Writing

Love letters from Paris

rsmith — Tue, 02 May 2023 22:14:07 +0000

rsmith Tue, 05/02/2023 - 17:14

Flanner and Hemingway enjoy a drink—one for him, two for her—circa 1944. Both served as US Army war correspondents during the liberation of Paris. (Glasshouse Images/Everett Collection)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/23

For 50 years Janet Flanner, EX 1914 (1892–1978), shared her witty, sharp observations of Europe with New Yorker readers.

Janet Flanner, EX 1914, longed to write fiction. An Indiana girl, well brought up, she had abandoned her husband in New York and fled to Europe with her lover, the writer Solita Solano.

The couple settled in Paris, where they lived in a modest hotel on the Left Bank (apartments were so scarce that hotels were cheaper, and both women detested housework). In the morning they breakfasted at the café Les Deux Magots; in the afternoon they worked on their novels; in the evening they drank and chatted with expatriate American friends, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Flanner described her glamorous new life in letters to friends back in America. One friend, Jane Grant, showed the witty, gossipy letters to her husband, Harold Ross. Flanner, she suggested, should be the Paris correspondent for their new, struggling humor magazine. Ross agreed, offering Flanner $35 (about $600 today) for a letter every two weeks—a generous sum in Paris between the wars. Ross specified he had no interest in what Flanner thought. He wanted to know what the French were thinking.

Flanner’s first letter from Paris appeared in the October 10, 1925, New Yorker with the byline Genêt; at the time, everything in the magazine ran under pseudonyms. She had thought Ross might choose “Flâneuse,” the feminine form of flâneur. “Genêt” was probably based on her first name and intended to obscure her gender; she never knew exactly why Ross chose it.

A breezy digest of current happenings—a bank clerk strike, a lecture series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a popular new nightclub called the Florida—Flanner’s first letter set the tone for her regular dispatches over the next five decades. Her writing was defined by her wit and sharp observations, as well as the lack of the first-person pronoun: “You’re safer with one or it,” she once said. “I is like a fortissimo. It’s too loud.”

Beginning in the 1950s, as more and more of Flanner’s New Yorker pieces were published in book form, the literary world took notice of her as a writer, not just a foreign correspondent. An anthology of her postwar writing, Paris Journal, 1944–1965 (Gollancz, 1966), won the 1966 National Book Award in arts and letters.

With the exception of the war years and occasional travel, Flanner remained in Paris, always living in hotels, always writing for the New Yorker, for the next 50 years. She considered Ross to be her inventor; in return, her arch, knowing, witty tone came to define that of the New Yorker.

Flanner, the second of three daughters, was born March 13, 1892, in Indianapolis. As an adult, she claimed her father was in real estate; he had investments, but his primary occupation was co-owner of the mortuary Flanner and Buchanan.

The Flanners were an artsy, cultured family. Her mother had hoped to be an actress, and she continued to write and produce plays after her marriage. She wanted Janet to become an actress as well, “but of course I was peculiar-looking,” Flanner recalled in an interview with her friend Mary McCarthy. “I suffered so at the sight of my nose. … I just shuddered at this beak.” In 1910 the entire family went to live in Germany for several months. Janet Flanner, then 17, fell in love with Europe and dreamed of returning.

At 20, when she entered the University of Chicago, Flanner already had a gray streak in her hair. She embraced the social whirl wholeheartedly, keeping schoolwork at arm’s length; only the writing courses taught by novelist Robert Morss Lovett held her interest. “I was a very poor student. Such a pity,” she told McCarthy. At her dormitory, Green Hall, “they did object to my coming in so often at 3 in the morning. I was mad on dancing.” Flanner lasted two years until, as she told McCarthy, “I was requested to leave.” (A passionate affair with a woman gym teacher may have had something to do with it.)

Back in Indiana, she reviewed vaudeville and burlesque shows for the Indianapolis Star; within a year she had her own bylined column. She kept in touch with college friends, including William Lane Rehm, PhB 1914, who occasionally came to Indianapolis to see her. During a visit in 1918, Rehm and Flanner suddenly decided to marry. At a time when young men were being sent to fight in the Great War, last-minute marriages were not uncommon—and Flanner, despite her newspaper job, was desperate to get out of Indianapolis.

The couple settled into a small apartment in Greenwich Village and quickly made friends in literary and artistic circles. She wrote satirical poems and occasionally published articles and stories; he worked as a bank clerk and painted in the evenings. But the marriage was not a success: Flanner felt “so at sea in my disappointment in not being in love as I had been with women.”

Less than a year into her marriage, she met Solita Solano, drama editor of the New York Tribune. Solano had lived in China, Japan, and the Philippines, and spoke Spanish and Italian. When National Geographic sent her on assignment to Europe, she asked Flanner to come too. Flanner was torn; Solano insisted. They departed in the summer of 1921.

The two traveled throughout Greece, then visited Constantinople, Rome, Florence, Dresden, and Berlin, searching for somewhere to call home. By 1923 they had arrived in Paris—“I wanted Beauty, with a capital B,” Flanner explained—settling in an oddly shaped room on the fourth floor of the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They remained there for 16 years.

Flanner took twice-weekly lessons to polish her schoolbook French; in a few months, she spoke fluently with a Parisian accent. She had her graying hair bobbed with bangs.

In cosmopolitan Paris, Flanner and Solano could live together without social censure. Although Flanner was dedicated to Solano, the relationship was nonmonogamous from the start. When asked, Solano once observed that Janet still lived with her—when she remembered to come home.

For half a century, New Yorker readers got their Paris news via dispatches from Genêt, the pen name of Janet Flanner, EX 1914. (Everett Collection/Newscom)

In the autumn of 1925 Flanner submitted her first letter to the New Yorker. She quickly established a routine: she read the daily Paris newspapers—at least eight when she first began—clipping items that caught her interest, which she would then follow up on. She credited the French papers, as well as Ross, for teaching her how to write.

When composing her letter—a process she often found painful—she remained in her hotel room for up to 48 hours at a time, pecking out her copy with two fingers, always with cigarettes nearby. She took her finished copy to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where the French post office had a special desk that sent mail on the fast ship to New York. Often, she heard nothing until her letter was in print.

Like the other aspiring American novelists and artists who crowded into Paris, Flanner and Solano wanted to become famous as quickly as possible. In 1926 Flanner published her first (and only) novel, The Cubical City (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), a roman à clef about her family and her struggle to love a man the way she loved women. Reviews were mixed. She was amused by one that compared her to John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, calling her writing “too masculine” to be measured against that of women writers.

Flanner started a second family-centric novel with the working title “A State of Bliss,” calculating she could finish it in months if she wrote 4,000 words a day—but she didn’t. She had thought the New Yorker job would underwrite her career as a novelist, but she increasingly realized that her New Yorker writing was her career. When The Cubical City was reissued decades later as a “lost” work of American fiction, Flanner added a blunt afterword: “I am not a first-class fiction writer as this reprinted first novel shows. Writing fiction is not my gift.”

Instead, Flanner began contributing profiles. A New Yorker profile, a 3,600-word essay on an individual, was usually assigned to a writer who knew the subject personally. Flanner published her first—signed “Hippolyta,” after the queen of the Amazons—on modern dancer Isadora Duncan in 1927. Despite the new byline, the copy, with its wry, cosmopolitan tone, was indisputably Flanner: “The clergy, hearing of (though supposedly without ever seeing) her bare calf, denounced it as violently as if it had been golden.”

Even more successful was her 1935 profile of England’s Queen Mary, grandmother of Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II). Denied any official information, Flanner patched together a deeply personal article based on information from English journalists, royal dressmakers, and other tradespeople. Ross’s opinion: “Superb.”

Not all readers appreciated Flanner’s obsessive attention to quotidian detail. Hemingway, a close friend, was appalled by her 1937 article on bullfighting, which included a long description of a matador’s complicated clothing and noted that after the fight bull meat was available at the local butcher. “Listen, Jan,” he told her over drinks at the Deux Magots, “if a journalistic prize is ever given for the worst sports writer of the western world, I’m going to see you get it, pal.”

In the 1930s, as the mood in Europe darkened, Flanner’s letters grew more serious. The New Yorker had been born apolitical, but politics was unavoidable.

Flanner produced a three-part profile of Hitler in 1936, based on sources close to him, as her Queen Mary profile had been. She read Mein Kampf in French—although the book was illegal in France—and skewered its ideas in print. As was typical, her piece poked fun at the Führer’s quirks: he was a teetotaler and vegetarian in a country of beer and sausages, she pointed out. When the story was collected in An American in Paris: Profile of an Interlude Between Two Wars (Hamish Hamilton, 1940), Flanner added a note that its only value was as a period piece from a time when Europe, at its peril, considered Hitler a joke.

Flanner and Solano departed for New York soon after the Nazis invaded Poland. Flanner had no interest in war reporting: send “a writer who is male, young, fighting-minded,” she advised the New Yorker. For five years, as war decimated Europe, Flanner did not return to her beloved Paris.

When the war in Europe was nearly over, Flanner did go to England as a war correspondent. She traveled the continent wherever she could, heartbroken at the extent of the devastation. The full horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were first beginning to be known: “This is beyond imagination,” she wrote to Solano, after she toured Buchenwald with a man who had survived it.

