The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. 

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: A friend of mine described Andrea Long Chu’s approach to criticism as perfecting a rigorous negativity. We all know how deeply fun it can be to hate on something for long and intense periods of time, but as any good analyst or theorist of emotion might point out, there always exists a hard kernel of love in hate. It’s an abiding love for the sheer act of thinking that I always sense in Andrea’s work. She’s this year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the book critic at New York Magazine. Her book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. I’m sure many of you have read her blockbuster reviews of books by Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and most recently Zadie Smith, as well as her essays on Phantom of the Opera and—my favorite—on the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I’m very happy to have her as our inaugural guest. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Long Chu: Thank you for having me.

For a full transcript and details of the piece Andrea responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books [link]

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Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females: an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Wesley Morris has served as critic at large at The New York Times since 2015, covering film, politics, and pop culture. He joins this week to discuss this year’s Academy Award nominations.

At the top, we discuss the omission of Greta Gerwig from the Best Director category, former Secretary Clinton on Barbie-gate, the ‘perversely effective’ nature of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the ways in which Bradley Cooper’s Maestro upends the traditional biopic. Wesley then reflects on his early adventures in moviegoing, the indie film boom of the late ‘90s, the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, what the Best Picture nominations of 1988 can tell us about 2023’s slate, and the erosion of the ‘middle’ across film and culture.

In the back-half: Todd Haynes’ beguiling new film May December, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the Academy’s fraught relationship to diversity, the function of Wesley’s work in 2024, and a reading of his moving, personal review about Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: What we’ve lost is the ‘middle’ of movies, the drama or comedy that has no great aspirations. It was not made to win or be nominated for awards. I want to try to unpack how—and why—we’re here. Do you see any parallels between the decline in film criticism with the decline in filmmaking? Did one precipitate the other?

Wesley Morris: Well, that’s a more complicated proposition, because the decline in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals where film criticism thrived. I think the two things are related but not necessarily causal of each other. I do, however, think that in the last fifteen years, there’s been a sort of downgrading of what a review can do and should do. You know, there’s this tension between coming up with a review—liking something a lot, they love that—or really panning something. When I worked at The Boston Globe, for instance, we gave things stars. If I was like, “Killers of the Flower Moon: two stars” that would have superseded anything I would have necessarily wrote about it. That middle place, the middle of moviemaking is gone, a kind of mixed criticism… people have lost patience for that. That a movie can’t have things that work and don’t work. The disappearance of the middle— there are so many middles that have disappeared. Middle ground, middlebrow, middle class. There’s either, or. There’s very little room for not even debate and disagreement, but just complexity. I find it really interesting that none of the ten nominees on this Best Picture list include May December. Did you see that movie?

SF: I love it.

WM: Yeah, I did not the first time I saw it. Then I went and saw it again, and was like, “What was my problem?” I saw it the next day. That’s a movie that has so much going on. It’s so of a piece with where we are right now. It’s not telling you what it’s doing or how it’s feeling or what it even is. It’s like the weird touchless-ness of Todd Haynes, even though there is so much touching in this movie— the music is touching, the butterfly metaphors are touching you. His fingerprints are all over this thing, but it still feels like the hand guiding it is completely invisible and these characters are just doing whatever it is that they’ve been set on this earth to do. To sit down and talk about this movie and what is happening here… it is really deep and really satisfying to unpack it or argue with people about it. Like, I leave a movie and do not trust my response to it. And in the case of May December, I just went the next day and saw it again. It was like seeing something dead come to life right before your eyes. I found that expansion of my mind exhilarating.

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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

In 1999, when overnight I quit a good job to write The Devil That Danced on the Water, I did so in the grip of a fury. From the United Kingdom I had watched my paternal country of Sierra Leone, finally and after decades of oppression, erupt in a violence that had simmered too long.

For months my stepmother had lived with me in my London home as a refugee. Inside Sierra Leone a decade had passed in which no one had made contact with the remainder of my father’s family, who were caught behind rebel lines in the north of the country. When the government in Sierra Leone declared it was safe to return, I had put my stepmother on a plane home, a terrible mistake as it turned out.

Within weeks the rebel army of the RUF began what was intended as the final onslaught on Freetown. They called it “Operation No Living Thing.” On the telephone to my stepmother I heard the shells exploding nearby, the gunfire of the advancing rebel soldiers. All of this made me feel desperate and very afraid, but it was not the cause of my fury.

The fury came from listening to and watching the reports of the war by the Western press, who salivated over stories of mutilation, rape, child soldiers, forced marriage, and especially cannibalism, of which there were multiple accounts. What was missing was any apparent effort to understand or to report the causes of the war. There was no context, no history, no politics, just the senseless violence with which Africa had long been associated. I was then a reporter at BBC TV. My beat, though, was British politics and current affairs. The BBC was not the worst offender, by any means.

When I let it be known that I was from Sierra Leone, at least one correspondent sought my advice. Once I called in from home and corrected the pronunciation of Magburaka, where my father spent part of his childhood, while the presenter was on air. For another correspondent, I translated interviews with my people caught up in the January 6 invasion of Freetown. Still, even within the most responsible news organizations, there seemed to be little interest in the question of why this was happening.

Elsewhere, the world went on with its business. Barely a soul asked after my family, even among those whom I considered my friends. Perhaps Sierra Leone seemed too remote a land to appear as more than an abstraction, or perhaps the absence of peril in the lives of most of my London friends resulted in a failure of imagination. I know now that my experience is shared by many people who endure war remotely, whether those people are returning combatants or refugees.

War in Sierra Leone had been turned into a spectacle without ever becoming a tragedy.

I have often been asked how long it took me to write The Devil That Danced on the Water and I have replied that it took me two years and a lifetime. Two years, because that was the duration of time in which I researched and wrote it, as the furies snapped at my heels. A lifetime, because sometimes you have to see enough of the world to begin to understand it.

In her Nobel Prize speech, published later as the essay “Witness: The Inward Testimony,” Nadine Gordimer describes the task of the writer as the “transformation of events, motives, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning.” And it was this “meaning,” viewed through the lens of subsequent events and the shock of war, at which it took me twenty-five years to arrive.

Following publication of the book, I returned to Sierra Leone year upon year. I gave talks at the schools and universities. I remember the first young man, a student, who approached me to tell me that he had heard me speak at Fourah Bay College and had then gone to talk to his parents. “Are these things true?” he had wanted to know. And his parents had replied, “Yes, they are true.” Then the young man had asked them why they had never told him and his parents had replied, “Because we were afraid.” This is the silence of oppression.

From that time on many young people came up to me in the street, or in a restaurant or store, or else wrote to me. All told the same story as the first young man, a story that they had never known. The silence of a generation had been broken. In time the history books used to teach schoolchildren in Sierra Leone would be rewritten to include the events related in The Devil That Danced on the Water.

A ‘meaning’ I have derived from writing this book is that certain patterns of historical events, sometimes including but not limited to cowing people into silence and terrorized inaction, could be repeated anywhere. What had begun as a quest to discover the truth behind my father’s murder would grow into a twenty-year investigation into the causes and effects of civil conflict.

In 2017, by then teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I was invited to lunch with Hillary Clinton shortly after she had lost the election to Donald Trump. I was seated next to one of her advisers, who listened with interest as I described my writing and where it had led me. I told her what I had learned of the signs of incipient and growing authoritarianism: control of the press and judiciary, co-option of the loyalty of the police and the army, rise of militias, manipulation of elections.

There was one more element, most crucially: a transformational leader, someone both charismatic and deadly. In the case of Sierra Leone this had been Foday Sankoh. In Yugoslavia the ambitions of Slobodan Milošević had placed the country on the course to war. The woman appeared to be listening with a great deal of interest. So, I concluded, these were the reasons I was worried about the United States of America.

