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'Yale Literary Magazine ib

Editors-in-Chief • Andrew R. Rossi Jennifer Mayer Carrie Iverson Senior Editors • Nelly Bly Lorin Stein Art Editor • Neeta Sharma Design • Jonathan Corum Staff • Joel Burges

Joe Formaggio

Dorian Q. Fuller

Rosemary Hutzler

Rebecca Lesnick

Aaron Matz

Laura Molles

Donna Ng

Mary Ohnuma

Meghan O'Rourke

Julie Piittgen

Avital Rosenberg

Jess Rou

Jonathan Schneider

Phyllis Thompson

Alex Zubatov

The Yale Literary Magazine is a non-profit, registered organization. The views expressed in this magazine arc not necessarily those of the staff and in no way do they reflect the opinions of Yale University, which is not responsible for the contents of this magazine.

Subscriptions to the Magazine arc available at a price of $15 for individual subscriptions and $35 for institutions. Please make checks payable to the Y.L.M. Publishing Fund, and send to: The Yale Literary Magazine Box 209087 Yale Station • New Haven, Connecticut 06520 The contents are az 1994. Copyrights remain the property of the individual contributors.

No portion of the contents may be repririted without permission. All rights are reserved.

Printed in Canada.

volume 5 • numbers 2& 3 • autumn & spring • 1993-94

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE WOULD LIKE TO THANK

• Ivo Banac • The Pierson College Master's Office • The Sudler Funding Committee • Robert Thompson • Timothy Dwight College • Phil Greene • Charlotte Pavia • The Yale College Dean's Office • Terry Towers • The Yale Printing Service

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER 7-19863-4

Contents Editors' Note • Jennifer Mayer • Andrew R. Rossi Poetry • Rachel Zucker, Love Like Motion

4 5

6

• David Greenberg, Harder

7

• Lorin Stein, Two Still-Lives

8

• Lorin Stein, Ode on Retreat

lo

Fiction • ZZ Packer, The Helmet Photography • Rhasan Manning, Greenwood, Mississippi

12

23

• Cory Johnston, Reeds, Bridgehampton, New York

25

• Cory Johnston, Barn, Wyoming

26

• Lisa Merritt, untitled

28

• Lisa Merritt, untitled

29

• Abbey Greensfelder, untitled

31

• Vesco Razpopov, Bar

32

Essay • Andrew R. Rossi, All That Brick t..7' All That Gothic Interview • Bronson van Wyck, Chuck Close Book Reviews • Vera Hoyden, Rameau's Niece

34

44

50

• Nelly Bly, In Extremis; Vindication

52

• Maxwell Gorge, Kitchen; Reckless Appetites

54

Art & Architecture • Martina Choi, Figure Studies

6o

• Martina Choi, Portrait

63

• Trattie Davies, House with Wings:3 plans,3 sections, elevation, 2 construction details & site plan

64

Editors' Note After deep disagreements over the purpose of the Yak Literary Magazine. we have decided to publish two Editor's Notes.

Although neither of us can speak for the entire editorial staff, perhaps we will both have the good luck to speak for some of our fellow students.

"Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well," wrote Palinurus fifty years ago. The well of poetry, and of literature in general, wasn't and isn't quite dry. Ifit were, we'd have left it alone by now. But they're precious little to snarl over, the shadows we see at the bottom. So let other students issue pronouncements on verbal Art and its Transforming Powers. My concern is the practical problem of how to publish the Yak Literary Magazine when even we students ofliterature are less and less literate.

By literate I mean closely, ambivalently acquainted with the body of writing that defines us. Nowadays we students of literature have just a nodding acquaintance with our minds'domineering parent, the Past. She goes unrecognized in virtually everything we write, then she shames us with our infancy. Have we meditated long enough on our ignorance, our disengagement, our slacking anomie?

Then it's no good pretending that were originals, or that we have no interest in taking our place alongside what's gone before. Its no good playing at revolutionary genius: we know it takes an age of scholars and skill to make one prodigy.

Still we are, for better or worse, students of literature. We can't help wanting to publish and read each other's work."No models ofpast times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions ofa contemporary." We need literate student-writing to dignify our studies, to show what we still can do. In particular, our poetry needs to be rescued: if students insist on cranking it out, they must be enticed back into reading it. "Poetry,even that ofthe loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest, has a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes."

These truths ofColeridge bear repeating.

If this statement of the problem sounds overblown, you must remember that the Lit has a responsibility to Yale College and to the whole ofour generation. In light ofthis responsibility, the Editors have no better choice than to publish only what they love, what they judge to be the best examples ofstudent work. Let their judgments be biased窶馬ot toward one form or another, but toward work that's seductive and literate. Ofcourse any editors may make mistakes, they may misjudge, they may not know enough to understand all oftheir schoolmates' submissions. For this reason the Editors ofthe Lit must be good students themselves. They must know enough between them to appreciate and explain what they read. In the end,they must decide,right or wrong, what is to be published, what is to be recommended as a model and pleasure to their readers. Because ifthe Editors recommend a story, poem or essay that they don't admire, they talk down to their readers. They impeach their own recommendation.

For this reason the Editors can't leave their decisions to chance or personality or fashion; they have to trust their taste. Otherwise they have no business recommending anything.

And why should they bother to publish writing for which they have no taste? To flatter incompc4 窶｢ The Yale Literary Magazine

tent writers? Seeing one's name undeservedly in print is cheaper and cheaper gratification. Give incompetent writers your pocket-change, point them toward a laser-printer and Xerox machine, and tell them to flatter themselves.

Should the Editors publish "self-expressions," however boring or illiterate, out of some interest inherent to such things? Save bad self-expression for Poetry Slams. If you crow or elegize with sloppy rhymes or unthinking rhymelessness, with confining meter or arbitrary verse, with pious essays or unplotted stories, then "we have difficulty to detect the precise person you arc." You have not expressed yourself at all, you mix in with the other student-writers: a questionable company.

But do your work and we'll know you. Do you think you can write untrained? Are you "easier to be played on than a pipe?" Only children think jazz means untrained self-expression.

Some may say that we should tolerate work we don't like so that our work will be tolerated in turn.

You might call this "fostering community": it's the most pitiful kind of sympathetic magic. The vast majority of student writing is shoddy. And no one, not the most vocally tolerant, pays attention to shoddy work, published or not. That is why to tolerate, to publish shoddiness invites inattention.Shoddy work is drudgery to read. No amount of toleration, no number of published pages, can remedy that.

But, some students will ask, shouldn't you publish the mediocre along with the good for fairness' sake? They may complain that this issue contains, aside from its essays,only one story,only one handful of poems. Indeed, just before this issue went to press, final decisions of the Editorial Staff were nearly reversed,and we new Editors were threatened with dismissal, over just this question offairness. In the end, the magazine's integrity went uncompromiscd; the attempt to compromise it holds no interest except as a symptom: we now hear schoolmates disparaged for using words too well, for taking us out ofour depth,for reading too much or too closely. Forgive us if we can't help but suspect that such disparagements have at their heart no concern with fairness, with inclusiveness in the abstract(ifsuch a thing exists); forgive us ifthey seem to have at heart that little goblin Wounded Pride.

Unfair!shrills Wounded Pride, pained by his illiteracy but unwilling to give it up. Wounded Pride stamps his sad collective foot: It isn'tfair.

We all wish we had more work to publish, and we have every reason to believe that there are skilled, talented writers who didn't submit their work to the magazine. Do you wish that we had more than one story, one handful of poems? If you're a student-writer, then write as engaging a story as the one in this magazine. Write poems that take their obstacles into as close account, that bear as much scrutiny, as much interpretation (these are the best poems we've had from these student-poets). No readers are more sympathetic, more desperate to be won over, than our Editorial Staff.

JENNIFER MAYER

The Yale Literary Magazine is not a judge appointed to condemn or reward student work. It is an invaluable mirror reflecting what our peers have accomplished in their pursuit to discover and articulate this life's meaning.

Above all it seems to me that it goes directly against the grain of reading and writing to erect barriers between texts or to create monuments out of texts. The curricula of most literature departments in the university today are constructed almost entirely out of monuments, canonized into rigid dynasticformation, serviced and reserviced monotonously.

Edward W.Said How rich is the thought that defies classification It is is it the imperative I pursue?

Fantasy that evades conventional wisdom; Yes, the game begins anew.

Accept It can Kill you If I Erase This will Never sit Alone in The mind Begin So that They are Not too Light to Release To unnerve And strain We bind No energy Accept Fuse this With it Live him Feel her Erase Now I See it Can we Begin

Let me raze an open cartridge; so Fill with it the data of infinitely regressive Programs that determination-dictates are a stable Environment whose predeliction is to ask of me For little more than a taste of free will, I would sell A sniff, a touch, the fed of pre-destined insecurity My voice in an auction of do-gooders Who can't care but raise the margin?

Valid understanding presupposes the word: (Will, acting, verbs, fighting, sleep) The rape of intellectual virginity renounced Greek recollection of Leda when the song sang...

Cryptic yet self-assured, as eccentric Though base acceptance-seeking-ontologicalLevels of no absolute (are the relative confinement), As the reality of a fantastic situation so Devoid of color—grey spectrums and sound— A silent frequency the tired lines Of boring lives too stifled to exploit The anouhil of their own mediocrity.

In their existing organization, monopolizing science and remaining thus outside social life, the savantsform a separate caste, in many respects analogous to the priesthood. Scientfic abstraction Michael Bakunin is their God, living and real individuals are their victims.

Conservatives fondle structures That maintain calm.

Independents burn alive, Extremities singed.

Values and beliefs writhe, Character fading.

Struggle to find sunlight In a wasteland of brick.

Paralyzed, you are drowning In a vat of White Out. We Editors are not distinguished scholars; we are privileged servants to our peers—graced with the resources to give fellow artists a voice, gifted with the potential to enchant readers across the world.

ANDREW R. ROSSI

The Yale Literary Magazine • 5

Love Like Motion Rachel Zucker In love, we move faster than anyone can track our progress.

So perpetually in flight we can not feel our own flying.

Mostly, when we sense motion at all it is only falling, but this a problem of perception. We may be falling upward.

We appear frozen. We are swept up in this love. A motion like the sound of ocean if you have lived life as a fish.

A love like motion, a brackish pride in our demeanor.

We loosen photographs from the walls but leave them hanging.

Oxygen for flames, we have the smell of ashes in a metal can. We try to recall the shape before.

No choice but to scratch words sworn unutterable.

We rush to hold you. You are a salamander.

On this journey we will encounter fire more than a hundred times.

Tears are all we can offer; moving too quickly for rain.

We ride love like waves - face and chest scraped along the surf.

We are like tops, spinning; our love centripetal.

A dramamine desire of back and forward gyrations.

Going nowhere but deeper dreams. Unconsciousness. We seek stillness. But we must spin to breathe, to believe.

To live, there is no escaping this love and we do not wish escape.

Only the still world passing blurred as we flee reminds us to fill and empty these lungs, although we have forgotten how to blink.

We are traveling neural networks. This is how memory works. Giving you the illusion of substance is our only sustenance.

All over the world women are dreaming of the same child.

Fingers poised around a golden tiger's eye marble.

It is the picking that is most precious. Most poisonous.

The only anodyne a theory, although unspoken, that we might find you. That there is a chemical we might trace which would reveal your many paths.

If we could trust enough to stand back, stand still, and see.

Your crisscrossed wanderings a sacred lotus lifting from this earth ascending from the center. We might stop then, long enough to feel our faces stung by brambles, by branches snapped back as we followed, always in the wake. But it is a hurricane with no eye. And we will never still.

Along the periphery we are straining at these limits.

Moving to remember. Dancing, our very molecules in flight.

We are in a love like motion.

No less than the love for our dead.

In mrmoty of Benjamin Eddins 6 • The Yale Literary Magazine

Harder David Greenberg The idea of praise, like so many sunsets, illumines what I least thought would be.

As if shadows were kind mirrors, the type of contrast you would want from an old movie projector, prayer indicates finely what we are not: not the priest, not the magician, just a moon falling again in dark seas.

When called upon to do so, Heaven flooded the evening tide pool, raising all boats.

Each cried out to drown on his own terms. A child weeps.

Clearly the mission failed. But the contagious reality continues, spinning from reel to reel at the abandoned multiplex at night.

People are drawn to the ruined theater: it's sexy, and women singing together always mean "desire" to men. Conversely, it takes work to listen, toil which shades the muscles straining to hear.

You can't fix time with a broken back.

I turned away from you to it, hoping to catch a glimpse of you there too, but found the race under God's eye finished before you came.

In the distance are the beasts without names.

TheYale Literary Magazine • 7

Two Still-Lives Lorin Stein All day gold afternoons burn like a bedside lamp Across the street and Green, and deepen in the grass To depths the rye infers, wherefingers look to pass And burrow, scrabbling in the tender chilly damp.

Like calico-catfur to the rye, like tiger's eye They promise insides, shady bowers underground: Sweet, still,false promises, the rat, the stone, the ground, Clearings, thick with lilies, that lips unsay the lie I. Rodenbach Family Plots

I.

What color is the eucalyptus stick That you stuck in the empty clear carafe?

The big vermillion vinyl couch, of course, Is red. The stiff synthetic-velvet chairs Are absinthe, chartreuse in a later shade, Later sometimes lime green. Then Taylor you, You are the most beautiful woman in the world And your Kandinsky, yes, is candy-striped.

Unwrapping like a rosy wallpaper.

He locked the door. He left the lamps all off.

What color is the eucalyptusfrond, Or strand, or branch? Is it the purple kind That wafts its balm through cool blue waiting rooms?

Is it not rather the peagreen or the seagreen Fragrant still offar-off Australian grottoes?

One asked to make small talk, dark in the window While he fetched waterglasses faute de mieux.

Was it Smirnoff, or Popov, or Majorska Hid in the back of the ice box? Some is left.

As they say, she wasn't that sort of girl, She was not an aesthete, she was not us.

We two deserve a Frequent Flyer status, Ruins, seas, etc., things to see Especially, exquisite and receding Into slant sunlight, slipping out of town.

Laid over at the Abu Dahbi airport, Late at night in the bright-lit azure dome We'll smile behind our drinks, our bottle-green shades, And see who in the wide world we once knew Might wander by us through the desert sky And with a shock never to be got over Would recognize us, looking out of this world Or over it, distinct and undismayed, With distant smiles, keeping to ourselves.

8 • The Yale Literary Magazine

What kind of flower's like hello/goodbye? Say, We are great fat Roseanne and her lovely husband: "Honey I picked these up on my way back home And would have cut and set them back in water.

My memory isn't what it used to be."

Recall the resolution of last night As if it were last night not memory But lust to know an afternoon renewal.

We see a sad shelf where no flowers are But purpled leaves and flitting epitaphs, Where untomed myrtled shades go gibbering Like hermit crabs from thumbnail sepulchres By ganglionish necropolities.

Mildews and the answering machine's Forgetful minutes of our commonplaces.

What will become of these untidy flowers?

If not for suchlike dozens, drizzly paper, Nail-scissors and cold green stems, chinoiserie Neglected in the last light on the table, Lisping pallid flower apologias Half-assed alases nearly innocent With wantonness, with watching and with wanting (Utterly unschooled in the Language of Flowers) Why last night, why did the night drag on?

Poppies were there, and pungent briar rose, The pretty passage, say, pauses of voices: Sleep's wide smile, or call it a wild spree With ceilings inching clockwise into dawns.

Poppies were not enough next to the tracks.

The salt sea-rose also was not enough.

Those scents free of anticipated pleasures Made no pretense of sufficiency.

But these wet dozen down a darkening hall, Six pink, six white, plus babies' breath like dots Stuck in the air, bred to faint, borrowed scents, Are not intense, where everything depends.

They bear airs of excuse. They aren't girls Or decorative indecorous young men To issue a bon mot at their expense, To cover the embarassment of flowers, But a suspense of suns. They linger over Aftermaths of red extravaganzas, Empties, frail perfumed pensivities Like mussel shells' unpeopled castanets, Set down for dishes and the radio After quavery bannisters and landings: Flowers more flyers, more badge than buttoniers Or transoms to a fiercer delectation.

For ST and SR The Yale Literary Magazine • 9

Ode on Retreat Or, the Seaside Study (Inscribed to a Northern Friend at the end of a Present of Parrs Spleen)

Lorin Stein Its happiness, the mind, that ocean.

The Garden

Two last fig-leaves: The book held no more darkness than this hand, So have you planned To leave all booksfor lovers? None believes, Say, palmfast to your breast, I'd hold you Or, peering in yourfist held in a ball You fix your nakedness Orfold in happiness.

No one last hand; no house hems in your corp°reality, no snail's Shellfits thefoot: we make our shadow-cells And take their warp.

1.

Take the Cape wind, Or Mount Desert quick-sands whose Sound conceals The strange close seals And odd dark porpoise' smiling-seeming kind.

