Maitresse

A second Second Sex

 
Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).

Viewed by many as feminism's foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.

An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too.  Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir's idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.

Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer's watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem.  Glazer writes,

In addition to misconstruing words and phrases, the American edition deleted nearly 15 percent of the original French text (about 145 pages), seriously weakening the sections dealing with women's literature and history -- Beauvoir being one of the first to declare these as legitimate subjects for study. Gone were numerous quotations from women's novels and diaries, including those of Virginia Woolf, Colette and Sophie Tolstoy, that she used to support her arguments. Little-known historical accounts of women who defied feminine stereotypes, like Renaissance noblewomen who led armies, also vanished from the English edition.

What went wrong with ''The Second Sex''? The answer may be as simple as the word ''sex.'' When Blanche Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and an editor in her own right, bought the book on a trip to France, she was under the impression that it was ''a modern-day sex manual'' akin to the Kinsey report, Deirdre Bair writes in her biography ''Simone de Beauvoir'' (1990). Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,'' sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book. Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy -- certainly not in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an adherent.

Capitalizing on the momentum kicked off by Glazer's article, Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign rights director of Gallimard, convinced Jonathan Cape and Knopf that they had to do a new translation, this time by translators who were feminists, who understood  Beauvoir's arguments, and who would restore the missing 20% of the book. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde, two Americans living in Paris, won the commission, and, with the support of the Centre National du Livre, the contracts were signed and the re-translating began. (See also Sarah Glazer's 2007 article in Bookforum for more on how this came about.)

Le Monde has the up to date story here.

*For a scholarly accounting of what's missing from the Parshley translation, and some of the issues at stake in translating Beauvoir, here is Margaret Simons's groundbreaking 1983 article, and here is one by Toril Moi from 2001.

I haven't seen the new translation yet, but I hope to get my hands on a copy soon.

writing & residing at Shakespeare & Co.

If you aren't already subscribed to the Shakespeare & Co email newsletter, I highly recommend you put yourself on the list. Every month they send out a message stuffed with interesting tidbits, quotes, reviews, ideas, and news about upcoming events at the shop. You can sign up at their site, look in the upper left-hand corner for the words "sign up here".

This month's newsletter includes a few words from Michael Smith, author of The Giro Playboy and most recently Shakespeare & Co's writer-in-residence, on his time living above the bookshop in the special room reserved for visiting writers (which I hope he doesn't mind my excerpting here):

I had wanted to stay ever since a friend told me about this mythical room years ago, and now here I was, sitting at the big wooden desk below the guilded [sic] Belle Epoque mirror, hammering the words out while ‘Three Blind Mice’ peeled out from the bells of Notre Dame beyond the tall French windows... its gothic towers dominated the view from the little room covered floor to ceiling in rare and wonderful books... if you closed your eyes and reached out and picked one, it was virtually guaranteed to be fascinating... the place is a “free university” indeed... I would take a breather from the writing and the books and wander over the bridges of the islands while the Seine flowed beneath and Paris played out her promise to inspire the best in us... one afternoon I ended up in the Marais, and Proust’s writing room, which was covered in cork so he could work without the city sounds distracting him; I loved it; I thought my room, alive with the sounds of unfamiliar French police sirens and the ding dang dong of Notre Dame was better... one evening I found out Burroughs had written parts of Junkie or Naked Lunch in the same room I was staying in, and later on a great dirty cockroach scurried across the desk and winked at me from behind my cheese plate... the little bastard was a living link to a great and noble tradition, I thought, and I was very happy to be sharing that room and that tradition with him... so as I sit here now, remembering it all in the East End of London, I raise a glass to that noble tradition, and to Shakespeare and Co, and to all who sail in her. --Michael Smith

I'm not sure I would have found the cockroach as inspiring as he did (which is why I'm glad I'm a writer with my own roach-free apartment here in Paris), but the rest sounds pretty great.

Women and the Occupation of Paris

You might remember that last year I mentioned there was a controversy here in Paris over an exhibit at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris showing a number of photographs by André Zucca of a very normal-looking Paris under the Nazi Occupation.

