to slow down, sharpen one’s attentiveness to images, and think carefully. In some early sequences of the film, Japanese snow monkeys and seaside iguanas are photographed surveying their habitats calmly, without agitation, taking in the world exactly as it comes to them. They may be offering us a lesson in how to witness all that is happening out there. Sometimes travel is best accomplished by sitting still.

618 Reviews of the Republic”), and infinitely better photographed. It is photographed, in fact, in 70mm Todd-AO, a truly astonishing old widescreen process best known for its employment in roadshow presentations of big-budget extravaganzas like Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days. Above all, Baraka differentiates itself from earlier travel films by being determinedly anti-informational. No Lowell Thomas speaks; no voiceover commentary of any kind speaks. The film’s anthropological sequences—and there are many of them—are simply put on the screen for us to watch and to understand as best we can. This is not to say Baraka lacks an organizational principle, since sequences are often grouped into what we can recognize as large general categories, say, Human Adornment. Nor does the film lack a viewpoint on modern life and its discontents. Its graphic matches—there are many of these, too—juxtapose images similar in appearance so as to make some point about what we have done to the natural world and to ourselves. For example, a shot of chicks being helplessly moved along an assembly line at a factory farm is immediately succeeded by a shot of com muters being helplessly packed into a Tokyo subway train. Other images are simply disturbing, and the more disturbing because they are so beau tifully photographed: cells in abandoned concentration camps, photos of inmates of the camps, human skulls piled up in heaps. The skulls stare at the camera, making their own tacit accusation.

—Jefferson Hunter Rehearsals for the Real Thing As we crept toward that post-pandemic day when we could watch danc ing bodies, in three-dimensional glory, perform before our eyes (cue the mysterious second movement of Robert Schumann’s piano quintet, which Mark Morris used for V, his 2001 assertion of life’s triumph over dark ness), dance on video continued to fill some of the gap, reminding us what we were missing. For more than a year, I have focused on new dances devised during the pandemic, some of which will hold the stage when we once again gather in theaters, others revealing themselves immediately as creatures of necessity—reminders that dancers need to dance, chore ographers need to arrange bodies, and audiences, however intrigued by the novel challenges of video and Zoom dance, crave the real thing. In

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In May, the Mark Morris Dance Group streamed four works live from Brooklyn’s BRIC House, including a world premiere, Tempus Perfectum. The title can mean “perfect,” “exquisite,” “excellent,” or “completed time,” but which does Morris intend? That his dancers perform in perfect time to the music, Brahms’s Sixteen Waltzes. Op. 39? (They do.) That as the pandemic ends, his new work celebrates the end of a dreary time? (It does.) In any event, the performers in this concert all pointedly wear Covid masks as talismans against the plague—even Laurel Lynch in Three Preludes, a 1992 dance to Gershwin, and Brandon Randolph in Jealousy, a 1985 work to Handel, mask up, although both works are solos. Masks have evolved from symptoms into symbols, Morris knows, commemorat ing the imperfect time we hope we have now completed. By obscuring the dancers’ facial expressions, they also force our focus onto their bodies and limbs, where Morris always wants us to look.

The four dancers in Tempus Perfectum explore varieties of movement to the brief Brahms piano waltzes, played by Colin Fowler, MMDG’s music director. Their black masks mark solidarity as well as precaution. They greet us by running at the camera, then peeling off at the last second, before Laurel Lynch, in a red dress (the costumes are uncredited), launches into the lovely and lilting first waltz. She skips with huge swoops of her legs in rond de jambe. Karlie Budge, in a light blue dress, performs sud den crunches and lunges during the second waltz, then lilts delicately left and right. Noah Vinson, in a blue top and black slacks, turns Budge’s lilts into more deliberate rocking before turning with smooth grace. The turns grow more violent when Dallas McMurray solos, in a green top with black slacks, then yield to little leaps and off-balance skitters. After meeting the full cast, we expect them to partner up—these are waltzes, after all—especially when Budge returns to join McMurray. But Morris has made a career of overturning expectations, and as Budge floats up and back, McMurray exits. In fact, Tempus Perfectum never grants the thing time has perfectly trained us to anticipate, a man and a woman waltzing together. Instead, both men join Budge for a kind of syncopated waltz fugue, with silly strutting, heads thrown dramatically back, and grand swings of the arms. Lynch has another solo with large arm exten sions, elegant sweeps and turns, and abrupt drops into steely, right-angled pliés, her arms shooting out to the sides. When the first duet arrives, it’s for the two men; they wrap their arms around each other, mirroring steps, and taking each onto the other’s hip. A women’s duet then provides sym metry, Lynch dancing with Budge, weaving in and out of unison, Budge now sinking into plié while Lynch thrusts out her limbs.

this final discussion of pandemic works, Mark Morris, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the New York City Ballet offer three approaches: respectively, a live online performance, recorded simulacra of live performance, and an elegant film that doesn’t pretend to be live dance but uses its own means to suggest that excitement.

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The Pennsylvania Ballet, in March, April, and May, presented a digital season of three programs rather arbitrarily called Strength. Resilience. Beauty. None of the titles really captured the spirit of its program—in the opening performance, for example, while George Balanchine’s 1941 Bach masterpiece, Concerto Barocco, surely demands strength of its dancers, its exquisite beauty and logic emerge only if the dancers’ muscularity lies hidden, implied by their restrained, beautiful line, like the steel frame of a skyscraper. And in the final program of three world premieres, nomi nally dedicated to beauty, Juliano Nunes’s Encounters features an extended series of lifts that hideously expose the four ballerinas. All three programs were recorded at Philadelphia’s Performance Garage, whose smallish stage and low-hanging lighting created an amiable “let’s put on a show” spirit.The Strength program included Stanton Welch’s 2001 dance, Clear, with an odd cast of seven men, led by Zecheng Liang, and only one woman, Oksana Maslova. The bare-chested men’s flesh-colored tights create an awkward illusion of nakedness, unlike the traditional black or white leotards that present nudity metaphorically. Welch loves Bach’s music, to a fault: his choreography doggedly follows the score—the Concerto for Violin and Oboe plus two additional movements—and while much of the dance is ingratiating, its inelasticity and its avoidance of steps that might counterpoint music’s greatest counterpoint master finally make Clear brittle and dull. Further, Welch’s addition of two movements from another work, which ignores the closure Bach seems to demand. For these and other reasons, Clear suffers from its proximity on the program to Concerto Barocco, danced to the complete Bach Double Violin Concerto. The Penn sylvanians dance the Balanchine slowly, sacrificing much of the ballet’s exuberance for a more meditative take. The corps’s extension also needs work—they seem content to form pretty pictures rather than express the aspirational dynamism of Balanchine’s choreography—but Yuka Iseda and Alexandra Heier, in the “first and second violin” roles, capture Baroc co’s mysterious combination of elegance and wit.