My companion looked at me and frowned, then she swatted the air with the back of her hand and pronounced: “Not in freedom-loving America!” I wonder what she thinks now. Even then, Donald Trump had begun to discredit the mainstream press and to promote his own ‘truth’ on social media. He was wooing the military by bringing generals into his administration and was seeking control of the judiciary by appointing federal judges at breakneck speed.

Four years after that conversation, on the day before the invasion of the Capitol on (coincidentally also) January 6, I sent a text to an American friend in London: “Are you ready for the coup?” I was only half joking. He would later ask me how I’d known, and all I could say is that I had spent a long time thinking about the ways in which a country strays from the path of peace.

In Sierra Leone in the 1980s, even as war raged in neighboring Liberia, people did not believe it could happen to us. We Sierra Leonians saw ourselves as essentially peace-loving, even if our leaders were venal. If anything, our problem was that we were too passive. But when things begin, they must begin somewhere. There is a schema, one that might be traced from the first flap of the butterfly’s wings to the hurricane.

On a noticeboard in my office, for a long time, I had taped a handwritten note to myself with the lines “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth,” which is true, I think, of a certain type of story. Two novels set in Sierra Leone followed The Devil That Danced on the Water. I continued to explore the themes of civil conflict in fiction.

Fiction allowed me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth. Ancestor Stones took the reader back to pre-colonial times to examine the century-long antecedents of state collapse. The Memory of Love examined the immediate prelude and the aftermath to the war and the silence of censorship, of self-censorship, of trauma, but also of complicity. How did a generation account for their actions, or inaction, to the generation whom they had failed?

The road to conflict may be long or short. Sometimes countries find their way back. Certain events may tip a country finally into war, chief among them an economic crisis. In time, my attention moved out of Africa and turned to the former Yugoslavia for the reason that the war that led to the collapse of that union had been almost exactly contemporaneous with the war in Sierra Leone (Yugoslavia 1991–2001; Sierra Leone 1991–2002). Though just as savage, the Yugoslav conflict had been reported completely differently, with both causes and consequences analyzed in forensic detail.

The war in the former Yugoslavia encompassed several nations. I chose to concentrate on Croatia, because there were striking parallels between Croatia and Sierra Leone. The first is size: Sierra Leone is 22,000 square miles, Croatia 28,000. At the start of the wars in 1991, the population of each country was around 4 million. Both are coastal countries of outstanding natural beauty, with a chiefly peasant population and a rural economy supplemented by tourism. Then, of course, there is the key similarity, the one that drew me in the first place—both nations had endured decades of authoritarianism, followed by economic free fall and, finally, civil war.

I have friends from the former Yugoslavia and we talked about our similar experiences. I was interested, too, in the differences. The war in Sierra Leone had never gone down ethnic or nationalist lines, despite the misreporting of the war as “tribal.”

In contrast the war in Yugoslavia had indeed been fought along viciously exploited ethnic divides. The war in Sierra Leone had begun after thirty years of exploitation of people and resources by a corrupt regime; it had been a slow burn. The war in Yugoslavia had been, comparatively, fast burning. A friend who had reported there commented: “The reason those wars kicked off so fast was because every man had a gun and knew how to use it.” This helped answer my question about speed. Men in Yugoslavia had been obliged to do military service, making for a supply of trained citizens who could be recruited into the militias that characterized that war. A nation in which guns are easily available is a tinderbox relative to one in which people have little access to high-powered weaponry.

My friend’s remark led me to understand something else, too. The war in the former Yugoslavia became a sniper’s war. Civilians were shot and killed by the thousands in cities under siege by men in the surrounding hills. Yugoslavia was a nation of hunters; Sierra Leone is a nation of farmers. The war in Sierra Leone had been characterized by amputations: the rebel army hacked off people’s limbs. When people go to war they pick up the weapon at hand, be it a machete or a rifle.

As time went by I became interested in the ways in which a population survives the aftermath of a civil conflict, when you must continue to live side by side with your enemy (as in the case of Sierra Leone) or with the knowledge of what you have done to them (as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where communities were ‘ethnically cleansed’ in the form of mass deportation and murder).

In The Memory of Love, two of my main characters are trauma specialists, and in the years of writing those books I spent many hundreds of hours talking to victims and those who try to help them. Early in my research, a Sierra Leonian psychiatrist had remarked to me, “These people will be all right, you know.” He was talking about the mental health of most of the population over the medium to long term. He thought that trauma diagnoses were being applied too widely and too quickly, in particular by Western aid workers.

His views echoed those of the French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik. Cyrulnik lost his parents in the Holocaust and worked professionally with many survivors of genocide. He challenged the orthodoxy that pain necessarily equals trauma. Instead, he argued that emotional vulnerability could be transformed into emotional strength. He called this ‘resilience.’

In May of 2014, I received an email from a woman asking if she might put me in touch with a former political detainee from Sudan. Sudan was then under the rule of the longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir. In 2013, Ezekiel (the name he used) and three other men had been arrested and charged with treason. They were held in custody at the National Security Headquarters, where on many days they heard rifles being fired within the compound, which they feared were the sounds of prisoners being executed.

One day a guard gave the prisoners each a copy of The Devil That Danced on the Water with the order to read it. The men did as they were instructed, but they also took to discussing the book among themselves. They saw the obvious parallels between their story and that of my father, and they concluded that both the book and the gunfire were part of a process of psychological intimidation. “They were trying to tell us that the same fate awaited us as had awaited your father.” But far from inviting despair, the book “had the opposite effect.” It renewed the strength of their convictions. They promised that, when and if they were ever released, they would find the author of this book and tell her about the inspiration they had derived from it.

Following the collapse of the government case against them, Ezekiel fled into exile. Soon afterwards he began his search for me. Omar al-Bashir, the dictator, would eventually be unseated in a popular uprising in 2019.

A positive temperament, an inclination to humor, the passage of time, being surrounded by people who care but do not “catastrophize” and by a society that does not turn every adversity into an existential question (why me?) but accepts that sometimes “shit happens”—all these factors help. In the end most of us develop the characteristics that help us overcome the bad things that have happened. Thus, my twenty-year enquiry into the causes and effects of civil conflict ended with a novel called Happiness.

To write a memoir is to live in the minds of readers as the person you were in the pages of the book, all of which leads me to a question readers often ask me. What happened to the members of my family after the events in the book were over? Here is the answer. In my father’s last will, written shortly before he was executed, he stated the wish that we children should be reunited with our mother. An international search for her took place, about which we, the children, were kept mostly in ignorance until one day we were summoned before a lawyer and asked if we remembered anything at all about our grandparents in Aberdeen. Anything at all, he said, perhaps the part of town where they lived? To which we replied: “Gran and Grandad live at 38 Gairn Terrace.” And so our mother, who was living in Zambia with her husband, the New Zealander, was found.

My mother is now in her eighties and retired in New Zealand. My brother and sister both have families of their own. Morlai, along with my husband, Simon, and myself, established a primary school in Rogbonko, a village founded by my grandfather where my father was born. Immediately following the war and the years of missed schooling, not a single child was able to read or write. Today Rogbonko Village School boasts university graduates among its alumni. And as for my stepmother, Yabome, she has lived quietly and contentedly in Sierra Leone ever since.

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From The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (20th Anniversary Edition) by Aminatta Forna. Copyright © 2023. Available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

In the early moments of a 1998 playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there was a brief stoppage in play as the referees untangled a special-teams skirmish. Somewhere off camera, reigning NFL MVP and future (alleged) welfare fraudster Brett Favre was idling near Bucs defensive lineman Warren Sapp. He turned to Sapp and asked offhandedly, “How much do you weigh?”

A disruptive force on defense, Sapp wasn’t used to quarterbacks engaging him in conversation, much less questioning his girth. And so, while he answered Favre—“Three-oh-seven Friday”—it wasn’t until the next whistle that he really responded.

“It dawned on me,” Sapp says. “I said, ‘What? You think you can outrun me?’”

Favre: “Oh, I’ll outrun your big ass.”