Her first postwar Paris letter ran in December 1944 under her usual pseudonym. Its tone was so angry, editor William Shawn rewrote the letter to soften it and changed her “we” to “I.” Flanner was not sure whether she wanted to stay or leave; in middle age, she had lost faith in the world. Paris was no longer her Paris.

She covered the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker, describing stomach-turning films and snapshots, taken by the Nazis themselves, of what they had done to other human beings. Almost as astonishing to Flanner: the defendants’ cowardice and disloyalty to their cause. The 22 Nazis on trial, she observed, “helped put millions of people to death, quickly or slowly, by torture, murder, or starvation. But not one of them seemed to want to die for the thing they killed the millions for.” In 1948 Flanner was named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur, a token of gratitude for her writing since her return to France.

After the war, Flanner’s personal life was complicated. In New York she had Natalia Murray, an Italian broadcaster, whose partnership had become the central relationship in her life. In France she had another American woman, Noel Murphy, a friend and lover since before the war. Flanner also remained close with Solita Solano.

Murray pleaded with her to give up her Paris post so they could be together in New York, away from her old attachments and independent way of life. Flanner seriously considered it, even tendering—but then rescinding—her resignation. “You complain that I have three wives,” she wrote to Murray, “and the truth is, as you know, that I also have a husband, The New Yorker.”

In 1949 Flanner moved into the Hôtel Continental, on the rue de Castiglione near the Tuileries gardens; from her small balcony, she could look out over the city. Here she lived alone, “like a monk,” as she described it, for the next 20 years. She loved her writer’s life, with no distractions, no responsibilities, and room service. In the afternoons, she often held court in the hotel’s cocktail bar.

At times Flanner was nostalgic for the Paris of the Lost Generation. “The uglification of Paris,” she wrote in the New Yorker, “the most famously beautiful city of relatively modern Europe, goes on apace, and more is being carefully planned.” Even its beautiful language was being corrupted by American slang. Flanner detested all slang, including “okay.”

In one of her final Paris letters, which ran in September 1975, Flanner reminisced about the long-ago days of her youth, sitting “on the broad, hospitable terrace of the Deux Magots café.” From there she had watched the brides and grooms outside the church opposite “with vagrant curiosity”—the same way she observed everything in Paris.

Arts & Humanities

Writing

College alumni

Legacy

“Truly extraordinary”

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:37:05 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:37

A. J. Verdelle, AB’82, studied political science at UChicago and founded her own statistics consulting firm before she allowed herself to pursue her dream of writing. (Photography by Asia Goffin)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

Web exclusives

11.08.2022

Author A. J. Verdelle on writing, teaching, and her friendship with Toni Morrison. Plus: An excerpt from Verdelle’s book Miss Chloe.

In 2022, three years after Toni Morrison died, A. J. Verdelle, AB’82, published Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison (Amistad). Their decades-long friendship began with a blurb Morrison supplied—“Truly extraordinary”—for Verdelle’s debut novel, The Good Negress (Algonquin, 1995).

Verdelle began her teaching career at Princeton, where Morrison taught. She now runs the creative writing department at Morgan State University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Read an excerpt from Miss Chloe.

What was your College experience like?

Very difficult. There were 17 African American students in my class. We were very conspicuous, though no one seemed to notice how difficult it was for us.

But the College opened me up to my minuscule place in a broad world—and the idea that my place might not be so minuscule, if I found a way to engage with what inspired me to think, research, and wonder.

Any particularly memorable professors?

Marvin Zonis [professor emeritus of business administration at Chicago Booth (1936–2020)], who taught SOSC, taught me not to use the word interesting. Interesting means, either you have nothing to say or you did not read the material.

I still quote the Aims of Education address, which for my year was given by Richard Taub, [Paul Klapper Professor Emeritus in the Social Sciences (1937–2020)]. He said, the sooner you accept that you know nothing, the better your experience of the College will be.

You finally allowed yourself to pursue writing once you had a full-time job, running your own statistics consulting firm. When did you find the time?

I always was an early riser. I made a schedule that started with a.a.m.—very early morning. Then a.m. and p.m. It ended with p.p.m.—right before I went to bed. I would use the a.a.m. to write and the p.p.m. to type.

I still tend to write longhand. If you read any of the creativity literature, it emphasizes the investment of your body in your work. For writers, that could be handwriting.

In Miss Chloe, you explain how you came to call your debut novel The Good Negress. How do you feel about that title?

I love it. One of my language projects is to un-erase things. Negress is a word nobody uses. The fact that it’s a good Negress nods to the negativity in the language.

Wendy [Weil, Verdelle’s former agent], who was Jewish, said, “You can’t name it that. It would be like calling something The Good Jewess.” I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about being Jewish. But I don’t think that Negress upsets people. It comes out of a past I know.”

In Miss Chloe, you also share the story of your second novel, which is about Black cowboys. Editors requested three revisions that required three years each. And it’s still unpublished.

I put it down for Miss Chloe and now I’m back. I’m trying to get the cowboys off my desk in the next five to six months.

One of my former students at Princeton told me which draft she thought was best. She said, in the beginning, the editors were just telling you what to do with the White characters. But once they started on the Black characters, that’s when the book went bad. I thought that was cute.

When Toni Morrison was nine, she had an argument with a friend about whether there was a God. And the girl said, “No,” and Toni Morrison said, “Yes,” and the girl finally said, “I’ve been praying for two years for God to give me blue eyes, and nothing has happened.” Nine years old. That was the beginning of her book The Bluest Eye [Rinehart and Winston (1970)].

So some stories are seeds that take a long time to sprout. The manuscript has been in existence for at least 10 years. I’m sure it’ll be alright.

How did you get interested in Black cowboys?

My grandfather on my father’s side was from Texas. He was a stevedore, unloading and reloading cattle and their accoutrements. One in four cowboys was Black. But they were erased.

I’m also interested in money, because Black people used to be money. Black people who escaped slavery were “stealing” themselves from their plantation owners.

Stealing the West, creating banks, branding cattle—all that is about money. We were branded too. So my cowboy story comes out of America’s money story.

You teach creative writing at Morgan State University and Lesley University. Does teaching drain your creative energy or feed it?

I love teaching. I feel called to teaching. I’ve been tutoring since I was a kid. People became my friends because it was easy for me to do their homework. So it started out nefariously.

My teaching makes me feel like, on a daily basis, I’m doing something useful with my life. Writing is invisible. Sometimes it looks like you don’t do anything. You don’t have on the right clothes, you don’t go outside. It’s invisible until you have the book.

What was it like to write about Toni Morrison?

It was an exercise in grieving. It was such an amazing surprise, such an incredible gift, that I got to just sit around with her. Those individual times were really special.

One of the greatest beauties of writing is that when you write things down, it opens up space in your brain. I would write memories down and new memories would come.

Writing about Morrison, it had to be polished. It had to be written as beautifully as I could, because I’m writing about the beautiful writer. She wrote about such horrors with such beautiful language.

What did you learn during the process of writing the memoir?

Especially as I’m watching Toni Morrison’s books being banned, I think about how Morrison very bluntly said, “Racism is a distraction.” I had heard her say that once or twice, and I wasn’t really sure.

But when I started to write about it, I realized how beautifully and succinctly true that is. As long as you’re talking about racism, you’re not figuring out, What can I do? What am I good at? How am I going to reach my own goals? This racism that’s being poured down on you is designed to keep you from becoming.

Writing Miss Chloe really broke that open for me.

Excerpt

Birth of a Writer

For most writers and scholars and readers, library experiences rise up as brain baptism. We don’t know the significance of these edifices and institutions when we’re first encountering them, when we’re young. But even as children, we feel the power of these repositories. When our language catches up to our experiences, we are able to describe the indescribable: libraries as hallowed ground and sites of awakening.

My mother—my stake in the ground—had a small but potent book collection in the house. New titles, mostly. The emerging array of contemporary Black books. I read indiscriminately.

My mother’s library was where I first encountered Toni Morrison. The mother-curated reading shelf in our house offered exponentially more entertainment than dictionaries or cereal boxes, Weekly Readers, or the pale and tepid Scholastic selections we were set up to buy. Books I loved the most: the Negro Heritage Library (ten volumes)—a gift from Ma Howell; The Black Book, which I did not yet associate with Toni Morrison; and my all-time childhood favorite, Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown. I did not associate Claude Brown with Morrison, either, but time told the truth: Morrison was editor for both The Black Book and Claude Brown. Decades will pass before I learn about editing as an activity or about Morrison as an editor. I learn the former first, which helps prepare me for my encounters with Toni Morrison.

Claude Brown passed in 2002. I was elsewhere—chasing a leaping toddler and paying in sufficient attention. I do not remember Morrison mentioning this to me, but I wish I had known to mention this to her. We could have raised a glass to dear Claude. I would have loved to hear her stories about launching his important book. Manchild in the Promised Land has sold four million copies. I hope he had heirs. I could have told Miss Chloe how many times I’d read his book while a babe cavorting in brand-new words.