While Welch’s Clear ends suspended in time, a 2012 number actually called Suspended in Time, collaboratively devised by artistic director Angel Corella, Russell Ducker, and Kirill Radev, is a wearying pop party ballet designed to be a crowd-pleaser. Its concept should have succeeded—six

Two more solos allude to folkdance, McMurray blending gaiety with severity, Lynch following emphatic leg thrusts with lovely arabesques. A Slavic-looking duet for the men grows more virtuosic: they simultane ously spin in opposite directions, circle each other, leap, and perform fancy kicks. In the finale, all four begin in canon, arms swept back. They surge forward into unison, retreat upstage, and finally advance, arms extended, raised and spreading to enact the sunrise. Tempus Perfectum sends a hand some, hopeful signal of our return to the normal cycles of normal days. ***

The Hopkins Review

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songs by Electric Light Orchestra, the brilliant 1970s orchestral rock hit machine—but the choreographers choose songs that sound too much alike, pumping to the same disco pulse, and the ballet, stuffed with lifts, whirls, and flash-and-dazzle, feels unrelenting. This mini-jukebox musi cal needs variety, and great ELO numbers like the Beatlesque “Telephone Line” or the fabulous rocker “Do Ya” might have made things fun.

Raymonda Suite, Corella’s adaptation of Act 3 dances from Marius Petipa’s 1898 classic Raymonda, also gets visual short shrift. The women’s pancake tutus, sprouting from yellow bodices (the costumes go uncred ited) are knockouts, but too often Iziliaev shows nothing below their stiff, circular hems, omitting much of the wonderful athleticism of Dayesi Tor riente and her partner, Arian Molina Soca. The cropping grows especially frustrating when Torriente bourrées sultrily about, slapping her hands during a misterioso passage in Glazunov’s score; getting the whole bal lerina, skipping in entrechats down a diagonal, say, proves far more grati fying.

Although the formalist premise that a dance primarily concerns its relationship to the music provides a logical starting point, some of the best

Balanchine highlighted the Resilience program, specifically Allegro Brillante, his 16-minute classical showcase to Tschaikovsky’s curtal Piano Concerto No. 3, led by gracefully precise Mayara Pineiro and the elegantly fluid Liang. Here the company shows all the zip and daring missing from its Concerto Barocco, and the eight corps de ballet dancers in this perpetual motion machine look crisp and tight, if still underextended. However, this video version suffers from Alexander Iziliaev’s cinematography and edit ing. A multitude of shots show the dancers from the thighs up or, worse, from the waist up, as if the feet didn’t matter—closeups depict attractive faces, but a dancer’s personality lies as much, if not more, in what the feet are doing. Things improve with the full cast on display, especially in the closing moments when Pineiro whirls into Liang’s arms, and he lofts her high overhead as they exit.

Beauty, the third program, consisting of three world premieres, might more accurately have been called Angst. The Pennsylvanians had the won derful idea of commissioning three new works to the music of Jennifer Higdon, an important contemporary composer who lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Curtis Institute. Her compositions feel right for danc ing, modern and melodic, challenging but listenable. Two young choreog raphers, Ducker and Nunes, and the more experienced Meredith Rainey might have benefited from what George Balanchine, at 24, learned from Stravinsky’s music while choreographing Apollo in 1928—“that I could dare not to use everything—that I, too, could eliminate.” While clearly the work of intelligent talents, all three ballets suffer from hectic slavishness to the score. Each choreographer fails to realize that a ballet, even with Higdon’s often complicated music, doesn’t always need a lot of steps wherever the composer uses a lot of notes. The results appear designed to exhaust both the dancers and the audience.

622 Reviews non-narrative ballets have a more ambitious emotional reach; they create an illusion that they express qualities about the human condition and human reality beyond what we see and hear. The beginning of Ducker’s Dance Card, to Higdon’s Dance Card for String Orchestra, looks at first like that kind of deeper exploration. The cast of 14 dance in eccentric formal wear—black tails for the men, and, for the women, off-the-shoulder gowns with uneven hems, knee-length in front, floor-length at the heel (despite their originality, they are uncredited). The slightly stiff, somewhat oldfashioned cotillion spectacle recalls Balanchine’s sublime La Valse, and the funereal costumes, the dark backdrop, the mannered way in which the dancers move, and the ballet’s title, which suggests a dance about a dance, prepare us for both a dance and something larger, perhaps even a Dance of Death. In an early section, which turns out to be the dance’s emotional highlight, Kathryn Manger and Ashton Roxander play at an erotic chase while angling their hands in strange semaphores, as in Balanchine’s fateobsessed work. Nothing, however, deepens this faint wrangle of Eros and Thanatos, and when each of Ducker’s dances ends, the partners part, rather than let us imagine rich dramas unfolding privately offstage.

Throughout Dance Card the men whirl the women around—the finale features all seven couples spinning in unison—so as to flash their legs indecorously, even vulgarly, given the formal attire. In some sections sev eral men manhandle one woman in a way alarming for the 21st century; in others, male-male and female-female partnering pays lip service to same-sex love, but with no balletic hint of erotic tenderness. Groups of a half-dozen women on their pointes recall the sublime, fateful finale of Balanchine’s Serenade with no suggestion of aspiration or transfiguration. Ducker can create stunning moments, as when, with the men partnering the women in canon in the opening movement, a kick ripples down the line of seven couples, but his ballet hasn’t decided what it wants to be about.On the other hand, Meredith Rainey asserts that Spillway, for 14 per formers and set to Higdon’s Concerto 4-3 for violin, reflects the continual flow of nature. Its relentless rambling, however, leaves unanswered what else interests him beyond this basic premise, and despite strong perfor mances by ballerinas Yuka Iseda, partnered by Jermel Johnson, and Lillian DiPiazza, partnered by Sterling Baca, it hurtles by, with too little variety to sustain interest.

