Monthly Archives: May 2020

“The Stench of Lust”: Daphne Du Maurier’s Flight of the Falcon

Posted on by under @DDMReadingWeek2020, review, Uncategorized

The Flight of the Falcon (1965) comes late in Daphne Du Maurier’s career. After it, she published only two further novels (the next one, The House on the Strand, is excellent; the final one, Rule Britannia, quite interesting). Like The House on the Strand, The Flight of the Falcon challenges the dangerous fantasy of recreating the past. It is a novel much preoccupied by generations—the narrator, Armino Fabbio, is 32, but he thinks of the students he spends time with almost as a separate species. He’s right, though, because he experienced the war, even if as a child, whereas they did not.

As a result of his upbringing—after the death of his father, his mother took up first with a German and then an American officer—Fabbio is fluent in several languages, knowledge he puts to good use in his job as a tour guide (though the novel prefers the more obviously hermeneutic term “courier,” reminding us of his role as a go-between). Fabbio spends his days shepherding mostly Anglo-American tourists across Italy, making the same jokes, answering the same questions, jollying along the same grumpy men and excitable women. In just a few deft pages, Du Maurier sketches the toll this life takes. Fabbio is a man stretched thin: hunting down lost packages and making nice-nice to exhausted Americans has brought him to the unstated but palpable edge of despair.

And it doesn’t take long for his life to go astray. A homeless woman who reminds Fabbio of his childhood nurse is found murdered down the street from the hotel where he and his charges are staying. His uncanny encounters with the woman—he pressed a 10,000 Lira note into her sleeping hand only to find her dead in the morning—prompts him to abandon his post and return to his hometown of Ruffano for the first time since leaving it in the backseat of a Nazi officer’s jeep. (Ruffano is made up; apparently it is closely modelled on Urbino; I must not remember much of my visit there, since I recognized nothing.)

fdf6c86a90b3191f6eee6792026e49bcFabbio finds Ruffano dominated its expanding university—in fact, his childhood home now belongs to the Rector. (I was fascinated—and made more than a little melancholy—by the novel’s depiction of higher education in growth mode—people fight over how to use resources, as they do at all colleges and in all campus novels, but in this case the resources are growing instead of dwindling to nothing.) Fabbio also finds Aldo, the charismatic Director of the Art’s Council, who each year organizes an elaborate recreation of some aspect of Ruffano’s past. Aldo, a cod-Nietzschean Fabbio can’t help but be attracted to (for reasons connected to his past), has devised a plan in which he pits the traditional (but already declining in numbers) Humanities students against the arriviste (but dominant in numbers) Commerce and Economics students in a plan to re-stage the five-hundred-year old uprising of the townspeople against the capricious and mandarin Duke who was known to all as the Falcon. Aldo wants to repair the Falcon’s image, but mostly he wants to stage trouble just because he can. “‘I’m here to bring trouble and discord,’” he tells the younger man, “ ‘to set one man against the other, to bring all the violence and hypocrisy and envy and lust out into the open.’”

If this sounds ludicrous, that’s because it almost is, but Du Maurier pretty much pulls it off. In particular, her characterization of Aldo is effective: we see that his amorality is wrong but we also see how students might respond to it. And we are made to thrill, against ourselves, to the real violence that the pretend battles incite. (If you liked The Secret History you might give Falcon a try.) What runs beneath Aldo’s plan—and the novel as a whole—is his desire to return to a glorious Italy untainted by fascism, though that effort comes to seem just as fascistic as the inglorious past. Aldo was shot down by the Allies and then joined the Partisans—an ideological shiftiness that runs throughout the book. Aldo seems more upset that the Germans took over the country than that Italy was fighting alongside them.

The novel’s national-political-social aspect, its preoccupation with how the present (especially an economically ascendant present: the novel is filled with the roar of Vespas) ignores the past (especially unpleasant and hardscrabble ones), is accompanied by a psychological-personal plot. For even as Fabbio becomes enmeshed in the politics of Ruffano, he is trying to find out who killed his old nurse, Marta, and why—for the murdered woman in Rome didn’t just look like his beloved servant. The time of capitalism—even in the midst of les trente glorieuse—is always out of joint; so too is the time of Fabbio’s fractured family. In retrospect, the obstreperous banality of the opening line—“We were right on time,” a reference to the tour bus’s punctual arrival in Rome—is in fact meaningful, and ominously so. To be right on time is to be at the risk of madness—whether from the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of the work of making possible other people’s leisure or from the megalomania of the dream of bringing the past into the present.

When the present seems either banal or tawdry, the past might seem enticing. That might explain why the past holds such a pull on the characters: early on, Fabbio dreams of his childhood and experiences release: “sleeping, I had been a traveler in time, no longer a courier.” Later sleep evades him as a thousand images run through his mind, people from the past and present blurring together: “Too many faces, too many passing strangers, too many hotel bedrooms, hired apartments; none of them mine, nothing I called home.” On the day of the Festival he relishes how the present has been replaced by a vivid, even virile past:

The palace was no longer a museum, a gallery hung with tapestries and pictures round which the tourist would prowl his indifferent way, but a living entity. Thus the link-boys saw it five hundred years ago, under moonlight and with flares and torches. Horses’ hooves rang on the cobbled stones, mingled with the clink of spurs [notice how the verb tense makes it unclear if Fabbio is talking about the Festival’s recreation of the past or the past itself]. … Behind me lay the present, slick, proficient, uniform, the young the same the globe over, mass-produced like eggs; and before me stood the past, that sinister and unknown world of poison and rapine, of power and beauty, luxury and filth, when a painting could be carried through the streets and worshipped by the rich and by the rabble alike; when God was feared; when men and women sickened of the plague and died like dogs.

The present feels impoverished, provisional, identikit; the past offers excitement and allure. But this vision is a dangerous fantasy, as the passage also indicates (with luxury comes filth; disease carries people away mercilessly—how much more like our present day does this description seem than like the 1960s Fabbio begins by despairing over). Du Maurier would develop this idea—that the pull of the past is dangerous—even more compellingly in The House on the Strand. But the theme can be seen in much of her work.

It is ironic that Du Maurier is known casually as a writer of historical romances, because she is skeptical of both history and romance. I actually don’t know what the deal was with Du Maurier’s own sexuality—I think I read somewhere that she was a closeted bisexual—but her writing is so queer, both in the modern sense of undoing the binary between hetero- and homosexuality and in the everyday sense of being just plain weird. Falcon shares with Strand (and My Cousin Rachel and Rebecca) a distaste for female characters, who want from men not just stability but also sex. That desire takes the chaste/Romantic form of the Rector’s wife; the grasping, malicious, yet indisputably alive form of the lecturer Carla Raspa, as abrasive and sexually dominant as her name; and, worst of all, the slatternly promiscuous way of Fabbio’s mother, who us presented without sympathy (instead of being a woman at the mercy of history and male violence who manages a good life for her child, she is presented, in Fabbio’s vision, as a slut, moving from one conqueror to another), a coldness that extends past the narrator to the text itself. Here’s a typical passage. Fabbio, wandering uninvited through Professor Raspa’s apartment, half ghost, half voyeur, is reminded of his mother:

I went through into the bathroom. Jars and bottles were on the shelves, and a dressing-gown had been flung on a stool. A nightgown, hastily rinsed through, hung limply on a hanger above the bath. The bidet was full of soapy water in which a pile of stockings had been left to soak. The sight made me sick. I went back into the kitchen, retching. The disorder, the intimacy, reminded me of hotel bedrooms long ago, in Frankfurt and other cities, when side by side with my mother’s underwear, similarly washed and rinsed, would be male socks and handkerchiefs, toothbrushes and hair-lotion. Streaky hairs would be lying in the bath. As a boy of eleven or twelve, my stomach had heaved. The stench of lust pursued me across Germany to Turin. It followed me still.

