With Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan has written an incisive, alive, wit-filled book. In a collection of essays with topics spanning from Bunny Wailer and the caves of Tennessee to TV culture and the Tea Party, again and again Sullivan employs a discriminating, yet encompassing eye when looking at his subjects. I recently spoke with him about his book, Guy Davenport, rereading, and his new essay in The Paris Review’s 200th issue.

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The Rumpus: “This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.” I was never on the lookout for a sentence that encapsulates American culture at this moment and maybe for the last fifteen years, but when I read that one in your essay on MTV Reality stars—“Getting Down to What is Really Real”—I thought you had undoubtedly nailed it. It comes at the end of a very plangent paragraph lamenting our country. It seems to me that if we aren’t weeping and lifting weights in the open as those on TV, many of us are at least the picture of your words behind closed doors. A number of people hold things in until there is an explosion. People hurt in our culture but it seems a message reigns that it’s more important to have stronger abs than to get to know our mother. How does the making of a sentence happen for you? And how can a culture so swamp bitten by the parade of ego-gratifying devices and websites still hold onto our soul and our imagination in the face of the pressure to be popular?

John Jeremiah Sullivan: That’s wonderful, your response to that sentence. Thanks for it. You described it in a way I might never do, but that seems equally legit. I can’t remember the actual thoughts involved in writing that, or what it felt like. I do know it was a visual, an image in my mind’s eye that I wanted to catch. Looking back, I must have been thinking crypto-politically about our longstanding tradition, as a people, of holding forth self-righteously while dropping bombs on your village. The way niceness and violence walk hand in hand through our history.

Rumpus: Your essay on the naturalist Rafinesque is dedicated to Guy Davenport, a writer of great eminence in American letters. About ten years ago you interviewed Davenport for The Paris Review—one of the few extended interviews he ever gave. Can you speak about his influence on you? He speaks of iconology (the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images) as being the “true study of the world, the true way to criticize anything.” In some of the pieces you are looking critically at cultural phenomenons like reality TV, the Tea Party, and Christian Rock, but you’ve also written a very fine review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (not in the book)—giving an overview of his career in the same piece. How does this method play into your own writing?

Sullivan: Guy lived down the street from my grandmother, in Lexington, and my brother had taken English classes from him at University of Kentucky, so he was in my imagination before I read or understood any of his stories, not that I really understand all of them now. When I was an editor at Harper’s, around 2000, Roger Hodge, who went on to edit the whole magazine, had the idea of doing a New Books column, in the line of what some of the British mags were doing—one writer reviews several books at a time, allowing each one a few paragraphs, and makes a little essay of it. If it’s done right, if the writer is good enough, you end up getting not just “notices” but an impression of somebody’s sensibility.

Anyway, Guy was the first person I called. I’d been corresponding with him for a couple of years by that point, mostly just to ask questions about his work. We became friends—I mean, at first, it was an odd kind of friendship. I doubt there was enough equality between us for it to be a real, enjoyable thing for him. He probably felt like he was talking to an idiot much of the time. He was a certified genius, after all, and that can be isolating. But I was happy to be his—what?—student? Yeah, I was his student. And that relaxed him, because he knew how to teach. I would visit him at his house on Bell Court, and take notes while he thought out loud. For about three years I read nothing but books he’d mentioned. That was a lot of books.

As time went by, the dynamic did develop into something deeper. I got to know Erik Reece, Guy’s real apprentice during those years. I got to know Wyatt Mason, another of Guy’s correspondents. Guy brought people together that way. Knowing him was an invisible college. And I got to know his fascinating wife, the research librarian Bonnie Jean Cox, who still lives in Lex. Point being: he was a magnificent, complicated creature—sure-minded and neurotic, sweet and ornery, gossipy, touchy at times, yet invariably quick to laugh at himself or retract some nasty remark if you called him down on it—those are only my late-in-his-life notebook observations. There are people who really knew him, as a man. I never did. But well enough to feel his absence very keenly. There were things, having to do with writing and history, that you could only call Guy about. Now that he’s dead, you won’t ever call anybody about them. The last time I heard his voice, he was quoting Kipling, on young men going to war, and crying. He did not try to hide that he was afraid—he did not give death the honor of having forced him to pretend that. I got to tell him my wife was pregnant with our first daughter. He said, “I envy all young people the enjoyment of their bodies.” I dedicated that “Rafinesque” piece (a mushroom grown in his shadow, to use one of his phrases) to his memory because… I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do have a vestigial hippie suspicion sometimes that our cells pass into other people somehow, and theirs into ours, and Guy had some of Rafinesque’s cells in him. If they’d been in Lexington at the same time, they would have become best friends, and then had a hideous falling out.

Rumpus: In some pieces in the book, most notably in “Upon This Rock,” “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” “At a Shelter,” “American Grotesque,” “Unknown Bards,” “The Last Wailer,” and Peyton’s Place,” you yourself are a main part of the piece. The “Mr. Lytle” essay is one of the most fascinating because it’s a reminiscence of yourself at a younger age where you say about Lytle: “I came to love him. Not in the way he wanted, maybe, but not in a way that was stinting. Mon vieux. I was twenty and I believed that nothing as strange was liable to happen to me again. I was a baby.” It seems that one reason that your book has touched such a cord is the openness between the author and the reader. We might feel you are being more of a pal than many other essayists and your trust in us is matched by our trust in following you into any subject. As with a John McPhee, you are a writer whose audience would be happy to buy you a beer. How do you keep the balance between what is too personal? Do you have a line you won’t cross?

Sullivan: If I do I haven’t found it. But then… in a way, the line is total. I never really feel like I’ve given myself away, in a piece; the “first person” isn’t you; you’re zero. The first person already involves the assertion of a mask. As for the balance, I feel about it precisely as one would at a meal or on a boat with strangers, wanting to talk about myself enough not to seem closed off, but never so much as to bore them, and always watching, in a probably paranoid way, for that moment, that line, when I’ve talked a sentence too long, and added a detail after they’d lost interest in the subject. The eyes people get at that moment, they glaze over and go dead, in an uncontrollable primate way—we can’t help it. I hate and fear those eyes. This isn’t exactly a heroic vision of the writer, but it’s natural. I am trying to charm the reader because I want him and her to come with me deeper into the piece. If you can bring them with you there, things get more interesting.

Rumpus: I know you’ve said you’ve gotten many angry comments on “The Violence of the Lambs” piece. It’s about the animal kingdom’s growing attacks on human beings, detailing the sharp increase in incidents in the last decade or so. I was surprised by the ending, but it wasn’t enough to sever that trust that the rest of the book had basically cemented. Why did you feel you had to make a fiction out of the situation surrounding these attacks? Did you want to make it a better “story?” Adding characters and a travel trip to unearth more bad news to up the tension?

Sullivan: I’m not into bullying readers with my own interpretation of my stuff. If they see it differently than I do—if they care enough to “see” it at all—this tells me it’s alive in the world, so I’m happy. I back off. But with that piece, it was more… a question of genre. There are people who think I was trying to write a serious report, and using deception to keep them hooked. They got mad at the end, when I revealed it. But the deception was the point of the piece. It was a hoax. Not a “Ha ha, I’m clever and you’re gullible” sort of hoax, I hope, but a “Don’t you see how easy it is to do this, to make totally insane things seem plausible?” sort of hoax. A satirical hoax. It was written in the thick of post-9/11 fear-mongering. I don’t know. I don’t suppose I have a right to complain, if some people took it wrong or continue to think it sucks, for that matter. He who lives by the hoax dies by the outrage.