As mentioned, Juliano Nunes’s Encounters, for eight dancers to a selection of short Higdon works, flaunts those lifts, whose grotesquerie costume designer Martha Chamberlin highlights by dressing the women in light-colored shifts over dark leotards. The chiffony dresses constantly ride up, exposing the ballerinas’ bottoms and crotches: women wearing leotards look like dancers, but when those leotards read as underwear, they can flout decency. One unfortunate dancer not only flashes her bum and crotch, but winds up clenching some of the shift’s fabric between her legs, leaving a frilly swatch creepily displayed. Nunes choreographed

In 1969, New York City Ballet dancer Edward Villella walked onstage and, to a delicate Chopin mazurka, slipped into the opening solo of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering. The dance felt both exploratory and nos talgic, a man returning in his imagination to a remembered place, feeling his way into steps he once knew, inspired by music he once moved to.

Natural light, filtered through thin curtains from the plaza outside, assists the romantic atmosphere so both illumination and shadow play over the performers—lovers, I wanted to say. La Cour’s vertical lift of Kowroski, floating her backward as her arms float angelically upward in surprised

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At the start of Sofia Coppola’s 25-minute film for NYCB’s Virtual Gala in May, Gonzalo Garcia enters a large, empty dance studio and begins to perform the same solo. It is a brilliant and touching moment—Garcia returning to a place he has known well for 14 years, from which 14 months of the pandemic have enforced his absence. As the piano music (played by Elaine Chelton) and the dance sweep him along, Coppola’s camera whirl ing about and along with him, we share the thrill of coming home again.

Encounters via Zoom; working with the dancers in the studio might have helped him tone down the soft-core pornography.

Iziliaev’s camera work and editing should serve the crucial purpose of orienting the viewer to the worlds of these brand-new works, but his insis tent virtuosity often makes them look incoherent. Shots lasting a second or less make it impossible for viewers to relax into an appreciation of the dance from a consistent point of view, and the busy editing obscures where we are looking and even what we see. New dances demand a patient eye, and when we can’t be there in person, the camera must be patient for us.

Coppola has shot selections from NYCB’s repertory mostly in blackand-white, using locations in the company’s Lincoln Center theater not normally given to dancing. Ashley Bouder and Russell Janzen perform one section of Balanchine’s 1972 Duo Concertant, to Stravinsky, in a tight backstage area that focuses the work’s intimacy, capturing its illusion of young lovers overheard and surreptitiously seen, as if we have encroached on a privacy. Chelton again is the pianist, with Arturo Delmoni on violin. Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour dance an excerpt from Balanchine’s glorious 1960 Brahms extravaganza, Liebeslieder Walzer, on the First Ring esplanade. While NYCB’s earlier film of Kyle Abraham’s When We Fell had lined up the camera along the logical grid created by the dark bands criss crossing the floor’s white marble, Coppola shoots on the diagonal, so the dancers’ whirling seems to free them from the floor to inhabit the air above it. Their dance comes from the first part of the ballet, when the women wear low heels, sparing Kowroski’s pointes from the punishing pavement. The camera cuts between long and medium shots, keeping the dancers’ entire figures in full view, creating a sense of space rare in dance films and conveying the erotic expansiveness of Balanchine’s choreography.

***

624 Reviews deserving, inspires a little gasp. As they dance, the esplanade, which has hosted decades of NYCB Gala parties but which they alone now inhabit, becomes the most elegantly private ballroom imaginable.

Justin Peck choreographed the film’s one world premiere, called, sim ply, Solo, danced on the theater stage by wiry Anthony Huxley to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings in its original quartet arrangement. We first see Huxley from the Fourth Ring, at a distance that the camera makes nearly cosmic, flanked by the starry-prism light fixtures that adorn the façades of the tiers of seats. The lights evoke not nostalgia, like the daylight of Dances at a Gathering, but elegy. As Huxley whirls and extends to the solemn music, Coppola cuts to a closer view, then suddenly brings us closer still, shooting from behind him out into the theater, those starry lights paying tribute somehow to the pandemic’s victims.

Huxley performs nobly, with sweeping gestures, a dance of both mourning and persistence. His practice clothes—white T-shirt, black tights with black suspenders, white socks—look as direct as grief. The camera rotates around him as he rotates, everything smooth and long-phrased, his arms sweeping, his leg slicing in whirling arabesques and ronds de jambe. His supple movements accelerate, although the quartet maintains its ada gio, Peck working against the music so both music and dance etch images in the mind (Pennsylvania Ballet choreographers, take note). Huxley adds some graceful turning leaps as he traces the perimeter of the stage, turning at each corner. His feet disappear for an unfortunate stretch of 20 seconds, but losing those moments of technical pleasure does not diminish the mood. Again Coppola shows him from behind, taking delicate steps at the front of the stage; when we can finally watch Solo in person from out front, it will look quite different. Her camera keeps moving, not for its own sake, but to clarify the choreography and focus the performance.

Peck maintains the formula: graceful turns, occasional leaps, large kicks—battements—sweeps of arms and legs, and stunning off-balance torques of Huxley’s entire body. Watching this lean dancer, at the top of his form, performing beautifully and elementally, without flaunting virtuosity, grows intensely touching. Solo marks an advance for Peck’s choreography—his Balanchine moment. Instead of stuffing the dance with ideas, a tendency that made some of his earlier work exciting but some times incoherent, he realizes that he, too, can eliminate. Solo feels both simple and expressive, recursive and purposeful, progressing slowly and steadily in its affect, like Barber’s Adagio, its solemn joy tinged with grief and stoicism. Like Garcia’s in that rehearsal room, Huxley’s steps appear to emerge spontaneously from somewhere deep inside, never bragging of their difficulty. As the dance advances, it seems more and more to defy elegy and define a life force. Even when Huxley lies on his side, then turns on his back, it’s not a living death but a momentary rest: his leg rises, pointing handsomely; he rocks forward, lies back again with both legs raised and pointing; suddenly he springs back to his feet, into a new adventure. His

stepping grows faster, at least double-timing the score, pushing through to the revelation that he need not succumb to mournfulness. He stops at the music’s climactic pause near the end and takes slow, syncopated steps backward, exactly in time with the players. He returns to the elegant ada gio steps from the beginning, turning, sweeping his arms, torsioning his body left and right. To the final phrases he dances slowly but energetically downstage on a diagonal, slanting downward in a couple of brief, modest bows, then folds up on the ground, facing out to the empty auditorium.