That controversy lives again in a very fine essay by Ian Buruma in this week's New York Review of Books:

When a cache of these pictures was exhibited at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris last year, the press reacted with dismay. How could this "celebration of the victor," "underlining the sweetness of life in an occupied country," take place "without any explanation"?

Buruma has an interesting take. "Perhaps there should have been more explanation," he writes,

but the pictures are only tendentious in what they do not show. You don't see people being rounded up. There is only one blurred image of an old woman walking along the rue de Rivoli wearing a yellow star. There are no photographs of endless queues in front of half-empty food stores. There are no pictures of Drancy, where Jews were held in appalling conditions before being transported east in cattle trains. But what Zucca's pictures do show, always in fine Agfacolor weather, is still revealing. They are disturbing to the modern viewer precisely because of their peculiar air of normality, the sense of life going on while atrocities were happening, as it were, around the corner.

Buruma effectively illustrates that there were at least two Parises under the Occupation, one normal one, for non-Jews, and one of "barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star," as Hélène Berr wrote in her journal.  Apart from those suffering deportation and death, the vast majority of Parisians under the Occupation were "just trying to get by." 

What is interesting in Buruma's piece is his discussion of French journalist Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques, which examines the way the body of the "Boche's girl," the French women accused of horizontal collaboration, became a site of conflict, occupation, and collaboration as much as Paris itself. Buisson "shows

that the presence of large numbers of German soldiers meant liberation of a kind for large numbers of French women: young women rebelling against the authoritarian strictures of bourgeois life, middle-aged spinsters yearning for romance, widows, women alone, women in bad marriages, and so on. Buisson does not ask us to admire these tens of thousands of women engaging in "horizontal collaboration," but to comprehend the complexity of their motives.

He is scornful of the movie stars, fashion folks, and social climbers who did better than most, thanks to their German contacts or lovers: Arletty, Coco Chanel, Suzy Solidor, et al. But he is just as hard on the men who took their revenge after the war on the army of unknown women who had strayed into German arms. Such women were stripped naked and paraded through the streets, shorn of their hair, their bodies daubed with swastikas, jeered at by the mob. Buisson writes:

When the Germans were defeated, or about to be defeated, the "Boche's girl" served as a substitute to prolong a battle that no longer held any dangers and affirmed a manliness that had not always been employed in other circumstances....

At last year's MLA in San Francisco, I gave a talk about Claude Cahun's wartime resistance activities on the Channel island of Jersey on a panel entitled "French Women Write the Résistance." We had a serious turnout given that the panel was at 8:30 in the morning, and during the discussion section a rigorous debate took place, which indicated to us (confirmed by this article) that this is very much a discussion people want to be thinking about right now, and thinking about in new ways. Couching the discussion of French resistance and collaboration in gendered terms seems to be one of these productive ways of re-thinking this historical moment. My co-panelists and I have put together a book proposal on the topic, which I believe is on submission at UPenn UP, so we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, do read Buruma's essay.

Rose Alley

My review of Jeremy M. Davies's recent novel Rose Alley is up over at The Second Pass.

An excerpt:

“The authentic experiences of the nineteen sixties will be composed of memories that will be a little bit mistaken.” Thus runs the epigraph, by F.T. Castle, to Jeremy M. Davies’ Rose Alley, and it’s as good a description of the novel as any. Ostensibly about the filming of an avant-garde film set in Paris during the student riots of May 1968, it is more of an album de famille, a series of portraits of the eccentric personalities collaborating on the film.

Also called Rose Alley, the film is a Restoration drama about the ambush of Poet Laureate John Dryden in an alleyway near Covent Garden in 1679 by thugs working for John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a rather bawdy fellow poet who was angered by Dryden’s essay on satire (and jealous of his favor with the king). But this historical kerfuffle is not the point. The point is, the film just can’t get made. Or rather, what gets made is in no way a fulfillment of the original idea.