My mother recounts having gone to see Toni Morrison in person when The Bluest Eye was first published. They attended, at Ma Howell’s insistence, and because Ma Howell refused to learn to drive, my mother always played chauffeur. Morrison skips no generations in her character construction, or in her appeal. Ma Howell was a driving intellectual force in our family. She was older than Toni Morrison but identified intimately with Howard; her alma mater anchored her neighborhood. My mother and Toni Morrison are near the same age. So, I imagine that my mother might have been more aligned with Morrison’s books. I was not of an age to discuss my mother’s book collection with my grandmother, though Ma Howell did call us on the phone every day. I might have been more likely to talk about books with my mother, but with three daughters and a job, my mother was busy, busy, busy. So, I read on my own and judged the books on my own. I was not much of a judge.

Because it was in the house, on the shelf, I read The Bluest Eye too early, really. I read Manchild prematurely as well. I read Song of Solomon, too, there at home. I did not encounter Sula until after I left for college, though it was released years before. As a tween and teenager, I was convinced my mother didn’t notice me reading her books. But there having been no Sula on the shelf makes me wonder. I’m not sure I was as unmonitored as I presumed.

Sula is Morrison’s fire book, her wanton logic book, her sex book, her “these folks are crazy” book. My college students respond so much more passionately to Sula than to The Bluest Eye. When I mention the word self-loathing to my students, that’s a guaranteed shutdown—sometimes, for the rest of the semester. After all these years, the notion of self-hatred remains unexamined and, therefore, feels abrasive and shocking and abrupt. So, in the interest of a responsive class, The Bluest Eye was removed from classroom rotation. Sula, my students can talk about until the cows come home. They get into arguments. They raise their voices. The energy they bring to Sula makes it worth choosing that novel. These are first-year students; sometimes we tussle to get them to read.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison wrote of a young girl’s extreme vulnerability among the vicious (private and public) forces of our time. (“Public” includes Hollywood.) When you have learned to read but are just learning about life, print equals truth. A book has always been holy to me—holy and tangible and real and sometimes, not always, predictive. Books certainly cast a warning shot. Seriously, books shape your mind. All children should read as thoroughly as is possible. The muscle of the mind needs development in everyone. And then, as the child ages into older childhood and adolescence, they start to question and compare. Knowledge travels with them from one book to the next. The landscape of life awaits discovery in books. African Americans were forbidden from reading—to prevent eventualities like right now, when the oppressors can be out-read, outreasoned, and outrun by the oppressed. The Bluest Eye offered me an education at a very early age; protected me, therefore. Education is insurance against stupidity and also against being caught unaware.

The Bluest Eye raises the “white doll” question. Now, it’s hard to imagine the universe of toys without Black dolls, but we’re looking at progress. During my childhood, toy manufacture did not include or consider us. White dolls were the only dolls (except for rare, handmade collectibles) when I was doll age. Since a very young age, I was uncomfortable with white dolls. Never liked them, never wanted them. This was a personal issue for me. I was even destructive to my sister’s white dolls—which I regret. But the words for this were laid out for all takers in The Bluest Eye. Morrison spoke my language, and I grew up learning hers.

Excerpted from Miss Chloe by A.J. Verdelle. Copyright © 2022 by A.J. Verdelle. By arrangement with Amistad.

Miss Chloe remembered

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:17:16 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:17

Writing Miss Chloe “was an exercise in grieving,” says A. J. Verdelle, AB’82. “I would write memories down and new memories would come.” (Photography by Asia Goffin)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/22

A. J. Verdelle, AB’82, writes lovingly, but honestly, of her friend Toni Morrison.

A. J. Verdelle, AB’82, was in her late 20s, working as a statistician, when she first heard Toni Morrison speak. Morrison had just published her fifth novel, Beloved (Plume, 1987). Hundreds of people had crammed into a Boston church to hear her read.

During the Q&A, an aspiring writer, who had rushed to be first at the microphone, described her dissatisfaction with her own failed stories and asked for advice. Morrison’s tart response: “Well, it sounds like you don’t know what you’re doing.” The audience gasped; Verdelle, an aspiring writer herself, was mortified.

All the more astonishing, then, that Morrison—who could be “steely,” in Verdelle’s description—would become something like a fairy godmother to her. “My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional,” Verdelle writes in Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison (Amistad, 2022).

Eight years after the church incident, Verdelle had completed an MFA at Bard College and written a debut novel, The Good Negress (Algonquin, 1995). Before its release, the publisher sent out galleys of the book as a holiday gift. A friend of Morrison’s sent one on to her; she wrote back describing it as “truly extraordinary.” With that description on the cover—one of the few blurbs Morrison supplied in her long career—the success of the then unknown author’s novel was all but ensured.

In the summer of 1997, Morrison invited Verdelle to New York for what Verdelle assumed was a gathering. She was surprised to discover it was just the two of them, a private visit. Morrison was “warm, curious, and engaged, full of good humor and blunt questions.” They talked for two hours.

That fall Verdelle began teaching creative writing at Princeton, where Morrison taught. Morrison had set that in motion too.

At Princeton they became friends—though it was never a friendship of equals. Morrison was a generation older, a fact Verdelle acknowledged with the affectionate nickname “Miss Chloe.” Morrison was born Chloe Wofford; the honorific “Miss,” Verdelle writes, was “a statement of considered, cultivated, well-trained deference—to age, to wisdom, to significance.” Verdelle was the only one who called her that.

Miss Chloe began as a short piece Verdelle published in the New York Times after Morrison’s death in 2019: “Miss Chloe taught me more in short exchanges than I’d learned in years of school,” she wrote. An early draft of the book was structured as a series of lessons. But her editor urged Verdelle to include more information about herself: “You have the friendship that everybody else wished they could have.”

Born Angela Jones, Verdelle grew up in Washington, DC; she dropped “the plantation name,” she writes in Miss Chloe, and adopted her maternal grandmother’s maiden name at age 27. Under pressure from her parents to pursue a practical, nonartistic career, Verdelle studied political science at UChicago, did graduate work in the social sciences, and eventually established her own statistics consulting firm. “I can turn words into numbers and then turn numbers back into words,” Verdelle says. “That was how I sold it.”

With a job and a steady income, Verdelle allowed herself to dream. She began by studying the “creativity literature,” she says, including If You Want to Write (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938) by Brenda Ueland and Flow (Harper & Row, 1990) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, AB’60, PhD’65. She read and reread books she loved—analyzing, counting scenes, trying to pick apart how good writing worked. “It was a beautiful time,” she says.

Her debut novel, about the struggles of a young girl who is raised to cook, clean house, and set her own dreams aside, was written with the working title “Trash.” (“The working title is like a coat hook,” Verdelle tells her writing students. “You just use it.”) The UK edition is titled This Rain Coming, which Verdelle’s agent loved but could never remember: “I know it’s This Rain Something.” While mulling over alternatives, “the phrase ‘a good little negress’ just rolled off my tongue,” Verdelle writes in Miss Chloe. “The words seemed like the title, and a gift.”

A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and other literary prizes, The Good Negress was well and widely reviewed: “I’ve never used the word genius in a book review before,” one began. Verdelle, who retains a fascination with numbers, tracked the reviews in a spreadsheet until she hit 150, which she considered a satisfyingly round number.

Meanwhile she had begun a novel about Black cowboys, inspired by her grandfather’s stories of working as a stevedore in Texas. She sold it, unfinished, to a publisher; it remains unpublished.

As Verdelle describes in dispiriting detail in Miss Chloe, the project—which has had several working titles, including “The Peter Cotton Tales” and “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch” (Morrison’s favorite)—was derailed again and again in the publishing process. Verdelle prepared three separate complete revisions, each taking three years. It was this lack of progress that finally led to a rift with Morrison, who told her bluntly, “You don’t need an agent. You need a lawyer.” Ten years later, Verdelle says, she is working on one final revision—and is ready to take Morrison’s advice.

Verdelle has two other works in progress: a collection of essays on the duality of Black existence, “being marginalized and being central at the same time,” and a writing craft book, “Punch and Beauty,” that systematizes revision. Powerful writing, Verdelle says, “has both punch and beauty.”

She left Princeton after six years, having realized “the best use of my energy would be teaching Joneses, Johnsons, Smiths, Washingtons,” Verdelle writes in Miss Chloe. She teaches in the MFA program at Lesley University and coordinates the creative writing program at Morgan State University, a historically Black institution in Baltimore. (Among her reviews on RateMyProfessor.com: “She’s a fabulous teacher. … I love seeing her around campus and giving her a hug!”) Verdelle encourages her students to experiment with writing longhand, as she does: “I value that connection. Brain to hand,” she says.

When she began Miss Chloe, she wasn’t sure she had much to say, so her editor asked for 20 pages. She wrote 100 in six weeks. Published just three years after Morrison died, the book shimmers with beautifully crafted passages, clearly revised and revised again. “I trust that you understand that Toni Morrison was a genius,” Verdelle says. When writing about Toni Morrison, therefore, you have to “write with all you have.”

Arts & Humanities

Books

Writing

Among friends

rsmith — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:10:35 +0000

rsmith Wed, 08/10/2022 - 19:10

Author Tomi Obaro, AB’12, author of the novel Dele Weds Destiny, is a senior editor at BuzzFeed News. (Photography by Reginald Eldridge Jr.)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The Core

Summer/22

In her debut novel, Tomi Obaro, AB’12, writes the story of a 30-year friendship.

Tomi Obaro, AB’12, is not a middle-aged woman. But in her debut novel, Dele Weds Destiny (Knopf, 2022), Obaro writes about middle age poignantly and convincingly, as if it were familiar territory.