I could imagine someone looking at the scene and thinking of cleanliness and order, or at least the labour needed to provide it. But Fabbio isn’t just scornful—he’s disgusted. In addition to the heaving stomach, look at those descriptions: for some reason, “rinsed through” seems to me more judgmental than mere “rinsed” would be; worse, it hangs “limply.” Female appearance, in Fabbio’s apocalyptic, misogynist vision, has only one purpose: to attract men. “The stench of lust” seem to be his mother’s, not her lovers.

This passage shows female bodies run riot—but the same is true of Fabbio’s own. It is as much—no, more—unruly than the women he disdains. Stepping into the church he was taken to as a child, he experiences “an intense awareness of being small and hemmed in by adults” that always provoked “a desire to urinate.” Later, when he glimpses a naked man who has been the victim of a student prank, he immediately runs “behind one of the newly-planted municipal trees and vomited.”

Moments like these suggest that Du Maurier is more J. G. Ballard than Winston Graham. This is now the eighth of her books I’ve read, about half of them in other words, and I’m enjoying seeing how even a minor work like The Flight of the Falcon fits into the larger picture. If you’ve never read Du Maurier before, this isn’t the place to start, but those already familiar with her enticing, disquieting vision should give it a try.

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I read Flight of the Falcon for Ali’s Daphne Du Maurier Reading Week (see the list of posts here; see especially her take on Falcon). Like last year, I didn’t finish in time, but maybe if she hosts again I can get my act together.

 

 

 

“A wing’s beat and it’s gone”: Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines

Posted on by under book review, review, Uncategorized

Sightlines is the second collection by the Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie I’ve read recently. Jamie would be an essayist even if she didn’t write essays—she has the temperament. She approvingly cites a friend, an addiction specialist, who tells her his job “isn’t to provide answers, only more questions.” In Sightlines Jamie’s fundamental question, arising again and again in different guises, is, “What is that we’re just not seeing?”

(This particular formulation comes from a fascinating description of what she learns after spending time with pathologists, who share with her the terrible beauty of the tiny pathogens that unwittingly enact such mighty change.)

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Asking herself what she might not be seeing allows Jamie to undo some longstanding oppositions. Chief among these are the distinctions between what’s remote and what’s central, and what’s wild and what’s cultivated. Jamie visits St. Kilda, Rona, and various other Shetland and Hebridean specks on the map: like so many others she is drawn to their isolation, but she soon begins to wonder why we don’t think of, say, Central London as isolated and remote. (I’ve often felt that way, coming down from the mountains to Banff, Canmore, and finally Calgary: not returning to civilization but rather leaving something vital behind.) Meditating on the corpse of a storm petrel and the metal birding-ring adorning its leg (the glint of which first caught her eye), Jamie argues that only a naïve belief in “a pristine natural world” would find it intrusive to catch a bird and make it wear such a ring. Instead, the man-made object only illuminates the bird’s startling life:

When I got the chart out, traced the route, measured the distance, and understood that yes, of course, on a southwest bearing, you could swoop via certain channels from the North Sea through to the Atlantic, on small dark wings, it was because this one ringed bird had extended my imagination. The ring showed only that it was wedded to the sea and, if anything, the scale of its journeyings made it seem even wilder than before.

This moment exemplifies the conclusions Jamie comes to on the basis of her attentiveness to detail. In this regard, a sentence from the opening essay is emblematic of Jamie’s method:

Once everyone is settled, the guide makes a suggestion: why don’t we keep silent, just for a few minutes, sit still and keep quiet, just listen?

The guide here has taken a group of travelers onshore in Greenland, but it could refer to Jamie herself. Perhaps what it means to be a guide at all is to be in a position to offer to gift of attention. Jamie differs from the tour guide only in that her preferred mode of paying attention is seeing, not listening. After I finished the collection I started to wonder about its title. What exactly is a sightline? An imaginary line from a person’s eye to an object, apparently, especially from the eye of a theatre spectator to the edge of the stage. But also the line representing the horizon in a perspective drawing. In both definitions seeing is connected to representing, to depicting the given, phenomenal world, to imitating it. I was reminded of an aperçu from an essay on observing a lunar eclipse:

Isn’t that what great paintings tell us? That to take the form of flesh, the form of a body, is difficult, vulnerable, and yet—partly because of that—sweetly enviable.

Notice again the importance of having a sightline, a point of view. How do we learn that being embodied is at once risky and desirable? By turning to art. Not because art is greater than nature, but because both partake of the same essence, which, paradoxically, is changeableness. The moon herself is described as “undergoing some Ovidian metamorphosis,” as if “she were one of those gods who want to stop looking down on us all, and instead participate, at least for a while; who want to taste the mutability of earthly existence.”

Mutability—and its accompanying fragility—is again evident in an amazing little essay called “Magpie Moth,” in which Jamie comes across a moth pinned down by the surface tension of the water of a lochan. Jamie decides to intervene, with mixed results, at least for the moth, but with the reminder, for herself, that even on a barren moor millions of tiny creatures are on about their business: “It’s all happening out there, and all you have to do, girl, is get your foot out of your eye.” “Magpie Moth” is Jamie’s contribution to that small but vital genre, the moth essay. In her decision to free the moth, she alludes to but counters the decisions made by Virginia Woolf and, later, Annie Dillard in essays each titled “The Death of the Moth.” Like these predecessors, Jamie begins from an encounter with this evanescent life form (moths seem, in Woolf’s work in particular, to stand in for the idea of the minimal—the basic threshold of intelligibility). And like them she moves from particular observation to abstract comment. Yet she pulls up short—“get your foot out of your eye”—never taking herself too seriously. I’m tempted to think of this down-to-earth quality as particularly Scottish, but I’ve no idea really.

Yet lightness is important to Jamie. It means more than self-deprecation or modesty or piss-taking. In “La Cueva,” an essay on a visit to a complex of caves in Spain filled with Paleolithic and Neolithic drawings, Jamie is led to think about fundamental human tendencies, as expressed in the way we talk about the cave art: “When we distinguish and segregate, we are serious-minded. When we make connections, when we say look, this is like a dress, like an owl, I am like you—then we laugh.”

(This could be John Berger, though, happily, less solemn.)

To make a connection is to acknowledge transience. In an essay on that topic, written in 1915, Freud, spurred by a memory of a walking excursion with the poet Rilke, broods on how constitutionally unable we are to recognize our mortality. Yet unconsciously we are aware of it, for otherwise we would not take such otherwise perverse pleasure in times of death and suffering. We would not find ourselves so stimulated by circumstances that remind us of our finitude. (Freud wrote the essay as the Great War lurched into its first full year.)

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As noted in the essay on the eclipse, mutability is Jamie’s great theme. The landscapes we admire didn’t always look the way they do now: nor will they persist. Even whalebone—the subject of two wonderful essays—is mutable, no matter how carefully preserved. A naturalist friend debunks the idea of natural harmony—catastrophes happen, people, places, species get wiped out. It is fitting that a book most consistently set along windswept coastlines ends by finding consistency in only two things, themselves of course emblematic of ceaseless change: “The wind and the sea. Everything else is provisional. A wing’s beat and it’s gone.”

 

The Book of Chloe by Chloe Harris

Posted on by under Guest post, personal, student essays, teaching, Uncategorized

Some years I’m lucky enough to teach a course I’ve designed called Writing for Life. In it, I help students write personal statements for scholarships, internships, or professional and graduate schools. I also work with them as they write personal essays. My aim is to help students see that writing is inextricable from thinking, and, as such, that writing is an important part of a reflective life, no matter what one’s eventual life path.

All students have been affected by COVID-19. But I have particular sympathy for the students of the Class of 2020, who have been denied those important, bittersweet last moments of triumph, expectation, and longing that compose the final weeks of a college career.

As a small way of compensating some of those students–as well as to highlight some outstanding work from my class–I asked three students who wrote particularly excellent final essays if I could share their work here.