Sapp liked what he was hearing. He shouted back, “Don’t worry. I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”

Favre and Sapp continued barking at each other the rest of that day and pretty much every other time they played. After a Sapp sack on Favre—which he would do eleven times over the course of his career—the quarterback turned to see who had dragged him to the turf. “Who you think it is?” Sapp asked. The two jawed so much that Favre’s teammates would literally forbid him from talking to Sapp.

“As good as he was as a player, he was equally as good as a talker, and if you were not careful, you would get caught up in that,” per Favre.

Favre wasn’t the only one to hold that opinion. In a 2006 Sports Illustrated piece about trash talk in football, multiple players singled out Sapp as best in class, while the New York Times dubbed him “one of the great blabbermouths in the game.” But if you ask Sapp about this reputation—and I did—he’ll tell you it’s off the mark. “I really wasn’t that big of a trash-talker,” he says. “I just got into conversations with certain dudes.”

It’s not that he denies talking; he just doesn’t think of it as trash. Todd Boyd would agree with this sentiment. As the University of Southern California professor and chair for the study of race and popular culture explains, “I mean, talking trash—it sounds disposable. The metaphor is disposable.”

Says Sapp, “Call it the dozens. Or call it shit talking. That’s all it is.”

As a kid, Sapp learned to engage in verbal combat both at home, where he was the youngest of six siblings, and in the neighborhood, where he would pedal the bike he asked his mom for every December—as either a birthday or Christmas gift—to wherever his friends were hanging out, where he knew they’d be talking shit. “That was our entertainment. That was our fun,” he says. “When we got together, we talked about each other.”

According to the activist H. Rap Brown, who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the dozens served as linguistic training for many Black youth, too. As he writes in his 1969 memoir: “Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.”And: “We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.”

If you didn’t grow up with it, perhaps the easiest way to understand the dozens is to think about the game as the exchange of your-mama jokes—combatants trying to one-up (and even upset) each other, while vying for verbal and creative supremacy via any vulgar means necessary. Usually, this would transpire before an inciting crowd of observers who served to heighten the accolades of success and deepen the humiliation of defeat. But the dozens isn’t so easily defined—neither in format nor content.

According to some accounts, the dozens can be traced to the early days of the United States, when it was played by enslaved people, while Elijah Wald, in his deeply academic book on the subject, Talking ’Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, makes the case that the game has African roots.

As an informal pastime played in schoolyards, on front stoops, and in barrooms, the dozens can claim no unifying theory. It’s always evolving, defined by its participants, informed by context, and infused with local flavor. For many, the dozens is known by other names—like joning, slipping, capping, bagging, or snapping—and individual experiences with the game can be equally varied.

For some, like Sapp, the dozens is an activity undergirded by affection and bonhomie. It is a prosocial endeavor—a bonding ritual—even if there are a few sharp edges. As Steve Jones Jr., the basketball coach and son of ABA star Steve Jones, describes it to me, talking shit was his dad’s “love language.” Todd Boyd can relate.

“My parents talked shit, like regularly. Like every day. It doesn’t get any closer than that,” he says. “After a while, that’s the normal mode of discourse. That’s how Black people talk. Black people I grew up around, anyway.” This dynamic would speak to what are known as “joking relationships,” which were defined by the pioneering social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown as consisting of “a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism,” in which intimacy can masquerade as hostility. In which, in other words, insults aren’t to be taken personally.

But just as play fighting can become the real thing, the dozens can be a dangerous game: sometimes people get hurt. “It is a risky pleasure,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it. In 1939, the white American psychologist and sociologist John Dollard was the first person to give the dozens serious academic attention in his paper “The Dozens: Dialect of Insult.” He noted that “the themes about which joking is allowed seem to be those most condemned by our social order in other contexts.”

Dollard saw the game not just as idle entertainment, but also as serving a utilitarian function for Black folks living in an openly racist society, specifically as “a valve for aggression” that would have otherwise and rightly been directed at white people, which would also have likely led to violent consequence.

Various other ideas and theories about the functionality of the dozens have emerged over the years, though Wald asserts that “all are interesting as much for what they reveal about the explainers as what they tell us about the game.” But while there may be no authoritative account—and while the meaning of the game to one person can be in direct contradiction with what it means to another—the explanations are instructive.

Some, for example, have cast the game as a means of negotiating social status, a puberty or initiation ritual, an in-group signifier, or a mechanism of survival. These all speak to a kind of testing—a challenge being presented.

This last functionality, in particular, has gained traction with many. In 1970, the psychologist Joseph White writes in Ebony “that the brothers and sisters use the dozens as a game to teach them how to keep cool and think fast under pressure.”

The following year, in their book The Jesus Bag, psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs describe the dozens as “a highly evolved instrument of survival” that introduces Black youth “to the humiliations which will become so intimate a part of their life.” They write, “In the deepest sense, the essence of the dozens lies not in the insults but in the response of the victim.”

Nigerian poet, scholar, and journalist Onwuchekwa Jemie—who links the dozens to similar West African traditions—describes this learned stoicism as a kind of immunization process: “It is as if the system is inoculated with virtual (verbally imagined) strains of the virus.”

But to gain true inoculation, one’s immune response has to be put to the test. And in that sense, the goal of the game is to not just best an opponent, but to get them to lose their cool. It’s why H. Rap Brown described the dozens as “a mean game,” wherein “what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words.” He continued: “The real aim of the Dozens was to get a dude so mad that he’d cry or get mad enough to fight.”

As Dollard writes in 1939, “it is good technique to attack the other fellow at his weak point, if that be found” and that “the one who fights first tends to be viewed as the ‘weaker kidder.’” Warren Sapp can barely imagine his childhood duels devolving into fisticuffs: “No, you throw a punch and nobody is going to hang out with you. You soft-skinned bastard.”

And yet violence was always a possible outcome with the dozens. Any insult contains an implicit and necessary threat, a violation—it’s what gives the insult its power—and if you’re going to disparage someone, especially by “getting close to dangerous truths in comical ways,” as Wald puts it, that invites retaliation, verbal or otherwise.

But even more than that, the dozens could be deployed at times with the explicit intention to hurt or to escalate an encounter to physical conflict. That distinction may not always be clear. As Jemie writes, the dozens is “always ambiguous and double edged. Always, it could be used either to amuse or abuse.” Many who understood the dozens for its bloody potential felt it was best avoided altogether, per Wald. At least one Mississippi establishment even hung a sign to that effect in the late 1920s: If you want to play the dozens, go home.

Others opted out simply because they didn’t want to get their feelings hurt.

Soft-skinned bastards.

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Excerpted from Trash Talk by Rafi Kohan. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

“I have long felt the need of someone to take hold where I begin to fall down. I know of course that no one can breathe the breath of life into a dead thing, but I have more favorable reviews, letters, etc. on all my work than most writers collect in a lifetime, yet something has been lacking. Either through laziness, lack of technique, skill or whatnot, I’m aways failing by a hair.”

These were the words of Jay Sigmund, a successful Grand Rapids, Iowa, insurance executive by day—and poet and writer in his spare time. Sigmund was explaining his writing struggles in one of several letters he mailed to Betty Smith in 1936-1937. Smith would become famous for her bestselling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943.

But at the time, Smith was a Yale Drama School-educated, struggling playwright, and single mother of two, living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Works Projects Administration had assigned her to work as a play reader for the Federal Theatre Project. Both writers were in difficult stretches of their lives—yet holding fast to their writing ambitions; both would gain substantially from the connection they forged.

There was good reason for Sigmund to feel comfortable revealing his insecurities to Smith, for she had disclosed her own rejections and jilted dreams: “Like you, I have been disappointed so many times, as far as writing is concerned” Smith wrote to Sigmund, “So many times, has a book, or a play come right up to the verge of success and then dropped through the vagaries of producer or publisher. So I shall hope for everything… and expect nothing. I have found this to be a good working philosophy.”