Rumpus: Your new essay, “Two Princes: A Reconstruction,” in The Paris Review’s 200th issue, is a little different from many of the essays in the book—yourself as writer has disappeared, with no references to your life and little to the world as we currently know it. In a way you’ve taken on the guise of a nameless scribe or chronicler, but one who is sorting out history as made jumbled and diffuse by many sources and viewpoints related to the Indian princes and their master, Captain Pecht/John Pight, who was in truth one man but with two names and two similar stories in the annals. What made you pursue this particular story? Was it the ability to reconstruct—to right a flaw in history? What also stands out is the 300-year-old attitude toward Native Americans from the sources you quote: the parading around, the examining them as specimens. In light of living in a time of many occupations across the world, particularly by the U.S., I can’t help but be unsettled by a glimpse into the impact of the largest genocide in history. How did your feelings about these topics play out in shaping the piece?

Sullivan: I’m glad it unsettles you. Yes, my whole interest in the early eighteenth century is a sublimated interest in the present. That’s a suppressed phase in our history. We have a couple of myths for the beginning of the South—we have Ponce de Leon finding the fountain in Florida, for the Spanish, and we have the whole Pocahontas thing in Virginia, for the English—but then it’s as if the South disappears for a couple of hundred years, in terms of our collective historical imagination—reemerging with the antebellum period, and then fully visible in the Civil War. But there were two centuries in between those phases. What was happening? Plantation slavery was happening, for one thing, getting codified, and the English were starting to export it west. The west was open now, which again in our textbooks happens as if by magic, “as settlement expanded,” but it was because of over two centuries of violence against and among the eastern Native American tribes. Disease epidemics were causing fatalities among the Indians that we don’t even know how to calculate, because in some cases they hit tribes whose existence and languages weren’t recorded, and the remnant populations disappeared into other tribes, if they were fortunate. You had this strange institution that the vast majority of Americans don’t even know existed here (but that existed for more than a hundred years)—Indian slavery. A scholar named Alan Gallay wrote the first really good book about it less than a decade ago. As the Indian populations declined, Africans started arriving to Carolina in newly massive numbers. An ugly, bloody period, but vivid and dramatic. I don’t think you can understand much about American history without it. And it generated some wonderful, haunting stories. My piece on the two American princes is an attempt to capture one of those and put it in a bottle.

Rumpus: What do you re-read? Are there certain pieces and authors you go back to? Does reading ever interfere with your writing? Is the relationship antagonistic or easeful?

Sullivan: With some books, it’s not so much re-reading as perpetually reading, and never finishing, since what would finishing even mean? Boswell is that way for me. A house where I know I’ll be spending time for the rest of my life. Pepys, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, books like that. The most recent book I re-read was Dame Frances Yates’s Rosicrucian Enlightenment. For a project I’m working on.

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• A People of Savage Sentimentality
• Southern Enlightenment
• Acts of Imagination

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The Rumpus: You’ve said that the novel, The Mirror in the Well, came faster to you than the three others you’ve written. How does a book make its way into your consciousness and then onto the page? Is there a recurring idea or image that does not go away? Is it more of a magical process or are there different levels you go through to imbue the sentences and have it cohere?

Micheline Aharonian Marcom: What I can say is: every book I’ve written has been different from the others, and each one seems to have its own timeline, requirements, and formal challenges. As for Mirror, my fourth book, I wrote it on the heels of finishing my third novel, Draining the Sea—a book which took four years to write and which required a lot of research and travel: I made four trips to Guatemala while writing it. Upon finishing Draining I knew that I wanted to write something very different, a book not about war or historical events, and I was interested in writing a novel that didn’t require years of research or travel, a “domestic drama” I suppose, which came more directly from the realms of the imagination and was not sustained or supported by historical events per se. And I wanted to write something slender, and after two novels in the voice of a man—something very particularly in the voice of a female protagonist. The first scene in Mirror was the first that occurred to me: the scene between the two adulterous lovers in a motel. I suppose I figured the narrative out as I went, although I knew that this was a book about illicit love and the breaking of taboos. And I wanted to explore the terrain of female sexuality without censorship. I love Henry Miller’s Tropic books, they were an inspiration—his unbridled and honest gaze at all things, including from inside the lovers’ bedroom. He inspired me to do the same for a contemporary American woman. To write a book, in effect, from the female sex, where the word “cunt”, that fine and strong old Anglo-Saxon word from Old Norse, is, I hope, a little bit rehabilitated as a word…the taboo on its use upended.

Rumpus: Here is the opening of a chapter from later in the book:

She looks at the unaroused cunt. The cunt is covered in black hair. The outer lips are pale-leg white and then change into darkbrown; the inner lips are black-edged and then brown and pink. The clitoris peeks out red of its darkbrown overcoat, pulls back at a rough touch like a tentative animal. She opens her sex with her fingers, licks smells her fingers, she loves the smell of her cunt, the cunt slit is pink-red, her own secretions aid in her movements; she licks her fingers, she uses the spit-covered fingers to finger the cunt. She has never looked closely at her cunt before, it is forbidden and she knows and as a girl she closed her legs; as a girl she was ashamed of her fat mound, her pubic hair, the smell when a boy would remove her pants, the fluids of the body. The lover has taught her to love her cunt because the cunt is her center, the cunt is pleasure, the cunt knows and knew him, picked him from a cavalcade of other men. (98)

This passage is unsparingly carnal. The voice of the novel is succinct and controlled, even though the second person voice bleeds into third person and then bleeds back. Direct, but not dispassionate. The repetition of “cunt” and the crayolaing of the genitalia for the reader all serve to press the situation of sexuality onto the reader in a florid way. What made you use this voice for this particular novel?

Marcom: I never feel like I am “using” a voice, rather I am listening to a voice and recording it as faithfully as it comes to me and as I can. I think that the female sex is much maligned, even in our supposedly sexually “open” society. It is the site of a woman’s pleasure, and the source of (most) children’s entry into the world, and an ancient symbol of power and fecundity, and we are directly or indirectly told in modern times that it’s dirty, shameful, ugly, odorous, and to be hidden away. As DH Lawrence said, the Protestant societies do dirt on sex, it is their dirty mind which aligns sex and a woman’s genitals with the debased and soiled. This is something terrible, I think, and to be contended with head-on in art.

Rumpus: In relationships such as the one you describe—where a person follows their hunger that feeds off the ecstatic—do you think the desire to have communion dies of its own accord, like a snake eating its tail? In reading the book I came away with the sense that the more the affair between the man and woman went on, the more it became apparent that sex has severe limitations. Someone may want to feel again and again the pleasure of being brought into bliss, but throughout that replication: life goes on, time passes, things change. Is eros ultimately doomed?

Marcom: This is a funny question: eros doomed! I doubt it…eros seems to drive most relationships, and not just those between lovers. Erotic energy is a big powerful force, it shakes things up, causes people to break the rules, makes people do crazy things! Reason doesn’t stand a chance in its face.  But it also seems to metamorphose and move around…there is a particular erotic energy created, I think, for example, by the breaking of a taboo: as with these two adulterous lovers: they are fucking on the peripheries of their marriages and that’s hot for both of them. It is perhaps true that that sort of sexual energy wanes over time—as the original impetus loses its luster. And then, I suppose, it’s on to the next thing. But eros is eternal, like joy.

Rumpus: You do have an author website but you are not on Facebook. Why have you resisted this phenomenon seemingly embraced by so many? How does the internet in general either aid or harm your writing?

