Feminism, Glenn Close, and the Curse of the Crazy Woman

Essays
June 29, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 15 5 min read

Related Books:

As we learned from Misery, the story of the woman who holds a man captive can never be a glamorous one. Over the course of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, we’re led to understand that Annie’s insanity—her insecurity, her obsession—is inextricable from that which makes her unlovable, a given long before she ever stumbles across the luckless object of her affections, her favorite writer, in the wreckage of his car. Dowdy and deranged, Annie forces him to rewrite his final novel according to her whims, crooning, “I’m your biggest fan,” over his tortured body.

covercoverAnd indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look.

While Glenn Close boasts a career spanning more than 40 years and dozens of awards, including six Oscar nominations, she’s still best-known for her portrayal of Alex, a woman who attempts to murder her married lover in a fugue of jealousy and rage. The story of Alex—otherwise known as 1987’s Fatal Attraction, the film for which Close received one of those six nominations—is one whose histrionics and gendered ableism have brought with it both critique and dismissal in the three decades since its release. And though Close herself has undoubtedly continued to thrive, she also hasn’t been able to escape its shadow.

coverSuch a legacy may sound like a curse—but then, Close does crazy so well. This spring, she returned to Broadway to reprise the starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and she’s as captivating onstage as she is in her best movies. Once more, she takes on Norma Desmond, the silent film actress fixated on her past glory from the shadows of obscurity, still ready for her closeup decades after the world has moved on to talkies (and to younger leading ladies). The plot ignites when Desmond hires screenwriter Joe Gillis to doctor the script that she’s convinced will spell out her big comeback, and though his capture isn’t quite as obvious as the one masterminded by Misery’s Annie, his gradual (co-)dependence on his new benefactress proves to be just as deadly.

Since Boulevard’s original film release, the role has become famous for its tragic, hysterical femaleness, and is for that reason vulnerable to one-dimensional renderings of empty, and even harmful, stereotype. But despite this, Close somehow succeeds in recreating a character whose humanity permeates the Palace Theatre, like a furious cloud of gold that envelops audience all the way up to the nosebleeds.

Close is good, almost distractingly so. As an audience member, I spent as much time enjoying the production as I did wondering just how she does it. Is it the suppleness and subtlety of her craft, for which James Lipton once praised her on Inside the Actor’s Studio? Is it the way she injects even the most heartrending of Desmond’s dramatics with narcotic, knowing camp? Is it in the way her presence, as commanding as her voice—its raw power somehow undiminished as the 70-year-old scales countless flights of stairs over the course of the 200-minute show—so masterfully balances bottled panic with profound and searching pain? Whatever the reason, only a seasoned artist could embody the crazy woman, a figure infamous for her unwantedness, without sacrificing an ounce of soul, or a whit of glamour.

Her performance is all the more remarkable considering the fact that humanity is not something the crazy woman is typically afforded, as critics of Fatal Attraction were quick to point out. This archetype, the creation of a society in which a woman who desires (what she doesn’t have; what she shouldn’t want; what is inconvenient or dangerous for male authority) must be institutionalized, silenced, or worse, is deep in the bedrock of our culture. Though Alex and Norma embody slightly different kinds of failed female revolt—the former as a woman professional, the latter as a woman artist—both are in conversation with hysteria, one of the 19th century’s most prevalent (and most gendered) diseases of the West. On film and in subsequent stage adaptations, Boulevard’s subtextual warning that women’s ambition, creativity, and desire for sexual fulfillment are the causes of unhappiness and undoing still comes through loud and clear. After all, the original film, released in 1950, starred a woman who was born in the heyday of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a pioneer in the study of nervous conditions who urged Charlotte Perkins Gilman to treat her hysteria by abstaining from her work as a writer, and to “never touch a pen, brush or pencil,” as long as she lived.

But even in the 21st century, Desmond still exists in the crosshairs of the 20th, an unsettling bridging of contemporary and Victorian gender dynamics. Regardless from which perspective she’s viewed, she’s still forced to star in the spectacle of her own artistic destruction, and as the villain, to boot. Such is her due, for the woman who is too needy (which means she believes she deserves happiness); too self-obsessed (though that same brand of self-obsession is how Boulevard’s Joe aims to fight his way to stardom); or too selfish (another quality that Gillis, played almost dandily by Michael Xavier, can unquestioningly deploy), no success goes unpunished.

More revealing than the spectacle of the crazy woman are the ebbs and flows of her presence in popular culture. At the moment, the cynical rehashing of old classics and dreamscapes for new entertainment is all the rage. One of the most prominent characteristics of the so-called Golden Age of Television is its mobilization of nostalgia, exhuming artists overlooked or misunderstood because of their gender (as well as other identities; nothing, least of all the crazy woman archetype, is untouched by the ravages of white supremacy). Slowly but surely, we’re beginning to revisit geniuses once dismissed as too narcissistic (Nina Simone), mercenary (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis), or selfish (Eartha Kitt) to be taken seriously. Though an incredible boon to the viewers of our time, none of this, of course, does Desmond, and the dead women she represents, any good: After all, it was the unforgivable sin of insanity, and not her own artistry, that garnered her a place in the celluloid pantheon.

The spectacle of female humanity was recently addressed by Jess Zimmerman in her brilliant Role Monsters series with an essay on the rapacious, relentless harpy. “In isolation,” writes Zimmerman, “female ambition is laudable, the kind of thing asset management firms make statues about. In context, it’s considered monstrous.” Even now, at a time when American women can ascribe to feminism with comparatively little fanfare, insisting on one’s own humanity as a woman is still an act of monstrosity—one with which ugliness and craziness, the two things that women are supposed to fear most, is always elided.

With Sunset Boulevard, Close returns to the stage at a time in which women and non-cis-male people across demographics are watching a reinvigorated assault on hard-won rights and liberties. While the monstrosities of misogyny and sexism play out in daily life, her embodiment of a woman made monstrous by her desire for better feels a lot like bearing witness. Curse though it may be, it’s also Close’s most beautiful legacy.

writes about culture, sexuality, and genderqueer embodiment. Their first novel, link the earthquake room, is now available through TigerBee Press. They tweet at @k8bushofficial.