In the same letter, in place of a curriculum vitae, she recounted the major chapters of her life: her education and jobs­­­—even an explanation of her husband’s livelihood. In the next paragraph, Smith added, “I no longer have a husband. The above material was given so that there would be no break in the, I suppose, story of my life.”

These facts of her life included financial struggles. The primary caregiver and provider for her daughters, Smith was constantly seeking paid work. She was upfront with Sigmund about her methods: “I earn perhaps five hundred dollars a year by a six week’s concerted drive of writing for the pulp magazines, mostly confession and love story magazines. I only do this when I need money terribly.” For the same reason, Smith had placed an advertisement in Writer’s Digest announcing her editing services.

Sigmund had seen the ad, and it had rekindled his hope in a writing dream. He’d already realized a few of his writing dreams, having published his poetry and some short fiction, both of which caught the attention of famous writers, including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson. But with Smith, Sigmund ventured into new territory: playwriting.

Their initial correspondence has the fumbling feeling of first dates. “I saw your little ad in the Writer’s Digest,” Sigmund wrote in his first letter. “I do not know whether you will be interested any in me or whether you have something that will interest me but as a starting place I am submitting three one-act play manuscripts so that you can judge whether or not there is any meeting of minds of the service you have to offer.”

Practical and frank in her correspondence, Smith wasn’t one to waste her time or money. “I received your three plays by mail and what is it you wish me to do with them?” she wrote to Sigmund. Explaining her menu of services and fees, Smith told him, “I shall not do anything with your plays until I hear from you. Let me know whether you want them criticized or returned and if the latter, please send postage.”

Sigmund mailed his $2.00 along with his request for which of the plays he wanted Smith to read.

Surprising herself and Sigmund, Smith enjoyed his script more than she expected. It was a “natural comedy,” Smith assured Sigmund. She explained that “the play has its faults but they are so minor, merely little odds and ends of technique. The main thing; the thing that cannot be taught is there.” Smith made Sigmund an unusual offer “which might not meet your approval.” What she really wanted, she wrote, was to collaborate with him, “that is to take your play and re-write it as co-author rather than hired writer.” Smith believed that after revising his draft, she could sell it by drawing on her playwriting connections. They would share the proceeds, fifty-fifty.

The offer delighted Sigmund. What had felt like a dead-end in playwriting, now seemed like it just might sail through. In his response, typed on his Cedar Rapids Life Insurance Company stationary, Sigmund disclosed more about his situation: “You may guess that my role has been a rather lonely one. From the letterhead you can see that I am a business man, but I have been writing poetry and short stories for years and have published several volumes of each.”

Sigmund’s life was not actually lonely in the conventional way. That is to say that he led an entirely conventional life: married with children and a profession in which he excelled. Sigmund was fully engaged in the civic and cultural life of Cedar Rapids; he was a friend to painter Grant Wood and to poet Paul Engle, who would establish the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. But Sigmund had difficulty when he reached the revising stage of a piece. And until Smith’s services, Sigmund had not known where to find the support he needed.

Perhaps his relationship with Smith was helped by its epistolary nature. Sigmund never had to watch the expression on Smith’s face as she read his work or as she told him her feelings about his writing. Sigmund felt free within the confessional of their correspondence to reveal, for instance, that “If I had a little more faith in my work and would get a little more wrought up over failure it would probably be a good thing, but I’ve had so much joy in my work that nothing else mattered much.” Now, Sigmund admitted to Smith, he was more interested in publication, because he was beginning to think about “permanent preservation” for some of his writings. With Smith’s co-authorship, Sigmund was able to sell a few of his plays.

Less than six months later, Sigmund would accidentally kill himself during a hunting trip.

Sigmund’s son wrote to Betty after his father’s death, not realizing it would be “the hardest letter which I should be called on to write,” for Smith was “so very kind to my father, and helped him so much in his hobby of writing.” Sigmund Jr. asked Smith, “Can you realize the importance which he placed in your kind judgment, and also the fine spirit of cooperation which you lent to make his writing life easier?” The “fine spirit of cooperation” is not usually what writers are known for contributing to the world, but it likely made a big difference in the lives of these two writers.

Sigmund and Smith never met in-person. But their exchanges benefited both writers: Smith revised Sigmund’s plays and helped him sell a few; Smith received much-needed income. Her confidence was bolstered, too. Here was a male writer, a decade older than Smith, who had already achieved success in other genres, trying to find his way in playwriting. Both writers were a little less lonely for the correspondence. Both received some of the feedback for which they hungered, but was so difficult to find.

A few years after Sigmund’s death, Smith began drafting A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, the novel which ultimately brought Smith fortune and fame and allowed her to establish herself as a writer. Although she was proud of having supported her daughters and herself through her writing even before she sold the novel, Smith had spent those years struggling. “I’d be so glad to concentrate all my abilities, experiences and education on one thing,” she explained to Sigmund in 1937 of her desire to focus on one major writing project “I work hard at even these odds and ends and it would be nice work hard for some one purpose.”

In her late forties as her first novel was about to be published, Smith seemed to be looking out onto the horizon of possibilities. Playwrighting had been the great dream of Smith’s life for so long—and she had been relatively successful, at least in terms of selling plays and winning prizes. But the money was not sufficient to keep her from feeling like she was always scrambling for work. Novels seemed to offer a more secure path. They would remain her primary genre, with three more following A Tree Grows.

When publication of A Tree Grows was imminent, but her publishers were contemplating a delay, Smith urged them to move as quickly as possible and to enter her novel in the appropriate prizes. “With so many good men writers tied up in in the War,” Smith pointed out, “I’d never again have so good a chance in competition.” Timing was crucial. Smith was determined not to lose her chance. As she explained to Harper & Row: “I’d like to have the beginnings of an established place in American novel writing so that I could sail on or I’d like to know definitely otherwise so that I could then console myself with a four hundred dollar a week movie job.” Hollywood was calling. But Smith viewed film writing jobs as a second choice.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was a way for Smith to finally declare herself a particular kind of writer: a novelist. But it wasn’t only that. It was her chance to make something of herself after so many years of feeling she was not fully succeeding. A few years earlier, in Jay Sigmund, Smith had caught a reflection of herself, and it wasn’t entirely flattering: a middle-aged writer still trying to really make it. Sigmund had written to her that he knew what it felt like to be a writer always failing by a hair. And Smith had understood him. But she did not want to live there anymore. And the possibility of sailing on into her future as a novelist was now so close at hand, she could practically touch it. Having helped another writer up, it was easier to believe she could lift herself up, too.

I’ve spent the last few months promoting a novel about young Muslim Americans coming of age in a post-9/11 Brooklyn. At every bookstore, radio interview, or university lecture hall, someone will ask me about the research I had to do for the book. I tell them about the NYPD police reports I read—these bizarre, chilling records of a massive law enforcement surveillance program targeting Arabs and Muslims in New York City. The reports are filled with awkward euphemisms to half-heartedly obscure the truth that they were spying on us for no other reason than we are Arabs or Muslims.

I explain what it was like to comb through these documents, to be riveted by them, to feel the pervading menace they so successfully instill. An undercover or an informant walks into an Arab-owned cafe and records the number of chairs inside, for example.

At this point in the book talk, I make a joke: “Oh, watch out for the Muslim chairs!” This always gets a laugh. The takeaway for audiences always seems to be: What a time that was! I can’t believe that happened. I’m glad it’s over. 

I’m not laughing now.

For the past four months, Palestinians have been begging the world to see a child as a child, a journalist as a journalist, a hospital as a hospital. I’m faced with the ugly realization that those decades of war against Arab and Muslim bodies have not ended. Part of that war is not only dehumanizing us so we can be killed en masse abroad, but also criminalizing us so we can be silenced at home.

