The Threepenny Review (ISSN 0275-1410)

165 SPRING 2021 SEVEN DOLLARS

A Symposium on Rhyme and Repetition, with Commentary by Mark Morris, W. S. Di Piero, Ellen Pinsky, Nate Klug, Ethan Iverson, Rosanna Warren, and Mark Padmore

Brenda Wineapple on Diane Johnson Javier Marías: Ridiculous Men

Poems by Louise Glück, Jim Powell, Charles Simic, Adam Zagajewski, and others

Ross Feld: Doing It Over David Hollander Watches Television

Photographs by Arno Rafael Minkkinen © Copyright 2021 by The Threepenny Review (ISSN 0275-1410). All rights reserved. The Threepenny Review is published quarterly by The Threepenny Review (a Volume XLII, Number 1. Periodicals postage paid at Berkeley, California, and at nonprofit corporation) at 2163 Vine Street, Berkeley, California 94709. additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Subscriptions cost $25.00 per year or $45.00 for two years (foreign rate: $50 The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, California 94709. per year). All mail, including subscription requests, manuscripts, and queries of any kind, should be sent to The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131, Website address: www.threepennyreview.com Berkeley, California 94709 (telephone 510.849.4545). Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Consulting Editors: Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser Geoff Dyer Associate Editors: Sabrina Ramos Deborah Eisenberg Rose Whitmore Jonathan Franzen Louise Glück Art Advisors: Allie Haeusslein Janet Malcolm Sandra Phillips Ian McEwan Robert Pinsky Proofreader: Zachary Greenwald Kay Ryan Tobias Wolff

Contents

3 Table Talk Jennifer Garfield 17 Poem: Asking for Light Louise Glück 5 Poem: Second Wind Mark Morris et al. 18 Symposium on Rhyme and Repetition Clifford Thompson 6 Memoir: The Home of Two Cliffs Wendy Lesser 22 Music: Back at the Berlin Philharmonic Madison Rahner 7 Poem: Sestina for the Matriarch Jim Powell 23 Poem: Inspecting the Game Brenda Wineapple 8 Books: The True History of the First Javier Marías 24 Perspective: Ridiculous Men Mrs. Meredith by Diane Johnson Steve Vineberg 25 Theater: John Van Druten Adam Zagajewski 9 Poem: The Great Poet Basho Begins… Peter Spagnuolo 26 Poem: Cinderella in Reverse Henry Walters 10 Books: The Poetry of Sappho Radhika Borde 27 Fiction: We All Have Our Stories Chelsie Malyszek 12 Books: Selected Letters of John Berryman Charles Simic 29 Poem: Photograph Kara Penn 13 Poem: Struggle’s Map Jake Crist 31 Poem: Springtime… Deborah-Anne Tunney 14 Fiction: Valley Oaks Drive Tomas Unger 15 Poem: Once Cover Art: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Skrøvafjellet Mountain, Skrøva, Lofoten Islands, Norway, 2007. For information on the Minkkinen photos Ross Feld 16 Miscellany: Doing It Over in this issue, please see pages 4 and 7.

Contributors

J. T. Barbarese’s latest book is True Does Nothing. His translations of selec- Kara Penn, the owner of a social impact consultancy, is the author of a book on tions from Prévert, After Prévert, is forthcoming in 2021. learning from failure. She lives with her family in Denver. Radhika Borde is a geography researcher at the Charles University in Prague, Ellen Pinsky, the author of Mortal Gifts, is a psychoanalyst in Cambridge, spending large parts of her time in India. Massachusetts. Jake Crist works for housing and homelessness nonprofits in Columbus, Ohio. Jim Powell’s poems of 1979–2009 are collected in It Was Fever That Made the His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Subtropics, and The Yale Review. World and Substrate. He is the translator of The Poetry of Sappho. Simone Di Piero’s recent books are a collection of poems, The Complaints, Madison Rahner is a novelist, biographer, and poet from Myrtle Beach, South and Fat: New and Uncollected Prose, both from Carnegie Mellon. Carolina. Ross Feld (1947–2001) was the author of four novels—Years Out, Only Shorter, Sabrina Ramos, an editor who currently lives in Oakland, California, is also a Shapes Mistaken, and Zwilling’s Dream—as well as the posthumously pub- bookseller and painter. lished Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston. Charles Simic’s most recent book of poetry is Come Closer and Listen. Jennifer Garfield is a high school English teacher in the Boston area. Peter Spagnuolo lives in Brooklyn. Spit-Take, a chapbook of his poems, will Louise Glück, who received the Nobel Prize in 2020, teaches at Yale and appear this spring. Stanford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish her new book in October. Clifford Thompson is the author, most recently, of What It Is: Race, Family, David Hollander, a recovering lawyer, lives in San Francisco. and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues. His graphic novel Big Man and the Little Ethan Iverson is a jazz pianist and composer who lives in Brooklyn. Men is due out from Other Press in 2022. Nate Klug’s new book of poems is Hosts and Guests, out last September from Deborah-Anne Tunney, novelist and poet, lives in Ottawa. Her latest book, a Princeton. He works as a Congregational minister in the Bay Area. collection of poetry on the life and work of Alfred Hitchock, came out in 2020. Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest Tomas Unger’s poems and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, book, Scandinavian Noir, will be out in paperback in May. The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. Chelsie Malyszek is a poet who lives in rural Virginia. Steve Vineberg has been writing for The Threepenny Review since 1983. He teaches drama and film at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. Javier Marías is perhaps Spain’s most famous contemporary novelist; his latest novel, Berta Isla, came out in 2019 from Knopf. Margaret Jull Costa has been Henry Walters is at work on his second collection of poems, The Nature Thief. his translator since 1992. Rosanna Warren’s new books are So Forth, a volume of poems, and Max Jacob: Toni Martin is a writer and physician who lives in Berkeley. A Life in Art and Letters, both out from Norton in 2020. Mark Morris is the artistic director of the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brenda Wineapple’s latest book is The Impeachers. She teaches at Columbia. author, with Wesley Stace, of the memoir Out Loud. Adam Zagajewski is a major Polish poet, essayist, and novelist. His translator, Mark Padmore is a working singer and hopes to be one again before too long. Clare Cavanagh, teaches Slavic Literature at Northwestern University.

2 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW York City in the Forties, Chicago in were pretty racy. the Fifties, Washington D.C. in the Back on the floor in my daughter’s Table Talk Sixties, back to Chicago, back to room, surrounded by books, I told Washington when Carter was elected myself to get a grip. “Surely you don’t in 1976. They dragged hundreds of feel that you personally need to hang on books around with them. Finally, to to these physical volumes. Everything’s the great relief of their children, they online anyway. We don’t have to keep donated most of them to Howard the written record in our home to pro- A S T JANUARY, I sent a stern about Zora Neale Hurston in Ms. University. None of us had room. tect it.” Still, in our family, where we email to my three adult children, magazine in 1975, an article that is I never studied African-American lit- don’t have houses or jewelry to pass L all over thirty, informing them credited with rekindling interest in erature in school. Harvard University’s down, we remember our relatives by that if they didn’t claim their posses- Hurston’s work, I found original copies African-American Studies department their books. I have scattered titles by sions by the end of the year I would from the Thirties of Their Eyes Were was founded amid great controversy in black authors, like the Hurston books, throw them out. The pandemic scram- Watching God and Go Tell My Horse 1969, the year I matriculated. I did not too well read to have rare-book value. I bled my plans: one son landed home for on my parents’ bookshelf. enroll in a course in the new depart- also have my grandfather’s 1938 edition months and my daughter, an ER doc- As a child, I think I understood that ment, partly because the political rhet- of The Book of Common Prayer and a tor, was afraid to visit, for fear of not every house had a library, but I oric on campus intimidated me. I was 1943 edition of Illuminations by infecting the old folk. Last week she didn’t think it was unusual. The motley one of the Negroes in the woodwork, Rimbaud, which belonged to my moth- finally drove up and managed to sort collection included Shakespeare, Book- perversely majoring in a field (geology) er, the French major. through a bookshelf. Many of the of-the-Month Club offerings, and mys- which a black resident advisor declared So I examine each book individually. books in the discard pile were paper- tery novels as well as works by black was not “relevant to the revolution.” At I find photographs and a letter from backs she bought for courses, titles like authors. My mother read whenever she the same time, I could not imagine dis- my daughter’s college boyfriend stuck Coffee Will Make You Black by April had free time. After she put us to bed, cussing racial themes with white stu- between pages. She might want those Sinclair and Native Son by Richard she would drink a beer and read alone dents, who seemed uninformed. I was someday. And a 1965 copy of New Wright. When I sat on the floor stack- at the kitchen table. Nothing irritated used to reading books by and about Negro Poets edited by Langston ing them into bags, I realized that over her more than for one of us to inter- black folk at home, and white books at Hughes, with my husband’s aunt’s the years my husband and I have rupt her during her sacred hour. I can school. I wasn’t ready to share my pri- name inside the cover. Aunt Peri was a instinctively held on to books by black hear her voice: “This is my time, now. vate world with strangers. jazz maven and constant reader, who authors, as our parents before us did. Your time is over.” Here we are, in a new century and a marked the poems she liked with one Knowing that these books were widely On a trip to Mali in 2005, I visited new world. When I visited my daughter penciled checkmark or two. That’s a available, even fashionable now, I still the Ahmed Baba Institute, a library in at her college, I sat in on an African- keeper. felt reluctant to let them go. Timbuktu which collects and preserves American literature class. The Black —Toni Martin My father, who earned a bachelor’s Arab manuscripts. We were told that Arts Movement had been churchified degree in English at the University of the manuscripts had been dispersed and deconstructed, and a multicultural * Michigan, was a journalist and editor into private hands in the nineteenth group of students was studying our lit- of the Chicago Defender in the 1950s. century to hide them from the French erature, some of which, like the HE FIRST and only time I saw John Langston Hughes wrote a column for colonists, carried in saddle bags on Hurston, had been rediscovered since I T Prine play live was on my thirtieth the paper in those days. In our house in camels when necessary. Yes, I thought, was an undergraduate. And the discov- birthday. It was a present from an old Hyde Park, there was a room off the that’s what my parents did, too. They eries continue. I just read The Street, by friend, who showed up with his new dining room lined with floor-to-ceiling held on to a written record which they Ann Petry, published in 1946, brought girlfriend and took me and my new bookshelves full of books by black felt was not valued by the majority cul- to new attention by Tayari Jones. I girlfriend to the Schubert Theatre in authors. My mother reviewed many of ture, not archived in mainstream insti- wonder if that book was on my par- Philadelphia. The sound was concert the books the Defender received. tutions. My parents moved every ents’ shelf—perhaps not, since, accord- class, no coffee-house brick walls to When I read Alice Walker’s article decade: Detroit in the Thirties, New ing to Jones, some of the earlier covers ping it back or drapery to damp it or

SPRING 2021 3 crowd to interrupt with a cough or a as effrontery or insensitivity, coming request. John Prine in a concert hall from a white male born just outside was a bit like chinchilla seat covers on a Chicago, whose Southern “accent” is Rolls-Royce, but of course this was pre- merely Southern-ish and as phony as cisely his appeal. Dylan’s or the dozens of Brits (Stevie He did all the songs he’s remembered Winwood, Joe Cocker) whose blackish for that night—“Hello in There,” accents were pure fakery. His charac- “Sam Stone”—but the one that lit me ter’s gender came with the voice he up was his masterpiece, “Angel from claims he heard. Prine was actually Montgomery.” These lines in particu- asked about that once. “I got asked THE lar made me sit up straight: years later lots of times how I felt I could get away with writing a woman’s THREEPENNY How the hell can a person song first-person. And that never Go to work in the morning occurred to me, because I already con- REVIEW Come home in the evening sidered myself a writer. And writers are And have nothing to say— any gender you want.” Coming from an American folk singer, this suddenly How many times had I heard some much-contested claim (it’s not quite an version of the same rhetorical question “It is roughly the size and shape of the New York Review of Books, argument), stripped of any and all the- raised over a family dinner, at the cor- but it is really a little magazine in disguise, with fiction and poetry oretical regalia, sounds as simple as the ner saloon, or coming from a porch song itself. Is it true, as Louis Menand and personal essays outweighing literary criticism. The Threepenny across the street? The lines don’t sound Review achieves a distinctive regional flavour without seeming pro- put it a while back, that unless you are or look like much—they don’t even born it, you cannot perform it? If you vincial... Among the most appealing recent contributions are two rhyme—but their plainspoken beauty answer yes, it’s instantly impossible to death-haunted musings: Francine Prose’s evocation of her father’s took my breath away. When Bonnie know what to say to Pound when he workplace, the Old Morgue in New York City, and Robert Pinsky’s Raitt covered “Angel” on a live album pretends to be the river merchant’s lullaby for himself, his ‘Alphabet of My Dead.’” years ago, she turned it into an aria, wife—a woman around sixteen years but it’s not quite that. It’s some approx- old and Chinese—or the British poet imation to and in the same dramatic Stevie Smith when she impersonates an mode as Shylock’s “Am I not a man?” —TIMES older man married to a younger LITERARY or Lear’s repetition of the word never woman during the Blitz. But this is not SUPPLEMENT across a line of pentameter. It doesn’t news: our cultural moment is poisoned To subscribe, look like much until one gives the ver- by politics. If the source seems obvious please send your nacular context a ninety-degree turn (our addiction to failed presidencies), is name and address (with and reveals the polarizing force of the the antidote more memoir, more per- zip) along with a check to question-that-isn’t-quite-just-that. I sonal reportage, more born-to-the- The Threepenny Review remember dismissing out of hand, manner accounts of what cannot be P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, CA 94709 years ago, a book titled The Poetry of refuted or ignored? Rock. This isn’t rock, but it is poetry. 1 year: $25 2 years: $45 Foreign subscription: $50 / 1 year Which brings me back to John Prine. And it’s also what sets Prine (and When you listen to “Angel,” pay atten- Joni Mitchell, who deserves her own tion to the way he inflects the third Nobel) apart from their contempo- and fourth lines of the quatrain I Thanks to Our Donors raries. Prine was more than just a folk began this with— singer, in part because his lyrics were scrubbed of politics and formalities The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Come home in the evening like strict cadence. This was actually Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, Mad Rose Foundation, and And have nothing to say poetry composed by a writer who, like the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by Thomas Hardy, wrote small novels in our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robert Bauer, Richard V. Clayton, —and note how he runs the syntax of verse and rarely intruded; and who, Susan Knapp, Richard Murphy, Eunice & Jay Panetta, Robert Redford, line three into line four. Singers, per- like Prévert, throve on gossip and anec- Neal Rosenthal & Kerry Madigan, Nancy Rudolph, and Pablo Woodward. formers of speech, whether singing or dote and direct lifts from remembered Other individuals who have kindly donated to the magazine are listed on reciting it, reproduce live speech and speech. If all poetry aspires to the con- pages 30–31 of this issue. Our heartfelt thanks to all! lift the lines off the page. Performers dition of music, American poetry invented enjambment. Here it identifies aspires to the music of American this moment as the climactic one, speech isolated within the particular when the old woman being imperson- endtime of its utterance. This is hard to ated is either raising or lowering her A Note on the Artworks describe unless and until you’ve read voice—in rage or frustration, it’s hard Whitman and especially Dickinson. to say. My ears hear a woman too For the past half century, Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Prine wrote “Angel” while he was a worn down to yell at a husband who Minkkinen has been engaged with one of the longest-running nonstop self- mailman, as he walked around making won’t have a ready reply anyway. portrait undertakings in the history of the genre. Not a document of a per- deliveries. His compositional praxis, in Whether moral or not, this is art formance nor a project with a beginning, middle, and end, his photographs other words, was like that of Emily because it does what art does. It allows duplicate the reality before the lens as he travels the world. “Make it differ- Dickinson, who scribbled lines or whoever is listening to migrate for a ent, keep it the same,” he says. “Making yourself the subject means no one whole poems between straightening moment into an alien, alienated con- else comes in harm’s way. Refusing manipulation rules out illustration. Being the beds or tending her garden, or sciousness, and maybe rise to that level without clothes instills timelessness. And listen to the planet. It’s pleading for Wallace Stevens, who composed in his of “compassion” generally unavailable its life.” head as he walked to the Hartford (we’re all pretty busy) and yet con- A Madison Avenue copywriter in his twenties, Minkkinen went on to Insurance Company every morning, or stantly advertised as the very condition study with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of William Carlos Williams, who would of cultural health and national sanity. Design. Currently Emeritus Professor at UMass Lowell, Minkkinen also pull his car over to the side of the road —J. T. Barbarese serves as docent at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Major monographs on the way to the hospital. When Prine are Waterline; SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen; Homework: was asked about “Angel,” he claimed * The Finnish Photographs; and the recent Minkkinen, which won the that something like what the ancients German Photo Book Prize in Gold for Best Monograph of 2020. His photos called divine afflatus brought him the HE SUGGESTED pre-requirements for are in over seventy-five museum and institutional collections worldwide, song by way of the character. It was Tenrolling in any non-digital art among them the Musée d’art moderne in Paris, the MFA in Boston, and the the character’s voice that “dictated” it class were Basic Drawing and Color Museum of Modern Art in New York. to him. I consider it a bad idea and bad Theory. I skipped Color Theory but His many awards include the Finnish State Art Prize, the Order of the manners not to believe genius when it obediently signed up for an introducto- Lion First Class medal of knighthood, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Society describes how it produced a master- ry drawing class that met twice a week for Photographic Education’s Honored Educator awards, and the Pro piece. If Dante says he actually lived at the Fort Mason campus of City Finlandia medal from the President of Finland. Fotografiska in Stockholm is the Commedia, that’s enough for me. College of San Francisco. The teacher currently presenting Minkkinen’s fifty-year retrospective, Two Hundred All of which leads me to wonder had graduated from RISD and had two Seasons, through April 18, 2021. whether a writer like Prine is possible sleeves of dazzling tattoos that climbed We are grateful to the artist for allowing us to reproduce his work in anymore. The opening lines of “Angel” her forearms. (The ink may have scaled The Threepenny Review and for generously providing us with the scans. —“I am an old woman / Named after higher, but the area above her elbows my mother…”—might appear to some was usually covered.) One arm show-