Essays

A Book is a Place: A Profile of Joe Meno

Essays
June 16, 2009 | 3 books mentioned 1 6 min read

At 35, Joe Meno has already published seven books and told Judith Regan – the infamous publisher of books by Jenna Jameson and (almost) O.J. Simpson – “You suck it.” He’s a sincere supporter of independent bookstores and presses, and he values the community of artists in his hometown of Chicago, where he still lives. Last week, Joe Meno came to Los Angeles as part of his tour for his most recent novel, The Great Perhaps, and the afternoon before his reading at Skylight Books, I met him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to continue a discussion we’d begun via email. We sat outside at the hotel’s Tropicana Bar, and as European tourists breaststroked across the David Hockney-painted swimming pool nearby, June Gloom be damned, I asked, “Did Norton put you up in this glamorous hotel?” (I got married at the Roosevelt, so I know a thing or two about glamor.) Meno said yes; when I asked if nice hotels were one of the differences between his current publisher and Akashic – the small press who put out his previous two novels – he nodded. “But that’s about all that’s different,” he said.In previous interviews, Meno has alluded to the similarities between Akashic and Norton, and I asked him to elaborate. He described their likeminded editorial processes, first with Johnny Temple and Dan Sinker at Akashic, and then with Tom Mayer at Norton. His first two books, published by St. Martens and HarperCollins, did not get the kind of close attention he is now so grateful for. “The way that corporate publishing is set up nowadays, the editors don’t have time, or they don’t have the inclination, or necessarily the skills, to line edit. They really are like A&R people where they acquire the material and then you’re kind of on your own. They’re not responsible for what’s inside of the book. What I really loved about Akashic – Johnny Temple and Dan Sinker – was that we would sit on a couch and go through each page at a time, line-by-line, word-by-word. Up until my third book, Hairstyles of the Damned, I’d never done that.”When Meno found out Norton and other large publishing houses were interested in The Great Perhaps, he asked each editor, “What needs work?” Tom Mayer had a lot of ideas, whereas other editors loved the novel as-is. “This is a 400-page book, that’s just not possible,” Meno told me with a laugh. “It spoke highly of what kind of editor [Tom] is, and what kind of place Norton is.” Meno was quick to emphasize that Norton is an independent publisher, owned by its employees, and that, although older and much larger, it holds the same ideals as a small press like Akashic.I asked Meno what changes he had made to the novel with Mayer’s editorial assistance. Aside from a small structural revision at the opening, they worked most closely on the prose; for example, Mayer pointed out how many times Meno had used the word suddenly. “You get to that point as a writer,” Meno said, “where the story, the characters, all that sound… is in place, and you can look at the language and how words work together. It’s almost like poetry, like William Carlos Williams, where you’re like, ‘How does this look on the page?’ It was great to work on that with Tom.”There were little things about working with Akashic that Meno had cherished, like being involved with his book’s cover design and marketing campaign, and this level of input has continued with Norton (it was included in his contract, he said.) Meno credits his own involvement for the success of his books with Akashic. He said, “This is a book you’ve spent years working on, and you shouldn’t be cut out from that process. My argument is that no one is going to have better ideas than the person who wrote the book about how it should be marketed and what the cover should look like.”Meno respects Norton and Akashic not only because they invite their authors into the publishing process, but because they’re not afraid to try new things, and be innovative. Neither will be caught in an outdated paradigm. “It’s a pretty lean year for publishing, and the next couple years will be,” Meno said. “The publishers who survive are the ones who can make changes, and use the technology, but also be open to taking advantage of whatever the authors have to offer.” He said of large, corporate publishers: “They’re almost like printers. They take your manuscript, they print this book and put it out there, and clearly, that’s not working.”In the ten years since his first novel was published, Meno says he has discovered his own agency as an author. When Tender as Hellfire came out, he thought publishers, “must know what they’re doing, this is their business… but they actually work like people gambling on race horses. I knew as much about the book and how to market it as they did.” He realized that getting in the car and doing a 36-city book tour, as he did for Hairstyles of the Damned, “could have the same result as millions of dollars in ad revenue.” He went on: “There was room for invention. That’s really gratifying to know. Even though this industry’s been around a couple hundred years in the States, it’s by no means all figured out yet. For people like Johnny Temple and Richard Nash, Norton, Melville House, there’s so much room to invent. It took me a long time to figure that out.”Throughout my conversation with Meno, the words “sameness,” and – perhaps its antidote – “invention,” came up repeatedly. One aspect of the publishing and book world that Meno doesn’t like is its uniformity. “What’s acceptable or worthwhile or deemed literary is so narrow,” he said. He continued:There’s a sameness to the book covers… there’s an aesthetic sameness to the way books are being sold, the kind of books that are put out, the content. There’s a sameness to the background of the writers – how many novelists graduated from Columbia… or Iowa. There’s a sameness to the style, and what New York publishing deems serious. [The style] is heavily realistic. It’s become increasingly in years bent more towards memoir, and almost journalistic. The era of inventive writing, writers like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Barthelme, outside of McSweeney’s, is almost non-existent… If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you write a certain kind of book, a certain tone, a certain style.The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It’s more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity… A book is a place where you’re forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you’re not being asked to imagine more.Meno made it clear that many of the writers he admires, like Tobias Wolff and Aleksander Hemon, write in a realist style; it’s simply the lack of diversity that bothers him. “I get nervous when it’s all the same,” he said. “There are plenty of writers who I admire who work outside of those boundaries but few of them are published by big houses, and few of them are known in America. They’re certainly not being reviewed in the New York Times, and excerpts aren’t being placed in the New Yorker. And I also think there’s an aspect of age and generation. As new media comes into it, there’s going to be shift.”The Great Perhaps, then, can be read as an attempt at complexity, both on an aesthetic level, with its many storytelling and formal devices, and on a thematic one, for its characters – the five Caspers – are trying to figure out this complicated, scary world without relying on dogma or easy answers. The novel, Meno said, is an attempt to answer the question: “How do you live in a world without having to rely on absolutes?” Of course, the novel never posits one simple solution; that would defeat the purpose of asking the question in the first place. Meno did say, however, that the historical sections of the book (which explore Jonathan Casper’s cowardly ancestors, as well as cowardly moments in American history), are meant to show that “questions of courage and fear aren’t limited to just our era. We seem to be motivated by fear a lot.” Could this be one reason for publishing’s refusal to reinvent? What are they afraid of?Joe Meno seems more than willing to try new things in his work, to stretch his expectations of what he can do as a writer, and what a book can be. “When my first book came out, I was 22, I was working at a head shop. I couldn’t believe someone was going to pay me and put my name on the book! That was the extent of my ambitions. Now of course [I] want my work to be seen as worthwhile, to be taken seriously.” Referring to his most recent short story collection, Demon in the Spring, with its inside jacket made from beautiful firecracker paper, and a different artist illustrating each story, he said, “The book doesn’t have to be just one thing. And increasingly we’ll have to find other ways of approaching what a book is. There’s room for artfulness… What’s terrifying is that you know every time you’re starting over, but that’s also what’s really rewarding. And why you keep doing it.”I enjoyed talking with Meno; even when discussing the flaws of the publishing world, he never lost that tone of hopefulness, that excitement for the alternatives. He seems to bring this desire for change and inventiveness to everything, even his teaching at Columbia College, where the writing classes are “process-oriented,” meaning the students meet for over four hours to write, read published work, and exchange positive feedback. (This sounded amazing!) As with everything else, in the classroom, Meno values diversity and inventiveness. What can we learn from one another if we’ve all read the same books? “The basic premise of storytelling is trying to make a connection with people who are different from you,” Meno said.That night, after Meno’s well-attended reading (he shared the stage with local writers Jim Ruland and Margaret Wappler), a few of us went for drinks at The Dresden. As Meno sipped his Blood & Sand (The Dresden’s signature cocktail), legendary lounge singers Marty and Elayne serenaded him in honor of his new novel. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…,” Elayne crooned. We all felt hopeful.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 1 6 min read
Essays

Freezing White Men for Posterity

Essays
September 14, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 8 8 min read

When I heard that there was another book by Don DeLillo, I thought, here we go again, another book that is going to be praised by my peers and betters, another book I’ll find pretentious and hard to get into, another book about which I’ll have to reserve judgment. “Visionary,” said one blurb. “Prophetic,” said another. The reviews also revealed that DeLillo was covering ground I had been writing about for the past year, in its reincarnation in Michel Houellebecq’s novels: terrors of the ailing white male body, a resurrection cult, a clandestine headquarters, a narrator that feels at once pulled and repelled by the idea of preserving his body forever. This sounded so much like Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island that I felt compelled to read Zero K to see just how much DeLillo and Houellebecq’s respective obsessions with death and resurrection converged.