To speak now about Palestine, especially for brown and Black people in America, is to knowingly put a target on your back. To code yourself as a threat, a barbarian, a terrorist, and an antisemite. To publicly grieve the lives lost is to submit yourself to a massive surveillance machine that will monitor your social media posts, your emails, your charitable donations, your friendships.

When I spoke to audiences about my book before October 7th, I urged them not to think of surveillance of Muslims and Arabs as a problem of the past. I reminded them how much better surveillance technology is now than it was in the years right after 9/11, and how the same methods used on Arabs and Muslims then are now being used to target Black Lives Matter or environmental activists.

But I think a small part of me did believe that perhaps things had gotten a bit better—that as the American public turned against the War on Terror, heard the lies about WMDs, wanted American troops out, that maybe Muslims and Arabs would no longer be so easy to use as a sort of global boogeyman.

Now, I’m forced to reckon with the crushing reality that nothing has changed. Because if we’ve learned one thing in these last two decades of the War on Terror, it’s that Arabs and Muslims are like a contagion. We must be surveilled and penned in; we must be stopped. Because what we have might catch.

The sensation of being watched is something I have carried around with me for years, trailing me like a shadow. To walk around in a state of perpetual paranoia, to speak and to simultaneously imagine your words being played back to you from a tape recorder. To imagine yourself moving through the world like a red dot on a surveillance map.

The main characters of my novel, two teenage sisters, also often feel watched and spend much of the book trying to escape that feeling—by being invisible, by transforming so radically that they will be unrecognizable, or by attempting to flee outside the radius of their surveillance. As teenage girls, there is the “ordinary” and universal form of being watched: they must exist under a patriarchal gaze. They are watched by men on the streets, by their older brother, by boyfriends, by neighbors.

But there is also another form of watching they must contend with: the invisible eye of the state. The girls often cannot see who is watching them. They are told there might be either informants or terrorists in their community, but they cannot tell who is who and which is more dangerous.

I often think about how those girls would feel if they were on a college campus today. We are now witnessing a robust build-up of surveillance programs designed to spy on Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who even vaguely supports Palestine. Officially, these programs are to combat antisemitism and support for terrorism on college campuses, but it’s not hard to imagine how this is going to go because it’s happened before.

I’m remembering the NYPD undercover who went on a 2008 whitewater rafting trip with Muslim students from City College. I’m remembering how in 2009 the NYPD set up a safe house near student housing at Rutgers University, and how when the superintendent of the building entered the apartment one day, he called the police because he thought it was a terrorist cell. I’m remembering my own college friends—how we would paste blank, unreadable smiles onto our faces whenever anyone new came around.

At a recent book event, a young man approached me from the audience and told me that he was one of the lead plaintiffs in a 2013 ACLU lawsuit against the NYPD. It was Asad Dandia. I recognized his name instantly, because I read about how an undercover cop befriended him when he was an undergraduate, claiming he wanted Asad’s help to become a better Muslim. Who will be the next Asad, I wonder now.

At another book event at a university, I met a young woman who told me a story about a man who often appeared and asked her and her friends odd questions. He had appeared again just that morning when he sat down next to her on the bus. “I’ve always thought he might be a—” she said, knowing I could fill in the blank. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

The idea our governments have asked us to subscribe to is that all Muslims and Arabs (there’s not much point in distinguishing between them) are latent terrorists, as if we all have a ticking time bomb in our chests, just waiting to go off. As I witness the deaths of thirty thousand Palestinians, live-streamed from the phone in my palm, which is also a tracking device, I do feel an awakening in my body, and I wonder if the politicians are perhaps onto something.

I wander past my car in parking lots, forgetting where I’m going. I cry uncontrollably and without warning in the grocery store. I recently left a meeting with my boss about my professional goals and ran straight into the bathroom, kneeling over the toilet and dry heaving great gasps of nothing.

My therapist tells me these are physical manifestations of trauma. “What trauma?” I ask her. My children are not being bombed in their beds. I have water. I have food. And yet my body is remembering something it has felt before. You can’t grow up watching people who look like you, talk like you, and have names like yours die across your various screens without it changing you. To watch them die on a massive scale—a staggering, nameless, faceless death—and to listen to the world’s cheers of approval, or perhaps even worse, the roar of its silence, without something cracking inside of you.

You cannot feel any sense of certainty when you exist in a constant state of gaslighting, of wondering and doubting whether you are considered an enemy by your own country, by your own college, or employer. I feel it most as a lump in the throat, like I have swallowed something that has almost, but not quite, choked the life out of me.

At a virtual support group for Arabs and Palestinian Americans, I heard others describe similar symptoms. Taking a sip from a glass of water brings one woman to tears. Another breaks down in Costco when her child picks up a treat and asks if she can have it. Several describe walking around in a mental fog. One person says it sounds like he has white noise blasting between his ears. We go to work. We pick up our children from daycare. We cook dinner.

“It feels like I’m fine and like I’m dying inside,” someone says. “It feels like I’m screaming, but no one can hear me,” another one says. At one point in the meeting, an unidentified “Zoom user” pops up onto our screens. The group falls silent.

I eye the black square at the bottom left corner of my screen like it might shoot me through my laptop. We dry our eyes. No one will cry in front of the black box. “Identify yourself,” we ask it. We wait for the host to remove the user.

But it’s not the same after that. There are no safe places to grieve. More than seventy percent of the dwellings in Gaza have already been destroyed. The premature babies at Al-Nasr hospital were left to rot in their cribs. And we, the American Arabs, the American Muslims, scream into the void.

______________________________

Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad is available via Doubleday.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ilyon Woo about her latest book, Master Slave Husband Wife.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So, a work like this that you’ve been thinking about for 20 years before you start writing it– and I don’t know how long it took you to actually write it – and now it’s out in the world and outside of you. Is there one thing that you’ll take away from this?

Ilyon Woo: A takeaway? That’s a really good question. You know, the one thing I keep thinking about is just in terms of the creative process – have you seen Sesame Street where there’s a character named Don Music?  He plays these songs on the piano and Kermit the Frog introduces him and he says, you know, here we are in the studio of Don Music and he’s in the process of writing this incredible song, it is going to be hit.  And Don Music is starting to write a song, which is obviously Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, but he gets stuck, because he can’t rhyme something or it loses a word, and he’s like, I’ll never get it. I’ll never get it. And he bangs his whole head and his hands and his face on the piano. For me being a pianist’s daughter, this seemed like the ultimate, you know, I mean, you just don’t bang a piano, right? So, there was that. But there was also that frustration that I could empathize with when you’re trying to do something, and it just doesn’t work. You just want to throw everything down. Maybe my takeaway as an artist is how even if you keep banging your head on the piano that eventually, I can find my way writing my way out of this. And usually, I found that when I got to that wanting to bang my head on the piano phase, it was because I didn’t know enough. It was because I was trying to force something when I wasn’t ready to get there. And if I could pull back for a moment and do a little more research around it, then something would pop open. And luckily, I have my own real life Kermit, my writing partner, Rachel Kousser, who would, you know, pat me on the back and also say, Isn’t it time to like peel your face and fingers on that keyboard?

***

Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD in English from Columbia University.

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.

In this gorgeous, sensualistic, tactile, provocative episode of Write-minded, we explore the senses with Janet Fitch of White Oleander fame. In this interview, Janet takes us on a tour through the senses, making the point that our language is impoverished and we can—and must—do more to become more sophisticated observers on the page. This is an episode you’ll carry with you into your next writing or reading session, keeping an eye out (and tastebuds at the ready and an ear attuned and the nose trained) for the next sensual experience or opportunity. Revel in the possibilities and ideas Janet offers to employ the superpowers each of our senses hold.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. 

________________________

Janet Fitch is the bestselling author of White Oleander, an Oprah book club pick, Paint it Black, and the historical novels The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, set during the Russian Revolution. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Noir, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing widely online and in person.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, and Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ The Bullet Swallower all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Knopf)

10 Rave • 1 Postive

“A deliberately provocative title that suits its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet who is painfully conflicted, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and frequently impossible … Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor … The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.”