Marcom: I have a woefully outdated website which I’m currently in the works to update. The internet, like social media, seems to me to depend on how you use it, where you spend your time on it. I used to be quite anti-social media, but I can see now that it can be a good tool for artists, a way for us to speak to each other outside of standard economies and across languages and borders.  I began to firmly change my mind when I saw how young Egyptians used Facebook, for example, to begin to coalesce their social justice movement in their country. And a good Iranian friend of mine showed me how also in Iran, till the government shut it down, much was communicated via social media. So I’m not against. I use the internet regularly to do research. It’s great but you have to use your discernment, especially if researching content. Right now I’m doing research on a book set in Mexico and I’m able to read articles from all over the world about the drug war in Mexico: this is invaluable and so much easier than ten years ago when I began researching novels. However, as we all know, in the ‘democracy’ of the internet, a lot of noise is created…and the quality and integrity of what’s disseminated varies hugely.

Rumpus: Your novels deal with some of the horrors of the world. Three Apples Fell from Heaven concerns the Armenian genocide. The Daydreaming Boy has a main character who is a genocide survivor and Draining the Sea looks at the Guatemalan civil war through the eyes of an American soldier complicit in civilian killings there. You’ve said that some people have urged you to write more commercially, with happier subjects. Can you speak about staying true to your vision at a time when some writers are writing more genre books to stay viable?

Marcom: Staying true to my vision, to the word as it comes to me, to my own aesthetic judgments, even when they disagree with the majority culture, is very important to me, and I think important for every artist. It’s what we have: our voice, our intuition, the truth as we understand and know it. When I write a book I write the best that I can and so much of that for me is following the book’s demands, the subject’s requirements—I love books, I always have. They have always been one of the places where I have felt very happy in the world. When I was younger, I loved to read genre fiction—I loved the magic-carpet ride of story! Now I need other things—I need the beautiful particular and strange language and form which brings a writer’s book to life in me and speaks to my intellect, and, dare I say it, to my soul.

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About ten years ago a dear friend told me to read Three Lives. I wobbled through a few pages and went back to something I could more easily handle. Stein’s writing seemed hokey–with the repetitions and seemingly unadorned language (going against the grain of many “rules of the road” for writing which say to vary words and not to repeat oneself), I couldn’t appreciate the world in her words. Yet this time around, her words subducted me as if I were the Juan de Fuca to her mighty Pacific tectonic plate.

“Melanctha” follows a young black woman from her beginnings to her end, as she struggles to relate to her family, friends, and men. On the fourth page, Stein describes her main character in plain, unsymbolic language:

Melanctha was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others…Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often.

These are the quandaries of existence as viewed by Zen Buddhists. Set forth in each sentence like a fire blanket is an “always.” This extreme word attaches itself to the novella’s undesirable but always desiring character, who grows up with ping-pong emotions–feelings that carry on into her dealings with men.

In looking at “Melanctha,” one also has to look at Jeff Campbell—though the titular character carries the whole, but not by much. Of the roughly 100 page novella, the middle 70 are taken up with the dance between Melanctha and Jeff Campbell, the ”serious, earnest, good young joyous doctor.” It was Stein’s forays into Jeff that struck me as so painfully true—because a man understands a man? Because his own cutting games limned my own? Here, as soon as the doctor enters the story a whirlpool of emotion from both parties begins, which Stein describes from Jeff’s point of view:

Jeff always loved now to be with Melanctha and yet he always hated to go to her. Somehow he was always afraid when he was to go to her, and yet he had made himself very certain that here he would not be a coward. He never felt any of this being afraid, when he was with her. Then they always were very true, and near to one another. But always when he was going to her, Jeff would like anything that could happen that would keep him a little longer from her.

Has the dance, has the uncertainty of feeling for another ever been broadcast in such plain terms at such an early date? There is a sing-song quality to Stein’s prose. Things are proposed, their pinnacles and pluses outlined, but soon they are viciously and rigorously negated, so that pain is more painful. When Melanctha goes and “wanders” after other men toward the end of their relationship, Jeff is hurt:

And Jeff Campbell now felt less than he had ever, any right to claim to know what Melanctha thought it right that she should do in any of her ways of living…Jeff learned every day now, more and more, how much it was that he could really suffer. Sometimes it hurt so in him, when he was alone, it would force some slow tears from him. But every day, now that Jeff Campbell, knew more how it could hurt him, he lost his feeling of deep awe that he once always had had for Melanctha’s feeling. Suffering was not so much after all, thought Jeff Campbell, if even he could feel it so it hurt him. It hurt him bad, just the way he knew he once had hurt Melanctha, and yet he too could have it and not make any kind of a loud holler with it.

“Hurt,” “feeling,” “suffering,” “alone,” “lost,” “bad”: the language of despair, full of suppositions that lend corrosiveness and instability to feelings once blooming with promise. When Stein says the hurt is “in him” she takes us closer to the epicenter of sorrow. Because it is already “in,” it is much more immediate and all consuming. Also the “hurt” forces tears from him, he doesn’t cry them. The a mighty phalanx of despair has taken hold and when she characterizes the “hurt” (a different hurt–the kind he passed on to Melanctha) as something he can have too, it is transfigured into another, grosser djinn that assaults and confounds. And when she says he “could not make any kind of a loud holler with it,” Jeff Campbell has finally forked himself with his knife, the “loud holler” being a term of Americana that grounds any loftiness in the plagued passage.

A Woman Under the Influence concerns a husband and wife and their three children. Nick (Peter Falk) is a construction worker, his wife Mabel (Gena Rowlands) a stay at home mother. She is acting more and more on the verge of a breakdown. My mother first showed this film to me in the early 90′s. She loved Gena Rowlands and knew of Cassavetes from Rosemary’s Baby. I knew of Cassavetes from a wonderful documentary called Hollywood Mavericks. We watched, stunned at the entire production, especially the everlasting, excruciating last hour of the film and the many trips up the stairs with the kids. I can remember watching it in college in 1996 after a woman destabilized my senses. I was so raw, I wept wildly, overcome by the twenty-two year-old mirror Cassavetes had provided. Last year I was lucky enough to see it projected. I’ve seen it close to ten times and just a few weeks ago, it still yielded–sending me to examine and rigorously discuss what it means to be human.

Both artists examine the process of destruction between people who profess love. Cassavetes understood human nature much better than his critics, who constantly maligned him, with Pauline Kael being his greatest detractor, saying of A Woman: “The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that meanings don’t emerge…[Rowland’s] prodigious performance is worth half a dozen tours de force–it’s exhausting.” This is taunting and unworthy of any critic. How many times do people tell each other they love each other in A Woman Under the Influence? How many times do they kiss each other? How many times do they hug?

How many times do they stroke each other? It’s unrivaled in American film and why? Because it is hard to look at love. At least it is hard to look straight on. Artists often miss the mark and make their scenes too cloying and sentimental (Oscar bait like Dances with Wolves), or are too cruel without consciousness and incredibly affectionless (Tarantino and his ilk). One can’t hide who one is in one’s art. It comes out no matter if one knows it or not: Kubrick’s control gleams in his mise-en-scene, Gass’s anger clogs his sinuous sentences, and Rilke’s compulsion to look is always on display in his prose and verse.

But Cassavetes projects the many muscled emotion in all its hardy splendor. Love is to the human as branches are to birds. Cassavetes said many times that he is only interested in love.

In the last minutes of A Woman, the kids are put to bed, comforted and kissed like in no other Hollywood film. Often they glaze over such details with quick cuts, smiles, and music. In Cassavetes, there is no sound except of people’s gaze and touch. Similarly, early in the film, Cassavetes spends four minutes showing Mabel picking up her children. Four minutes of film time! Unimaginable.