On the fourth page of Zero K, the narrator’s father is taking his sick wife to an embalmment and rebirth facility so as to freeze her until a time that her illness might be cured. His son asks, “This is not a new idea. Am I right?” The line is a sly comment on the conception of the book. It is actually almost disconcerting how similar these novels are — two sides of the same coin.

In both books, death becomes yet another experience to be fully curated for the wealthy. Would you like your current body destroyed and and your DNA resurrected in some other human form (The Possibility of an Island), or would you like your organs taken apart and be embalmed in a pod? (Zero K). (You’re probably better off in Houellebecq’s world because he provides us with some news from the future: some of the book is narrated by the clones of the first Daniel to try this technology. We know it has worked.) The narrative switches between the experiences of the first Daniel, and his future clones’ commentary on the life he has lived. He is reincarnated up to the 25th Daniel, when that clone decides to sample the “wilding” way of life — the life of the descendants of people who have continued to breed in the atavistic manner. We are gently warned that your skin color may determine how well you do in Houellebecq’s future: the wild humans who have resisted cloning and look for food just outside the protective fences are “of Spanish or North African origin.”

In these tales of the contemporary malaise of the global north, it is women whose bodies are the first to malfunction — take this verb as broadly as possible — and through them the central male narrators face their own mortality. In both novels, men continue to be desirable much longer than women do, and the female body suffers for the central male(s) in a sort of ersatz Passion, carrying the cross of aging. “Her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance was beginning to suffer the first blows of age […] I recognized the look she wore afterwards: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack,” Daniel says of his partner Isabelle, who decides to take her chances with the cloning cult before he does. In the DeLillo-Houellebecq universe, the women do the work of accepting the end of the white body (and hence, of history).

In Zero K, not long after they go to the facility called Convergence, the father (Ross) of the narrator (Jeffrey) decides to join his wife in the freezer; he doesn’t want to live a life without her, and adds he can only be the man he is with her. I.e., an older man who can get the attention of a younger, attractive woman. In his obsession with his younger wife, Ross is very much like the original Daniel in The Possibility of an Island, who feels death’s shadow upon him not because his body is falling apart with hemorrhoids and the like, but because his young girlfriend (Is she the second or third woman he’s been with in the novel? Who’s counting? Definitely the youngest and the supplest.) decides to leave him. It is then that Daniel takes up the offer of the Elohimite cult, who are offering to preserve the DNA of their members, to be cloned for use in a better future.

Right after he is abandoned by the young girlfriend, Daniel takes a plane, not to Central Asia, where DeLillo’s Convergence is headquartered, but to much nearer Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The headquarters of both these quasi-scientology cults seem to be “off stage,” extra murs, outside the city limits. For Houellebecq, it’s enough that this non-space is outside the Mediterranean. For the American DeLillo, the stakes seem to be higher, and the non-place is somewhere beyond the Caucasus, beyond the habitat of whiteness: word play allows him to insert a definition of “Caucasian” in his explorations of geography. The Convergence is “somewhere” in the steppes of Central Asia, a place the coordinates of which Jeffrey gives by saying, if I may paraphrase, neither Kyrgyzstan nor Kazakhstan. Somewhere not far from where the Soviets tested their nuclear bombs, “beyond the limits of believability and law,” the very realm of the homo sacer.

Both novels are full of screens showing disasters and human ineptitude. Houellebecq’s narrative of teleology is mostly sustained with distaste for what Europeans have done to their culture. They have become too liberal (by allowing women to put careers before service to their husbands) and, oddly, at the same time they have let the occidental way of life be adulterated by the barbarians (letting Islam push Europeans towards “moral austerity”). This is expressed with that very French degout: “It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without a trace — one begins to feel slightly ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic,”Daniel says to Isabelle after she has decided to commit suicide and leave her DNA with the Elohimites.

Earlier, talking about his career as a comedian, Daniel explains: “I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West’s absurd attraction to cynicism and evil,” and gives an account of his offensive brand of humor that we know well from Charlie Hebdo — bodies washed up on the Mediterranean coast, women reduced to their sex: “Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina? A Woman.” For all this, he says, he was called “a cutting observer of contemporary life,” a term that Houellebecq might well have borrowed from either his own or DeLillo’s dust jackets. “I looked like an Arab, which helps,” he says. “One had to wonder: had my mother always been scrupulously faithful? Or had I been engendered by some Mustapha? Or even — another hypothesis — by a Jew?” Daniel fears that not only the culture, but even his own European body has been adulterated by oriental elements.

DeLillo’s narrative, on the other hand, seems to proceed with a more inward-facing melancholy, and a friendlier, more romantic form of Orientalizing.

Jeffrey’s father’s new beard is heralded as a ritual of entering a new dimension of belief and there are several loaded signifiers that don’t quite add up. By the second page there’s a chador, and a woman’s headscarf is described as “her flag of independence.”  In his exoticness scales, Slavic and Turkic languages vie with one another, and the Turkic ones come on top: “In bed I wanted to hear her speak to me in her language, Uzbek, Kazakh, whatever it was, but I understood that this was an intimacy not suited to the occasion.” He feels trapped in his father’s language and looks for a way out. “I wanted a non-Roman alphabet,” he says. Luckily, in the Convergence philologists are designing an advanced language pared down to its mathematical basics. They plan to get rid of metaphor and simile for the future when the bodies in the pods will be resuscitated.

The book is filled with musings on what it means to be a son to a wealthy, famous father who has left him and his mother for a younger woman. Clearly very suggestible, Jeffrey feels absorbed and awed by the Convergence, while Houellebecq’s narrator Daniel maintains his ironic distance and detachment at the Elohimite headquarters for a long time. So whereas Houellebecq’s tone is sarcastic, in many places Zero K is sermonizing (in addition to its many Biblical allusions); it reads like one of those religious pamphlets that passed through my hands as a teenager, a genre I grew to recognize and stay well clear from. The eschatology becomes extremely familiar when Jeffrey wonders what age his father and stepmother will be when they are revived — the number, certain Muslim esotericists (and Jesus) will tell you, is 33.

The book asks too many metaphysical questions we are used to hearing from clerics lusty for new followers: what is the essence of time, is there an afterlife, where does your soul go, when does the person become the body? It’s difficult to tell whether DeLillo is asking these questions in earnest or whether he is trying to mimic the atmosphere of the Convergence in the voice of his narrator.