As Coppola fades out on Huxley, the film suddenly snaps into color— the bright Karinska costumes and the sky-blue background of Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15, his 1956 Mozart ballet. Coppola films the finale, with Tiler Peck leading this rich and intelligent classical confection, soloing happily, then dancing with Andrew Veyette. The dancers perform on the theater stage, photographed clearly, if more conventionally: Coppola no longer shows them from every possible angle, and we miss the gorgeous illusory spaciousness of her Liebeslieder selection, but the colors help cre ate an illusion of being in the theater, with really good seats. Ordinarily the kind of program Coppola has assembled, an anthology of excerpts, leaves me feeling cheated—Divert (as the dancers call it), Dances, Duo, and Liebeslieder feel so much richer in person and in their entirety, and we have missed them for so long. ***

As it turned out, NYCB’s pandemic-delayed return to Lincoln Center marked a rite of passage for the company, whose fall homecoming teemed, ironically, with farewells. Principals Ask la Cour, Lauren Lovette, and Abi Stafford all gave special final performances, and longtime soloists Lauren King and Erica Pereira took final bows as well. With spring farewells scheduled for Garcia and Amar Ramasar. NYCB’s rising younger dancers have begun to transform the company.

On October 17, the last day of NYCB’s fall season, Maria Kowroski danced her final performance after 27 years with the company, and no goodbye has proven more symbolic or emotional. No other ballerina since Suzanne Farrell has embodied choreography with Kowroski’s unique alchemy of cool technique and erotic warmth, or displayed her remarkable expressiveness in both ultramodern ballets and Balanchine’s sparkling reinventions of classicism. I once wrote in a poem of a ballerina’s ability to “push / sex skyward into an ethereal / realm.” Surely I had Kowroski in mind, and images of her at work, especially in Balanchine ballets, have permanently imprinted themselves in my memory: rotated in arabesque by her supporting thigh in Serenade; carried across the stage in Symphony in C, her extended legs measuring the world like compass points; erectly per fect in Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces, half automaton, half Egyptian queen; a geometric figure with a heart in Agon; rotating across the stage on all fours in Stravinsky Violin Concerto; bourréeing in supplication downstage

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626 Reviews in Mozartiana, and then, later in the same ballet, after alternating with her partner in a fiendishly brilliant set of solo variations, dancing with him an extended, endlessly evolving (and revolving) pas de deux, finally collaps ing backward over his shoulders in satisfied desire.

—Jay Rogoff

Kowroski’s farewell program bestowed a series of quick, lovely glimpses. In the first pas of Balanchine’s Chaconne, to Gluck’s glorious music, she suggested Eurydice reunited with her Orpheus. A brief new work created for her and Amar Ramasar, Mauro Bigonzetti’s Amaria, to two Scarlatti keyboard pieces, offered mannered but intriguing twists on classical technique, as she thrust her foot up before her face and grabbed her ankle, slapped her raised feet and flexed elbow, and climbed about on Ramasar while extending her limbs. Ramasar ended his solo bowing at her feet, which seemed only appropriate. For her finale, Kowroski chose the high spirits of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Balanchine’s 1936 show-stopper from Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, which he revived for Suzanne Farrell in 1968. The number let Kowroski sparkle comically as the strip-tease girl who falls for a Broad way hoofer and must save him from a murder plot, but it also offered a final flashing look at the legs whose dancing have given so much pleasure for so long. At one point, she falls backward over Tyler Angle’s arm, and he supports her, parallel to the ground, as they advance across the floor, Kowroski gloriously kicking the stars at every step. ***

“The last great American letter writer” hazards Stephen Yenser about James Merrill. Since Mr. Yenser is co-editor (along with Langdon Hammer, Merrill’s biographer) of these almost 700 pages of the poet’s epistolary efforts, his claim is less than disinterested. Still, it’s a wholly plausible one to a reader dizzied and grateful for such profusion not to be found on email. Publication of these letters pretty much fills out Merrill’s bib liography: collected poems, collected prose, novels and plays, a memoir, and, backing them up, Hammer’s 900-page biography of a few years ago.

Kowroski’s departure from the stage also marks my exit from these pages. My 13-year run as this magazine’s dance critic ends with this article. The great dance critic Edward Denby wrote, in 1949, that an inter esting writer “can tell what the dancers did, what they communicated, and how remarkable that was.” Watching dance is a transcendent pleasure, and writing about it a happy privilege. I hope I have at times succeeded at reporting on what the dancers did and communicating how remarkable this beautiful, urgent, and evanescent art can be.

A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser (Knopf, 2021), 736 pp.

—Jay Rogoff

His first lover, whom he met while an undergraduate at Amherst Col lege, was the poet and translator Kimon Friar and some of the earliest let ters here are to him. Merrill worries that his mother will find out about his same-sex love affair with Friar. An evening with Anais Nin, to whom Friar has introduced him, reassures him, and he writes Friar, now in Greece, that “Everything, now, is balanced, is not what I feared. I am at peace and I love you peacefully + longingly.” This first of his love letters—there will be many more with many other lovers—is not such as to give one much pause: nothing in the writing beyond the nervous, guilty, and excited young man caught up in a romance. It occurs on page 21 of the letters, but on page 38, two years later, writing to his best friend and Lawrenceville classmate, Frederick (“Freddy”) Buechner, he describes a social occasion in strikingly different and much more interesting language. He had been invited to a New York party, given for the Sitwells (Edith and Osbert) at which the famous photograph of the guests shows such literary luminar ies, both arrived and yet to be, as W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop. Merrill didn’t get into the picture, having been relegated with others, momentarily, to a lesser room; but he did get a chance to meet Sitwell, whom he described to Buechner in memorable terms—some of which I shall quote:

The first impression, apart from the remarkable face, was one of shapelessness—much bottle-green satin beneath something black and not smooth. Out of this her hands proposed themselves: one holding a drink, this hand largely hidden by an enormous ring, elliptical, agate or tortoiseshell, at whose extremity little more than the fingernail was visible. He then moves to the other hand, preparatory to the “shocking face,” Buechner is invited to imagine (“place your palm over your face verti cally”) by way of determining that it was “very big:” Bending over it to greet her, it could not be seen all at once, as though I were even closer than I was and on the verge of kissing her :… “The mouth was large, the lips thin, their curve arbitrary; the eyes, though finely socketed, small and (perhaps because of the nose’s prominence) close together. As though magnetized by

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Merrill joins Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as recent American poets whose lives and work have been fully represented, and done so with edi torial scrupulosity, imagination and wit. Unlike the writer who, anticipat ing his death, instructs that his letters be destroyed, Merrill preserved both outgoing and incoming correspondence; there is no temptation, reading these letters, to wish them away on grounds of discretion. You don’t feel like an intruder into some one’s privacy as you read along.

Perhaps, he thinks later, “she really is her own Collected Works, that, considering our brief span on earth, it is beyond all else remarkable and of the highest poetic order, that a single person could have achieved a bodily appearance of that quantity and quality in anything less than two hundred years.” One picture may not always be worth a thousand words if the words are as artfully, irresistibly composed as these, from a hand that “proposed” itself down to the whole figure sitting on the john. Merrill at age twenty-nine has little more to learn about the art of prose.

628 Reviews what kept them apart. Colorless and hairless was the entire face, powdered, and in spite of the impression of great age, unwrinkled; a suggestion of thin, brownish hair at the turban’s edge. The expres sion was one of considerable malignity; the manner was kind and restrained; I could imagine her doing many things, lecturing, sleep ing, sitting on the john, playing the harp—everything, perhaps, except writing a poem.

On one hand the young man in love, or something like it, slightly con fused; on the other, a perfectly eye-and-ear coordinated portrait of Dame Edith. What’s interesting here, and what’s evident in most of Merrill’s portraits, literary and otherwise, is that their energy is not of the negative sort, intent on reducing Sitwell to rubble; the energy is creative rather, directed at doing full justice to this bodily appearance. Eliot’s always use ful distinction between critical and creative satire comes to mind. As with Dryden’s Shadwell who “stands confirmed in full stupidity,” the effect is of enhancement issuing in something like admiration on a reader’s part. Merrill is performing here for his good friend Buechner who we can pre sume to have applauded the result.

“My genial spirits fail;/And what can these avail,” Coleridge lamented. It is inspiriting to see how seldom in these letters do Merrill’s genial spirits

This is not an exceptional, isolated instance of how Merrill writes about somebody or something he’s less than enamored with. Visiting San Francisco in the late 1950s, after giving a reading, he is introduced to some of the Beats, “a wild little group of Zen-Hipster poets, most of them West Coast converts and therefore much more ardent.” The director in charge of things murmurs her hope that the confrontation with East and West won’t make trouble, which there was not, though at the intermission some of the poets question him: “What’s the matter? Why don’t you scream? That’s what people out here want! Embarrass yourself! Talk about cock! We’ll do anything if you just scream!” He meets “a tiny monkey with hair in his eyes” named Gregory Corso, and afterwards, at the reception “They made more of a show…taking off their shoes, reading their works in squeaky faint voices, piling slices of turkey high on bread, calling Shelley the “greatest poet of all times.” It’s the slices of turkey that make us feel quite warm about both Merrill and his new friends, a nice example of the often genial mode of these letters.

fail him. Perhaps the biggest moment of ‘uplift” in the earlier letters comes with the Ouija board discoveries and what they entailed. As a skeptic who can’t follow with much pleasure those discoveries as they issued in The Changing Light at Sandover, I was nonetheless ready to delight in Merrill’s early account of them. In a lengthy letter to his mother describing the “series of very strange experiences which have in a matter of days made a profound change in my life,” he details some of his conversations with Ephraim who has revealed his experiences on earth and in the afterlife.

As with the description of Edith Sitwell’s face, the geniality is not upset by any intrusion of a more crudely satiric note, When Merrill can’t fully withhold his animus toward the person in question, his tone of presenta tion stays mainly neutral, even regretful. Auden’s unfaithful and unap pealing lover, Chester Kallman, comes to the fore when Merrill prepares for a five-day trip to Vienna visiting the pair: The former [Kallman] will give me enough to eat and drink so that for once (I trust) I’m not turned to stone by the latter’s brilliant + unanswerable discourse. I saw Chester first 20 years ago, white + gold + willowy across a theatre lobby, “That person,” said Meredith {the poet, William Meredith] has the most untenable position in all Fairyland.” Now he is puffy, bleary, sagging + humped over, a Jew ish Mother inside and out. I mean I dote on him, though once in a while I wish he would say something I didn’t understand. This could be just snarky, but is saved from that by the tone of regret about what’s happened to Kallman—yet Merrill still “dotes” on him—even though he is all too easy to understand.

Merrill patiently listens as Ephraim recounts the situation of various souls and the “stages” through which they progress. After Merrill is told about the “patrons” assigned to these souls (his own being an 18th century man named Ford, while his father, Charles, is in the care of a Hindu mystic,) he inquires about Wallace Stevens, who had recently died. Ephraim replies that “He had been raised at once to Stage 9, because of strong intervention from Plato.” Merrill is allowed to speak to the soul of Stevens: “He remem bered meeting me and quoted me a line from one of my poems. We had little to say. ‘We are embarrassed.’ he said, ‘like guests who have met too recently at one party and find each other again at another party.’” One’s impatience with (my impatience with) such fol-de-rol is mitigated by the offhand reference to “the strong intervention from Plato,” as if this were sufficient guarantee of what happened to Wallace Stevens.