What is emotionally naked here? At the end of the clip is what is hardly ever seen in film–a mother and her young children having a significant conversation that isn’t clichéd. The talk is very alive and Mabel shows her weakness and insecurity, but also awareness. She puts her children first and wants to make sure they are comfortable. Somehow, throughout the film, the children act like children (if they are “acting” at all). The smiles are genuine. Much has been written about Cassavetes films having a documentary feel. Hand-held camera moves with no effort to cover the blurring and people acting like real people are some of the traits, but much of this has been bandied about to insult his artifice. The fact is the films were carefully scripted and choreographed. Cassavetes, because he bowed to no studio and practically financed his films himself, was able to create an environment that embraced open emotion. Like his characters, his context would openly bleed so the actors wouldn’t shy away, or couldn’t as they arrived at emotional discharges so unique people thought they were watching home movies. As Cassavetes dissected the heart, he found people to be both emotionally ugly and beautiful. He looked at his characters compassionately and celebrated them for being human and not conforming their pasts to a plot.

Cassavetes made films about himself, his wife (Rowlands), his family (his mother and Rowlands’s mother play the mothers of Nick and Mabel in the film), and his friends. He abused alcohol and most all his films show characters similarly imbibing. Everything he was culminated in A Woman, with the five films following it being aftershocks of this triumph. As Bergman said, “It’s the same film every time, the only difference is we’re older.” Cassavetes’s characters aged throughout his oeuvre, so that by the time of his final masterpiece Love Streams (the main characters are a brother and sister who live with each other after their own marriages have failed) romantic love becomes something else, as it does when we get older. He then looks at how the main characters love themselves when they are alone, nearing the end.

Both “Melanctha” and A Woman contain characters from the lower classes. In “Melanctha,” the black characters live in very early 20th Century Baltimore where many have such jobs as servants, coachmen, and deck hands. In A Woman, the couple sleeps on a couch that opens into a bed in what doubles as their dining room. They have no room themselves. Nick works on a construction crew for the city. Mabel is a housewife.

Family is also at the heart of the character’s problems. In “Melanctha,” Stein details the childhood of her sorrowful character, describing her relationship with her parents in few pages with resounding repetitions (these are the first mentions of the father and mother in the novella):

Melanctha Herbert had been raised to be religious, by her mother. Melanctha had not liked her mother very well.

Melanctha Herbert almost always hated her black father…

Melanctha Herbert had not loved herself in childhood. All of her youth was bitter to remember.

Melanctha had not loved her father and her mother and they had found it very troublesome to have her.

The young Melanctha did not love her father and her mother, and she had a break neck courage, and a tongue that could be very nasty. Then, too, Melanctha went to school and was very quick in all the learning, and she knew very well how to use this knowledge to annoy her parents who knew nothing.

Obviously this is no recipe for happiness, let alone health. Melanctha is a character to be pitied, but because Stein is so direct in her descriptions, a terror arises as the reader asks, “People live like this?” Melanctha is smart but not only uses her knowledge to “annoy her parents,” she also uses it to trade jibes with Jeff Campbell, cutting him with words when she should be holding him with her hands. Mabel and Melanctha are similar in that they “always loved too hard and much too often,” as Stein describes it (witness Mabel’s gritting her teeth at the end of the spaghetti scene, saying “I love your friends. I love everybody you bring in the house!”). It is no surprise she gets cut off from the world: her father, Jeff Campbell, her last love Jem Richards, and, most wretchedly, her friend Rose Johnson all leave her life. That she will die alone is almost a foregone conclusion.

In A Woman, Mabel is at odds with her father and mother-in-law in addition to her husband. There is a pivotal sequence the night of her return from the mental hospital–this last hour of the film takes place in close to real time. The conflict with her father and all of her family on both sides is amplified. Earlier, soon after she had come into the house for the first time, her father has a fit about them having spaghetti for dinner, a fit similar to Nick’s fits throughout the film, when he loses his patience with Mabel and starts yelling–he hits her twice. After the commotion is broken up, she sits by her father and says: Do I look pretty dad?

DAD: You look beautiful hon.

MABEL: You think I’m going to be alright?

DAD: You’re going to be fine.

Mabel then starts hugging and kissing him, but after a few seconds he tells her to go over to her mother. He can’t take the intimacy. While she is dining with her family for the first time, Mabel is pressured by her husband to snap out of her initial catatonia and with all of the parents, children, uncles, and cousins looking on, even looking at her like she is an animal in a cage (they say very little but stare and wait for her to make the first move), she asks for them to leave so that she and Nick can make love. Immediately she is rebuked for saying such a thing in front of the children. But is not the desire to make love a natural one? She repeats this request and is rebuked again. All through the scene, Cassavetes oscillates between a long shot of the whole table (Mabel is at the head, with her father at the opposite end and everyone except Nick, seated next to her, is assembled like inquisitors) and close-ups of the characters. After she is ganged up on and after Nick has another fit (screaming, “Normal conversation!”), she asks her father to stand up for her. Her father ascends but she again, tearfully, asks that he stand up for her. He is dumbfounded. Mabel is asking her father for help and does not receive it. She can see by this point that she is under the influence…of a man (Nick)–as Cassavetes told Michael Ciment in the wonderfully revealing audio interview on the Criterion DVD. Who else can stand up to Nick? She can’t. She is trapped with an at times tender, at times violent man. He loves Mabel, but he can’t understand her and finally, he yells in frustration at her going crazy, after the family does leave, that he will kill his “son-of-a-bitching” kids. Did the right person go to the mental hospital? Though Rowlands (deservedly) received many accolades for her work, the film also contains Falk’s greatest performance and his acting stands up as one of the best American male lead performances ever, along with Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, and De Niro in Taxi Driver.

Cézanne's "Portrait of Madame," owned by Stein

Stein loved sentences. Her whole project was sentences. Sentences and composition. Stein said  Cézanne and Flaubert influenced everything she did. Prior to writing Three Lives she translated Flaubert’s Trois Contes into English. As for Cézanne, she said, “[he] conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole…” She owned a portrait of Mme. Cézanne painted by her husband and she stared at it while working on Three Lives. Each sentence of “Melanctha” is required to make the whole whole. So, seemingly, but surely majestically, Stein became Stein by looking. Did looking create the emotionally naked result? I, as many others (Cézanne, Rodin, Rilke, Gass, etc.), would argue intense looking promotes more intense feeling, and more intense love and compassion. Again Stein: “Conception of this has to be based on a real feeling for every human being.” In her stalwart essay on Stein in the Language of Inquiry called “Three Lives,” Lyn Hejinian says, “Stein was interested in compassion as an artist, which is to say formally; this is at the root of Stein’s desire (and ability) to ‘include everything.’ It is a clinical, not an encyclopedic, impulse; there is nothing that can be considered unworthy of attention…Inclusiveness in this context means a willingness to look at anything that life might entail…the detachment which it requires is what permits the shift from manipulative to structural uses of compassion…” (286)

By “including everything,” Stein gets closer to what is most joyous and painful about being human. The more fully conscious a work, the more repellant it will be to a certain cadre of critics and audiences–this fits both Stein, and her long march toward acceptance in the canon, as well as Cassavetes. Though I am examining their most canonical works (and most popular), Stein’s is still a grudging acceptance as Gass notes in his own “Three Lives” essay:

…though…Stein’s reputation has grown rather steadily through recent decades, it is a reputation in constant peril. One kick takes the stool out from under the otherwise unattractive weight of the lady. Nor would her downfall spoil anyone’s afternoon.

“Anything that life might entail” is included in “Melanctha,” especially the details of how people speak to each other. Stein’s dialogue is a stunning jabberwocky of poetry, exemplified here by Rose Johnson, Melanctha’s friend, talking to her early in the book (it will be echoed later on, on the final page after their friendship dissolves):

I don’t see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you’re blue. I’d never kill myself Melanctha just ‘cause I was blue. I’d maybe kill somebody else Melanctha ‘cause I was blue, but I’d never kill myself. If I ever killed myself Melanctha it’d be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I’d be awful sorry.