Funmi, for example, had always been beautiful. “She still felt in her spirit that she was no more than thirty,” Obaro writes, “but her body was beginning to betray her.” Thinning hair, thickening waist, back fat. She is newly self-conscious around her old friend Enitan, who has not aged in the same way: “a stark contrast from when they were teenagers and Funmi had mainly felt persistent pity.”

The novel, which inspired an auction among 13 interested publishers, centers on Funmi, Enitan, and Zainab, three friends who met at college in Nigeria. They are reunited after 30 years for Funmi’s daughter’s wedding in Lagos. The inspiration for the novel came from observing her mother’s close relationships with her best friends from college, Obaro says: “They all ended up in radically different places, but have been able to maintain deep, meaningful friendships.”

There are younger characters in the novel too—Enitan’s half-American daughter Remi as well as Funmi’s daughter Destiny—but Obaro does not let us into their heads very much. As a writer, she says, it was exciting, and a little frightening, to imagine herself her mother’s age, to “grab for myself that authority.” In Yoruba, Obaro notes, there are no gendered pronouns—no he or she. But there are sharp differentiations around age and seniority.

Obaro writes just as confidently about Nigeria, although this is somewhat unfamiliar territory as well. Born to Nigerian parents, she has never lived there; they visited often when she was a child growing up in the Gambia. (The family also spent time in Surrey, England, and in Ohio.) Obaro researched the political unrest in Nigeria in the 1980s—the period when the three friends met—and occasionally asked her parents veiled questions: “It’s only now they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s why you were asking.’”

At UChicago, Obaro majored in international studies, with no specific career plan. She wrote for the Chicago Maroon and the South Side Weekly, took a few classes in creative nonfiction writing, and after graduation interned at the Washington Post. She is a senior editor at BuzzFeed News, where the writers she has worked with include cultural critic Lauren Michele Jackson, PhD’19.

Obaro began writing Dele Weds Destiny in the summer of 2019, after her twin sister, Dami Obaro, AB’12, moved out of their shared New York apartment, leaving behind her desk. “There’s something about actually having a desk,” Obaro says. “It just made it easier.”

Tomi Obaro wrote movingly about the push-pull of twinship in the essay “To Love Your Sister Is to Grieve Your Twin,” which was included in the Atlantic’s 2017 list of exceptional works of journalism. “Growing apart, or becoming sisters and not twins, was mostly horrifying,” Obaro wrote, “but sometimes it’s a relief.” Dami, who majored in political science, is now assistant attorney general for the state of New York.

Dami was Tomi’s first reader, but didn’t help shape Dele Weds Destiny—other than confirming it was worth reading. “We’re very honest with each other,” Tomi says. She shelved her first attempt at a novel—keeping only the title, Dele Weds Destiny—after Dami’s less-than-enthusiastic response.

When the pandemic hit, Tomi Obaro—like many young New Yorkers—moved back in with her parents. There was nothing to do in suburban Omaha, Nebraska, other than eat all the Nigerian foods she had been craving and write. Soon the manuscript was finished.

Now back in New York, Obaro has a new project underway; too new to talk about. Once again it’s hard to carve out time for writing, although the fact that her job is in editing, not writing, is helpful, she says: “If I were doing any kind of writing every day for work, it would make writing novels much harder.”

Interior monologue

rsmith — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 01:30:07 +0000

rsmith Fri, 02/04/2022 - 19:30

Interior designer Richard Himmel, EX’42, was known for his ebullient personality, his flamboyant taste—which he did not impose on his clients—and his over-the-top book release parties. (Photography by John Reilly)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/22

Decorator and pulp writer Richard Himmel, EX’42 (1920–2000), had a private eye for design.

I pointed to the piano. “You play?”
“A little,” she said.
“Would you play for me?”
“No. I don’t think I’ll ever play again.”
Oh, baby, I was thinking, you’re going to play a lot of things again. You’re going to play a lot of things you never played before.
—Richard Himmel, I’ll Find You

Johnny Maguire—the narrator of I’ll Find You—is right, of course. Shirley is not the demure young Kansas widow she pretends to be. After she fakes her own death, Maguire finds her in Florida, now reinvented as a nightclub singer. A complicated plot, with generous helpings of sex and violence, ensues.

I’ll Find You by Richard Himmel, EX’42, published in 1950, was one of the first paperback originals from Fawcett Gold Medal Books. Short, fast-paced, printed on cheap paper with lurid illustrated covers, Gold Medal paperbacks sold for 25 cents (about $3.00 today) at newsstands, drugstores, and dime stores. I’ll Find You was reprinted five times, and more books featuring self-described “punk” lawyer Johnny Maguire quickly followed: The Chinese Keyhole and I Have Gloria Kirby in 1951, Two Deaths Must Die in 1954, and The Rich and the Damned in 1958.

The series is set in Chicago (though it’s never named), and occasionally Himmel borrows from his UChicago experience or makes in-jokes for the home crowd. In I Have Gloria Kirby, for example, Maguire checks his ex-girlfriend—now a gangster’s moll addicted to heroin—into a hotel under the name “Marion Talbot.” The real Miss Marion Talbot, UChicago’s first dean of women, would have been scandalized. “My mother always said my typewriter should be washed out with soap,” Himmel once said.

Richard Himmel, EX’42, was so fond of the typewriter he used at the Maroon, he bought it and pecked out his potboilers on it, using two fingers. Himmel and his typewriter served as inspiration for this issue’s cover. (Photography by John Himmel)

But Himmel himself was leading “a double life,” as the headline for a 1951 University of Chicago Magazine article phrased it, hyperbolically. Writing “slick fiction that sells and sells” was just a side hustle. Himmel’s day job—aimed at a completely different set of consumers—was “a best-selling business in swank North Shore interiors.”

In the early 1970s, a New York Times article described Himmel as “Chicago’s most successful interior designer.” In 1985, when the Interior Design Hall of Fame was established, he was among the first group of designers inducted. In addition to the residential work, he designed restaurants, nightclubs, country clubs, banks, and even corporate jets. Yet descriptions of interiors are almost entirely absent from his fiction, which is characterized by short sentences, world-weary observations, and, above all, action.

Born in Chicago in 1920, Himmel enrolled at the University in 1938. He studied with Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, as well as novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, a part-time faculty member at the time. Described by classmates as “social arbiter of the years ’39 to ’42,” Himmel wrote a gossip column for the Maroon and was its last editor as a daily paper. He was so fond of the typewriter he used as a freshman reporter at the Maroon (illustrated on this issue’s cover), he bought it and pecked out his potboilers on it, using two fingers.

After serving in the Army during World War II, Himmel returned to Chicago and, with his sister Muriel Lubliner, EX’38, cofounded Lubliner and Himmel. The interior design company started as a furniture business, specializing in remaking antiques in unconventional ways: chairs reupholstered with bright modern fabric, musical instruments transformed into lamps or vases. “It’s the design of the piece, not the antiquity and tradition that I respect,” Himmel once told the New York Times. His first interior design project was a half bathroom in a Lake Shore Drive apartment; when he was finished, the client hired him to do the other 17 rooms.

Himmel married Elinor Bach in 1947. The couple had two children: a daughter, Ellen, and a son, John Maguire Himmel, named after his novels’ Irish protagonist.

In the evenings Himmel worked on his first manuscript, “Heart of the Wilderness.” The dark, brooding story centers on a love triangle: after Jack is killed in the war, his widow, Kit, and his best friend, Rocky, try to make sense of their grief. Although homosexuality is condemned—in a scene in a Paris hotel room, when Jack confesses the true depth of his feelings, Rocky punches him out—their relationship is portrayed sensitively and sympathetically. Literary publishers rejected the manuscript, but it was released as a pulp novel, Soul of Passion, in 1950.

Himmel gave up moonlighting after the fifth Johnny Maguire book, The Rich and the Damned, appeared in 1958; he stopped publishing for almost 20 years as his design career flourished. Although he was discreet about his residential clients, he was known to have worked for Muhammad Ali, gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, and Saul Bellow, EX’39. Himmel was successful, according to a 1971 New York Times article, because he did not impose his taste on his clients: “You tell me, baby, how you live and what you like,” he would say, “and I’ll deliver it.”

Himmel’s own living spaces were as unapologetically splashy as his fiction. His library in the 1970s, for example, had a mirrored skylight, floor-to-ceiling windows, a collection of Napoleonic figurines, a Mickey Mouse telephone, and all of the books—including the first editions—covered in plain white dust jackets. “Outrageous?” he told the New York Times. “Far from it, I call it serene.”

In the 1970s and ’80s Himmel returned to writing, publishing three hardcover spy thrillers: The Twenty-Third Web (Random House, 1977), Lions at Night (Delacorte Press, 1979), and Echo Chambers (Delacorte Press, 1982). (Himmel’s release parties were legendary: for Lions at Night, set in Cuba, he rented a parking lot on Michigan Avenue and brought in lions and men in guerrilla fatigues.) His final manuscript, “The Uncircumcised Jew,” never made it into print.

When Himmel died in 2000 at age 79, he was primarily known for his design work, while his writing—despite the millions of books sold—had fallen into obscurity. In 2019 publisher Cutting Edge Books began reissuing his novels as stand-alone paperbacks (sadly, with far less arresting covers) and in collections with other writers. The Complete Works of Richard Himmel, with all 12 of his published works, was released as an e-book in 2020.