The novel is structured as a trip into the archives of the film, decades later, compiled and catalogued by an unidentified narrator. You read it as if you’ve found a scrapbook of people you don’t know. (This involves a lot of rereading and cross-checking to make sure you’ve got everyone straight in your head; Davies has anticipated this, and has helpfully provided an index.) One by one, Davies trains his lens on the producer, director, leading lady, screenwriter, and assorted members of the cast and crew, zooming in tightly to look for the wrinkles and pockmarks, and just as the frame clicks into focus — just as we think we have a handle on this terribly strange and specific character — we cut to someone else.

Until the image clarifies, the characters feel as if they’re always getting away from us; peculiar details stand out, but the rest of the image blurs. “Here was the faux Jew with his six gold Stars of David swinging between open fifth and fourth shirt buttons, and then the real one with his Flemish accent, ersatz Spanish name, and Moorish features embalmed in a pale Northern face.” The screenwriter was raised by parents who stuttered so badly that they communicated exclusively by whistling the choruses of popular tunes: “He proposed with ‘Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter’ — risky — and she accepted with ‘Deed I Do.’ ” The oddities of these deeply flawed characters are like nothing you’ve ever read in fiction; Dickensian with a dollop of Pynchon, or Barnesian (Djuna, that is) with a veneer of Nabokov. Cheeky, but brilliant, the novel is so sexual it can’t keep its hands to itself.

Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company

Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and here and documented here-- this one caught me and Badaude sitting on a bench, front and center!) she suggested doing the same thing to Sylvia's wall that she did to my blog! And the result is so fantastic I can't even tell you! Look:

But I'm not the only one who thinks Badaude's the bomb. BOMB thinks she is too! So Paul Morris interviewed her and you can read it here. An excerpt:

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in particular?

Joanna Walsh: [...] My drawing always relates to writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses (full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

Here, on her own blog, she explains what it was like to draw on the walls of a 17th century building. (I made myself useful by erasing her pencil marks, handing her pens, and shelving books in the children's section with Sylvia and Gemma. Hey, if I'm only ever a handmaiden to genius, that's enough for me.)

And here is the text of the wonderful quote from Ulysses that snakes its way through the William Morris-inspired "wallpaper":

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

The eBook and the French reader

I know. You don't have to say it. I'm sorry. But I'm here now, aren't I? 

So I've been teaching. And working on my dissertation. And trying to keep myself sane in an apartment gone haywire. And last week I flew to Montreal to participate in a panel on Thirties Modernism and a seminar on Woolf and modernism. (I write to you now from my parents' kitchen on Long Island; back to Paris on Saturday.) So things have been busy. But I know, it's no excuse. 

One thing I did do a couple of weeks ago was attend a panel at the Centre national du Livre on digitalization. I was there because the panel was part of the study trip a couple of friends had made to Paris to learn about the way French publishing works. Here's how it works, for those of you who were not on the trip: protect, protect, query nervously, protect. 

That policy of protectionism is mostly a good thing. (For more on that, see my article in issue 8 of Five Dials magazine, downloadable here). It's occasionally seen as a bad thing (cf Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon's Que reste-t-il de la culture française) because it encourages a kind of stasis in French letters; it could be said to perpetuate a dominant tone of mediocrity amongst the writers, publishers, and readers' expectations. But hey, it's better than the dominant tone of trash you find in the US and UK. 

For years now, the French have been  talking about the digitalization of the book, and what that might look like. No one could have imagined at the beginning of the '00s that people would actually want to read a book on a screen, much less on a cellphone; and so for years now, the conversation has remained hypothetical. But with the success of the Kindle and other e-readers in the US, the French are starting to get a little nervous, and a little excited, like a seven year-old standing at the edge of the high diving board, about to jump for the first time, but terrified of how very far down there is to fall.  

French readers, however, are no more ready than the publishers are to take the plunge.  A poll currently being conducted by Le Figaro asks "Are you ready to read a novel on a screen?" A resounding 75% percent is saying Non! "[An e-book is] not a book!" declares one commenter, who compares the e-book to margarine and decaf coffee (with whom I happen to agree). "Right or wrong, I want my books on paper," says another. Only a very few readers are able to identify this as a false dichotomy, pointing out that the advent of one does not necessarily imply the decline of the other. 