4 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW cased the ocean floor, with Haeckel- attempting to grow in a neat set of jars. Tango in Halifax? Not violent, about unexpected places. There’s future like illustrations of coral, sea anemo- He is carefully holding one glass cylin- old people, stars an actual distin- Queen’s Gambit diva Anya Taylor-Joy nes, a pearl resting on an open-faced der up to the lamplight, trying to guished stage actor, Derek Jacobi. as a child in boarding school in oyster, and many types of seaweed. The detect any change, any growth. Reasonably entertaining, in its way. Endeavor! There’s Andrew Buchan, other arm pictured a banquet table set No one in my intensive painting class Someone recommended the French the sad father of the murdered boy in with a candelabrum, wine goblets, a thought much of this work, myself series Call My Agent (featuring a dog Broadchurch, looking dapper at a bowl full of fruit. Each scene was a included. When the teacher asked why named Jean Gabin). So much fun I party with Prince Charles in The visual bounty, loaded with an amount I was unsatisfied with it, I told her the doled it out to myself slowly. Crown! There’s a very young Olivia of color and detail that was surprising painting didn’t look as good as the Then an old friend recommended Colman in the BBC’s The Office from to observe on skin. I accepted the photograph I had based it on. I’d failed Giri/Haji. Quite violent, which used 2002! And wait—that clean-cut cop in sleeves as proof of my instructor’s cre- to capture what was contained in that to make me recoil—but it turns out I Occupied looks familiar. Yes! In a few dentials, though I never asked if she intimate scene of looking, inspecting. I loved it! Maybe I could handle the years Oddgeir Thune will portray designed the tattoos herself. In any expected the teacher to tell me that I highly-touted The Americans. And I Stone Age man Navn in Beforeigners, event, all the exercises and demos that ought to approach the painting on its did—for a couple of seasons, until its naked and gnawing on a raw rabbit in were done in that classroom under her own terms rather than with standards characters’ impossibly conflicting loy- twenty-first-century Oslo. guidance have been of lasting value to set by another medium, and that I alties became too much of a mind- I try to preserve a vestige of my sta- me. Never have I learned so much so shouldn’t get hung up on staying faith- fuck and gave me bad dreams. But I tus as a snob. Most days I watch an fast, and for so little money. Tuition at ful to a photo. Instead, she asked to see had fallen for Matthew Rhys. What actual motion picture in addition to City College of San Francisco was then the picture. I opened the file on my else could I watch him in? Brothers & television. This year it’s been fun $45.00 a credit. And enrolling in the phone and handed it to her. After Sisters, season after season. Some “going” to film festivals, which used to class had the added economic benefit of examining it, she said, “It’s a nice television-watching friends told me I’m be inaccessible except to industry types allowing me to postpone repaying my image. Maybe you should try taking nuts: that’s generic situation/soap and critics, who would gush about considerable undergraduate loans. I photographs instead of painting, and trash. Am I developing a problem? No. things mortals couldn’t see for months. couldn’t afford to stop learning. see where it gets you.” I took the unex- Perhaps it’s okay just to be entertained, But now that it’s virtual, I too can be After completing Basic Drawing, my pected feedback for what it was without pretensions of enlightenment. at the opening night of the New York conscience was cleared to try worth—as an invitation to keep exper- Since I’ve never seen anything, there’s Film Festival. Introduction to Painting. This class imenting and working out new ways to so much to watch. Police procedurals, So for the duration of whatever this also met at the top floor of Fort convey what I see. of course—Unforgotten (Nicola is we’re living through, I have a rou- Mason’s Building B, but in the bay- —Sabrina Ramos Walker solves cold cases), The Bureau tine. A few hours of television, mostly facing wing of the building. Whenever (French spies), nutsy Money Heist viewed on my large iMac and heard I went between the studio and the stor- * (Madrid mint robbers), Endeavor through wireless headphones. Then age closet where canvases were left to (Oxford), Deadwind (grim-looking dinner, which my industrious husband dry between applications of oil and N JANUARY 27, 2020, the reported Helsinki, sexy detectives), the new has usually cooked as his own pan- acrylic, I always made sure to look out O death toll from the mysterious Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys resur- demic therapy. More television. At the fire-exit door (which was kept new disease in Wuhan grew to 106, faces). But also the wonderful Borgen 10:00 P.M. or so, a movie (or more tele- propped open to circulate the paint- stock markets shuddered around the (Danish parliament), the saucy Love & vision) jointly selected and viewed on perfumed air, no matter the weather) world, and I ordered a state-of-the-art Anarchy (Swedish publishing house), the big screen, followed sometimes by and catch a glimpse of the San fifty-five-inch OLED video monitor. It lovely Rita (Danish school), The Paper a video nightcap. The resurrected Dr. Francisco Bay. In the distance you was time to hunker down. (Croatian newspaper, plus crime), The Who is perfect for that: cartoon-scary, could see birds and sailboats, and the Newton Minow said in 1961 that Last Word (German eulogist), The but the Doctor (especially in his David stony face of Alcatraz Island. TV was a vast wasteland, and his House of Flowers (Mexico City flo- Tennant incarnation) always makes Learning to paint has been a slower words became gospel to me. For most rist), The Night Manager (arms traf- things right by the end. process for me than learning how to of my adult life, I was the worst kind ficking), Bodyguard (with its high-level I am learning so much about life draw. I’m still frequently frustrated by of television snob. In college in the late tension and swoon-worthy Richard from television. People all over drink my inability to get something right on Sixties, and downtown New York in Madden), In Treatment (crotchety way too much. All parents have diffi- canvas. So much of learning to paint the Seventies and Eighties, we definite- Gabriel Byrne and astringent Dianne culties with their teenagers. Scandi- the way you want to comes from trying ly had better things to do in the eve- Wiest as shrinks), Big Little Lies (crazy navians (and Croatians) say “OK” things out. Through experimentation nings. Entertainments were supposed rich women in Monterey), Dead to Me even more than we do—and it can and failure, I’ve learned that the kind to be high art, or highly transgressive. (crazy women in Laguna Beach), and mean almost anything for them, too. of painting I do best is straightfor- When I did watch television, it invari- Chance (all kinds of crazy in San Most importantly, if you cheat on your ward, representational. In spite of my ably annoyed me. Blathering talking Francisco). Not to mention the most partner, or lie to your family or busi- sincere efforts, not to mention the heads, unendurable advertising. A pre- Zeitgeisty show of all, Russell T ness associates, it will very likely end efforts of the instructors who encour- mature cord-cutter, I haven’t had cable Davies’ brilliant Years and Years. badly. Despite this, people continue to aged me to take a more expressive in this millennium. I hadn’t watched a One of the joys of rampant television lie and cheat. direction, I never got comfortable with series since Twin Peaks ended in 1991. watching is spotting favorite actors in —David Hollander abstraction. To try to translate into a When Downton Abbey arrived in personal idiom the objective, compre- 2011, I was nesting in San Francisco hensible beauty that surrounds my with a new partner, and we decided to easel feels beyond me. I suppose I see give it a go. (On DVD. Remember no need to intentionally mediate reali- DVDs?) And we loved Downton Second Wind ty as it hits my eye—only to render it Abbey. Who could not love Mrs. as sensitively as I can with the skills I Patmore? Otherwise, we stuck to have managed to cultivate at a great motion pictures. Streaming arrived, bargain. and Netflix and Amazon seemed to be I think this is my second wind, When I moved to Oakland a few vast wastelands of their own, with few my sister said. Very years ago, I enlisted in a summer-long quality films and poor interfaces for like the first, but that intensive painting course at Laney finding them. The Crown, still the ended, I remember. Oh College. It wasn’t the same learning Mount Everest of series for me, was the what a wind it was, so powerful experience, of course; their art build- only one we watched. We relied on the leaves fell off the trees. ing is single-story and adjacent to the Filmstruck and later the Criterion I don’t think so, football field. At Laney, the fog never Channel for art films. I said. Well, they were rolled in to meet the water’s horizon Then the pandemic arrived and we on the ground, my sister said. Remember the way it did from the windows of the were all stuck at home with time to running around the park in Cedarhurst, studios inside Fort Mason. During fill—and, well, there are only so many jumping on the piles, destroying them? these months of adjusting to a new sit- quality movies. Also, a good movie is a You never jumped, my mother said. uation, I found myself drawn to repre- full meal, or at least a full entree. You You were good girls; you stayed where I put you. senting interiors—not interiors in the don’t want two entrees in a night, do Not in our heads, sense of emotional or psychological you? Television series are more like my sister said. I put states, but sitting rooms, hallways, the tapas. You can eat some, and then my arms around her. What corners of my new apartment. some more. Some are good for starters, a brave sister you are, For the class’s final critique, I paint- and some make good desserts. I said. ed my bedroom. My partner is includ- I started watching series TV with ed in the frame: with his exposed back elitist intent. Netflix had picked up an —Louise Glück turned toward the viewer, he stands to edgy indie series called Eastsiders, very the side of our wooden bureau, gay, fresh and original. As usual, one inspecting the mycelium he had been thing led to another. How about Last

SPRING 2021 5 memoir the same time, there were things I new to the city and living on the top dreamed of and pursued but felt very floor of this brownstone. I shared it far from achieving. Did I have the bal- with another man, a thirty-year-old ance right, or had I gone wrong some- who, like me, was named Cliff. This all The Home of Two Cliffs where, followed the wrong conviction might have come from the mind of a or not followed the right one? There sitcom writer, since our first names were times when I thought of my life as were the beginning and end of what we Clifford Thompson a giant machine, one that I had built had in common. Actually, that’s not but that was now controlling my true—we were both thin, and neither of actions with merciless regularity, us was exactly tall. Otherwise, imagine regardless of what I might want or any The Odd Couple with both guys Y OLDER daughter and I team had last had contact with it, convictions I might have. There were named Oscar. I was introverted, quiet, were biking around Brook- determining which team should have it other times, in the few hours I had to and, incidentally, black, with close- M lyn’s Prospect Park to her now. You could say the stakes were not myself, when I wrote or read or cropped hair; my roommate was extro- last soccer game of the season, she in high. Still, this was a job that called for watched a film or listened to music, verted, loud, and, incidentally, white her pale green uniform. The spring of someone with complete confidence in when I felt as one with the creative (and Jewish), with stringy blond hair 2003, this was. I had turned forty a his judgment or, failing that, the belief spirit. that came to his shoulders. Cliff rented couple of months before. My daughter that being decisive was more important What would my father have done? the top floor from the family down- was nine. As I recall it, it was during than being right. This is the person I was, this was the stairs, and I rented the larger of the two this ride that she asked if I played I was the opposite of that person. I life I lived, these were the questions I bedrooms from Cliff (his room was sports as a kid, if my father was once heard liberal defined as someone asked as I stood on the sidelines and tiny); we shared a kitchen, bathroom, involved, what all of that was like. who won’t take his own side in an cheered for my daughter’s soccer team. and living room. When I moved in, my “My father thought it was important argument, and to some extent that was After the game was over, the parents roommate cheerfully changed the mes- for me to know how to play baseball,” me, a person who would do anything and kids all met at the coach’s house to sage on the answering machine to say, I said as we pedaled in the pleasant air “This is the home of TWO Cliffs!” We around the park’s paved inner loop. shared other things, too. I had a turn- “People in his generation thought there table and a stack of albums—rock, were some things boys should just R&B, a few classical—that I put in the know how to do. So he tried to teach living room. One day Cliff told me he me. We spent a lot of time playing had rearranged my albums. “It’s a sim- catch in our backyard. I wasn’t very ple system,” he said with a grin. “See if good at it at first. And he wasn’t well— you can figure it out.” When I couldn’t, he was a good dozen years older than I he told me: he put the ones he liked on am now, and he was in pain a fair top. He felt I should be free with his amount of the time. He died within a things, too. Once I asked if I could bor- couple of years of that. But he thought row or use something, I forget what. it was important for him to do this “You don’t gotta ask,” he told me. while he still could, because he knew “Just do.” Cliff’s laugh sounded a lot he didn’t have a lot of time. When I like a car engine revving. When a friend messed up, he got impatient, and some- of mine from back home visited, he and times a little nasty. He was in pain, like I and Cliff and Cliff’s girlfriend went to I said. I understand it all now, but at see She’s Gotta Have It at the old thea- the time I hated it, and I resented it. So, ter on Flatbush Avenue; the movie that was my experience with sports as made Cliff laugh, and my friend was a kid.” more entertained by my roommate We came to what I called, in my than by Spike Lee. “Coolest white boy I head, Dead Man’s Hill—the steep ever met,” he later told me. decline we had to bike down before When I knew him, Cliff didn’t have exiting the park at the Parade a job—“I’m livin’ on spit,” he said at Grounds. This part of the ride always one point—and/but he was an aspiring made me nervous. I worried that my pop musician. “If it’s not Top 40, I’m daughter would panic at how quickly not interested,” I heard him tell a she was moving and lose control of her potential collaborator. He sang— bike somehow; I pictured a horribly yowled, really—and played guitar, and scraped or broken arm, a head injury he would play me the songs he wrote. despite her helmet. But I didn’t tell her That was how I discovered that you to be careful, as I was tempted to do, can get songs stuck in your head, and because I didn’t want her to be afraid. find yourself singing them, whether We coasted down the hill in silence, you like them or not. slowing as we always did when the What about the other Cliff, the one road mercifully flattened out. Soon we speaking to you now? I would write reached the field where her team would short stories, typing them up on the be playing. manual typewriter I had bought for On the soccer field, parents and uni- seven bucks at the local flea market. formed girls stood around, mostly (On a few occasions my roommate quiet, waiting for the doughy, brown- read and critiqued them, thoughtfully.) haired coach. “Good morning,” I said, before he would risk being in the have pizza and celebrate the season. I worked for a company in Manhat- for some reason, as he and his daugh- wrong. This seeming self-effacement The coach and his daughter lived not tan, where I was my department’s low ter, who was on the team, walked onto may in fact be a kind of egotism, the far from my apartment—one street man on the totem pole—that may the field. Old habits die hard, I guess. conviction that one knows what the over and a few blocks down the hill have been my title—a job in which, “How are you,” he said as joylessly as rights and wrongs of a situation are, that gives Park Slope its name. The unlike future jobs that involved more usual, no question mark, because it that one is above the rest of squabbling house, a brownstone, was near the bot- responsibility, I never knew from one was the very last thing he wanted to humanity. tom of its block. The house number hour to the next what would be com- know. The team photo, which we Convictions are tricky. To be with- seemed familiar. When we walked in, I ing at me. I didn’t like that much. I would all receive later, told me I should out them is to live, at best, a meaning- looked around at the layout and the didn’t like the pay, either. One of the not take it personally: his face, as he less life. To follow a conviction too high tin ceilings. In the same moment I measly twice-monthly paychecks cov- stood by the girls, was the face of devotedly—say, the conviction that realized, and said aloud to whoever ered the rent, or most of it, and the someone who has spent hours outside your son should learn to play baseball was nearby, “I used to live here.” And other covered everything else, or the operating room and is finally about come hell or high water—can do more for a moment, like a character in a sci- didn’t—I can remember stuffing laun- to talk to the surgeon. harm than good. ence fiction series, I was transported to dry into a pillowcase because a pillow The coach, as always, asked for a How had I managed this balance in another time, another life, another self. seemed beyond my means. parent volunteer to be a linesperson. I my life, up to age forty? The answer The unpredictability of life in those took a couple of steps back. I had done could lie, or not, in a quick glance at days, at work and outside it, had the this before, and I hated it. When the that life. I had a decent job and was HE TIME was seventeen years earli- occasional upside. I recall going out for ball went out of bounds, as it frequent- happily married and raising two girls I T er, the late summer and early fall the evening with a casual female ly did, the linesperson called which adored in a beautiful neighborhood. At of 1986, when I was twenty-three and friend, an occasion I didn’t think of as

6 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW a date until, as we were having coffee, gracious about it.” watched his daughter climb higher and our hands accidentally touched on the We learn gradually about ourselves, higher in a tree, who felt afraid for her table, and neither of us pulled away. and our selves, and we do what we but did not want to make her afraid by All of this is to say that I hadn’t yet can. Sometimes it works better than saying so? How much of the machine is built the machine, the one that ran my other times, this rising of our different genetic? From time to time I look in the life with such regularity. That had its selves to meet different roles. My old mirror and wonder what other people Photo Credits problems. If I didn’t know from day to roommate had called the top floor of are looking back at me. day what was happening in my world the brownstone “the home of two But we can deal only with what we externally, that was partly because I Cliffs”; my body was, is, the home of know. At forty I began to think of my Aside from the two news photos that wasn’t too sure what was going on more than two Cliffs, probably many father not as one who had made my life accompany Javier Marías’s essay on inside, either. I had convictions—about more, and who knew how many other miserable for misguided reasons, but as page 24, all the photographs in this issue were taken by Arno Rafael the unimportance of race, the oneness people. Somewhere in me was my one who thought he had a job to do Minkkinen and are copyrighted in his of people—that I had not thought father, a man I never really got to and tried to do it the best he could. As name. Below are the captions for each through very far. What would later be know, and he was only the beginning. I looked more kindly on him, I began Minkkinen image, listed by page. my interests in film and music were Occasionally I think of the people I to father myself. I’m not sure I ever told more impulses then, blind groping. To will never know about. Was there, cen- my daughter that part of the story. I put it more succinctly, there was a lot I turies ago in Africa, an ancestor who will have to, one of these days.@ Front Cover: Skrøvafjellet Mountain, didn’t know about who I was, and Skrøva, Lofoten Islands, Norway, 2007. knowing who you are makes difficul- ties on every level easier to deal with. 3: A Fan of Myself, Rockport, Maine, I wonder, now, if that accounts for 2005. the inordinate fright I felt late one night in my room, when summer had become fall, when I was on the edge of 6: Foster’s Pond, 2000. sleep and suddenly heard a rustling I thought was a rat under the floor or in Sestina for the Matriarch 8: Coralie, Fort Foucault, Niort, France, the wall. I went to get the other Cliff. 2009. As we stood in my room, he explained in a groggy but kindly voice—I had woken him up—that the heat was 9. Oulujärvi Afternoon, Paltaniemi, Kajaani, Finland, 2009. coming on, that there was nothing to It’s filtering down across our state line worry about. In that one moment I felt now that the storm has passed—the kind of water comforted, cared for. Fathered. we’d like to think was born of the river, 10: Castello Tancredi Gate, Bibbiano, A young woman I was close to at the but it’s not. It only arrives after drowning Italy, 2000. time said once that Cliff had a big swine in their slaughterhouses. This water’s black, death-steeped, brackish. My neighbor’s sons heart. I realized she was right. I liked 11: Cathedral of the Three Saints, him, though if I was being honest I Vilnius, Lithuania, 2007. would have said that I liked the idea of float across the road, basking in the sun- him, that there were days I wished he warmed water, belly-crawling ’cross the line would practice his big-heartedness, halving the street. I warn of worms wading over black- 12: Salona Necropolis, Solin, Croatia, 2017. and his loudness, and his voice exercis- top. Good as poison. They wallow in this water es (“I-love-you-TRU-u-u-ly”), and his that tastes of decay and is day by day drowning midnight sessions with his girlfriend, the houses that lie low to the earth. The river 15 top: Daniel, Andover, 1979. and his freedom with other people’s things, away from where I lived. I was feeds and swells till it isn’t just the river, it’s my home, and even under our scathing sun 15 bottom: Daniel, 12.31.1986, beginning to learn that much about Andover, 1986. myself. So I wasn’t altogether dismayed I can’t parse the difference between drowning when Cliff told me after three months and redeemed. Rising, inch by inch, the only line that the landlord wanted to give the that matters anymore is where there’s water 16: White Sands, New Mexico, 2000. top floor to a family member, and the to recede and leave behind the rotted, bitter, black two of us needed to leave. “Welcome 17: Helsinki, Finland, 1975. to New York,” he said. I moved out, in of charred remains, like Nana’s ashes turning black, the casual way of the young—that sinking like loose tea leaves into the river. brownstone was the third of five places Maybe it’s been her all along, a gator in the water 18: Piimävuori, Finland, 1996. I lived in when I was twenty-three— free to scratch against our crawlspace, sun- shimmered, spiteful. Swimming under the line, and went elsewhere in the neighbor- 19: Le Petit Eiffel, Daniel, Andover, hood, and then places out of the neigh- cloaked in dark scales, between alive and drowning. 1986. borhood, starting on the road that brought me, seventeen years later, to She always said baptism’s as good as drowning an afternoon pizza party with my in this kind of place. This flood is her black 20: Foster’s Island, For Bravo, 2020. daughter and her teammates and their swan song. She smears our inheritance with a hard line parents and the coach. of rot across her living room walls for the river 21: 9.9.99, Foster’s Pond, 1999. to rise to. She came to me in a dream, her son least loved, but I didn’t heed her warning that water S WE sat and stood eating pizza, 22: Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, 1977. A the coach talked about the people is the wage of sin. That in bearing life, water who volunteered as referees for the is worshipped, matriarch of the drowning 25: Masking the Unknown, Polaroid 20 x American Youth Soccer Organization. masses. This is our purgatory beneath the sun’s 24, Boston, Massachusetts, 1987. “It’s one thing if your kid is on the slow burn, shining over the ever-rising black team, and you’re a coach for that rea- lapping against our ankles. Our river can’t be escaped. I know which side of this line 28: Halfway Up Mt. Mitchell, Burnsville, son,” he said. “But being a referee— North Carolina, 2013. that’s just pure altruism.” So, this man’s being a coach was an we were destined for even as the waterline extension of what he saw as his respon- crests. Everything I know is drowning in this river 31: Väisälänsaari, Finland, 1998. sibility as a parent. Being deeply and the sun can’t dry this sort of black. uncharismatic, he was better at some Back Cover: Nude Descending a parts of this job than others. But who Staircase, Rockport, Maine, 2005. fills all roles equally well? And I thought of something I had —Madison Rahner witnessed earlier in the soccer season. For information about the artist, The team’s win/loss record was not please see the note on page 4. impressive, but during a break near the end of one game, the coach gath- ered the girls and told them, “It’s looking like we’re going to win this game. So it’s important for us to be