–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)

2. The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
(Simon & Schuster)

4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Elizabeth Gonzalez James on the “weird, wild literature” of her home state, here

“Mixes elements of western novels and magical realism to deliver a wildly entertaining story that spans generations and crosses borders in a riveting family saga … While great characterization and superb storytelling make this an enjoyable read, Gonzalez’s use of magical realism elements is what pushes this novel into must-read territory. The narrative reads like a western, but the magical elements enrich the story in unexpected ways.”

–Gabino Iglesias (The Boston Globe)

3. Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn
(MCD)

3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Dead in Long Beach, California here

“Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control … It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t …

We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.”

–Stef Rubino (Autostraddle)

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Nonfiction 

1. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here

“A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

2. The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
(William Morrow & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Shuster paints with great sympathy a complex picture of Mr. Zelensky and his transformation … Like many writers on a tight deadline, Mr. Shuster crafted a longer book than he otherwise might have. But The Showmansurpasses all similar efforts to date and is set to be the standard by which all other works on Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine’s wartime politics will be judged.”

–Bojan Pancevski (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold
(Penguin Press)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Disillusioned here

“…presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development ‘that functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ … Disillusioned excels in documenting the effects racial exclusion and intimidation had on suburban growth, and Herold offers eye-opening details like the fact that Compton, Calif., was once home to George Herbert Walker Bush and his young children. For readers like me, who previously only thought of Compton as a burning epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Herold reminds us that places don’t start out in disrepair. They’re shaped by forces that cause decay … As Herold jumps between cities and decades, it can be hard to keep track of the exact rulings in different cases regarding desegregation. But the patterns are clear and continuing, cementing the idea that equal rights and opportunity exist only in theory in this country, not in practice.”

–Vikas Turakhia (The Star Tribune)

This speech was written during a period when William Maxwell was discouraged over what he felt was a lack of public encouragement and he had thought that he might give up writing and just be an editor. In a journal he wrote,

I do not ever want to write again. I want checks to come in and requests for reprint and translation rights from every country under the sun….

The two subjects I have are both highly introspective and lacking in action—the man without confidence, the man who doubts his capacity to love. They are probably the same subject….

Who will I take as a model, as a clue to subject matter. Not Flaubert, because I don’t want it to be cold. Not Conrad, because it has to be not adventurous. The hero must be forty, and not trail along behind me. Wells, Joyce, Dostoievsky? It should have an action, and not begin with a character or a psychological difficulty….

The speech consists of notes that Maxwell had been keeping for a piece of writing and a companion text that he wrote almost entirely on the train to Massachusetts. The section of instructions—”Begin with the…”—are the part that was written beforehand. By the time the train had arrived, he had finished the speech and decided that he liked writing too much to give up.

–Alec Wilkinson

*

A speech delivered at Smith College on March 4, 1955.

One of the standard themes of Chinese painting is the spring festival on the river. I’m sure many of you have seen some version of it. There is one in the Metropolitan Museum. It has three themes woven together: the river, which comes down from the upper right, and the road along the river, and the people on the riverbanks.

As the scroll unwinds, there is, first, the early-morning mist on the rice fields and some boys who cannot go to the May Day festival because they have to watch their goats. Then there is a country house, and several people starting out for the city, and a farmer letting water into a field by means of a water wheel, and then more people and buildings—all kinds of people all going toward the city for the festival. And along the riverbank there are various entertainers—a magician, a female tightrope walker, several fortune-tellers, a phrenologist, a man selling spirit money, a man selling patent medicine, a storyteller.

I prefer to think that it is with this group—the shoddy entertainers earning their living by the riverbank on May Day—that Mr. Bellow, Mr. Gill, Miss Chase, on the platform, Mr. Ralph Ellison and Mrs. Kazin, in the audience, and I, properly speaking, belong. Writers—narrative writers—are people who perform tricks.

Before I came up here, I took various books down from the shelf and picked out some examples of the kind of thing I mean. Here is one:

“I have just returned this morning from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with….”

One of two things—there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had. And the reader is caught; he cannot go away until he finds out which of his two guesses is correct. This is, of course, a trick.

Here is another: “None of them knew the color of the sky….” Why not? Because they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you.

Here is another trick: “Call me Ishmael….” A pair of eyes looking into your eyes. A face. A voice. You have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands; who will perhaps insist that you love him; who perhaps will love you in a way that is upsetting and uncomfortable.

Here is another trick: “Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those gray towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much grayer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.”

A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in. Another trick: “It was said that a new person had appeared on the seafront—a lady with a dog….”

The narrator appears to be, in some way, underprivileged, socially. She perhaps has an invalid father that she has to take care of, and so she cannot walk along the promenade as often as she would like. Perhaps she is not asked many places. And so she has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront.

Here is another trick: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife….”

An attitude of mind, this time. A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s.

So far as I can see, there is no legitimate sleight of hand involved in practicing the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. They appear to have had their origin in religion, and they are fundamentally serious. In writing—in all writing but especially in narrative writing—you are continually being taken in. The reader, skeptical, experienced, with many demands on his time and many ways of enjoying his leisure, is asked to believe in people he knows don’t exist, to be present at scenes that never occurred, to be amused or moved or instructed just as he would be in real life, only the life exists in somebody else’s imagination.

If, as Mr. T. S. Eliot says, humankind cannot bear very much reality, then that would account for their turning to the charlatans operating along the riverbank—to the fortune-teller, the phrenologist, the man selling spirit money, the storyteller. Or there may be a different explanation; it may be that what humankind cannot bear directly it can bear indirectly, from a safe distance.

The writer has everything in common with the vaudeville magician except this: The writer must be taken in by his own tricks. Otherwise, the audience will begin to yawn and snicker. Having practiced more or less incessantly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, knowing that the trunk has a false bottom and the opera hat a false top, with the white doves in a cage ready to be handed to him from the wings and his clothing full of unusual, deep pockets containing odd playing cards and colored scarves knotted together and not knotted together and the American flag, he must begin by pleasing himself.

His mouth must be the first mouth that drops open in surprise, in wonder, as (presto chango!) this character’s heartache is dragged squirming from his inside coat pocket, and that character’s future has become his past while he was not looking.

With his cuffs turned back, to show that there is no possibility of deception being practiced on the reader, the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up.

Hot, tired, and uncomfortable, the little boy wishes they could go home. The wheat field is like an oven. The flying machine does not go up.

The writer will invoke a particular place: With a cardinal and a tourist home and a stretch of green grass and this and that, he will make Richmond, Virginia. He uses words to invoke his version of the Forest of Arden.

If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. If he is a bad novelist, you probably shouldn’t. Ideally, you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)

The novelist has tricks of detail. For example, there is Turgenev’s hunting dog, in A Sportsman’s Notebook. The sportsman, tired after a day’s shooting, has accepted a ride in a peasant’s cart, and is grateful for it. His dog is not. Aware of how foolish he must look as he is being lifted into the cart, the unhappy dog smiles to cover his embarrassment.

There is the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. A conspirator goes late at night to a street of pet shops in Shanghai and knocks on the door of a dealer in live fish. They are both involved in a plot to assassinate someone. The only light in the shop is a candle; the fish are asleep in phosphorescent bowls. As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end.

These tricks of detail are not important; they have nothing to do with the plot or the idea of either piece of writing. They are merely exercises in literary virtuosity, but nevertheless in themselves so wonderful that to overlook them is to miss half the pleasure of the performance.

There is also a more general sleight of hand—tricks that involve the whole work, tricks of construction. Nothing that happens in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, none of the characters, is, for me, as interesting as the way in which the whole thing is put together. From that all the best effects, the real beauty of the book, derive.