But I'm only scratching the surface of what was discussed at that panel. For a more in-depth view of the Great Franco-American Publishing Exchange, do read Chad Post's write-up of what the American editors learned on their trip.  And to be continued, when the French come to New York early next year...

Charlotte Mandell reads from Zone

(I am two weeks behind on this one, but had to feature this here, as Charlotte is a friend and someone whose work I admire very much.)

Charlotte Mandell was recently awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work translating Mathias Enard's award-winning 2008 novel Zone from French to English. The novel has the neat trick of being composed of one long sentence stretched over 517 pages, but this doesn't only function as a gimmick, or as some wacky constraint: it actually serves the narrative, cradled as it is during one long train ride from Milan to Rome, deviating down rail lines not taken or taken long ago, reliving and imagining getting off at other places.

But there is more here than one man's ride on an Italian train; Zone contains multitudes. I read much of it this summer, although I still haven't finished, but from what Charlotte reads in this video, she's captured exactly that feeling of a civilization trundling down a railway track at night, en route to the inevitable.

Via Open Letter.

undergrad, redux

When I was an undergrad I remember having difficulty scheduling time to shower, much less to do all of the reading and writing for all of my classes.  Then things calmed down and I forgot what that was like. Then when I started graduate school I remembered again. Then grad school calmed down and I forgot again.

And now, because I took on extra teaching hours for a few weeks, I am teaching so many hours a week that I barely have time to prepare my lessons, much less eat/sleep/shower. I am not kidding. It's a good thing my man is all the way in Hong Kong! Like a PC perilously close to crashing, I am running in safety mode.  Last week I taught the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Odyssey-- none of which I had read in their entirety, much less taught, until very recently. This week it's been the Odyssey, the Canterbury Tales, and a lecture, with slides, on Greek Art.  When a student complained the other day about the amount of reading they have to balance with going on trips to the ballet and Burgundy, you can imagine how wryly I smiled.  I never imaged, when I was in college, that my professors were as overloaded as I was.

Next week it's the Ramayana and Shakespeare's Sonnets.  And then, finally, finally, my teaching schedule will revert to usual, I can go back to eating (cooking even!), sleeping (more than 6 hours a night!) and showering (might even wash my hair!).  And next year, if I teach this class again, the prep will already be done, and I'll breeze through on my notes from this year. But next year is so far away...

unfinished

Since I've been back in Paris I've all of a sudden become a shockingly lazy reader. I've spent more time planning my lessons and watching "Big Love" than doing anything else.  So Wolf Hall sits, halfway finished, next to my bed, joined by Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (which I'm reading for a Thursday evening Barnard Alumnae book group), David Foenkinos's La Délicatesse, and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.

The only book I did manage to finish was Beigbeder's Un roman français, and the only reason I blew through that is because it was mediocre enough that it didn't take much concentration. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to read it.  Here's a summary: Beigbeder gets caught sniffing cocaine with a friend outside some nightclub from off the roof of a car.  They are too messed up to notice they're getting high right in front of a police car.  They're arrested and hauled into jail.  Being in jail is a terrible experience, Beigbeder finds, and, much like that other writer-guy dipping a madeleine into some tea, or whatever, Beigbeder finds the fact of imprisonment summons up his entire childhood. Being locked up--oh so paradoxically!--gives him access to all these memories he thought were locked away inside himself.

Although it has real moments of tenderness (when he thinks about his daughter, or his relationship with his brother, verging into full-blown, large-scale sentimentality, weeping about his mother while sitting in prison, his tears dripping into his beard), the rest of the guy's strut and performance seriously undercuts any lasting affect the book might have had. He tells us over and over that he's such a loser-- but it just feels like part of the act. We never for a moment believe that Beigbeder really believes he's a loser.