SPRING 2021 7 books amorous, intelligent, and worldly man Meredith smoked, and he liked who liked to eat well, enjoyed Greek Tennyson’s poetry. He was also a fin- poetry, and composed his own verses. icky eater with a nervous stomach. A But though he seemed unafraid of friend of the Peacock family dubbed Belated Recognition intelligent women, he married a pro- him “The Dyspeptic.” vincial Welshwoman, Jane Gryffydh, Mary Ellen, a gourmet cook, catered who seemed not to share his interests. to George’s unhappy digestion, retain- Brenda Wineapple Such were the paradoxes of Victorian ing for a time her sense of humor while culture. she prepared his special diet. Johnson Within six years of the Peacock mar- wonders, though, if perhaps Mary The True History of the First Mrs. to be misinformed or even willfully riage, Jane Peacock would go mad, in Ellen was alluding to domestic difficul- Meredith and Other Lesser Lives benighted.” (While the Biographer may the parlance of the day, or at least ties when she reviewed a recently pub- by Diane Johnson. have been imprisoned in a set of become debilitated by the strangling lished cookbook. “Many are the blue NYRB Classics, 2020, Victorian attitudes, Johnson observes, depression that followed the death of devils which a vulgar rich dinner has $17.95 paper. these notions also seem to plague mod- her second child. Her firstborn, Mary raised, and scattered on evil missions ern biographers.) Ellen, was doted on by her father, and amongst the children of men,” Mary When turning to her desired bio- at Mary Ellen’s birth no one minded Ellen wrote, “many a childish disobe- NITIALLY PUBLISHED in 1972 graphical approach, Diane Johnson that she wasn’t a boy. Quite the dience is concocted in a soda-cake; and and nominated for a National Book sides with Virginia Woolf, who felt reverse, it seems; her father kept her many a lover’s quarrel lies in ambush I Award in 1973, Diane Johnson’s that life consists in personality as much supplied with French novels and clever at the bottom of a tureen of soup, The True History of the First Mrs. as actions, words, or derring-do, and house guests. One such visitor was where it jostles with matrimonial Meredith and Other Lesser Lives is a that biography would enlarge its scope, Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, dashing squabbles, morbid creeds, and poetic gem: tart, canny, and unaccountably or, more to the point, deepen it, by son of the ferocious “Fighting Nicolls” misprisions.” out of print for many years, but as fresh hanging lanterns in odd corners to suss of the Royal Marines. Mary Ellen mar- Mary Ellen was also pregnant “more and wry and vital today as when it first out cant or pretension. “The biogra- ried Nicolls in early 1844, but just two or less continuously,” as Johnson notes, appeared. pher,” Johnson notes, “must be a histo- months later the lieutenant drowned speculating that the multiple pregnan- Partly it’s the story of Mary Ellen rian, but also a novelist and a snoop.” during a storm while trying to rescue a cies may have caused or made worse Peacock Nicolls Meredith, the first the renal disease that would later kill wife of the novelist George Meredith. her. Certainly she was seldom well, Though she was largely ignored in the and there were miscarriages and debts. Victorian biographies of her eminent She and George had a son, Arthur, husband, Mary Ellen had a hold on who flourished, but Mary Ellen kept Meredith’s imagination. (For one falling ill. More and more George was thing, he wrote the sonnet cycle traveling. Marriage to The Dyspeptic Modern Love, about the protracted was falling apart. end of a marriage—presumably theirs.) Now enter Henry Wallis, another But he pretended she didn’t exist, or lesser life. The son of a prosperous didn’t speak of her except now and architect, and a “pre-Raphaelite broth- then to say she was insane. His admir- er in the second degree,” as Johnson ers followed suit, relegating her to a remarks, he was a minor celebrity single page or to a footnote. After all, when he and Mary Ellen began their she’d committed the unpardonable sin: affair. His recent painting The Death she’d run off with a painter, leaving of Chatterton had been shown in the behind a chap “clearly destined to be Royal Academy Exhibition of 1856 great,” as Johnson wryly notes. “How and praised by John Ruskin. (Today could anyone leave a man like that?” the painting hangs in the Tate.) In later Indeed—but Mary Ellen Meredith life Wallis was also known as an could and did. Worse, she didn’t even authority on Far Eastern ceramics and have the good sense to throw herself in all-round decent fellow, but he too was the Thames, the only respectable relegated to a footnote, if that. Leslie recourse for such a woman. At least Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and a she was considerate enough to die friend of George Meredith, excluded young. Wallis from his Dictionary of National All that remained of the first Mrs. Biography, as if to make sure he stayed Meredith, except for some deriding lesser or, preferably, nonexistent. remarks, were a lock of hair, a pink The model for that painted Chatter- parasol, a green satin dress, and a few ton happened to have been George essays: not the stuff of biography, to be Meredith, which likely made Mary sure, and certainly not enough for the Ellen’s affair with Wallis even more conscientious Victorian biographer, galling. But Thomas Peacock seems to should he have been inclined to care. have been unruffled by his daughter’s As a result, one of the pure pleasures of behavior, and when Mary Ellen and Johnson’s book is its firm but gentle Henry Wallis had a child, whom they sendup of the genre. called Felix, he seemed nonplussed. We might suppose that beneath all Her purpose, then, is aesthetic (hence one-armed sailor. His young, pregnant George was not quite so sanguine. He that bustle, the Victorians were really the novelist) and ethical (hence the wife was catapulted into widowhood. grabbed Arthur and refused to give like us. But they weren’t, Johnson empathetic imagination that the novel- Unlike the Queen, Mary Nicolls him back. remarks in one of her many pungent ist deploys). Every life has intrinsic would not dress in black for the rest of By then Mary Ellen was desperately asides: “People’s psyches conformed, as value, and therefore biography is right- her life. She stayed active, and by 1848 ill, and when she died in 1861, Arthur much as their manners did, to the ly concerned, or should be, with the was involved with a literary magazine, was eight. The next year, Johnson tells peculiar notions they had created.” lives of the obscure—the “lesser life,” the Monthly Observer, which she and us, when the boy was nine, George The same might be said of Victorian which, as Johnson mordantly observes, several friends were editing. Among Meredith packed him off to boarding biography. Winking at the reader, “does not feel lesser to the person who them was a callow George Meredith, school and soon to Germany. As Johnson invokes the specter of the leads one.” seven years her junior. Handsome and Arthur grew older, he would have little Biographer, a “good man,” but a prim Enter Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls already desperate for fame, Meredith to do with George, who surmised that traditionalist who buttresses a very Meredith, the forgotten woman who fell hopelessly in love, though in later his son did not like him much. (And conservative genre. He’s constitutional- flouted convention and embarrassed years he hinted that he’d been some- apparently he didn’t, Johnson drily tells ly unable to imagine that grief is any- her great husband. Born in 1821, she how “ensnared.” That’s hard to be- us.) Mary Ellen’s daughter Edith, the thing but exemplary; that Schaden- was raised to be independent-minded lieve, since Meredith proposed mar- child of her first marriage to Edward freude feels good, as does anger; or and fearless by her father, Thomas riage to Mary Ellen six times before Nicolls, was very kind to her half-broth- that real people, even historical ones, Love Peacock, who has himself become she relented. Her father wasn’t pleased. er Arthur when he became stricken with have bodies and actually embrace. “I something of a lesser life. A friend of It seems young George wasn’t likeable tuberculosis, and she took care of him am sometimes severe upon the Biog- Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, or willing to bend in any way, particu- during the last months of his life. Edith rapher,” Johnson tells us, “for he is the Peacock was both a satiric novelist and larly when it came to making money. had lived with her grandfather Thomas purveyor of received attitudes and an official in the East India Company; (Peacock had to rescue the couple and Peacock until his death and had then accepted traditions that often turn out by all accounts he was an amiable, put them up in his home.) Plus, begun to write his biography. Another

8 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW “lesser” life, she later became principal of the National Training School of Cookery, having learned quite a bit THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS from her mother and grandfather, and she remained head of the school until she was seventy-five. She married, pub- Named in honor of lished notable cookbooks, earned a Anthony Trollope’s witty and gold medal from the Royal Society of engaging Victorian novel, the Arts, and was made a Member of this select group consists of the British Empire; she was something people who have of a chip off her mother’s block, but The Great Poet Basho generously donated luckier. at least $1,000 per year to Felix was only three when his moth- Begins His Journey The Threepenny Review. er died. But his father, Henry Wallis, was devoted to him and raised him in full view of his acquaintances, even though Felix was “illegitimate.” He THE GOLDEN BOWL took Felix on his travels and was care- After lengthy preparations ful about his education, keeping him in the great poet Basho begins his journey. Named after Henry James’s England rather than dispatching him The very first day he happens great novel about the to the Continent. Felix became a busi- to walk past a sobbing child nessman, married, and had children. abandoned by his parents. complicated relations between As for George Meredith, he seems to He leaves him there, by the roadside, art and money, have portrayed Mary Ellen as “fretful” because, he says, such is Heaven’s Will. this group consists of people in novels like The Ordeal of Richard who have kindly donated Feverel, while accusing her, in his self- He walks on, northwards, toward the snow at least $500 per year to exonerating Modern Love, of “faith- and things unseen, unknown. The Threepenny Review. lessness of heart.” Presumably, though, Slowly the imperfect cities’ sounds grow still, he was more just in his proto-feminist only streams hold forth chaotically novel Diana of the Crossways, written while white clouds play at nothingness. more than twenty-five years after their He hears an oriole’s song, delicate, marriage ended. Though Meredith was uncertain, like a prayer, like weeping. nominated for a Nobel Prize several times, he never won, and remarkably few people read him now, despite his THE SILVER BELLS acknowledged virtues as a novelist. Henry Wallis would outlive Mer- —Adam Zagajewski Named for Papageno’s edith by seven years. After he died, (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh) peace-inducing musical museums began to squabble over his instrument in Mozart’s opera collection of rare pots and vases, some The Magic Flute, this group of which he had already donated to the honors those benevolent donors Victoria and Albert. In “Brief Lives,” who have given us between the appendix to her book, Johnson $100 and $499 per year. wittily identifies Wallis as “the vil- lain—or hero—of this work.” As for Mary Ellen Meredith, Johnson describes her as unfortunate but coura- FRIENDS OF THE geous. To my mind, Mary Ellen has actually been quite lucky in a critical THREEPENNY REVIEW way: the brilliant Diane Johnson has freed her.@ Named after our own publication, this group celebrates all our dedicated supporters and subscribers who have donated up to $99 per year, over and above their subscription costs.

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SPRING 2021 9 books whole, the part admits of most every work. To Horace, she was mascula, interpretation. The larger the number of “manly, vigorous,” though whether such possibilities, the stronger the urge that referred to the vigor of her expres- to throw up one’s hands and dispense sion or the fact of her expressing love The Tenth Muse with any exegesis whatever. Where for women is anyone’s guess. By the poems have been whittled to koans, as Middle Ages nearly all of her work was here, Sappho is only nominally poietes, lost, and the world was free to make Henry Walters “the maker.” Time, in the role of her a symbol for un-Christian vice— unscrupulous translator, has written the namely, frankness of eroticism—or, Sappho we imagine we know. later, for the virtue of the same name. Whoever gets the credit, the collabo- Conscientious scholars like Dimitrios The Poetry of Sappho, lyre called the barbitos or, as she called ration continues to be successful. Yatromanolakis, recounting some of translated by Jim Powell. it, barmos. As to where she sang, for Sappho is read widely, and not only by these (mis-)appropriations, are forced Oxford University Press, 2019, whom, and whether these songs were specialists with axes to grind. Over a to refer to her as “‘Sappho’” or $15.95 paper. accompanied by the burble of wine or dozen English translations remain in “[Sappho],” as though the very sylla- barefoot dancers or respectful silence, print, differentiated by titles ranging bles have become too volatile to handle we are free to speculate. Oddly, far from the romance shelf (Stung with without gloves. HE ABBREVIATION lac., in more deductions can be made about Love—Poochigian) to the unwittingly In acting as medium, the translator the laconic shorthand of a tex- the earlier Greek epic tradition that instructive (You Burn Me—Edmonds) renders not only the words of the poet T tual scholar, indicates a lacuna, culminated in Homer, himself more to the oxymoronic (Complete Poems but the odd phantasm she has become. or a hole in the received text. Like myth than man, than about the world and Fragments—Lombardo). Many As the latest Penguin edition attests, death’s heads, or stone lions flanking a that gave rise to Sappho. And so, collections have been revamped and re- the temptation to gussy up a fragment locked door, the letters are posted instead of a white chalk outline where issued to include “new poems” uncov- into a rhymed couplet or to sort them before and behind nearly all of the her life and work should be, the field of ered by scholars in 2004 and 2014. into thematic categories is too strong to shredded poetic corpus that bears the “Sappho studies” looks like a crime One of these is Jim Powell’s The Poetry resist; lacunae indicated by the three name of Sappho. Precious little sur- scene crisscrossed by the footprints of of Sappho, whose notes give as capable dots of an ellipsis suggest not so much vives: bits of papyrus, shards of scholars, poets, translators, papyrolo- and thorough an introduction to poet, a textual mutilation but rather a narco- inscribed pottery, a few quotations in gists, Hellenophiles, feminists and poems, and critical reception as might leptic Sappho continually nodding off. later authors. All told, about 650 lines Even her most thoughtful translators— of Greek have been, in one way or Mary Barnard, Guy Davenport, Stan- another, tied to her over the centuries, ley Lombardo—have aimed to make though the vast majority resemble poet- something whole out of what is patent- ry the way chimp typewritings general- ly not. The poet and scholar Anne ly do Hamlet. One poem, a hymn to Carson, whose bizarre idiolect makes Aphrodite, is complete; the remaining Sappho “sound like herself” in quite a lines can be grouped into a couple hun- different sense, goes furthest in offer- dred fragments. ing a non-classicist a window onto the If her work leaves much to the imagi- translator’s predicament. In her ver- nation, what we know of the poet her- sion, which transcribes the Greek on a self consists of little else. In the ancient facing page and includes even the world Sappho was famous; her poems shortest fragments (191 consists of the were widely disseminated by word of single word “celery”), reading becomes mouth, written down, and eventually something like archaeology: a few let- compiled in collections (none of which ters here, a syllable there, now a survive). Yet facts about Sappho’s life stranded phrase, finally a few lines in fall somewhere between the hypotheti- succession, but cut short, mid-breath. cal and the wishful, usually reflecting “Sappho,” we start to think, is simply the preoccupations of the wishers: a messy collaboration between a Greek what she looked like; whether she was poet and her own posthumous history. married; the names of her mother and As in the prints of Piranesi, both the father; her politics; her much-discussed bones of the temple and its ruination sexual preferences; how many poems have staying power. And anyway, she wrote. One third-century BC there’s no choosing: we’re cursed and inscription records that she and her blessed with double vision. family were exiled to Sicily for a period In Powell’s version, we meet the of time, but for what reason, we have poems as a body of work, with typo- no idea. She was born around 630 BC graphical fleurons easing the movement on the island of Lesbos, then a bustling from one to the next as if they were a center of trade, near what is now series of anthologized quotations. To his Turkey. Its people spoke Aeolic Greek, credit, though, Powell does not flinch a dialect that dropped aitches like an from rendering broken, damaged text. ancient Cockney and was ridiculed as Where the sense of a passage becomes “barbarous” by one of Plato’s charac- impossible, he supplies brackets, and the ters, two hundred years later. But other gaps make themselves felt in the read- than a few inferences drawn from ing. A lacuna, like a sudden gulp, has its archaeology and later histories, we own strong music: have little basis on which to recon- struct even a general cultural context. misogynists, LGBTQ advocates and be wished. In fact, his scholarly reason- ] don’t you remember [ Her disfigured poems, and those of their naysayers, and, when “new frag- ableness takes for granted that these we, too, did these things in our youth [ Alcaeus, her fellow islander, are the ments” turned up in 2014, by the are known quantities; hence his modest only primary texts on which to build. whole mad stampede of the blogo- proposal is “not…to make Sappho over Whatever the “things” Sappho wishes Even the question of what poetic sphere. as our contemporary, but rather to her addressee to call to mind here, they landscape Sappho might have inhabit- One might well wonder whether our allow her to sound like herself.” could not be more poignant to us, at ed remains blurry. For centuries after interest is no more than the allure of all More easily said than done. What, this distance, than the black hole of the her death, Greeks and Romans recited the unsolved mystery. Like frayed spi- one asks, did Sappho sound like? More bracket suggesting where that memory her poems as after-dinner entertain- derwebs with no trace of their spinner, importantly, to whom? To her contem- once lived. Sappho’s poems seem ment at symposia, helping build her her poems give us so much to ponder porary Alcaeus, she was “violet-haired, always to take place on both sides of reputation as “the tenth Muse” (Plato because so much is missing, even the holy, soft-smiling Sappho”: hardly this border, the event horizon between again) but also as a sort of proto- doorframe in which she spun them. helpful. To a Greek of the Hellenistic irretrievable past and some invitation chanteuse, a woman of shady character Confronted by a snippet such as period, she was already antique, an into her immediate presence, whether making art of our own proscribed established part of the lyric canon, her calling on a goddess, a beloved, herself, desires. This was invention, but we are and gold chickpeas were growing on the name a byword for the female poet par her lyre, or, as in the fragment above, right to understand her genre of “lyric” banks excellence and a trope for vase paint- an unexplained “we,” as if she felt an as first of all a musical one; depictions ers. To Catullus, her Roman imitator, easy familiarity even toward us, her of Sappho (vases, coinage, statuary) you, reader, are utterly free to read by she was a model of the unvarnished readers, light-years away. The combi- regularly show her carrying a type of your own lights. Without reference to a directness that he sought in his own nation of the two perspectives is also

10 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW what makes the fragmentation so ourselves, who will undergo the same Perhaps a fragment, by its very willing to go to bring him back? Do we ghostly; over and over, accident seems rendering, soon or late. nature, makes unreasonable demands dare sacrifice the illusion that we, the to enact the very separation Sappho is Once pulled into such a state of of us. Some of the last lines Keats living, know more about the dead than describing and lamenting: heightened suggestion, we may be for- wrote, in 1819, appear upside-down on the dead know of us? Do we dare given for hearing in the fragments a a draft of a poem called “The Cap and insert ourselves back into the poem? Like a hyacinth in the mountains that men kind of commentary on our own read- Bells,” itself unfinished: What an anachronism. The danse shepherding ing, as though Sappho herself had fore- macabre is an illusion. We know full tread underfoot, and on the ground its knowledge of what would happen to This living hand, now warm and capable well, or else we should: we are not the purple flower [ her songs and was laughing, ever so Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold, ones being addressed. And yet the frag- gently, at our efforts to patch them And in the icy silence of the tomb, ment insists on the illusion: “you” The way these poems are damaged together: So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming means—[gulp]—us. may be arbitrary, but the effects are nights What this fragment and Sappho’s That thou would wish thine own heart dry often chillingly beautiful, as though As a sweet apple reddens fragments so often reveal is the of blood damage had a consciousness of its on a high branch strength of such illusion and our appe- own. (This is especially true, ironically, That in my veins red life might stream again tite for it. Lyric poetry has always in translation, which tends to sharpen at the tip of the topmost bough: invited our participation. Its pronouns the text’s ragged edges.) Often, uncan- The apple-pickers missed it. And thou be conscience-calm’d—see, here it is, stretch to accommodate us. When nily often, it excises with a censor’s I hold it towards you. Sappho suffers, we suffer; when she precision the personal details we long No, they didn’t miss it: They couldn’t reach it. longs for a nameless you, we feel her for. What is left, skeletally bare, is a The lines don’t belong to “The Cap longing. Dispassionate reading is bad single poetic gesture that might have She seems to be looking at us, seeing and Bells.” They don’t seem to belong reading and has always been. In the been written by anyone, anywhere: anywhere. Helen Vendler and other sixteenth century, a scholar named us. Another fragment reads simply, “I critics have suggested, despite the Isaac Casaubon emended the received Lithe girl, in the old days think that someone will remember us I strayed from you, and now again [ in another time.” Who is us? Most cadaverous setting, that “you” should text of Fragment 147, changing the probably, Sappho meant “me and my be understood as Fanny Brawne, to past tense of mnasasthai (“remem- To read the fragments as fragments is lover,” and yet we cannot quite banish whom Keats became engaged around bered”) to the future mnasesthai (“will to discover how much depends the hope that we, her living readers, this time. (“Love? His affections do not remember”). What had been a banali- (unloading Williams’ wheelbarrow) on might be included there. At the very that way tend.”) Other scholars give ty, a scrap of something else (“I think the archetypal impulses of the genres least, aren’t we the someone, remem- good reasons to think the lines were someone had us in mind”), became a in which Sappho worked and helped bering? Historically speaking, this is intended for another, hypothetical, poetic gesture that stood alone, with- establish: the ode’s impulse to praise, fanciful; there is little to suggest that “lost” poem or even that we should out reference to particular persons, the hymn’s to pray, the elegy’s to bind any of the Greek lyric poets were imagine them spoken by a character in places, times (“I think someone will with a love charm, the curse’s to blight, hatching so Whitmanian an instinct to the play Keats was working on, the for- remember us”). Is it Sappho’s? No. But the priamel’s to individuate. The force speak to the distant future, or even gettable Otho the Great. But such rea- that we emend, translate, engage in of these genres does not require a per- that Sappho would have recognized sons fail to prevent the shivers we feel, such revisionism is no embarrassment; sonal portrait of their maker any more such a thing as a lyric poet’s task. She reading the last line. Might this not be it is the poetic instinct alive and well in than Shakespeare’s sonnets require a sang; she played the lyre; she celebrated the actual poet speaking to us from us. Our poets are inseparable from the name for their “Dark Lady.” If in read- marriages; she named the ones she beyond his grave? History itself tempts history that maims and scatters their ing Sappho we are confronted time and loved. Her own wide world was, by all us: Keats had a hunch he was going to work. We might even say that very his- again by the haphazard erasure of the estimates, wide enough. Are we to call die. He holds his hand toward us, and tory is what keeps those poets perenni- personal, the pity that wells in us is not all poems prophetic that have under- we do wish it were living. He suggests al. And as we are part of history our- for the poet’s particular oblivion or for gone a mangling at the hands of time we have troubled consciences, and we selves, it is our wayward reading, too, the poetry the world has lost, but for and lived to tell the tale? begin to feel guilty. How far are we that does the scattering.@

SPRING 2021 11 books years later, to locate the first clue. good drama—especially when that Lowell recognized in the 1970s that blurring is caused by the reverberations readers had a sordid desire to read dirt of racial tension. about poets. Letters help us satisfy our The racist dialect throughout The curiosity about the minds of poets, per- Dream Songs has been a frequent focus The Private Life haps especially “confessional” poets, of contemporary black poets. Kevin whose private lives were as much the Young has edited a selection of stuff of their poems as the other way Berryman’s poems and written critical- around. We know what came of the ly about Berryman’s diction. Tyehimba Chelsie Malyszek poets’ lives, but we do not know how Jess gives us an antidote to Berryman’s those lives came to be. Letters, or at blackface minstrelsy in his collection least the letters that have lately been Olio, for which Jess won the Pulitzer The Selected Letters of Despite Berryman’s wishes, it would published, show us the destruction in Prize in 2017, as Berryman did for 77 John Berryman, seem, we now have The Selected slow motion. Dream Songs in 1965. Claudia Rankine edited by Philip Coleman and Letters of John Berryman, edited by If The Selected Letters of John repurposes Dream Song 53 in Citizen: Calista McRae. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae. Berryman presents far less drama than An American Lyric. If any part of Harvard University Press, 2020, In the past two years, numerous the Lowell or Eliot letters, it may be Berryman’s career was a call—for help, $39.95 cloth. caches of poets’ letters have been dug because the most titillating episodes for attention, for a new poetic move- out from archives to be cleanly pack- appear already in Berryman’s poetry. ment—these poets give him a long aged as published collections. Sylvia In The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman overdue response. HAV E A slight bone to pick,” Plath’s final letters poignantly crawled drifts through the surreal, nebulous The Selected Letters can finally clar- John Berryman griped in a to their inevitable end point. The terrain of biographical events and ify which parts of Henry are indeed “I1942 letter to James Laughlin Dolphin Letters felt redemptive by mental collapse, a slow unraveling that Berryman. But that clarity can be of New Directions Press. A letter of contrast: over forty years after Robert is performed for us at a remove. achieved only as a result of the meticu- Berryman’s to Laughlin had been dis- Lowell converted private letters from Berryman speaks indirectly through lous and demanding work of sharp edi- played at Harvard’s Widener Library, his wife Elizabeth Hardwick into the an interlocutor named Henry, who tors. Anyone brave enough to take on and the ensuing cost of “two hours’ material of poetry, both sides of the from the very first Dream Song is editing a selection of letters faces a rage” was too much for Berryman to exchange could finally and fairly be “pried / open for all the world to see.” heap of difficulties that shift as the expend a second time. “If a possibility judged. The recently unsealed letters However, Henry’s openness obscures book comes together. There is, fore- exists that anything of the sort will from T. S. Eliot to his lover Emily Hale the facts and fictions of Berryman’s most, the ethical dilemma of whether happen at any time in the future, I quickly exposed Eliot’s infidelity to his own life. Berryman explained Henry to publish letters at all. Many times would like the letters destroyed or wife Vivienne, but more so his cruelty away as “nothing but a series of con- over in The Selected Letters, Berryman returned to me. Sorry, but I feel very to Hale. Prolonging the suspense, ceptions—my conceptions.” Henry’s asks his correspondents to destroy his strongly about this,” Berryman insist- researchers in the Eliot/Hale archives unnamed friend is the more troubling letters: “don’t pass any of this letter ed. Not surprisingly, a letter outlining narrated their finds, letter-by-letter, as presence. He speaks in the vernacular out, of course,” he asks Lowell, of all his will, written to his second wife, the drama unfolded. of a nineteenth-century minstrel and people, in one instance. The appeal of specifies that “I want all my journals & Reading the letters of long-dead refers to Henry as “Mr. Bones.” The Berryman’s letters is heightened by the diaries & all such notes destroyed at poets is like skipping to the end of a blurring between poet and speaker drama of his desire to conceal them. once unread; also my correspondence.” mystery novel and then doubling back, generates all the constant thrum of a Then, there is the issue of how to