Five “Melanctha”s. Six “kill”s. When someone uses your name so many times you are endeared to them (unless they are patronizing you). These four sentences have the harmonics of a Bach fugue, with the “kill yourself” motif played in the first sentence and played back in different ways and repetitions: kill myself, kill somebody else, kill myself—ending with two “killed myself”s, ending with that scorcher of a word: sorry. The sentences expertly demonstrate the line between those who might not care to survive and survivors. Rose Johnson speaks from the deep space inside herself that we often don’t let other people see unless we trust or love them in such a way that we aren’t afraid of being hurt.

The above example of Rose Johnson’s speech with dialogue as revelation, is like the mise-en-scene that accompanies the spaghetti eating scene in A Woman (close-up after close-up and close-ups of regular guys, most of whom never appear in the film again): it presents an individual, it doesn’t judge, evaluate, or manipulate the reader into a point of view, it just presents. When Mabels’s white hands are splayed around  Billy Tidrow’s round, black, beautiful, smiling face and she says, “I love this face. I love that face. Nick, this is what I call a really handsome face,” Cassavetes and Stein make us see people, see their processes. In film the actors and mise-en-scene create sensation and in literature the words and their order fillet us, making us care about who we read about—getting emotionally involved, putting us where they are as we gain compassion for them, and hopefully for ourselves and those who challenge us.

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Much of Davis’ fiction, from the miniature one-line stories to the full-length tales, create an unsettling yet familiar world in which people engage in mental acrobatics. They try to figure other people out by studying behavior with a wry, inductive sense. Most often they try to find and fit themselves in a sad and humorous existential quandary of life.

The narrator in “New Year’s Resolution,” who is studying Zen again, resolves to see herself as nothing, but instead realizes that: “halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing.”

In a recent correspondence we spoke about how she writes, Samuel Beckett, love and insects.

***

The Rumpus: Would you describe your beginnings as a writer?

Lydia Davis: It was like the family trade—both my parents were short stories writers at various points, and writing was talked about constantly at home.  I was also good at it in school, so I received lots of encouragement.  So writing felt like my destiny from about age 12 on.

Rumpus: There are certain words that come up again and again in your work: “anger” and “disturbance,” and to some extent “upset” and “annoyance.” Many times the narrators and characters are walking around with loads of anger. From the story “Story”: “Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort…” I’ve found that in life anger is one of the most common yet hidden emotions. What is it about anger that makes you reference it so? How would you define it? Would you consider it central to your work?

Davis: I would hope that I wouldn’t have to say anger was central to my work—that sounds so sad.  I suppose people are more likely to turn to writing when they’re filled with a negative emotion than with a positive one, so the stories might be disproportionately negative—angry, sad, upset, etc.  There is simply less of a need to “frame” or “distance” a positive emotion.  I read somewhere that anger is always a secondary emotion;  i.e. the primary one might be fear, or frustration.  I found that very interesting.  Now, I look beyond the anger to see what the primary emotion might be.

Rumpus: Do you write from a particular mood? Does a mood present itself on your radar, impelling you to write? Or do you proceed from a neutral state?

Davis: I’m always sparked by something specific—a sentence or an idea or something I hear or see.  So the mood depends completely on what that instigating thing is.

Rumpus: I want to ask a series of questions about your novel The End of the Story. The unnamed narrator reconstructs what happened during a failed affair a few years prior. As she analyzes scenes and emotions over and over again from different perspectives, the novel feels like Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape extended to novel length. The conflict she often faces is feeling one way at the time of an event, but later feeling very differently about the same incident. So where are the true feelings? Are there such things as true feelings or is “feeling” like writing, where there is constant revision and reexamination?

Davis: Interesting comparison with the Beckett—which I had read long before writing the novel, I suspect.  But you never know where things are buried in the brain.  I don’t know where her true feelings are, or whether there is any such thing as a “true feeling.”  Truth is elusive, or non-existent.  A feeling is what it is, and then it changes.  Memory falsifies anyway.  One’s memory of the past, including past feelings, is pretty unreliable.

Rumpus: There’s a claustrophobic feeling to this novel caused by the reader being plugged into the unnamed narrator’s mind, becoming subject to her sudden reversals and hairpin emotional turns. Here is an example from the book:

I seem to have written two accounts of one of these phone calls and the days surrounding it. I have just rediscovered the earlier one, and it seems less accurate and more sentimental. For instance, I say that after he told me he was seeing another woman, I was in pain because I still held him in a little corner of my heart. Now the idea of my heart having a corner bothers me, and other things about the sentence bother me, too. I also said I remembered how happy it made me to hear him laugh and see him smile, which was certainly not true. P. 136

What I find fascinating about this novel is that time, as displayed above, is out of sync and it seems the reader is inside another person’s brain—the brain portrayed as both rational and cool. Yet the viewpoint of the other main character, the man, is missing. This funny, rigorously thinking voice must be trusted. What made you write The End of the Story and in this particular way?

Davis: The thinking voice can be trusted temporarily, or provisionally.  What about the reader’s relation to the thinking voice of Humbert Humbert, for instance—there’s another strange relationship?  The reader, in order to go on, must be willing to inhabit the mind of this narrator, a claustrophobic situation.  The novel started out as two:  the story of the past relationship, and the story of trying to write the novel.  Then I combined them:  I felt that the story of the past needed the perspective of the “present.”

Rumpus: This paragraph from the novel has fascinated me:

He wrote things in a notebook, and I wrote things in a notebook. Some of what we wrote was about each other, of course, and now and then we read aloud from our notebooks. The things we had written were often things we would not say to each other, though we would read them aloud. But we were not willing to say anything about them after we had read them either. P.59

There is an absurdist notion working here—a vaudeville of human foibles. There is a great intimacy in sharing writing about each other with each other, but also a disconnectedness in that words can only be written and not voiced. You’ve said before that when reading your stories you were surprised that people laughed. I think of it as recognition of some past pain in them, and also in me, that provokes such laughter, because—cliché as it is—it’s seemingly easier to laugh than cry. What is your own sense of humor like? Is it similar to the one above or do you not regard the excerpt as funny? How do your stories play into these ideas?

Davis: I do see the humor in the quoted passage. My own sense of humor is similar to the sense of humor that produces the humor in some of the stories, but, again, not exactly the same.  I’d say there is an overlap.  I can find humor in things that I wouldn’t put into a story.  Laughter is definitely close to tears—they are both forms of release. I can remember at least twice laughing at something and then beginning to cry over the same thing.

Rumpus: I read your novel as I went through a breakup of my own and I began to feel fortunate at the relatively easy manner in which I dealt with it. But then as I read on, especially toward the end, I began to feel that something was wrong with me, that I should act more obsessively if I wanted to claim to having truly been in love—that as a romantic I should be writing more pleading letters and asking friends to set up surveillance on my once beloved. I had the feeling from your novel that I missed something in my own undoing; that if I’d only gone as deep as this narrator, then I would perhaps have come to more deep-seated realizations. In short, I took on the personality of the narrator to an extent. Is this the aim of literature, to build recognitions and encourage people to reexamine their own actions?

Davis: What you say about your reaction to the novel and the breakup is fascinating, because it adds more layers of complexity to the situation.  You could write a short story that contained the novel with its story-within-a-story.  As for your question: I don’t think literature has an aim.  It happens by accident, clearly, since it is made up of all the accidental compositions of individual writers.  What a reader takes away from a book is another matter, and of course entirely personal.  It is a response to something that happened by accident, that was born of a certain emotional necessity on the part of the writer.  But inhabiting another mind, and all that goes with that, is certainly part of the experience.