On his first visit, Jeffrey looks at the naked mannequins lining the corridors of the Convergence: “I imagined placing a hand on a breast. This seemed required, particularly if you are me.” We are not given a reason why particularly he should be expected to molest lifeless bodies, maybe because, as he keeps reminding us, “he is his father’s son.” Jeffrey’s optimism that we will all live to be 100 makes him describe the bodies in the pods as “rendered dead” well before their time — any dead white body is too young to die. As Jeffrey inspects these “patients” one question that comes to his mind is whether these pod peas get erections; he later later imagines his stepmother in “a state of virgin solitude.” In The Possibility of an Island, the 24th clone of Daniel contemplates the bodily degradation of what to him are “primitive” humans and says of the male body: “Subject to aesthetic and functional degradations as much as, if not more than the female, he nevertheless managed to overcome them for as long as the erectile capacities…were maintained.”

In Houellebecq’s Submission, the protagonist obsesses about how the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign has caused women to give up wearing skirts, reducing his opportunities at leering ; in The Possibility of an Island, Daniel likewise seems to experience changes in the weather as a function of how they will affect the length of skirts. In DeLillo, it must be said, there is little leering, but it isn’t absent. Jeff’s last vision of the Convergence is again to do with the female body — an impression of a woman’s skirt “lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine?”

Having been seasoned by Houellebecq, I expected Jeffrey to give into the temptation and get into a pod on his second visit to the Convergence, but he desists. What does all this worrying about death and what waits for us afterwards amount to? A grotesque form of nostalgia, Jeffrey says. Nostalgia, possibly, for a time when there was more room for the dead and the dying in our worlds, when the business of death didn’t have to be done off stage, in the bowels of a volcanic island or a wasteland of radioactive fallout. The nostalgia for a more enlightened Occident that was full of purpose, that produced great works of art, that was able to keep itself young and relevant without having to, albeit begrudgingly, let in immigrants from the Orient to quicken itself. Like so many nostalgias working their way across the globe today, it is nostalgia for a perceived golden age, the benefits of which extended only to the chosen few.

The rich seem to inhabit an ethereal form of reality in which the day of reckoning can be averted, in which they can transcend both their bodies and histories, whereas other classes seem more tied to their corporeality and finite lives. “In their prime” the men need women to reassure themselves of their libido; in death they need strangers who speak in “different alphabets” to prepare them for the ultimate alienation. Apres moi…not deluge, but — in Houellbecq’s novel — a drying up: just as the white body has shriveled up, so has the earth, and time has come for humans 2.0., sans hunger, sans passion, sans bodily fluids. Houellebecq seems convinced that by the time his own body stops there won’t be any proper human lifestyle left worth living. DeLillo, however, is more optimistic: the last image he leaves us is an alignment of the sunset and the New York City grid, the wonder of which is reflected on the face of a boy. Though the old guard may be paralyzed by a sense of narcissistic impending doom, DeLillo, at least, allows for a future that will still have moments of transcending beauty and meaning, reflected on the face of tomorrow’s man.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 8 8 min read
● ●
Essays

In Praise of the “Starter Book”

Essays
May 23, 2018 | 3 books mentioned 5 min read
Now, after the sting of selling 200 copies in three years has passed a bit, looking back fondly on my little “starter book,” I’m able to say that even though I didn’t write something that changed lives, I learned lessons that were invaluable to building a career as a writer.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 5 min read
● ● ●
● ●

15 comments:

  1. Serendipitous that this essay appears today, so soon after yet another deflection from the issues via attack on a woman”s mental state by #45.

    I an not the only one who has made this observation, but this very website’s comment section is rife with a slew of such attacks against women with the temerity to disagree with certain prolific commenters’ opinions. Among other terms that have been used to describe me, that can think of off the top of my head:

    Obsessive-compulsive, hysterical, determined to find offense, humorless, and the good old all-purpose medical term: “Nuts.”

    We see you.

    Moe

  2. My understanding was that Close derided the portrayal of a women unhinged in Fatal Attraction, as she recognized years later the ramping up or exaggeration of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (or hysteria long ago), a severe non psychotic illness which causes great suffering and is engendered by early neglect and abandonment, and often sexual assault. This neediness caused by abandonment is scorned – to be deemed needy is the worst and yet to need is to be human. A reminder: women with borderline personality disorder are capable of great compassion and empathy, despite what Harvard proffesor Dr. Baron Cohen states in his book (can’t remember title) where he lumps women with BPD in with anti-social personality disorder and incapable of empathy. Excellent essay though.

  3. Well, change comes slow. Misogyny and sexism are monstrous, certainly, but where is the data about just HOW prevalent they are? If anything, the world of 2017 is vastly improved over the world of 1917, or 1947, or 1977, and we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality. Is it perfect yet? No, far from it, but I just wish the ID politics crowd could step out of the vacuum of the now and add a little historical context, or to show me some evidence that this problem is doing anything but getting better. It’s almost like they want women to continue be oppressed (or be perceived as every bit as oppressed as they were a hundred years ago) in order to validate their own worldview.
    As for Glenn Close, her legacy isn’t determined just by a showy role in Fatal Attraction. Damages continues to grow in regard as a critically acclaimed moment in the development of prestige TV, and her reputation as a film actress with over 50 credits, including fine work in Nine Lives, Cookie’s Fortune, Reversal of Fortune, The Natural, and The World According to Garp, is far closer to the hearts of cineastes than boiling rabbits (though I do think Adrian Lyne is a provocative European-style filmmaker whose body of work is impressive in its own right). Close also stops mid-play and tells people to put their damn phones away, so kudos to her for preserving the sanctity of the theatrical experience.

  4. @SeanH @SwogHolllow

    Just going to recycle a little Swog Hollow from an earlier piece on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I am confident you will deem Swog one of that fine cohort of “clear-headed white male empiricists.”

    I believe this pretty much covers the waterfront.

    [Sean,

    Still “I refuse to think that somehow by mere dint of one’s status as a woman or a POC, they are somehow more fit to judge the objective reality of a situation than an objective, clear-headed white male empiricist”

    Is something you should think hard about. Women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC. Try listening a little more and being turned off by the messaging a little less.]

    “End Swog Hollow”

  5. Sean – good point re Close’s legacy not determined by one film.
    Moe – fight the good fight. xo

  6. Hey Moe,
    I’m all for taking criticism as well as dishing it out, but what’s wrong with being a clear-headed empiricist? I simply do not think that “women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “what it’s like to be a woman or POC.” There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be gay. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc. This universalizing is the basis of racism, sexism, bigotry, and discrimination. To say that because someone is a member of a group that they INHERENTLY are a certain way, that’s racism. To say women are more emotional. To say blacks like fried chicken. To say that whites can’t dance. There is no universal experience of what it’s like to be ANYTHING.

  7. “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman.”

    Well, bless your heart.

    Moe Murph
    Over and out on this thread

  8. @Sean

    Much of what you’ve written up there (against Essentialism) is Spot On… BUT (there’s always a but): look to the definition of “Empirical”. Doesn’t it privilege direct experience over observation-at-a-remove and hearsay? In other words, in discussions of Sexism/ Racism, wouldn’t Women and POC function as better “Empiricists” on the topics than Het White Fellers? Which is not to say that Women or POC *own* these conversations, but their (our) contributions, empirically speaking, are going to be more relevant than yours.