The gunwale heaves between the heaviest thing's Calm solid wrinklings and unwrinklings And you, draws inches low And wants to go below.

So do we row, against the tide, for shore And call that fog-sphere fear When we laugh by their fire. But when you're here This small unsure Qreen room's your realm, Your quiet the rattling panes: the siren pines' Insistent signs Of innocent distress, they keep you calm.

At your desk, a cracked, fold-up vanity, You mistake (for a parking lot) the sea, Which is enough. You note No need to touch, to boat To somewhere in the center of it all: No one will come for a drink, Set it politely down, ask what you think Or that you call.

2.

An old story: That blood-red seagrapes mock the flooded rose Then decompose Washed up with the oyster dock, all allegory.

Qranite blocks the ocean's overtaken, Brambles striding down the long forsaken Qarden to the sea With thorn and blackberryEnsnare the mussel, and the cherrystone's Strange fruit (hid in the pit) That guides the spade (strange squeezing stone) with spit All tongue and bones.

to • The Yale Literary Magazine

Such fruits suit us Who'd curl our elm-shade haven in a shell, So sheltered dwell Sunken in beds whole ink oceans across.

Let a cove curve, curl nacreous and muddy Under the window of a warm green study: Life needs life on the edge Olanced overtop the page.

Life needs the longing shore, the uncertain wave That dreams the shore apart Till nothing left to wait, nothing to part We shall not crave.

3.

In a quiet pool Of mercury the anxious lantern turns, Oh but she burns On frightened wheeling wings against the pull Of dark horizons, or the lights from town, Burns freezingly, afraid of looking down.

Each turn turns what she sees Of transcendental seas To what would fill, some day, a million books.

She cries: Oh let the eyes' Radar close its seas and dot its Is Safe, on the rocks.

This burning bird Might lift, might find its solitary perch Still on a verge But new-plumed, dazzling in a various word For lonesomeness, an end to cleave, and leave, Where night lies far off, underneath the cave To whom she tends herself: So take down from the shelf A heaven expanse within a double room, Whose devil makes the dusk An ocean aromatic with the musk Of this old tome.

With Time cognized To russhng pages and unmeasured tides, The self abides No more deferred, but moored about the mind Madeforesty with masts, their leavings'furled From vagaries amid the warmer world An emblem of retreat To lamplight's little heat, One red window the closest pane to rage, Fug orfonder want, Setting itself about an evening slant Offoliage

TheYale Literary Magazine • ti

The Helmet ZZ Packer

The chrome domed machine in the Nashville Greyhound bus station flashes "Chips! Chips! Chips!," but you wouldn't know that it was broken unless you've been here for a long time, like I have, watching a pale, chain-smoking suicidal girl whose life—as if deciding on a suitable method ofsuicide wasn't enough trouble— is brought to a grinding halt by an inability to obtain Fritos. She kicks the machine then cracks her knuckles. She prowls around as ifshe is a large cat, but she's not large at all, and that's what makes her so funny looking. It takes someone like me to laugh at a suicidal girl and someone even more like me to then refuse to even acknowledge her with a laugh. After she prowls, she pouts and sits next to me and cries for a bit, expecting someone to comfort her, but no one does. I've diverted my attention to the Mexican family, all lined up in a row, a declension of Babushka dolls, as ifsome giant had taken one straight out ofthe head of another until accomplishing six people—father, mother, undernourished girl and three ugly little boys—all staring at a great Greyhound map of where they are and where they must go. There is a disappointment in distance. The smallest boy breaks free and begins pulling the knobs of the "Chips! Chips! Chips!" chrome domed monster as if it were a slot machine. The pale suicidal girl hurriedly begins to tell me the story of her life: running away, razor blades, and living day to day on cigarettes and Ritz crackers.

"Would you shut up?" I ask her, my head in my hands. I am trying to think. Trying to piece this all together, my own life and where things began to go wrong. The girl seems as though she hasn't heard me.

"The Eskimos kill themselves by floating out on an iceberg," she alerts me, her eyes as far away as the North Pole itself, her skinny fingers balancing some cheap cigarette, the circles ofsmoke growing wider.

I want to tell her if she can find an iceberg near abouts Tennessee, I'd be glad to strap her to it. But I don't say this. My whole head is burning and when I think of where my life went wrong I want to say the word,to feel it in my mouth; to say "helmet", but that's not quite it. How can such a thing change a life. It can't, I've concluded. No one can point to the time and place ofthe when and where wrecked lives go wrong, one can only diagram proximities, tracing through the lifelines of blood, paths of circumstance and the adamancy of destiny.

"But Chinese protest students light themselves on fire," she rasps like one ofthose drunkish Lite-'n'-Easy listening station DJs. I squirm away and keep holding my head, trying to show her that I'm holding my ears too, that I'm not listening to a damn thing she's saying. I don't know when I fall asleep—a dangerous thing to do when you're alone in a bus station—but I do it, and in racking my head for a beginning I am furnished only with reeking muscatel in the morning. And her face, my mother's face, begins to shape itself, not smiling nor laughing, but struggling.

They say that black mothers are strong, caring and defiantly beautiful; they tell their no good bastardy men to fuck-off; they spank their children with patience and peach-tree switches, they make stick-to-your-soul sweet potato pies, bear the fragrance ofIvory soap and collard gre.ens, faithfully attend church, and are the moral consciousness of America—the adopted papacy swaddled deep in layers of understanding respect-mongering mahogany flesh.

Well hell. Five year olds don't think about beauty in quite the same way as others, but in retrospection I suppose Mama might have been beautiful in someone's personal history, but none which I was privy to. She was breathtaking in a way only alcoholics could manage; in that slow head bobbing,sleepy eye-lidded way which conceived entire universes just three feet away in tall amber bottles. Her periods of drunkenness emboldened me enough to ask about my father whom I had never met, my father who died in Vietnam; a death which I assumed was neither honorable nor laughable since my mother refused to talk about it. She just said he was a good man, but that she was kind ofglad that he died. Glad,she said, because she was convinced 12 • THE HELMET

that he would turn out bad. Mama said that all men, whether good or bad, all end up bad in the end. The voice in which she couched her words thwarted any refute; she spoke of my father as though he was someone she might have met in the A&P, that his "goodness" or "badness" was somehow on the same scale as milk expiration dates. So after a while I did not press for details and she was not obligated to provide slurred heavy-headed answers.

At nine years old I found myself with the only mother I knew, and she was vastly different from the mother I had hand picked from my own land of make-believe. By the age oftwelve my elaborate make-believe mother was making fried chicken dinners with mountains of whipped potatoes, morassed in molasses-thick gravy, contiguous with heaps of deeply steamed kales smelling of fat-back. She had conniptions when I went out in the cold with no scarf, she cried and pressed me into her bosom when I got As, and she yelled at me periodically in that loving, rich voice. Of course, my real mother never did any of those things, and I would not dare ask her.

If you have to be religious to qualify as a good black mother then I guess mama gets points for that. She used to be religious, but not because she grappled with the large questions ofFaith and Divine Grace. Let's at least get this straight—my mother is a junkie, and like everything else in a junkie's world, religion becomes a drug. Marx said it was the opium of the people. Well, if Marx lived in Louisville, Kentucky he would have known that Jack Daniel's and the Baptists supplant opium any day. And suffice it to say, mama was Kentuckian through and through.

She did the church thing for a while and for a while we had "Sisters" and "Brothers" calling us night and day. Did we want to go to a fish fry? Did we want to go over to play Bible trivia and listen to the late night Gospel Hour ofPower? Did I want to go on the Sunday School trip to Kings Island? Did I want to play softball in the park with girls from my Sunday school who wore skirts so long as to put nuns to shame?

Oh yeah. And that was another thing. The Rules. This church had rules. Not your regular Ten Commandments stuff either—this was hard-core. At the Iroquois Trail Pentecostal Church ofthe Redeemed and Fire Baptized they make you swear off any drugs, tobacco, alcohol and cussing. Women may not wear pants or makeup or jewelry. You had to do other stuff, too. You had to address other church members with "Sister" or "Brother," you had to find some way of incorporating Bible verses in your course of everyday speech; you had to learn to volunteer to clean the church toilets with a cheerful, unquestioning countenance.

Nevertheless I got my dose of Moses and Jesus, leaps offaith executed with trembling and trepidation. Mama took it a different way. Without explanation, she just stopped going. She still sent us, but she stopped going. David would stomp all the way down stairs and looked at me as if I were responsible for today being Sunday.

David and I didn't get along anyway. I've always wondered if I ignored him or dropped him or something when he was a baby to make him hate me for life. He had always had heart problems, and for a whole year he was in and out of the hospital. But after his surgery he got so much better that I began treating him like I would treat a brother, roughly and without mercy. And for this, he hated me. And of course, I didn't like him, either.

"What are you looking at!" David would yell at me.

"Why don't you shut up!" I would yell at him.

"Make me!" he would yell and roll his eyes. I stared at him some more just to prove that my eyes were my own and my field of vision could devour him. He stared at me. My dress was hitched up funny and my stockings were loose. The stockings were mama's, only pulled all the way up to my non-existent waist and rolled down up on the bones of my hips. Anyone could see beneath my old worn-thin dress, the stockings rolled around my legs like tiny inner tubes.

He snapped my stocking, sending it down around my ankle.

"You idiot!" I yelled.

"Why don't ya'll both be quiet!" mama said. Mama said "quiet" as though she were trying to fit it in at the last minute with the rest of her sentence. Mama was tryTHE HELMET • 13

ing to eat breakfast. She had this way of talking over food. Usually she would be yelling at us, over a bowl of cereal. You never know if she's drunk or not. She hides it very well. You could only know if you smelled her. Or if she does something which no amount of acting can cover. Like let her face fall right into the bowl. One time she was drunk and she was just talking like normal, about how I shouldn't eat up all the bacon and how David shouldn't eat up everything else; about Miss Mama's new fan and about Uncle George coming to visit in a few days so a cake had to be baked. Just normal. Then her head just fell into the bowl of Rice Krispies. Just like that. That drunk. So that's how we knew she was drunk that time.

But that was that time and that was way back. This last time wasn't so long ago, when she quit the church for good. She quit church when David died. He was in the hospital and she was praying and the Brothers and Sisters were praying, and I was supposed to pray but I didn't really know how.

When David died Mama drank more. That time was scary because you couldn't tell whether she was drunk or not, she was just a woman at a kitchen table yelling into her cereal. The bowl just took her face in, and her hair was floating like broken sticks in the Cheerios and milk. I shook her shoulders and screamed. She could have been dead.

Anything could have happened. More than anything else, I remember her face coming out ofthe bowl crying milk. As Miss Mama would say, it's a crying shame.

I look for the suicidal girl on the Greyhound but do not remember if she got on or not. An old man smelling ofcatfish and wet wool sits next to me. He tells me about Monopoly. Ever heard of it? he asks. Yes, I say. Did you know I have a bitty boy grandson? he asks. No,I say. Well my grandson likes to eat those hotels, he says,"If those hotels is on St Charles Place—they is irresistible!" Is that right? I ask.

Then for about two seconds he and the whole bus is silent. That's when he starts humming the theme to the Andy Griffith show. The bus driver gets on the intercom to tell whoever is whistling that people are trying to sleep. The old man's idea of insurrection is to whistle jazzier versions ofthe Andy Griffith show.Some people on the bus tell him to shut up. Then he begins his jazzed up version of"Happy Trails."

When I was seven, Mama's drinking had gotten so bad that I spent the summer at my paternal grandmother's house. My dead father's mother was called Miss Mama by everyone I knew.I stayed at Miss Mama's with my cousins—all boys—Teddy T, Juny and Snot. That summer the wasps descended upon us in early August. The wasps were mud-daubers and they came in deep humming swarms across the clear white planes of Delta sky. The secretive insects resembled dark angels; tiny CocaCola bottle shaped angels who minded their own business until we poked their muddy pottery with long exterminating branches. The wasps descended upon our dust-colored towns, building their precarious nests on the slick aluminum siding throughout the Delta; breathed in low hums,fell prostrate in rains, and endured until they grew so old as to fall to the ground with the suddenness of heavy fruit.

"Shit," says Teddy T, the oldest cousin and my life long role-model. He's poking his stick at the mud daubers. I love Teddy T and go wherever he goes. Once he made me close my eyes and lean my head back with my mouth wide open while he rifled a steady stream of tabasco down my throat through a straw. But I don't hold that against him. Not in the least. He was ten then, he's eleven now and he has taken his salamander-poking stick and gives well-muscled tries at the elusive construction of the mud-dauber nest, sending it down in a papery crash into a spray of dust.

"Shit," says Juny.

Juny is my cousin, too. I could spare Juny's company. I never wanted to go anywhere he went, but since Teddy T's opinion usurped Juny's, we'd always end up going wherever Teddy T was going anyway. Juny loved Teddy T and followed him around. Everybody loves Teddy T. The wasps are everywhere. They were buzzing near the ground getting their brown lacquer-backs dusty. They are buzzing near my face making zig-zags of excitement before my pupils. Teddy T and Juny are running. They are Running away 14 'THE HELMET

and they have Snot. They sound like noises on the TV when the vacuum is going at the same time; static-y, bright and soft and the sky is falling in bits of white; first a tower of emaciated pines, then in bright slow moving clouds. They run away and I have stayed. I knew the wasps were getting closer, I could see their shapes all on me and I could feel their stings. I cried and hollered and hollered some more. I peed in my dress with my yarn ribbons in my hair and screamed and screamed. Before I knew it, I was back at the house with Miss Mama.She plunged me into a bath filled with Palmolive soap bubbles.

"We can't take you anywhere," Teddy T says.

"Yeah," says Juny.

Snot snorts. They were going to go down the road to Cleo's Grocery Emporium and Auto Works. I was going, too. I knew they would try to leave me behind but I'm not letting them. And if they do leave me behind I can tell Miss Mama and she will whip their hides. They've been whispering to each other. They begin to speed walk, leaving me far behind. Snot can't walk very fast so he's behind Teddy T and Juny. I run up ahead ofall ofthem. They can run faster. They shoot up ahead ofme and their squeals ofjoy are punctuated by raspy coughs ofexhaustion. They fall to the side of the road like fresh chopped cane. I catch up, then I fall to the side ofthe road along with them.

Only Snot is still hopping up and down. Looking like a toy bear. Snot.

"Sit down, boy," yells Juny. Snot and luny are brothers. Teddy T is an only child.

We all sit down in the middle ofthe road. Whenever we're all sitting together, trying to be quite or something, Miss Mama says we look like refugees.

"Y'all look like a bunch of ref-you-geez!" Miss Mama would say. Juny is the first to get up.

"Y'all look like a bunch of refugees!".Juny shouts. Teddy T throws a rock and Juny darts like he's playing dodgeball; moves his hips one way and moves his arms and head the other and smiles like he's a jack °lantern. Like he is just plumb crazy.

Teddy starts hurling more rocks and so do I. We are laughing and Juny is just dodging all the rocks.

"Put that one down!" yells Teddy T to me. I've got a big rock. I don't put it down.

I hurl it at Juny. A car—we didn't even hear it coming—is suddenly in front of me and luny is gone. The car stops. A big grape colored man gets out. He is so dark that his face shines in distinct sculpted planes. He's got on an army uniform. He is so tall, he must be six foot five and growing. Whenever Miss Mama says somebody is tall she says "they must be six foot five and growing." He is tall and big and we are all afraid of him.

The man doesn't say anything to us, his car is still humming and he shuts the door so hard that it already sounds like trouble.

The man goes over to the other side of the road. He comes back with Juny leaning his head against his leg. That's how tall the man is, Juny has to lean up against his leg. Then luny runs over to us, and stands stiff legged and determined to be by us and not leaning his head against the leg of this strange man.The man doesn't seem to be slighted by Juny's rejection, he just takes his hands and sweeps them across his forehead like all men do here in the heat. He bent his body in what appeared to be three separate pieces, set his eyes on the spot which we, too, set our eyes—a big unmistakable dent thrown by a big unmistakable rock. My rock.

The man looked at us as if he were deciding which one of us had the lowest pain threshold. We looked at him. He looked at us.

"She threw the rock!" Juny yells, "I know because she was throwing it at me!"

"Shut up!" I cry indignantly. I almost think I'm going to wet my pants but I squeeze my thighs and pray.

"I not going to hurt anybody. I'm an officer in the United States Marine Corps.

I'm sure insurance will pay for the damages."

He sounded so official that I thought he was the police. I was sure he was going to take me away from Miss Mama and Teddy T, and even Snot and luny. I might never see my mother again. My whole life rushed before my eyes. I started to cry.

THE HELMET • 15

"Hush, lir lady," he says to me. I hushed a little, but just because he told me to.

Then was I forgot why I was even crying and stopped completely.

Nobody else said anything. Not even Snot. We stood there as though we were in the lineup for a firing squad. The man leveled his hands as though he was a symphony conductor trying to hush us up. We said nothing.