Rumpus: Do you think love exists? If it does, why is it so changeable?

Davis: I’d say of course love exists—we have only to consider our child, or our dog, to know that.  It’s changeable just because everything is changeable, because we’re alive.  In fact, I think it is a very deep instinct in us to welcome change.  That’s why sometimes good things are ruined—because some organization thinks it’s important to put its mark on something.  A thriving neighborhood is torn down to make way for some urban thing that’s less successful.

Rumpus: You are a professor, and there are many female professor figures in your work. Is it second nature for you to choose to write about these characters? Do you enjoy playing with autobiographical elements, or are the creations more divorced from reality than one would think?

Davis: At a certain point, I realized I could shape events from my own life into narratives, using a protagonist rather like me but not exactly me.  I do enjoy using that sort of “found” material—including material from other lives—rather than inventing it.  I have certainly mixed in material from friends’ lives and changed things around in whatever way I please; so, although there is plenty of autobiographical material in many of the stories, there is also plenty of material from other sources.

Rumpus: Encounters with insects make up a few of your stories, such as “The Caterpillar” and “Cockroaches in Autumn.” It seems you might have spent some time contemplating them. What draws you to insects?

Davis: Oh, I look at everything around me, and living things are of course more interesting than static or abstract things—or I should say that that depends on one’s mood.  In certain moods I’d rather watch what the ants are doing than read a page of Hegel; but in other moods I’d rather read the page of Hegel.  That’s just an example—I don’t often read Hegel.  Animals, including insects, are mysterious because they do many of the same things we do but are a foreign species with whom communication is not very successful.  We long to talk to them—sitting outdoors, we’d like to make a bargain for the evening with the mosquitoes—but we can’t.  Some people solve that problem by squashing them, but it’s more interesting and friendly to study them.

Rumpus: I want to talk about “The Old Dictionary.” It begins as a very easy-going, lighthearted piece. A professor type muses about her fragile old dictionary but a quarter of the way through the piece she says, “What struck me today was that even though my son should be more important to me than my old dictionary, I can’t say that each time I deal with my son, my primary concern is not to harm him.” I can imagine the reader’s smile, like my own, quickly turning into a frown. There is something so violent and appalling here; but it’s what we do as human beings. Do the mind’s divagations create more harm than good?

Davis: I don’t think it’s the mind’s divagations that create the harm.  In this story, I’m simply detailing as honestly as possible a certain woman’s behavior—laying it out for examination.  I was told that in one class where this story was taught, the students—I think they were in high school—became very indignant over this woman’s behavior, momentarily forgetting that it was “fiction” and voicing their outrage.  But of course that’s good—if a story leads to a productive discussion of how one should treat the things and people in one’s life.

Rumpus: Many of your stories are very aware of grammar, but most especially “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders.” Why this particular interest? Is this story based on an actual set of letters? Was reveling in the innocence of the children’s writing the impetus for creating the story? Have you had experiences teaching children?

Davis: I can’t help being fascinated by grammar, since it is through the manipulation of grammar that a writer creates meaning, and through the finest manipulation of grammar creates the subtlest nuances of meaning.  (Look at Beckett.)  That story was based on an actual set of letters that completely charmed me by their innocence, yes, and their manipulation of grammar to express their thoughts.  I was moved by the letters, and my response was to create a rather cool sociologist type who would study the letters in minute detail.  Maybe she was trying to get closer to the children—in her own way.

Rumpus: Your titles always delight me. There are the mundane yet very explicit titles: “What I Feel,” “How He is Often Right,” “A Few Things Wrong with Me.” There are the puns: “Meat, My Husband,” “Passing Wind.” And there are the set-ups to punch-lines in the micro-fictions: “Samuel Johnson is Indignant,” “Certain Knowledge from Herodotus,” “Collaboration with a Fly.” Are titles something you fuss over or are they relatively easy?

Davis: Most titles come very easily—sometimes they’re obvious, like “The Walk,” which is about a walk.  In other cases they start with something obvious like “Helen and Vi” for a story about two women named “Helen and Vi,” but then get more complicated. This title went on to include a subtitle suggested by the sounds of the names and subject of the story:  “A Study in Health and Vitality.”  Finding a title for my one novel, The End of the Story was very difficult—I must have had about 200 possible choices before I decided on that one.

Rumpus: You’re also an acclaimed translator. Would you describe how you approach translation? What have you found to be the greatest challenges? Do you think your recent translations—Swann’s Way by Proust and the forthcoming Madame Bovary by Flaubert—have affected the way you approach your own writing? Any further thoughts about being in the company of these writers for so long?

Davis: I approach translation in a rather straightforward way:  I don’t read the text ahead of time because I want each paragraph to be unfamiliar so that the prose of my translation will be fresh.  Then I follow the original very closely, which makes the work both simpler and more difficult—I don’t try to recast a sentence, but I also have the challenge of writing well in English while staying close to the original.  I have no idea how translating has affected my own writing over the years, except that I certainly have found material while translating that has led to the creation of works of my own—such as my forthcoming “Stories from Flaubert.”  One of the most enjoyable things about translating is having an extended experience of writing in a style that I would never write in otherwise.

Rumpus: “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho” and “The Walk” are placed back-to-back in Varieties of Disturbance and, in each, past works of literature are excerpted and made to work on the characters. In the former, the woman reads Beckett’s Worstward Ho while riding in a public van as the sun sometimes obstructs her ability to read. The van driver make stops and passengers try but fail to find a working bathroom at these stops. Beckett’s sentences are excerpted as the woman reads them and sometimes repeated in the footnotes. The woman concludes that, “Although she has liked many of the words that came in between, its last words, ‘Said nohow on,’ say as little to her as its first, ‘On. Say on. Be said on.”’ p.71

In ‘The Walk,” a translator and a critic take a walk after attending a conference on translation in a foreign town. Two translations of a section from Proust’s Swann’s Way are excerpted, one attributed to the woman translator in the story and one to the preferred translation of her male colleague, who gets very frustrated at the prospect of getting lost on the walk. The Proust excerpt in some ways mirrors the action around the walk, especially the parallel between the woman guiding them back to where they started and the father in the passage doing the same for his family. In each instance, the wife and the critic express wonder at how they had come to find themselves back where they started. The woman thinks the critic will recognize the similarities, but he does not. The translator gives herself over to the mysteries of the foreign city, while the critic often expresses indignation at their situation.

In each case the passages threaten to overwhelm the narrative, so much so that the former adopts a Beckettian tone and the latter revels in the longer paragraphs and deep descriptions of Proust. These pieces seem like examples of the power of literature to crystallize moments of our lives and imbue them with a resonance that can be at turns mysterious, disturbing and seemingly affectless. What inspired these works? How do you view their intertextuality?

Davis: Yes, they may be examples of that, as you say.  I am stimulated or inspired by things I encounter, whether a little insect or a passage of Proust.  And these things find their way into my stories.  I could say that witnessing the insect is a primary experience, whereas experiencing a passage of Proust is the experience of a text that is already mediating a primary experience—the author’s—so that for me it is at once primary and secondary.  It is certainly more complex: there is the pleasure of what Proust describes, and the pleasure of the language in which he describes it.

Rumpus: Beckett has often come up here and in many other interviews. Were you ever under the spell of Beckett? Did certain works mean more to you at different times of your life?