    As a Het male POC, I wouldn’t dare to presume to relativize the suffering/ Othering/second-classing of Women… for two reasons: 1) the Relative intensity of a pain is meaningless to anyone in Pain (ie, being drawn-and-quartered has got to hurt worse than a serious tooth ache, but tell that to someone with a serious tooth ache, in lieu of giving them morphine) 2) how would I know, from direct experience, how bad Sexism is now, compared to “then”, and should anyone be grateful that an absolutely unnecessary (but convenient) Evil has eased somewhat in a century? Surely there will be an urgency about making *all* of the Evil disappear? Especially if the Evil impacts one directly.

    But (again): it doesn’t impact *you* directly; from your distance, things appear to have gotten so much better that you feel people with complaints are exaggerating. You aren’t in possession of enough Empirical Evidence to judge; as a good Empiricist, you should be able to admit that.

    In ’95, I came back to America after a long absence and stayed with married friends in a lovely house by the lake. My old (White) friend had her own dog-walking/ sitting business and asked me, one morning, to check on dogs in two different houses (masters away on vacation). Doing this for her would have entailed letting myself into nice big houses in largely-White neighborhoods at the crack of dawn. Hilarious, right? I’m a Black guy of six feet tall… even wearing white tie and tails wouldn’t have helped. I had to beg off the request. My old friend thought I was being paranoid. She lectured me that there had been lots of “changes” in the US since I had left (remember, this lecture came to me in ’95) and that I had to “face these changes” and “move on”. Racism, she told me, was becoming a thing of the past. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise.

    Don’t be like *that*, Sean! laugh.

    PS “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc.”

    But there is definitely such a thing as what it’s like to be persecuted/ degraded for being “black etc. etc”.

  9. I mostly hear where you’re coming from, Steven (and thanks as always for an articulate response), but there is such a thing as letting one’s life be too muhc governed by fear. If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?
    Also, empiricism can cut both ways. I understand and fully agree with your point about direct observation (in a Masters & Johnson sort of way; you can’t just ASK people what they do in the bedroom, you have to literally observe and record stuff). But that said, certain experiences bias people. Are people who have lost children to drunk drivers really capable of being empirical about DWI laws? Should the widows of people who were killed on 9/11 be in charge of anti-terrorism policies? Too little experience is bad for empiricism, but so is too much.

  10. Sean!

    Ugh, as they say. Seriously: ugh. This is borderline loony (and a new kind of magical thinking, possibly):

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    Sean, how will we put an end to Nigerian email scammers if *you’re* too risk-averse (and cowardly, even), to engage with them? More importantly, how will women put an end to domestic abuse if they keep selfishly leaving abusive households instead of sticking with it and taking beatings in the name of eventual progress that will come, after all the abusive husbands and “lovers” are simply worn out from beating them, posthumously?

    Well, I tried.

    Signed,

    Articulate Black Guy Steven

    PS And no, I will not “hijack” this thread with an off-piste cluster of responses to more and possibly equally absurd rejoinders. I have to mow the lawn, or something, instead. But, yeah: ugh.

  11. Come on man! You’re better than that, Augustine. You’re totally distorting what I say with limp analogies. If you’re going to use domestic abuse as an analogy, what you’re saying by refusing to water plants for a white family in a rich neighborhood is: “Because some women get beaten by their spouses or boyfriends, why bother dating at all.” Show a little gumption, man.
    Or look at it from the other side; what you are saying is that, by your logic of irrational fear, you would encourage a white person to reject a black friend who lived in “the ghetto” who asked the white guy to dogsit/be in such a neighborhood at a perceived “dangerous” time. How is that not furthering the problem? America (and the first-world west in general) is WAY safer than it’s ever been, and even taking into account that the request you received was 20 years ago, it still was recent enough to be a pretty safe activity. People live in fear because of the media. Crime is a fraction of what it was in the 70s. America is safe as hell and there’s very little violent street crime.
    Do black people sometimes get harassed by the cops in wealthy, largely white neighborhoods where there are hardly any black people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. Do white people sometimes get harassed by the natives in lower class urban neighborhoods where there are very few white people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. But to give up on interraciality or to just assume you will be the victim of violence if you “cross lines” is too fearful for me to support as being anything remotely approaching a logical or empirical approach to living one’s life.

  12. Sean

    Steve didn’t distort what you said. You said:

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I have no words for this stupidity.
    Congratulations.

  13. This line is just classic. I can’t get over it. You have to break your brain in order to process the logic in this.

    “Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists.”

    Somebody should create a meme. The opportunities are endless.

    “Is it more dangerous to drive a car into a brick wall? Yes, but the dudes who do so in spite of the risk are the real car enthusiasts.”

    “Is it more dangerous to inject fentanyl? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real daredevils.”

    “Is it more dangerous to eat 12,000 calories per day? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real foodies.”

    “Is it more dangerous to jump down a mineshaft? Yes, but the kids who do in spite of the risk are the real athletes.”

  15. Toad,

    You just compared walking alone at night to driving a car into a wall. How am I the one with logical flaws in my rhetoric?

    Really, think about it. All your comparative examples are ridiculously dangerous. A woman walking alone at night is the essence of “take back the night,” it is the absolute essence of feminism–that a woman has every right to walk by herself at night that a man has, and that she should do so with just as much freedom and ease, and without fear of reprisal or harassment.

    You don’t have to break your brain at all to see the difference between my examples and yours.

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Essays

Teenage Dream: Life on the Pageant Circuit

Essays
August 9, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 12 min read

Listen to this and other great longform stories read aloud with the Audm app, now available in the App Store.

1.
So one time you enter this beauty pageant. It seems like a good idea at the time, and hey, why not? Then you get third place and have to spend the year being a princess, travelling around doing parades and shows in this royal-blue off-the-shoulder gown and a purple cloak with fake fur trim, and this crown.

“You” is me. It’s from a short story I wrote about it a few years afterwards. I was 15 when I took my short, cold dip into pageant life, and I can’t shake that naive voice. I slide into it when I talk about that time, which isn’t often (I never published the story). A fog descends, not just at the thought that it was me swanning around western North America in a rhinestone tiara. Like a lot of smalltown girls, I gave a good impression of agreeable calm — like a lake. When I think of myself and my friends then, I see us holding still in spite of all the usual teen infernos, as if just about to be photographed.

The Lady of the Lake is a young woman who has a personal presence that leaves a favourable and lasting impression. She has the integrity to meet anyone in an honest and genuine manner, the self assurance and judgement to converse intelligently, the finesse to meet dignitaries in any social setting, the natural warmth and grace of a young lady, as well as the intelligence, and excellent public speaking skills. Combined with the fact that she has an awareness of herself as an individual, and you have the young woman who is the Ambassador of Kelowna.

This is from the curiously antique-sounding pageant website. Or maybe not so curious, given that the competition began in the 1930s, when my British Columbia city was hauling itself up from its one-horse-town roots. It hit its stride in the 1950s, when the winner’s every move was reported breathlessly in the news. “Lady of the Lake” is Miss Kelowna’s alternate title, straight out of King Arthur, wherein the Lake spits out Excalibur and the Lady is Lancelot’s foster mom. Kelowna has a lake of its own, and its parade float is covered in blue tinsel to approximate it. The real lake is narrow and very deep, and home to more than one lost corpse. I used to swim down as far as I could off my grandmother’s wharf with one of those disposable underwater cameras, trying to photograph bones or ghosts.