Occasionally funny, but often not, the novel's worst offense is its complete unwillingness to trust the reader.  Beigbeder can't just tell a joke without immediately telling you why it's funny; he can't build on a theme without pointing it out to you-- how do you like my theme?-- which is just insulting. Even the dimmest Beigbeder fan is capable of noticing different passages and ideas seem to circulate around the idea of imprisonment.

Other ideas that he tries to bring in-- such as his childhood summers spent in the southwest, or his family history-- don't really work. As he said the other night at Literary Death Match, lamenting the fact that the only thing that interests people in his book is the coke-sniffing scene: "No one seems to care about my great-grandfather." Maybe it's because Beigbeder doesn't seem to care that much about his grandfather. The man is there, one suspects, just as an opportunity to share details about his aristocratic lineage. The grandfather in question died on the field of battle in the First World War, "like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four children sacrificed himself knowing full well what he was about. This descendant of Crusaders [oh yes, apparently he is descended from Crusaders] was condemned to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life for others. I am descended from a valiant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne." With all due respect to the soldiers of World War I and their families: Oh, lord. Eye-roll.

What does work nicely are the descriptions of the various houses and apartments in which he grew up; Beigbeder evokes quite nicely the different spaces, how it felt to be in them, and how they determined who he would become. (There are some scenes with his father and his friends that could have been taken from the adult Beigbeder's life-- we certainly understand why he became such a fétard.) But Beigbeder doesn't seem interested in asking hard questions of himself, and hard questions are the only ones that really matter in a memoir. Otherwise it's just a show, just a shallow depiction of what it's like to be Beigbeder, without yanking the reader into that hulking physique. 

More on Foenkinos, Toltz, et al, when I finally finish reading them.

For more on Beigbeder at Literary Death Match, see here.

Scenes from a Paris night, in the key of A

Badaude has outdone herself.  Here, she has immortalized the Five Dials launch party in one of her trademark sketches-- shunning all vowels except the letter A.  Why do such a thing? Because the reading included a brilliant almost-Oulipian poem by the not-Oulipian Joe Dunthorne, in which he used only the vowel I. On which, more later. For now, enjoy the drawing, and check out Badaude's account of the evening.

Can you spot me and Coquette? And Badaude? (hint: she's wearing Isabel Marant) And Sylvia and George Whitman?

In Paris this week

Well, I'm back from Hong Kong, and back to being a literary girl about town. (Which is kind of a contradiction in terms. I don't actually get around that much because mostly I am in my apartment, reading.)  This is a busy week! Let me tell you about it.

Last night I headed up to Belleville with Elisabeth for the semi-monthly Spoken Word poetry happening.  It was only my second time going, but I really like the atmosphere there-- part Beat, part bobo, with a dash of dada.  The series' host and founder, David Barnes, rules the stage in a top hat and, lately, arm cast.  The game goes like this: you read for 5 minutes.  Or you sing. Or you chant. But you only have 5 minutes, and the most dynamic your performance, the better. (It's an open mike format, and unfortunately, you do get a few mumblers and lacklusters mixed in with your dynamos.)

For writers who are also performers,  it's really a great forum. For those of us less dramatically-inclined*, there's beer on hand and the prospect of seeing some really special performances.

(*In fact I am super dramatically-inclined, just not when I'm myself. Give me a role in a play, however, and I'll tear up the scenery.)

*

So that was last night.  Now, tomorrow night is going to be really something: Opium Magazine are bringing their Literary Death Match to Paris! The always effervescent Todd Zuniga will be MCing--in French-- with the magazine's European editor, Kevin Dolgin.  Again, there's a game, and here's how it goes: four writers read their best stuff.  Three judges assess their performances on the basis of literary merit, originality, and panache. Hilarity ensues, or so I'm told.