Another less than lovable character, the writer William Burroughs, houseguest to a friend of Auden’s, Alan Ansen, is neatly summed up in less than a sentence—“sallow, nondescript party who talked of nothing but drugs and sex crimes, just like my mother’s Atlanta friends.” The absolute surprise of yoking the sallow Burroughs with Hellen Plummer’s

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630 Reviews well-dressed friends makes for a truly poetic figure thanks to their com mon devotion to lowdown matters. Sometimes you think you’re headed somewhere, are confident about Merrill’s tone toward it, then are taken somewhere different from the superior position you thought you were in.

As when he attends an art show: In Boston the other day I squeezed my way through 8 rooms of Andrew Wyeth who is, I suppose, the first major American in the arts since Frost. The public was fan-tas-tic: pure mass hypnosis; everyone suddenly knew more (about) art + the world than ever in life before. Boys of 9, freckled + 50 lbs overweight were talking about Thoreau. Old ladies slow on their feet + feeling the heat were saying, “Look at those red-rimmed eyes in that picture. Can’t you tell how hard that woman’s life has been?” As with those Frost audiences towards the end, you felt that the people had compla cently come to show themselves to the work, rather than vice versa; and, while the experience wasn’t wholly agreeable, it seemed to be of a piece with this two-way flow. Not a wholly agreeable experience, but something to take note of, as does this complicated paragraph of social observation.

“Sylvia Plath doesn’t grab me all that much—she’s too easy to read; you ever need to understand more than the images + emotions. And she’s so EARNEST”: it’s not surprising that the social tone found in these letters is quite alien from Plath’s life-or-death visions. Bits from the let ters quoted are informed above all by something like a comic sense of things, an extremely urbane comedy in which the writer’s voice seldom gets raised above thoughtful, humorous observation. This doesn’t mean there are no painful exchanges, mainly with lovers, but on the whole an open-eyed engagement with experience goes along with a reserved, ironic tone toward it. Frost says in one of his letters about writing poetry, “Something has to be kept back for pressure.” What’s kept back in Merrill is an unconsidered earnestness. He writes to Judith Moffett, a friend and aspiring poet, warning her against trying to say too much in her poems: “How many poems are ruined by precisely that inflated urgency of a Mes sage—at its worst, all greasy with sincerity; at its best, made impenetrable with avant-garde rhetoric (Rimbaud?), Just write a lot and let what hap pens happen.” He describes an audience at Housatonic Community Col lege where he has given a reading—“Everyone’s wanting to know ‘how it’s done’—without reference to anything as far out as craft or even feel ing.” ‘You say you work in the early morning, Mr. M. Is that a good time to work? If I changed my schedule around, would I have a better chance of getting published?’ “Then they are hurt + incredulous if you don’t like Rod McKuen.” He says he has been cheered up by a phone call from Eliza

beth Bishop who reveals that once after a reading somebody asked her “Do your ideas just come to you or do you make them up?”

The last chord fades. The night is cold and dark. His master’s voice rasps through the grooves’ bare groves. Obediently, in silence like the grave’s He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone Only to dream he is at the premiere of a Handel Opera long thought lost—Il Cane Minore. Its allegorical subject is his story!

Reading through these letters provides a vivid sense of how tempera mentally he and Bishop were allied. The fact of same-sex love in the lives of each may have promoted sympathetic closeness, but the extraordinary wit shared by them made the friendship unbreakable. When his superb book of poems Braving the Elements was published in 1972, he writes Bishop that Helen Vendler’s review of it, which has “Told All,” is bringing in some “curious fan mail. I hope I’m not turning into a Gay culture-hero (Without the beard how could I?” The feeling was analogous to Bishop’s disinclination to be praised as a foremost Woman Poet. Together they seem to me the most companionable—both in their poems and their letters—of the late poets from the last century. In case this party of two seems too cozy, I would add Philip Larkin, not as companionable perhaps but whose writings, like theirs, illuminate life. Each of them was a serious listener to music. When it comes time to ask the three to read from their work, I would expect Larkin to decline, Bishop to insist that Merrill precede her, and Merrill to respond affirmatively to my request he read “The Victor Dog,” the wittiest and most moving of his poems about music. Its three final stanzas are as follows:

A little dog revolving round a spindle Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, A cast of stars. . . . Is there in Victor’s heart No honey for the vanquished? Art is art. The life it asks of us is a dog’s life. Merrill was exceptionally sensitive at registering the harmonies beyond belief music brings. Unlike the little dog’s dream of Handel, it is Mozart who provokes the most profound tribute in these letters—specifically The Magic Flute and Sarastro’s “music of peace and friendship, those disci plines of humanity at once warm +rigorous…that divinely anonymous music, quite beyond personality, that music about the power of music to undo evil.”

—William H. Pritchard

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632 Reviews

It has been said that Winslow Homer arrived in the English village of Cullercoats in April 1881 an illustrator and departed eighteen months later an artist. This is something of an exaggeration—we have only to see his pioneering works from Reconstruction Virginia—but it is true that the works in Homer’s “Cullercoats manner” display a newfound assurance and maturity worth a closer look. The Cullercoats period has typically been regarded as something of a mystery. With relatively little documentation from or about the artist, these months are often considered merely a transition period for Homer (1836–1910), bridging the Barbizon mood of the 1860s with the later, so-called Darwinian works. Homer specialist David Tatham is too experienced a scholar to be entranced by romantic fictions. He establishes in the book’s early chapters that we in fact know rather a lot about Homer’s movements in the area and can assert quite credibly how the artist arrived, set to work, and quickly adapted to his surroundings. Primed with a three-week stay in London, mainly to examine the British Museum’s watercolor paintings, Homer came to Cullercoats intending to stay only three months. Although he was surely aware of the region’s rich cultural heritage, he included few examples of the ancient and medieval ruins in the vicinity. That Homer chose to concentrate on a living community rather than a bygone one is a sure sign of a turn toward pictorializing that was motivated more by inquiry into the present than sentiment about the past. Homer, ever the pragmatist, was also attracted to the area for its reputation as an art colony, which meant easy access to painting supplies, studio space, willing mod els, and exhibition opportunities. (Homer was also attuned to the value of his work in the marketplace and didn’t hesitate to take an active hand in its promotion, even suggesting to one art dealer that putting an attractive girl at the front desk might increase foot traffic.)

Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England’s North East, by David Tatham (Syracuse University Press, 2021), 90 pp.

Of course, it was the hardworking fisherfolk of Cullercoats that kept Homer painting in Northumberland for more than a year. Tatham dispels any tendency to romanticize the village by pointing out that although it had a lively fishing population, it had neither docks nor a fishing market. Its denizens were not hardscrabble peasants carving out a brave existence in the face of encroaching industrialization—in fact, the majority of the town’s non-fishing population were commuters making the daily trek by rail to Newcastle upon Tyne. Cullercoats itself (the name is thought to derive from dove, or culver, cotes) was cramped and not at all quaint. Its elevated position above Whitley Bay added geographic interest, espe cially in times of storms, when the fisherfolk stood lookout there. The village’s most significant feature was the new Life Brigade Watch House, a waterfront base for the volunteer rescue squad that monitored the bay for vessels or individuals in distress; Homer often depicted its distinctive, russet-colored roof and clocktower in his Cullercoats works.

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By the time he arrived in Cullercoats, Homer was an accomplished watercolorist, master of a delicate and unforgiving medium, and one that he deployed to great effect in his portraits of the fisherfolk, in particular, its women.

Tatham notes that Homer’s portrayals of the fishwives and fisher lasses as equal partners with the men, mending nets, baiting hooks, sort ing and selling the day’s catch, would have been unknown to American audiences used to more sentimental imagery of women as teachers, milk maids, or shepherdesses. Homer’s treatment of working women would have been new not only to American audiences but to Victorian Britains as well, “depicting what amounted to the ‘new woman’ of the English work ing class” (67). While the portrayal of coastal fisherfolk was not unique to Homer—John Singer Sargent, another American artist, depicted oyster gatherers on the Brittany coast in the late 1870s—the Cullercoats work shows a sustained engagement with a community and a poetic and, at times, heroic encounter with a natural environment both rich and perilous.

Since his days as a Harper’s Civil War correspondent, Homer had become adept at capturing how groups of people move, separate, form smaller groups, and regroup whether on the battlefields or in the camps. He developed the ability to create a sense of narrative within a static image, deploying a few figures or hundreds to convey story and mood. In addition, he was one of the first American artists to record the interaction of the races with respect and sensitivity and to depict women as individu als rather than as conventional types.

Tatham organizes the book into studies of groups of paintings brack eted by an introduction to England’s North East and what Homer did after returning to America in 1882. Four Fishwives (1881) is one of the finest of the Cullercoats watercolors. The beach is crowded with undifferentiated fishermen and boats in the middle distance, while four young women stride across the foreground, loaded with large creels that are empty now but soon to be brimming with fish. The women are dressed in traditional long skirts and aprons, white blouses, and red scarves and share similar facial features, most likely those of Homer’s favorite local model, Maggie. The lowering sky and the women’s brisk body language suggest a sense of haste as the weather threatens to interrupt the day’s work. This painting captures what Tatham sees as Homer’s essential insight into the women of Cullercoats: “the rapid yet businesslike movement . . . reinforces the repu tation of fishwives as persons of strength and independence in their jobs and in community life as well” (31). From what we know of Homer’s time there, they were also tidy, droll, and direct, with a keen sense of the pro prieties: “An unwritten rule of the fisherfolk community held that when a fishwife posed for an artist, another fishwife needed to be present” (28).

What has always made Homer such a remarkable artist is his virtuoso touch with atmospherics: lavender-green dusk, tempestuous waves, lim pid sunlight, scudding clouds, and, in Cullercoats, the “Scotch mists” (47). That he could convey these transient effects in recalcitrant watercolor is little short of genius. Ravishing though these paintings might be from a technical standpoint, it is the symbolist elements that hold our attention.

Tatham notes ruefully that the “great success of Homer’s . . . Culler coats watercolors lost much of its luster within a year, upstaged by none other than Homer himself” (74). Indeed, Homer’s positive notices from the 1883 American Watercolor Society exhibition reinforced one of his besetting habits as an artist, his tendency to work episodically, to turn impulsively to new subjects becoming with each body of work a “new artist” (76). After Cullercoats, Homer would paint some of his most memo rable works, including The Life Line (1884), as well as travel scenes from Florida, the Caribbean, and the Adirondacks, but Tatham wonders what long-term effects, if any, the Cullercoats works had on Homer, especially in his subsequent depictions of women: “He had always been a person very largely connected with the present rather than the past” (77). Tatham concludes by observing that only three years after Homer died in Prouts Neck, Maine, the 1913 Armory Show would change art in America (and the world) forever. In spite of the disruptions of modernism, Homer’s work endures not merely for its inherent merits but because we sense that the artist (like many of us) is a “reluctant modern,” working in a time of continuity, change, and chaos with faith in the eternal values of goodness, truth, and beauty.

634 Reviews In The Gale (1883–93), a young mother navigates slick cliff rocks, buffeted by wind gusts and barely avoiding the oceanwater washing up to her brogan-shod feet. Perhaps she is looking into the storm anxious about her husband out on the sea—the wide-eyed baby on her back is certainly fearful—but in this painting, she is more than a Cullercoats fishwife; she embodies the maternal instinct itself and an elemental fear in the face of heartless nature. Likewise, Bridlington Quay (1883), a complex watercolor that shows a mother, baby, and an older woman outdoors with Bridlington Harbor in the background. Homer establishes the facts of the scene: the mother is clearly a fishwife, her creel by her side, living with her family in the busy seaport of Bridlington, a town much larger than Cullercoats as we can tell from the thicket of ship masts and building chimneys. Yet this work is also an example of the common artistic trope of the three ages of man signaling the transience of beauty and the fragility of human life. To this Homer adds visual cues connoting the passage of time. The mother’s straightforward gaze signifies the present, while the woman we can assume is her mother looks to the left to what has come before; the baby faces Bridlington, its urban bustle a harbinger of the future, one in which villages like Cullercoats will have no part.

—Leann Davis Alspaugh

MICHAEL AUTREY is a poet and critic living in rural West Virginia. His first book of poems, Our Fear, was published in 2013. He has published reviews and review-essays in, among others, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Essays in Criticism, Literary Matters and Raritan

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

BRIAN BRODEUR is the author of five poetry collections, including Every Hour Is Late (Measure Press, 2019), and the chapbook Local Fauna (Kent State University Press, 2015). New poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Southern Review, and 32 Poems. Brian teaches at Indiana University East.

ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU’s books include the poetry collections The Kafka Sutra and Home and Variations and the critical studies Laureates and Heretics, The Poet Resigns, Inventions of a Barbarous Age, and Poetry Uselessness from Coleridge to Ashbery. A small volume of his essays, The Literary Bohemian, was recently pub lished by Art & Letters.

JOS CHARLES is author of the forthcoming collection a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, March 15, 2022), feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). Charles has poetry published with POETRY, Poem-a-Day, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. From 2013-2018 she served as the founding-editor for THEM lit, a trans literary journal. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is currently a PhD student at UC Irvine and resides in Long Beach, LEANNCA.DAVIS ALSPAUGH is managing editor of The Hedgehog Review

CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Eternity & Oranges (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016). He is Director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki & Thasos.

WILLIAM BROWN is an MFA student in poetry at The University of Florida. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Copper Nickel, Crab Creek Review, Madison Review, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.

LISA CORINNE DAVIS is a Brooklyn-based painter best known for paintings and works on paper that resemble multilayered maps with encoded narratives. Born in Baltimore, MD, Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute, and her MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at June Kelly Gallery (New 635

JEFFERSON HUNTER is The Hopkins Review’s film critic and the Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English and Film Studies, Emeritus, at Smith College. His current project is a critical and comparative study of six directors: F. W. Murnau, Anthony Asquith, Rouben Mamoulian, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Dziga Vertov.

JOANNE LEEDOM-ACKERMAN is novelist, short story writer, and journal ist. Fiction includes The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels. Nonfiction includes upcoming PEN JOURNEYS: Memoir of Literature on the Line. She is senior editor of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate and is Vice President emeritus of PEN International.

MICHELLE LESIFKO-BREMER completed a Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University before completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Florida. She is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she completed post-baccalaureate writing courses at the University of Pittsburgh, and currently lives in New York City.

PIETRO FEDERICO was born in Bologna, Italy in 1980, and currently lives in Rome. He is a writer, copywriter, story editor, and professional translator. His poetry books are: Non nulla (2003, Published by Ibiskos Editore, Empoli) winner of the prize Il Fiore Pistoia 2003; Mare Aperto (Published by Nino Aragno Editore, Turin, 2015) winner of the Subiaco Award 2015 and Ceppo Award 2017; La mag gioranza delle stelle – Canto Americano (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, 2020).

MARK HALLIDAY’s seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at Ohio University.

STEVEN LEYVA was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of The Understudy’s Handbook. Steven he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design, at the University of Baltimore.

636 Notes on Contributors York), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York), Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (Chicago), Spanierman Modern (Miami), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, (Hudson, NY), and The Mayor Gallery (London).

GABRIELLA FEE’s poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Washington Square Review, The Common, Guesthouse, Sprung Formal, Levee Magazine, LETTERS, The Wellesley Review, and The American Literary Review, where she won the 2019 Prize for Poetry. Her translations appear in The Journal of Italian Translation and The Offing, and are forthcoming in the anthology Italian Trans Geographies. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, and was recipient of the 2021 Elizabeth K. Moser Fund for Poetry Studies Fellowship from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry.

ALEXIS SEARS is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize forthcoming from Autumn House Press in 2022. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in the Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Northwest Review, Literary Matters, Able Muse, Birmingham Poetry Review, and WILLelsewhere.SCHUTT is the author of Westerly (Yale University Press, 2013) and transla tor of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press, 2018) and Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla (forthcom LUKEing).

TALIA NEFFSON lives in Brooklyn, New York.

RICHARD MICHELSON’s most recent collection is More Money than God (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series). Michelson served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton MA where he owns R. Michelson Galleries and hosts Northampton Poetry Radio. www.RichardMichelson.com.

STROMBERG’s work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Smartish Pace, The New Criterion, Think Journal, The Hopkins Review, and several other ven ues. He works as an adjunct English instructor at Eastern University and La Salle University and serves as the associate poetry editor of E-Verse Radio

WILLIAM LOGAN’s most recent book of poems was Rift of Light (2017). His book of long essays on familiar poems, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (Columbia University Press), will be published this spring.

H. PRITCHARD is Professor of English Emeritus at Amherst College. His latest book is In Search of Humor JAY ROGOFF, The Hopkins Review’s dance critic since 2009, is at work on a book tentatively called Balanchine Is NOW, about watching George Balanchine’s ballets in the 21st century. His seventh book of poetry, Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, appeared from LSU Press in 2020. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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MICHAEL MINGO earned his MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in Spillway, The McNeese Review, Third Coast, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals. He currently resides in north west New Jersey and works as a medical editor.

JOHN POCH is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University. His poems and translations have appeared widely in magazines such as Poetry, Paris Review, and Agni. His most recent book is Texases (WordFarm WILLIAM2019).

KAREN WILKIN recently curated Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting 1950–1970, for the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT. Author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, she writes regularly for Hudson Review, The New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal, and teaches in the New York Studio School’s MFA program.

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Notes on Contributors WILL TOEDTMAN lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of The Several World, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. His poems have (or will have) also appeared in Able Muse, Dappled Things, Literary Matters, and elsewhere.

RYAN WILSON is the editor of Literary Matters, and the author of How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019) and The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), which won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His work appears in Best American Poetry, Five Points, Sewanee Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere, and his book, Proteus Bound: Selected Translations 2008–2020, is forthcoming from Franciscan University Press.

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press for the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University IN THIS ISSUE: Robert JoanneLeannChristopherMichaelArchambeauAutreyBakkenBrianBrodeurWilliamBrownJosCharlesDavisAlspaughLisaCorinneDavisPaulDeanPietroFedericoGabriellaFeeMarkHallidayJeffersonHunterLeedom-AckermanMichelleLesifko-Bremer Steven Leyva William Logan Talia RyanKarenWillLukeWillAlexisJayWilliamJohnMichaelRichardNeffsonMichelsonMingoPochH.PritchardRogoffSearsSchuttStrombergToedtmanWilkinWilson