"Listen," he whispered,"I'm not going to hurt you,I'm just trying to find the Farrell place. I can talk to yall's folks later about m'car."

Teddy clears his throat and scratches the nape of his neck.

"Back there is the Farrell place," he says with his clear fearless voice,"them is our folks. Our grandmama."

"Well." the officer said, pronouncing well as two syllables, weh-hell. He smiled as though he had just discovered that dust was gold and his car was shrouded in it.

That smile made us stand stiff, still and sweaty.

The man gave us a ride back home. Teddy,luny and I all fit on the front row seat which was long and generous in the way those older Buicks tended to be.Snot had to sit in the back, but he made a game out of it, sliding from the right side of the back seat to the left side—then back again as if he were stuck in his own private pinball machine.

When Teddy T pointed to our house, the Buick's slow tires agitated the dust which hid beneath the gravel; a column offine red earth hovered above the car, waiting to settle into a patina ofimmobile dust on the car's sleek maroon finish.

After a chorus of door slams, we walked as silently as thieves to the screen door of Miss Mama's.

Miss Mama was usually on the porch, doing something with her hands—shucking corn, snapping peas, twisting bits of string and fabric into something new and useful. Miss Mama would be out in a moment, no matter what business she had to take care of inside. Mississippi in August is no laughing matter,it's so hot that people truly live on their porches. Snot and I fidgeted around the strange man, looking up, up, up at him. He kept looking around the porch as if he expected to meet several of his best friends right then and there. Teddy T and luny started silently hitting each other; that game in which both try not to yell as they pound into each other's flesh with increasing force. Just when Juny was about to break down, we could feel Miss Mama coming on.

And here she comes.

"Miss Mama mis man come heah ta tawk ta YOU!" Snot yells. Snot has two volumes: yell and cry.

"Hush up boy—Teddy T, would you dust him off! Good Lord, he's a dust magnet! Excuse me and my gran'babies—how y'feeling?" she says to the tall statue of a man. He smiles down upon her.

"Just fine, ma'am—I think the heat might take me out, though," says the officer, still smiling and wiping his brow.

"I know that's truth! I says if God had been born in Mississippi in August he wouldn't have rested on that seventh day 'til he made some genuine Saveen EverCool air-conditioners!"

"Yes, Lordy!" chuckles the officer. The way his face warps when he's talking to Miss Mama makes me feel better about him. He seems like someone we might know—as if he was from around here.

"I would invite you inside but our air conditioner hasn't come yet and those big fans don't do nothing but circa-late the hot air..."

"Oh no ma'am,I don't mind being outside, I say you're doing right fine on a porch with a view of God's living room!" he chuckles again.

On and on they talked for what seemed like days. I didn't learn until later that Southerners don't ever really say anything too important. They fill the days with talk and gossip and news so twisted that it, too, becomes gossip. Miss Mama was true Mississippi—she could talk forever about the position of the sun on a certain day or what ratio of ingredients makes the proper chicken salad. But unlike Northerners, Southerners talk to the point when it matters. They might keep you in stores 16 • THE HELMET

forever discussing the virtues of each and every vacuum cleaner, but when there's a wedding or birth or death they kept it short and sweet, chief and brief. Miss Mama talked with the officer pleasantly until he cleared his throat.

"I must get down to brass tacks with you—else it wouldn't be fair. My name is Sergeant Nathaniel Montgomery. I served in Vietnam with your son, Rozzie, you see..." Miss Mama stood there with a tight line drawn on her face. For the first time in my life I realized Miss Mama was small. Tiny, even. The man towered over her with his hat a top his head gleaming spotless and white with blue rope around the neck of the hat. A gold crest stared from the hat's center like a solitary eye. He looked as though he was poured into his uniform, it fit him so well with it's neat sloping corners, the broad expanse of blue cloth was punctuated by a thin brass medal and a column of buttons which seemed to hold the two hemispheres of his body together. When he said that name, I found it hard not to stare at him, not to notice each and every detail about him, his eyes set in his face as though they were searchlights; his painful-looking cheekbones; his mouth thick and heavy and seemingly dedicated to justice ofsome kind or another.

He looks at Teddy T. "He looks just like Rozzie," says the officer to Teddy T. He palms Teddy T's head,"Your father would be proud to see you—such a strong looking boy," says the officer. Now it seems as though not only his hat, but his whole self is gleaming, silently applauding for Teddy T and his "dead father."

I look up at the man who is not even looking at me,I look up at him and learn the unspeakable rage which grows from the union of disappointment and a child's unripe love. I can't help it, I know I will cry, but words come out instead of tears.

"B-B-But, Rozzie is my daddy's name. Ain't it Miss Mama?" I ask.

Miss Mama looks like she's going to cry too, but when Miss Mama cries she looks into the sky, she looks at God and I'm convinced that God looks back down on her, and when tears come to her eyes they.stroll, soft and viscous down her leathery cheeks. When she cries she looks as though she could be angry, but is not; as though she could be sad, but will not.

"Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!" she begins to chant. His heavy hand finds my head and brings it toward her breast. This gesture just makes me cry all the more. I know when Miss Mama does this that things are important.

"Ain't he my daddy?" I ask again,%knowing the answer, but wanting affirmation. I had never even met my father, and maybe because of that, I loved him so much. My mother didn't care about herself nor my father, but I felt that if I could hang onto them both, that maybe they would both come back. That's what little kids think, and only time—the delicate surgeon, can remove these half-formed dreams. I realize this now, but couldn't have known it then.

"Yes, chile, Rozzie was your daddy. We miss him don't we,sweetie," she whispers, hugging me so that I can not even breathe. That is also the first time that I couldn't breathe and almost let myself stop doing it. I would have been so easy to just keep my face pressed against the thin cotton of her dress, never breathing in again.

"Fuck you," I would have said ifI had known then what I know now. I did breathe back in again. I wiped my tears and turned to the officer, Sergeant Montgomery. He looked at me with eyes that were pitiful excuses for sorrow. I was glad that I had single-handedly wrecked his car. Nothing is worse than a girl who spites a big grown man. Two,if you count a father who didn't have the guts to live. I ran outside and up the road.

I didn't come back till dusk. The officer's car was gone. Miss Mama didn't even ask where I had been. I went straight to the bedroom. I didn't want to eat supper. I was going to go to bed without even bathing and no one would stop me.Since I was a girl, I got to sleep in a bed by myself in the same room with Miss Mama.I plopped onto the bed without even turning back the sheets. Staring at me from the head of the bed was a helmet.

THE HELMET • 17

I haven't been to see Miss Mama, Teddy T, Juny and Snot in ages. I'm living with mama again and I don't really give a damn how much she drinks as long as she lets me go out and do my thing. As long as I can be free and do what I want I'll let her rot in the house and do what she wants. I've had this helmet for a while, and I've thought about it some. All I really knew about it was that it was my father's helmet.

It has a huge hole in it, and that can keep one thinking about the possible ways of death forever.

About a month ago I took my money and a Greyhound and tracked down Nathaniel Montgomery, the kid who answered his phone said that he was at his ice-cream shop.

"Are you sure," I asked, "The Nathaniel Montgomery I know was a sergeant."

"Yeah, yeah, it's him," the kid said. It took me several hours with maps and bus schedules to find the place—I got lost a couple oftimes and had to ask bus drivers for more information than they seemed willing to give, but eventually I found it. He had opened up an ice-cream shop with some old lady who—really—had purple hair.

I introduced myself.

"Oh my goodness! You have grown! When I was in Mississippi you were just an itty bitty thang!" He looked at me in that way that men look at women. I looked him straight in the eye with no frills like I do when I play pool with men. I was letting him know that I was here on business. I smiled one of those half-smiles that I inherited from Miss Mama,the kind of half-smile she uses when she's complimenting people who really don't deserve the breathe she wastes on them.

"I guess you want to find out about your father?" he asked me with a smile and a sigh.

"Yeah," I said.

We sat down at a tiny white table outside while some androgynous freak ofnature took over behind the counter. I had mocha chip ice-cream with walnuts on top. He had a cigarette.

He talked everything. He talked about 1975 and about the North Vietnamese bombing the hell out of the Defense Attache Office. Some marines were on duty when the 122MM'S started railing in. Sergeant Montgomery tried to describe the incredible force with which a 122MM can rock a compound. He tried to describe how the North Vietnamese started sending in heavy shit, 130's and above. He talked all about it, how he was glad as hell to be finished with the whole mess, how he can't even watch television anymore, how he cries for no apparent reason.

"Sure I wanted to be out of there, but you can't just say we're going in now we're going out. At least not without saying goodbye to those people. The Vietnamese were nice people, and they were so scared. You just can't imagine. They were so scared they weren't even afraid to die—they were afraid ofliving. When we left outta they tried to cram into the helicopters as many as would fit. Helicopters, planes, One time, when a bunch left Tan Son Hut—and I will never forget this—it was leaving the roof, it blades just clattering, chopping the air, and there were people hanging off, still scrambling to get in—are you listening?"

"Of course I'm listening!"

"Well—when that bird left, there was a chain of Vietnamese people, hanging on, like they were a human ladder to the ground or something. American's got on first, of course, then came the Vietnamese. Like I said, they weren't afraid to die, some got in the chopper and some kept getting in; I couldn't understand it—the helicopter had to have been chopping air mighty big because it was blowing shit in our faces below just from the pure force of it. Some Vietnamese on the ground were crying, but most were just staring at the one's who got away slowing making their way in, like tiny ants, into the bird. We stared for what seemed like hours, but must have been just seconds, and the last one, the last one hanging on, didn't make it. He looked like he was going to, but he just seemed to be caught by a hand of air. All I remember is him like a balloon in the air for what seemed like eternity. For a while no one said anything, then a tiny Vietnamese woman broke the silence as smooth as a leaf falling on water.

"Spiders who walk on clouds have their webs made in heaven"—that's what the woman said in soft, broken English.

18 • THE HELMET

I tell you this story months after I saw Sergeant. I am on the Greyhound bus, pregnant, about to start my life over again in a different city, a different state. I am heading north now, maybe west later. I'm headed for as long as I can on exactly one hundred bucks. Then I'll work and save some more money and go ride the bus some more and go live some more. I'm about to go into the bus bathroom. When the old man lets me out we have to squirm for a little while because of his "old knees" but I finally get out and I use the bus bathroom and I am thinking as I brace myself against the wall of the moving bus—I am thinking of what I might look like when I return. I know the old man's eyes will be full of pity and he will smile one of those sympathetic smiles and he might say to me that I should get some help. You yourself might say that I should go back to live with Miss Mama and all those wasps and all that dust. You might say that I should go back and help my mother get on with her life. You might say to yourself that I'm Another Unwed Pregnant Black Teenager, throwing her life away. And I laugh as I think of my impossible belly growing bigger than a basketball, bigger than this helmet that I held in my lap.

It took me a while at the ice-cream shop that day to realize that Sergeant Nathaniel Montgomery hadn't mentioned a damn word about my father. None of the things he mentioned explained the helmet and the big hole in it. I thought he was just talking shit. But I was determined to find out the details of my father's death. He invited me to his house and I met his kid.

"Our youngest," he said. I nodded to the youngest. The youngest shook my hand like he was trained to do so, then went back to whatever video game he was playing.

Sergeant Montgomery lead me into the kitchen where he began beating the shit out ofsome poor red cut of meat just removed from it's styrofoam tray.

"Tenderizing," he said. I nodded.

"I think about you all the time," he says as he bangs on the meat. I cringe. "I think about that day I just ignored you—I just didn't realize that Roz might have a daughter until it was too late. Your father had talked about a son he had, but I didn't remember him talking about a daughter."

"Yeah, well, I guess you couldn't help it," I say. He puts down the meat tenderizer and wipes his hands on a dish towel.

"I sorry," he says,"I'm so, so sorry," his Adam's apple bobs up and down and his chest rises and falls. He begins to speak in the hushed tones of a desperate person.

"I want to protect you. That's what war makes you want to do. You grow sick of blowing shit up. You want to kiss everything small and delicate. You want to hold everything close to you."

"That's a bunch of bullshit," I said to him. He looked at me as if he wants to deny it, but hasn't the strength. Even though I thought it was bullshit, I had done enough in saying that I thought it was bullshit. Whatever else came could be bullshit, too— 1 didn't care—I just wanted it to be known that I took him for what he was: a sensitive war-stricken bull-shitter.

His six feet five-and-growing frame is bearing down over my small one. I inhale.

I can smell the meat and paprika all over him.

I knew that he had a wife and I knew that I could get pregnant. We had condoms for a while but we ran out. If you asked me at the time why did I do it, I wouldn't have known what to say. But it takes time to realize that your life is set in a certain way, and you can change some things, but you can't change them all. Some things you do just because that's the way you are going to do them and that's they way it has to be. I guess whenever I fucked anyone, they left me. So I may have figured, way deep down, that fucking Sergeant would get him the hell out of my life. Fuck him out of my life.

But you see, it didn't work. He still hadn't told me everything I needed to know about my father, so I couldn't let him leave. And I myself couldn't leave. Not then.

So I stuck around till afterward. I guess I was making a mistake by doing it and I guess I helped him make the mistake of cheating on his wife. I laugh at how little sense it all makes—like everything else. I laugh as I brace myself against the GreyTHE HELMET • 19

hound bathroom wall. I have decided that stories do not have to be exceptional to justify their telling, they just have to be able to hold against the strain of bathroom bus walls. They must have a sort of motion that coincides with how we move and roll along while we tell the story, while we live it out. The telling has to be appropriate to the way the story wants to go: sometimes it's long and drawn out, sometimes it's full of fits and starts.

I had come on business and my business wasn't finished yet. After we had sex, I grabbed Sergeant's flaccid penis and demanded that he tell me about the helmet, and what the hell it had to do with my father.

"Stop! Let go!" he yelled.

"Tell me!"

"I'm not trying to hide anything just-00000!"

"Well spit it out!"

"I already told you!"

"Like hell!" I squeezed harder.

"O00000000!"

"I'm bigger than—Ow! Ow! Owwwww! Leggo and I'll tell you! LET GO!" Reluctantly, I let go.

"Shit," he sighs and fans his penis. He's sweating. "It was that day, the one I was telling you about. Remember? The woman who said "spiders of the clouds have their webs made for them in heaven?"

"Yeah. And?" "That was your father she was talking about. It was funny that she should say that—she didn't even know your father—or at least I don't think she did—but the deal was that we used to call Roz 'Spider Man'. He was so damn thin, but he had muscles. He could climb anything, I guess that's what made him think he could be the last one to get on the helicopter.

"Wait. I thought Americans went first? Why did he get on last?"

"Because he was Spider Man. He always showed off. He was always climbing shit like he was some gorilla or something. I says to Spider Man one time, I says 'Spidey, you can't be Spider Man for fun—this is a damn war,' says I,'this is a damn war!"

I can't tell ifSergeant is crying or not. His wife could come in any second. His kid could come in for a goodnight hug. And still my father is dead.

"So Spider Man says to me before he goes up, he says 'I may be Spider Man,but I'm also a gentleman. I'm an American just like a white man but those is women and children.I don't car' ifthey're Vietnamese,those is women and children and I'm a goddamn nigger gentleman from Sugar Flats, Mississippi!" and he just whooped and hollered and I whooped and hollered with him.I guess I fancied myselfa nigger gentleman from Nashville, Tennessee. But your father was the real hero. Much more than a gentleman.

Gentlemen lead honorable lives. Heroes lead themselves to honorable deaths."

He stopped for a while and looked like he might be looking at me. I checked the air for traces of bullshit. I couldn't tell as of yet. He continued.

"Before I knew it he was up there and all the ones on the ground were either cheering or crying. I was trying to tell them to shut-up, but I didn't know the Vietnamese word for "shut-up" and I didn't know if they would listen to me being more like a large animal than a person to these people,so I just gave up. That's when everything got quite for a while. All you could hear were those brilliant steel blades chopping the air, making all the trees spray their heavy fronds in waves and waves of green white light."

Sergeant sighed. He cleared his throat and began again.

"When we found him...mm-hmm...all you you could see was that helmet. It had that big hole in it when we found it. His head had sprayed out ofthat thing. I'm sorry, baby... I'm sorry and I'm a sorry man." He was crying and sobbing, enveloping me like I was as small and as dear as a long lost childhood toy. Maybe that's what I was for him. He didn't stop crying for a long time, and I just remember thinking that if his wife came in right then, I wouldn't care at all. His cries seemed to lift themselves into the air like balloons. I was convinced that those cries could lift us up too; I had the feeling that those man-sized cries would lift us right out ofthat room if they had to."

20 • THE HELMET

I flush the gurgling blue liquid in the toilet, and I'm still laughing like crazy.

That's probably what they all think I am. They can probably hear me all the way out there in their seats. That cowboy in the last row with the fish tackle on his hat along with the "Fuck NYC" pin is probably coming in to rescue me from my own laughter. And they're all just waiting for me to return. The old man is sitting there with his breath making a mist on the hard cold glass in the deep dark night.