Jean Hannah Edelstein summarized the buzz when LDM came to London:

The Literary Death Match is the brainchild of Todd Zuniga, the affable editor of Opium, an American literary magazine now (despite the bad odds of print) going strong in its eighth year. (Full disclosure: Zuniga is a friend of a close friend, although this week was the first time I met him.) Launched in New York, but now a key event on the cultural calendar in several American cities (last night was the European debut), the Death Match runs in three rounds, like a sort of manic, jolly, literary talent competition mixed with a bit of a game of chance.

The writers on trial tomorrow night are Frédéric Beigbeder (sigh), Philippe Jaenada, Max Monnehay, and Mohamed Razane.  The judges are David Foenkinos (whose latest novel, La Délicatesse, is the only author of la rentrée to see his book nominated for four different awards, including the Goncourt and the Femina), Yorgos Archimandritis, and a person called Bo.

Trust me, if you are any kind of literary-type person and you live in Paris and you like to think of yourself as savvy and with-it, you will not want to miss this event.

When: Wednesday, September 23; Doors at 7:00, show at 8:00 p.m. (sharp) 
Where: Le Reservoir: 16, rue de la Forge Royale, Paris 11.  Remember that you can have dinner at Le Reservoir.  For reservations call 0143563960
Cost: €10

*

Then on Friday night, issue #8 of the London-based online literary magazine Five Dials is having a launch party at Shakespeare and Company. What's so special about issue #8? Why, it's an issue dedicated solely to Paris! And in it you will find the work of an illustrious group of writers on the City of Light: Ali Smith, Albert Camus, Susan Sontag, Badaude, and Lauren Elkin.

Yes, you read that right! I have a piece on the bookselling scene in Paris, and I will be sure to link to it when it goes live. But that will not happen until 11 pm Paris time on Friday evening! So come on down to Shakespeare and Co and be there when the editors, Craig Taylor and Simon Prosser, hit send.  There'll also be readings from Steve Toltz and Joe Dunthorne. I guess they're in it too, or something. 

Friday September 25th, 7 pm

Shakespeare and Company

38 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005

On Cromwell

ARGH. Is it Snow Leopard's fault that all my applications are freezing today? I don't know. But I just wrote a whole post about historical fiction and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and-- you guessed it-- Safari decided to freeze and I lost the damn thing. Typepad is supposed to autosave drafts.  HA. That's a good one.

Anyway.  Here's what I said, in a nutshell: I like historical fiction.  Went through a phase in my teen years where I was obsessed with pre-modern English history, mostly thanks to Sharon Kay Penman.  This caused me to mostly hate the Tudors.  Now, however, I like to watch "The Tudors," so I guess I'm over it.  I'm psyched that Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on the Booker list because it means I get to read historical fiction and feel like it's not just a guilty pleasure.  So far, 50 pages in, it's really good, except I keep picturing James Frain as Thomas Cromwell.  

I would say it might be interesting for Frain to read Mantel's book before filming next season, but if you watched last season's finale, well, you know how that turned out.  

I do wonder if Mantel watched "The Tudors" while she was writing this, and to what extent Frain could have influenced her image of Cromwell...

Here's how Mantel sees him:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old.  He is a man of strong build, not tall.  Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement.  His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon.  It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt--ready with a text if abbots flounder.  His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard.  He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.  He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again.  He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed.  He makes money and he spends it.  He will take a bet on anything. (p. 31)

In case you too would like to learn how to train a falcon, here are some instructions.  

playing at trains

Emily Gould posted a video with the view from the subway train as it goes over the Manhattan Bridge and it made me all nostalgic for New York:

Almost every day I get to look out the window at the water and the sky and the advancing skyline from the window of the Q or B train as it crosses the Manhattan bridge.  I have heard more than one person say that “The moment I stop noticing this view is the moment I know I should just leave New York,” and when they’ve said this I have fervently nodded my agreement.  But of course I don’t always look up and have a magical transformative moment or even a tranquil reflective moment every day.*

So I thought I'd reply in kind. This is the view from the 6 train as it crosses the Seine from Passy to Bir Hakeim, which I used to take when I taught at Nanterre, and which I will take now that I'm teaching at NYU. (Except I go in the other direction, Left Bank to Right.)