Photographs eat your soul, right? (We all talked like that, in questions.) But that’s what I think about when I think about that time: being looked at. This was the early 1990s, pre-cellphones, pre-Instagram, but in training the pageant candidates developed an alertness for cameras, like animals for danger, or for food. We learned how to wave (one from the elbow, two from the wrist). How to eat soup (dip the spoon away from you, it looks less greedy). How to sit down (edge of the chair, legs angled to one side, ankles uncrossed). How to close a door (behind you, without turning around to look). How to exit a car without displaying your unmentionables (press your legs together and swing them out first). What unmentionables to buy for beneath evening gowns and suits (“Cinnamon” was an approved shade for nylons. So was “Nude”). How to pose: three-quarter turns, feet in third ballet position, arms at sides, chins slightly down. Look up at the lens from under your eyelashes.

I loved it. This was stuff I would never have learned anywhere else; my parents were bookish and kept to themselves. The ladies who ran it, the 30-ish Trainer and the 60-ish Director of Royalty, insisted this was not a beauty pageant, but they took femininity seriously. They looked the part, never without jewelry and full hair and makeup. Here was arcane knowledge: This is how it’s done. I remember going to the drugstore for their recommended French-manicure polish and touching a bottle of Witchcraft brand on the shelf. That’s how it all felt, occult. Initiation. Ritual. Hogwarts before there was Hogwarts, watered down for middle-class Canadian girls.

2.
Men start things for me. Two of them, friendly and middle-aged, from a local service club, get my name from school, and one evening they come to my house to meet me and my parents and ask if I will be their sponsored candidate for 1991-92. They sit in the living room and politely accept cheese and crackers and ice water. The glasses sweat as the men chat with my dad about ski lifts and construction. My mother keeps out of it. My younger siblings lurk in my view at the top of the basement stairs, narrowing their eyes identically when the conversation turns to me. Why you?

I sit next to the fireplace, keeping my back straight and ignoring them. I’m flattered to be asked, persuaded easily, as I am into most things. The men are full of good cheer. The club buys me a dress. I pick blue velvet. The club’s name goes on the white satin banner I have to wear over it.

A couple of my more academic or proto-feminist friends are dumbfounded by my decision. But Why not is a minor refrain with me, and I’m used to pleasing adults. I usually choose Truth in Truth or Dare, so I can lie pleasantly if necessary and escape. This candidacy feels like a dare, and I take it. It plays into my inner perversity, doing something that already feels bizarre and out of time.

I have long hair, I like makeup. I play piano and flute, I get good grades. I look at myself in the mirror frequently. A bloodier part of me, the part that pours out gothic tales in a flowery journal and occasionally startles the English teacher, knows to stay in its kennel. But it’s easy enough to move between selves. I want to see me as you see me. Joyce Carol Oates makes this a refrain in Blonde, her psychological portrait of Marilyn Monroe. But I think it goes beyond that.How thick a shell can I build, so you can’t see me at all?

3.
The competition takes months. There are nine candidates, all sponsored by local shops and clubs and societies. I’m the youngest, the oldest is 20, the upper age cutoff. Two girls are Asian, the rest white. Most of us have biggish 1991 hair. There is much friendliness, sisterliness, at training nights and the local events we are sent to. We wear matching boxy suits and white heels. We hear over and over in speech practice about respective career plans (teaching, beauty therapy, “a singer in Japan,” the law) and causes (children, mostly). Some of the girls are deeply earnest about all of it, with stage-mothers bustling in their wake. If you win this, you go on to more pageants, ideally to Miss Universe. Win that and then what? Then you win.

No one is mean. There’s a Miss Congeniality trophy at stake.

But first blood outs itself at the talent competition. Our hackles shift as we side-eye each other’s outfits and abilities. What can you do? For me, this question goes two ways: what is your talent, and what are you supposed to do about it? One of the more outspoken girls talks petulantly about a candidate from another year who played a video of herself synchronized-swimming while she did ballet live, in a costume she’d made herself, also singing at the end. The sense of injustice is visceral. Showing off is not what you do with your talents. But what do you do, then, if you have to perform them in public?

This part is held one evening at the Centennial Hall in the middle of the sports fields, with its chalk-dust smell and its raised curtainless stage. A girl puts on a felt beret and shows off her art. Another performs a liturgical dance in a white robe. There are a couple of jazz routines, a dramatic monologue in a fetus’s voice. I play the flute to a fuzzy tape-recording of myself playing the piano. The Trainer stops me backstage and powders more blush on my cheeks and forehead. More smell of dust. I get out there and do reasonably. In spite of nerves and hissing worries about being showoffs, we’re all enjoying being looked at onstage. Doing something that merits being looked at. We know this is what we’re here for.

The audience is gravely favorable. A full house, half-visible in the dark, but no cheers, just long gentle applause for everyone. One of the girls is tearful afterwards. She sniffles, “I want to do it again.” I’m not sure whether she means she wants to do her song better, or just to be on stage again. She’s inconsolable. We circle her, pat her.

As it turns out, my flute and piano and I win this part. Standing alone on the stage again, I feel I had nothing to do with it. I’m always surprised by things that happen to me. And I’m tired. The training nights are getting longer and more frequent, as are the weekend charity events.

School ends, and we do a summer fashion show for a full house. The pageant is approaching like an express. We inhabit our bodies more and more uneasily, though we go over and over walks and turns for the evening gown component, and the Phantom of the Opera jazz-dance routine we’re all in. There’s a judges’ question we each have to answer at the end of the big night, and the practice answers get sharper, and at the same time less sincere. No one says she doesn’t want a career or a cause, but a flabbiness has struck the responses. Yeah whatever, I want to be a teacher, I guess. Will we ever need careers? Aren’t we enough, doing this? Isn’t this what we’re here for?

4.
Then it’s late August and the valley is soaked in heat. I’ve been avoiding tan lines all summer because of my strapless blue velvet. And it’s time. On pageant day, I get my hair done in long spirals, though it’s already curly. I take a bubble bath and it sags. My mum has caught a whiff of the stage mothers by now and starts to fuss around my head, but I tell her to leave it, and I get myself into my blue velvet dress and white banner. My heart is thudding like an old machine. When I arrive at the hotel hours early to get ready for the night, the candidate trainer clacks her tongue and attacks me with bobby pins. “They need to see your face,” she tells me, looking hard into my eyes and puffing my hair above my forehead. I close them against the hairspray bomb until she’s pleased with her work. She touches my cheek softly, an uncharacteristic gesture, checking me like a grocery store fruit.

The hotel is older, built to look modern in 1961, and still the most formal in town. The water in the central courtyard’s outdoor pool shifts and glitters. People in swimsuits watch from their lounge chairs as we dart back and forth between dressing and rehearsal areas. A woman is lying facedown, her white bikini top undone, the man beside her massaging her tanned back in slow circles. In a sudden sweat I thank God there is no swimsuit competition; I don’t think I’ve considered that possibility until this moment, and it’s nauseating. It’s not the abrupt hint of sex that scares me. Teenage pageants are resoundingly asexual, or at least the outer rind of them is, in spite of being all about bubbling femininity and strapless dresses, in spite of male-gaze theory. Those father-daughter Purity Balls are cousins. Girls doing what they ought to do, while everyone waltzes around the fact that they’re getting old enough to do what they want to do.

I stare at the half-naked woman on the lounge chair. It hasn’t occurred to me that people might look at us that way, though one of my indignant friends told me that prostitution and pornography are exact equals to what I’m doing. But those analogies are too easy. They don’t take into account the hiding in plain sight. And this woman isn’t hiding. She couldn’t care less who looks at her. The nauseating part is that I never think things through. I see that now. I don’t want to be stared at, but here I am, asking for just that.

The ballroom begins in darkness. The emcee is a slow-voiced AM radio host. The judges are local celebrities, two women and the token man. We know them by now, we’ve seen them watching us. And we know each other, we watch one another more closely. These are all smart girls, and tonight, waiting to go on, I see the way they use or screen their smartness. One is grieving her mother’s recent death, hoping to make her proud, but she rarely brings up this fact, though others might have. Her eyes swim with tears now. One, who has little chance, stands with military straightness in the knowledge that her candidacy has given her family undreamed-of pride. A couple inhabit their bodies with ease and proficiency, in tighter gowns than the rest of us, shifting their breasts in their bodices, posing better. They look as if they were another species, bred to this.

We do everything we’ve trained for. The judges’ surprise questions come towards the end. They ask me whether young people today should have goals and I’m momentarily flummoxed. Is the question stupid? Is it deeper than I’m seeing? Do they want us to have goals? Should I say No, they should not?

I don’t argue. I come up with something about physics, and my struggles with it, that somehow relates. The two in the tight gowns are asked about whether men and women are different (yes, but equal! Like hands!), and about heroes (people with cancer!). One of them tells me later that “Hitler” was the first word that popped into her head, but her big hazel eyes never showed a fleck of obscenity. She is very good. The purple cloak she ends up with suits her.

She wins, after last year’s Princess revenges herself on the Queen with a farewell speech about how she ate too much Mexican food on a trip to Washington. The other tight-gown girl is second. I am third, and dazed, and thinking Now what. The tiara is now what. Its combs gnaw at my scalp as I’m crowned, and the three of us stand on the low stage doing our wave to the long, packed room. Some of my friends and family are there, grinning in amusement or bemusement. As we walk off, escorted by scarlet-coated RCMP officers, Lionel Ritchie’s “Ballerina Girl” plays loudly.

The Director of Royalty takes us aside. She tells us we’re now living in a goldfish bowl, and all our movements will be scrutinized by the public. Her lined face is plentifully made up. Her heavy earrings tremble as she talks. She’s been running this show for years, she lives for this. She radiates joy. It hits me in the chest, like heartburn.

5.
The watching goes on. The Director and her husband chaperone us during all our royal duties. He drives quietly, doing his male part. We three new royals are crammed together in the backseat of their compact Chevrolet, listening to Abba tapes or to the Director talk about World War II and why she will never buy a Japanese car or wait in line for a restaurant. It’s not something we do. We travel to parades and other pageants around BC and Alberta and Washington State. It’s another planet, all of it. We model wedding dresses and sportswear. We meet other royalty and exchange city pins. We meet Superman, Christopher Reeve, at the Calgary Stampede, a few years before he falls and is paralyzed. In our matching gowns and cloaks, or matching suits, or matching snowsuits, and always in crowns, we ride the City of Kelowna float with its blue tinsel. Floats lumber, parades are long. The driver, a realtor, is hidden underneath with the controls. I can just see the back of his head from my place left of Ogopogo, our resident lake monster, staring bland and bug-eyed from the top. I wave until my shoulder shakes, I smile until my jaw trembles and migraine stabs my left temple.

The Queen is sometimes handed solo gas-station roses in plastic tubes, or asked for autographs. I’m impressed by her easy handling of these peripheral guys, these dumb spider mates. She and the First Princess get along splendidly. They don’t wear unmentionables under their nylons, avoiding panty lines altogether. They’re not shy about showing me how this works. They idly discuss whether posing for Playboy one day would be a good idea.They’ve already staked their claims on womanhood, and they don’t know what to make of me. The Queen tells me, “You’re so innocent.” I’m not sure if she’s exasperated or curious. I use my innocence as a shield, pretending not to understand what they talk about half the time, though I’m always listening. They snap my bra, do my hair, hide my textbooks, tease me about sex, paint my nails, lend me earrings, rub my neck, make me share a bed with one of them everywhere we go. The rooms are always doubles. The motels are always functional. In small bathrooms, I take long showers to be alone for a while.

At many events, we’re paired up with local high-school boys as escorts. I find this humiliating and hilarious, as most of the boys seem to. One of them tells me he’s doing it for a PE credit. We usually dance one or two dances and then I try to bow out and sit on the sidelines, tiara-ed and smiling gamely. One night I end up with a boy I’d known in primary school. We haven’t seen each other in years. We leave the gym for air and stand around looking at the stars and laughing. Our reunion makes me bizarrely joyful, as though my actual life is still tethered to me. As though I have a life. I feel it then, shifting around in my chest under my strapless bra.

6.
I remember a lot of disconnected details like this. The stars, the helpless laughing, the welts from control-top underwear, the pads in the balls of high-heeled shoes to ease pain. At one parade, a little girl with brown braids and a purple shirt asked me if I was a real princess. She was suspicious. I liked kids, I babysat all the time, but I curtly told her no. I’m not real.

I found the blue velvet dress in the garage a while ago. It smells, but I tried it on anyway. It just fits (it has a full skirt). But teenage me still doesn’t seem to have quite existed in this world. Stacy Schiff’s recent book about Salem in 1692 makes clear that the original accusers at the infamous witch trials were very much adolescent: The neighbor made me do this. I don’t like her. She pinched me. I’m tired all the time. The men and the hints of sex only entered the story later: She bewitched me. She made me think of her constantly. Her form came to my room at night. The way things slide away from you. You start them, then they escalate, they’re not in your control. You can only watch.

We looked a little witchy in the early ‘nineties, given free rein. Black dresses and tights, dried-blood lipstick. I got my driver’s license during the pageant year. I passed without having to parallel park; the examiner and I had the same name, so he let me off the hook, saying it was a wonderful coincidence. After being introduced to the mayor with the other candidates that night, I got to take the family Honda out by myself for the first time. I was still in my boxy suit and nylons, my white heels thrown into the passenger seat so they wouldn’t scuff. I drove everywhere, aimlessly, for hours. It occurs to me now that what I felt like was one of those teen witches flying off on a broomstick through the night over Puritan New England. Surveilled, questioned, harnessed by someone else’s power, but turning it around. Watch me now.

Image: Wikipedia

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 12 min read
● ● ●
● ● ●
● ●
Essays

Leonora Carrington’s Unruly Prose

Essays
May 26, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 1 5 min read

Centenaries beget opportunities. Publishing opportunities, marketing opportunities, opportunities to redress a reputation. Unsellable manuscripts can be dredged from locked drawers; under the sign of the centenary, every work is worth a critic’s words.