Himmel’s novels were intended to shock, and they still do. He was unembarrassed by his subject matter, with one exception: “I am always afraid,” he told the Magazine in 1951, “that Norman Maclean [PhD’40] will pick up one of my books in an El station, and send it back to me, corrected like one of my old themes.”

In Himmel’s work, sex is celebrated, never punished or shamed—even in the books from the early ’50s. Women characters are not weak: when slapped (as happens not infrequently), their typical reaction is contemptuous laughter. Himmel’s books are transgressive in ways that are both disturbing and exhilarating. They’re also stylish, escapist, breezy, and almost impossible to put down.

Updated 02.14.2022 to note Muriel Lubliner’s affiliation year.

Read an interview with John Maguire Himmel about Richard Himmel’s dual careers as a writer and an interior designer—and what he was like as a father.

Stories about (not by) Bette Howland, AB’55

rsmith — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 21:27:57 +0000

rsmith Thu, 04/01/2021 - 16:27

(Photography by Jacob Howland)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

Web exclusives

04.01.2021

The Hyde Park Book Club discusses Howland’s 1974 novel W-3 and Bette herself.

The February meeting of the Hyde Park Book Club—on Zoom, like everything during the pandemic—begins with a slideshow.

There’s a black-and-white photo of Bette Howland, AB’55, middle-aged, smiling, her chin resting on her fist.

Then headshots of her sons, whom we met as little boys—one dark, one blond—in the pages of Howland’s bleak memoir W-3 (Viking, 1974). The older son, Jacob, his dark hair now salt and pepper, is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa. The younger, Frank, still sandy blond, is professor of economics and leadership at Wabash College in Indiana.

Next comes a photo of New York editor-publisher Brigid Hughes of A Public Space Books—like Bette, in arty black and white, chin on fist—who rediscovered Howland and introduced her to a new generation of readers.

“In 1968,” reads the next slide, “Bette Howland, a divorced single mother of two boys and a struggling author, took an overdose of sleeping pills and was admitted to the University of Chicago psychiatric ward (W-3). W-3 is a memoir of her experience, originally published in 1974 and newly republished in 2021.”

The final slide highlights Bette’s years in Hyde Park: as an undergrad in the early ’50s, she worked as “an au pair of sorts.” In the late ’60s she lived at 56th and Dorchester; Jacob and Frank attended Ray Elementary. From 1993 to 1996 she taught in the Committee on Social Thought.

“Welcome,” says Michal Safar, MBA’77, one of the coordinators of the Hyde Park Book Club, as the slideshow concludes and the screen fragments into a five-by-five grid of faces. It looks like one of those verification tests to prove you’re human: click on the squares that include bookshelves. About a third of them do.

Frank Howland speaks first, adding more depth to the slideshow’s biography: “Not surprisingly my mother loved books and read very widely,” he says, reading from prepared remarks. “But she also loved music, art, architecture, and theater. Among her favorite writers were James Fenimore Cooper, Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hardy, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Primo Levi. … She adored Bach’s cello suites and Schubert’s piano sonatas; loved the Missa Luba, a Latin Mass sung in Congolese style; and was a big fan of Joan Baez and Odetta.”

In her writing, Bette returned again and again to “the people who live on the margins in Chicago—the poor, the old, and the sick—and her family,” Frank continues. “I wasn’t around in the 1940s and early ’50s, but I can say that the portraits she paints of the family in the 1960s and ’70s are dead on.” Jacob, in his square on the opposite side of the screen, smiles and nods knowingly.

While Frank covered the biographical, Jacob focuses on the literary. Bette’s description of the psychiatric ward in W-3, he says, “is the language of myth, of the soul’s journey through territories of ultimacy … a region between life and death.” The structure of the book “has something of the ring structure of ancient epic.” By the end of her stay there, “she finds some saving knowledge and draws from the common stock of myth and literature to fashion her indigenously American, Chicagoan, working class, and female voice.”

Then it’s Brigid Hughes’s turn. Hughes, whose imprint A Public Space Books reissued W-3 in January, first discovered the book in the dollar bin of a secondhand bookshop. In Hughes’s Zoom background, that hardback copy, with its lurid green ’70s lettering, rests on top of her bookshelf on the left; the new hardback edition is on the right. “It feels somehow appropriate to be meeting Bette Howland not directly,” she says, “but through the people she knew and who were important to her.”

Hughes reads the passage from W-3 that first caught her attention while flipping through the dollar-cart copy: “All I knew was this: I couldn’t take it anymore, no longer could bear this burden of concealment. Things seemed bad enough without adding extra weight. I wanted to be rid of it all, all of it. I wanted to abandon all this personal history—its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-lit sorrows and prides—to thrust it from me like a manhole cover.”

When Howland first published W-3, many reviewers remarked upon “how little of her there is in the book, and how much of it is her looking at others,” Hughes says. This unusual approach for a memoir was another reason she was drawn to the book.

Howland with her extended family—the frequent subjects of her stories—in her parents’ West Rogers Park apartment around the time of her hospitalization. Younger son Jacob stands with Howland at right; Frank is at left. (Photo courtesy Frank Howland)

The discussion opens up to the broader group. “I worked in the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago in the middle ’60s, but in outpatient psychiatry,” says Joseph Marlin, AB’54, AM’60. “I did not know her. But I do know that many patients at that time stayed in as inpatients much, much longer than they do now. The standard used to be 120 days, which is almost unthinkable.” The fact that Howland remained in the ward for so long, he suggests, “gave her an opportunity to exercise her perceptions.”

Among tonight’s attendees are several people who did know Howland. “I was just checking in W-3 to find the part that I was in,” says Ruth Knack, AM’70. She and a classmate from graduate school had visited Howland in the hospital. (“They looked as though they had some official status; social workers maybe, or medical students—two pretty, bright-faced, confident young women in short skirts, sandals, with sunburned cheeks,” Howland wrote. “I was proud of my fine visitors.”)

Their portrayal in the book was not negative, Knack says. “We had no nicknames, nothing like the other people. We were kind of stuck in there, and I’ve never really known why.” She appeals to Jacob and Frank: Did their mother ever explain? Do they have theories?

“I’m pleased that you outed yourself, Ruth,” says Jacob. Both laugh. He offers his interpretation: “The whole point of the scene is this contrast between who she was—you’re her friends, she identifies with you, you’re graduate students—and then where she was. She’s always standing between two worlds.”

Later in the discussion, Dottie Jeffries, also one of the book club coordinators, adds her own recollection: “I met Bette in Union Pier, Michigan, in the company of Ruth Knack. One of the things that always struck me was the fondness she had for her grandchildren. She just would get illuminated talking about them.”

“She left Chicago a few years after the events of W-3 and never really lived there again,” Hughes notes. (Howland, who divorced in her twenties and never remarried, moved often, settling in a series of isolated places: an island in Maine, rural Pennsylvania, a Quonset hut near the lake in Michigan, a farm in Indiana.) “Do you know why she left?” she asks Frank and Jacob. “Did she ever think about coming back?”

“She was pretty portable. She didn’t have a lot of stuff,” Jacob says. “She would make her nest everywhere she moved. She loved to cook, made her own yogurt. She was superfit—would always do yoga and swimming. I’m not sure she felt completely settled anywhere.”

“She really liked beautiful places,” says Frank. “She most liked Lake Michigan. She enjoyed walking along the beach every part of the year.” When she moved somewhere new, “she had no trouble making friends.”

Neither one has memories of the time their mother spent in W-3. Frank’s recollections of that year, 1968, include the Democratic National Convention and that their grandfather, Bette’s father, was stabbed in the back on the street and then just walked home. “He had a fairly fleshy back,” he notes. (Jacob dissolves in laughter.) But of his mother’s illness, Frank says, he remembers nothing.

“We had a strong relationship with her,” Frank adds. “She didn’t believe in sidelining children. She didn’t believe that you needed to lose to children in games.” Jacob is laughing again, leaning back in his chair.

“I remember one day she taught us to play poker,” he continues. “Our grandparents arrived in the apartment—this is in Uptown—just at the moment when I burst into tears because my brother had bluffed me out of my little hoard of pennies. My grandparents were appalled.”

“That’s right, I remember that,” says Jacob. “And I’ve been bluffing ever since.”

Arts & Humanities

Writing

Books

Committee on Social Thought

College alumni

How an author wrote the books she wanted to read as a teen

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 20:10:03 +0000

admin Fri, 08/21/2020 - 15:10

Author Samira Ahmed, AB’93, MAT’93, on campus. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she sometimes broke up her routine by writing in Mansueto Library. (Photography by Jean Lachat)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The Core

Summer/20

Growing up, author Samira Ahmed, AB’93, MAT’93, never read a book with a Muslim protagonist. Now she’s written three.

@sam_aye_ahm: She wants to make films & kiss boys--her Muslim parents forbid both. Will a terrorist & Islamophobia shatter her dreams? #pitmatch #YA #CON

@ericsmithrocks: *breaks mouse clicking like button so hard*

Samira Ahmed, AB’93, MAT’93, worked on her manuscript “Swimming Lessons” for seven years, off and on. Mostly off. “I wasn’t even sure how to start,” she says. “I would just—as all writers do—procrastinate by doing research on how to write a book.”