There were nights when I prayed all those old Pentecostal prayers while mama snored off a fifth, her head tilted with a pillow so she would not choke when she vomited in her sleep. For me, praying was not a matter involving God at all, it was a matter involving me—me and my memory. I prayed for Mississippi, the whole land in whose dust I seemed to be free, those summers in which I rejoiced getting the shit beat out of me by Teddy T, Juny and Snot. I prayed for that whole part of me, prayed that it hadn't died while wiping the milk off mama's face. I tried to believe that the warm drunken skin leaning against my own was Miss Mama's, her being forcing breath through my nostrils and peace through my hot brain. I prayed until I forgot how praying was done. And soon after I forgot what I was praying for in the first place.

I am still laughing in the hollow box toilet of the Greyhound bus, bracing myself against the walls, letting the helmet rest in the tiny washbasin. It's funny how you can become attached to objects. You are probably feeling sorry for me as I hold onto my father's helmet. It reminds you ofthe size ofmy belly. People who love objects loved people once.I love this helmet. I stick my finger through the jagged hole as if! could somehow push myself through the helmet's hole; into some other life. I try to think of what it must have been like to be my father. Spider Man. Mama says that all men, good or bad, are destined to turn out bad in the end. She was glad that he died. Did she know he would die a hero? Did he know? Or was he just being a stupid self-deluding country boy who believed he could climb, spider-like, into an ascending helicopter?

I grate my finger back and forth along the hole's jagged edge. I have done this so often that my finger has bled and developed into a massy scab. Then I begin again, scraping my scabbed finger in the hole over and over again, tearing away the old hardness and freshening the wounds. It's just this thing I do.

I am thinking about good deaths and bad deaths; thinking about my mother and my father and where things go wrong, wondering if things ever go right, or just various shades of wrong. I hold my head in my hands with one smarting finger and her image pacing about like some feline creature, that pale suicidal girl at the "Chips!

Chips! Chips!" machine. She is a prowling cat, licking her wounds, babbling about the Chinese and the Eskimos and other pretty ways to die; holding her cheap cigarettes in swinging arcs, tracing and shadowing the outlines of blood and destiny in her careless trails ofsmoke.

THE: HELMET • 21

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The Yale Literary Magazine • 33

"All That Brick & All That Gothic" Re-reading 6o's radicalism through the Yale Literary Magazine

Andrew R. Rossi

THE SIXTIES RE-VISITED: INTRODUCTION

Black power, student pride, be-bop and the Beatles. The New Left, SDS, the Beats and the Black Panthers. Ginsberg, Olson, Hayden and Hoffman. Why do so many critical narratives concerning sixties' radicalism begin with a mantra of loaded yet indecipherable titles?

Recent events and personalities seem to manifest themselves in flagrant disregard of possible origins or likely outcomes;they are eruptions ofan affective enthusiasm that evades explanation and classification. We give these events names or dates that function as rigid designators to mark the very fact that we cannot determine their historical significance. These names evoke a political discussion in order to invent the criteria by which the events may be processed.

The voices of oppositional groups and figures from the sixties still resonate with idealistic fervor and mythological authority, even if, thirty years later, theoreticians struggle to package them into neat ontologies. Yet nostalgia and myth provide little insight. Furthermore, dialectical discourse fails to produce trustworthy explanations precisely because the subject of our research concerns the radical. For the radical, which is engaged in a struggle against dominant cultural values and established socio-political structures, denies canonical methodologies of investigation or categorization. Radical history itself seems an oxymoron.

Or does it? Amidst the cultural debris left over from radical transformations of the sixties, we find a window into sixties history that complicates reductive and nostalgic recollection without negating narrative analysis. Enter the nation's oldest literary review, the Yale Literaty Magazine, established in 1836.

From 1959 to 1969, editorial columns in the Yale Literary Magazine radically criticized the conflicting forces of a university that preached egalitarianism yet functioned by elitism. Nevertheless, the Yale Literary Magazine was politically provocative only through mainstream cultural polemics considered 'safe' within the university. The distinction between high and low art, perpetuated by university tradition and the academic canon, precluded the radicalization of this periodical. Indeed, the Yale Literary Magazine discovered it most political voice as a commodity subject to the dominant values of a consumer market formed by students whose tastes increasingly matched those of a 'counter-cultural mass culture'. Once the magazine's readership and profits were threatened, the editors pursued aesthetic and ideological directions that were radical only by the conservative standards of the intellectual enclave that controlled the magazine in the past. Within its historical context, then, the example of the Yale Literary Magazine suggests that radical voices of the 1960'5 were subject to de-politicization within a consumer culture that the profit-seeking elite dominated.

GOD AND MAN AT YALE: HEGEMONY THROUGH HIGH & LOW

William F. Buckley's ('51) essay on academic freedom, God and Man at Yale, describes the hegemony that limited the Yale Literary Magazine's opposition to dominant values and political views. Arguing against the Keynesian economic theories that a professor expounded in class, Buckley writes that he and his fellow classmates supported the expulsion of this potentially Marxist professor; because, ...the faculty of Yale is morally and constitutionally responsible to the trustees of Yale, who are in turn responsible to the alumni, and thus duty bound to transmit to their student the wisdom, insight and value judgements which in the trustees' opinion will enable the American citizen to make the optimum adjustment to the community and to the world.'

34 •

ALL. THAT BRICK & Al.!. THAT GOTHIC

The traditions of the past, perpetuated through trustees' assessments of alumni standards, controlled opinion within the university. This conservative political climate that governed the university and influenced Buckley's book, published in 1951, continued to pervade Yale during the sixties, when other colleges tolerated liberal views. Indeed, Paul Booth, Students for a Democratic Society (sps) member and Swathmore graduate recalls that Yale and Buckley's stance was so rigid and outdated that—in contrast to young SDS leader Tom Hayden—Buckley seemed to be speaking a different language. Booth is quoted as stating, I remember one evening that William Buckley spoke outdoors in a driveway.

Tom Hayden got into an argument with him... And Buckley said,'The trouble with you liberals is that you have no eschatology.' I don't remember what else was said; I went running around trying to figure out what the hell an eschatology was.2

As an elitist ivy league institution with even stricter standards than other elite colleges such as Swathmore, Yale functioned as a bastion of high culture as well as a paladin ofconservative politics.

AN AVANT-GARDE BUT A-POLITICAL YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

In the early sixties, the Yale Literary Magazine re-assessed its ideological priorities to reflect a radical aesthetic. Simultaneously, participants of the New Left organized activist programs based in a Socialist attack on republican government and institutional education. However, the Yale Lit's radicalism was artistic and attacked mass culture in a reactionary defense of the high culture of the avant garde. Politically, the editors of the Yale Literary Magazine disdained popular reform movements; and, ideologically, their elitist artistic views opposed the New Left's (particularly sps') goal of'participatory democracy'. The Lit sought to fashion an avant-garde and thus high, anti-mass culture aesthetic.They had no intention of forging a political art with democratic—much less socialist—principles at its roots.

As early as 1961, Gabor Peterdi lamented the decline of critical perspective in his essay,"Humanism and Hucksterism in Contemporary Art." The student wrote of sixties art, "Acceptance, but on what terms? Art suddenly is being turned into mass entertainment and big business... Art is not self-expression nor propagandizing...Art is always a search for order."3 By 1964, perhaps influenced by the New Left, the Yale Lit's vanguards of high culture used Marxist language to assail the "machinery ofthe mass." Much like "Humanism and Hucksterism,: Rockstraw Downes'essay, "Culture and Anarchy" decries the acceptance of popular art not guided by the search for order" that Peterdi defended. Indeed, Downes' wrote, "The use of a clear and defined tradition is seen to allow the author depths and precisions of meaning,not available to the experimental poet." Yet Downes consistently couches this conservative stance in the terminology of a radical cultural critique that could have been authored by C. Wright Mills. Downes'defense oftradition was articulated so as to allay radical's fears when he wrote, "In the case ofthe suburbs ofculture we observe immunization by saturation. But in the so-called cultivated audience of art, there is a regrettable tendency toward the suspension ofjudgement."4 Within the same volume, Sheldon Nodelman's "Truth and Circumstances" follows Downes essay with an even more scathing review of popular culture that strikes at a capitalist art world which encourages competition to increase the supply and demand of literature. Nodelman's perspective seems more appropriate to a Marxist conspiracy theory rather than a critique on aesthetics when he declares that, Inevitably the entire spectrum of human relations is being transformed on the model and in conformity with the the demand of serial production. A,great industry has arisen which employs the most sophisticated techniques of psychological warfare to condition ever new needs for the consumption of objects...

Fortified in the ivy citadel ofthe university, the academic is accustomed to look down upon these manifestations.., but, as a scholar, it is his business to produce—books, articles... Publish or perish.5

ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC •

35

Yet Nodelman does not fear 'conformity' as the tool of an economic and cultural elite, nor does he lament consumerism's "psychological warfare" as dismepowering common citizens (as New Left critics would). Instead, Nodelman uses Mill-ian terminology to decry the subjection ofacademia to this capitalist system that should only exploit the uneducated masses while the academic "looks down upon these manifestations." Nodelman defends the distinction between high and low culture not only to separate elite and popular art but also to create a social gap between high and low classes that is large enough to keep academics in the "ivy citadel." Despite their similar language then, Nodelman and the New Left share no ideological beliefs; rather, they are diametrically opposed.

Compared to the tenets of the New Left, the Yale Lit's Philosophy clearly communicates a conservative and anti-activist political message. In a 1961 editorial, Lit chairman Kevin O'Sullivan romantically philosophized that the magazine ...[is] an attempt to move in the direction which may generate out ofitself wideranging explorations and clarifications ofthe possibilities of life. Such a state of things is...political action and social criticism of the most radical kind."6

Lest the Lit mistake its humanistic pursuit to clarify the "possibilities oflife" as politics "of the most radical kind," Staughton Lynd provides a precise description of radical politics as the activism that conceptually structures the New Left. To Lynd, ...the commitment to action, in the knowledge that the consequences of action can never be fully predicted in advance, has survived all changes in political fashion and remains the single most characteristic element in the thoughtworld of the New Left?

As a periodical experimenting with avant-garde conceptions of mass culture that ultimately supported high art, the Yale Literary Magazine did not approach any attempt at the action which constitutes New Left radicalism. Simply by virtue of its representation in a verbal rather than a visual or spectacular text, the Yale Lit limited its audience to an elite few; because, as Minister of Defense for the Black Panthers, Huey Newton explains,"The majority of black people are either illiterate or semi-literate. They don't read. They need activity to follow."8 Thus the Yale Literary Magazine was structurally incapable of wide-ranging political influence.

Despite their experimentation with an avant-garde aesthetic, editors of the Yale Literary Magazine believed that New Left activism contradicted an intellectual's high art values. Edward Muller, Lit chairman from 1964-65, clearly outlined the double standard which informed dominant values governing both the university and the magazine. The ideal student would scorn mass culture and refrain from political action in order to defend high culture; because, "The struggles and privations of the artist should neither become the realism ofextensive social reform nor the stuff of public idol [or low culture] worship."9 The politically charged social criticisms of Peterdi, Nodelman and O'Sullivan may seem to contradict the chairman's philosophy. However, in a recent interview, Muller explained that the radical edge to these writers' critiques was intended to have aesthetic rather than political impact.

Although the Lit's new ideology was informed by an avant-garde provocativeness, this aesthetic was not political per se. Muller stated while interviewed, The view of the Yale Lit previously was that it was a subsidiary, low decibel part ofthe mainstream... We wanted to be more innovative and provocative, to touch on larger issues... Definitely, we felt that there was a turning point in American culture, and we wanted to reflect and express it and our views both for and against it in a literary sense. But we weren't trying to use the magazine as a political pulpit. We were not a New Left group... I mean, we were committed to reforms like everyone else, but we were working through existing democratic structures unlike the later New Left revolutionaries whom we were skeptical of.'°

Thus, as Muller confirms, the Yale Literary Magazine opposed dominant values only by experimenting with aesthetics that ultimately called for the values of high culture already pervading the university.

36 •

Al]. THAT BRICK & ALI. THAT GOTHIC

THE LIT & THE BEATS: RADICAL MEANS, CONSERVATIVE MESSAGE

While the Yale Literaty Magazine's critique of mass culture affirmed the dominant values ofthe university, the editors' celebration of Beat poetry presented a more complex calculus. In publishing the works of Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson and praising the writing of William Borroughs and Jack Kerouac, the late sixties editors of the Lit gravely challenged the canonical standards that previous editors expounded. However, beyond their seemingly low poetic techniques, Beat writers presented an indictment of middle-class careerism which the Yale Literary Magazine appropriated as a defense of the avant-garde intellectual rather than a call to working class toughness within the counter culture. Moreover, as devotees of the Beat aesthetic nearly a decade after its peak, Yale Lit editors qualified more as beatniks rather than radical poets. Indeed, the Yale Literary Magazine's identification with the Beats was ultimately a defense ofthe privileged intellectual who would never sacrifice the comforts ofacademic life for hand-to-mouth living "on the road."

The Lit acknowledged that Beat poetry was a radical break from traditional form. Yet the editors embraced the genre's social awareness and believed that the true reason the literature received scorn was due to its "realistic" view of mass culture—a view they ultimately appropriated as a rationale for the intellectual avantgarde. In a 1965 issue that published works from Ginsberg and Olson, professional poet Robert Creely presented an essay entitled "Statement" which functioned much like a manifesto for the Yale Literary Magazine's new identification with the Beats. The author warns early on that the absence of narrative line and the improvisation which Beats employ requires that "The usual vocabulary will not be of much use in trying to locate the character of writing we have now come to." However, Creely suggests that the poetry's unconventionaljorni is not the real cause for negative appraisals ofBeat literature. Instead, Creely proposes that the writing's content is most disturbing to the reader. He writes,"What has been criticized as a loss of coherence in contemporary American prose—specifically that of Borroughs and Kerouac—has been rather, evidence of this character of the real." Although Creely employs cryptic language to describe the 'real' substance which the Beats treat, he simply appreciates the poets' social awareness. Describing "material things" and critically assessing "the accumulations of life that wear us out— clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts," Beat poetry's low themes are more shocking than their radical forms. Creely exhorts his audience ofstudent writers to inform their own work with this cultural relevancy and "consciousness of space," because it breaks the conventions set by mass culture and thus appeals to a radical (and elite) avant-garde. Creely explains, That undertaking most useful to writing as an art, for us, should be the attempt to sound in the nature oflanguage those particulars oftime and place of which one is a given instance, equally present...The most severe argument we can offer against the 'value ofsome thing or act, is that it is not real, that it has no given place in what our world has either chosen or been forced to admit. So it is the condition of reality which becomes our greatest concern.'3

So that the Yale Literary Magazine would occupy a 'real' "place in what our world has either chosen or been forced to admit," subsequent editors of the Lit encouraged provocative writing that would keep the magazine away from the 'coffee tables' of its readers. Indeed, in a 1966 editorial, the magazine's chairman advocated the Beat perspective not as a radical, counter cultural voice which could alienate readers with its low standards of mass culture. Instead, the editor viewed Beat writing as art that would "burn with vitality" and attract the new Yale intellectual who, affecting the avant-garde pose, could "never have it said that the Yale Literary Magazine sat polite, inconspicuous on a coffe table."4 Despite its radical form then, Beat poetry offered the magazine and aesthetic that perpetuated the high avant-garde values of a burgeoning intellectual enclave within the university. Thus, appropriated by Yale and the Yale Lit, the works of the Beats lost their role as anti-establishment.

ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC •

37

The Beat's "on the road" philosophy also attracted the editors of the Yale Literary Magazine. However, they identified with the Beat attack on middle class life as a defense ofthe intellectual in the "ivy citadel" that stands above the masses rather than (as it was intended) a celebration of the low class worker whose income and lifestyle place him socially beneath the middle class. Thus the radicalism of the Beat's tough, blue collar values was lost when the intellectual aristocracy of the Yale Lit used the Beat voice. In The Hearts of Men,Barbara Ehrenreich explains that the mystique of the Beats lay in their social position outside of mass culture which afforded a critical perspective on the mainstream. Ehrenreich writes that, "Men looked to Beats for a vision of themselves... [Beats supplied] a critical vantage point from which it might be possible to judge what something 'really means."5 Thus, to the editors of the Yale Lit, who enjoyed the rarefied life of the intellectual in denial ofthe middle class, the Beats offered a pose from which to scorn the man of mass culture. If those on the Lit felt helpless because, as one editor wrote,"Today even the bright-boys jump for a middle rung on the horizontal political-corporate ladder; the office, steeple, nice little wife tedium circuit,"16 they did not have to worry. Because, as Ehrenreich explains, "In the Beat, the two strands of male protest— one directed against the white collar work world and the other against the suburbanized family life that work was supposed to support—come together."7 The editors' frustration with the typical male role found an outlet in the Beats whose radical values contextualized themselves within a larger "male protest."