12 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW frame the selection. Coleman and to Eileen Mulligan is disclosed for the annotations in The Selected Letters rather than a strong opinion about McRae note that it is “important to first time in the midst of an angry let- can be just as overdone as Berryman’s what poetry should be or do. stress how many letters have not been ter to the couple’s landlord, in which gloss. When Berryman’s signature Berryman dishes out his best advice included,” such as Berryman’s letters to Berryman berates him for a fridge that appears twice at the end of a letter to when he is barely published, and it is his mother (previously published in We never worked properly. Laughlin, the endnote indicates that worth quoting at length: “The poet Dream of Honour in 1988), lost let- For those familiar with Berryman, “MS [manuscript] and TS [typescript] invents some of his materials, and oth- ters, and omitted letters that contain there is a certain suspense in reading signatures are retained here.” The edi- ers he takes where he finds them,— sensitive material about living persons. these letters and waiting for the tors’ addition (there are others like it) from personal, conversational and lit- Previous assortments of Berryman’s moments we know are coming—the indicates their extreme attention to erary experience; what he gives them is letters have had a more focused lens divorces, the deaths, the affairs, the textual detail as scholars, but this same order, rhythm, significance, and he than just “selected” letters, and the edi- failures, the triumphs. When such scrupulosity leads them to supply infor- does this by means of style and the tors point the reader to a few of these moments surface, there is a sudden mation readily discernible from the let- inscrutable operation of personality.” for more information. Berryman’s rush of relief, as if the Berryman we ter’s content: “I take it you have a These letters rough out the myriad Shakespeare (1999) showcases letters have been expecting has at long last Guggenheim,” Berryman writes to ways Berryman’s inscrutable personali- about the bard, and two Berryman arrived in front of us, delivering bad Delmore Schwartz in a letter from May ty controlled the rhythms of his con- biographies include relevant correspon- news we have perversely been waiting 1940, which is followed by a note versations and, ultimately, the develop- dence. to hear. “In short, I can’t live, and my explaining that Schwartz won a ment of his style. What makes The Selected Letters insurance, the only sure way of paying Guggenheim in April 1940. Anno- But not all the materials of a poet’s enjoyable is its utter capaciousness, its my debts, expires on Thursday,” he tations such as these are perhaps how life should be published. Berryman willingness to select without any evi- tells Mulligan soon after their separa- the collection ended up with a whop- wrote to D. D. Paige, the editor of Ezra dent narrative in mind. That capa- tion in 1953. “So unless something ping 1,270 notes. On the other hand, Pound’s selected letters, “I’m glad ciousness, though, also hides the logic happens I have to kill myself day after only after we have hefted hundreds of Pound’s correspondence is to be done; behind the editors’ process of selection. tomorrow evening or earlier.” (The let- pages from right to left does it become it should make a very useful book. I The introduction explains that the ter ends mid-sentence, and an endnote clear that phrases in German, French, don’t envy you any part of it, the col- “main principle of selection was to tells us that “subsequent pages of this and Italian are not translated anywhere lection, the deciphering, or the annota- shed light on Berryman as writer.” letter are missing.”) Here is a familiar in the book. tion.” He believed that “a complete This principle does not necessarily clar- Berryman: the tortured genius, the A reader hoping simply to crack collection wd be intolerable,—the ify for readers what has been selected, manic-depressive voice of The Dream open The Selected Letters at random problem is to select, and then make as Berryman believed a selection ought Songs. and pluck out Berryman’s juiciest poet- clear for readers what has been select- to do. Instead, the selection was con- Over the course of The Selected ic insights will have to do more work. ed.” The editors of The Selected ducted partly through the negative, as Letters, Berryman reveals a stylistic tic The instances of Berryman’s writing Letters of John Berryman have per- the editors eliminated previously pub- of suppressing many of his major life advice are infrequent relative to the formed valuable, painstaking work, lished and unavailable letters. We are upheavals, literally pushing them down mass of letters in the collection. His and although the result may not have left to grapple with the gaps and ques- into the space below the text body. To advice, when it does arrive, can sound pleased Berryman, it is certainly far tions of a life told from one perspective reveal upsetting information in the like weak sotto voce encouragement from intolerable.@ and unfettered by the demands of com- appended space of the postscript was prehensive biography. something of a Berryman signature. As it has come to be known, The “P.S.” lingers below the material Berryman’s life has the direness and that Berryman wants to present to his dudgeon of a soap opera. He was born correspondent. He can pretend every- in 1914 in Oklahoma to John Allyn thing is fine if he technically leaves it Smith and Martha Little. He was out of the letter. Yet one effect of the named after his father, but retained delay is that these revelations come that name for only twelve years, until across as cliffhangers. The first time John Senior committed suicide behind Berryman signs off in these letters as the family apartment in Florida in “John Berryman,” in 1929, he does so Struggle’s Map 1926. Months later, Berryman’s moth- in a letter to his stepfather which ends er remarried the family landlord, John with a note so devastating it must be Angus McAlpin Berryman. At that sincere: “P.S. I’m a disgrace to your moment, John Allyn Smith, Jr., became name.” When in 1959 he writes that he Even scavenging birds seemed reticent John Berryman. (Predictably, Berry- “is dead all the time” and likely “hav- to circle that dead thing washed ashore man’s letters demonstrate his fondness ing a nervous breakdown,” the expla- in its gray dress of skin and net. for invented names, in particular cute- nation, which might be expected in the Bright red cuts were raw and crossing— sy pet names for his wives and close text body, comes after Berryman’s struggle’s map. If you followed the slow friends.) He was married three times, valediction. “I am divorced. God bless freezing of the eddies in winter’s grasp fathered three children, and won a all married persons & everybody else Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, too,” he slips in. After praising the this told the creature’s death, and a Bollingen Prize. In 1972, he work of Edmund Wilson, he adds as a each crystal building upon itself until committed suicide by jumping off of P.S., “What you wrote abt yr father a body cemented at the edges. If you the Washington Avenue Bridge in moved me v. much; my father killed stumbled upon the carcass, car-large, Minneapolis. himself when I was 12.” The post- you would see it was fresh—not yet Given the dramatic arc of Berry- scripts are like an act break in a soap smelling of destruction but of hot man’s life, it is merciful that his let- opera or the unpredictable volta in a ters frequently focus on the minutiae sonnet. blood tinged in ice. You would know of daily life. James Merrill supposed Some of the narrative is predictable. suffering was long—weeks, maybe months, that if poetry were considered an aria Letters to publishers and editors smol- before this frozen beaching. Netting to be sung by an individual, prose was der with rage about money owed and is a heavy, slow noose. You’d contemplate the recitative—the explication that poems not accepted. But Berryman is closing the eyes that likely don’t, consider moves a story along. In The Selected liable to switch subjects and tone in an Letters, Berryman’s arias are barely instant. “I am not impressed by your lying along the body’s shadowed side, announced, nearly drowned out by the women. All I can say of Miss Perga- hoping for the cold sand to open, to swallow humdrum of quotidian housework and ment is that I hope you got her to bed its own. Who of dignity wants to be carried off errands. “All I did yesterday,” he and it was worth it,” Berryman re- organ by ligament by vessel in the sea’s onslaught details to one of his youthful lovers, sponds in 1940 to Laughlin, who was or in the tiny mouths of the living? “was write out a long letter to Shea editing an anthology of five young and half dozen others, unpack & sort- American poets. This is hardly the ed all my papers of the last 8 months most disturbing comment that appears & back, began working out my fiction in the letters, and the worst moments —Kara Penn course, reckoned my bank account & are best left unquoted. bills.” Notes to fellow poets, including The tamer letters, too, have a tinge Delmore Schwartz, Ezra Pound, and of unpleasantness. For instance, when Robert Lowell, likewise have the famil- Berryman promises a lover that they iar pleasures and rhythms of small can go to Mexico and live “on beans talk. Many letters run this same course & amour (French for love),” his and are “short and practical,” as the romantic sweetness is tempered by the editors note. Even Berryman’s marriage condescending gloss of “amour.” The

SPRING 2021 13 fiction

Valley Oaks Drive

Deborah-Anne Tunney

HORTLY AFTER I moved into this house, more than a decade ago now, I which ended in sports socks and brightly colored running shoes. met the neighbors who lived behind us. Their yard, the same size as mine, S butted up against my yard, and their house, also the same size, had an iden- tical layout. In our neighborhood there were four models that repeated on five T THIS time, I was working in the office with my husband, looking after pay- long, winding streets. Our house on the outskirts of the development faced a A roll and the accounts. The day of the BBQ was a Saturday and I needed to high hill and on the incline, leading to the top of this hill, the crest that separated return to work to complete a report for the auditors who would be at our office us from the Pacific Ocean, were palatial homes that at night we’d see glittering, on Monday, and so I was only able to stay long enough to greet my neighbor and as if they were the stars themselves. Some of these houses had vineyards terraced her husband. He was lanky and gave off an air of befuddlement, with a mous- along the hill, enclosed by fences, and all properties sat on at least an acre of tache that seemed suited to an action figure from the 1970s, and I wondered—as land. I often wonder when I see someone looking as if they were from a different era— When my husband and I moved here the house felt enormous and there were what delusion of style kept him looking this way. rooms we did not even use. This was before so much happened—before the I remember this day in particular because my husband was standing with death of my mother, before the diagnosis of my husband’s illness, the disease another neighbor, a tanned woman who lived a few doors down from us. She that made it impossible for him to work. So much has changed in the past was tall and wore—again, I remember this clearly—a wide patent-leather belt decade, but what I’ve been thinking about lately, what I’ve been holding in my with a huge buckle that stood out against her white dress. Strange that I should mind as I go through the day—caring for my husband, working at a large chain remember this, standing with my neighbor and her husband as my own husband hardware store, making meals, doing the gardening, housework—what I’ve laughed his sharp, bark-like laugh. I barely heard what my neighbors said, as been thinking about are our neighbors, how they were a decade ago, when we some anxiety, or was it merely anger, settled. As I watched him I thought how first met. And how one night I saw them in a private moment when they were comical he looked, when I knew he was trying to be ingratiating, or maybe even unaware I could see them. mysterious. I interrupted him and this woman whose smile never wavered, say- ing we had to leave to get back to the office. “Oh, duty calling,” my husband said, smiling broadly at the woman. There was a small patch of spinach on his HE CALIFORNIA sun in summer spreads over our yards, the streets, the hills front tooth that I did not tell him about. T where I walk each morning, as I’m sure it spreads, honey-smooth, over the poorer neighborhoods that lie close to the commercial core of this small town, where the Mexican field migrants live. It reaches as far as the eye can see, and if HE MASTER suite in my home takes up the entire back area of the house. we decide—as we used to when we had more funds—to travel over the moun- T Above the bed there is a cathedral ceiling with a fan which, when on, moves tain, through the forested pass, to the throbbing ocean, it would be there too, its the air about languidly. I would lie some nights when I couldn’t sleep looking at shards of light touching each wave with a blinding brilliance. These things con- that fan, when I was worried about making the mortgage, or those months after tinue unabated despite what happens to us in our little house. Of course, the getting my husband’s diagnosis—the information that told us why his leg trem- house is only small in comparison, especially to the huge, never-still ocean. It has bled, why he had trouble holding utensils and his hands shook. Those nights high ceilings in the front rooms, two-story windows, a kitchen, breakfast nook, alone, if my husband had fallen asleep downstairs, or beside me but turned away, and family room make up the rest of the first floor, with a master suite and three I’d watch the fan moving in the evening heat, its endless loop. California nights more bedrooms with washrooms on the second. We bought this house before the are seldom humid, even if the day has been, and usually you can trust a breeze to collapse in the market and over the past five years or so we have barely been able rustle the trees, bringing into the room the sound of its sizzle, as well as the per- to hang on to it. fume of the oleander and lilac bushes, the hibiscus and wild roses. One night, when I was reading a novel my sister had left the last time she visit- ed, I put the book aside and glanced toward the large Palladian window that HE NEIGHBORS behind us live there alone, they’re childless, or their children overlooked my yard. It was the first time I noticed that at that time of night I Tare gone, married, far away, for I never see or hear visitors in their yard. The was able to see across my yard to my neighbor’s and into their bedroom. It was fence between our yards is solid and high and I only had the opportunity to that moment of the day when the sky seemed to gleam metallically, to almost speak with the woman who lived there when our dogs started barking at each shimmer, while the darkness was settling in the streets and yards. When I other through the fence. I heard her voice before I saw her. “I’m so sorry,” she looked over, I could see my neighbor’s husband lounging on the bed, watching said. “I can’t seem to make Rodeo calm down here.” television. The door to the washroom opened but his attention stayed on the It had been only a few days since we moved in and I did not want to seem like show he was watching, even though his wife entered the room completely a problem neighbor with an unruly dog (although the unruly dog was certainly naked. Her skin had a rosy glow as if she had just stepped from a hot bath, and true). “Oh no, it’s this crazy creature of mine,” I said. “He thinks he owns the she moved with an unconscious confidence, draping the towel in her hand along neighborhood.” And then I worried this made me sound entitled, as if my dog a high-back chair. She said something to him and he answered without glancing had a right to be a nuisance. “I’ll bring him in,” I said quickly, and she said, toward her. It struck me how beautiful she was—her wet hair pulled back, the “Oh, thank you. I’m sure they’ll learn to behave.” plumpness of her torso, high breasts with deep rose-colored areolae, the curve of “I’ll just be happy if they learn to shut up,” I said and then thought I sounded her waist, triangle of hair at the top of her legs, and when she turned to go back harsh. “I mean Cracker here. He should shut up.” And I heard her laugh in to the washroom, the round full buttocks with two high dimples above. She was response. a vision, radiating warmth, something fundamental as life, or maybe even love. She went back into the washroom and when I glanced a few minutes later, the curtains had been drawn. Her image stayed with me, how this vision was in HE FIRST year we lived here, a community group organized a neighborhood contrast to the woman I had met with her running shoes and tight t-shirt and T BBQ, and it was here that I was able to meet my neighbor in person. These ruddy complexion. BBQs were to end when the economic situation worsened, when more and more houses stood abandoned, or people were publicly evicted. I witnessed this trauma twice on my block and gained three cats from those neighbors, who begged us to S I went about my routine the next day, the image of my neighbors during take in their animals. A that calm, unmediated moment returned, how she stood in front of her hus- On the day of my first neighborhood BBQ, ten years ago, I was introduced to band, saying something before turning away, something I imagine as inconse- the woman who lived behind us, the owner of Rodeo, a poodle, the dog who quential, I’m going for lunch tomorrow, or Is the news on yet? My husband continued to bark at Cracker. The woman was shorter than I am, which makes asked me why I was so quiet as we drove to our office in the city. I didn’t tell him her short, with sturdy white legs that I could see below her shorts. Her blonde because I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I thought he’d hear naked woman and hair was curly and loose to her shoulders, and she, true to my over-the-fence not understand what it was I saw that had touched me. impression of her, was quick to laugh. She wore a T-shirt and was what some At the office that day I had lunch with the receptionist, Karen. My husband people would refer to as “chunky,” as if she were put together in chunks—hefty and I owned the business and most of the people there avoided me because of shoulders, a block of chest, midriff, wide generous hips, and those lumpy legs, this, but Karen was young and her democratic sense meant she spoke with

14 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW everyone. I wonder what has happened to her. My husband and I were to lose this business within a year, and Karen was never to speak to me after we were unable to make payroll and she was out a month’s wages. But on this day, the day after I had witnessed our neighbor, she and I sat on the patio of a restaurant close to our office in the industrial park where our business was located. She was speaking about a man she’d met the weekend before and did not notice my attention slipping from her, until she said, “He’s Canadian. Like you.” “Really,” I said. “Good guy, then.” “You think?” “I’m joking, Karen. There are some pretty awful Canadians, you know.” “I guess. But you always speak so well of Canada.” “My family, of course, my family is wonderful.” This reminded me my sister was to visit soon, the first visit since the death of our mother the winter before. I had gone home then and stayed with her the last week of our mother’s life. The night before the death, my sister and I stayed at our mother’s nursing home. Her body under the thin flannel sheet was small, withered, and the skin parched. “She’s used every bit of her body,” my sister said as we placed new warmed blankets on her legs. “Every part.” It snowed heavily that night and we could see it accumulating in the courtyard outside her window. Karen mentioning Canada brought this view back to me, and it struck me then, not for the first time, the capriciousness of memory, how it drills down and settles on an image or a sentence said in haste, and how there doesn’t seem to be any hierarchy to what the mind remembers and brings forth. “This reminds me, my sister is com- ing in a few weeks,” I said, but Karen wanted to speak of the man she met and the conversation soon returned to him and her hopes for the future.

Y SISTER lives in Ottawa, where I grew up. She is more than a decade M younger than me, and when I was a teenager I was often tasked with look- ing after her, especially during the years our father was ill and our mother was forced to work. This was before my marriage, before my first husband, the father of my two children, before the move to California after he landed a job there as a map maker. Our divorce shattered so much. I look back at it, at how liberating and damaging it was, equally. It was the moment I first truly sensed that every- thing would pass someday, the moment that told me I could not continue living as I had, that the dullness our lives had settled into was to be fought instead of endured. Once My ex died shortly after my mother, more than ten years ago, and their deaths seemed to end permanently that version of me—before the move here, before this second marriage. That was the one time I ever sleepwalked. I’ve spoken to my sister about this and she said, “But I’m here. I remember When you wake up, you’re a little boy you then.” My sister is a writer, has written from the time she was young. And halfway down some hall of a huge hotel so when she visited me that time, a few weeks after my lunch with Karen, the with far too many rooms, endless many. first visit since our mother’s death, I said to her, “Here’s something you could You’re only half dressed, half weeping write about.” And told her about the neighbor. I told her how the woman already. When someone finds you this way seemed so relaxed entering the room, and her husband not looking at her. “I how will you ever explain. What will you do mean there was nothing sexual about it, nothing like that. But there was some- when no one finds you. Your family sleeps soundly thing, I don’t know, something so intimate and full of trust.” in no room whose number you know, so you say My sister said, “You could write it. I mean you’ve been able to make me see it, to yourself, it is this one, pounding the door feel how important it was. You should write it, just the way you said it.” till the rhythm of the act makes you certain We were sitting on the deck in the back yard, having a glass of white wine. this man wincing through the careful opening Rhine wine. Because she said she has a hard time finding it in Canada. We had must be your father. The exhausted stranger spent the day at Santa Cruz, walked the boardwalk and beach, ate at an outdoor looks almost afraid. Security takes pity. seafood restaurant, watched the sea lions, heard their heavy bark and talked Security is a clerk who knows every mystery about our mother. “No, no,” I lifted the wine glass and before taking a sip said, and so asks nothing, only leading you back “I’m not a writer.” in the odd hour, hour of numberless things My husband came to the back door, slid it open, and spoke through the that might be forgotten, a hand on your shoulder. screen. “Dinner any time soon?” he said, and I answered, “After this glass,” holding it up to him. He shut the door and I said to my sister, “He’s mad, always gets mad when I have people here that I love more than him. Which —Tomas Unger these days is just about everyone.” We laughed. The sun, so bright during the day, was dimming, illuminating the pots along the fence, full of pansies, daisies, and roses. The orange tree branches hung over the table where we sat, and the birdbath and fountain gur- gled. We fell silent until I said, “You should do it, write that scene, don’t let it slip away.” And she looked away from me, toward the neighbor’s yard. “She lives there?” “Yes, our bedroom windows are level,” I said. “But you can only see clearly at a certain time of night.” “Well,” she took another sip of wine, “I’ll keep it with me. I’ll keep it and maybe someday I will know what to do with it.”

FTER DINNER—broiled salmon, salad, corn, and buns—when the night A began to rest darkly upon the neighborhood, my sister and I went for a walk on the hillside pathway. It was a long walk, and as we passed some of the large estates their lights came on, like sudden fireflies. We spoke of our mother, of the last night of her life, we spoke of our memories of her and we laughed at times, became silent at others, and made it almost to the top of the steep hill before turning back. When we reached Valley Oaks, our street, it was late and dark. There was a mingling of scents, garlic from the nearby farms, citrus from the lemon and orange trees in the back yards, and the warm perfume of the oleander bushes that grew wild along the street. I think back on that night, how two cats came down the wide lane to greet us, how we could hear the sound of my hus- band’s cheer as he watched a football game and we entered the house to its rau- cous sound. I think back, and wonder why we were not happier.