She didn’t like any of the advice she read: cloud diagrams, outlining. Finally she tried writing her idea as a short story. Set at an Indian wedding, that story became part of the first chapter of a “sprawling” 120,000-word manuscript.

Ahmed’s novel centers on 17-year-old Maya Aziz, the only Muslim girl in her Batavia, Illinois, high school. She has a secret boyfriend, as well as an acceptance letter to film school that her parents don’t know about. The family conflict is set against a background of rising Islamophobia.

In 2016, with a trimmed-down manuscript, Ahmed entered Pit Match, a Twitter contest that connected aspiring authors with agents; four days later, she was signed. Her young adult (YA) novel, published as Love, Hate & Other Filters (Soho Teen, 2018), was on the New York Times best-seller list in less than a month.

Now that Ahmed has found a writing practice that works for her, she’s published two more YA books in two years. “I write a short story first. That’s my treatment,” she says. “I write a story around the protagonist, try to get a couple other main characters in there, and see if I like where this could go. Do I like that character and world enough to write 70,000 or 80,000 words or more?”

Her second book, Internment (Little, Brown, 2019), explores similar themes as the first, but it’s set in a bleaker world. After the election of an Islamophobic president, Muslims are rounded up and sent to an internment camp. The protagonist, Layla Amin, rebels against her new circumstances—disregarding the objections of her parents and some camp inmates, who just want to survive. Internment was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, which described the book’s setting as “a Trump-like America” and categorized it as “realistic fiction.”

This year Ahmed published her third book, Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know (Soho Teen). The title, as contemporary as it sounds, comes from a description of Lord Byron by one of his spurned lovers.

The narration alternates between Khayyam Maquet, a French American teenager spending the summer in Paris in the present day, and Leila, struggling to survive in a harem 200 years earlier. The book draws on research Ahmed did more than 25 years ago for her bachelor’s thesis, which examined Byron’s poetry in the context of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt.

One of the poems Ahmed analyzed was “The Giaour.” In the poem Leila, a member of a harem, is thrown into the ocean in a sack as punishment for infidelity. Although the poem is long and features multiple points of view, Leila “literally has no voice in the story at all,” Ahmed says. In Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know, she finally gets her voice.

Growing up Ahmed never read a single book with a Muslim protagonist. “Every child should be able to see themselves as a hero on the page,” she says. “The first time I felt like I saw myself in a book—that wasn’t written by an Indian in Hindi or Urdu and then translated—was Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.” Multiple stories in the collection, published in 1999, made Ahmed think, “Yes, this is a piece of me here.”

After graduating from UChicago, Ahmed taught high school, first in the Chicago suburbs, then in New York. “I just love those teen years. It’s such an interesting group to teach and to write for,” she says. “Teens are really on the threshold between childhood and adulthood—a liminal space, a space that has hope in it. I naturally am a writer who leans into hope.”

Arts & Humanities

Books

Writing

Stephanie Soileau, AB’98

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 19:29:33 +0000

admin Fri, 08/21/2020 - 14:29

(Illustration by Benjamin Wachenje)

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/20

Questions for the creative writing faculty member, College alumna, and author of Last One Out Shut Off the Lights.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

Unrealistically: busking on the streets of New Orleans with an old-time string band, captaining a shrimp trawler in Barataria Bay, field reporting on oil industry abuses and environmental degradation in the Niger Delta.

Realistically: collecting oral histories and folklore in Gulf Coast Louisiana.

What do you hate that everyone else loves?

John Cusack, picnics, kite flying, board games, brunch (the event, not the food), falafel, comedies, bike riding, Saturday programming on NPR (Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, A Prairie Home Companion), #Caturday, wind.

So, basically, if John Cusack showed up one fine, breezy Saturday morning with his boom box blasting Garrison Keillor, a picnic basket of falafel sandwiches on his arm, Scrabble and a kite strapped to his bike, and a phone full of adorable cat photos, I’d fetch my slingshot and tell him to get off my lawn.

I know. I’m a monster.

What do you love that everyone else hates?

Mayo and bologna sandwiches on white bread. Or olive loaf instead of bologna, if I’m feeling fancy.

What was the last book you finished?

The novel Valentine by my dear friend Elizabeth Wetmore. It came out in March of this year, and it’s already a raging success, with good reason. Set in West Texas in the 1970s, it gives voice to women doing their damnedest to survive the brutal, toxic, masculine culture of a boom-and-bust oil economy.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Every time I find a copy of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson in a used bookstore, I buy it and give it away to the next person I see who might love it or need it. I’m also always recommending The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (which will make you feel like you’ve lived an extra lifetime), The Changeling by Victor LaValle, The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders—all very different kinds of books, and all exactly what I needed at the time when I read them.

And if you want to try something brand-spanking new: Inheritors, an incredibly sophisticated collection of stories about post-Imperial Japan by Asako Serizawa, and Scorpionfish, a novel by Natalie Bakopoulos that has drawn much-deserved comparisons with Ferrante’s work.

What book changed your life?

When I read Les Miserables at 14 years old, I thought My God, a novel can do all that? It’s history and morality tale and philosophy and psychological case study and high (melo)drama all at once. At the time I read it, I remember feeling deeply changed (as only a 14-year-old can be) —in my behavior and belief systems, in my reverence for human beings and for the writers telling our stories. That’s when writing became a vocation for me, in a nearly religious sense. Some of that ardor has faded, of course, but Les Miserables is still a touchstone when I need to remember why the hell I’m still doing this.

What person, alive or dead, would you want to write your life story?

For a while there, my old bachelor daddy’s neighbors were trying to set him up with ladies, but he wouldn’t have it. “When the time comes, if it does,” he said, “I believe I’ll do my own shopping.” That’s how I feel about this question. When the time comes, if it does, I believe I’ll do my own writing.

What’s your least useful talent?

I’ve gotten pretty good at knitting one sock. I mean, every pair ends up that way anyhow, right?

Who was your best teacher, and why?

Jim McPherson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hands down. A Black man from a working-class family in Savannah, Georgia, he got a law degree at Harvard and went on to write some of the wisest, most humane essays and short stories I can think of (check out Elbow Room: Stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978, Crabcakes: A Memoir, and A Region Not Home: Reflections on Exile). He was also so generous with his books and vinyl, his thoughts, his time, and his kindness, and he gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me about fiction writing: “You speak two languages,” he said of my Southern blue-collar background and my white-collar UChicago education. “You have to use them both.” I left every visit to his office with a tower of books and often found articles about Cajuns or trailer parks or the eternal return that he’d tucked in my mail cubby. His enthusiastic engagement with my writing taught me to care about my writing, and his impulse to draw from eclectic sources helped me discover what kind of writer—and what kind of teacher—I wanted to be.

What did you learn at UChicago that still benefits you today?

I could go on about how the Common Core at UChicago taught me to be broadly inquisitive, to recognize patterns across disciplines—how important that has been to my fiction writing. That makes me sound like such a company girl, but it’s true!

Maybe more important, though? When I moved from my mama’s single wide in South Louisiana to the dreamy, monastic fortress of UChicago, I was thrilled – and terrified into silence. Over those four years of undergrad, I had to learn to speak up, to show up, to recognize and try to overcome my first-gen imposter syndrome (though we didn’t have those words for it back then). I learned to stop saying yes sir and yes ma’am. I learned—or started learning, anyway—am still learning now—not to be intimidated by others’ socioeconomic and educational privilege. I learned that I belonged here too.

What UChicago classroom moment will you never forget, in three sentences or less?

My junior year, I took a class with Bill Veeder on the American gothic, and he gave a lecture on “Bartleby, the Scrivener” that brought me to tears. He was such a great lecturer because he is a natural storyteller with a contagious enthusiasm for literature. He was also so supportive of my fiction writing. I’m not sure I would have kept at it if it hadn’t been for his encouragement.

Rediscovering Bette Howland

admin — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 15:55:21 +0000

admin Thu, 11/07/2019 - 09:55

Bette Howland, AB’55, in an undated photo, which she sent to her longtime friend and mentor Saul Bellow, EX’39. (Photography by Wolfgang (Bill) Price; Bellow, Saul. Papers, Box 32, Folder 8, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/19

How the work of a celebrated Chicago writer was lost and found again.

It was the cover that drew Brigid Hughes in.

The book, which she picked out of the bargain bin at Manhattan’s Housing Works Books in 2015, had “this fabulous 1970s cover” with neon green lettering. On the back, a blurb from Saul Bellow, EX’39.

Hughes had never heard of the author, and it is her business to know authors. She was the second editor of the Paris Review, after George Plimpton; then she founded the literary magazine A Public Space.

“I’m sure you’ve had those moments,” she says. “You open a page at random and there’s a sentence or a paragraph that resonates very powerfully.” The book’s price: one dollar. Hughes bought it.

W-3 (Viking, 1974), the first book by Bette Howland, AB’55, is a lightly fictionalized memoir of her stay in the University of Chicago hospital’s psychiatric ward, recovering from a suicide attempt. Hughes read the book quickly, though she found it harrowing: “There are a number of sentences where you want to pause and take them in and walk around thinking about them.”

She wanted to know more about Howland. An internet search brought up nothing at first. More digging yielded an obituary for Howland’s mother, which mentioned a grandson, Jacob, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. Bette Howland was his mother, Jacob confirmed, and she was still alive. But she was suffering from multiple sclerosis and dementia.