The final assignment was to write about an important object in their lives in a way that case light on the object, on the writer, and on some concept or idea that could only be reached by thinking about the relationship between writer and object.  This year, I gave students the choice of reflecting on their experience of the pandemic. I think it will be clear which direction each student chose. At the end of the essay, you can learn more about the writer.

Today’s essay is by Chloe Harris. It is titled The Book of Chloe. You can read the two earlier essays in this series here and here.

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The author’s mother showing off some of her crosses.

The Book of Chloe

I like to read. I used to love to read. My younger self dove into book after book, living vicariously through the main characters, losing all touch with reality while my eyes drank in the details. You would find me curled up on a bench during recess, sneaking to the bathroom during dinner or with a flashlight late at night, catching up with my favorite friends.

When my focus returned to the present, I was involved in a program called National Girls Ministries from Kindergarten to 8th grade. In the later years of the program, we were expected to read the bible every week and write about what we learned. My initial resentment of the assignment for taking me away from the mystical world of wizards and dragons wore away when I started reading more of this Good Book. War, love, sacrifice, betrayal – I couldn’t put it down, reading more than I was assigned every night. I read the entire collection cover to cover, rereading the books that interested me the most. I always skipped Numbers, but Exodus, Thessalonians, Ezekiel, Job and Revelations had pages nearly ripped at the spine from the many times I flipped back through the stories.

I was forging my own sermons by the time I was 11 and even wrote a song for the choir to sing during a Sunday morning service. For each resonating passage I found, I’d practice the way I’d interpret it in front of my mirror, throwing in phrases I’d heard in church and long pauses to build suspense. I suppose this is the first place I found my love for taking leadership, expressing my opinions, connecting with those around me. When I think about the bible, I often think about my father. We shared many moments discussing the verses and relating words written nearly 3000 years ago to twenty-first-century society. He taught me how to see beyond the words, finding meaning hidden in the verses. Our back-and-forth sharpened my mind, opening my eyes to perspectives I hadn’t considered in my initial readings of the captivating stories.

My relationship with religion, and with my father, was commensal. I was a remora fish suctioned on to the belly of large shark. I gained a lot from the shark when I was younger: Protection, nutrients, a great community. Eventually, though, I realized the shark was not gaining anything from me, ignoring my presence when I asked where we were going or suggested an alternate route. Something once so integral to my identity is now only a fading memory.

My parents had been divorced for many years, but my mother opened a new case for custody when I was in 8th grade. She won, and after moving out of my father’s home, I was able to start forming my own opinions. I started questioning the connections we drew from the scriptures more often during the weekends I spent with him. My father’s responses were condescending, rigid, and offered little for my understanding. The more I asked, the harsher his reactions became. A shark snapping at the small fish that swam too close to its snout.

“I don’t understand why God allowed Job to be tortured” My words tip-toed from my mouth as I skimmed over the pages of one of my favorite chapters.

“Mmm? Why’s that?” His eyes peered through his reading glasses as he sorted through papers scattered across the coffee table, too preoccupied to see my furrowed brow.

“Aren’t we supposed to resist Satan’s temptation? It seems like Satan was goading God and rather than ignoring it, God felt challenged and Job suffered for it.” I glanced up from the passage to see my father glaring at me, his glasses pulled away from his face as if to make sure the small windows weren’t impeding his anger. He regurgitated the lesson on how God will test us and the next day, our devotion was centered around what happens to those whose faith strays.

My questions soon turned into statements of disbelief and angry mutterings as my relationship with God became seemingly one-sided and futile. I was tired of hearing “read these verses and pray about it” when I wanted validation. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but the book I used to love transformed into a tiresome riddle that I was weary of reading. Anger lingered around me for a long time. My anger grew when I couldn’t justify my faith any longer or discuss scripture with my youth group without a cynical shadow looming over the conversations. It exploded when my mom finally told me that the church had shunned her, the kindest woman I have ever known, even as the pastor preached acceptance and community in every sermon. It simmered when I realized the only connection I had with my father was our shared love of the bible and mine was dissipating. I was just angry, and all my rage was directed at God and everything about him.

My father and I never recovered our relationship after I rejected my faith. I haven’t seen him since the summer after my 9th grade year and reading the bible only opens a wound that isn’t fully healed. I stopped going to church services, removed myself from youth group chats and threw away the extensive scripture journal I kept, distancing myself from any reminders of religion. I became the shark, refusing to acknowledge any part of my past that remained attached to me. At least until my mom came home with an obsession with crosses.

My mom’s crazy addiction for the simple shape made seeing them bearable. The excitement and joy she radiated when a new cross settled into its space on the wall made it difficult to look at the shape with disdain. I found myself drawn to her reactions. All giggles and scrunched noses and happy dances while she hung the ones my brothers and I would give her. Mom’s joy was infectious. She was always 100% herself, with chaotic decorations, loud laughter, and random bursts of energy.

During my years in high school, I saw my momma cry for herself for the first time and many more times. Her post-partum depression deepened when we found out she needed surgery to remove a tumor from her cervix. Her hormonal instability worsened when menopause wreaked her endocrine system and she found out my little sister had sensory OCD. Her heart broke when her husband cheated on her and she was facing yet another divorce that she knew would be difficult for everyone involved. I watched her strain to maintain her happiness while the world continually threw shots at her, as if it were trying to find her breaking point. But she never broke. I think the crosses had something to do with it. Despite loving her reactions to them, I was not exactly thrilled about the dozens of crosses gracing the wall right across from our front door. They were obnoxious and loud, with giant gemstones, bright colors, and mismatched patterns painted on the limbs, but I think I think the crosses made her feel closer to God. They reminded her she could shift some of the weight of her burdens onto His shoulders and He would take them, the same way Jesus took them when He carried a cross through Jerusalem.

I started to appreciate God for helping my mom even if I could not bring myself to repair my relationship with Him. He was helping her be who she really was underneath the pain and those crosses reminded her of that. They reminded her of the love she was able to give. During my Pentecostal upbringing, countless sermons reminded me to let the Lord’s light shine from within us. “Show others the kindness and mercy of our savior, let Him lead them to the light through you.” I cannot think of a more light-filled person than mom. Working as a nurse for more than half her life, the patients my mom has taken care of remember her. The words “nurse Kristy” shout to her from across parking lots and in grocery stores when people recognize the woman who took the time to care about who they were rather than what they were diagnosed with. Visiting her at work and seeing the smiles she could bring to the faces of those riddled with cancer and losing hope fueled my determination to make a difference in the medical field – to have her light shining from within me. I strove for many years to shine the way she does, letting the love of God fill her so that when people are around her, they can feel the love too. Her selflessness, empathy, and wholehearted kindness leak from her as if she’s made of a porous material that cannot contain it all. She took a small, simple symbol, and shaped it into something that gave her strength, resilience, openness, and the ability to change.

The older I get, the more I see how much of my mother seeps out of me. I laugh while I’m crying when watching sappy movies, I jump up and down, singing out my words when I’m excited, I cry for my friends and dance to songs in my head when I’m bored. Though my interior design skills are far superior, I am so proud to be her mirror image. The first cross my mom bought was large, nearly 3 feet of bronze decorated with elegant twirls of metal, twisting in and out of large gaps found at the end of each limb. The middle of the cross was a raised hemisphere with small curled knobs circling it, once a dark brown, now shining with oil from the many times my mom rubbed it as she passed. A small gesture reminding her she was okay.

“What you don’t like this one? EEEEK I love it! Y’all know I have my special style!” I raised an eyebrow as mom threw up her arms and pretended to cock a shotgun holding the hot-pink trimmed zebra printed cross in her hands. Hiding my grin, I rolled my eyes and watched her struggle to find space for it on the crowded wall. My eyes skimmed over the bedazzled, glittering objects, falling on the Dallas Cowboys themed cross she was moving to the side and laughing as I cringed. She started humming some hymn I vaguely recognized from church. I felt my chest squeeze tight and the grin drop from my mouth as that familiar feeling of resentment settled over me.