The Yale Literary Magazine's version of the Beat philosophy proposed no rebellion.

Rather, the Lit supported the Beat critique offamily life in service ofthe university intellectuals. This defense of their elite position in the upper class ultimately protected the establishment. In contrast, the true Beat ideology had radical origins and implications because it opposed mass culture in service of "on the road" values common to the lower classes. Although their aesthetic was malleable, the Beats would never see their philosophy(if their various ideas could even be so organized) expounded by ivy league editors. Indeed, as Ehrenreich states, The new bohemianism of the Beats came from somewhere else entirely. from an underworld and an underclass invisible from the corporate 'crystal palace' or suburban dream houses... Dropping out from their own mostly lower class backgrounds, they worked, when they worked at all, as manual laborers, seamen or railway workers, and hung out in a demimonde inhabited by drifters, junkies, male prostitutes, thieves, would-be-poets and actual musicians.18

Simply by holding a steady job on a magazine—within a university no less—the editors of the Yale Lit—despite their agreement with the criticism of mass culture—could not truly adhere to the radical values of the Beats.

Moreover, by celebrating the Beat aesthetic when time had already worn Ginsberg's black turtleneck and shaggy beard into a cliché, the Yale Literary Magazine was able to explore the radicalism of Beat perspectives without denying their readers the luxuries of consumer culture which ivy league privilege afforded. Several years before the Lit embraced Burroughs and Kerouac, Lye magazine had exposed the Beat devotee, the Beatnik, as an imposter participating in the counter culture only by vicarious imitation. Beyond their pretense, those who co-opted the Beat aesthetic— like the editors of the Yale Lit—declined the austere life that denied access to the consumer market. As Ehrenreich states in her explanation of the 1959 spread in Lye, 14-e's Beatnik, portrayed wearing 'sandals, chinos and turtleneck sweater'...as the caption explains, is just a consumer like anyone else, a conformist defined by his own commodity ensemble.'9

In order to appreciate consumerist temptations, Lit editors had to substitute the Beat's hard edge with the soft and self-indulgent character of the hippy, while still maintaining the intellectual radicalism of their new avant-garde. Being tough required repression and "unsatisfied appetites," so in editorials like that of the 1967 Alumni writing issue, the chairman of the Yale Lit discredited stereotypical masculinity as inappropriate for the Yale student. The chairman wrote, 38 •

ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC

There are all kinds at Yale, embodying different life styles, pursuing different ambitions... But the world of the Regular Guy. the Good Guy, the Sure Guy and the Cool Guy is not easily [the Yalies'] world. He tends to be intense where others are casual, a little tender, perhaps, where others are han!2°

Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America and professor at Yale in the late sixties, similarly lamented that the academic, alienated from mass culture and forced to uphold a stereotypical male self-image, was traditionally unable to revel in consumer luxuries. Amidst the 'tender' atmosphere of Yale, however, Reich's "great realization was that," as Ehrenreich reports, "it was no longer necessary for the middle-class white collar man to be a voyeur in the supermarket."21 Ehrenreich suggests that Reich's realization occurred to counter cultural leaders beyond the ivy covered walls ofthe Yale campus. She proposes that the sixties witnessed a turning point in which the hegemony ofa consumer culture overwhelmed all sectors ofthe capitalist society—the 'masses' and the university's intellectual enclave alike."Never had the consumer culture been more congenial to men, more tempting,so that if there was a time to drop out, to abandon work and the material privileges of the middle-class, this was not it.... Inevitably—the consumer culture ended by affirming the middle-class, materialistic culture it had set out to refute."22 Despite their attempts to identify with the radical ideology of the New Left and the anticanonical aesthetics of the Beats, the Yale Literary Magazine's avant-garde pose ultimately accelerated the periodical's commodification.

SUCCUMBING TO CONSUMER DEMAND: BLACK WORDS & RADICAL CHIC

For seven years Lit editors explored radical aesthetics in order to maintain the Yale Literary Magazine as a vanguard of high culture. But by the late sixties, financial constraints were more important than intellectual prejudices. A dwindling readership and decreasing profits forced the editors to recognize that the Yale Lit's pretenses as an avant-garde publication did not insulate it from any other commodity's dependence on consumer tastes and demand. The late 6o'sYale student required the periodical to exhibit greater relevancy to popular culture and political issues. As the Yale Literary Magazine changed to treat mainstream concerns, its focus on high art shifted toward the low mass culture, and its radical aesthetic became an appropriation of popular trends rather than a provocative political statement. Thus, when the editors of 1969 published a Black Words issue, the Lit was participating more directly in 'radical chic'(see Wolfc's "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's") rather than in the Civil Rights Movement. Ironically, when the Yale Literary Magazine was most integrated into consumer culture, the editors, by engaging in a fashionable polemic on race and poverty, made their most radical statement within the university.

As Charles Reich had discovered, Yale students no longer felt alienated from the consumer culture when the hippy lifestyle reached peak popularity. On the contrary, intellectual 'goods and services' were being judged by the same market standards used to choose products in a supermarket. In the sixties, the Yale Literaty Magazine changed from an intellectual staple regularly purchased and esteemed by academics into a commodity vulnerable to competition from other publications and leisure goods. In a 1968 editorial, Lit chairman Alan Mendyl described the changing market for journalism at Yale as a shift in students' intellectual priorities.

Mendyl writes,"The 1967-68 academic year marked what might be described as a 'renaissance' in student journalism... The thinking of Yale students has changed, and this change is being reflected in new kinds of publications."23 Twenty-five years later, Mendyl recalls the magazine's status in the volatile periodical market with a more realistic appreciation of the economic forces at work. In a recent interview, Mendyl re-interpreted his editorial: in Ely terms, the };//e Lit, based on its history, was no longer relevant. People were preoccupied with what was going on politically, social changes. Vietnam and what ellect these had on them personally. The magazine was never a political venue, hut it, at the very least, needed to express student's cultural concerns....

ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC •

39

I

I I , ;.111 N10i/.111c

ci

0 TTYJ MILd o

We wanted to bring 'power to the students', not to have a forum for people [professional writers] who were already famous, because we didn't have enough money to publish a magazine that was purchased only by a few professional contributors. The Lit had to sell on rampus.24

The editors realized that, low or not, a new, more profitable aesthetic was necessary if the Yak Lit was to remain competitive on the journalism market.

In the move toward a more relevant and profitable periodical, the Yale Literary Magazine acquired a bold look and a more egalitarian artistic philosophy. Indeed, for the issue in which Mendyl commented on the change in student opinions and publications, a provocative photo of a nude woman's back graced the magazine's cover. In contrast to previous Yale Lits which traditionally pictured an ink drawing of the publication's 1836 founder—complete with white whig and tights—the nude photo was a brazen and titillating change. In a recent interview, Mendyl said of the issue,"I remember being in college dining halls to sell the magazine and getting double takes from freshmen. The issue attracted a lot more interest, because previously we had been so much more conservative in our approach."25 Inside, the magazine's content was also transformed to reflect the new aesthetic that embraced the "vital" expressions of popular culture. Thus in 1967, the Lit presented a Beatles issue which published cartoon stills and excerpts of dialogue from the Beatles' film The Yellow Submarine. Through classics professor Erich Segal, who wrote the movie's screenplay, Lit editors acquired graphics whose psychedelic-camp aesthetic served as the thematic base for the issue. Anticipating the magazine's popularity, the editors promised more of the same in Yale Lits to come; their editorial column reads: "We feel this issue is a statement of our future aesthetic objectives and goals. It is our ambition to supplement the outstanding creative writing from the Yale community with a survey of what is current and vital in the arts today."26 If the Beatles' Yellow Submarine offered a cultural paradigm for the Yale Literary Magazine, then the editors explicitly denied the magazine's previous high culture pretenses.As the Lit chairman explained, the Beatles' film was not just a promising commodity but also an attack on intellectual enclaves like that which had governed the Yale Lit just a few years earlier. The chairman writes,"In parodying themselves, the Beatles of course are parodying us—our insistence on intellectualization, our plodding and frequently barren profundity. If the Beatles have a platform, a message, it is for simplicity."27 Thus the new Yale Literary Magazine looked to avoid "barren profundity" and score a big profit.

In the midst of the political turmoil that ravaged the nation during the late sixties, Yale students further demanded outlets to express solidarity with or opposition to political movements such as that led by the Black Panthers. Indeed, the Panthers, based in New Haven, were the topic of much campus debate which was recorded weekly in the Yale Daily News beginning in 1969 until long after May Day, when Black Panther rallies on the New Haven Green left several stores on Chapel Street, only a block away from campus, burned down to the ground (see Yale Daily News issues from 1967 to 1971—particularly the May Day issue, May 5, 1970). So that the Yale Literary Magazine would not appear ignorant of the heated political discourse raging on campus, the editors added their insights to the dialogue. 1968 Lit chairman wrote,"The days of the old boola-boola good times are passing: when a Yale student does have time to spare, he prefers to spend it on organizations.., like the civil rights community projects, all of which set themselves a purpose."28 Though the voice of African American protest was particularly relevant to Yale—with its immediate exposure to the Black Panthers—the Yale Literary Magazine identified with the "Black aesthetic,"29 as they termed it, to express the broader counter culture and radical values that could attract political students supporting any cause. KobeMercer provides a useful explanation of white's appropriation of black culture with a thesis that politically complicates the exotic primitive fetish. In her view, the "White Negro" politically identifies with the oppressed African American not because of a passionate belief in civil rights per se. Instead, the "White Negro" seeks a reductive symbol for his opposition to dominant values in genera1.3" With the pub40 • ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC

lication of a Black Words issue celebrating the "Black aesthetic" in the poetry of African American authors, the Yale Literary Magazine fits into what Mercer describes as "this context of displacement, in the literary bohemia of the 'underground' and in vernacular youth subcultures of the time,[where] we see the appropriation and articulation of black signs as an iconic element in the cultural expression of oppositional identities within white society."31 However, the white editors of Black Words emphasized their attempt to not present a paternalistic view of African American literature. Moreover, in the essay "Black Writing IfIt Is Not Going to Disappear," African American student Larry Thompson writes passionately in support of black literature that does not cater to white tastes." The author declares, Black writing if it is not going to disappear, must address itself to the needs and wants and aspirations of Black people. The only way for Black writing to do this is to create myths, symbols and heroes that Black people can identify with. It must be revolutionary in all ofits aspects. It can no longer compromise and invent a view of Black life which is false so it can appeal to a white consciousness and Black writers must understand why this is necessary. It is necessary for suRvivAU32

Nevertheless, in the context of a magazine with traditionally white contributors and readers, Black Words was most likely not received as revolutionary literature but as 'radical chic' instead. By publishing and reading African American poetry the editors and subscribers to the Yale Literary Magazine were able to identify with an egalitarianism which, in the late sixties, became popular by virtue of its opposition to the less cultured. Indeed, many Americans would not sit in the same seat as Blacks—much less enjoy reading their literature. Again, in Mercer's view, "The trope of the White Negro erodes an antagonistic subject-position on the part of the white subject in relation to the normative codes of his or her own society."33 Thus when students appreciated Black Words they expressed their opposition to dominant values in general. The Yale Lit capitalized on this "trope of the White Negro" because radicalism had become chic and now helped to sell hard copy.

Ironically, the most radical aspect of Black Words was not its political provocativeness, since radical chic was already in fashion. Rather, the issue broke from the Yale Literary Magazine's past because it had such mainstream appeal; and, as a successful commodity that tripled the Lit's press run in a single month, it violated the tradition of a limited and elitist readership.

ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC CONCLUSION

Nostalgic and de-contextualized analysis of sixties radicalism inevitably exaggerates the oppositional role that institutions such as the Yale Literary Magazine played within mass culture and intellectual enclaves. Yet a history informed by the anticanonical theories of Marxist social and economic theory proves that no organization within a capitalist society can achieve radical reform without revolutionary action and comprehensive structural change. By virtue ofits continued existence as the same periodical founded in 1836—despite all aesthetic and ideological alterations—the Yale Literary Magazine could never fully defy the hegemony of university high and low valuations nor escape the commodity's dependence on consumers.

Sterling history professor Jaroslav Pelikan, author of The Concept of the University Re-examined, member of the Yale corporation, Vice-President of the Yale Press and President-Elect of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a unique perspective on the history and philosophy of higher education, the arts and publishing organizations. Pelikan maintains that even amidst the explosive climate of the sixties, a written journal could never achieve the impact of radical action. In a more elaborate explanation of what Huey Newton described as the root ofthe written word's powerlessness, Pelikan stated in a recent interview that, One sees all that brick and all that gothic, so the critics suppose that all the weight ofthe centuries will support the university against all internal and outside attacks... [However] in the sixties, we learned that the institutions of ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC • 41

:75;;Ic T.itcrary Niagazille • Wilitu

thought are much more fragile than we had supposed... What you put down on paper as a permanent record to continue a dialogue for years to come has a very special function. But, because what is written is printed to be responded to, it does not have the inflammatory effect that rhetoric, which may take immediate effect, does...When it was published in 1898, the Communist Manifesto certainly had a much greater effect than it does now that we have dissected and deconstructed it... You can say inflamatory things in print which do not immediately become incendiary.34 Almost thirty years after their original publication, dissected and deconstructed issues of the Yale Literary Magazine from the 1960's offer the reader provocative aesthetics yet none of the radical change exhibited by New Left politics, Beat poetry and Black power.

NOTES I Buckley, p. 26.

2. Miller, p. 88.

3 Pcterdi, p. 57.

4 Downes, p. 18.

5 Nodelman, p. 27.

6 O'Sullivan, p. ii.

7 Lynd, p. 5.

8 Lynd, p. 6.

9 Muller, p. 5. to Muller, Interview. it Creely, p. 32.

12 Creely, p. 35.

Mendyl, Interview.

Newman. March, p. 3.

Newman. March, p. 3.

Newman. Sept, p. 5.

Thompson. wimeerr rr: p.432.

13 Creely, p. 40.

4 Witty, p. 4.

15 Ehrenreich, p. 64-65. i6 Gilfond, p. 3.

17 Ehrenreich, p. 52. i8 Ehrenreich, p. 55-56.

25 26 27 28 29 30

Ehrenreich, p. 64.

210 9 Lydgate, p. 4.

2t Ehrenreich, p. no.

22 Ehrenreich, p. 114-115.

23 Mendyl, p. 6.

24 Mendyl, Interview.

31 Mercer, 32 Thompson, p. 43.

33 Mercer, p. 435.

34 Pclikan, Interview.

WORKS CONSULTED Buckley, William F. God and Man at Yak: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, Chicago: Henry Regnery Comp., 1951.

Creely, Robert. "Statement." Yak Literary Magazine. 163 vols. to date.

New Haven: Yale Literary Society, April, 1965, vol. 133.

Downes, Rackstraw. "Culture and Anarchy." Yale Littraty Magazine. 16; vols. to date.

New Haven: Yale Literary Society, Spring 1963, vol. 131.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment.

New York: Anchor Books, 1983.

Gilbert, Dave."Consumption: Domestic Imperialism." Long 26-43.

Gilfond, Michael. "Editor's Table." The Yale Literary Magazine. 163 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale Literary Society, Dec. 1962, vol. 131.

Haber, Al. "Getting by with a little Help from our Friends." Long 289-310.

Isserman, Maurice. If I had a Hammer...The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New lift.

New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987.

Kampf, Louis."Notes Toward a Radical Culture." Long 420-435.

Lears, T.J. Jackson. The Concept of Cultural Hegemony. N.p: n.p., n.d.

42 • ALL THAT BRICK & ALL THAT GOTHIC

Long, Priscilla. The New lift: A Collection of Essays. Boston: Horizon Books, 1969.

Lynd, Staughton."Towards a History of the New Left." Long 1-13.

Lydgate, William. "Views." Yale Literary Magazine. 163 vols. to date.

New Haven: Yale Literary society, Sept. 1967, vol. 136.

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Miller, James. Democracy is in The Streets: From Port Huron to the Stige of Chicago.

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Muller, Edward. Interview. New York: n.p., 1993. . "Editor's Table: Literary Criticism and its Audience." Yale Literary Magazine.

163 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale Literary Society, Nov. 1964, vol. 133.

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ALL THAT BRICK & ALI. THAT GOTHIC • 43

_

INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE Despite his disdain for labels, painter and Yale School of Art graduate Chuck Close has been described as a Photorealist—as well as one of the foremost artists ofthe zoth-century.

Bronson van Wyck

YALE LIT:

To what extent, both personally and empirically, do you think art represents reality?

CHUCK CLOSE: What's

more interesting to me than the reality of art is the degree to which art is artificial; for, ofcourse, the word art is in the word artificial. A painting is simultaneously something real—that is, what you're looking at: colored dirt on a flat surface—and at the same time, it transcends its purely physical reality to become greater than the sum of its physical parts.