Later in 2015, with Jacob’s help, A Public Space published a portfolio of Howland’s work. It included two short stories (one, discovered in a Tulsa safe deposit box, published for the first time), an essay on heroines in American literature, and excerpts from postcards and letters sent by Bellow (also from the safe deposit box). Jacob told his mother all about it; she was “mildly pleased,” he says.

In October 2017, two months before Howland’s death, Hughes launched an imprint, A Public Space Books. Its first publication, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (2019), includes a novella of the same title and 10 other short stories by Howland. Now articles and reviews are everywhere: the Paris Review, the New York Times, Harper’s, Lithub, the Wall Street Journal.

But Howland’s reviews were always good. A Commentary review of W-3 points out that, unlike other memoirists of mental illness, “she writes as if she were a participant-observer, a novelist-anthropologist in a strange, often perplexing new place.” When her second book, Blue in Chicago (Harper & Row, 1978) was published, Studs Terkel, PhB’32, JD’34, invited her on his WFMT radio show. “Bette Howland is one of the most perceptive observers of a city, Chicago,” he said, introducing his guest. “Her picture of the city is a haunting one, a poignant one.” The New York Times described her third and final book, Things to Come and Go (Knopf, 1983), as “a quirky collection of three long stories by a writer of unusual talent, power and intelligence,” just like “the brilliantly executed Blue in Chicago.”

How did a well-reviewed writer with such a prestigious pedigree—an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1984—come to be so thoroughly forgotten?

After discovering Bette Howland’s (AB’55) memoir W-3 in 2015, editor Brigid Hughes became fascinated with the writer’s story. Hughes’s imprint published a new edition of Howland’s work, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, earlier this year. (W-3 cover courtesy Viking; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage cover courtesy A Public Space; Blue in Chicago cover courtesy Harper & Row; Things to Come and Go cover courtesy Knopf)

Author and critic Bill Savage, who teaches Chicago literature at Northwestern University, wrote his dissertation on how Nelson Algren was precanonical, canonical, and then decanonized. (Twenty years later, he’s being canonized again.)

When Savage teaches canon formation, he starts by explaining the competing definitions. “There’s the right-wing, conservative, Allan Bloom [PhB’49, AM’53, PhD’55], Saul Bellow definition,” he says. “The canon is those timeless works that everyone agrees speak universal human truth. ... It is the canon, singular.” But this notion is not historically accurate, he says: “Things move in and out of canonicity. Shakespeare was the equivalent of television. Twain was the equivalent of Game of Thrones—pop fiction.”

The “left-wing idea,” in contrast, claims “the canon is just a political process by which people in power make other people read things. That has truth to it too, but it’s not 100 percent.” (His own preferred definition: the canon is that list of books and/or writers that educated people “either have read, feel guilty about not having read, or can fake having read.”)

When editors like Hughes seek to broaden the canon, they often look for “scenes,” as Savage puts it: “who’s sleeping with who, who’s publishing each other’s work, who’s blurbing each other.” Howland’s relationship with Bellow encompassed all three.

Among Bellow’s papers in the UChicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center is a decades-long correspondence between the two. Howland sent Bellow numerous short stories, including at least one that to my knowledge has not been published anywhere. I immediately emailed Jacob to let him know.

“See, you are demonstrating how the canon process works,” Savage says. “You’re part of that process too, with the alumni magazine.”

Howland around 1940 in front of her childhood home in West Lawndale. In later years, Howland’s relationship with her parents grew strained—but she never stopped writing about them. (Photo courtesy Frank Howland)

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. … At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.—W-3

Bette Sotonoff was born in 1937—in January, of course, the bitterest month of the bitter Chicago winter—and grew up in Lawndale on the West Side. Her father was a factory worker, her mother a social worker. At 15 she enrolled at the University, earning a 12th-grade certificate in 1953 and taking the blandly named Core courses of the time: humanities, history, and so on.

For her final quarter, autumn 1955, her transcript lists five law classes: Elements of the Law, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Torts, and a tutorial. But rather than completing a law degree, she withdrew her registration in January 1956 and married Howard Howland, AB’52, who became a prominent neurobiologist. She was 19.

The couple had two sons, Frank (born in 1958) and Jacob (born in 1959). Around the same time, Bette Howland’s first published stories began to appear: “Sam Katz” in the literary magazine Epoch, “Julia” in the Quarterly Review of Literature.

In July 1961 she attended a two-week literary conference at Wagner College on Staten Island, where Edward Albee taught drama, Robert Lowell poetry, and Saul Bellow fiction. Howland, then 24, and Bellow, 46, were immediately taken with each other. “Bette was easily the most accomplished of the young people who had signed up,” Bellow wrote in a recommendation for her more than 30 years later. “Even then, before she had fully organized her talents, she was quite obviously the real thing.”

In August Howland sent Bellow a submission to his literary magazine. “I’ve no great hopes that Noble Savage will take this, in spite of its commendable qualities and my fine connections,” she wrote. The story is not with the letter in Bellow’s papers, but presumably it was “Aronesti,” published in Noble Savage in 1962, along with work by Nelson Algren and Arthur Miller.

When Howland was visiting her parents in Chicago that winter, Bellow phoned; he was spending a quarter as “Celebrity in Residence”—so named by the University’s public relations office—in the English department. (Bellow had just married Susan Glassman, AM’73, wife number three of five, but she remained in New York.) “It was his alma mater; mine too; and one of the few places you really can go back to—maybe, in Chicago, the only place,” Howland recalled in an unpublished scrap of memoir titled “Herzog’s Bellow.” He invited her to a small gathering with Algren and a group of visiting Russian writers. As glamorous as that sounds, the evening, in Howland’s retelling, was awkward and tiresome.

By 1963 Howland was a divorcée—“that lurid word,” she called it in W-3, “that benighted condition”—and had enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, partly thanks to Bellow’s recommendation. Howland completed her MFA in 1967. Her thesis, “The Iron Year,” includes early versions of some of the stories published a decade later in Blue in Chicago.

In letters to Bellow from Iowa, she insisted that she was happy there, but an incident at the very end marred it. Her thesis had a minor error in formatting. A secretary refused to accept it, and she was not allowed to graduate with her class. Howland never forgot; she refused to let the school ever use her name.

By 1968 Howland was living in the same decrepit Uptown building as her grandmother, working part time at the branch library and editing manuscripts for the University of Chicago Press. It was not much to raise a family on. Jacob, whose darkly funny observations mirror his mother’s, recalled in an essay that the three of them once collected six dollars in change from a puddle of blood in their building: “We needed the money.”

Around this time, Howland was hospitalized. The unnamed narrator of W-3 (the name of the psychiatric ward) does not die, despite the bottle of sleeping pills she swallowed, because she immediately thinks better of it and calls the doctor, who alerts the police. In real life, Howland took the pills in Bellow’s apartment. According to Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader, Bellow discovered her and probably hushed everything up.

But Howland rarely hushed anything. W-3 is an unsparing look at life in a psychiatric ward: the humiliations of institutional life, the peculiar behavior of the patients, the haplessness of the doctors and nurses, whose speech is usually rendered in all caps. “NOW YOU’RE MUCH TOO YOUNG, TOO PRETTY A GIRL, TO HAVE TRIED A THING LIKE THAT,” she is told soon after she’s admitted. “NOW THAT WON’T DO AT ALL.” Her young sons are not allowed to visit. In one heartbreaking scene, her mother brings them by so she can wave to them from the window; they can hear their mother’s voice calling but can’t find her. “It was a terrible thing I had done to them,” Howland writes. “And I felt like a ghost.”

W-3 ends on an optimistic note: her sons return from her parents’ home in Florida, she moves to a new apartment, she paints the walls late at night as the boys sleep. In reality Howland still wasn’t well. Her sons begged their father to let them live with him and his new wife, who was pregnant with their first child; Frank and Jacob visited their mother during the summers.

She made every effort to make up for her absence, both sons recall, taking them to concerts, museums, and plays, and on trips abroad. “She loved us very much,” says Jacob. “But having said that, her writing always came first.”

Howland with her son Frank (left), novelist Henry Roth (far right), and Roth’s wife, Muriel, around 1980. (Photo courtesy Frank Howland)

It seems to me that there is something immoral—because inattentive—about reading when your body is in transit. And maybe I felt even then that I should be paying attention instead. But paying attention to what?—“Blue in Chicago,” Blue in Chicago

In 1971, at Bellow’s suggestion, Howland enrolled as a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought, where he had recently become chair. During this period she published several short pieces in Commentary.

“Public Facilities—A Memoir” is set in the Borglum Branch (actually Bezazian) of the Chicago Public Library in Uptown, where she had worked part time. Howland writes mercilessly about its oddball librarians and shabby regulars: the elderly, the poor, the nobodies with nowhere else to go. (The story is “hilarious,” says Bill Savage. “It should be samizdat-xeroxed and sent to every library branch in CPL.”) Commentary published a long, furious letter from Bezazian’s reference librarian: “Parts of her article were highly exaggerated and other parts were downright fictitious and malicious.”

In 1974, the final year Howland was enrolled in the committee, W-3 came out. Her thesis, never completed, was on Henry James.