Davis: I wouldn’t say I was “under his spell,” since that implies an uncritical acceptance.  Rather, I was studying his style very closely and analytically in order to learn from it.  And most of this study occurred when I was in my early and mid-twenties.  I began with his earliest prose, the short stories and the novels, and then went on to the shorter and stranger texts.

Rumpus: Are there stories you feel closer to than others? Stories you never tire of reading out loud?

Davis: Yes, and yes—and they are not the same stories, necessarily.  Some that I take great pleasure in would be deadly to read aloud—they should be read on the page.  The very shortest ones are fun to read aloud, partly because they all work differently.

Rumpus: A few writer friends have expressed how they would prefer to have a mentor rather than go through a creative writing program. How important is a mentor for a writer trying to find their way? Did you have one?

Davis: I would be wary of both the writing workshop and the mentor.  Each is useful in small doses, but each can have too great an influence—dangerous.  I would suggest working mainly on one’s own, with, as I said, occasional doses of mentorship and/or writing group situations.  A friend with the same sensibility who gives useful feedback is also good—or several for different kinds of work.

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First Andrei Tarkovsky, whose brand of magic is mysteriously and eerily displayed by a sequence in his quasi-autobiographical Mirror (1974):

The mother here is seen through her young son’s consciousness, but the young son (the boy will grow to become Tarkovsky the filmmaker) sees wet locks of golden hair and much more. It’s a childhood vision — half lovely, half terrible. All the boy has at that age is his mother (as his father is often away at war) and she is paramount but precarious. She could be safely nestled next to him and then she is gone, the world crashes. Someone could hurt her…

Tarkovsky adored Robert Bresson and put two of his films (Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette) on his top ten list. Au Hasard Balthazar was released in 1966. It was probably conceived and shot in 1965 or early 1966 at the latest.

What a two-year period for cinema! All over the world, the greatest directors were writing, shooting and editing some of their best work. Antonioni working hard in England on Blow-Up. Bergman directing Liv and Bibi in Persona. Kubrick researching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tarkovsky himself putting together Andrei Rublev in Russia. Cassavetes jumping around in Southern California, trying to get Faces shot. And then Bresson premieres this simple little parable of a film, about a donkey seen from birth to death. The film is no Lassie — many people own Balthazar in the French countryside, including some of the vilest people in film history, including a young thief, a drunkard, and a miser. And yet Balthazar is Balthazar throughout. An innocent, a donkey who does his work, who doesn’t ask for anything.

Here is the opening:

This sequence, until the crack of the whip, is so easygoing and childlike, it’s hard to imagine an old man created it. This is Bresson’s magic. A simple showing. There is no ostentatious editing (dissolves dominate the entire film), the camera movements are slow with mostly medium and close-up shots of the characters, though the long shot of the school and people walking toward the camera is a motif Bresson returns to throughout, a cleansing of the visual palette if you will. Bresson blends in some of the main characters in cast during the opening, including Jacques, Marie and her father. He also throws in a sick child who won’t appear again in the film. Her covering her face in agony of not being able to fit in takes about five seconds of real time but everything one needs to know about the situation is shown — Bresson creating multiple worlds.

It seems the purpose of this sequence is not only to show the innocence of Balthazar, but also that of human beings. Children play and happily push each other in swings — life is sweet. The rest of the film is not.

Money plays a huge role in the film, and it affects Balthazar always as people weigh the benefit of feeding him for the work he will produce. As he gets older, his worth is questioned more and more.

Midway through, after being passed on to a few people, Balthazar ends up in a circus. In the following magical sequence, he is pulled around and shown the other animals in their cages. A tiger, a polar bear, a money and the elephants. (The video is bad for the first few seconds, but watch on.)

When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It’s a moment in cinema like no other I know. Here are animals just looking at one another — a filmmaker had somehow entered their consciousness.  No music underscores these dazzling encounters; the eyes meet as if to say, “What are you doing here?” Like them, Balthazar is about to be exploited, and they must keep to their cages and endure. This sequence reminds me of the photographs of human and owl eyes (and prose)  in the first pages of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and of course, Rilke’s ‘The Panther.’ We can never fully know what is going on for an animal, but these artists have dared to evoke them.

As Marie grows up and her father gives up his school teaching to become a farmer, enduring many losses along the way, she falls for the thug Gerard, an attractive but evil young man who steals money from old couples, traffics goods over the border and beats on Balthazar because he sees Marie is too affectionate with him. They have an affair over time but she is eventually spit out and finds her way to a miser’s house in the rain.

The key dialogue (emphasis mine):

Marie: This is a place to die in. With no regrets.
Miser: Who mentioned dying?
Marie: Me. Don’t you believe in anything?
Miser: I believe in what I own. I love money. I hate death.

Dialogue is at a minimum in this film, but when it hits, it hits. The miser gives her money and she immediately accepts it, but after the miser’s speech about how money is king, she gives it back, saying she needs a friend. According to an interview with Bresson, “This is her moment of greatness,” and her fundamental honesty wins out. The miser will comfort her and perhaps sleep with her — the film is not explicit on this point. All the while Balthazar is in the background during these exchanges, remaining silent. Though there are many characters and many subplots (it’s amazing how much Bresson packs into ninety-five minutes), Balthazar remains stable. He doesn’t ask for anything, he doesn’t try to put himself in a superior position. He continues to give for his entire life. Marie’s mother calls him a saint toward the end, but he’s more than a saint, he’s divine. He dies because of Gerard’s indiscretions but, fittingly, he dies among other animals: sheep.

Watch again how at :59 Balthazar stops, perfectly foregrounded against a mountain, and looks to his left. Like Tarkovsky’s fascination with animals, one wonders, How could they do that? But these movements seem more organic than special effects. It is a transcendental image. And soon it is revealed he is looking at a herd of sheep in the distance. Is this Balthazar’s plan? To not be alone at the end? The viewer is then introduced to the herd and the sheep dogs, but through crafty editing, as the camera pulls back it is revealed Balthazar is already with them, already surrounded. The bells are no accident and though Schubert’s piano sonata rises once again, Bresson wisely lets it fall off so we have only bells sounding as cinema’s only divine being dies.

There is much more that goes on in the film, including a drunkard’s time with Balthazar, his inheriting a load of money and eventual death, but a summary of the plot would be feeble. Motion pictures are dubbed such, because the images are supposed to communicate all to the spectator. Bresson is more interested in how things happen rather than what happens, and Au Hasard Balthazar is about facial expressions: Marie’s darting eyes in front of Gerard, her father’s stony ignominy at the failure of his life and Balthazar’s quiet, humbling face. Here is Bresson’s simple formula from Notes on the Cinematographer:

“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”

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Once asked why he kept making small films in terms of characters and length—chamber pieces for lack of a better word—Ingmar Bergman quoted Frederic Chopin’s answer to a woman who asked why he concentrated more on sonatas and concertos instead of that grand, opulent form—the symphony: “My kingdom is a small one, but I am its king.”

People have voiced similar concerns about flash fiction or very short fiction or any of the other diminutives for the form that currently saturates the internet. In the spirit of her Northern European brothers I offer Kim Chinquee as the answer—the queen of flash fiction–and her most recent collection, Pretty.

In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the characters’ life but leaves them confused and sorry—sometimes stoic, as in the title story where the narrator recalls going back and riding on a parade float in the small town she used to live in, seeing boys who had done unspeakable things to her, “…I stood, wearing a white dress, holding a gigantic cross statue to keep my balance. I felt sort of like a star then.” (50)

These pieces are not epiphany-seeking. In their taut spaces and narrow corridors of action there is no room for insight. They are like looking at half-completed puzzles of medieval times. In the corner, the turret of the castle has been constructed because it’s gray and stands out from the forest and shrubs of many greens, but the main body is empty or partially constructed. Chinquee’s shorts almost have the air of thrillers or mysteries because clues lay about disguised as the most ordinary things: a dog, a drink, a scar, football on TV, an article about panda bears, inciting both applause and disapproval, regret and recalcitrance as they enlighten and defuse Chinquee’s characters.