How then is Realism dyferentfrom Photortalism?

In its literary sense, I see Realism as more ofan attitudinal thing than Romanticism.

I don't really know how to concretely define it in painting. I guess I would tend to use a term like naturalistic, perhaps, or representational, or figurative. And that is, in fact, what these things are. Whether they have anything to do with Realism I guess I would have to leave to the viewer. If the baggage that viewers bring with them when they relate to the painting are things that come from life experiences, then perhaps the art will be something which will seem real. Whereas, if they get to it through art experience, it will probably seem more like artifice.

What about the philosophy of Baudelaire, that photography can only be the tool to a higher art, to true art? Is your photography an end in and of itsejf?

No. It became an end in itself, but it wasn't at first. I only took photographs because they were the most convenient and efficient way to jot down information that wasn't going to change.... If! paint from a model, a model changes. They're happy; they're sad; they gain weight; they lose weight; they're awake, they're asleep; their hair grows long or they cut it off. So a painting that's done from life over an extended period of time becomes a mean average of all the things that have happened to the model, plus all the changes you experienced in your own life while you were relating to the model.... I didn't think of myself as making photographs. I just used it as a kind of sketch pad, in the sense that I jotted down with the camera those things that I thought I would want to deal with when I made the painting. Later I began to make photographs strictly as photographs that I would not make paintings from. And at that point I think I became—to whatever extent I am—a photographer, although I still see myself primarily as a painter who makes photographs for painting.

Sofor you photographs are the means to an end. Does this way of using photographs say anything about photography's ability to stand alone... that photography is perhaps less legitimate as a discipline?

I don't think photography's the least legitimate; I think nothing lies like a photograph, because we believe them so much. We know that a painting is made, so we don't necessarily believe a painting. You can put things together in a painting that weren't ever actually at the same place at the same time. It's interesting now with computer generated images to make really fake photographs and put people and things together that really weren't there. So I don't know how people are going to look at photographic reality in the future when things are capable of being so manipulated with such ease. Photography's also the most difficult discipline. I mean, it's the easiest medium in which to be competent: virtually anybody can be competent, and he can even have an accidental masterpiece. You're not going to have an accidental masterpiece if you're making your first painting. But certainly if you go to a photo processing lab, about one out of every hundred photographs that comes out of the machine is really interesting whether the person knew he was making something interesting or not. But the thing about photography is that... it's the hardest [discipline] to have a personal vision with and to distinguish yourself by making your photographs look different from everyone else's.

Why do you dislike being described as a Photorealist?

Well it's the Realism part that bothers me.... like I said, it's the artificiality that interests me more than the reality.

44 • INTERVIEW: CHUCK

CLOSE

So you're notjust scanning the photograph, making a painting that is as close to a photograph as possible and therefore as close to a reality as possible?

No,I was always trying to make paintings. If they don't make sense as paintings—if they don't hang on the wall with other paintings, then they don't make sense at all.

And a painting isn't made in the same way a photograph is made. Photography's still got a magic. When I go into a darkroom, and I slip a blank sheet of white paper into a tray, and an image comes up... I still can't believe it after all these years. But it happens all at once. A painting gets made a little piece at a time, and the part-to-whole relationships are very different, because it's made; it's built. It's not something that happens because of a chemical reaction, so the conventions and traditions that interest me are the conventions and traditions of building things and slowly making something out of different colors of dirt on a flat surface.

I also think that part of the wholefantastic and magical element ofphotography in your work—and especially the way you use photography to produce a painting—is that you're taking something real which occupies three dimensions and you're ttying to make it into a painting which occupies only two dimensions. If as you said before, paintingfrom a photograph removes the distorting itylurtice on the subject of the time you spend working on the image; and—if we assume that time is thefourth dimension, then what you're doing is using photography to get rid ofthatfourth dimension in order to transform the subjectfrom three dimensions to two.

That's the reason why I like working from photographs. I don't really understand three dimensions very well. I could never be a sculptor. Sculpture occupies real space like we do, and I have a lot oftrouble remembering anything in three dimensions. But once it's translated into two dimensions, then I have an almost photographic memory for being able to remember it. So I gravitated toward painting and photography because they allowed me to work in realms in which I was far more comfortable and where the particular learning disabilities I had weren't so much of a problem.

Tell me about your rareform of dyslexia. I know that you only discovered it in 1985 at a lecture at your daughter's school. Your particular problem gives you photographic recall ofimages even though it inhibits your recognition of them.

Yeah, I've been told that I'm the only case who's not in jail for forgery. When I was at Yale, I forged everything. Once, the head of the campus police was riding his bicycle through one of the parking lots behind the Economic Growth Center. I had about five jobs: I worked at the Law School, I worked at the Economic Growth Center, I worked at the library. I had a studio on Crown Street and I went to school on York Street and Chapel, so I made five parking stickers for my car, but the head ofcampus police knew that even Kingman Brewster only had two stickers. So he was curious as to how I could have five, and he looked at them very closely. I had left out the union printing seal because I thought I might get into trouble for that. He figured out that mine were fake, so he came in to ask whose car it was, and I said that it was mine. He said, "These are very good; I have to give you a lot ofcredit for creativity and invention." So he told me to leave any two I wanted, but to scrape off the other three.

Yeah, the union seal is really important. In the political campaigns I've worked on, they've always made sure to use union printers because f they distributed literature without the seal, the union leadership wouldn't be too happy. What are your politics?

Democratic, left wing.

Did you support Clinton?

Yeah, but I wish he weren't—I wish everybody wasn't—so ashamed of being called liberal. I think the brilliance of Reagan (and there wasn't much, but I give him credit for being brilliant on occasion) was that he made conservative—which up to that point had been a dirty word—something that people were proud to call themselves.

I hate to see people run from anything that doesn't sound like the middle ofthe road.

Has politics entered into your art at all?

INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE •

45

No, not really, except that I'm a political being and people make art; and, if you make art, and if you're a political person, then it probably gets in there somewhere.

In no conscious or overt way.

Were you really close to yourfamily; because, I see your art, and its allfriends and relatives and, lately, other contemporaty artists—which could be another sort °gamily?

Well, I don't do commissioned portraits. I don't want to do college presidents, or the President of Yale.

Or presidents of the United States?

I didn't want to do that. If I did commissioned portraits, you can imagine what the ego would be like ofsomebody who'd want to have a nine-foot picture of himself to hang around the house. They're going to want their nose straightened, and their teeth capped, and their zits removed. And I never wanted to get into that.

Say you're making a painting of a really goodfriend, do you drop the zit?

That's the beauty of it. My friends and family, in an act of extreme generosity, lend me their image, not knowing what I'm going to do with it. They can't complain if they don't like it and they can't remove the zit. It's really something which means a lot to me that they're willing to give me this image, and sometimes I'll use the image for years and years and years, while I'm sure that some of them get tired of seeing it around. The images are often difficult to look at, but that's what I need in order to make paintings. I appreciate the generosity of the people who're my subjects.

Ifyou have a picture ofyour daughter Maggie or ofyour wye, or of somebody who you photographed ten years ago: even though the person is completely different now, would you recycle the old picture now?

Yes, I've made several paintings of my wife from different photographs from different periods of her life. But for some people I just keep using the same photograph...

And the interpretation changes.

Yes, and it's almost more interesting to keep using the same photograph and see what further mileage I can get out of it. I learn something more by moving it some place that it hasn't been before. The fact that the photo stays constant really makes it more clear to me and, perhaps, to the viewer, that the real subject of the painting has changed somehow. But it's the route taken that makes for the experience. It's not just where you're going; it's how you get there. My paintings, if they celebrate anything, celebrate the route. I'll do it one way one time and another way the next time, and on one level it's very simple: the image will look quite the same. But I hope that the experience ofstanding in front ofthe painting, or the drawing, or the print—or whatever it is—is quite different.

How subjective is your interpretation in light ofyour relationship with the subject? Clearly you're going to conic up with a dfferent painting ten years later. But when you're doing yourfirst painting; and, when you're doing a second painting ten orffftern years later, how much ofyourfeeling toward that person comes into the art?

Well, the paintings look more like the people than the photographs,so I'm sure that I'm putting in a lot about what I know about the individuals; but, I don't try to do that particularly.... I care more about people than I care about anything else, and there are potentially as many portraits as there are people out there. I only paint people that I care about. I only paint people that I photograph. I wouldn't work from somebody else's photograph. I try to engineer into the photograph those issues that I'm going to want to deal with on a formal level in the painting. I think the nice thing about the face is that you don't have to editorialize; you don't have to have them crying or laughing. A person's face is a sort of road map of his or her life. So if they've laughed their whole lives then they have laugh lines; if they've smiled a lot, they have other wrinkles. There are things that tell if they've been frowning their whole lives.

So without editorializing—without saying this is a happy person or whatever—cer46 • INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE

tam n stuff just creeps in, because we're used to reading subtly and with great nuance all kinds ofthings on peoples' faces. So I think that becomes automatically part ofthe work without me having to choose it, to underline it or draw arrows or say to my subject,"See, this is what you should be doing."

Have you ever wanted to do a portrait ofsomebot4, who you weren't close to?

Well, not everyone is my closest personal friend, but something about them or their work is important. I first started painting other friends who were artists, but they were very anonymous artists. Later they became famous, after—but not because— I painted them. Many of them became famous and they were no longer quite so anonymous. Lately, as you noted, I've returned to painting my friends who are artists—as that other family. So I started doing portraits of people whose work particularly speaks to me. So, they don't have to necessarily be my closest personal friends, because I feel I have another important relationship with them.

What was your relationship with yourfamily growing up in Washington state?

I was an only child. Both my parents were only children so we had a very small family. My parents were very supportive of the idea of me wanting to be an artist.

Did you knowfrom the beginning?

I thought about it by the age offour. One ofthe very first presents that I asked for for Christmas was an easel. My father bought me an easel. Then I remember going through the Sears&Roebuck catalog. They had genuine artists' oil paints in a wooden box, and I wanted that desperately. I can still remember the smell of those cheap oil paints.... I started studying privately when I was about eight. We came from a real poor white trash family. We were certainly not people ofany financial means.

Were you in Seattle?

Near Seattle, yeah. I came from a mill town where nobody really aspired to do anything. You were a success if you managed to stay out of jail. My mother had been trained as a pianist and the Depression came along and that put an end to any kind of performance career. My father was a sort of jack-of-all-trades: a former electrician, sheet-metal man, whatever.., and an inventor. He invented a lot of stuff. So I grew up in a situation where nobody aspired to be a doctor or lawyer. Of the five hundred people in my graduating class we had no lawyers; we had one doctor and he was a chiropractor. Mostly people worked in warehouses, mills, or at Scott Paper Company, one of the local mills in town where their parents worked. Most of the people I went to high school with are still living in the same town. For some reason, I wanted to get the hell out of there, and I had a lot ofsupport to do it.

At that age were you looking at any particular artist?

In the forties and fifties, most of the painting that I'd ever seen was on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, which all had painted illustrations for covers. I remember as a kid going over these magazines with a magnifying glass trying to figure out how somebody made a painting; because, I really hadn't seen any. I was about eleven when I first went to the Seattle art museum in 1951, and I saw a Jackson Pollock painting. It really outraged me; it challenged everything I thought painting could be, and I just thought it was garbage. But the degree of my reaction kind of scared me. There was something about it that really got to me. By the end of the week, I was dribbling paint on top of all my paintings. And in fact, I've been chasing that experience for the rest of my life: that moment when you look at something, and it doesn't look like art and you say,"Wait a minute, what the hell is this?" For a brief period of time when you look at it, it just challenges everything that you hold to be true, and it seems to operate outside of what art can be. Then very quickly it begins to become absorbed by the art world, and it becomes part of the new shape of the art world—a new shape that develops because this type of art exists. But there's something quite wonderful when something challenges what you think is art.

INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE • 47

You talk about Pollock whom we're taughtfront the very beginning to describe as an Abstract Expressionist. How do you want art historians to classyy your work?

You see, nobody likes any labels. Labels and the concurrent pressure to see things in terms of movements is one ofthe problems with art history. Art history tends to make things linear, so-and-so begat so-and-so, so-and-so begat so-and-so. It's becomes an old testament version of art. The problem with grouping things together like this is that, when you put things in a movement, you tend to see more clearly the vague common denominators which may or may not be important to the individual artist or the art....

It's really the individual differences and what makes one person different from another which is really interesting, and that's often obscured by this incredible need we have to pigeonhole people and stick them into boxes or into one movement or another.

So you would call one ofyour works a Chuck Close painting, as opposed to a Photorealist painting?

At this point, I don't often get referred to anymore as being a member of any particular stylistic point of view. This eventually happens if you live long enough and keep working. You end up defining whatever it is you produce so that other ways of describing it no longer seem applicable.

Do you see the making of a painting as a release, or, as an expenditure? Isgong, to a studio and creating a work of art an expenditure of vitality, or a release of creativity or even offrustration?

Well, I don't do it as therapy. I do therapy as therapy. To me there are only two reasons to make art. One is a sort ofself-gratifying, therapeutic thing where you feel better as you make it. And the other reason is for communication. I make work to put it out for people to look at. And although I'm primarily interested in what I think ofit, and secondarily most interested in what my colleagues and fellow artists think of it, I very much want to get it out in the community in which it's made. Ultimately the nice thing about it is that you put it out, and someone else picks it up. You don't even have to know who they are. Your work can have meaning to people you've never even met.

It can have meaning years later, for people who share very little with you.

Do you think about that when you're producing a painting? Do you think about where it's going to be in ten years; do you wonder y it's going to be sold or y it's going to be in a museum, or in your home, or in one ofyour daughters'apartments?

I'm fortunate that all along—really from the beginning of my career—my work has gotten out, and a vast majority of it is in public collections, which I prefer—especially having been a poor kid. When I first came to New York,I couldn't believe that all this stuff was available, that anybody could walk into a gallery; and, if you asked to see something, they'd take you to the back room and show you something. Museums are available to everybody. It meant a lot to me that this world was open and available and so accessible. So, I've worked very hard, as have my galleries over the years, to try to place the work as much as possible where it will be viewable.

That all the works at your recent opening were already sold before the show opened suggests that you and your galleries are doing a pretty goodjob at placement.

Yes, especially in these troubled times. But you also have to remember that I only make three of four paintings a year. I think I've shown tremendous restraint in not flogging the market with tons of work.

Is that all you make in a year; or, is that all you make to sell in a year?

That's all I make.In fact there are years when I've made only one painting. It's not so terribly difficult at this stage in my career to sell one, or two or three paintings. And because they're few of them, they're sought after and then people don't put them up for auction. They're not speculated upon. We try to make sure the people we sell them to are people who are buying them for the right reasons. I never found a way to crank more paintings out in order to take advantage of the fact that I had a ready market for the 48 • INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE

things. I've always tried to put new rocks in my shoes. I don't want to just become a performer.I don't want to just demonstrate the fact that I know what I'm doing in a studio.

Has that changed? Say ten years ago or twelve years ago, were you putting out a lot more paintings?

No, I've never made a lot of paintings. I've never made more than, maybe—at the most—three paintings in a year. I did a couple of paintings that took twelve or fourteen months for each individual painting.

Do you work on somethingforfour orfive months and thenfind that it'sjust not happening and end upjust trashing it?

No,if it's not going well, I know it very quickly. I abandon it then. I try not to abandon anything if I've worked a long time on it.

Do you think you're going to keep painting? I know you've taught before; would you evergo back?

I taught at U. Mass, and at the School of the Arts and at NYU, and I've taught at Yale during summers. But what I do takes so much time, and since I've come to a point where I no longer need a separate career to support my profession, I've quit teaching and have been lucky enough to be able to sustain myself without having to do anything else. I miss teaching sometimes. But I get over that quickly. w important is teachingfor the budding artist? How importantfor you was taking art classes at Washington State or at Yale?

Terribly important. And I was very lucky; I was always in the right place at the right time. I was at schools at particularly golden moments. And that's something you don't have any control over. If you're lucky, it happens. I was at Yale at a really wonderful, wonderful time. The mix ofstudents... Yale has always had the ability to attract the best students from all over the country, and one of the best things about it is that it doesn't have a big undergraduate art school feeding students directly into the graduate programs. If there are 35 graduate students, they probably come from 30 different schools and everybody has had different experiences. The students were often big ducks in various puddles. You end up throwing all these people and all these egos together into one space. The best schools always have the best students, but not always the best faculty. Sometimes the faculty can be ignored, and sometimes schools that have a faculty that's too strong—and by that I mean a uniform idea about what they envision you doing—can overwhelm the student body,so you end up with a kind ofschool style. The best schools have really diverse faculty and students. Then everything's confusing and everything's up for grabs. That, to me, seems the best environment. When I was at Yale, it wasn't clear that the students were all that exceptional.

Time gave clarity though..