Though my mother and I are so similar, I am sometimes lacking in her ability to let things go, change her thinking and move forward without burdens. My anger toward God fueled an ongoing battle between my past self and the person I was becoming. It took a lot of energy to house all that hatred, to blame a single entity for every negative aspect of my past and work to forget a lifetime of experiences. For a long time, I saw my religious past and the relationship I had with my father as something that needed to be cut off so that I could grow into who I was meant to be. I realize now that I did not lose a part of myself when my opinions and beliefs contradicted the rigid interpretations my father had laid out for me. I reshaped it. I reshaped it the way my mom is constantly reshaping herself so she is not consumed by morbid and harmful realities and can accept the world as it is.

My religious past gave me critical thinking skills. Sitting criss-cross applesauce at the end of my bed, my neck craned over the yellowing pages of a bible, I saw more than laws and stories. I found my opinions. I owned my voice. When reading essays and research articles, I appreciate their beauty and intelligence, but still critique and interpret their meanings.  The bible gave me a curious mind and a desire to understand the afflictions of those suffering. I am not easily satisfied with unanswered questions. I push and I speculate, and I can change my mind. My mom’s relationship with crosses reminded me of my ability to see things in different perspectives while respecting each one. She helped to put aside the pain I held onto. I am still a shark. Swimming along with my remora fish, no longer ignoring the suggestions and lessons they have, I use their guidance to build my own path. I do not have the same relationship with my father or God as I once did, but I am grateful for the things they taught me.

“This is great, Chloe Anne-Marie. You wrote this all by yourself?” I struggle to picture the blurry face of my father as he said these words the first time I brought him a sermon. Written in purple marker with small yellow flowers, orange fish and blue crosses decorating the borders, the paper filled me with pride. “You need to reference the bible more often though,” his cheery tone turned flat, “or these are just your words and not words that were given to you by God.” I watched as he stenciled in possible verses, slashing his black ball point pen through the words I had practiced a dozen times in the mirror. My eyes glued themselves to the wrinkles lining his forehead while my teeth dug into the soft flesh of my cheek. I wrote two sermons later that night. One was written in pen, with the addition of versus and quotes from the bible lying neatly on my father’s desk. The other, a replica of the original, hanging beside my bed, signed Chloe Harris.

Fin

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Born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Chloe Harris graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in biochemistry and molecular biology from Hendrix College. She will go on to work in a urology clinic during her gap year before attending medical school next fall. When she isn’t making detailed lists or talking off her friends’ ears, she’s covered in paint and hunched over a canvas. 

“Hidden Within the Darkest Part of Myself”: Malicroix, the Gothic, and the Experience of the Unknown by Nat Leach

Posted on by under Guest post, readalong, review, Uncategorized

As always, I’m delighted to post writing by my friend Nat Leach. Here Nat contextualizes Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (1948) twice over: by thinking about its uneasy relation to Gothic literature, and by comparing it to contemporary works by the theorists Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. The resulting essay made sense of much of the novel for me. Enjoy!

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Literature can create an experience that, illusory or not, appears as a means of discovery and an effort not to express what one knows but to experience what one does not know.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 1949, trans. Charlotte Mandell.

Reading Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (originally published in 1948, and recently re-published by NYRB in a new translation by Joyce Zonana) put me in mind of the work of some of his contemporary French writers of the late 40’s, such as Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, and the above passage from Blanchot resonated very much with my experience of reading the book. Not only does the protagonist, alone on a strange island, reflect on his own strange experience, but readers are confronted with an unknown world that does not entirely correspond either with their sense of the real world or with their expectations of fiction. While Bosco employs conventions from genres such as the adventure novel and the Gothic novel, he takes them in unfamiliar directions.

The plot itself appears straightforward: the protagonist, Martial de Mégremut, inherits his uncle’s property on the condition that he not leave the remote island on which his house is located for a period of three months, and that he accomplish an as yet unspecified action after that period has expired. The inheritance is not particularly lucrative, but Martial’s determination (which surprises even himself) to remain on the island creates conflict with his uncle’s notary, Dromiols, who tries to induce him to leave. While this is the stuff of adventure novels, it’s also significant that the most dramatic encounter with this antagonist takes place about 2/3 of the way through the book. This underscores that the book is much more about Martial’s internal struggles, of which he himself is sometimes only dimly aware.

Bosco establishes the dominant conflict within his protagonist in the first few pages of the book. Martial belongs to the “gentle and patient” Mégremut family, which is characterized by its amiable sociability, but his uncle Cornélius, from whom he inherits, was, conversely, the last of the line of the Malicroix, a passionate and prideful lineage. Cornélius himself was a wild and anti-social being, and we soon learn that these characteristics were the product of an unhappy past linked to these negative qualities of his line.

Many of the characters, Martial himself included, question whether he is a “true” Malicroix, possessing as he does the “blood” but not the “name” of Malicroix. From the beginning, Martial acknowledges the presence of the Malicroix blood “hidden within the darkest part of myself” and this hidden force often seems to dictate his actions throughout the book, as when his conscious mind decides to leave the island even as he unconsciously determines to stay. The structure of the book suggests that Martial’s journey is a progression from Mégremut (the title of the book’s first section) to Malicroix (the title of its final section), but the ending actually complicates this opposition, showing the Mégremuts to have an unexpected toughness, while Cornélius’ final request has an unexpectedly redemptive quality to it. One significant question raised by the ending, then, is whether Martial’s actions succeed in harmonizing these two dimensions of his character, or whether he remains fundamentally split between them.

Another way of framing this opposition is that the Mégremuts represent sociability and communicability, or the beautiful as opposed to the obscurity and secrecy of the Malicroix sublime. Martial notes of his family: “We are not given to unvoiced sorrow or silent reproach. Faces and gestures speak; voices confirm. In this gentle family we love each other too much not to confess everything, especially the reproaches, the sorrow, the deep roots of tenderness.” Martial moves from the family hearth where everything is expressed directly on the surface to the mysterious island where nothing is clear. His solitude and the force of the elements (powerful winds and blinding snow) produce insomniac reveries and, eventually, feverish dreams as he falls ill after collapsing in the snow. At the height of his solitary anxiety, he observes that “I suspected that because my situation was not reasonable, it concerned my whole self, not just my reason. It was up to my soul to speak, but my soul was silent.” This sums up much about the book; it takes us beyond a merely rational apprehension of events towards their deeper, hidden meanings, which nevertheless remain mysterious. In other words, it reveals the Malicroix at the heart of every Mégremut.

This lesson is also suggestive of the book’s associations with the Gothic genre. On the surface, it is a very Gothic book indeed, with its solitary, foreboding house, mysterious will, passionate, anti-social ancestor with a traumatic past and even a woman with a strange ghost-like quality. The troubling of the distinction between Mégremut and Malicroix is also typical of the Gothic’s tendency to blur boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the human and the inhuman, communal order and individual desire. Categories that, on the surface, appear to be opposites are shown in fact to be intricately implicated with one another at a deeper, unconscious or secret level.

The book also Gothically hints at the possibility of supernatural agency, but these hints are neither confirmed nor rationalized away, leaving it in the category designated by Tzvetan Todorov as “the fantastic,” which constitutes a “hesitation” between the real and the imaginary. The action of the book thus takes on a dreamlike quality, resistant to the faculty of reason and consequently to the limiting logic of genre. For example, when Martial is rescued by a mysterious woman (who later gives her name as Anne-Madeleine, while insisting that this is just her “name of this earth”), we are made to wonder whether she is a supernatural figure come to nurse him back to health, a femme fatale come to deceive him, or just an ordinary woman who lives nearby. She functions in the narrative, variously, as all of these things, but in the end, there is no definitive answer, and only the rational mind would insist on one; it is Martial’s often indistinct perceptions of her that are most significant in this book.

In fact, this is a book full of ambiguous and shifting characters, which seem to correspond to some dimension of Martial’s psyche rather than following their own internal logic. Like Anne-Madeleine, Dromiols’ clerk, “Uncle Rat,” and the old shepherd Balandran veer abruptly between appearing as threats or helpers; for example, Balandran’s initial surliness, coupled with the fact that he stands to inherit if Martial defaults on the conditions of the will, lead us to expect him to become a significant obstacle in the narrative. Instead, he quite suddenly transfers his loyalty to Martial. Only Bréquillet, Balandran’s dog, is consistent in his character, one of steadfast canine loyalty.

Even Bosco’s brief “Notice” to the reader at the beginning of the book frames it as a Gothic text, explaining that some 40 pages that “form a separate, private account” have been removed and that “only someone truly qualified for such revelations might one day break the seal”. This minor detail already suggests the major themes of the book: its secrecy and the notion that there is a single “proper” reader of the secret, just as Martial is the single proper reader of the codicil to Cornelius’ will.

But this centrality of Martial—which is undeniable, as everything is focalized through him—is troubled the fact that his own sense of identity is uncertain and shifting. For example, before his final confrontation with Dromiols, he observes the face of his adversary, unperceived:

Into this mask had flowed a massive thought whose immobility revealed savagery, stubbornness. It fascinated me. For this thought was me, and most likely Dromiols was actually seeing me, inside himself. Troubling impression of presence. I was there. I was solely there. Did I have a life, a will, outside that savage head whose slow meditation revolved around my weak figure? I obsessed him; I was his anxiety, what haunted him.

Bosco goes beyond the convention of the Gothic double in which the antagonist mirrors the protagonist and represents his darker impulses; rather, the distinction between the two characters seems to collapse completely as Martial describes Dromiols by describing his perception of himself within Dromiols, while simultaneously demonstrating Dromiols’ power over him, as they mutually “obsess” and “fascinate” one another.

The “troubling impression of presence” described here characterizes much of the book, and suggests a more troubling experience of the unknown than is typically conveyed in the Gothic. Martial speaks of himself as inhabiting some level of being that goes beyond his experience of his own identity. It is in this respect that the book particularly made me think of Levinas and Blanchot, whose works of the late ‘40s (and beyond) articulate a sense of a self that is not an autonomous master of the world, but is inescapably chained to it. Levinas, for example, writes about what he calls the “there is,” the inescapable fact of being that eludes the rational mind’s attempt to reduce all phenomena to objects of knowledge. Martial is plagued by this kind of anxiety-inducing awareness of the world around him. Compare, for example, Martial’s reflections:

The sharpness of these sensations soon grew so strong I began to suffer from a kind of pure insomnia. Not a normal state of wakefulness, in which confusion alternates with mental effort and is prolonged. I felt as if I had fallen prey to a dry lucidity. A hypervigilance refused to surrender any shadow to self-forgetfulness, and I remained painfully aware of everything.

to Levinas’s:

Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish—that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which one is held. Vigilance without end (Time and the Other, 1948, Trans. Richard A. Cohen)

This experience of the anonymous, unshakeable awareness of “being” seems to be something more than the anti-social “blood” of the Malicroix talking, a more profound experience of the unknown than that associated with the Gothic.

This contrasts with the book’s ending, which is active as opposed to passive, and describes an action that can only be completed by one person: Martial. One might therefore be tempted to read this as a progression from Martial’s initial state of undifferentiated being on the island to his specialized status as the last of the Malicroix, but again, this seems too simple; the final action is less a resolution than a gesture in the direction of some kind of new order. The book ends without dispelling its profoundly unsettling apprehension of something not just unknown, but perhaps unknowable, because, as Martial says, it is not simply rational but concerns the “whole” silent, irrational “self”.

Split by Connor Onitsuka

Posted on by under Guest post, personal, student essays, teaching, Uncategorized

Some years I’m lucky enough to teach a course I’ve designed called Writing for Life. In it, I help students write personal statements for scholarships, internships, or professional and graduate schools. I also work with them as they write personal essays. My aim is to help students see that writing is inextricable from thinking, and, as such, that writing is an important part of a reflective life, no matter what one’s eventual life path.

All students have been affected by COVID-19. But I have particular sympathy for the students of the Class of 2020, who have been denied those important, bittersweet last moments of triumph, expectation, and longing that compose the final weeks of a college career.

As a small way of compensating some of those students–as well as to highlight some outstanding work from my class–I asked three students who wrote particularly excellent final essays if I could share their work here.

The final assignment was to write about an important object in their lives in a way that case light on the object, on the writer, and on some concept or idea that could only be reached by thinking about the relationship between writer and object.  This year, I gave students the choice of reflecting on their experience of the pandemic. I think it will be clear which direction each student chose. At the end of the essay, you can learn more about the writer.

Today’s essay is by Connor Onitsuka. It is titled Split.

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The author’s bike, front left

Split

            It can’t be that hard, right? The thin tires on the 52-inch road bike stared me down as I hoisted myself over the seat. What are these things where the pedals should be? Setting my feet on the clip-on pedals, I rubbed around on the smooth, oval-shaped pedals to try to get a better grip. When I shifted my whopping 112 pounds of weight onto the cracked seat of the bike, the pale white frame creaked a little. I pushed off to a wobbling start, straining my hands on the short bullhorn handles, struggling to stay balanced. After a block, though, I was getting used to the thin tires. Faster. With each revolution of the wheel, I felt my anxieties whip away, my stressors left far behind. Before I knew it, my twists and turns around the block had taken me right back.

“How was it?” Mom asked. She told me she’d pay for half of a cheap road bike so I could shuttle myself to and from school, since she worked over forty minutes away.

“I think it’ll work.”

I spent my years of high school running. Not in the literal sense: I quit cross country my sophomore year. The competitive aspect of cross country, the meets, the expectation to improve, and the daily time commitment drove me away from it rather quickly. Instead, with my new-used bike, I pedalled away from everything I loathed, as fast and as often as I could.

For a beginner’s road bike, the vintage Bianchi I found on Craigslist in my sophomore year wasn’t all that bad. Mom and I took it to a bike shop after we bought it, where we were told that a few spokes on each wheel had cracked. It rode fine though. Mom paid for the tune up and every safety-related item imaginable: a helmet, 650 lumen light, Kryptonite U-lock, flat repair kit, and some shiny reflectors to tie around my ankles at night. The bill came out in the hundreds. Though expensive, it was not the last price Mom would pay after we bought the bike. Rather than simple, reliable transportation, she bought my liberation – from my responsibilities, from school, and tragically, from our relationship.

By high school, my near-perfect relationship with Mom had changed drastically. Throughout my parent’s divorce, I spent most of my time with Mom, who won primary custody over me and my sister. We preferred spending time with her anyway; Dad was an ass. Mom has always been caring and silly, and provided a solid foundation for us throughout a chaotic divorce. As my sense of humor and identity developed through elementary and middle school, she and I would banter about the girls I might or might not, but definitely didn’t like, or how my sister might never stop wearing striped skirts and checkered knee-highs. Unfortunately, the once playful banter between Mom and I became harsh and hurtful when I started high school.

Mom and I fought and bickered daily after the first semester of my freshman year. She questioned me about my choice in friends, my time spent playing video games each day, or why I was acting like I was high on a drug I’ve never done. We drove to school in a tan 1999 Camry that was sunbleached and crunchy, constantly requiring some kind of tune-up or replacement. The Camry was a replacement for Mom’s reliable Honda Odyssey that had been totaled in an unfortunate run-in with FedEx.

Unlike the Odyssey, riding in the Camry was a trap. Not so much because it was unreliable—although it was: the windows worked about half of the time, and the locks even less—but because when I was in the car with Mom, it was lecture time. On shorter drives, I would get a quick check in on my attendance or a comment about how Mom hadn’t slept well because I was up all night yelling at my video games. On the longer drives, quippy remarks would metamorphose into a full-fledged life lesson I’d heard four times before. I felt penned in by the Camry, and I figured that I could probably get to anything within the city faster on my little white bike.

It’s hard for me to tell whether getting a bike was ultimately beneficial. Aside from the obvious boon of physical exercise, it helped me find a new pastime after quitting soccer and cross country. It saved me from playing more than 8 hours of video games alone in my room, instead shuttling me to my friends’ houses, where we could play video games together in their rooms. At the same time, I hurt myself and my relationship with Mom by getting a bike. I crashed an absurd number of times, with permanent scars serving as ugly reminders. Out of all of the safety items Mom had bought, I used the light when night came, the U-lock, and sometimes the helmet. I remember sneaking home a bloody meat crayon, lucky to have avoided broken bones and brain damage, avoiding Mom’s concerned gaze as I scuttled up to my room.

By my senior year, my goal of being valedictorian had been downshifted to “show up today.” A combination of boredom and stressors from home and school made going to class feel suffocating. Ironically, Mom had helped me buy my bike, and in turn, she lost her son for the better portion of two years. It turns out my bike hadn’t just provided freedom, it also contributed towards a twisted retaliation against my wonderful mom.

This retaliation manifested itself in my school attendance. Due to a failure in my high school’s attendance policy, I could have as many absences or tardies as I wanted, as long as I showed up to class once every two weeks. Mom let me bike myself to school, so over my final semester in high school, I accrued ninety-eight absences and thirty-something tardies. Though I typically attended my difficult classes like AP physics and calculus, my grades and classroom relationships suffered. For the first twenty or so absences, Mom received a call from the school and begged me to get to school on time. After weeks of daily voicemails, she gave up. Liberated from her lectures attempting to make me go to class, I capitalized on my victory by continuing my rampant streak of delinquency, unaware of the stress Mom was shouldering on my behalf.

My relationship with Mom improved drastically after I left for college. College itself was another attempt at an escape, but when I came home for the longer breaks, things were as though the last few years had never happened. We were back to our usual banter, complaining about my sister’s messy room or how our evil cat wouldn’t let us pet her. I still went on bike rides, though they weren’t meant to escape so much as a means of simple transportation.

Petty crime had been steadily rising in Portland while I was away for school, according to Mom. My now rickety old white bike, despite no longer looking like something remotely worth stealing, disappeared one afternoon. The U-lock was left cracked and discarded a few feet from the bike stand. For the rest of the summer, I opted to take rides with Mom in her old Camry that had just crested 200,000 miles. What once guaranteed long lectures with no escape became another place Mom and I could make up for lost time – I was happy to ask for rides, or drive when she didn’t want to.

The bike had been stolen once before, too. During my junior year, my attendance began wavering, especially for classes scheduled earlier in the mornings. Shortly after winter break, I woke up to the sound of my laptop playing YouTube videos, still running by autoplay from the night before. It was already 10:00. At this point in my high school career, I still felt remorseful for missing class. I was at school by 10:30, my hair greasy and clothes soaked by the perpetual Portland drizzle. In my haste I managed to forget the U-lock, but I couldn’t afford to miss another class to go get it. Doing my best to conceal the lack of a lock, I rested the contraption between a few other dingy-looking bicycles.

Inevitably, the bike was stolen during class and I was left stranded at school. Mom was strangely understanding on the phone, rushing home from work to pick me up. We spent hours searching the school and surrounding park for signs of the bike. Miraculously, we found it and two other bikes locked to the railings at the parking lot furthest away from the school buildings. Mom suggested I lock my bike to the railing with my own U-lock she had brought from home, and come back in the morning. My bike made it through the night, and the next day, the foreign lock had disappeared, along with the two other bikes.

To this day, I don’t understand why Mom worked so hard to save my bike. She knew it granted me the freedom to be absent from the house and from school. Maybe she assumed I’d find another way to escape anyway. I’m afraid to ask, mostly because I feel ashamed that I used the freedom she offered to hurt her. Though I haven’t voiced it – I don’t know why, either – I’ve been doing my best to make amends. The second time the bike was stolen provided a perfect opportunity to assure Mom I no longer felt the need to escape.

I didn’t consider it much of a loss when my bike was gone for good. Financially, the bike was probably worth less than the steel it was made of. Emotionally, I blamed the bike for the time I lost that I could’ve spent with Mom. Despite my unfair assessment, the bike was dead to me. I was happy to drive around with Mom, who had just started working from home. We took the Camry, still chugging along, to go bowling after dinner, to bubble tea shops and cafes, and sometimes nowhere, just to chat. High school-me would have immediately gone out to get another bike. In fact, Mom offered to help me find another. I declined under the reasoning that I would only be there for the summer anyway, leaving unvoiced the excitement of more rides in the Camry.

Last summer, my sister finally nabbed a driver’s license and utilized Mom’s Camry to its fullest extent. Out of necessity, I searched Craigslist for another road bike, and once again, Mom offered to split the cost. My new bike, a beautifully marbled black racing bike, took me to and from work downtown. It didn’t see much use outside of exercise and transportation, though. When the Camry was free to use, Mom and I would head out to the store to find ingredients for a new recipe to test, or to a bar, where we drank BFK’s (coffee mixed with Bailey’s, Frangelico, and Kahlua) to gab and gossip. After college, I’m sure we’ll take the old, reliable Camry out to keep making up for lost time.

I’ve been trying to train up to a marathon. When I first mentioned the idea to Mom, she was hesitant but supportive. Over winter break, we drove from store to store, comparing different running shoes that could live up to the arduous 26.2-mile task.  I found a pair of shoes I liked, and took them for a test run around the block. Taking off down the street, I felt comfortable knowing that my feet weren’t whisking me away from anywhere or anything in particular. At the end of the test run, I was happy to find myself back where I started, with Mom.

“How are they?” She asked. Once again, she offered to split the cost.

“I think they’ll work.”

We had a nice drive home.

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Connor Onitsuka, who is from Portland, Oregon, double majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BCMB) and Neuroscience at Hendrix college. He’ll be taking a gap year to shadow and work as a scribe in Portland, while also spending time with his cat and drinking bubble tea.

What I Read, April 2020

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Ugh, April. A terrible month in my line of work at the best of times. Which this April, of course, was not. I was both busy—the last four weeks of the semester are always crunch time—but also, strangely, not. (No commute, far fewer admin obligations, the many office hour meetings vanished to almost nothing.) The month felt like a Zoom class that leaves exhausted but also unsatisfied. (God, I hate looking at myself so much.) Some days the pandemic routine was just fine, even enjoyable. Other days terror and depression pinched hard. On the plus side, we spent so much time together as a family. But on the downside, we spent so much time together as a family.

April is the best month of the year, weather wise, in Little Rock. And in that regard at least 2020 didn’t disappoint, so we were outside in the yard a lot. I fear what will happen when the hot weather sets in, in a couple of weeks or so. So I tried to read outside as much as I could. But what I mostly read this month was undergraduate prose—many, many essay drafts and short writing exercises. Some of that writing was excellent, some not. Either way, it took me away from books, plus I was working away at some chunksters. Thus this meager final tally:

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Philip Kerr, Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018)

Ingenious of Kerr to make his rumpled anti-hero Bernie Gunther an insurance adjuster in this last book of the series. (Kerr completed one more before he died, but it is set back in the 1920s, with Bernie a rookie beat cop.) Insurance is a great milieu for non-PI crime investigating, and I’m surprised more writers don’t take advantage of it. (Double Indemnity, of course, and Don Winslow’s California Fire and Life—can you think of others?) Here, Bernie is sent to Greece to investigate a suspicious claim. No surprise, what he finds relates to the Nazi occupation of the 1940s. What is a surprise is the ending, which offers a new, but quite fitting, direction for Bernie, serving an intriguing new set of masters. I would have loved to see Kerr develop these possibilities, but it’s satisfying as it is.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985)

A damn good book, which kept me company through the first confusing and anxious pandemic weeks, back when things felt both more terrifying and less depressing than now. In the 1870s, down by the Mexican border, a group of cowboys work the Hat Creek ranch under the direction of two former Texas Rangers. The return of an old comrade and a sense that life has become played out convince the men to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, where they plan to set up the first ranch in the territory.