The centenary in question marks 100 years since the birth of the artist and writer Leonora Carrington: an opportunity to publish The Complete Stories (including three previously unreleased works) and a reprint of her memoir Down Below, out of print since 1990. Centenaries ask us to put aside our doubts and pay tribute; that said, the fact that these texts have lain dormant for years is not wholly without reason.

Down Below is a troublesome book full of mystic reckonings and fragmented occlusions. As an autobiographical account of Carrington’s incarceration in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during the Second World War it is, as Marina Warner writes in her introduction, “an unsparing account of the experience of being insane.” You need to have acquired a certain prestige for a book like that to sell, and I felt a similar skepticism towards the new short stories. Knowing Carrington’s tendency for tail-chasing dream narratives, I didn’t necessarily expect them to be literary masterpieces. And I still can’t really claim that they are. Here’s the thing: Carrington resists all critical categories.

Any article about Carrington should probably start with an account of her life, a fiction in its own right. Carrington would no doubt subvert this tradition and so I’ll start with her death, which shocked everyone. Shocked, mainly because no one in 2011 expected her to be alive — to be 94, still living in Mexico, still notoriously “difficult” and still painting (she had renounced writing in 1980). British-born Carrington had made Mexico her home after marrying the diplomat Renato Leduc in 1941, a marriage of convenience which enabled her to bypass her parents’ plans to send her to an asylum in South Africa. Here, the story blurs. Over the course of the previous year, Carrington, aged just 23, had been under the charge of Dr. Morales at his hospital in Santander; there she was treated with Cardiazol, a drug designed to replicate the effects of electro-shock therapy through chemically-induced convulsions. Down Below is Carrington’s account of that time. Visions fill the spaces life left behind.

Before that, “an era of paradise.” Carrington had been living with the Surrealist artist Max Ernst in a Provençal farmhouse, where images of their avatars emerged from the walls: she the horse, he the prince of birds. Those sculptures and murals can still be seen, untouched since Carrington’s frenzied escape to Spain (and into the hands of Dr. Morales), after Max had been transported to a Nazi concentration camp. Carrington later dismissed her relationship with Max, frustrated that his fame had become the source of her reputation. However, she never denied his role as a catalyst for her creativity; that he had given her cause to leave London for Paris in 1937, where she was initiated into the company of the Surrealists.

The Paris Surrealists were a boys group headed by André Breton; the role of a woman was as mistress and muse. Carrington nevertheless managed to hold her own, fulfilling their fantasies of magical femininity while refusing to play the femme-enfant. She was well aware of her beauty and power — although her marriageability had been somewhat tainted by a spell at Amédée Ozenfant’s London art school, she was still the desirable debutante who had been presented to the court of George V in 1935. Any eligible suitor would presumably have been unaware of Carrington’s schooling history, marked by a series of expulsions; convent schools did not appreciate her studied attempts at levitation, or her habit of writing backwards with her left hand. An upbringing governed by a grandmother’s myths and a father’s strictness might produce such a child, especially if the setting was Crookhey Hall, a neo-gothic mansion in the north of England. Carrington was born in the industrial north in 1917, a scrap of new life in the midst of war. And hence, her centenary.

Chronology wasn’t something Carrington cared for much. Her stories take place in timeless zones defined by strict social codes: a queen politely offers her guest beef tea, a young girl is chastised for transforming into a horse. In one of the later stories, Joseph Stalin has a cameo: he is a shriveled fetish, applied for medicinal purposes. Nevertheless, The Complete Stories takes a sensible approach to time. The book opens with Carrington’s best known story “The Debutante,” in which a young girl sends a hyena in her place to a debutante ball. We move through the early tales that so delighted the Surrealists, via her descent into madness and towards those written in New York and Mexico; the book concludes with the three new stories, as yet undated. The structure makes sense, as does the choice of cover image, Carrington’s famous self-portrait “The Inn of the Dawn Horse” (1937-8). There she is, tightly outlined in white jodhpurs, accompanied by her animal avatars in a room defined by rigid perspective. As if to say, to read this book is to read Carrington.

But as the stories progress, we retreat ever further from the Carrington we thought we knew. It turns out that “The Debutante,” with it ice-cold anti-climax and bloodthirsty details, is little more than a palate cleanser. It is by far the most accessible of the stories, which start to seem like the convoluted dreams people recount at breakfast. Nonetheless, these are not the sort of dreams that exist to be decoded. Carrington can frankly out-Freud any Freudian, and her perfectly circular logic casts doubt on the state of dreaming itself. “The Neutral Man” ends with the disclaimer: “There’s no ending because the episode is true, because all the people are still alive, and everyone is following his destiny.”

This resistance to interpretation doesn’t necessarily make for readable prose, and the less accepting reader might find Carrington’s life to be all the story they need; in this case, I would point them towards Joanna Moorhead’s recently published biography, The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (2017). I would be less likely to recommend Down Below, with its visionary digressions, cosmic theories, and confusing characters. That’s not to say the book is not worth reading. In its strange evocation of visions recalled in hindsight, it recreates a semi-lucid state that is both powerful and moving. And yet, the sense of dislocation which pervades the text is due to the fact it was written not for the reader, but for the writer.

When Carrington writes in the opening paragraph: “since I fortuitously met you, who I consider the most clear-sighted of all,” she is addressing the surgeon Pierre Mabille rather than the general reader. Mabille, a friend of the Surrealists whom she had met in Mexico, encouraged Carrington to write the Down Below in 1943 as a way of expurgating her trauma. REVELATION was the word emblazoned on Carrington’s suitcase when she crossed the border to Spain, and she writes to reinhabit her former state of madness, to transgress once again “that initial border of Knowledge.” If the reader expects to be initiated into this realm of Knowledge, they are soon shown to be misguided.

As a writer, Carrington was always a resistor. To accepted forms of literariness, to psychoanalytic readings, to the people who tried to read her in her creatureliness. The proof that her mission succeeds is clear from the way she managed to outwit whimsy. In the hands of any other writer, scenes of talking corpses and celestial sheep would be rich pickings for a Tim Burton movie, but I like to think Carrington’s characters would always fail the screen test. That they would never appear in CGI with spooky button eyes, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter singing:
Even though you won’t believe me
my story is beautiful
And the serpent that sang it
Sang it from out of the well.
No. Whimsy requires warmth to grow, it cannot be committed in cold blood. Even The Milk of Dreams, the book written and illustrated by Carrington for her two young sons and recently published by NYRB, doesn’t quite fit the bill. The horror is too simple, to real. Carrington wasn’t thinking of the needs of high-brow parents and their progressive youngsters — she was telling the simple facts of “ugly” characters who know “this bunny is pretty, but it’s not theirs.”

I may eat my words. Helena Bonham Carter might have already signed the contract to voice Virginia Fur, Johnny Depp might have settled on an accent for Igname the boar. But if I do eat my words, they will be served with bunny and sweet meats, truffles and crushed fruit. With torn-up pages of review copies for croutons.

Image Credit: Flickr/Kathleen Maher.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 1 5 min read
● ●