But we were very confused. We didn't produce a lot of finished, showable work, but there were a lot of ideas. We learned a lot of good work habits and developed a lot of important relationships that we took with us when we left school. In fact my whole class sort of moved en masse to New York, sort of like Yale graduate school moving South. We all lived within lo or 15 blocks of each other and continued to have important relationships with each other, looking at each other's work and helping each other. So it was perfect.

So, you got as muchfrom your peers as you didfrom the top?

Yes, and I continue to. My generation of artists at Yale lists like a Who's Who. Our work is all very different, but we all talked the same way. I was there with Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett, Maya Lin, Robert Mangold. We all had a different interpretation of reality.

What then is your reality?

The reality is paint on the surface.

INTERVIEW: CHUCK CLOSE •

49

S RdMedU \. lece

by Cathleen Schine Vera

Hoyden

If you managed to look at the Times Book Review in the last few months, you may have noticed funny little diaries-of-the-week by Cathleen Schine.

Oh,they're not for everyone, of course: reflections on painting oni's apart-ment the same week that one attends a gay wedding, or meditations on one's poetical education, as occasioned by the Navy's post-Tailhook proscription against sending "unwanted poems" to the object of one's affections. Your favorite was probably the piece about Martin Amis's recent engagement to a member of what British papers apparently call the "New York glitterati" (lowbrow fantasies of highbrows like Schine).

Because if you are like me, you grew up on Bill Hamilton instead of Loony Tunes. You preferred "Metropolitan" to "Slacker," and just last Winter Break you went to see "Six Degrees ofSeparation" a second time, no matter that every giggle got you astonished looks from your fellow Clevelanders, or Washingtonians, or Wilsonville-Oregonians.

You are that old institution, a New York intellectual waiting ever so impatiently to happen; you can practically taste your glorious, amused disappointment once you do. All the dinner parties, all the academic gossip, all the slightly demeaning, obligatory walk-ons, they're not all they're cracked up to be: It's time (you can almost hear yourselfsay) it's time I got out of the City.

Still, deep down you relish (or rather, you know you'll relish) all the petty absurdities of the metropolis. For this reason Schine's diaries suit you to a tee.

The other day, then, you set the Book Reviews down with a sigh of contentment and turned to your breakfast companion: "It's no wonder she likes Martin Amis," you said (like most New Yorkers, you have your anglophilic side). "She should write a novel herself."

Imagine your intense delight when your breakfast companion (so much more attentive to such things than you)drew your notice to her byline."Ms.Schine's last novel is Rameau's Niece, a satire of New York intellectuals."

"But Rameau's Niece— 'There's ass-kissing literal and there's ass-kissing metaphorical—" "That's Rameau's Nephew. By Diderot. This is someone different. It had better be pretty good, parading around as the sister—or the cousin—of the Nephew."

It was no trouble finding the novel that afternoon on the bookshelf of your mutual friend Aaron Craig(we imminent New Yorkers travel in packs), who recommended the novel highly and informed you (on the most reliable of sources) that Schine is a declared P.G. Wodehouse fan. By now you had lost interest in your coffee, or Bloody Mary, or Rolling Rock. You were fondling the book without shame.

You had already begun to slaver on the back-cover when you noticed the first blurb: "Our cousinly reply to A.S. Byatt. And the sex is better." As if you needed any further recommendation. At last, you thought, an ancien-regime-Possession-as"Talk of the Town"-piece, with smut. Parody, imitation, satire, sex-farce. What more could any reader want?

Ofcourse, no novel could live up to such unfair expectations. But then no novever have raised them so high in the first place. should el As parody, Rameau's Niece does seem to aim at Byatt's Possession, a romantic whodunnit of several years ago, in which two academics team up to unearth the love affair of two Victorian poets. Just as Byatt invents poems and letters reminiscent of the Brownings, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, Schine invents a charming, if less ambitious, lost dialogue a la Diderot(a dialogue which in the end, ofcourse, proves to have been Diderot's model)and intersperses its story with the modern-day erotic tribulations of her protagonist, Margaret Nathan.

50 • Book Review: Rameau's Niece

Like Byatt, Schine fills the contemporary action of her novel with cozy grotesques, of whom Margaret is the most interesting—partly because Schine entrusts her with most ofthe novel's wit and partly because Margaret is the closest the novel comes(and it is tantalizingly close) to real satire. She is the novel's most original creation, both as caricature and as point of view, and her originality rubs off on the characters around her.

Margaret has been driven into academia and marriage(and into storybook success in both) by debilitating, self-absorbed forgetfulness: Names and dates, faces, theories—she sought them with a kind of desperation. She could never possess them, not really, and so they became for her precious, moving, full of wonder.

In the course of the novel this absent-minded urge to research (catalised anew by the coyly pornographic, empiricist education of Rameau's niece) lures Margaret away from her perfect husband, Edward, only to return her to him once she discovers that he is her "best tested" theory. As the sexually liberated, Franco-Lockean moral reads: "in the end our truest opinions are not the ones we have never changed, but those to which we have most often returned."

Edward is Margaret's complement, a Columbia English professor with great gusto and an excellent memory,for people as well as poems: Edward had no difficulties at dinner parties. If he had been seated beside a rock, he would have quickly begun a discussion of its layers ofgranite or sandstone or lime, its life underground, its ocean journeys and aspirations for the future. Intoxicated by this encounter, he would regale Margaret with talcs of the rock's history, which he would tell with such enthusiasm and such grace that she would laugh and hope that some day she too might sit beside a stone at dinner. And the stone? It would sigh and bask in its newly realized glory, its importance and beauty, necessity and dignity—I pave roads and build towers, I form mountains, I rest on the throats ofgracious ladies. So we have Edward at the beginning and end: the (British and Jewish)embodiment of culture and pedagogy, a thoroughly loveable egotist who quotes Wordsworth in the car, Whitman at the breakfast table, and Schuyler on the telephone; he enters and exits the novel as every English major's perfect crush.

Betweentimes Schine seems to share Margaret's new ambivalence toward Edward: he hovers through the middle pages saintly and misunderstood. By the time Margaret finally returns to him, you can't help wishing she would get rid of him once and for all. His non-development is the novel's worst disappointment.

All of the other characters seem to have been thought up for a certain scene or couple of scenes; they're walking one-liners. Usually good one-liners (Schine has trusty eyes and cars for the ludicrous) but one-liners nevertheless. In general, Schine's briefest grotesques are funniest—though one wonders whether we really need any more caricatures of semioticians (there are, after all, still some running around in the flesh—and,for that matter, how much longer will "text" be expected to get a laugh, even when spoken by a Frenchman?) As for sex—Margaret does do it, once or twice by explicit mention. Rameau's niece and her interlocutor do it more often, if only to prove their favorite point (in a nutshell, that epistemology has something to do, believe it or not, with erotics). I'm afraid it's nothing you'll blush to read on the subway, or even on Metro North.

But if your train is leaving in half an hour, and if you cancelled your subscription to the New Yorker years ago, and if you're standing in Book Haven looking for something to get you in the mood (for the City anyway), you could do much worse than Rameau's Niece. I know you'll know when to laugh.

Book Review: Rameau's Niece • 51

In Extremis

by Deborah Baker

Vin • d•ICd ion

by Francis Sherwood

Nelly Bly

How do you tell the story of a historical figure and be certain it's true? How do you reveal someone else's infuriating temperament and maintain your reader's patience?

And while we're at it, how can one overcome bad writing? Let's not answer these questions, but look to two recently-published books whose authors approach the problems somewhat differently.

Deborah Baker, in In Extrenns(Grove Press, July, 1993), the first published biography of Laura Riding, makes a just-short-of-satisfactory effort. She owes her success to her subject matter more than anything: Laura Riding, publisher ofGertrude Stein, begetter of the New Criticism along with Robert Graves, and winner of Yale's Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1991, was not by any account an easy person to live with. William Carlos Williams said of her, "All I know of her is that, personally, she is a prize bitch." Baker, too, for all of her interest in and esteem for Riding, betrays in her tone more than mere frustration at Riding's resistance to biography. Manipulative, opinionated, and ambitious, Riding nevertheless commands our respect by the scope of her accomplishments and the clear force of her words, words which Baker copiously quotes.

Here's why we're glad for that: to begin with, Baker is guilty of misplaced modifiers, dangling participles and other atrocities. These are distributed throughout the book with just the frequency to emphasize, as soon as we begin to forget, the distance between ourselves and Riding's sharp tongue. To add to the confusion brought on by this carelessness, Baker less than masterfully organizes the book without the convenience of strict chronology, a bcmuddling approach that makes the book even more arduous.

What identifies In Extrenns as traditional biography—and, ultimately, what redeems it at all—is an investigative thoroughness that allows Baker to quote from and extensively paraphrase the writings of Riding and her acquaintances. The result is a work whose intelligent turns of phrase, even if not the author's, provide us with some reminder of why we wanted to know about the life of this literary figure in the first place. Riding's life, too, is replete with events and revolving themes neatly orchestrated enough by felicitous chance that we are thankful at least for one aspect of Baker's style: that, in recounting the events of Riding's life (often wondrous in themselves), she minimizes her own words so we can hear more of Riding's.

For example, Riding's first poem, which so perfectly served as the elegy read at her burial, concludes the book's epilogue: Measure me by myself And not by time or love or space Or beauty. Give me this last grace: That I may be on my low stone A gage unto myself alone.

I would not have these old faiths fall To prove that I was nothing at all.

Riding's words ask to speak for themselves. It is ironic that Baker should choose this poem to conclude her own work, considering that they almost make the reader feel guilty for so completely disregarding their request for independence from biographical interpretation.

Suggestive, too, without the help of Baker's writing, is the series of names Riding went by in the ninety years of her life: Laura Riechenthal as the young Rosa Luxemburg fan in New York's Jewish ghetto; Laura Gottschalk as the envied student and wife of her history teacher at Cornell; Laura Riding as poet and launcher ofthe New Criticism, and as lover of Robert Graves in Greenwhich Village and Europe; and Laura Jackson, as the wife of Schuyler Jackson, as renouncer of poetry and even the written word, tucked away from the public world in a Florida bungalo.

52 • Book Review: In Extremis

And so we applaud Baker for her diligent archive-digging, for bringing these facts back to us. But Riding would not be so inclined. She always insisted that her work not be read biographically, and bitterly objected to any criticism to the contrary.

What would have been her authorized biography was left unfinished because Riding, deeply offended, would not accept it, and Graves' biography and other writings relevant to her life received her bitter condemnation. Her own memoirs, also unfinished, have much more to do with her theories than the events of her life. No amount of fact-finding could prevent Riding's indignance at having her life told differently than she remembered having lived it.

Mary Wollstonecraft, once-famed author of A Hndication of the Rights of Woman, was a financially independent author, translator, and editor, a celebrity, a lover, and the only woman in a circle of artists and intellectuals that included William Blake, Thomas "I am the Revolution" Paine, Henry Fuseli and William Goodwin. Yet, in her personal life, as Francis Sherwood paints her in Vindication (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 1993), Wollstonecraft embodied the insecure and unstable antithesis ofthe capable woman she advocates in her writings. Abused as a child, nearly raped, prone to romantic infatuations and nervous breakdowns, Sherwood's Wollstonecraft is about as 'real' as one could imagine her, a far cry from what we would expect from a historical account of an eighteenth-century feminist.

Even if this contradiction between Wollstonecraft's writings and personal life never really existed, Sherwood's mode of biography—a novel, of all things—approximates as closely as possible the requisite excuse for any such inconsistency, posing in itself a provocative question: since a personal history can't really be capable of preserving the facts, why not drop the pretention altogether? Sherwood's novel not only makes for a more enjoyable read, it portrays Wollstonecraft vividly enough to make her hard to forget. Sherwood's Wollstonecraft is probably far from the real thing. But is Baker's Riding that much closer? I imagine Riding would think not.

On the other hand, Sherwood's way of making this not-exactly-historical figure unforgettable is a little cheap. And by cheap I mean: the pages turn as fast as the best bodice-ripper you can find at the airport. In this case, though, the Harlequin parameters are expanded to include such disturbing scenes as oral rape, a naked psychedelic tea with the Blakes, the horrors of Bedlam's conditions and childbirth fever (this final hardship was to kill Wollstonecraft after the birth of her daughter, who would later be known as Mary Shelley). Neither are Wonstonecraft's sexual attraction to her best friend Franny, nor her discovering the homosexuality of her publisher, Joseph Johnson, by walking in on him in medias res, anything you might find in a book of the grocery-store genre.

And yet this book was eagerly snatched up from the slush pile at Farrar, Straus & Giroux by its editor-in-chief, and not without reason. The writing is intelligent, the historical setting volatile, and the approach a great deal fresher than Baker's unsuccessful chronology experiments. Vindication does not solve the problem of biography as an inevitably inaccurate enterprise, but it does make suggestive use of it while delightfully etching its heroine in our memory. Riding would certainly have thrown twice the fit over a Sherwood biography of herself.

But it would sure be a better read.

Book Review: In Extremis • 5;

<itchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

Reckless Appetites

by Jacqueline Deval

and various writings of M.F.K. Fisher

Maxwell Gorge

...And all our tender aspirations choke And half remain, and half go quickly broke Then, swilling pale cheer from a grudging cup Each wonders what became of Growing Up. His was a kitchen, hers a dining room Rosed with ladies, and laughter, and perfume While she lay curled in the laughing dark; at dawn A faint sweet wine-smoke sunlight lingered on And purple-centered globes, with candle-ends, Napkins, china and corks—all evidence Of this strange nightly spell that cast itself Then clasped up, like a gilt book on a shelf Just out of reach, a joke she didn't get, A snatch of French untranslated as yet....

Ida Lighthed "Invitation to Dinner"

Perhaps we have always looked to food as the last bastion of our enjoyment, the least vulnerable ofour pleasures. A good meal always cheers me up anyway; and last Thursday I was lucky enough to be fed in the lofty High Street eyrie of my gracious friend Allie LePage. Allie claims that the most important part of any dinner is what comes after; indeed it has often occurred to me that I am nowhere happier than at her table after a late, late supper, when her guests leave the candles burning and the dishes in the sink. She brews a pot ofcoffee then opens her old record player and her box offancy black cigarettes(ifshe's feeling extravagant, she may open a bottle of whiskey, too); then we sit and listen to music, and we talk.

Or rather, we sometimes talk—for just as often, we allow ourselves to fall shamefully under Allie's spell; for half an hour at once she will preach to us unchallenged.

Then when we bring ourselves to make some response, our sole interest is to make her speak again. We hang on her words, however they pain or disconcert us; for it should be said that her speech, if always a model of politeness and consideration, is not always marked by its calm or reverence for convention. Indeed, some complain that Allie's conversation is over-passionate, that the heart of it is infected with bitterness, or rotten with nostalgia. For this they suspect her political sympathies. How should I represent their suspicions? Perhaps like me they imagine from time to time that Allie moves among earnest, whiskered men in frock-coats and women in highbosomed Empire gowns, or among the lost souls ofsome long-gone, languorous fin de siecle, or among the transient cosmopolites ofsome future computer-network(as yet only virtually real); perhaps they fear that we arc figments less tangible to Allie than are the past and future crowds whom she musters to make us up.

If in fact this nostalgia, this romantic view toward past and future, is what makes them suspicious, then I would offer a word in her defense. Nostalgia, properly understood, for a fiction of the past(or equally, for a future in the terms bequeathed it by the past) makes nothing happen. It indicates merely the sane preference for talking things up to living or reliving them without benefit offiction, without having talked them up. And none will deny that Allie is a wonderful, wonderfully interested talker.

By "interested" I mean that Allie keeps up with the world in a way most of us never can manage to imitate, a way I cannot even comprehend. She reads everything—newspapers, all the old books she should (and all the new books she ever would), journals, school-texts, even fashion magazines—and she remembers what she reads, just as she remembers names and gossip, and all the details of her friends' complaints and plans and confidences(her memory astonishes everyone).

She does these things, not as a chore, but out of what seems an honest hunger: she's always hungry for a story. I imagine it is just this hunger that lets her bewitch us; she has become necessarily a connoisseur of stories; she eyes the bearer of any news or strong opinion, whether the bearer be man, woman, or printed page, with the lust you or I might reserve for the crackling cleavage of a goose, or a lobsterback, or the heart of the artichoke.

That is why, last Thursday night, as we lingered over the remains of our hazelnut tarts, I was not surprised to hear Allie discuss a few recent books that take the art of the table as a model for the art of storytelling: 54 • Book Review: Kitchen; Reckless Appetites

"Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers [she began, settling back in her chair and giving her wine-glass a thoughtful swirl] took pleasures, almost unheard of among us, in all kinds of arts: in singing and playing music; in going for walks; in giving parties; in politics, by which [here she turned to the woman at her left, given to talk of"subversion," of"marginalia" and "othering," and (in a lighter mood)of socialist "cells," or discussion groups], I mean real pragmatic politics. They took pleasure in furniture; in theater; in card games; in religion; in foreign languages; in beautiful clothes; in writing letters or diaries; in picnicking; in drawing and painting; in dancing; in all sorts of other things. They were athletes, but their sports were not cosmetic. These women I am thinking of could ride, and play tennis, and sail: they could tie sailors' knots. Just watch an old woman row, if you get the chance. Watch how straight she holds her back, how her oars just touch the water. So much economy and know-how for enjoyment. They took more pleasure in a cocktail than we take in a Saturday night. Their love affairs would kill us nowadays."