SPRING 2021 15 miscellany never bought the deer rifle charged to that go where they want to go, the kind your statement, nor a narrative on a of shoe no one in his right mind— resume that details your work histo- except a novelist—would ever think to ry—it’s not till then that you realize wear more than once. how useless the dry and mannerly con- When Dostoevsky began work on Doing It Over cept of revising is, and that you’re The Idiot, he conceived of its main going to have to replace it with its far character, Prince Myshkin, as the worse mannered, grubbier cousin: re- embodiment of everything over- Ross Feld writing. Which is something that’s not refined, over-rationalistic, everything pretty—as Hemingway somewhere, at cynical, manipulative, and cruelly evil some point, must have said. in the world of that day. We happen to The reason that the far funkier pro- know this because Dostoevsky says it HERE ARE cosmic jokes, as we bulks the fiction catalogue of every cess of rewriting isn’t pretty is mostly right there in the amazing notebooks all know; and the one I’m prob- library—one of the reasons why most because it is, at its deepest core, for the he kept for each separate novel’s prog- T ably most familiar with on a of that is of so little account is because writer, an exercise in spiritual humilia- ress. By the time the book was done, daily basis is the one whose punchline the obvious chasm between meaning tion. Absolutely necessary—but no less though, Myshkin had become not the goes: “I don’t write...I rewrite.” As cos- and saying instills a bout of paralysis in hard to take. The writer’s ego finds anti-Christ but instead its opposite, the mic jokes go, this is hardly the most ter- the writer. To paraphrase the poet Jack itself not on Parnassian heights but on Idiot: the saintliest, most open-spirited, rifying; but, as I say, it’s the one I’m Spicer: I wanted to write a paragraph the ground floor: If I’m so wonderful, simplest example of pure grace to most familiar with, and like all such about the war in Vietnam and ended how come I didn’t say this well, say inhabit a human body. How did this jokes its aim is to chasten. up writing about skating in Vermont. this nicely, right off the bat? And then ever happen? Everyone who’s ever written any- Now what do I do? in the basement: I don’t exactly seem It happened because Dostoevsky thing at all knows all about this hum- You revise. After all, that’s what you to know what the point is of all this, didn’t revise. He first read his own bling joke, of not writing but rewriting —with the exceptions perhaps of teen- age poets and professional philoso- phers. Whether it’s to be a love letter or a term paper on Thomas Paine or a few blistering remarks to be delivered before the neighborhood livability sub- committee, or whether it’s Anna Kar- enina—the semi-comic truth is that whatever is first put down on paper shouldn’t be seen as much more than simply a way to get the ink accustomed to coming off the pen. That’s it. Even to call it a framework or a scaffolding is probably to say too much. Better to think of it as the beginning of a dazzling process of subversion. You knew—or you thought you knew—what you were going to say. After all, you knew what you thought, right? But the moment you commit it to the piece of paper on the desk or in the typewriter, or to the floppy disk (and if there’s ever been a more appro- priately metaphorical term for a recep- tacle for human thinking cast into lan- guage, I don’t know it)—the moment you first try to write it down—all that certainty steals away. Doubt—doubt that you ever really knew what you were thinking about—sets in. But that’s only if you write occasionally. If you write more than just occasional- ly—for instance, every day, in order, God help you, to pay the rent; if you write because there honestly is no other decent thing in the world you know how to do—then doubt doesn’t set in. “Set in” in that case is too mild. Think instead of those booths at fairs, those dunking booths. There’s not a writer who can see one of those without wincing. That feeling of sitting up there, just waiting to go down. The fun then starts, the joke part I spoke of. You had no idea what you were taught to do in high school by do I? And finally, subbasement, every- book—what was there and what wanted to say, it turns out—Hell must your English teachers: revise. Today body out: Words apparently know wasn’t in each successive version—and be where they paper the walls with we’re going to learn to revise our com- more about me than I do about them. he also let his book read him. Tell him your first drafts. You definitely did say positions. The word basically means to One particular subcategory of all what it thought. The other characters, something—it’s right there in front of see again, and is in the same family as chastened, slightly foolish-feeling re- it turned out, didn’t need Myshkin to you, unless you want to cover it with a to review—but with some of the juice writers is the novelist—who not only be bad; they needed him to be saintly. magazine or your forearms—but what removed. And what most high school has sentences that whip around like In a sense they staged a revolt against did you say? You’re forced to actually and college teachers really mean by garden hoses, going where they want, what Dostoevsky had originally look. E. M. Forster’s quip—“How am “revise” is a kind of literary dress code: but imagined characters and plots planned to do. I supposed to know what I mean until I straight seams, color-coordination, no doing that as well. The insecurity is, in So he didn’t do it. Instead he turned see what I said?”—is everywhere the ragged hems, every button buttoned; its way, spectacular—until the novelist on a dime. We’re speaking here of an truth. And what you said isn’t neces- the imposition of manners. House- gradually comes to know his or her act of almost sublime artistic acrobat- sarily the same thing that you meant. keeping—straightening up before com- story as a foot does a shoe. You wobble ics and courage. Which in part ex- So then the question becomes, of pany gets there. into it; foot and shoe come to some plains why there are so few Dostoev- course, with which side to throw in But not until you write prose that comfortable compromise, a fit; if it skys. Still, it’s the dirty little secret your lot? What you meant or what you isn’t strictly utilitarian—not a paper looks good and feels right, you’re half- common to all novelists: that you never in fact said? One of the reasons most that’s due next Wednesday, nor a letter way home. But only halfway. Novels, had the faintest idea of what was going writing—the stuff that overwhelmingly to Mastercard explaining that you complicatingly, also happen to be shoes to happen until you got about mid-

16 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW way...and it then happened. Day after going back to books they wish they day of going in there and rapping away could beat, wish they could be better for hours without more than a glimmer than—and which paradoxically are the of wistful confidence that things may ones that provide the most hope, the really resolve: it’s nerve-wracking, and ones that break, as Kafka said, “the can make a writer quite impatient. frozen sea within us.” Asking for Light When novelists become impatient, they They also re-read, however, because either seem to turn excessively stylish they’ve got some insider’s information: or they begin dropping moral hints they know that all literature is itself I make my students write sestinas that are about as subtle as horseshoes. basically a re-reading. to prove they are more than machines. But underlying this hysterical skill and/ Fiction, for example, reads and re- Do not go gently into that blue light, or didacticissm is basically a layer of reads life. In a novel or story, we are I joke. We are reading the unknown, embarrassment—at not having got it encountering a middle slice of a height- future characters who want to be bodiless, right the first time. At, in other words, ened reality different from ours yet free from our stone-age flesh. They don’t despair being human. Art is both forgiving and somehow recognizable, as if it already unforgiving of its creators’ fallibility. had been buried in us. To take an arbi- over pronouns, prefer their avatars to despair But I have a feeling that the pliancy of trary model, let’s say a very lousy book in pixel-hearted dreams. They never write sestinas. the relationship between the ideal and set in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. You I used to think the goal was to see through the body— the reality—what you meant to say and pick it up and then very shortly put it like a telescope, or submarine eye, or prism machine what finally came out—is exactly down. Why? Because nowhere did it distorting a thousand rays into an unknown where the art of fiction is found. The ring true; it seemed too “unbelievable.” palm asking for light. old and really beautiful maxim, Life is But how was it unbelievable? What what happens to you while you’re busy do you know about the Pharaohs? I tell my students to use the word luminous making other plans, is one a novelist Honestly, nothing—or only things seven different times. Mean laughter, I say. Mean despair. should understand. Slipping in the from other speculative sources that C says he is going to use the word bullet, a known words A novel for Life. may themselves be incredible, who topic appropriate for poetry. The class nods, their own sestinas knows. Yet you do know, somehow; suddenly dimmer, less worthy, a cog in the teacher’s machine. you do know about what’s credible, on Maybe they feel used, like discarded bodies KNOW THIS all sounds like the writ- either the banks of the Nile or the I er’s side of the matter only. But is banks of the Ohio. Somehow, especial- in our online utopia. The poem is the body, there something that rewriting, the fair- ly when the book is not lousy and I say. The words are the soul. I feel erudite, light ly ghastly process, can reveal about re- instead is great, you know a whole raft cascading from my mouth, so not a machine. reading—or the other way around? of things you never knew you knew. I wave my expo marker around. The heart is despair! People, as no one but a librarian is in a You find yourself able to respond as I near-shout. The poem is love! Most of their sestinas better position to know, mostly read a fluently to the days of a Russian prison are about broken legs and puppies. Don’t forget the unknown book one time only. They perhaps camp inmate as you can to the rude reserve the right to re-read, but it isn’t shock of a young man waking up to I whisper to B. She looks at me oddly, unknown. exercised too much. (Although libraries find he’s been turned into a cockroach Another girl is writing about her lover’s body, are in some way designed to be there in during the night, or to the nuptial and I am horrified by the word—lover—in a sestina the isolated event such a right is acted anguish of a Jane Austen maiden as by a fourteen-year-old. I fear how she will incorporate luminous upon.) Yet it does happen sometimes of fully as to the sexual frustrations of the and am concerned perhaps it is I who dwell in despair. course: pride will spur a vexed reader wife of a French bourgeois named Still, not a machine! on to try again and get into something Bovary. that the first time locked him out—or My guess—my writer’s guess—is At least she is writing about sex and not machines. vice versa. Or there’s a book that you that the reason fiction can let us do This reassures me, hedges the unknown weren’t ready for. It’s my suspicion that, these amazing acts of sympathy and so I can continue on with the usual despair like a not completely pleasant secret, identification is because it instinctively of teaching teenagers. At least she still wants a body. every veteran reader privately carries a calls up in us our inherent taste for There is hope in that, and the bullet, and the light book he or she guiltily knows they complication. And no other art does shining through each child’s truly horrible sestina. failed and not vice versa. Failed this so well—since only this one is pro- through inattention, laziness, or simply duced by humans for humans and If I am a gentle machine? I give each sestina meeting it at the wrong time. When I expressly must be in some way about an A for effort. Let the bullet’s despair illuminate was thirteen, I read everything I could humans. Fiction satisfies our lust for the unknown lover. Let the poem glow inside every body. find by John O’Hara. What could I muddle that our daily lives repress. have understood of John O’Hara’s at And so fiction turns out to be any- thirteen? What possibly? thing but a means of escape. Actually, —Jennifer Garfield But my suspicion is that the reason it’s a recapture. Into mischievous mess- the general reading public doesn’t re- es, into the capacity we all have to read is simply because they’re never screw things up. asked to. Children crave hearing the It’s no wonder, then, that writers, same stories over and over; the same- who give form to these screw-ups by ness brings with it security. And no one screwing up themselves, know this best complains at having to listen to of all. And that they therefore are able Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony more to read with a kind of humility and than once—Oh, that thing again?— shame and readiness for re-experience nor at seeing a reproduction of the and re-focus that’s not at all a bad Sistine Chapel. Art may be the one thing in this very disposable world. place where familiarity doesn’t breed Libraries have a shelf with a sign that contempt. reads something like: Books You May So why can’t a book be read again? Have Missed. “Missed” here presum- Why can’t favorite books be for adults ably means never read when first what they are for children: things to be issued; but as you’ve guessed by now, responded to as though a kind of I’m sort of suggesting an even longer music? Is it because we already know shelf. It doesn’t have to be in the actu- how a novel or a story turns out? al, physical library. It’s probably better Unlikely; adults stay up through off, more potent, in the mind of the Casablanca at two in the morning, librarian—that there are books we knowing exactly who is and who isn’t have missed and maybe always will, getting on that plane. We probably and that every now and again they don’t re-read because we’ve forgotten deserve another shot. To come back at how to—and why. a book ten, twenty, thirty, even forty Writers, though, happen to be a years later is always a remarkable group of people who frequently do re- experience, whether disappointing or read. They’re looking for how-to tricks exalting, but it can be something more and hints; and they also have a habit of also: a refresher course in why we read re-reading as a form of self-punishment, at all.@

SPRING 2021 17 pulse, a repetitive, rhyming rhythm... ance. And I love the repetitive sounds and it gets you somewhere; you’re trains make. No matter where I am, I striding through space and time. catch myself pausing with attentive A Symposium on Rhyme and Repetition When I start to think about these happy reverence at the clack-a-clack-a subdivisions and accents of time—of of wheels—city or country, streetcars R—I go nuts. There are so many exam- or boxcars. Best heard in the darker ples, so many tangents, that it is hard hours of the day. Best while pained by a to pick a few to pursue. I’ll skip that day’s fatigue or night-worries. part in favor of the general. Repetition can satisfy our need for Editor’s Note: As is always true in the case of our symposia, these contributions were It’s all about arriving, albeit tempo- steadiness and predictability. It can written simultaneously and independently in response to the assigned topic. Any over- rarily, in consonance, satisfaction, pacify the jagged unhappy soul. It laps, parallels, or violent disagreements are therefore purely serendipitous. completion. R lets us know when to entrances with its sheer clockwork nor- stop: the rhythm, the repetition, the malcy and has a peculiar moral force, rhyme all meet on the terminal beat, a persuasiveness. Its constancy con- TTEMPTING TO define these natural habitat of my work, I see R as the tonic, the end of time and of soles, especially in times of distress, terms, I found myself lost. something like this: the “beat,” or tempo. The punchline, the terminal upset, manic irregularity. Repetition is A Considering how I rhyme and “foot,” is a dot, a point in an arc of cadence of the symphony, the “cherry the mesmeric heartbeat of old-style repeat within my own work, as a chore- time, with time being the duration of a on top,” the orgasm, the “button,” the rock and pop, though its beauty and ographer of dance to music, I realized performance. It takes a minimum of “Tristan chord,” the sunset. R bears slipperiness will give it a maddening that I could not discuss rhyme or repeti- two beats to establish R. There is a us, seduces us willingly through the unforgettability. (Get out of my head!) tion without including rhythm. pattern of R in just about any occur- whole experience, to the end. We made It induces an aggravating wakefulness. Rhyme is a pair of things that agree. rence of any duration: the beat, the it! R creates memory, ritual, satisfac- “Na-na-na-nana-na-na, Hey, Jude.” Repetition is something that happens measure, the phrase, the movement, tion, nostalgia. “Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar-Barbara-Ann.” again. the full “piece,” the evening, day, At the resolution of even the most Repetitions like these, which can Rhythm is the establishment of a week, month, year, etc., infinitely large densely complicated figures in sound like entreaties or come-ons, time period. and small in every direction. American square dance, the four cou- charge us up with hope, undetectable All three require a minimum of two I believe that fundamental R is based ples of the quadrille head back to their cellular hope, because they presume an events. I can’t tease them apart, so I on heartbeat, on breath, on bilateral start positions: “Home.” It is a re-set, enthralling ongoingness. On a dance won’t: they are impossible to disentan- symmetry; the body spatchcocked, split an end-rhyme, a conclusion. A task floor, repetitiveness makes us feel hap- gle, as all three are interwoven in use down the middle; pairs of eyes, ears, completed, with style. Home. pily lost. and in description. Therefore let knees, thumbs, ovaries, lungs, feet, —Mark Morris In poetry, repetition is essential to Rhyme + Repetition + Rhythm = R. nostrils, and nipples. Bipedalism freed cadence and pacing, which means it’s I’m thinking of R principally from the arms to swing in coordination with critical to the shape of feeling. In the angle of dance/music, but inclusive the legs, and to clap hands, row a boat, * “During Wind and Rain,” Hardy’s of poetry, cuisine, architecture, visual knit. Songs and chants, and their R, great poem about household and famil- art, sport, and nature. The three com- unite people in actions such as pulling ial change—mortal change—the ponents are each a form of matching— ropes, moving water, herding livestock, LOVE TRAINS with a city boy’s love. haunter-lines that alternate through of tension, suspension, release. In the lulling an infant, plaiting hair, dancing I Train horns are elsewheres, vague four stanzas, reacting to scenes of microcosm of the theater, which is the and singing. Walking is a steady beat, a promises, a route or pattern of deliver- domestic tranquility and dislocation,

18 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW are “Ah, no; the years, the years” and Freud described an eighteen-month-old need you. I’m sending you away restoration in the mind: “Ah, no; the years O!” The repeats (the child’s “great cultural achievement.” In myself.” And there’s the additional sat- lines are used twice each) intensify the what is the first recorded psychoanalyt- isfaction of the child’s revenge: he When I was sick and lay a-bed, mournfulness and doom. ic infant observation, ever, by anyone, throws her away. In repeating the rep- I had two pillows at my head, Poets have their favorite instances in Freud watches his toddler grandson resented experience of abandonment And all my toys beside me lay, Shakespeare, favored because of the playing, with wooden spool and string, and return, he’s like a poet, and like To keep me happy all the day. musicality of the repeat or refrain, or the game of “fort-da.” The little boy, his essayist grandfather, working And sometimes for an hour or so because of how it textures meaning. who has let his mother go without fuss, through his grief—a “great cultural I watched my leaden soldiers go, When Macbeth goes into himself in repeatedly tosses his toy over the side of achievement.” With different uniforms and drills, Act V with “Tomorrow and tomorrow his cot, “fort” (gone), then pulls it But in this game there’s never a Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; and tomorrow,” you hear the tremen- back, “da” (there), thus managing the moment of doubt who controls that dousness of the defeat he feels in his experience of loss by symbolically re- wooden spool. The little boy is the And sometimes sent my ships in fleets destiny-defining aspiration, to have enacting it over and over again. choreographer of loss. This constantly All up and down among the sheets; action trammel up its consequences, to Therapeutic repetition. reasserted authority reminds me of the Or brought my trees and houses out, be dictator of reality, summary lord of The baby also finds words to repeat: talking cure Freud invented. In psycho- And planted cities all about. events. The phrase voices a tragic tedi- “o-o-o-o.” In emphasizing the untiring analysis, too, one stages scenes, repeat- um. Near the end of King Lear, the old repetition of disappearance punctuated edly rehearsing and rehashing experi- I was the giant great and still man pleads with the universe not to by the toddler’s spoken “o-o-o-o” ences in the mind. The patient may feel That sits upon the pillow-hill, take his daughter from him, and his [fort], Freud isolates the centrality of stuck, but the repetitions, he or she And sees before him, dale and plain, speech has a terrified absolutism that The pleasant land of counterpane. Shakespeare achieves by hammering “No, no, no life? / Why should a dog, Deprived by illness of the world a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no beyond his bed, Stevenson’s boy, like breath at all? Thou’lt come no more. / Freud’s toddler, is a choreographer of Never never never never never.” The loss. And like Freud the essayist, or reductive pistoning monosyllabic ques- any other writer, the poet creates a tion is followed by Lear’s desperate scene—the protagonist stuck in bed repetitive “never” answer. In a differ- and in his own head. My head, my ent context it might turn into a non- toys, my soldiers, my ships, my trees sense jingle, instead of a gasp of end- and houses. Five repetitions of authori- stop pain. The line also reverses (with ty and control followed by the last desolate emotional neediness) the stanza’s stillness, and calm: “I was the established pattern of the previous line, giant great and still / That sits upon the the mighty little iamb, mightiest when pillow-hill”—the past of “I was” and timed to completely overcome and the eternal narrative present of the overturn life. The language is itself an seated giant, both strung on the thread agonizing intimacy. Its metric counts of desire. out the end of continuity, of the for- —Ellen Pinsky warding of existence. The pitch of grief, the agony of Lear’s existential reckoning, is measured by the metrical * mechanics. In these punchy blank verse lines, he’s also punching himself for having arrived at the gibbet too late HAT BETTER than rhyme epito- to save Cordelia. Then the turn, the W mizes both the blind luck intrin- recognition, enacted in those five sic to poetry and the humiliation of words whose cadence reverses what using shabby words to communicate? I we’ve just heard. Now those “never” remember the rush of fortune when, in trochees enact finitude and finality. an early poem, searching for an echo In the closing lines of “Those Winter for the word “flecks,” I stumbled on Sundays,” a lyric about the tense, anx- “vortex” and crested onto an image I ious intimacies between father and wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. son, and about necessary repetitive But when rhyme slips into our everyday household chores, Robert Hayden speech, in English at least, it often feels reflects on childhood’s opacity, the embarrassing, undercutting the force of inability to really read the meanings of what we’re trying to say. Sometimes an human actions. The father, on yet unintended rhyme even prompts that another cold morning, is getting a fire wincing joke about being a poet with- started and polishing his son’s shoes. out knowing it, as if the art comes to The son seems to tremble a little recall- mind only when language is at its least ing “the chronic angers of that house.” convincing. At the end, he puts a question to him- language to the individual’s develop- hopes, are headed somewhere. “I am overtired / Of the great har- self that’s also an assertion: “What did ment, and within human culture itself. For Freud, it is a given that reality is vest I myself desired,” Robert Frost I know, what did I know / of love’s aus- Cadence, too, is a form of repetition: unsatisfying, and to transform it by rhymes in “After Apple-Picking,” a tere and lonely offices?” Play it back, rhythmical cooing and rocking create a fantasizing is the nature of being poem about appetite and pattern—that vocalize it, sliding stresses from one minimal, symmetrical other, bringing human. Like a child at play, the adult is to say, about the conditions of art- word to another: emphasize the comfort to the upset baby so he is less builds “castles in the air”; we day- making itself. Poems that employ “what” or the “know” or the “I.” The alone. In playing “gone,” he uses his dream. An event in the present rouses a rhyme foreground the art’s relationship language’s repetitive simplicity enacts imagination to give shape, meaning, desire and “[f]rom there it wanders to repetition, constructing a sonic the morning rituals in his and most and vocal music to the loss. back to the memory of an early experi- game out of the mind’s hunger for cor- other households, and the fraughtness All development happens against the ence…in which the wish was fulfilled,” respondences. But in Frost’s poem, the of such mornings, such regularity. backdrop of loss. In giving up the Eden thus bringing present and past togeth- speaker is haunted by abundance, by Repeated household habits lend time of omnipotence, a surrender that never er. And the daydream adds a future— nature’s excessive answering of his an orderly rhythm but also reinforce ends until the final loss, Freud’s toddler the three moments of time held in one appetite: “I keep hearing from the cel- whatever is unbearable and stifling. endures his pain by making something. imagining. In Freud’s marvelous lar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load Read the lines and they change on The wooden spool, like the mother, is words: “Past, present and future are on load of apples coming in.” There is you—they change the shape of experi- gone and then returns, saying, in threaded, as it were, on the string of a sickly-sweetness in tasting, or “hear- ence, they astonish, they wake you up. effect, “Da! I am here!” But even more the wish that runs through them.” ing” (for Frost puts it in sonic terms), —W. S. Di Piero important, the boy who creates the Repetition can be a source of com- too many similar things. And in a drama is also saying “I am here: I did fort, creating reassuring order: form poem full of recurrent sounds, Frost’s this, I’m the one who made it!” The becomes a companion. Here, in final repetition is telling: the word * boy stages a “joyful return.” Then Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The “sleep” appears four times in the final Freud adds another motive, the turning Land of Counterpane,” is an older six lines, and twice in the last two of passive to active, as with comedy child more elaborately re-arranging his lines. The pursuit of correspondence HUNDRED YEARS ago, in Beyond and delight he speaks the boy’s defi- diminished world, with the outward has given way to dullness, deadness, a A the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund ance, “All right then, go away! I don’t play of rhyme and repetition achieving closing down of possibilities:

SPRING 2021 19 One can see what will trouble divine value and must be preserved. As “Eight Beats to the Bar” in the right Pinetop Smith knew Lewis—they This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Sufi wisdom puts it, “When you first way, the effect can turn from hypnotic practiced together—and a year after Were he not gone, meet [someone else], he may seem to to ecstatic. “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” he The woodchuck could say whether it’s like be very different from you. He is not. Usually boogie-woogies are based on released the 78 LP that named the his He may seem to be very much like a twelve-bar blues. The blues is right- form: “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” This Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, you. He is not.” fully considered one of the most soulful record is one of the key documents in Or just some human sleep. —Nate Klug and humane musics, but many boogies American music, a template for hun- add in the unfeeling repetition of dreds of hit records since, from Tommy What happens when a poem’s tradi- industrial mechanization, namely the Dorsey to Ray Charles. Tragically, tional scheme of echo and variation * steam locomotive. In Meade Lux Smith was killed in a dance hall fight a breaks down altogether, and a poet Lewis’s “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” year later. rhymes the same word with itself? first recorded in 1927, older African “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” features Thomas Hardy’s “Who’s in the Next polyrhythms blend with the bumping exhortations from the pianist explain- Room?” features four intricately OOGIE-WOOGIE IS one of the few and thumping of the rails. Lewis’s left ing what the dancers should and rhymed stanzas of dialogue between genres of music whose name keeps steady sophisticated time while shouldn’t do. It’s party music. The best two voices, drawing to a close on a B rhymes. Rhymes repeat sound, and the right decorates with an elaborate boogie-woogie remains connected to final couplet that undermines the pre- the musical characteristics of boogie- gallery of whistles and bells. Some of that celebratory party feeling, but the vious resonances: pianism is refined into high art. Meade “Who’s in the next room?—who? Lux Lewis and Pinetop Smith made I seemed to see their mark in Chicago alongside two Somebody in the dawning passing through, other legendary practitioners, the out- Unknown to me.” standing virtuoso Albert Ammons and “Nay: you saw nought. He passed the surreal poet Jimmy Yancey. From invisibly.” Kansas City came Pete Johnson, a drummer turned pianist whose direct “Who’s in the next room?—who? approach offers an obvious link to I seem to hear rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Somebody muttering firm in a language even the most repetitive American new music of all, hip-hop. Many other great That chills the ear.” “No: you catch not his tongue who has pianists contributed to posterity during entered there.” those early halcyon years, often bear- ing colorful names: Cow Cow “Who’s in the next room? —who? Davenport, Little Brother Montgomery, I seem to feel Big Maceo Merriweather, Cripple His breath like a clammy draught, as if it Clarence Lofton, Montana Taylor, drew Speckled Red. I have a special fondness From the Polar Wheel.” for the 1939 side of “Little Joe From “No: none who breathes at all does the Chicago” by Mary Lou Williams, who door conceal.” suavely varies both the top and bottom patterns in a notably carefree fashion. “Who’s in the next room?—who? A figure wan Musicians call that kind of initiative With a message to one in there of “mixing it up.” Williams mixes it up, something due? but her performance still has enough Shall I know him anon?” hypnotic danceable repetition to make “Yea he; and he brought such; and you’ll it classic boogie-woogie. know him anon.” —Ethan Iverson

Cutting through Hardy’s prosaic awkwardness, the doubling of “anon” * produces a chill at the poem’s end. Throughout “Who’s in the Next Room?” and especially in each stanza’s OETRY IS an art that performs the rhyming couplet, we have been experi- P magic trick of converting sound, encing repetition as difference—just as provisionally, into sense. It pulls a the next day of our lives diverges from semantic illusion out of the phonetic the previous day, even while resem- hat. The rabbit dangles before our eyes bling it. At the poem’s end, as at the only as long as the poem lasts; when end of a life, Hardy gives us repetition the final words trail away, sound col- as identity. As in “After Apple- lapses back into its intrinsic meaning- Picking,” similarity has succumbed to lessness. Good rhyme, insisting on like- sameness. That the word Hardy choos- ness of sound, produces a frisson, even es to repeat is “anon” heightens both a shock, of simultaneous relation and the banality and the terror of the final incongruity: the sound chimes, the stanza’s turn. The figure in the next sense differs. We feel the gorgeous force room is death, of course, and with that of this hybrid art, mingling sensory second “anon” we realize how closely excitement with intellectual exercise. In he’s been lurking all along. a whole poem, rhyme sets up a struc- Sameness is what Frost’s and Hardy’s ture of memory, anticipation, and reve- patterned correspondences nod to but lation. keep at bay until the end. Often associ- woogie include melodies and rhythms the polyrhythms conjure the sound of a Auden is one of the masters of mod- ated with closure, rhyme in these that constantly replicate. Standard level crossing, and eventually the pia- ern rhyming. His poem “As I Walked poems actually enables suspension, a boogie-woogies generally feature an nist slows down as the train pulls into Out One Evening” plays along with a maintenance of distinctions. Is it going unaccompanied pianist. Both hands of the station. faux-naïf trimeter melody in quatrains too far to extrapolate an ethics from the player repeat short musical ideas, in Lewis’s masterpiece was the end rhyming ABCB, a kind of folk song: these observations about form? We each case looking to generate hypnotic product of several decades of commu- “As I walked out one evening, / want the world to arrange itself into and danceable joy. The left hand stays nity research. After the Civil War, Walking down Bristol Street…” The patterns we can recognize, and recog- in the bottom of the keyboard, romp- African-American musicians in the first rhyme is simple: “street”/“wheat.” nize ourselves within. Rhyme, whether ing through a churning ostinato pat- South were allowed access to pianos. But in the second quatrain, the mis- intended in art or accidental in speech, tern, sometimes called “Eight Beats to They began using that keyboard to placed stress throws off the apparently suggests the pervasiveness of such pat- the Bar.” The right hand offers a bit combine ragtime, blues, church music, simple rhyme of “sing” and “ending,” terns. But in seeking correspondence more variety, but it is still repetitive. European classical music, guitar jan- and so throws the romantic illusion off too insistently, we might fail to see the Short, groovy, and shouting blues gles, popular song, and everything else. balance. “Love has no ending”: we world; we might only see ourselves. phrases can be called “riffs,” and a The primitive turn-of-the-century bars cannot pronounce the line to rhyme Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is the good boogie pianist has a full comple- known as barrelhouses frequently had properly with “sing.” In this case, the otherness, the “irreducible alterity,” of ment of them at the ready for their pianos: if you could play for dancing, effects of rhythm and scansion distort every human being that contains right hand. When “riffs” cycle over you could drink for free. the rhyme.

20 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW The poem unfolds in a savvy ticiple modifying “unknown.” It has before we are able to anticipate what is the great champion of pushing things sequence of chimes and dissonances, to be all of these: in his mysterious to come. to their limits: in one quirky song, Ein delivering in stanza seven one of my deliverance, the speaker is both maker Think for a moment of the opening Selbstgespräch—“A Monologue”—he favorite rhymes in twentieth-century and instrument of the transformative of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: one of sets the word ich fifty times.) English: act of unknowing. “Unknown” simi- the most recognizable statements in all This involvement of the listener—the larly hovers. It could be the past parti- classical music—da, da, da, DAA; da, demand that the listener has work to In the burrows of the Nightmare ciple as noun, the object of the da, da, DAA—fortissimo, unison. The do—seems to me to be a fundamental- Where Justice naked is, “made,” modified by “this”: “I made repeated rhythm alone would identify ly important part of the experience of Time watches from the shadow this unknown.” But it could also work the piece for most listeners. The second music. The expectations set up by And coughs when you would kiss. as an adjective, modifying the speaker: four-note group also rhymes with the rhyme and repetition encourage an “I, unknown, made this.” The speaker first, although they are not identical; active participation; we can guess what The clash of “is” and “kiss,” with the has given himself up to a discovery, the second group is a step lower and might be coming next even in music we sinister hiss of “Justice” echoing has relinquished control, is no longer where the interval between the third da are hearing for the first time. And behind them, perverts the ideal cou- the sole agent. The rhyme, from and the DAA in the first group is a remember that before the invention of pling of sound the pattern has led us to “unknown” to “my own,” in the space major third, it is a minor third in the audio recording, people were always expect. In vain does the poem revert to of four syllables, makes the redemptive second. What Beethoven gives us, encountering music for the first time. simple rhymes like “Jack”/“back” and leap. instantly and irrevocably, is the means Johann Sebastian Bach performed the “distress”/“bless.” The damage has Eliot has made Seneca and Shake- by which to make sense of an entire St. John Passion just four times in his been done. Innocence is lost; romantic speare his own, as he has repossessed span of music. The opening gestures life, each time in a different version, love cannot be made whole. reaching an audience of perhaps two T. S. Eliot’s “Marina” rhymes much thousand people in total. If you weren’t more irregularly and complexly. It in Leipzig for one of those performanc- doesn’t even present itself as a rhyming es, you would not have had another poem, so its few instances of rhyme, chance to hear it in your lifetime. and one stanza built on exactly repeat- Perhaps that is why Bach chose to ed words, stand out in high relief. This play so radically with his audiences’ intensely moving lyric, written in 1930 expectations: to make sure they were at a time of Eliot’s estrangement from paying attention. The whole of the his wife Vivienne and his recent con- John Passion is full of subversion and version to the Anglican Church, recalls irony, but the greatest example comes an early landscape of joy, the Atlantic in the final soprano aria, Zerfliesse, shore of Cape Ann in Gloucester, mein Herze (“Melt, my heart”). It Massachusetts, where the poet spent seems that we are in a standard da his boyhood summers. It’s a poem of capo aria—the conventional form, regeneration set in a frame of destruc- ABA, for arias in opera and oratorio in tion, and its themes of images return- Bach and Handel’s time. Rhyme and ing and a rediscovered daughter are repetition are in place: sounded out in the rare rhymes, which restore sounds we might have lost. Zerfließe, mein Herze, in Fluten der Marina, we know, is the lost daugh- Zähren ter in Shakespeare’s Pericles, miracu- Dem Höchsten zu Ehren lously restored to her grieving father. But this fable of return is shadowed by Erzähle der Welt und dem Himmel die the epigraph from Seneca’s Hercules Not: Furens, where the hero wakens from Dein Jesu ist tot! madness to find that he’s murdered his wife and children. Eliot sets himself the Melt, my heart, in floods of tears In honor of the highest task of rescuing Pericles from Hercules, one father’s story from another’s, and Tell the world and the heavens the anguish: rescuing the lost daughter. He does it Your Jesus is dead! through his own memory of a blessed place: “And the scent of pine and the We get an instrumental introduction wood thrush singing through the fog / with solo flute playing the melody that What images return.” An Atlantic, not the soprano will take over; we then a Mediterranean scene. hear the sung A section of the text with In the second stanza, the clangorous internal repeats, and this is completed repeated words—“meaning,” “mean- by a play-out from the instruments. ing,” “meaning,” “meaning” and The B section takes place conventional- “Death,” “Death,” “Death,” “Death” ly in the relative major key, again with —petrify in spiritual stasis. But that internal repeats, and we start on the da stanza pours in a fluid enjambment to capo with the original instrumental the opening of the heart in stanza three, introduction, only this time the sopra- where rhyme, unlike literal repetition, no interrupts as if to say, “No, you allows change: “grace”/“place”/ “face.” don’t understand! Your Jesus is This triplet leads to another: “hurrying dead!”—interjecting the last line of the feet,” “all the waters meet,” “paint B section to shout out the shocking cracked with heat.” And these in turn enormity of what has happened to the give way to the mysterious drama of crucified man. Only then can the da consciousness reintegrating through childhood’s lost freedom of heart and form the material of the first subject of capo resume, returning us to the the integration of sound and sense, the chance for unselfish love. And it the movement’s sonata form and (changed) world with a new under- past and present, as we hear memory shows, yet again, that poetry is an art remain present in the bass even during standing of the necessity of those tears. becoming conscious and restorative: that works through the senses even as the unfolding of the more lyrical sec- In an age of instantly accessible it touches the mind, unifying con- ond subject. Beethoven plays with this music, when we can listen to the John I made this, I have forgotten sciousness and restoring us as whole material throughout the movement— Passion while doing the washing up And remember. sentient beings. he changes the pitches and the inter- and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony whilst The rigging weak and the canvas rotten driving to the shops, it is all too easy to Between one June and another September. —Rosanna Warren vals, he turns it upside down and elides Made this unknowing, half conscious, it—but because we remember its take these pieces for granted and not unknown, my own. source, we can orient ourselves; we notice what is being said. But the great- * become present because our memory est music demands attention. Its “Unknowing” hovers between a allows us to look forward and to imag- rewards come from a listening that is present participle and a gerund, ine the completion of the gesture from not merely passive but alert and imagi- between verb and noun, performing its HE ART of listening is governed by its start. Memory also enables us to be native, that gives as well as takes. own kind of rich syntactic unknowing. T Mnemosyne, the goddess of mem- surprised and delighted by the delayed As Bart Simpson once said about It could be the object of the verb ory and mother of the Muses. Rhyme gratification when, instead of three another art form: “C’mon people! This “made.” It could be a participle modi- and repetition are tools of memory, and das, Beethoven gives us nineteen (!) poetry isn’t gonna appreciate itself!” fying the speaker. Or it could be a par- by bearing in mind what has gone before reaching DAA. (Beethoven is —Mark Padmore

SPRING 2021 21 music rounded Paul Hindemith’s Der Schwan- big part of the draw. endreher, his concerto for viola and And he did not disappoint. This time small orchestra, with complementary he was conducting, not the fabled pieces by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Berlin Phil itself, but a smaller, younger (the twelve-minute Symphony in D group called the Chamber Orchestra of major) and Béla Bartók (the always Europe. I’d heard them before, con- Back at the Berlin Philharmonic welcome Divertimento for String ducted and accompanied by András Orchestra). The Hindemith was a reve- Schiff, so I knew they were good, but I lation, especially as performed by didn’t know how good until I saw Wendy Lesser Zimmerman, who allowed the other them under Rattle’s baton. He has a members of the orchestra, and particu- way of taking a familiar old chestnut— larly the harpist, to shine along with in this case, Beethoven’s violin concer- her. And Roth proved a distinctly able to—and introducing subtle variations N MARCH of 2020, Berlin, like Komische Oper—which put on a tre- if not terribly exciting leader of the of volume and pacing so as to make it the rest of the world, shut down its mendous live Bassarids last year that somewhat reduced Berlin Philhar- seem a newly minted piece. In this case I live performances. Gradually, as required us to sit in our seats for two monic that was spread across the stage. the chestnut happened to be a very late summer blended into fall, indoor and a half hours without pause—cra- The two other programs were heavy delicious one, and Rattle was assisted concerts began to reappear in a few venly inserted an intermission in its on Haydn and Beethoven, who both in his reconfiguration by an astonish- selected places, and by the time I got to video-heavy Magic Flute this fall, turn out to be great mood-lifters dur- ing young Norwegian soloist, Vilde the city at the beginning of October, I increasing the chance that we could ing a pandemic: Haydn because he is Frang. This slender, swaying, almost had my choice of a number of classical infect each other while going to and fro relentlessly cheerful, even in the face of dancing violinist appeared to be about music venues. In the course of less than in the crowded, narrow hallways. bad news; Beethoven because of his sixteen, at least from my seat (though a month—that is, before the second Only at the Berlin Philharmonic, willingness to confront his own interi- when I looked her up later, she turned wave of coronavirus arrived and locked with its ninety-minute intermissionless or agony, which outdoes and in some out to be thirty-four). But she had the everything down again at the beginning performances, did I feel a hundred per- way counters any external dire events. kind of ageless genius that makes the of November—I was able to attend cent safe and comfortable. I was grate- In the concert conducted by Marc musician seem a perfect channel for the eleven performances in five different ful for every element of precaution: the Minkowski (another visiting French- music, a living embodiment of its vital locations. cordoned-off rows behind and in front man), we were treated to Haydn’s force. As I watched Frang play and lis- At first, I was like a hungry person of me, the three or four empty seats on Symphony No. 59, which I don’t recall tened to her violin’s swelling commu- set down at a banquet table, stuffing either side, the masked ushers escorting ever hearing live before, followed by an nion with the orchestra, I had the sense myself past the level of comfort. I each and every patron individually to even greater rarity, Beethoven’s ballet that I was truly hearing live music once attended a performance on the very again. Nor did the distinctly humorous night I arrived, something that expec- Haydn symphony that followed—No. tations of jet-lag generally prevent me 90 in C major, with its series of false from doing; and although I was endings leading up to a final firm con- thrilled to be hearing live music for the clusion—subtract one iota from the first time in eight months, I found overall experience. If the Beethoven myself barely able to focus on anything had offered an intense emotional high but the germ-laden aerosols I imagined point, the Haydn was a pure joy, Jörg Widmann was blowing out at us effortless and thrilling. through his clarinet. Three nights later, As the concert ended and I made my I packed in two concerts in a row—a way out, down scarcely peopled stairs, 5:00 P.M. symphonic performance at through the unoccupied restroom, then the Berlin Philharmonic, followed, past the uncrowded cloakrooms to the after a brief subway ride, by a 7:30 nearly empty lobby, I had a sense of my quartet concert at the Pierre Boulez own privilege that was so overwhelm- Saal—and again, my eyes proved big- ing as to be viscerally guilt-inducing. ger than my stomach. I’m not sure I This is what royalty must feel like, I would have enjoyed the Belcea Quartet thought. I had sat through the concert under any circumstances (I have heard in splendid comfort, with no nearby them before, and they are always a bit patrons to annoy me with their coughs too harsh and unmodulated for my or page-turnings, no tall heads in front taste), but coming immediately after of me to obstruct my view, and now I Simon Rattle’s splendid interpretations was exiting the building—a building of Beethoven and Haydn, they just that had always before, in my experi- seemed unnecessary. ence, been filled with crowds—as if it I was also distracted, during that were my own space alone. first week or two, by observing the dif- Many things about the pandemic fering approaches the various venues have made me aware of my privileged took to our safety and security. At the existence. It is impossible to live Konzerthaus—a vast, beautiful old pre-reserved places, even the contact- music for The Creatures of Promethe- through something like this and not auditorium—the ceiling was high tracing paperwork we had to fill out us. Both works were beautifully per- feel the unfairness in life and death, the enough and the surrounding seats before the concert and drop off in a formed by the Philharmonic musicians, way some people end up shielded, empty enough that I felt comfortable box afterward. On my first night there, and both had their high points (quite a through no merit of their own, and taking off my mask during the perfor- when I came to the wrong door and number of them, actually, in the sixty- others take the brunt of the punish- mances, as we were allowed to do. At had to be led around to the sole minute Beethoven piece), but I never ment. But until I attended that Simon the Pierre Boulez Saal, the relative mobile-ticketing entrance, the masked quite got that feeling of transcendent Rattle concert at Berlin’s Philharmonie, crowdedness of the chamber-music young man who escorted me confided lift-off that arises from the most I didn’t fully connect that sense of priv- venue was countered by the high quali- as we walked, “We have to be really enthralling concerts. ilege to the role of art in my life. ty of the masks that were handed out cautious, because even a single infec- Perhaps I had been spoiled by my This belated realization does not free at the door and were required tion will close us down.” Add to this first experience back at the Berlin make me inclined to renounce art. I throughout the concert. (A Berlin that I also heard the best music of my Philharmonic, that late-afternoon couldn’t manage to do it even if I want- friend, when I showed him my Boulez Berlin month in this acoustically per- Simon Rattle concert which took place ed to, and in any case I am not a per- Saal mask afterward, told me they fect hall, and you will see why I regret- on the fourth day of my Berlin stay. By son prone to self-sacrifice. It does, retailed for between five and eight ted that a mere three out of my eleven that time, my accommodation to the though, make me more conscious of euros apiece.) My evening listening to a concerts were held at the Philharmonie. city and its habits was already pretty the isolated splendor in which I nor- musically terrific though dramaturgi- And the music itself? It ranged from complete, so I was not distracted by mally dwell, now exacerbated by the cally nonsensical Die Walküre at the pleasurable and fascinating to deliri- mundane irrelevancies like jet-lag and worldwide virus and its effects. I am Deutsche Oper was ruined by the fact ously exhilarating. Admittedly, only mask etiquette. It was also a thrill just used to thinking of live music as a that the management insisted on one of the three concerts—the evening to be back in the beloved building, communal experience, and to a certain retaining the standard two lengthy designed by artist-in-residence Tabea with its warm wood tones, its terraced extent it is that. But this time, at the intermissions, replete with maskless Zimmerman in conjunction with visit- seating in the round, and its perfect Berlin Philharmonic, I was also made dining and drinking; I was so terrified ing conductor François-Xavier Roth— sound quality. I have to admit, too, aware of how separate my existence is of the possible contagion that I spent featured what I would normally call that Simon Rattle—for a long time the from the general lot of humanity. The these dangerous periods huddling adventurous programming. Zimmer- reason I returned to the Philharmonie awareness is discomforting and, per- alone in an empty stairwell. Even the man, herself a brilliant violist, sur- to hear concerts year after year—was a haps for that very reason, valuable.@

22 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW Inspecting the Game

Poled upriver in teakwood dugouts we disembarked and were greeted a second time paraded up a prayer-flag avenue and mounted on five elephants, seated snug in the howdah’s pillowed canework carriage, three to a pachyderm under the canopy plus the mahout with his hooked goad up front in a tasseled beanie, riding astride the neck, Carol and I on the same colossal beast as yesterday. Our magisterial behemoth led the way for the procession tearing off obstructive branches and muscling aside debris that compromised his passage and meanwhile, at intervals, picked and stored between his tusks pale shoots of a favored foliage he ate with relish in our idle moments.

The jungle was not exciting—bedraggled sparse trees, the forest floor burnt over, scorched. Back out along the river again we spotted a pair of sambar—a largish, handsome deer— and crossed to an island, the elephants wading a languid current belly-deep with flotillas of waterbirds escorting.