 

(I love the dour-looking woman sitting in the strapontin who's like "mais qu'est-ce que vous foutez avec ce caméra, putain")

*Emily doesn't mention what used to anchor the city at its base, that is now missing from that video, but she posted on September 10th, so I think the connection is clear, if unconscious.

hong kong you're nice but paris je t'aime

Toy Soldiers from Alta Media Productions on Vimeo.

I'm going home in less than a week and I can't wait.

Jean Rhys: Life and Work

Anytime Jean Rhys is mentioned outside of the academy (and very often inside the academy), it's to discuss on the autobiographical aspects of her life, and very often to substitute the fictional events of her novel for those of her life. Often these discussions are engrossing and revelatory-- witness the recent exchange between Maud Newton and Alexander Chee over at Granta, who discuss Rhys's affair with Ford Madox Ford, the "affair that spawned four competing narratives."  But just as often they are infantile, narcissistic, and sleazy (But I'm not naming names here. Ahem, David Plante.).  

Of course a writer's life is worth wondering about, but I wish there were more discussion of her work. Or at least of the problematic relationship of her life to her work.  This is what I've tried to address in my own recently-published essay on Rhys, which begins as a review of the lame new biography (sorry, "portrait") of Rhys, The Blue Hour, and works outward to consider the particular challenges Rhys presents to biography, and the usefulness (or not) or trying to pin down what, in her work, really happened, and what was invented. 

From my review:

As Pizzichini points out in her Afterword, she wanted to go in a different direction from Angier, who, she says, “leaves no stone unturned”; she elected to “present the facts in such a way that the reader is left with an impression of what it was like to have lived such a life.” Pizzichini improvises, conjectures, assumes, and imagines herself into Rhys’s shoes. The “facts” are culled largely from Angier’s volume (as far as I can tell she did not consult the Rhys archives in Tulsa where Angier herself got more of her primary source material); a good deal is cobbled together from Rhys’s own work, resulting in a narrative that reads like a mash-up of everything Rhys ever published. Were I to cut up my copies of Angier’s biography, the Collected Novels and the Collected Stories and paste them back together, the result would not be so far off from what Norton has just brought out.

When she isn’t rewriting as biography what Rhys already wrote as fiction, Pizzichini is engaged in an ongoing pastiche of Rhys’s own inimitable style. “It was winter 1925 and Jean was back in a Paris as cold and grey as London after love has left you.” It sounds like Rhys, but—is it Rhys? The clue that it is not—or at least, if it is, it has been lifted out of context—is that moaning kind of wistfulness in the rhythm and the alliteration. Rhys herself would never have let such a sentence stand. It may have her trademark simplicity and sinew, but it is also utterly sentimental, something Rhys never was. Anytime she felt herself verging towards sentiment—which is really just a plea for pity, or an expression of self-pity—she would stop herself, go off in a different direction, or self-criticize. Pizzichini aims to channel Rhys’s blues, but what lets Rhys get away with it is her fight—her spunk, her refusal to take herself seriously. Pizzichini herself says she took a “more poetic approach” to writing this biography, but there is neither poetry nor biography here, only a weepiness and self-indulgence for which Rhys is utterly blameless, and ought not to have attributed to her.

This essay is about the meanest thing I've ever published, and I want to stipulate that I do commend Pizzichini for her interest in Rhys and her effort to promote her work. But it just doesn't fly with me as a serious contribution to the body of work on Rhys, I'm afraid. "We live indeed in a Golden Age of female literary biography," Terry Castle wrote in 2000, reviewing Judith Thurman's biography of Colette. "Thurman’s life can easily slide in alongside Hermione Lee’s recent biography of Virginia Woolf as a somewhat unlooked-for end-of-century masterwork, being vital, absorbing, delectably written and psychologically astute beyond anything anyone had any right to expect, especially given the mass of books (many excellent) already devoted to her subject’s life and career." I dearly hope this golden age is not at an end-- but the fact that Norton would publish this very poor biography of Rhys certainly seems to signal its apocalypse.