Here Allic warmed to her subject. She leaned in, she set her elbows on the table.

She started to taste her words, as if the flavor of each might summon up italics in her voice. All of us had heard her in this mood: we refilled our glasses, we lit our cigarettes, and sprawled back at attention.

"They savored stories and poetry sentimentally, almost bodily, and in this sense they were unsophisticated. They liked what set them puzzles to solve, gave them shudders, piqued their curiosity, brought them to tears, or in any way stirred their blood: they knew (or, maybe I should say, they felt) a good line when they read it—whether a line of verse or philosophy: 'For,' as Malebranche once wrote of Montaigne, 'this pleasure of reading arises principally from concupiscence, and supports and strengthens only our passions, since the author's style is agreeable only if it affects us and imperceptibly arouses our passions.'If you are lucky enough to have had poems recited to you by an old woman, or even just to have inherited an old woman's book of poems check-marked, annotated, and underlined, you will already know these things.

"Though, as you will have guessed, I am not speaking primarily of our biological grandmothers, many ofwhom never led lives ofcomparative luxury. I mean the grandmothers of our privilege; the grandmothers of our more-or-less leisured, educated class, ifthere is(and we are)such a thing. I mean the grandmothers ofour freedom,of our liberal education—which is to say, our education in pleasure-reading.

"But what, you ask, is left of this mythical class? Where is this voluptuous inheritance? The decline of poetry, and of reading in general, has been a tired story all our lives. By our parents' generation, the indulgence was a duty; by our time, a shirked forgotten duty. What our grandparents loved and lived by, our parents could hardly remember. We have no need of a meanspiritcd Free Press to remind us how far we have fallen in this regard. Nor will the blandishments of any inexperienced Muse—however she drapes her paltry nudity—convince us that any heartfelt poem is the equal of any other. Remind her of Wildes dictum that "All bad poetry is sincere," and let her love, her innocent student-editor, babble that loose stitches, and sequins, and an ignorance of style are the costume of"many-cultures." We know the tired story for what it so ingloriously is.

"But I wonder now and then [Allies voice descended to a growl,and we leaned in to make out her words], I wonder if this same tired story could not be told of many little arts—ofall the skillful uses of leisure time. If we take less pleasure in reading, we take less pleasure generally in practiced things, in things put off and done well.

Consider the decline of mixed drinks. Or read the accounts of the old hashishins, and try to imagine writing anything so sensual, so enamored of the high, now that nothing is more dull than pure enjoyment. For it's true. Now enjoyment must be [she sipped] shot through with usefulness, it must be on the way to something else.

"And so everything finished and set before us as an object of delectation, everything practiced and polished or formal, everything neatly turned out, we condemn as a dandyism. Like Charlemagne picking the mould out of his roquefort, we dig into every technique for its necessary traces of meanness, exclusion, and privilege, as if they were worms in our pleasure and not an appreciable delicate aftertaste Book Review: Kitchen; Reckless Appetites • 55

unto themselves. We have come to distrust our pleasure and, in the arts, to hate discipline most of all—in other words to hate becoming what we arc not, to hate making others what they are not, to hate [she leered with a wicked allure] cruelty, or education—as if pleasure must come easy, not somewhere wedged between a wanting pang and a wimper ofsufficiency. It is no wonder, then, this temptation of our writers to offer us food as a figure for writing, and for art in general, just when art is worst abused and most reviled.

"When every craving for craft has been stifled, still we have hungers for one dish and not another. No amount of flattery in the world can puff up the fallen souffle; no Holquist persuade us that the lambchop might suffer a terror for meaning.

Though we develop a taste for garlic, or wasabi, or asparagus, and we lose the taste for milk or peanut-butter, this development and loss has the feel of a natural progress. We are glad of our education in the realm ofthe table: we still admit that we have been schooled, and we still relish our schooling.

"Because food is art and life, something made up and actual all at once. If like a language it admits of endless refinement, it is nevertheless the native language of our pleasure. No matter how complex its grammar, it pleases us more simply than words or pictures, more simply even than music. Like every real art it takes time, it takes cruel hunger and painstaking preparation, it takes thought and experimentation, it takes discipline.

"And,in this loneliest age in the world, when so many ofus must plan an indefinite future of days and nights by ourselves, it is no wonder our writers make food a lesson in ethics as well as in aesthetics. Because food is everyone's way of life, and as such it may be lived well or badly, carefully or sloppily. Food is, perhaps more for us even than for our grandparents (witness the ever-growing ranks of the obese), a last-possible consolation, like Roald Dahl's peach or chocolate, like the baker's bread in the Raymond Carver story, like Jake Barnes' impotent, multi-course, moveable feast. It is a symbol to us that life, even the solitary life of the senses, of hunger-pains and satiations, may one way or another reward us in itself."

Now Allie stared into the space above our heads, and we knew that she was about to muster a quotation. It is one of her feats. She quoted: The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place where they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light(ting! ting!).

I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom.

Strangely, it's better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door ofa towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely....

When I'm dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it's cold and I'm all alone, or somebody's there and it's warm, I'll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If I'm in the kitchen, I'll think, "How good."

"So [Allie lowered her gaze to us] begins the translation of Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, a novel entranced with the prospect ofthe consolation to be derived from impromptu meals and the cuisine of the everyday. Its narrator, Mikage, moves through a world of clean counters and sparkling gadgets, of tidy griefs and spotless sexchanges, of gentle effortless affections and requitals, a surface world that even Yoshimoto's translator, Megan Backus, fails to sully in any very substantial way.

"Not that we have any reason to suppose that Kitchen requires a particularly sensitive translation. In a novel that makes every character, every situation dreamily simple, there is perhaps no need of nuanced prose. Perhaps Backus fails only when she overlays Mikage's (perhaps also Yoshimoto's) artlessness with 'interesting' or racy diction, or with any attempt at what Backus might consider depth.

56 • Book Review:

Kitchen; Reckless Appetites

"You see, Mikage is charming and exactly as deep as the paper she takes up. It is difficult (and, I think, superfluous) to separate one's image of her from the fulllength photographs (of someone I take to be Yoshimoto) that grace the book's dust jacket: on the front cover the photograph steps, toe upraised, smiling coyly, toward the reader. On the back cover she is revealed to be hiding a little posy of wildflowers behind her back, flowers as dear and insipid as Mikage, and Yoshimoto, themselves.

"A third indistinguishable, dear insipid young woman narrates Kitchen's companion-piece, a less successful novella called 'Moonlight Shadow.' Yoshimoto seems to consider mourning her proper subject; indeed, the absolute innocence of Mikage's death-prattle makes Kitchen the confection that it is. By the end of'Moonlight Shadow,' however, you will have finished your tea(or coffee, or night-cap)and will have found that Yoshimoto's sweetness has begun to cloy. Neither work begs to be read again.

"For this reason, I am happy to give any one of you my copy of Kitchen; I only hope it entertains you half as long as it entertained me."

Allie rose from the table and returned with the little hardback, which she offered to any one of us who cared to take it. Its cover depicted Yoshimoto (for indeed, it was she) with all the promise that Allie had described; only by a show of politeness could each ofus forego the present, until Allie pressed it with special vehemence on one particular new friend. When we clamored to hear about some other recent culinary fiction, she produced another little book(as if in imitation of Yoshimoto) from behind her back: Allie always foresees her guests' desires so well.

"Observe [our hostess began]. This front cover bears the tinted photograph of some silent-movie heroine,some yellowed-postcard seductress, holding an apple to her lips. See how her cheeks strive with the fruit (none can say which wears the more delectable blush) and her great eyes, dusky and heavy-lidded, betray those other, neat, small, features of the ingenue. Her chestnut hair hangs in the winning disarray, the heavy waves, of a young Sarah Bernhardt, as if Nature herself attended to the toilette of this nymph, this littlest sister of the Muses. Perhaps it is her fair lost twin who enchants us in "Hunky-Dory;" it is surely her perversion, her horrid fallen sister, who haunts the "Eraserhead" radiator.

"Now,however, she is in her most coming-on disposition: for Nature has rouged her rose-petal lips to burn what one would until now have thought an impossible scarlet—as if after a first kiss. Certainly the girl takes no notice of the apple in her hand but looks upward, at the lips ofthe lover with whom she will share her pastoral refreshment. She begs—not the apple, for that she has. No, she begs to be kissed again, to be devoured, because she too is an apple: her name is Pomme Bouquin.

Above her head we read the title of her story, Reckless Appetites: a culinary romance.

"As we all know, it is neither fair nor safe to judge a book by its cover. While Appetites is culinary, it is not, by any stretch, a romance. If it is reckless in dispensing with plot, characterization, and all but the fancy that we associate with fiction, it has an undeniably calculated charm for any historian, or practitioner, ofthe kitchen.(As you seem to agree, having made, before dinner, such short work of her Sardine Pâté de Balzac, and after, such equally short work of her Alice B. Toklas Tart.)

"Writing as the Anglo-French Pomme, Jacqueline Deval dips into the literary history ofgourmandise on both sides ofthe Channel and the Atlantic, in search of the most refined uses(or as she might say, the most powerful rhetoric) offood— as aphrodisiac, self-expression, even poison. These researches are sprinkled with the culinary correspondence and diaries of other characters close to Pomme, and with two of Pomme's own articles for Culture and Cuisine magazine, one on English cooking, one on writers and coffee.

"Deval fills Reckless Appetites with recipes and menus; they are the book's prime attraction; they elevate the Like Waterfor Chocolate conceit to a raison d'itre. The prose between recipes need only string us from one to another. And as a stringer-along Deval acquits herself with style: Book Review: Kitchen; Reckless Appetites • 57

MFK

FISHER

71 ( ) BEUIN AGAIN icories r

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Byron, in his abhorrence of watching women eat, interrogated his hosts before he accepted an invitation to make sure no women would be among the guests. He once turned down a dinner because Madame de Stael, the writer and critic, had also been invited. Fickle, self-absorbed, and syphilitic to boot, Byron with his advice on love is not to be trusted. Does Pomme dare to dismiss one of history's great lovers in so cavalier a fashion? Mais bier sur! cries our Colette. All great seducers are treacherous, Colette declares—something she once said about a bottle of wine but which applies to Byron too. Colette once asked a selfstyled, modern-day Don Juan about the memory he had left with the women he had possessed."Why, without a doubt," he replied without a moment's hesitation,"a feeling of not having had quite enough." Like Colette's heroines, with their natural, animal-like enjoyment of food, Pomme decides to feed her lover full and take her full share too.

Pomme reads the love letters of other writers, looking for their experiences of dinnertime seductions. In a letter to his beloved Sarah Stoddard, William Hazlitt...declared that he loved her best when they dined together on a boiled scragg-end of mutton and hot potatoes.

Sarah and William eventually married and eventually divorced. Perhaps Sarah didn't care for scragg-ends, or for his instructive comments that appeared later in the letter about how she should wear her hair. When Pomme strays from Colette, she discovers only what not to serve at dinner. Byron would have her serve lobster or else nothing for herself; Hazlitt, an ugly cut of meat and potatoes; the Dickens household, some reheated codfish; Greene, D.H. Lawrence, and Norman Douglas, eel or testicle pie.

If Colette is the star of Appetites, she is not its only luminary. On the contrary. Appetites is an attractive, impressively researched little volume, not just the 'fictionalized' warming-over ofsome few scholarly works. If this Pomme Bouquin is indeed a bookish creation, still she sends us scurrying into the kitchen (or back to the menu). She is an Apple-aperitif, you might say, a Tome too red to read Before one merely reads to pass the time.

And if she owes especially much for sources or general style to any particular precursor in the genre, it is only to the incomparable M.F.K. Fisher—and this can hardly be counted a fault."

"But who," one of our number asked,"who is M.F.K. Fisher?

Now it was my turn to sing, however poorly, the praises of a favorite of my own. I recalled the first I had heard of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, from a friend who had discovered The Art of Eating neglected on a shelf of the L&B Reading Room.

Who else, since that day, has let me taste so many meals that I shall never have the good fortune actually to eat, or that (even if I were someday to encounter them)I should never appreciate had they not come to me first as appreciations, in all the glory of remembered delight?

It might, after all, have been of her own books that M.F.K. Fisher wrote in Consider the Oyster There are stories that in their telling spread about them a feeling of the Golden Age, so that when you listen you forget all but the warmth and incredible excitement of those other farther times; oysters can be as fine as Ozymandias king of kings in them, and as unforgettable.

I shall remember always the mysterious beautiful sensation of wellbeing I felt, when I was small, to hear my mother talk of the suppers she used to eat at boarding school. They were called "midnight feasts," and were kept secret, supposedly, from the teachers, in the best tradition of the 1890's. They consisted of oyster loaf. There may have been other things. Maybe the most daring young ladies even drank ginger beer, although I am afraid it was more likely a sweet raspberry shrub or some such unfortunate potation. Maybe there were cigarettes, and pickles, and bonbons. But it is the oyster loaf that I remember....

58 • Book Review: Kitchen; Reckless Appetites

It was made in a bread loaf from the best baker in the village, then the loaf was hollowed out and filled with rich cooked oysters, and then, according to my mother's vague and yet vivid account, the top of the loaf was fastened on again, and the whole was baked crisp and brown in the oven. Then it was wrapped tightly in a fine white napkin, and hidden under a chambermaid's cape while she ran from the baker's to the seminary and up the back stairs to the appointed bedroom.

Fisher proceeds to give the results of her search for the mythical oyster-loaf: I shall never try them out. Although this passage shows something of her method (and there is not a dull page in any of her culinary works), its setting is uncharacteristic.

Fisher was herself no product ofan Eastern boarding-school: she was a Californian when California stood for everything modern and free-spirited and backwoodscosmopolitan, when it was America's dream of itself. Even after Fisher left California and traveled the world, she led a fascinating life—although any life she led would have been fascinating, simply because she wrote so very well(Auden called her America's best prose-writer), so charmingly. Who else could write such an entertaining, unpretentious cookbook for the poor? Or would unabashedly give recipes for "morning" drinks? Every recipe, every observation tells a story:"When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and ffne reality of hunger satisfied.., and it is all one."

Two years ago Vintage published To Begin Again: stories and memoirs 1908-1929 and last year Stay Me, Oh Conyort Mt:journals and stories, 1933-1941. They are good diaries; she lived an eventful, passionate life life and could have made any daily record a source of later fascination. But unless you are the sort of person who enjoys diaries especially, I suggest that you save them until you until she has found your heart by way of your stomach. They will mean more to you then. After her articles on food, you might begin Fisher's non-gastronomical oeuvre with the late memoirs and stories collected as Sister Age. You will happen on some of the same characters and events in the diaries, but it is perhaps best to meet these first in a distant recollection—the way we meet up with Mrs. Kennedy's oyster loaf.

Perhaps now you will condemn me for the sin of nostalgia that I meant to defend in Allie. This is the effect on me of love, or a well-loved meal, and Fisher puts me in mind of both. I wonder if indeed Allie had not had Fisher a tiny bit in mind when she spoke so lovingly of those artful past women, and all their lost tastes.

Surely, in Serve It Forth Fisher has in mind nothing so grand as a defense ofthe whole of Art; yet for her too the rare case of a bite thoughtfully enjoyed is not bereft of its own deep implications: The taste-blind eats apple pie, good or bad, because he has always eaten it. Then one day he sees a man turn his back on the cardboard crust and sodden half-cooked fruit, and eat instead some crisp crackers with his cheese, a crisp apple peeled and sliced ruminatively after the crackers and the yellow cheese. The man looks as if he knew something pleasant, a secret from the taste-blind.

"I believe I'll try that. It is—yes—it is good. I wonder—" And the man who was taste-blind begins to think about eating. Perhaps he talks a little, or reads. All he really need do is experiment.

He discovers that cream is good in coffee in the morning, but that after dinner black coffee is better. He looks for the first time at soup, and pushes it away if it is too pale, too thick or thin....

He is pleased. He is awakened. At last he can taste, discovering in his own good time what Brillat-Savarin tabulated so methodically as the three sensations:(I) direct, on the tongue;(2)complete, when the food passes over the tongue and is swallowed; and most enjoyable ofall (3)reflection—that is, judgment passed by the soul on the impressions which have been transmitted to it by the tongue.

Yes, he can taste at last, and life itself has for him more flavour, more zest.

Book Review: Kitchen; Reckless Appetites • 59

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