Howland’s second book, Blue in Chicago, collected six short pieces, four previously published in Commentary. Readers, even professional ones, weren’t sure what to make of Blue in Chicago: Was it a short story collection or not? Some publications reviewed it as fiction, others as nonfiction. “I certainly don’t want it reviewed as fiction,” Howland complained to Bellow. “For one thing, I went to a hell of a lot of trouble—no one will ever know how much—to work with the facts.”

Throughout Blue in Chicago—as in her work in general—Howland’s powers of observation are like military-grade weapons, deployed most often against her family. Her mother “seemed to talk only when her mouth was full and her cheek was bulging like a fist. As if she were chewing a quid of tobacco, and about to squirt.” Uncle Rudy “had to be trundled through high school in a wheelbarrow.” The house he shares with Aunt Roxy: “Unmade beds, unwashed cups, cigarette butts, dishes in the sink; it’s like a frat house.” There’s more.

“I recognized everybody, and she just nails them,” says son Jacob. What did her relatives think of these sharply drawn portraits? “Roxanne—that’s my Aunt Jane. She loved it. She just was so thrilled. ... Her husband, not so much.” What his grandparents thought, Jacob never knew. Although Howland wrote of her parents again and again, her relationship with them was strained to the point of breaking. She didn’t speak to her father for years, “until she couldn’t speak to him anymore, because he was in a coma, on his deathbed,” says Jacob. “She expressed the love in her writing.”

Writing from life was what Bellow was known for too, and in his novel More Die of Heartbreak (Morrow, 1987) it was Howland’s turn. The character Dita Schwartz, based on Howland, is self-conscious about her acne scars, so she tries a new technique, dermabrasion, to smooth them. Bellow writes about her coarse skin and her gruesome recovery from the procedure in cruel detail.

How must Howland have felt? Her letter to Bellow offers few clues. “I’m longing to talk with you,” she wrote. “Your book held me strangely; I dreamed of it every night. It was like seeing you or talking to you—& yet still in a kind of disguise.” Their correspondence, and friendship, continued.

There is nothing here I would ever choose—and nothing I can ever part with.—“The Life You Gave Me,” Things to Come and Go

In 1983 Howland published her third book, Things to Come and Go: Three Stories (Knopf). The following year she won a MacArthur Fellowship, thanks to the strong support of Bellow, who served as an evaluator. Yet in the last three decades of her life, with her children grown and financial pressures removed, she published no more books. It’s not clear why.

Her biography on the MacArthur Foundation site states “she is at work on a monograph, Jacob: A Life, and a short novel, A Time for Kennedys.” Neither of those works ever appeared.

In 1993 Howland accepted a three-year position teaching literature in the Committee on Social Thought. The CV she submitted includes two books described as “in progress”: “The Landlady (Knopf, 1992)” and “Grisha Lapidus: My Life (Knopf, under contract).” Those books were never published either. (Her CV also lists her 10 years in the Chicago Public Schools while omitting her MFA from Iowa, although a terminal degree from a respected program would have made her hiring easier.)

Seeing his friend’s career stalling, Bellow, as always, tried to help, submitting her work to his new agent and to the New Yorker: “You are not likely to have heard of her, although she is the author of several books of the highest quality, each of them a succès d’estime.”

Howland continued to write and to publish literary criticism. Jacob suspects winning the MacArthur sapped her confidence; too much was expected from a certified genius. In 1999 she published her final piece of creative work, the novella “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” in the literary magazine TriQuarterly. The journal’s former editor told the New York Times: “She seemed doubtful of the worth of what she had done and of what she was doing, and she was reluctant to be published.”

Howland’s older son, Frank, blames her perfectionism. “She spent a lot of time trying to write things that didn’t come out,” he says, such as Grisha Lapidus. “She never completed that to her satisfaction.”

The novel was based on an unpublished memoir by her grandfather’s cousin. Born in Europe, he lived in Palestine, got caught up in the Russian Revolution and the Mexican Revolution—then moved to New York and led an entirely ordinary life. Frank has a 200-page typescript, plus a large sketch pad—14 by 17 inches—with 80 pages, front and back, written in pencil. “This is clearly something she hoped to publish after the MacArthur award.”

By 2005 “cognitive decline begins to set in,” says Frank. She had learned to use a computer but would get confused and lose her revisions. Howland was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010, and in 2014, while walking home from the grocery store, she was hit by a pickup truck, which worsened her dementia. As Jacob wrote at the time, “Her words scatter like vegetables bouncing on asphalt.”

A year after the accident, the neon-green cover art of W-3 caught Brigid Hughes’s eye.

Illness, old age, funerals, and death were constant themes in Howland’s writing. An observer to the core, she seemed aware of her diminished capacities, Jacob says. One writer, A. N. Devers, insisted on trying to interview her; Jacob agreed to let her. “What does it feel like to be Bette Howland?” Devers asked.

“Bette Howland died a long time ago,” she replied.

What would she have made of the furor over her rediscovered work? Jacob suspects she would be irritated by the focus on gender, a perpetual theme in reviews and articles. “I can hear her voice saying, ‘I’m not just a woman writer, I’m a writer,’” he says. “She thought of herself as an American writer, and more specifically as a Chicago writer,” working in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright.

And yet she was a woman writer, writing from her own distinct perspective—as a daughter, as a mother—and that fact shifts the Chicago literature canon, which is still “a boys’ club, a sausage fest,” as Savage puts it. Its beginning is often traced to Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” Savage says, “where he actually personified the city as a working-class man.” (Interestingly, the few women writers added to the canon in the more recent decades—Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros—are all women of color.)

One mark of canonicity, of course, is the price of first editions. Wanting to buy Blue in Chicago, Savage searched online, but all the copies he found cost hundreds of dollars. Until this year, Howland’s work had never been available in paperback.

Brigid Hughes keeps that bargain-bin copy of W-3 on her desk at A Public Space. The bright orange “$1.00” sticker is on the back, a few inches below Bellow’s blurb: “I was much moved by W-3. ... No poses are struck and no vain gestures made in this brave and honorable book. Bette Howland is a real writer.”

Read the short story “Po wer Failure” by Bette Howland.

Updated 11.15.2019 to correct Bette Howland’s degrees and the photo credits. All family photos are courtesy Frank Howland.

Updated 01.08.2020 to note that the story quoted the former editor of TriQuarterly.

Arts & Humanities

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College alumni

Two poems by Rosanna Warren

rsmith — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 14:49:33 +0000

rsmith Thu, 08/15/2019 - 09:49

Rosanna Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, and a poet and translator whom critics invariably seem to wish more people knew about. (Photography by Ann Ryan)

Rosanna Warren

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08.15.2019

In 2020 W. W. Norton will publish Rosanna Warren’s fifth book of poetry, So Forth. With the permission of the poet, we share two poems that will appear in the volume

Sans Domicile Fixe

Clouds like boulders. Boulders
like petrified clouds that rolled down
and stalled in the meadow—that was

yesterday. Now we’re in the centripetal apartment
with peonies ageing in two
vases, pink and cream petals

frizzling into crepe. Mirrors multiply
the years: I see you seeing me
in the gilt-framed oval by the desk, I see us both

in the window reflected in the closet door glass.
My eye-corners crease. Flecks of dark chocolate
streak the inner spines of all the books—

words are drugs, love is a drug—while Europe
contracts into dark burgundy upholstery and cushions.
Deep in the French-English dictionary, three asterisks

mark extreme vulgarity. How long
can we stay here? Outside,
the new homeless twist dreadlocks

and pace their mastiffs. Tattoos bulge
on their forearms, paper wrappers
and crushed cans clot the gutter.

Sun leaps off the roof tiles. A brisk
sea wind. In the mountains, those small purple flowers
with pods and curling tendrils (now you tell me) were vetch.

Originally published in Raritan.

Rosanna Warren at home in Vermont. (Photography by Joel E. Cohen)

Glaucoma

Garnet flashes in the wild turkey’s wattle
as late sun singes the far edge of the meadow.
Lace-work bird-calls unravel little by little
into a frayed cat’s cradle for catching shadow.

Ceremonial as bishops in their jerking strut,
the turkeys process into the transept of white pines
up the slope, where the millefeuille shale lies shut
in an ancient book, all scribbled between the lines.

The yellow fungus arrays its party dress
over petticoat and flounces. It dreams of rot.
The stream, silver-tongued, has more to discuss
as day grows tired and changes the subject, but

only in highlights now, and undertone.
The black bear, on our walk, gave me a hard look,
then lollopped up the hill this afternoon
melting into the grove of beeches across the brook.

We’re all melting. This house is not our own.
Daily, my vision fails. What will it be
no longer to stare at bronze beech leaves strewn
on the loamy floor, at the stream’s currency, not to see

the pearled, shadowless dawn unspool the field?
At the edge of the pond, a single heron stood,
a hieroglyph. I don’t know what he spelled.
And Diana’s last look, just days before she died:

enlarged by disease and sleeplessness, her eyes
searched mine as if across a no-man’s-land,
and as if, by gazing, she could memorize
my face. I gazed back, wordless, stroking her hand.

Evening has settled now in the apple boughs,
the turkeys have gone. A half moon chalks the sky.
The stream keeps lisping the only story it knows,
and a loosened cobweb veils the moon’s eye.

Originally published in the New Yorker.

Committee on Social Thought