Soon game abounded. The principal attraction is single-horned rhinoceros, now rare; also hog deer, swamp deer, water buffalo and more sambar. The rhinos are immense lumbering things, massively armored and quite tame. One stopped and mugged for cameras shamelessly. They are complacent creatures. Formerly they were trained to plow. Now old bulls have started tagging along behind the elephants which gives the tourists a poor impression of their ferocity. The charging buffalo is reputed the most dangerous. A holstered double-barrel howdah pistol is strapped behind the mahout ready to hand. Its 20-gauge slug load can stop one short.

The view afforded from our swaying vantage was lordly but unpromising. This country is without resources. The market price of timber will not meet the cost of transport. The farming villages are self-subsistent, imported goods are rare and odd exotics. The Paris Zoo acquired a stockade rhino last year for twenty thousand rupees, and now the price is forty thousand. Such is prosperity.

Two hours was enough of the mosquitoes, the heat, the back flies, the humidity. I detached our elephant from the party taking a guide and rifle to contend with possible tiger. Much of our passage back to the field station guest house was downriver, belly-deep again at times. Once our animal noticed an object on a gravel bar, picked it up in stride and delivered it to his mahout, a lidless film canister.

—Jim Powell

SPRING 2021 23 perspective moments, time enough to make sure could easily epitomize the devoted, mil- that the guard of honor was properly itarized German society of the time. turned out and that all was in order— There’s the old man with peasant fea- either because he was keen on protocol tures and the young men from good or simply loved playing with soldiers. families, the shopkeeper sporting a What is most striking, and most small, imitative moustache and the Ridiculous Men shocking, is that Hitler is in civilian industrialist concealing his bald patch dress reviewing thirty-nine armed with a very precise comb-over; per- guards, complete with helmets and haps, also, the civil servant revealing Javier Marías high boots. He is shorter than the the vehicle’s secrets to Hitler. The shortest soldier, or so it seems, and degree of submissiveness is apparent in that front row could, with just one the fact that no one is looking at movement of their arms, so easily Hitler, but only at what he is looking WAS PROMPTED to write this least not fairly. In that photo, accord- become something very different: a at: they see it purely through his eyes. article by two photos of Hitler I ing to the caption, Hitler is reviewing somewhat overmanned firing squad. The Führer is smiling a smile border- I came across in a copy of 150 Years the guard of honor before receiving the The person reviewing them is not, of ing on the imbecilic, captivated by the of Photo Journalism. We have become new Spanish ambassador at the presi- course, a condemned man, but some- sight of the engine being shown to so accustomed to images of Hitler that dential palace. He’s not wearing a mili- one who himself tirelessly handed out him—what a beauty. However, despite we barely notice them any more; he has tary or even a paramilitary uniform, death sentences, and while he may not the innocuous nature of the scene, that become an icon of evil so well-known but the formal garb of a diplomat; he is be in uniform, his haughty demeanor mouth drawn back in a smile and and so often reproduced—so ubiqui- dressed and ready for the occasion. It shows that he is in command. His gaze those pale cheekbones send a shudder tous—that we tend to gloss over such appears that the Spanish ambassador is so stern as to be ridiculous, so over- through me, for I can sense the irasci- images, to ignore them, to dismiss them has not yet arrived. Since it’s unlikely the-top that it could be that of an ble man beneath that proud exterior; briskly with a meaning and a name: ah, that anyone would have dared keep the impostor playing the part of an inspec- indeed, those cheekbones look as if yes, Hitler. His face has become some- Führer waiting, one cannot imagine tor of the guard. There is even some- they had a life of their own. thing phony about his arms: his right It’s easy to be wise so long after the arm by his side, in a simulacrum of event, but it’s still hard not to wonder militarism, his left arm bent as if he how it was possible for entire nations were carrying an invisible whip. But —not just one—to trust such an indi- look at his feet—good grief, those feet vidual and idolize him. Perhaps it was placed awkwardly one in front of the precisely because his clownish, risible other really let him down and trans- appearance made them think that in form the whole image into a scene out his hands power would be less power- of a vaudeville show or an opera buffa; ful than in other, more imposing it’s the kind of step a staggering hands. Nothing is more dangerous drunkard might make, and one finds than disdain. We are disarmed by oneself picturing the next step (the those we laugh at and who fill us with step not captured by the photographer) something akin to pitying derision, as he brings that laggardly right leg those to whom we feel so superior that forward. If this were a still from a we see no point in stopping them in movie, we would replace Hitler with their tracks or stooping so low as to Chaplin or Jerry Lewis or Peter Sellers, confront them, just as, in ancient or some self-absorbed, inebriated times, noblemen would not deign—or clown taking advantage of a case of were not allowed—to fight a duel with mistaken identity or usurpation or a someone not of the same class, hierar- concession to his evident madness; a chy, or rank. But as we all know, such nobody, a fool. It’s hardly surprising noble men have long since been erased that the Army despised him, because from the face of the earth by the ridic- he seems so inoffensive. ulous.@ The second photo shows him at the how all too déjà vu, so familiar that we our compatriot (who would have been launch of the Volkswagen in 1938, find it neither strange nor shocking: a Republican) arriving late, and so one gazing enraptured at a model car. (Translated from the Spanish by what you might call a normalized presumes that Hitler had a few spare Around him are nine other men, who Margaret Jull Costa) anomaly. There are hundreds of images in which Hitler appears in the most his- trionic and grotesque of poses, a lunatic caught in mid-harangue, disguised as a soldier or, rather, disguised as himself. We confuse him with all the parodies and caricatures, especially Chaplin’s version of him in The Great Dictator, and because of this he has become, in a way, a deactivated icon, divested of all his real horror, as is also the case with the more hackneyed versions of the Devil, complete with horns and hooves, trident and tail. Nowadays almost no one fears or takes seriously such a fig- ure, not even when depicted by those who did once believe in his existence, a belief that now arouses feelings of either pity or laughter. This is precisely what struck me about those two photos, because they made me stop and see Hitler almost as if I didn’t know who he was, as if he were someone to whose face I had not yet grown accustomed, as if I were looking at that first photo through the eyes of someone seeing it in 1935, long before the Second World War, long before our own Civil War, when Hitler had come to power just two years before, following a democratic elec- tion—a political process he then ensured would not happen again, at

24 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW theater The Voice of the Turtle and Bell, Book that Van Druten’s inspiration was A and Candle. Two are period dramas Midsummer Night’s Dream—he even and künstlerromans, specifically narra- references it—and the magic allows tives that trace the development of him to build a layer of high comedy John Van Druten young writers: I Remember Mama and around the insulated community of I Am a Camera. One, Old Acquain- witches and warlocks to which Gillian and the Remnants of a Lost Era tance, is a high comedy that focuses on belongs. In both Shakespeare’s play the complicated lifelong friendship of and Van Druten’s, the magic under- two middle-aged writers. scores the theme—for Shakespeare, Steve Vineberg The Voice of the Turtle, from 1943, that love turns us into idiots in a farce; is the story of the unexpected romance for Van Druten, that love is its own between a young actress, Sally Middle- sort of enchantment. But Shakespeare ton, and a sergeant on leave, Bill Page, separates the magic out from the struc- HE PLAYWRIGHT John Van has the cash to take her out on the who get thrown together one evening tural romantic-comedy convention of Druten has long since been for- town. God knows the conflict is time- in Manhattan. What almost keeps an obstacle that the lovers have to over- T gotten, but he had a phenome- worn, but the characters are sharply them apart is their shared cynicism come (it’s Hermia’s father, in this case), nally successful career. He wrote drawn and the dialogue has a natural, about love; each is still suffering from a whereas in Bell, Book and Candle the twenty-eight plays, sixteen of them in fluent quality that makes it seem fresh broken heart. The Voice of the Turtle magic provides the obstacle. Witches London in the Twenties and Thirties nearly a century after it was written. is the only one of this quintet of plays aren’t supposed to fall in love; if they and the others for Broadway in the When you read the lines, you can hear that isn’t of much interest; one guesses do, they lose their powers. Gillian seiz- Forties and Fifties. (He died in 1957, at them in your head. that its three-season Broadway run was es on Shep out of a desire for a superfi- the age of fifty-six.) Five of his dozen American plays from Van Druten’s due to a combination of factors—the cial romantic fling. Under her spell, of American plays were made into major era, even very fine ones, have tended to wartime mood, the frankness about course, he can’t tell the difference motion pictures. For many years now, between that and real love: he just American theater has imposed an invis- knows that after spending a few hours ible boundary between popular enter- with her, he no longer has any interest tainment and serious drama, but in Van in marrying Merle. But undoing the Druten’s heyday, when a theater season spell doesn’t restore Shep’s world to its was packed with new offerings, that previous shape, because he finds he line was blurry, and Van Druten, who doesn’t feel the same about Merle as he was both a skillful technician and a used to. That second kind of enchant- highly literate writer, could work both ment has come over him, though he’s sides of it. The plays that made his rep- so furious at Gillian for what she’s utation were box-office successes, but done that at first he doesn’t realize it. critics valued him too: he won the New Only when she experiences love for York Drama Critics’ Circle prize in him—and thus loses her powers—can 1952 (for I Am a Camera), and John their happy ending come about. The Gassner included four of them in his plot is an ingenious rethinking of the Best American Plays anthologies. In convention. the tradition of George S. Kaufman, You could hardly hope for a better Van Druten often directed the New production of Bell, Book and Candle York productions of his plays. He than Richard Quine’s 1958 movie, wrote or co-wrote eight movies, too, with James Stewart as Shep and Kim and the three I’ve seen are all notable: Novak, gowned by Jean Louis, as Night Must Fall (1937), based on Gillian. (The film came out the same Emlyn Williams’s thriller, with Robert year as Vertigo, which paired the same Montgomery as a psychopath; Lucky two actors; they’re such an inspired Partners (1940), a romantic comedy match in both pictures that it’s a pity with Ginger Rogers and Ronald they never got to work together a third Colman, derived from a film by the time.) The lush cinematography is by French writer-director Sacha Guitry; James Wong Howe, and he and Quine and, most famously, George Cukor’s wittily employ the artificiality of the Gaslight (1944), with Ingrid Bergman soundstage to point up the supernatu- as the fragile Victorian whose husband ral quality of the plot. Daniel Tara- (Charles Boyer) is trying to drive her dash, the screenwriter, sticks closely to insane. (Bergman deservedly won the the playscript, but he wisely invents on- Academy Award for her performance, screen roles for two off-stage charac- and the screenplay Van Druten co- ters, Merle (played by Janice Rule) and wrote with John Balderston and Walter the sorceress Mrs. de Pass (Hermione Reisch was nominated.) Gingold), whom Shep pays (exorbitant- The only one of his English plays I ly) to un-witch him. The fact that we was able to get hold of was London get to see Merle rather than just hear- Wall, which was first produced in 1931 ing about her also has the effect of soft- and has been revived both in the West fade into obscurity unless they were sex, and the presence of the disarming, ening Shep’s treatment of her, because End and off Broadway. (The estimable written by a handful of playwrights quicksilver actress Margaret Sullavan we can tell from the outset that she’s Mint Theater in New York, which res- who are universally agreed to be in the part of Sally. The 1947 movie, simply not right for him—not good urrects obscure English and American enduring masters (chiefly Eugene which stars Eleanor Parker and Ronald enough for him, just as the characters texts, mounted it in 2014, the year O’Neill and Tennessee Williams), or Reagan, provides no clue to what the- Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn after its well-reviewed London revival, unless theater companies suddenly atergoers got excited about and it omits are engaged to marry in Holiday and but foolishly I missed it.) It’s a compel- deem them to be of contemporary rele- the sex; Eve Arden, as the woman who The Philadelphia Story, respectively, ling example of a kind of drama no vance. But I think it’s also the case that leaves Bill high and dry, is its only high are not the people we want to see them one writes anymore—an ensemble a playwright without a trademark spot. wind up with. piece driven by its setting, in this case style, who refused to fall back on the Bell, Book and Candle, which Of Van Druten’s two portraits of an office that houses a firm of solici- same genre over and over, tends to be opened in New York in 1950, is some- young artists, the 1944 I Remember tors. What makes it unusual for its era underappreciated, especially after his thing else again. The lovers are a pub- Mama is by far the superior one. I Am is that the main characters are all time. Nothing about Van Druten’s lisher named Shep Henderson and his a Camera is the first dramatic version members of the female office staff, plays makes them immediately recog- landlady, Gillian Holroyd, who lives in of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin whose careers are dead-ended since nizable as his: not the style (which is, the apartment below his. What makes Stories, set in that city during the rise there’s no opportunity for advance- except for Bell, Book and Candle and it unconventional is that Gillian is a of the Nazis. The main problem with it ment, and whose only chance of happi- a few touches here and there, standard witch who puts a spell on Shep on is that you can’t help comparing it to ness is in the domestic realm, if they’re American realism); not the kinds of Christmas Eve to get him to dump his Jay Presson Allen’s screenplay for lucky enough. The protagonist, a nine- characters he favors; not even the fiancée, Merle, and fall in love with Cabaret, which restores plot elements teen-year-old named Pat Milligan, has genres. The five published American her—because she finds him attractive, that the stage musical took out, as well to choose between a struggling young plays by Van Druten are, not surpris- but also out of a malicious impulse to as some of Van Druten’s dialogue. I man who adores her and the womaniz- ingly, the ones that generated movie get back at the fiancée, whom she Am a Camera has fascinating charac- ing managing clerk of the firm, who versions. Two are romantic comedies: knew and disliked at college. It’s clear ters, and it’s extremely ambitious, but

SPRING 2021 25 the tonal shifts are clunky (not general- are charmed, as if a magical sprite had out years ago yet she’s convinced she requires her to lie about herself. “She’s ly a failing of Van Druten’s), and the flown into the room in the middle of can get him back as soon as she learns a complication I hadn’t visualized,” she last act—where the writer-protagonist, the night. Even the one death in the that he’s going to marry someone else. admits (which is a pretty fair way to Chris, realizes that as a human being story, of Mama’s uncle Chris (Oscar Kit protests that she treats Preston characterize children in general). And he can’t divorce himself from the politi- Homolka, the only actor in the film (who, as Milly learns in the course of when Rudd asks her to marry him, she cal horrors around him, and as a writ- who also appeared in the stage ver- the play, was once in love with Kit) “as goes from insisting that they never had er he can’t be merely a camera record- sion), is stylized: he bids his niece though he were a piece of pie you don’t the kind of relationship that leads to ing what he sees—turns bluntly cau- goodbye, then he lies down, contented, want, but [you’re] darned if you [are] marriage and “you can’t change stakes tionary. and passes away with a smile on his going to let anyone else eat.” The in the middle of the game” to realizing In terms of its longevity, I Remember face. It’s a magical death, a death from major bone of contention between the that her lifestyle has left her lonelier Mama was Van Druten’s most success- a child’s story. And part of the styliza- two women is Milly’s nineteen-year- and more unsettled than she ever sus- ful play. It ran for two years and was tion comes from what Van Druten and old daughter Deirdre, who finds her pected it had. turned into a hit movie, a television then Bodeen and Stevens leave out— own mother tiresome and is entranced Van Druten has given Kit, his most series that held on for eight seasons, Dagmar’s cat getting wounded in a by Kit’s life. Kit invited her into it self-aware and reflective character, and a Broadway musical that was fight, or the way that the sudden when she was a little girl; now she has lines a good actor would kill for, and Richard Rodgers’s final venture. Based knowledge of Katrin’s selfishness carte blanche to crash at Kit’s Wash- in the 1943 movie version, adapted by on Kathryn Forbes’s novel Mama’s around her high-school graduation, ington Square apartment whenever Lenore Coffee and Van Druten him- Bank Account, I Remember Mama is which her sister Christine (Peggy she’s in Manhattan. self, and directed by Vincent Sherman, set in San Francisco around 1910, and McIntyre) insists on bringing to light, This is a marvelous premise for a Bette Davis accords them all the depth the heroine, Katrin, is a teenage girl affects her. Mama had intended to give satirical comedy, but Van Druten never they deserve. (It’s perhaps the least her- and an aspiring writer; the play is a her a family memento, a cherished makes the hack’s error of simplifying alded of Davis’s great performances.) series of episodes about her Norwegian brooch, for a graduation gift, but the two women—of making them sym- The movie is tremendous fun, but family, the Hansons, presented in Katrin pushed for a dresser set from bols of an authentic and an inauthentic much of the complexity has been flashbacks as she reads aloud from the the local drugstore and got her way; way of being. Milly has qualities that stripped from the play—inevitably, I book that, in her twenties, she has pub- what she doesn’t know is that Mama surprise you. Kit asserts that she’s a think, because the Hays Code restric- lished about them. Forbes’s major traded the brooch for the gift her sharp-eyed reader of Kit’s manuscripts: tions make it necessary for the writers influence, and thus Van Druten’s, is daughter really wanted. The recogni- “She’s got an extraordinary gift of to mute the sexual material, though Little Women: like Jo March, Katrin tion of her bad behavior leads her to common sense that never seems to get miraculously they don’t tame it down can’t become a good writer until she perform distractedly in the school play near her own work, but is quite unerr- entirely. The other reason is Miriam stops spinning romantic fantasies and that night, and afterwards she bargains ing when it comes to mine.” And Hopkins, who plays Milly: she’s hilari- settles down to write about what she with the shop owner to get the brooch though Milly’s fury at Kit when she ous, but so broad that she tends to flat- knows best, the lower-middle-class back, but Van Druten didn’t write finds out that Preston once wanted to ten out her scenes. family she loves so dearly. Katrin either of those scenes, and the movie marry her is pumped up and unjusti- That John Van Druten could write focuses on her wise, grounded, imagi- omits them too. The result is an elided fied—Kit refused to consider his pro- Old Acquaintance, I Remember native mother, who offers her four chil- version of the short story—a fragment, posal, out of loyalty to Milly—her Mama, and Bell, Book and Candle, dren not only a rock-bound sense of like a memory. accusation that Kit has tried to steal plays that are all ideal pieces of dra- values but also a sense of security My favorite of Van Druten’s plays is her daughter away from her has a great matic construction but hardly seem to through a benign lie about a last-resort Old Acquaintance, his second for deal of truth in it. Moreover, Kit’s have emerged from the same imagina- bank account that they avoid having to Broadway, opening in 1940. It’s the maternal feelings for Deirdre have put tion, is mysteriously wonderful. That dip into by economizing and making only one I’ve seen in live performance: her in a false position. Kit, who’s forty- the playwright who accomplished it sacrifices for each other. (The eldest the Roundabout Theater in New York two, has a lover, Rudd Kendall, more has vanished from cultural memory Hanson offspring, the only boy, Nels, mounted a first-rate production of it in than ten years her junior, and she’s isn’t so mysterious, but it is dismaying. was played onstage by Marlon Brando, 2007, directed by Michael Wilson, kept their relationship from Deirdre When the Roundabout produced Old three years before A Streetcar Named with Margaret Colin, Harriet Harris because she doesn’t want the young Acquaintance a friend of mine who Desire.) and Corey Stoll—and it marked the woman to emulate her lifestyle. Her runs the box office was kind enough Is I Remember Mama sentimental? first time I began to think seriously own first affair, at Deirdre’s age, was to make sure I didn’t miss it but told Absolutely—it’s a sentimental triumph. about the virtues of this playwright. unsatisfying, and she’d like “the first me sadly that audiences weren’t show- I’ve never seen it onstage, but George Old Acquaintance is a commercial hay that [Deirdre] hits to have some- ing up for it. Why should they? It was Stevens’s beautifully filmed 1948 entertainment, and some of it is quite thing worthwhile in it.” It’s a noble an old play by someone they’d never movie, faithfully adapted by DeWitt funny, but the characters are psycho- mission in a way, but of course it heard of.@ Bodeen, works in tandem with the text logically true, the way they are in the to gently stylize the material, giving it plays of Philip Barry or S. N. Behrman, both an old-world charm (though America’s premier high-comic play- Katrin and her siblings were all born in wrights of the first half of the twenti- America) and the fairy-tale softness of eth century. fond memory. The dialogue has a folk- The two principal characters are Kit fable rhythm, and the three aunts, Markham and Mildred Watson Drake Mama’s sisters—bossy, overbearing (the triple-layer name is a clue), friends Jenny (Hope Landin), the whiny com- since childhood. Kit is a highly respect- Cinderella in Reverse plainer Sigrid (Edith Evanson), and ed novelist who struggles with her timid Trina (Ellen Corby), who has books, turning out one about every fallen in love with the undertaker and four years. Milly decided at some point is afraid to tell the other two because that she could be a writer, too, and her You finish cleaning the toilet on your knees, she doesn’t want them to laugh at potboilers, which she churns out at the sour, unsung, no one looking for you— her—are caricatured, with outsize hats rate of about one annually, are huge your looks all gone, busted, it’s all you can do and overcoats and theatrical Nor- sellers. They’re awful, but the two to finger that rosary of memories, wegian accents. When Papa (Philip friends show each other everything flicking the ghost channels, bored, your lease Dorn) and Nels (Steve Brown) put their they write before it’s published, and Kit on luck expired, bi-polar, in rags. But who heads together to figure out how they has avoided telling Milly what she real- was that sexy charmer? He really knew can afford the boy’s high-school educa- ly thinks about hers by critiquing them how to spin you ’round the floor and grease tion, they walk with parallel gestures, strictly on their own terms. Milly is a your hips. I’m sure he’s dead. This bead: that touch like a father and son in a comic strip. ridiculous woman—a melodramatizer, shivering your thigh—remember when? Your dress The credits contain old-fashioned a scene-maker who behaves like the up a tree, gin fizz at dawn, silk and marabou lithographs of the family life of the characters in her books. Her entire life poolside, naked as Eve? It all ends much period (the last one morphs into a real has been fueled by an obsessive jealou- too soon, Pumpkin, youth’s royal, hot mess. cityscape), and the shots of the street- sy of her best friend, whose bohemian None of it fits you now, not even that shoe. car down the hill from the Hansons’ life suggests a profound contentment Steiner Street home look like etchings. with unconventionality that Milly Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes) addresses essentially doesn’t approve of but that, the camera to introduce each episode, pretentious and restless and never satis- —Peter Spagnuolo and there’s a lovely moment, invented fied with her own life, she somehow for the screenplay, where Mama (Irene envies. “It’s been that way right from Dunne), having stolen into the hospital the beginning with you and me,” she ward to visit Dagmar after her opera- complains to Kit. “Me, having all the tion, sings her a Norwegian lullaby advantages, and you, having all the and all the lonely children in the ward fun.” Milly’s husband, Preston, walked