And finally there are the tricks that involve the projection of human character. In the last book that I have read, Ann Birstein’s novel, The Troublemaker, there is a girl named Rhoda, who would in some places, at certain periods of the world’s history, be considered beautiful, but who is too large to be regarded as beautiful right now. It is time for her to be courted, to be loved—high time, in fact. And she has a suitor, a young man who stops in to see her on his way to the movies alone.

There is also a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos. In the midst of feeling sorry for her you burst out laughing. The laughter is not unkind.

These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it.

It would help if you would give what I am now about to read to you only half your attention. It doesn’t require any more than that, and if you listen only now and then, you will see better what I am driving at.

Begin with breakfast and the tipping problem.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish and the breakfast tray still there.

The marmalade dish, shaped like a shell, is put on the cabin class breakfast tray by mistake, this once. It belongs in first class.

Begin with the gate between first and second class.

Begin with the obliging steward unlocking the gate for them.

The gate, and finding their friends who are traveling first class, on the glassed-in deck.

The gate leads to the stealing of the marmalade dish.

If you begin with the breakfast tray, then—no, begin with the gate and finding their friends.

And their friends’ little boy, who had talked to Bernard Baruch and asked Robert Sherwood for his autograph.

The couple in cabin class have first-class accommodations for the return voyage, which the girl thinks they are going to exchange, and the man secretly hopes they will not be able to.

But they have no proper clothes. They cannot dress for dinner if they do return first class.

Their friend traveling first class on the way over has brought only one evening dress, which she has to wear night after night.

Her husband tried to get cabin-class accommodations and couldn’t.

This is a lie, perhaps.

They can afford the luxury of traveling first class but disapprove of it.

They prefer to live more modestly than they need to.

They refuse to let themselves enjoy, let alone be swept off their feet by, the splendor and space.

But they are pleased that their little boy, aged nine, has struck up a friendship with Bernard Baruch and Robert Sherwood.

They were afraid he would be bored on the voyage.

Also, they themselves would never have dared approach either of these eminent figures, and are amazed that they have begotten a child with courage.

The girl is aware that her husband has a love of luxury and is enjoying the splendor and space they haven’t paid for. On their way back to the barrier, they encounter Ber-

nard Baruch.

His smile comes to rest on them, like the beam from a lighthouse, and then after a few seconds passes on.

They discover that they are not the only ones who have been exploring.

Their table companions have all found the gate.

When the steward unlocked the gate for the man and the girl, he let loose a flood.

The entire cabin class has spread out in both directions, into tourist as well as first class.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

The man is ashamed of his conscientiousness but worried about the stewardess.

Will she have to pay for the missing marmalade dish?

How many people? Three English, two Americans cabin class. Three Americans first class.

Then the morning on deck.

The breakfast tray still there, accusing them, before they go up to lunch.

The Orkney Islands in the afternoon.

The movie, which is shown to cabin class in the afternoon, to first class in the evening.

The breakfast tray still in the corridor outside their cabin when they go to join their friends in first class in the bar before dinner.

With her tongue loosened by liquor, the girl confesses her crime.

They go down to the cabin after dinner, and the tray is gone.

In the evening the coast of France, lights, a lighthouse.

The boat as immorality.

The three sets of people.

Begin in the late afternoon with the sighting of the English islands.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

No, begin with the gate.

Then the stealing of the marmalade dish.

Then the luncheon table with the discovery that other passengers have been exploring and found the gate between first and second class.

Then the tray accusing them. What do they feel about stealing?

When has the man stolen something he wanted as badly as the girl wanted that marmalade dish for an ashtray?

From his mother’s purse, when he was six years old. The stewardess looks like his mother.

Ergo, he is uneasy.

They call on their friends in first class one more time, to say goodbye, and as they go back to second class, the girl sees, as clearly as if she had been present, that some time during the day her husband has managed to slip away from her and meet the stewardess and pay for the marmalade dish she stole.

And that is why the breakfast tray disappeared.

He will not allow himself, even on shipboard, the splendor and space of an immoral act.

He had to go behind her back and do the proper thing.

A writer struggling—unsuccessfully, as it turned out; the story was never written—to change a pitcher of water into a pitcher of wine.

In The Listener for January 27th, 1955, there is a brief but wonderfully accurate description of a similar attempt carried off successfully:

Yesterday morning I was in despair. You know that bloody book which Dadie and Leonard extort, drop by drop from my breast? Fiction, or some title to that effect. I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands, dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando, a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till twelve….

It is safe to assume on that wonderful (for us as well as her) morning, the writer took out this word and put in that and paused only long enough to admire the effect; she took on that morning or others like it—the very words out of this character’s mouth in order to give them, unscrupulously, to that character; she annulled marriages and brought dead people back to life when she felt the inconvenience of having to do without them. She cut out the whole last part of the scene she had been working on so happily and feverishly for most of the morning because she saw suddenly that it went past the real effect into something that was just writing.

Just writing is when the novelist’s hand is not quicker than the reader’s eye. She persuaded, she struggled with, she beguiled this or that character that she had made up out of whole cloth (or almost) to speak his mind, to open his heart. Day after day, she wrote till twelve, employing tricks no magician had ever achieved before, and using admirably many that they had, until, after some sixty pages, something quite serious happened.

Orlando changed sex—that is, she exchanged the mind of a man for the mind of a woman; this trick was only partly successful—and what had started out as a novel became a brilliant, slaphappy essay. It would have been a great pity—it would have been a real loss if this particular book had never been written; even so, it is disappointing. I am in no position to say what happened, but it seems probable from the writer’s diary—fortunately, she kept one—that there were too many interruptions; too many friends invited themselves and their husbands and dogs and children for the weekend.

Though the writer may from time to time entertain paranoiac suspicions about critics and book reviewers, about his publisher, and even about the reading public, the truth is that he has no enemy but interruption. The man from Porlock has put an end to more masterpieces than the Turks—was it the Turks?—did when they set fire to the library at Alexandria. Also, odd as it may seem, every writer has a man from Porlock inside him who gladly and gratefully connives to bring about these interruptions.

If the writer’s attention wanders for a second or two, his characters stand and wait politely for it to return to them. If it doesn’t return fairly soon, their feelings are hurt and they refuse to say what is on their minds or in their hearts. They may even turn and go away, without explaining or leaving a farewell note or a forwarding address where they can be reached.

But let us suppose that owing to one happy circumstance and another, including the writer’s wife, he has a good morning; he has been deeply attentive to the performers and the performance. Suppose that—because this is common practice, I believe—he begins by making a few changes here and there, because what is behind him, all the scenes that come before the scene he is now working on, must be perfect, before he can tackle what lies ahead.

(This is the most dangerous of all the tricks in the repertoire, and probably it would be wiser if he omitted it from his performance: it is the illusion of illusions, and all a dream. And tomorrow morning, with a clearer head, making a fresh start, he will change back the changes, with one small insert that makes all the difference.)

But to continue: Since this is very close work, watch-mender’s work, really, this attentiveness, requiring a magnifying glass screwed to his eye and resulting in poor posture, there will probably be, somewhere at the back of his mind, a useful corrective vision, something childlike and simple that represents the task as a whole. He will perhaps see the material of his short story as a pond, into which a stone is tossed, sending out a circular ripple; and then a second stone is tossed into the pond, sending out a second circular ripple that is inside the first and that ultimately overtakes it; and then a third stone; and a fourth; and so on.

Or he will see himself crossing a long level plain, chapter after chapter, toward the mountains on the horizon. If there were no mountains, there would be no novel; but they are still a long way away—those scenes of excitement, of the utmost drama, so strange, so sad, that will write themselves; and meanwhile, all the knowledge, all the art, all the imagination at his command will be needed to cover this day’s march on perfectly level ground.

As a result of too long and too intense concentration, the novelist sooner or later begins to act peculiarly. During the genesis of his book, particularly, he talks to himself in the street; he smiles knowingly at animals and birds; he offers Adam the apple, for Eve, and with a half involuntary movement of his right arm imitates the writhing of the snake that nobody knows about yet. He spends the greater part of the days of his creation in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, his hair uncombed, drinking water to clear his brain, and hardly distinguishable from an inmate in an asylum.