Take the beginning of ‘Labor’: “After making love, my new husband asked about my last one. He propped his head up on an elbow, ran his finger along the scar from my old surgery. It was a long jagged mark, just below my naval.” The first sentence throws the reader directly into the action. Post-coitus, post ex-husband and with a new husband. There are so many places the story can go, the levels have been built up in a few words and the stakes are very high. But the scar sticks out more than anything and leads the narrator to tell the story of her labor, ending in an absent husband. The new husband then says, “’You ever going to tell me anything?’” The narrator thinks of her son in college now and responds, “’You know?’…I laughed a little, nudged him.” (58-9) It’s a mysterious ending. A relationship unsure of itself tries to build itself stronger than the one that came before, but the scar remains. This could be a tagline for most of the stories in Pretty.

If there is a war in these pages it’s between women and men. Both are hungry, but on the whole the men want sex and the women want intimacy. It’s an age old story but Chinquee imbues the concerns with fleeting, imbedded traces in sentences such as: “He told me to call him Joe, then he sang songs to me, as if he were a blackbird,” (38-9) “She told him she was curious and he told her that was passion,” (35) “He pictured her bedraggled, her hair a mess, her naked, asking him again will you ever touch me, will you again ever, and will you, will you, will you? ever, do you love me?” (28) The banter, the zigzagging one-upmanship—it’s a world where people tip-toe around, where wrestling with this thing called love is avoided head-on, except in the last example—a moment of supposition where a ghostly woman beckons.

One masterpiece called ‘Lint’ is made up of very short paragraphs, most only one sentence long. It’s a simple telephone conversation, but Chinquee sprinkles the past in like seeds evenly planted every few paragraphs. The narrator talks to her girlfriend who used to be a closer friend but now they live on different coasts. The woman in California drinks a lot of vodka and thinks about the man who can’t love her, who tells her she whines. The narrator walks around her new apartment with the phone, picking lint from the sofa, remembering how the woman comforted her after her husband beat her. “She put a sponge to my forehead, said she was going to beat my husband.” (69) It’s a past that can’t make too much a difference in the present. Sometimes people save us and they fall away. We can’t always relate, we can’t return the favor. Soon the woman gets another call and abruptly hangs up. ‘Lint’ examines a moment of connection (people needing reassurance) just long enough for past aches to return. It ends, but what has been summoned won’t recede. The chilly human emotions make the scars that remain tingle.

Pretty is another cog in Chinquee’s oeuvre that began with Oh, Baby. What will come next? More minute examinations of life’s crackle and sag? Packing more characters into flash fictions and widening that world? We eagerly await the next arrival of the Queen.

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She invited me into her beautiful home one cold day right before New Year’s and we spoke of her life, her art, the cave painters, Antonioni, the Cathar Massacre in France and a host of other things. We sat by the windows overlooking her garden, which contains an evergreen tree that is one of the only two in Brooklyn, the other being in the Botanical Gardens. Midway through our conversation, a visitor tentatively approached us from the other end of the room. A cat called Lucy. Fox had taken her in as a stray a few years ago. The cat is no small emblem in Fox’s oeuvre. Desperate Characters begins with arguably the most famous cat bite in literary history, when a stray bites the female protagonist’s hand after she pets it and the woman, “jerk[s] her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.”

The Rumpus: I wondered if you could talk about your beginnings as a writer, from your earliest efforts.

Paula Fox: Yes, well actually I began when I was 7. I wrote a story about a robber who came into a house and killed everyone and then they all came miraculously alive. It was two or three paragraphs. I was working hard all the time during my adolescence and later so I didn’t get a chance until my twenties and then I sent stories out to New American Review and some were turned down. I don’t even remember, right now, but I sold two early stories to The Negro Digest and Hoyt Fuller, I don’t think it exists anymore, maybe it does, and he wrote to me to find out what color I was, because they were both stories about black people. Fiction pieces. I still have them upstairs, they’re very ragged now. Then, I got a job teaching at the Ethical Culture Society School, downtown at 63rd Street. And two women came into the faculty room looking for a black woman and it was me. “Is there a Paula Fox here?” They had gotten notice that there were these two stories because I had mentioned to Hoyt Fuller that I taught at Ethical Culture.

I really didn’t start working on my first novel until my husband Martin and I and our sons went to a Greek island called Thassos. And that’s where I began Poor George and Maurice’s Room at the same time. Maurice’s Room is children’s book about the way American nursery’s in children’s rooms look like stores and it was brought about because we went out one day with a fisherman to a little island. He looked like Ulysses and he stood up to throw the oars. And he said, “Many things in America.” And that’s what gave me the idea from Maurice’s Room because this was a kid who doesn’t like toys, he likes rusty mattresses. So that sold and Poor George sold. I was still teaching then.  One day the phone rang. It was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Poor George had been accepted for publication. So I went back to the fifth grade having drunk invisible champagne and I told them my book had been accepted and they all applauded. It was a very nice day. Maurice’s Room was accepted as well by an editor I had for decades, Richard Jackson. So that’s how I began. I kept teaching because my income came from that, and then I wrote Desperate Characters when we were living in Boerum Hill (Brooklyn).

I had seen a murder on Central Park West, a man shot to death, so we moved to Brooklyn. That was 43 years ago. I worked on Desperate Characters, finished it and I got $35,000 which I plunked down on this house. We had to renovate it. It had been a boarding house for Swedish, Norwegian and Scandinavian sailors. There used to be a hostel down on 2^nd Place a few blocks away. When the ships would come in they would go there to stay.

So then we moved in here and I wrote the Western Coast which took about three or four years. Then The Widow’s Children and the rest of the books. Meanwhile I’ve written twenty-two books for children. I made some money from the children’s book, it wasn’t a lot, but there was one that won a Newberry Award and the Hans Christian Anderson Medal. And last year Portrait of Ivan won an award in Germany though it was published forty years ago. I’m not working on a book now. I’m working on articles. I recently wrote a piece about L.J. Davis and his book A Meaningful Life that was just reissued by the New York Review of Books press.

I was assaulted in Jerusalem. I’m trying to write about that. It’s taken me twelve years to get around to it, but it did stop me from smoking. I saw a story in the Times that scientists had discovered the addiction center, which is a prune shaped little thing in the right side of the brain. That was hit during the attack. I was struck to the ground and spent a month in the hospital. Apparently it’s the addiction center for tobacco and well as other things. And I’d been to smoking groups. The neurologist told me that was a hell of a way to quit.

Rumpus: Was the attack the most challenging thing that happened to you?

Fox: No, my whole life has been difficult. I can’t remember the first two weeks, which happens with most people who are assaulted. They don’t remember the circumstances. And if they’re assaulted in the right way they don’t remember anything. I read a book on the brain when I was able to read again. A very eminent composer had been assaulted in Paris and was unable to read music. Couldn’t learn it and lost all of his knowledge so he could only play what he composed, but he couldn’t read music anymore. It’s very strange isn’t it?

Rumpus: It’s been hard to write about till now?

Fox: Yes. I haven’t avoided consciously but I didn’t want to confront certain things. It certainly changed me a lot.

Rumpus: Will it be part of a new memoir?

Fox: Oh no, I think I’ve written all the memoirs I’m going to write.

Rumpus: I was wondering about the genesis of Desperate Characters. Was it more difficult than other things? How much editing did you do on it?

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