Lonesome Dove has an exciting plot (McMurtry is good with weather, and he sure knows how to create drama out of a river crossing), but what it really has is a set of great characters. (Be warned: the intersection of these qualities often takes the form of death. You’ll lose several people you’ve become quite attached to.) For me, the book is about the things other people can see about you that you yourself just can’t. (A theme abetted by the novel’s roving omniscience.) Lonesome Dove is about the limits of self-knowledge—limits that abet the uncaringness of the universe that everyone, we learn, runs aground against anyway. Most heartbreaking is the inability of the outfit’s stoic leader, Captain Woodrow Call, to acknowledge that he’s the father of one of its youngest members. (There’s a beautiful, moving, frustrating scene between them at the end: the book’s plenty sentimental, which I like.) Almost as heartbreaking is the story of Call’s partner, Captain Augustus McCrae, as excitable and gregarious as Call is reticent, who is felled not by reencountering the love of his life but by his own stubbornness and vanity.

The novel’s only weakness is that there are almost no women in, only three really, though to be fair they’re important, and McMurtry handles two of them well (especially McCrae’s old flame, Emily). The prostitute Lorena Wood is less successful: what might have seemed a sensitive portrait in the 1980s doesn’t work today. But the book has a sweep, a verve, a love of life (it’s often laugh-out-loud funny) that really captivated me, and I can imagine tit ending up on my end of the year list.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Bark (2011) Trans. Samuel Martin (2017)

I can’t be fussed to look back and see what I wrote when I first read this a couple of years ago. Pretty sure I liked it then; I like it a lot now. I’ve taught it twice, and it’s a keeper. Didi-Huberman—a French academic who has written a lot about photography—juxtaposes photographs he took on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau with little essayistic reflections on the experience. I now have a better handle on his argument, viz, we need to see without looking, which is to say, without being guided by preconceptions. Only self-awareness about the limitations of looking can let us do that. Students love the book—that came through even over our less-than-ideal video sessions. On my previous readings, I hadn’t picked up how much Didi-Huberman hates Claude Lanzmann, so that was a nice little bonus for me.

Henri Bosco, Malicroix (1948) Trans. Joyce Zonana (2020)

Strange and compelling, especially in its first half. A young man inherits a small house on a small island in the middle of the Rhone river—or he will if he satisfies the unusual requirements of the bequest. I will have more to say soon!

Sujata Massey, The Widows of Malabar Hill (2018)

First in a crime series set in 1920s Bombay (with detour to Calcutta). Parveen Mistry is the city’s first female solicitor (unlike her father, with whom she practices, she cannot argue in court) and a member of the city’s small but influential Parsi community. (She is modelled on the real-life Cornelia Sorabji.) When the firm is asked to execute the will of a longstanding Muslim client, Parveen’s gender turns into an asset, as the deceased three wives live in purdah. Her ability to speak to the widows directly becomes more pressing when a member of the household is found murdered. As I said about Greeks Bearing Gifts, I enjoy seeing how writers tackle the problems and opportunities offered by non-police or PI characters. It will be interesting to watch Massey deal with this constraint as the series goes forward. The crime takes a backseat to Parveen’s involved history—in this, as well as the period setting and the sensibilities of the main character, Widows reminded me of the first Maisie Dobbs novel; fans of that series will enjoy this one—but the story of her education and the unhappy events that led her to work with her father are compelling enough that I didn’t mind. I’ve already bought the second book, which, I gather, riffs on The Moonstone.

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May is shaping up to be a better reading month, once again with plenty of crime but other things too. Among other things I’ve been plugging away at Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. I’ve read 650 pp, and there are still 800 to go! Sometimes I just laugh at how big it is. Soothing, though. Tune in next time to see if I finish it.

Six Feet Apart by Chelbi Gilmore

Posted on by under Guest post, personal, student essays, teaching, Uncategorized

Some years I’m lucky enough to teach a course I’ve designed called Writing for Life. In it, I help students write personal statements for scholarships, internships, or professional and graduate schools. I also work with them as they write personal essays. My aim is to help students see that writing is inextricable from thinking, and, as such, that writing is an important part of a reflective life, no matter what one’s eventual life path.

All students have been affected by COVID-19. But I have particular sympathy for the students of the Class of 2020, who have been denied those important, bittersweet last moments of triumph, expectation, and longing that compose the final weeks of a college career.

As a small way of compensating some of those students–as well as to highlight some outstanding work from my class–I asked three students who wrote particularly excellent final essays if I could share their work here.

The final assignment was to write about an important object in their lives in a way that case light on the object, on the writer, and on some concept or idea that could only be reached by thinking about the relationship between writer and object.  This year, I gave students the choice of reflecting on their experience of the pandemic. I think it will be clear which direction each student chose. At the end of the essay, you can learn more about the writer.

Today’s essay is by Chelbi Gilmore. It is titled Six Feet Apart.

Chelbi Treehouse

A treehouse the author’s father built for her and her sister. (Since lowered and used for storage.)

Six Feet Apart

   I sit on my bed, attempting to do homework, while my parents and sister argue about Easter plans in the living room. I try to tune them out and focus on what I’m working on, but this quickly proves to be impossible. I dread walking in there and being dragged into another hour-long conversation that ultimately ends without resolution.

This is how our nights are spent now, arguing about how we should respond to the current global COVID-19 pandemic. Tonight, they’re discussing whether we should participate in our normal Easter routine: attending church and having an egg hunt for the kids. My dad leads a house church, which means that 6-7 families meet in someone’s home each week and he gives a short sermon. It’s not traditional, but we love the close bond that has formed among all the members. He has continued to hold a house church service every Sunday during the coronavirus outbreak. My mom and I have abstained from attending, which has caused dissent in my family. We believe that having 25 people in a confined space during this time is socially irresponsible, but my dad doesn’t see the problem.

“I just wish you guys would stay home more,” I hear my mom say.

“We’re not together even when we are here!” my sister yells back.

She’s not wrong. Even when we’re all home, we watch TV and work in separate rooms, only gathering for dinner. When we’re all together, we feel the tension that the outbreak has caused our family. I know inevitably I will be dragged into the dispute, so I finally decide to leave the comfort of my room and join the rest of my feuding family. I walk into the living room and sit next to my mom on our couch, which is facing my dad and sister standing on the opposite side of the room. We’re six feet apart, even in our own home.

When the outbreak started making headlines, I didn’t anticipate people would have such mixed reactions to it. I assumed everyone would do everything the CDC recommends and self-isolate inside their homes to avoid unknowingly spreading the disease. However, in my family of four I’ve seen firsthand how much dissent these recommendations have caused. My mom and I have taken the federal and state directives, like staying six feet apart from people in public, seriously and refuse to leave our house except for essential reasons. My dad, on the other hand, believes that everyone’s overreacting about the virus. Other than washing his hands more frequently, he has made few changes in his life to minimize the spread of COVID-19. Every day, around five o’clock, my dad comes home from work, changes clothes, and leaves again to go to our local park to play disc golf with his friends. I haven’t seen any of my friends in person for almost two months now, but my dad continues to hang out with his every single day and risks exposing them or us to the virus. After arguing about this irresponsible practice repeatedly, my mom and I eventually grew too exhausted to continue trying to change his mind.

It seemed fitting that on Friday the 13th we received the email informing us we would not be returning to college after that weekend. At first, I only felt bummed to be missing out on the last two months of time with the friends that I had spent almost every day with for four years. At this point, I didn’t comprehend what the full impact of the COVID-19 outbreak would be. I thought I was simply going to move back into my parent’s house and spend my days in front of my computer, bored, as I log into this new virtual version of school. I couldn’t have foreseen the stress that would come with moving back home.

Well, perhaps I could have. My dad and I have always disagreed about politics, but we’re able to have (mostly) calm conversations explaining our beliefs. After Donald Trump was elected president, we began to have these disputes more frequently. The night of November 8, 2016, I remember sitting for hours with many of my peers at Hendrix, watching the election polls. We continued watching way after we realized that there was no chance Hillary Clinton would win. It’s like we couldn’t bear to look away from the disaster that was unfolding before us. People cried as we walked back to our rooms in the early hours of the next morning, grieving the livelihoods of everyone that would be affected by Trump’s horrible policies. My dad, on the other hand, was rejoicing 120 miles away in my childhood home. Ever since Trump began campaigning for the presidency, my dad has supported him. He claims that it’s refreshing to see a president who doesn’t act as a politician, but rather says exactly what he thinks. He argues that Trump is an advocate for “working class people” and can’t see that he alienates many people, some who would even fall into the “working class” category. I point out to my dad the reason Trump doesn’t act like a politician is because he has absolutely no idea how to run our country. In the past few years, we’ve had numerous debates about abortion, immigration, healthcare policies, etc. Neither of us are willing to completely compromise, but we’re always willing to listen to each other.

For the first time, I feel like my dad isn’t responsive to my point of view at all. In the past, he’s always been willing to listen to the reasons for my beliefs. His opinion didn’t feel as rigid as his opinions about COVID-19 feel. I think this is because with most issues he doesn’t completely disagree with me, but rather, he prioritizes something else. For example, during our many disputes about President Trump’s immigration policies, I always point out that some people who immigrate to the United States do so because they feel like they have no other choice. Many people that Trump is trying to keep out of this country are seeking refuge from terrible situations. My dad does not argue with this fact; however, he says that immigrants are “taking jobs from American people”. He agrees that these people need help, but he prioritizes the U.S. economy over this need. So, while he mostly disagrees with me, he acknowledges that I am right in some respects. In contrast, we both see our argument regarding social distancing as purely black and white. There is no movement towards agreement; we’re in a stalemate.

Now, I don’t mean to make my dad seem like a terrible person. He’s one of my favorite people and has always supported me in my endeavors. For example, he wanted me to completely focus on my schoolwork in college, so he supported me financially, even though my parents didn’t have the excess money to give. He sacrifices everything for not only myself, but the rest of my family too. In our family, he’s the guy who will always help you out, no matter what you’re asking of him. There have been many times when he would get a call from one of his cousins who were in trouble because they’d spent all their money on drugs. He loans them money that he knows he’ll never get back. My dad always helps the people around him, even if they continually ask for his help and give nothing in return. He owns a small construction company and makes a point to hire people who can’t find a job anywhere else. My dad not only supplies them a job, but also truly cares for them. Recently, one of his guys decided to separate from his wife, so he needed somewhere to live. My dad let him stay in my late grandma’s house for free until he could afford to pay rent. He lets friends borrow his truck, lawn mower, construction equipment, and tools whenever they may need. He does all this for the people in his life, so why does he not care about those affected by COVID-19 or Trump’s administration?

I think many of our differences can be attributed to what we’ve been exposed to in our lives. My dad went to work at his family’s construction company straight out of high school. Shortly after this, he met my mom and they were engaged nine months later. They built the house that I grew up in together, which means that he moved directly from his parents’ house in with my mom. She has a similar story. She was raised one town over from my dad and married him within a year of graduating high school. I cherish their small-town love story, but it means that they haven’t experienced much outside of the place they’ve lived their whole lives. For me, there were many positives to growing up in a small town. For example, it was easy to make friends because I saw the same people every day in school for 13 years. However, there are downsides to this kind of community too. I was never exposed to people from a different background than me, so I didn’t truly value a diverse community until I came to college. My parents have always lived in the same area with an overwhelming number of white, southern, traditional people, so I think they struggle to sympathize with those who are different than them. For them, voting for Trump is the most natural thing to do because everyone around them supports him too. I wish that my parents could experience what life is like for those discriminated against by the Trump administration, even just for one day.

While my sister and I grew up in the same geographical area as my parents, we were also raised in a time when everyone is connected online. We were exposed to different perspectives simply by being on social media. I think that the media I consumed played a huge role in my acceptance of people who are different than me. Of course, there are still many ways that TV shows and movies could be more inclusive, but as the shows I watched become more accepting of people’s experiences, so did I. When I began college, I was surrounded by people who valued diversity. Now, I almost forget that other people in my life don’t think the same as me.

Even though my sister also grew up in the “digital age”, she has still chosen to align herself with my dad in this heated debate about COVID-19. I don’t think her experience with diversity in media has influenced her feelings about the pandemic. The only reason she “agrees” with my dad is so she can continue hanging out with her few friends still willing to socialize. She’s always been eager to soak up whatever the people around her think, especially my parents. She is a “people pleaser”, so she thinks like the people she wants to please. It’s simply easier to regurgitate what my dad shouts at the news every night. So, when my family started arguing about how we should respond to the coronavirus outbreak, she chose the side that would allow her to continue doing what she wanted to do. I’m not saying that my sister doesn’t have any individuality, but she does tend to accept the information that my parents tell her without researching to decide what she believes.

Despite our differences, my family has always been close. We’ve never been this divided over an issue, or at least we’ve never acknowledged it. Maybe I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the problems I have with my parents’ beliefs. Until now, I’ve always been able to escape conflict by going back to my friends at Hendrix. It’s difficult for me to reconcile my love for my family and the frustration I feel towards them for their beliefs. To me, it seems so clear that we must do everything we can to “flatten the curve” and keep others healthy. However, my dad has a completely different perspective. He believes that the media is causing panic among the American people, so we don’t need to change our daily habits to stop the spread of the virus. No matter how hard my dad and I try, we can’t see why the other person thinks the way that they do.

He always tells me that my “bleeding heart” will get me in trouble. He says I think about others too much and should think more practically about how the economy is negatively impacted when the U.S. government helps others. It seems so strange to me that he says this when he has a “bleeding heart” for everyone he knows. It’s easy for him to prioritize economic gain over a human life when it isn’t directly in front of him. However, if the issue is off in the distance, he separates his feelings and refuses to care about people he doesn’t personally know.

In my living room, the night before Easter, my mom and I are stationed on one side of the room opposite of my dad and sister. My sister and I mostly let our parents do the arguing. I interject a few times when it seems I might explode if I don’t let my thoughts out. One time, I tell my dad how I can’t bear the thought of accidentally passing the coronavirus to an elderly couple in our church.

“See, I don’t think like that,” my dad replies. “I don’t live my life in fear of what might happen!”

My mom and I try to convince him that we aren’t fearful, but cautious of how our actions affect others. I’m not afraid for my life, however, I don’t want to jeopardize the lives of others. My dad thinks we’re silly for thinking this way, but I don’t care. Even if my mom and I are completely wrong about COVID-19 and the disease isn’t as infectious as the CDC says, I would rather be on the side of caution than in my dad and sister’s position.

“I just want us all to be together on Easter,” my mom says, implying that she wants my dad and sister not to participate in the festivities tomorrow. My dad concedes and decides to stay home the next day. This is not a permanent solution. Next week, they will be right back to their regular scheduled outings each Sunday. We will continue to isolate ourselves in our rooms to avoid this repeated conflict, wishing for the eventual day when the COVID-19 pandemic ends. Hopefully, at that point the divide in our family won’t be so deep that it’s irreparable and we’ll be able to close the six-foot gap between us.

Chelbi

Chelbi Gilmore is from the small town of Alma, Arkansas and recently graduated from Hendrix College. She will start working as a medical scribe in central Arkansas this summer and plans to apply to medical school in the fall.