26 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW fiction We All Have Our Stories

Radhika Borde

HE ALWAYS sat in the fourth row of seats. And never on the driver’s side. She passed the church. When she was opposite the monastery that was adja- She was the sort of person who anticipated accidents. So many had already cent to it, she turned to look at it. And the bald guy did the same. S occurred. To one side of the church you had the steady drip-drip-gurgle of a spring that Her coat was a subdued rust-orange. All the lint had been picked off her black was supposed to have curative powers. Further on, you had an herb garden. She cloche hat. It was important for her to be clean and stylish. She didn’t want peo- would have seen the bald guy in her peripheral vision when she had turned to ple to think she was a gypsy—it wouldn’t be convenient. In this country, gypsies look at the monastery. Why, then, did she choose to move away from the rela- often weren’t clean, and had stopped being stylish more than a half-century ago. tively public space outside it, into the shadowy confines of the herb garden? Back home, she had enjoyed flaunting a cat-eye, but here she wore her face She walked into the green space very slowly. stripped of makeup. She had thick, dark eyebrows and full lips. Her face didn’t There was a stone bench in a corner, and she sat down on it with some sage need to be painted for the features to stand out. Everything was already clearly she had plucked on the way. She began to chew the sage with an air of absent- visible, and when people were taking the measure of her, she wanted a single mindedness. glance to be enough. The bald guy was standing at the stone and wrought-iron entrance. Looking in. Not that this worked on the bald guy. They would have to give up their pretense soon. She called him “bald guy” in her mind, because she didn’t know his name. She shifted her gaze to him. And he smiled, walking over to her as he did so. They had never spoken, but they had communicated. And here he was again No, he didn’t keep looking at her the whole time as he approached. That today. Muscles under his leather jacket. A quiet, black scarf. Looking at her and would have been predatory. His gaze slid to the ground and then back to her looking away. Taking a seat that would face hers, as he often did. face. But his expression didn’t change. Her name? Myrtle. “Dobry den, hello,” he said, when he was a few meters away; an opening A sentimental aunt had given it to her. And she had worn it self-consciously gambit in two languages. ever since she had realized that the curiosity people expressed when they heard “Dobry den,” replied Myrtle. it for the first time was not benign. Such an old-fashioned European name for “Every day, I see you on the bus and I thought we should speak,” he said. His someone who was not of European origin. “My family…they are Anglophiles, English had the polish of someone who used it regularly. you know,” she would say to those who asked about it. Apologizing. Myrtle paused. She had a half-smile on. The sort that people wear when they Myrtle had grown up in Queens, in New York, but had since moved east- want to appear friendly and caught off-guard at the same time. wards. “Why not? I’m Myrtle,” and she stood up, suddenly all very businesslike, and The bald guy would continue on to Beroun. And she would get off at Vráž. held out a hand for him to shake. An unlikely place for an American woman to live. But for her it was the right “I’m Roan,” he answered, with his head cocked to one side and a smile play- kind of hermitage. ing on his lips. “You don’t want to live in Prague?” people would ask. Astonished. In her other hand she held the sprig of sage with the tops of the leaves bitten off. “No, I see enough of it when I work, and I can always stay back for some- He pointed to the sage with a theatrical gesture. thing in the evenings if I want” was her reply. “You like to eat plants?” he asked with a grin. She didn’t need to huddle with all the other foreigners in Prague. The Czech “Actually, yes,” said Myrtle. He was being funny. Taking control. “My fami- lands were not closed to her as they were to them. ly’s Indian. In India, people eat a lot of plants.” In Vráž, she had a wood-burning stove in her attic apartment, and her land- At Myrtle’s words the bald guy’s eyes narrowed. Assessing. But the smile lady’s garden was fenced with raspberry bushes. didn’t leave his lips. Myrtle taught English in Prague. It was supposed to have been Czech litera- “I thought you were,” he said at last. “But you speak perfect Czech—I heard ture. But this wasn’t possible anymore. Her position as a visiting lecturer hadn’t you talking to the bus driver several times. So I wasn’t sure. It’s very nice to become anything more permanent. She had been an adjunct for a while. Which meet someone from so far away,” he added. she had accepted. After all, how much was a doctorate in Czech literature worth “Actually, I’m American,” said Myrtle. “But as I said, my family’s Indian.” back home? She also translated. It had been business reports and policy docu- At this he threw his head back and laughed. ments at first. And now she had an arrangement with a Czech publishing house. “That is complicated,” he said. “Here in the Czech Republic, we are used to Two children’s books every month. meeting people who are simple.” As she looked out at the receding gleam of Prague’s domes and spires as the “Oh, I think Czech people are very complicated,” said Myrtle. bus left the city, Myrtle often wondered if things would have been different for “Really?” asked the bald guy. her, career-wise, if she hadn’t been a “woman of color.” Such a politically cor- And so it had started. Before too long, he was sitting beside her on the stone rect term, and one that the Czechs were wonderfully ignorant of. bench. After half an hour he invited her to go with him to the pub with the fresh But she wasn’t thinking about this on that first day. She was thinking about beer. the bald guy. “It is too cold to talk on this bench,” he told her. “And I think it will be possi- The driver had shifted gears and the bus was powering its way up the summit ble to eat some cooked plants in the pub.” of a small hill with a throaty whine. The bald guy didn’t look comfortable. The In the pub, they chose to sit at a banquette that was set into a shallow niche sun was setting at an angle that sent rays of orange light deep into his irises. beside the fireplace. They were blue with flecks of green. Now glowing with more light than they Beers and pickled sausages followed. Myrtle told Roan why she was where she could stand, and they had begun to water. But he wasn’t going to move. He was. And Roan told Myrtle that he was a mechanical engineer in a company liked his vantage point. He loosened the scarf around his neck and lowered his that built locomotives. He even told her about the divorce. Marriage when he eyelashes to block out the sun. Like everyone else, he had a phone that he liked was nineteen to a girl he had met at a party. A child tucked away in the moun- to play with and he began tapping. tains that bordered Germany. The child a young man now. Twenty. And then Myrtle did something unusual. She got off. At Svaty Jan pod Unemployed. Living with his mother. Father and son met for beers twice a year. Skalou. The church under the rock. Her ticket was for Vráž. The next stop. He was playing the part of the man who is in a hurry to unburden himself. “Stomp, stomp, stomp,” said her boots in the resin-scented air, as they moved Making himself transparent. So dazzlingly transparent that she wouldn’t be able off down the pavement. to see the most important stuff. The bald guy had gaped at the action with his phone in one hand and the He walked her home after they had finished their beers and unburdening. It index finger of his other held aloft in mid-tap. Then he got off the bus too. was a short walk and the autumn evening was pleasant. He took care to say Just beyond the bus stop was a restaurant that served freshly brewed beer. goodbye to her at the garden gate without showing any eagerness to be invited Was she going there? in. She turned around to smile at him as she shut the door to the house. He was “It is pork. It is okay for you?” waitresses would ask whenever she ordered a watching, and he raised his hand in something between a wave and a salute. traditional Czech sausage with horseradish sauce on the side. They never asked if she ate beef, though this might have been appropriate. Myrtle’s family came from India and she had relatives that didn’t eat beef even though their ancestors FTER THEIR first meeting, both of them suffered three awkward bus journeys had been Christians for two centuries. They gave their daughters names like A that began with perfunctory hellos and an exchange of pleasantries at the Hyacinth and Myrtle and wanted them to be married in white dresses. But some bus stop, followed by Myrtle’s retrieval of a slim novel from her bag, absorbed traditions had to be kept up. phone-tapping by Roan, and a subsequent scramble for separate seats. Myrtle had walked past the restaurant—no, she wasn’t going there. She was And then, one day, Roan had asked her if she would like to walk with him. walking fast, with her head bowed. The bald guy was following her. He kept his Risky. It implied an intimacy that was fragile, if existent. phone in one hand and looked at it every now and then as if he had a GPS app She had said yes. Her yes was coy. Perhaps there had been no other way to say open. yes. She couldn’t have said yes with eagerness.

SPRING 2021 27 T IS a beautiful autumn evening when Myrtle says yes. The sky still holds an first appeared in writing in the twelfth century. Women didn’t want to be ruled I orange sun. There is that autumn sadness in the air. All the leaves just starting by men, so they initiated an armed rebellion against them. A war. Šárka was a to say goodbye to the trees. The knowledge that the heat will soon go out of the key figure. A female warrior. She used tricks to entrap a band of men, led by a land, a starkness will descend, and people will bury their chins into their scarves man called Ctirad. Ultimately, she was defeated. Along with the other female and look at the ground when they walk. rebels,” says Myrtle. Adding, “Ctirad was killed. And after the war Šárka kills “Have you ever been to Divoká Šárka?” he asks her. herself.” He has raised his head from some frown-inducing swiping and scrolling. His “There’s some sort of romance between Šárka and Ctirad,” says Roan. thumb is on the screen, he can lower his eyes to it in the same second that he “Hints of it, yes,” says Myrtle. “But it’s not clear if they fall in love.” will take to stroke it. “Why do you think she kills herself?” asks Roan. “Isn’t it because she feels “I haven’t,” says Myrtle. guilty about being responsible for Ctirad’s death?” “Do you know the story of Šárka?” he asks. “That’s what some interpretations argue,” Myrtle says. “The most common “I do,” says Myrtle. explanation is that she jumps off the rocky ledge because she can’t stand the “You know everything,” says Roan. He smiles, and shakes his head in admi- shame of being defeated by the men’s army.” ration. “Tell me what you know,” he says. “Would you like to go to Divoká Šárka?” he asks her. “You know too much “A Bohemian tale. Some think it is legend. Others think it is oral history. It about it not to go there. We can walk among the rocks.”

28 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW She says yes. the weight of it. But before I can drop it my grandmother takes it from me. Why does she say yes? Perhaps she has seen him looking at her too many ‘Dekuji,’ she says to the man on the sofa. He smiles and makes a dismissive ges- times on the bus. And Myrtle is a person who can be shaped by a gaze even ture with the hand that holds the cigarette. Then the two men who are sitting though she has struggled against this malleability all her life. on the chairs take me for a late-night drive. We go in a big white car. As I step They agree to go there on a Saturday. out of the lighted front hall I turn back to look at my grandmother. She is wav- There’s a breeze when they meet. She’s waiting at the bus stop in Vráž, in her ing at me. The men put me into the front seat. It is green leather. I sit between olive-green trousers. The trees are throwing leaves at her. The black boots she the two men. We don’t wear seatbelts. In those days, you didn’t have to. The car often wears will do for hiking and she’s got them on. He comes in a car. An old starts with a jud-jud-judder. The headlamps are switched on. And we move Fiat with some dents. But he’s cleaned it, and it smells of clean rubber and rose- through the dark streets of Litvínov with the broken pavements and the occa- scented air freshener. In the car, she removes her thick framed sunglasses and sional alcoholic. I am so small that I can’t see much. Mostly, just the top halves gives him an indulgent smile. They have that conspiratorial air of not-yet-lovers. of buildings and the street lamps as they pass across my line of sight through the The journey takes an hour, and when it’s over, he parks the car beside a windshield. The men are laughing. They’ve rolled their windows down and their Hostinec. The crag from which Šárka jumped rears above them. arms are balanced on the frames with the elbows sticking out. Cigarettes move There’s a path that will take them to the top of the crag. They climb. And from their lips to the window frames. They don’t need to flick the ash off the soon each one has damp palms and armpits. The breeze still blows. Myrtle has tips. The drag breaks it up and carries it away. We trail glowing sparks in the her hair in two side French braids and they’re too tight and heavy to be lifted by night air. We are magical. moving air. She made them in the morning with the help of a tutorial on the “‘Your mother is a very special lady, you know,’ one of them says to me. ‘A internet, and it took many attempts before she was satisfied. very special lady for our very special boss.’ When they reach the spine of the crag, they take off their jackets and sit down “‘He is very high, very high, you know?’ the other one says. ‘A very clever on the rocks. After they are no longer panting from the climb, conversation man. A big engineer.’ becomes appropriate. Neither one seems to want to start. They survey the tum- “And we drive all over Litvínov in our big white car. Always for just about an ble and crash of slate and rust-colored rock below them. The determined little hour. trees that are scrabbling in crevices for things to feed off are flame-colored. Not “When we return, the big man’s got a belly laugh rippling through him. He’s a pretty place where a man can hold a woman’s hand. A place where a woman leaving. He’s swigging a last shot of Slivovice as he’s leaving. He’s blowing kiss- died. es to my mother, who’s got her head sticking out of the upstairs bedroom win- “Tell me about your childhood,” she says. Maternal feelings, and a tide of dow. She’s blowing kisses back. Her lips are bleeding color. She looks so happy. compassion. She doesn’t like to see Roan panicking. She prefers it when he is Her hand that’s usually slack with fatigue is waving energetically. And then she suave. sees me, and she isn’t happy anymore. The smile disappears from her face and Roan looks at her. A bald guy-baby look. her face disappears from the window. That’s when I know—she doesn’t like me. “My childhood?” he says. For some reason, she doesn’t like me. She would like to have the big man with “Yes,” says Myrtle. her always and to have me in the white car all night and all day.” He nods. And begins to tell her a story. A story of hams and a big car. And now Myrtle’s hand is on his arm. Pat pat, pat pat. “My mother was very beautiful,” he begins. “But my father had left us “You know that’s not true,” she says. because there was a widow in the next village who had a big farm. My father He looks at her. His eyes are dancing with emotions. Mischief is one of them. used to work with the cows in the farm. But then he saw that the widow was He lets out a short, snappy laugh with a sideways jerk of his head. Unbelievable, lonely and that he could be the master. You understand?” he asks. his headshake says. His childhood is unbelievable. His life is unbelievable. Myrtle nods. Brows slightly furrowed. Her face otherwise expressionless. “She was doing it for food,” he says. “Hams and oranges. Once, even, a pine- “We were very poor, and my mother took me to live with her parents in the apple. Which they didn’t know how to cut. We pricked our tongues on the eyes city of Litvínov. I was four at that time,” he continues. when we ate it. It was fun. No one had ever seen a fresh pineapple before…we “I’ve never been to that part of the country,” says Myrtle. recognized it from the pictures we had seen in books. A bottle of champagne as “It’s a mining area,” says Roan. “Now, there are mostly just museums. But well. I watched them drink it together at the kitchen table. The big man, my there are also mountains and even some spas. It’s beautiful. Of course, it is an grandparents, my mother, everyone. Everyone drank. In the green crystal glass- area with many problems. It was Sudetenland... You know about it?” he asks. es. These were the nice things. But there were things my mother didn’t like. Like “Yes, I do,” says Myrtle. “The part of Czechoslovakia that was occupied by the sweat. The big man would sweat. She didn’t like that. She always changed Germans—who were expelled after the Second World War. Repopulated by the bedsheets the next morning. She didn’t want to do it at night because she Czechs and Slovaks from other parts of the country... Did your family come thought that would make me ask questions. I didn’t need to ask. I knew. I could there from somewhere else?” smell his sweat when I was brought back to my bed. I knew he had been in it “My mother’s family did,” says Roan. “But my father’s family had been living with his clothes off. I could smell my mother’s juices. I knew what they had in the area around Litvínov for many generations. They were living alongside done while I was being driven around in the big white car.” the Germans. And liked them. Relations were good. When the Germans left and And then the bald guy stops. they had a chance to grab their property, they didn’t. Sentimental reasons. An image of his beautiful mother with the big male sweating into her bed Other people took the beautiful wooden houses with the expensive ceramics, hangs between them. the land. My father’s family preferred the poverty they knew. I think my father Myrtle looks him over. “Well, well,” she thinks. “But we all have our stories never forgave them for that...” now.” He resumes his narrative, “I remember being woken at night by my grand- parents. It happened twice a week sometimes. They would be so happy when they woke me. When it first started, I didn’t know they could be so happy. My grandmother’s cheeks would be shining. I would wake to see my mother paint- ing her lips. A very dark red. She would be standing in front of the big mirror that leaned against the wall beside the cuckoo clock. We had three cuckoo clocks—I think they had been taken from the houses of rich German people. Photograph My mother never looked at me or said anything to me when she saw me looking at her in the mirror. She would be wearing a gold-colored silk housecoat. In that house, we had cuckoo clocks, silk housecoats, and beautiful teacups. But we He was framed didn’t have much food. Not good food. Most people didn’t. We lived in the city Sitting pretty and most of the time you could only buy cabbages and papriky in the shops. With a tough guy Potatoes, cabbage, and bacon or sausage once a week. My mother was painting Look that said her lips to get food. Food for me. But my grandparents were happy because they would be able to keep most of it. ‘We can’t let you get fat, and too much meat I’ve had it good, for a little boy is unhealthy,’ I had overheard my grandfather say. And now you “After I was woken, my grandmother would dress me to go outdoors and take Have it good, me from the room I shared with my mother. I slept in a little bed that was set Unknown miss, into a window nook, and my mother had a canopy bed with heavy drapes. My grandmother’s shining cheeks would light up the corridor that led from our Seeing me drop room to the living room. I would walk along it with my small hand in my Out of a book grandmother’s sweaty one. In the living room, there would be a big man sitting You picked out on the sofa. Two other men would be sitting on the chairs. All of them would be At a garage sale. smoking Marlboros. It was very difficult to get Marlboros in those days. You could only get them in a special shop called a Tuzex. My grandfather would be standing—handing out shots of Slivovice.” Below them, now, the trees are acting possessed. Whipping their red and orange crowns around while the gnarled fingers of their roots grip the rocks —Charles Simic ever more tightly. “When the men see me, one of them takes a big ham out of a black net bag that is placed on the glass-topped center table. He gives it to me. It’s so heavy that I can’t hold it. Everybody laughs. They are pleased by its size. I totter with

SPRING 2021 29

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30 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW Springtime, George Covitch Stephen McKean Grant Crider Barbara McKinney Permanent Supportive Housing William Dennis Susan Meiselas Julie Diamond Ruth Misheloff Dennis Dimick Dennis Missavage Gwen A. Edelman Cathy Montgomery Once again ransacked by the actual— Eric Edwards Linda Moore By the down-slurred chirps of a cardinal Maria Elekidou John Morgan Outdoors as much as by Jack, foetal, slack Stephanie M. Ellis Daniel Moriarty In the bathroom stall, startled back Dale Engle Eugenia Murphy To life by a nasal shot of Narcan. Kenneth Erickson Jesse Nathan Once again Susan’s riled, resolved again Teddy Fakles Robert Navarro To focus on coping skills; thus she works Dr. Jack Feder Emerson Noronha Markers on a mandala coloring book. John Fiedler Frank Olson A dumb brass band of daffodils tunes up John Firmani Irene Oppenheim As Dan who’s off his Seroquel is schlepped Anonymous Dean Pasvankias In cuffs by CPD back to Beau Vista. Stewart Florsheim Michael Pearce Replete with incident, event-laced, the Edwin Foote Wallace Pendleton Day scintillates with joy and grief; it shines Walter Frank Stephen Perkins Both the tragedy of Roy off the wagon Gene Fredricks Andrew Phelan Dragging a bag of Bud cans to the bin Shirley Frobes William & Kathleen Pierrot And the rapture of Shanée skipping the lawn Kathleen Frye Maellen Pittman With her therapeutic Pomeranian Lynn Gringrass Susan Pliner With equal brilliance. Troy Glover Peter Porco Ephemera in, Pat Goldsmith Anonymous Ephemera out, ephemera held, Colleen Gonzalez Matthew Puster Ephemera lost to the erstwhile world. Sarah Gordon Michael Rachael Out back where Jim, in eternal sweatpants, Warren Gould Deborah Rasmussen Tends to his motley spread of plaintive plants Zack Graham Kim E. Revay Is the flicker of courting woodpeckers Judith Grey Laing Reynolds Wrapping an oak. It’s enough, more or less. Janice Hackel David Rice The squad screams into the lot; the squirrels Mike Hale Martha K. Rice Screech into the nut. Redbuds, crabapples, Thomas Hamann Philip J. Ringo Magnolias efflorresce; green ensues. Scott Hamre Judith Rock And, of course, case management continues. Thomas Harris Lawrence Rogers Nancy Hayashi Kay Rood Bryna Hellman Barry Roth Stephanie Hemelings Therese Rousseau —Jake Crist Anonymous Veronica Sanitate James Hollman Elaine Sawtelle Kathy Hooke Gerald Schaefer William Hossack Dr. Morty Schiff Clifford Humphrey Jim Schley Jane & David Huntington Lynne S. Schwartz Howard Isenberg Robert Shanklin Sheila Johnson Marilyn Shapley Janis F. Jones Gary Shaw Louis B. Jones Randall S. Smith Charles Jordan George J. Socha Lauren Kahn Elizabeth Somerville Kathy Karlson Joan Sparkman Mary Kelley Sophia Starmack Robert Kersey Richard Stein Leonard Keyes Peter Steiner Alan Kim Miriam Struck Tony Knoderer James B. Thede Sally Lapiduss Theo Theoharis Britt Leach Mark Thomson Adrian Leal Ricki & Peter Thompson Lawrence Leffel Lawrence Thorpe Francis Levine David Tinling, MD Marc Levy Camilla Trinchieri Cynthia Livingston Filiz Turhan Mary E. Lorenz Nannie Turrell Zenobia Love Philip Wagner Edward Lucas Ron Wallace Kathryn Ma Hugh Westrup William Macanka James N. Wicklund Frances Magurno Sean Wilkinson Carol Maier Gordon Williamson Howard Mansfield Richard Wilschke Rachel Markowitz Nick Wineriter Cleopatra Mathis Tina Woelke Pamela Matz Mark Woodhouse John McClain Elizabeth Woods Grady McGonagill Leah Zazulyer

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