Like many such unfortunate people, he has delusions of grandeur. With the cherubim sitting row on row among the constellations, the seraphim in the more expensive seats in the primum mobile, waiting, ready, willing to be astonished, to be taken in, the novelist, still in his bathrobe and slippers, with his cuffs rolled back, says Let there be (after who knows how much practice beforehand)….Let there be (and is just as delighted as the angels and the reader and everybody else when there actually is) Light.

Not always, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But say that it does work. Then there is light, the greater light to rule the daytime of the novel, and the lesser light to rule the night scenes, breakfast and dinner, one day, and the gathering together of now this and now that group of characters to make a lively scene, grass, trees, apple trees in bloom, adequate provision for sea monsters if they turn up in a figure of speech, birds, cattle, and creeping things, and finally and especially man—male and female, Anna and Count Vronsky, Emma and Mr. Knightly.

There is not only all this, there are certain aesthetic effects that haven’t been arrived at accidentally; the universe of the novel is beautiful, if it is beautiful, by virtue of the novelist’s intention that it should be.

Say that the performance is successful; say that he has reached the place where an old, old woman, who was once strong and active and handsome, grows frail and weak, grows smaller and smaller, grows partly senile, and toward the end cannot get up out of bed and even refuses to go on feeding herself, and finally, well cared for, still in her own house with her own things around her, dies, and on a cold day in January the funeral service is read over her casket, and she is buried….Then what? Well, perhaps the relatives, returning to the old home after the funeral, or going to the lawyer’s office, for the reading of the will.

In dying, the old woman took something with her, and therefore the performance has, temporarily at least, come to a standstill. Partly out of fatigue, perhaps, partly out of uncertainty about what happens next, the novelist suddenly finds it impossible to believe in the illusions that have so completely held his attention up till now. Suddenly it won’t do. It might work out for some other novel but not this one.

Defeated for the moment, unarmed, restless, he goes outdoors in his bathrobe, discovers that the morning is more beautiful than he had any idea—full spring, with the real apple trees just coming into bloom, and the sky the color of the blue that you find in the sky of the West Indies, and the neighbors’ dogs enjoying themselves, and the neighbor’s little boy having to be fished out of the brook, and the grass needing cutting—he goes outside thinking that a brief turn in the shrubbery will clear his mind and set him off on a new track.

But it doesn’t. He comes in poorer than before, and ready to give not only this morning’s work but the whole thing up as a bad job, ill advised, too slight. The book that was going to live, to be read after he is dead and gone, will not even be written, let alone published. It was an illusion.

So it was. So it is. But fortunately we don’t need to go into all that because, just as he was about to give up and go put his trousers on, he has thought of something. He has had another idea. It might even be more accurate to say another idea has him. Something so simple and brief that you might hear it from the person sitting next to you on a train; something that would take a paragraph to tell in a letter….Where is her diamond ring? What has happened to her furs?

Mistrust and suspicion are followed by brutal disclosures. The disclosure of who kept after her until she changed her will and then who, finding out about this, got her to make a new will, eight months before she died.

The letters back and forth between the relatives hint at undisclosed revelations, at things that cannot be put in a letter. But if they cannot be put in a letter, how else can they be disclosed safely? Not at all, perhaps. Perhaps they can never be disclosed. There is no reason to suspect the old woman’s housekeeper. On the other hand, if it was not a member of the family who walked off with certain unspecified things without waiting to find out which of the rightful heirs wanted what, surely it could have been put in a letter.

Unless, of course, the novelist does not yet know the answer himself. Eventually, of course, he is going to have to let the cat—this cat and all sorts of other cats—out of the bag. If he does not know, at this point, it means that a blessing has descended on him, and the characters have taken things in their own hands. From now on, he is out of it, a recorder simply of what happens, whose business is with the innocent as well as with the guilty. There are other pressures than greed. Jealousy alone can turn one sister against the other, and both against the man who is universally loved and admired, and who used, when they were little girls, to walk up and down with one of them on each of his size-12 shoes.

Things that everybody knows but nobody has ever come right out and said will be said now. Ancient grievances will be aired. Everybody’s character, including that of the dead woman, is going to suffer damage from too much handling. The terrible damaging facts of that earlier will must all come out. The family, as a family, is done for, done to death by what turns out in the end to be a surprisingly little amount of money, considering how much love was sacrificed to it.

And their loss, if the novelist really is a novelist, will be our gain.

For it turns out that this old woman—eighty-three she was, with a bad heart, dreadful blood pressure, a caricature of herself, alone and lonely—knew what would happen and didn’t care; didn’t try to stop it; saw that it had begun under her nose while she was still conscious; saw that she was the victim of the doctor who kept her alive long after her will to live had gone; saw the threads of will, of consciousness, slip through her fingers; let them go; gathered them in again; left instructions that she knew would not be followed; tried to make provisions when it was all but too late; and then delayed some more, while she remembered, in snatches, old deprivations, an unwise early marriage, the absence of children; and slept; and woke to remember more—this old woman, who woke on her last day cheerful, fully conscious, ready for whatever came (it turned out to be her sponge bath)—who was somehow a symbol (though this is better left unsaid), an example, an instance, a proof of something, and whose last words were—But I mustn’t spoil the story for you.

At twelve o’clock, the novelist, looking green from fatigue (also from not having shaved), emerges from his narrative dream at last with something in his hand he wants somebody to listen to. His wife will have to stop what she is doing and think of a card, any card; or be sawed in half again and again until the act is letter-perfect. She alone knows when he is, and when he is not, writing like himself. This is an illusion, sustained by love, and this she also knows but keeps to herself.

It would only upset him if he were told. If he has no wife, he may even go to bed that night without ever having shaved, brushed his teeth, or put his trousers on. And if he is invited out, he will destroy the dinner party by getting up and putting on his hat and coat at quarter of ten, causing the other guests to signal to one another, and the hostess to make a mental note never to ask him again. In any case, literary prestidigitation is tiring and requires lots of sleep.

And when the writer is in bed with the light out, he tosses. Far from dropping off to sleep and trusting to the fact that he did get home and into bed by ten o’clock after all, he thinks of something, and the light beside his bed goes on long enough for him to write down five words that may or may not mean a great deal to him in the morning. The light may go on and off several times before his steady breathing indicates that he is asleep.

And while he is asleep he may dream—he may dream that he had a dream in which the whole meaning of what he is trying to do in the novel is brilliantly revealed to him. Just so the dog asleep on the hearthrug dreams; you can see, by the faint jerking movement of his four legs, that he is after a rabbit.

The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extension, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught in a net of narration.

He is encouraged by the example of other writers—Turgenev, say, with his particular trick of spreading out his arms like a great bird and taking off, leaving the earth and soaring high above the final scenes; or D. H. Lawrence, with his marvelous ability to make people who are only words on a page actually reach out with their hands and love one another; or Virginia Woolf, with her delight in fireworks, in a pig’s skull with a scarf wrapped around it; or E. M. Forster, with his fastidious preference for what a good many very nice people wish were not so.

But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature. To achieve this facsimile the writer has, more or less, to renounce his birthright to reality, and few people have a better idea of what it is—of its rewards and satisfactions, or of what to do with a whole long day.

What’s in it for him? The hope of immortality? The chances are not good enough to interest a sensible person. Money? Well, money is not money any more. Fame? For the young, who are in danger always of being ignored, of being overlooked at the party, perhaps, but no one over the age of forty who is in his right mind would want to be famous. It would interfere with his work, with his family life.

Why then should the successful manipulation of illusions be everything to a writer? Why does he bother to make up stories and novels? If you ask him, you will probably get any number of answers, none of them straightforward. You might as well ask a sailor why it is that he has chosen to spend his life at sea.

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Excerpted from The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine.