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Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt

Photo of the campsite on the Mississippi River Rory Doyle.

The Mississippi Delta is the name of the vast swampy bottomland that runs for 200 miles between Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi, North America’s second-longest river, mostly created this alluvial landscape. Dense forests covered it. White money, forced Black labor, and government engineering seized, farmed, and tried to control it. For many people, the name evokes images of Tom Sawyer or the Blues or roadside barbecue joints. Author James C. Cobb’s book described the Delta as “The Most Southern Place on Earth.” Even though populous Memphis sits on its northeastern edge, and many Blues festivals take place there, for its size, the Delta is not a region many outsiders visit. It contains some of the US’s most searing poverty, some of its greatest natural beauty, the origins of Blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and some America’s most violent, racist history. Writer Boyce Upholt has made it his beat.

A Connecticut native who found himself in Mississippi, Upholt has written about the Delta’s groundwater for The Atlantic, about the Delta’s Indigenous cultures for Roads & Kingdoms, profiled Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, the Delta’s last rural juke joint, for The Believer, and has explored one Delta island for the Oxford American. Once home to a murderous, moonshining frontiersman name Perry Martin, the legends associated with Martin cloak Big Island as much as its thick woods. This mix of wildness, lore, and neglect drew Upholt back for many trips, where he camped and brewed his morning coffee with Mississippi River water. His resulting travel dispatch “Beyond the Levee” brings this far corner of the nearby world to life, partly through Martin, a character who embodies the land itself. In a few brief pages, the piece explores two huge topics ─ America’s most iconic river, and the idea of wildness ─ and satisfies itself with providing not a volume but a window, a tantalizing glimpse, just big and deep enough. Upholt took the time to speak with me about this story, his work, and the Delta he loves.

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I grew up in Arizona, and first learned about the Delta on a visit to an ex-girlfriend’s family farm in the floodplain in eastern Arkansas. It was pure chance I traveled there, but that vast land’s lush, tarnished beauty immediately gripped me. You grew up in Connecticut. How’d you get interested in the Delta?

It was chance, for me, too. After college, I wasn’t sure how to become a writer, so I joined Teach for America and took a job as a math teacher on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. Then, after an unsatisfying yearlong stint in journalism, I decided to go work for TFA coaching teachers. I wanted to get somewhere “new” ─ to me at least ─ so when they offered me a job in the Delta I jumped. I wound up staying  for nine years, and I credit the place with getting me writing for real. There is such a rich history of storytelling and literature. I began writing a blog, then local magazines. Eventually I got an MFA and managed to find a way to write full-time.

In this Oxford American story, one person, Perry Martin, embodies this regrown patch of Delta, and then you become a new character in that story of development and environmental degradation, because you rewrite how we view the Delta’s character: wild or tame? Ugly or magical? How’d you first hear about Perry Martin and Big Island?

As someone who grew up hiking and camping, I found the Delta’s farmland beautiful but orderly: it’s a giant garden, nature contained and restrained. Then, in 2015, I wrote a profile of John Ruskey, a Mississippi River guide who is based in the Delta. We went out on the river, and I became obsessed.

The Mississippi sits amid a vast, wild landscape that almost no one knows is there; the river is at once a national icon and something we have completely forgotten. I kept writing about the river, kept exploring. In 2016, I did a weekend canoe trip with three friends down the backchannel along the west side of Big Island, which is one of the wildest, quietest stretches on the river. As a guide, I used Rivergator, an online text that John compiled. He offhandedly mentions a history of moonshiners on the island, and eventually, though conversations with locals, I began to fill in the details.

Back to that 2015 profile you wrote: What about the River fueled your initial obsession?

I will always remember that first campsite: we were on this wide sandbar that was covered with coyote and bird tracks. All night, I could hear the sound of trucks driving on the levee, which was just a stone’s throw away; I could see a glow on the horizon that was Angola Prison. And yet I felt completely remote and isolated, surrounded by the water, in this un-human space. I wanted more of that. But I also just kept finding interesting little tidbits: abandoned steamboats sitting along the riverside; attempts to catch and process invasive carp; a rapidly changing ecosystem. It still blows my mind that no one has written the book I’m working on: a look at what we’ve done to this river and the effects we’re seeing now.

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions.

Let me ask you about that book you’re working on: Why haven’t other people written it yet? Would it fit into the distinctive literary nonfiction cannon that includes Eddy L. Harris’ memoir Mississippi Solo, Mary Morris’s memoir The River Queen, or more like John M. Barry’s Rising Tide, and John McPhee’s River chapter in Control of Nature

The latter books, definitely. I’m not a huge fan of the adventure memoir. The landscape has so much to tell us, so why focus so narrowly on ourselves? There’s a difference, in my mind, between a trip ─ a paddle downriver, a hike along a trail ─ and a ramble. In the latter, your path is unclear; you make unexpected detours; you return to the same places, sometimes, looking at them in new ways. This, in my mind, makes for a much more interesting book. Great Plains has been a huge inspiration: Ian Frazier spent a few seasons driving around the middle of the country, often seemingly at random, and from that mess he pulls out this compelling history of a forgotten place. Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is another great example; he sees this wide swath of the Arctic on various scientific expeditions.

As for why that book hasn’t been written, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe because people don’t think of the river as a place, just a line of water. But there is a whole valley around it, that was a part of it, and was regarded as the country’s first Wild West. That valley was cut off by the levees; now even people who live just a few miles away rarely see it. It’s easy to overlook the environmental problems there, until they well up into floods, like this year.

Your Twitter bio says “i wander around and write stuff.” People often wonder how writers find their stories. So you found the Big Island story by writing another story. But as a wanderer, do you find many stories by chance, or do you have some process that lets wandering lead to discovery?

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions. I have a lot of Google Alerts. I read blogs and newsletters. I flip through newspapers and listen for what people are saying when I’m on the road. (Latif Nassar’s ideas on where to find stories are spot-on, by the way.) Honestly, the hardest part can be deciding which of many ideas deserve my commitment. Lately, I’ve been spending more time reporting before I even decide to pitch, to make sure stories have depth.

You describe your interest as a writer as “how we shape place, how place shapes us.” Lots of writers have beats or themes they fixate on: music; sexual politics; war. What does your interest in place say about your nature or worldview? Or your approach to writing and reporting?  

Really, I wish I had a clearer beat. I’ve always been fascinated by landscapes, both human-made and “wild” (though that’s a problematic word). Scratch the surface of a landscape and you find all kinds of history. Paying attention to the history of places often reveals connections: we are connected to the land itself, to a larger ecosystem, and to a long chain of people who, through the generations, have crisscrossed the world. In terms of how I write and report, these sorts of stories often demand that I get out and be on the ground, so I can be a tour-guide through strange, misunderstood corners of the world. It also means I have to find a way to include myself in the story without becoming too solipsistic. I’m not sure I always succeed.

Travel writing used to be a very popular genre, filling many magazines’ pages. That’s changed a lot. But some of my favorite kinds of travel stories are the kind you just described: where a bit of the author’s personal narrative leads readers to unfamiliar parts of our world and reveal larger connections. What are your thoughts on travel writing and the travel dispatch as a form, one not pegged to any news or event, but that has something to say?

It’s among my favorites, too, though when done poorly it’s awful. There are many pitfalls. I  try to stay particularly aware of my privilege: as a middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual white guy, I have so many legs up in terms of getting a publication to pay me to write about a place. Often, we’d all be better served to hear from someone from that place. The river, as a place, poses less of this conundrum, though I try to honor indigenous traditions that existed along the Mississippi ─ and in many cases persist ─ as well as the way Black laborers, often enslaved, did so much of the physical remaking of this place.

Yes, the Black labor that cleared the dense Delta hardwoods also drove America’s lucrative cotton economy: the legacy of their forced labor and dehumanization remains. Poverty still plagues so many people of color here. Is it difficult to explore nature apart from humanity in this region?

In any region. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as “nature” apart from humanity. Humans are animals, after all. And human beings have been living on this continent for tens of thousands of years. They cleared forests, built monumental structures, actively manipulated the environment. The idea of an empty wildness came later. (John Muir argued that the Native and Hispano migrants should be kept out of his beloved Yosemite by soldiers; they spoiled the view, he thought.) I always come back to a quote from the critic Raymond Williams, from the “Ideas of Nature”: “[T]he conquest of nature . . . will always include the conquest, the domination or the exploitation of some men by others. If we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end, though unequally, by alienating ourselves.”

Also, have you seen the photo of the lush old-growth bottomland forests in Lucy Braun’s canonical 1950 book The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America? A towering canopy with vines trailing down the stout sweet gum trees. Makes me wish I could tramp through just a few acres of woods like that, though just a few. It’d be exhausting.

I haven’t, but it’s gorgeous. You can do it, though! It’s not old-growth, but there are plenty of acres that look much like this inside the levees, along the river. I wish there were more of them, and what we’ve got left is at risk. The only way we’ll get there is if more folks go out and explore and appreciate them!

Remembering Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston at the Austin Music Awards, March 16, 2005. Randall Michelson/WireImage

Singer and songwriter Daniel Johnston was found dead at his home on the morning of September 11. He was 58. He sang about good and evil, sex, and true love. He courted and obtained a large, loyal cult following, as well as the respect of his musical peers. Johnston was an outsider artist, visually and musically. Diagnosed variously with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, he stood on the outside of mainstream expression looking in, and this exclusion granted him insight. “Everything you cling to will rot,” he sings on “Big Business Monkey,” “and everything you do will be forgot.”

Daniel Johnston embodied contradiction. His songs had an innocence that belied years of assiduous craftsmanship. His lyrics floated out in childlike rhymes, but addressed adult themes of love and loss and mental illness. He was considered pure — to the extent that he could not be corrupted by outside influences — but there was a patronizing quality to such considerations, allowing for  destructiveness as much as gentleness. As ambitious as he was incapable of handling recognition, Johnston constructed his legend by dismantling his career. 

“Quite often, Daniel was a pain in the ass,” friend and Austin Chronicle editor and cofounder Louis Black wrote in 2005. “Manipulative and innocence, Dr. Jekyll & Casper the Friendly Ghost, he looked like a near-child, sounded like an innocent, seemed a little slow, but a part of him always judged the odds around him better than any Vegas veteran.”

Born in Sacramento in 1961, Johnston was raised in West Virginia. His family was deeply religious. He learned to write songs in his parents’ basement by studying a book of Beatles music. Struck by a quote by Ringo Starr in which he claimed that the Beatles rewrote other people’s songs for their own purposes, Johnston did the same thing: He took his heroes’ songs apart and reassembled them in a different shape. 


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Johnston’s first record, Songs of Pain, was recorded on cassette. In between songs his mother can be heard saying things like, “You’ll never amount to anything!” His next album was titled Don’t Be Scared. 

After a brief attempt at college, Johnston followed his brother to Texas, winding up in Austin after stints in Houston and San Marcos. He made more albums, recording his shaky voice and chord organ on a boombox in his brother’s garage, and he gave the cassettes away to anyone who would listen. Initially unable to duplicate the tapes, he simply recorded a new version of an album every time someone asked for a copy.  

“Imagine what it was like,” Black wrote about first hearing Johnston around 1985. “Everything you know is wrong. Music reinvents itself in the middle of your ears. You sit there, not stunned but not normal. You play the tape again.”

One of Johnston’s cassettes made its way to Austin musician Brian Beattie, who, like other local songwriters, found the music strangely compelling. “I guess everyone who’s heard it for the first time, you’re kind of like trying to confront or understand that nervous feeling you get, that voyeuristic feeling from listening to how intimate [it is],” Beattie told the Austin Chronicle in 1999. Local bands, including the Butthole Surfers, began covering Johnston’s material.

Mark Kramer, founder of New York indie label Shimmy Disc, recorded Johnston in 1989. At first enjoying the experience, Johnston became increasingly agitated, singing about graveyards and the devil. He was unable to complete the album, so some live tracks were included to round it out. Supposed to be called 1989, the production took so long that the album was released as 1990. This record contains what is arguably Johnston’s most famous song, the plaintive “True Love Will Find You In The End.”  

“This is a promise with a catch,” Johnston sings. “Only if you’re looking can it find you.”

’Cause true love is searching too

But how can it recognize you

Unless you step out into the light the light

Don’t be sad, I know you will

But don’t give up until

True love will find you in the end

Johnston’s mental illness sometimes manifested itself quite publicly. The stories of his breakdowns — often brought about by positive reviews — are legion. By the early 1990s, Johnston had self-released several crudely recorded albums, appeared on MTV’s The Cutting Edge, attacked his manager with a pipe, suffered a psychotic break as a result of taking LSD at a concert, pulled the key out of the ignition of his father’s plane mid-flight, chased a terrified woman out of a window because he thought she had the devil in her, spent months in various mental institutions, and gained masses of fans for his vulnerable, awkward, undeniably catchy, and disarmingly direct songs. 

When Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston T-shirt during a string of photo shoots, things really took off. Cobain had been given the shirt, featuring the enigmatic Johnston-drawn cover of his Hi, How Are You album, and wore it during a performance at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards and numerous photo sessions at the height of Nirvana’s fame. Cobain also included Johnston’s Yip/Jump Music on lists as one of his favorite albums. 

 

This led to an almost instantaneous major label bidding war on Johnston: Elektra offered him a carte-blanche deal, but Johnson rejected the label as satanic. (Metallica was on their roster.) He fired his long-suffering manager and signed with Atlantic while residing in a state psychiatric hospital.

Fun, perhaps the most polished of Johnston’s work, was released in 1994. It stands alongside Skip Spence’s Oar and The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett as a brilliant, disjointed communication from a stricken and singular voice.  

Johnston was quickly disillusioned by major label patronage. “I had $35,000,” he remembered. “I was going, ‘Yeah! I’m rich!’ The next day they came out, made a video, and a couple of weeks later I get a $30,000 bill. Isn’t that a ripoff?” Fun sank without a trace. Atlantic dropped Johnston in 1996.  

The 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston further lionized the tormented artist. Listing Beck, Tom Waits, Wilco, and Pearl Jam among the luminaries who had covered his songs, the movie compared Johnston to the brilliant, struggling Beach Boy Brian Wilson, among others, and deftly portrayed him through animations of his drawings, new footage, and childhood home movies.

It’s always been troubling, at least to me, that Johnston’s turbulent life was consumed as avidly as his art. American culture has always been drawn to creators touched by fire; it confers a shamanistic quality, which helps explain the mysteries of artistic ability and inspiration. The side effect, of course, is that doing so puts that person at a safe remove, which is beneficial to those who love a so-called good train wreck or wish to profit unimpeded. But Daniel Johnston’s talent was his ability to communicate with unaffected emotional directness, which, when you listen to him, not only makes it harder to separate the artist from his art, but also from you yourself.

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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Sam Schuyler

My Love Affair with Chairs

Willian Justen de Vasconcellos, Getty

Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…

Prayers to Lucia

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Heather Quinn| Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,102 words)

 

Obtain for me, by your intercession with God, perfect vision for my bodily eyes, and the grace to use them for God’s greater honor and glory and the salvation of souls.
— Prayer to Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia holds her left arm outstretched, a silver platter balanced on the palm of her hand. On the platter rests a disembodied pair of eyes. They are looking, lidded, expressive. What they seem to express, in their straight-ahead gaze, is serenity and knowing, a kind of Mona Lisa without a face. In some images Santa Lucia holds the eyes in her hand directly, without a platter to rest on, with a sort of branch that connects them both like fruit on a tiny tree. I think of optic nerves connected directly — without the brain as intermediary — to the spinal cord. Sight talking to body, vision sent from nerves straight to muscle, a physical and tangible thing.

These are Lucia’s own eyes, though she gazes out from the picture with an identical pair of her own, safe in their sockets. They were gouged out while she was alive, then restored to her after her death.

Lucia is the patron saint of eye diseases, blindness, writers, stained glass makers, the poor, and sore throats. Her name means light and her feast day is attended by young girls in red-and-white gowns with crowns of candles upon their heads.
Read more…

After Three Children, Reclaiming My Body and My Mind

Illustration by Tiffany Baker

Ukamaka Olisakwe | Longreads | September 2019 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

Nurse Ruth’s face was set in tense lines of seriousness as she probed my cervix with a metal instrument. I knew this procedure by heart, having been through it five times in the past 17 years: dilate the cervix, measure the uterine cavity, insert the intrauterine device.

But Ruth was frowning. The last time, another nurse said the depth of my uterine cavity was too short. Twelve years ago, after the birth of my third child, I learned that my retroverted uterus had yet to properly settle itself nicely inside my pelvis and that my cervix had partially descended into my vagina.

Now as Ruth brought out the instrument and gazed at the blood smear on the tip, I trained my eyes on the crumple of her brow and tried to decipher what she wasn’t saying. In another life, I would not set my foot within a 10-mile radius of this place. But here I was, 36 and frightened, and I willing her to say something positive; I willed her to say that childbirth hadn’t ruined me that much.

But she didn’t say those words. Instead, she worked until I could no longer endure the discomfort of metal scraping against the soft of my womb. Because my cavity was still so short, Ruth suggested an alternative contraceptive — a progestin implant. She feared my uterus would expel an IUD if she went ahead and inserted it.

True, the last IUD had snapped and poked at my insides all night until the following morning when I found a doctor, who pried open my cervix and got it out. The one before that, my body began to act strangely and I experienced unexplainable vaginal bleeding whenever sex was vigorous.

“I have heard terrible things about the implant,” I told Ruth. “I hear it can reduce me to the biblical woman with the issue of bleeding who was healed by Jesus.” She laughed, despite the seriousness of the moment, but then she had positive and convincing things to say. She invited me to the clinic’s family planning seminar scheduled for that week. She gave me an emergency oral contraceptive for the time being, and we agreed to have the contraceptive inserted into my arm at my next visit.

I smiled and thanked her. Then I cried all the way home, ignoring the curious looks of concerned passersby, some of whom paused, as Nigerians are wont to do, to ask what made me cry.
Read more…

Hot for Teacher

Getty / McSweeney's Publishing

Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)

What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.

More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.

More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.

Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.

Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.

More than anything, she wanted a baby.

More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.

Read more…

Exilium Vita Est: The Island Home of Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo, pictured sitting in his writing atelier in his home in Guernsey, completed some of his best-known works as an exile on the island. All illustrations by Emma Jacobs.

Emma Jacobs | Longreads | September 2019 | 8 minutes (2,229 words)

 

Like a cabin in the woods, an island sounds like a writer’s dream: inspiring scenery and a remove from distractions. Here, the mythology creeps in, the writer can achieve an internal calm to match external tranquility, and of course will not suffer in the least from the isolation.

Give the writer a desk at a window with a view. Victor Hugo’s would do nicely. In the late 19th century, the French author lived for 14 years as a political exile on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. He wrote overlooking the sea and, on a clear day, he could see all the way to the hazy coastline of his beloved France.

Engaged with the outside world but removed from it, he produced an outpouring of words — including poems, essays, and books — and most famously completed his five-volume novel, Les Misérables.

I wanted to visit Hugo’s home on Guernsey, called Hauteville House, for a mix of intangible reasons we visit writers’ houses, but mainly out of curiosity about how someone so iconic lived and worked, and for some better understanding of the mind at work here. The house also has a reputation as worth seeing in and of itself, a masterpiece of Hugo the decorator. Hugo scholars, known as Hugoliens, consider it another one of his great works, alongside his books. His son Charles described it as an “autograph of three stories,” and “a poem in many rooms.” I had avoided looking too closely at photos of the house that became synonymous with his time abroad, which might muddy first impressions.

Before my visit, I had imagined Hauteville House standing apart, alone on a hilltop, like the writer-in-exile in a moody series of portraits taken on the neighboring island of Jersey. Seen from various distances and angles, Hugo, sepia-toned, poses on a coastal outcrop known as “The Rock of the Exiles.” In the most arresting portrait, he appears in profile, gazing over the water.

As it turns out, Hugo’s Hauteville House is near the top of a steep, curved street. From the rear, with its spacious garden and an airy facade full of windows, it could pass for a country mansion. But it is hemmed into a row of Georgian-style townhouses.

Hauteville House, now grey, stands out on a quiet block of the town of Saint Peter Port.

Hauteville House, now gray, stands out on a quiet block of the town of Saint Peter Port.

During recent renovations, the street-facing side, previously painted in a light shade like its neighbors, was restored to the severe dark gray of Hugo’s era. It has a forest-green fence and three flagpoles, flying the standards of France, Guernsey, and the city of Paris.

It took four years for Hugo to pinball from Paris, which he left in 1851, to Guernsey. After opposing the coup by which Napoleon III replaced France’s nascent democracy with its Second Empire, he had first fled to Belgium, wearing a fake beard to avoid being recognized on the journey.

Hugo was already famous from his works for theater and his wildly successful novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known to English speakers as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The book’s success had literally transformed its namesake, prompting the first extensive renovation of the neglected cathedral in the 1840s. (In a modern twist, the recent 4.5 million euro restoration of Hauteville House was largely funded by French billionaire François Pinault, who has also pledged 100 million euros toward the restoration of fire-damaged Notre-Dame.)

In Belgium, Hugo continued to write scathing tracts about Napoleon III, eventually making himself an unwelcome guest. Next, he and his wife and children joined other European exiles on the Channel Island of Jersey. Expelled again for his political involvement, he finally boarded a steamer named Dispatch for the town of Saint Peter Port on a rainy day in October, 1855.

The picturesque town of Saint Peter Port rises steeply from its modern harbor.

The picturesque town of Saint Peter Port rises steeply from its modern harbor.

The island of Guernsey, a semi-independent British Crown dependency, is 24 square miles of craggy coastline. Once Hugo bought the (reputedly haunted) Hauteville House in 1856, under the island’s laws, he could not be expelled.

“No longer having a fatherland, I would have a roof,” he wrote in a letter to fellow French writer Jules Janin. Driven from place to place, “I rebuilt [my household] with the patience of an ant. This time, they won’t chase me off again. … From now on, I will be chez moi, the walls, the floorboards and the ceilings will be mine.”

His continued residence assured, Hugo went about redecorating to his own particular tastes.

He collected sea chests from Guernsey’s antique and junk shops, which he had reconfigured into furniture. He covered walls and ceilings with tapestries and oriental rugs and even china plates.

The island of Guernsey is a British Crown dependency, with signs of its historical ties to both Britain and France.

The island of Guernsey is a British Crown dependency, with signs of its historical ties to both Britain and France.

Today, Hauteville House is a tiny French outpost on the island, owned and run by the city of Paris. A painted plaster frieze of scenes from Notre-Dame de Paris greets visitors in the entryway. Guided tours take place in small groups, beginning in the billiard room where the family socialized, and circling upward through the large, three-story townhouse.

Hugo mixed and matched to create eccentric, eclectic rooms. In one ground-floor salon, he united a wall of carved wooden chests, Flemish tapestry, a 19th-century Japanese lantern, Dutch stained glass, a Persian rug, and Chinese paintings on paper.

He incorporated his signature, literally, throughout the house, including the Notre-Dame frieze above the entryway. His initials appear in some cases carved into wood paneling, and as a tile relief over the dining room fireplace. The writer characteristically included words and phrases into the decor. In the dining room, a Latin maxim reads: Exilium vita est (“life is exile”).

“It is necessary to work or die of boredom,” Hugo wrote during his period overseas.

His productivity at Hauteville House was grounded in a strict routine, according to assistant curator, Stéphanie Duluc.

“He rose very early in the morning,” she said, and wrote until lunch, which he took with his family. “Then he would go walking in the afternoon,” most often along the coast to Fermain Bay, where today you’ll find a beach café with picnic tables. Evenings were for revisions.

A visitor in Victor Hugo's library of Hauteville House.

A visitor in Victor Hugo’s library of Hauteville House.

In 1860, he returned to a manuscript he had begun 15 years before. It revolved around events on a Paris barricade in 1832, and the lives of the characters who converged there.

The tour of Hauteville House continues up to Hugo’s dark wood-and-glass library, dim and densely packed with novels and reference works, and then up one more flight of stairs to the glass-walled “lookout” Hugo had extended from a rooftop window. Roped off to preserve the Delft tiles and a glass window in the floor that serves as a skylight to the stairs below, the remove adds to the aura of Hugo’s sacred, impenetrable workspace. Hugo wrote here, moving between two simple desks that fold out from the wall.

But even standing before Hugo’s inspiring view, it was still strange to imagine Hugo writing Les Misérables from Guernsey, literally facing — masochistically, almost — a country he would not set foot in until political tides turned, if he lived that long.

Hugo wrote another novel he set on Guernsey, called Toilers of the Sea. Its somber dedication reads: “To the rock of hospitality and freedom … where live this noble, little people of the sea, the Island of Guernsey, severe and kind/soft, my present exile and probable tomb.”

Details from the present-day harbor of Saint Peter Port.

Details from the present-day harbor of Saint Peter Port.

In Toilers of the Sea, Hugo paints a peculiar island subject to enveloping fogs and superstitions. Guernsey, in the book, is not isolated per se — the plot is regularly propelled by international travelers arriving on various ships. But the novel’s central drama takes place on a group of barren rocks offshore, where the protagonist, Gilliatt, spends many grueling weeks alone, salvaging the engine of a wrecked steamer — and fights off a monstrous sea creature.

The Guernsey of Toilers of the Sea feels worlds away from the crowded streets of Paris. It also doesn’t sound much like the island of today, which receives over 100,000 cruise passengers a year.

In fact, during my brief visit, I had a nagging sense that Hugo would not have liked what the island has become. Retellings of the writer’s life on Guernsey give prominent place to weekly dinners he hosted for impoverished children on the island near the end of his work on Les Misérables, which comments on income inequality, among other subjects.

The stone gateway before one of the town's stately homes, which have names like Magnolia House and Fairsea.

The stone gateway before one of the town’s stately homes, which have names like Magnolia House and Fairsea.

Saint Peter Port is still picturesque. My time on the island seemed to disappear as I walked up and down its streets and staircases, encountering wildflowers growing out of crumbling stone walls and pretty Georgian-style houses with names like Magnolia House and Fairsea. But a number of these townhouses now bear the names of asset management firms, a sign of the financial clout of the island, which is known today as a tax haven. Residents drive small but clearly very expensive cars “because they can,” explains a tourist brochure taken from the ferry terminal.

Then again, Hugo himself lived a life full of contradictions and contrasts. He lived in a grand house in which he created a monumental wood-paneled bedroom for himself, incorporating pews from the Chartres Cathedral, a prime example of French Gothic architecture, and an imposingly huge desk. But Hugo actually slept in a small, simple bedroom above it. It is brightly lit, with cheerful yellow walls and a modest bed almost level with the floor.

Under scrutiny, even Hugo’s exile breaks down a little. He received hundreds of visitors in Hauteville House’s richly decorated salons, including pilgrims from all over the world and his French peers, including Alexandre Dumas. Though, Duluc notes, some days Hugo refused to see anyone.

Victor Hugo pictured in the red salon, where he entertained visitors.

Victor Hugo pictured in the red salon, where he entertained visitors.

But the most preoccupying contradiction is Hugo’s assembling of a masterpiece of the French literary canon and social commentary from a British island.

While dreaming up the colorful cast of Les Mis would be impressive anywhere, Hugo at least had resources to draw on beyond his own memories. He sent journalist Théophile Guérin on fact-checking missions to verify geographic details of Paris and consulted Juliette Drouet, a French actress who became his mistress and joined him on Guernsey, about the memories of her childhood in convent school for another section of the book. After nine years, he made his first return trip to the Continent to visit the site of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium, with his manuscript packed in a waterproof bag. The publishing process sounds maddening: In his biography about Hugo’s masterpiece, The Novel of a Century, scholar and translator David Bellos describes how batches of typeset pages were sent by mail from Brussels to Guernsey for corrections via boat and train, a circuit which could take up to 10 days.

But, despite these obstacles, the book was published, and Les Misérables became an international bestseller.

Was this the silver lining of Hugo’s exile?

While not working on the great American novel, I have found living outside the U.S. in recent years to be helpful for a sense of distance, granting me permission to disengage just enough from the relentless daily news cycle.

Hugo was a mail boat away from the French coast, a safe distance from the thrumming of Paris. While he loved his country with a patriotic fervor that would raise eyebrows today, leaving it ultimately gave him the room to complete his complex ode to France.

 A statue of Hugo from 1914 in Candie Gardens looks toward the harbor of Saint Peter Port.

A statue of Hugo from 1914 in Candie Gardens looks toward the harbor of Saint Peter Port.

Hugo returned to Paris as soon as Napoleon III fell in 1870. As the long-exiled patriarch of French democracy, he now reached a status at home that Michael Garval, an American professor who studies 19th-century celebrity, told me is hard to translate: “part-Mark Twain, part-Ernest Hemingway, part-I don’t know, Abraham Lincoln.”

Hugo was swept into the social and political worlds of Paris once again. He would have to return for an extended stay in Guernsey later that decade to finish his last novel, Ninety-Three.

“He plays this role of wise grandfather of the Third Republic,” said Garval, manifestly enjoying the adulation that came his way.

“At the end of his life you have this sort of extensive anticipation of his passing and of his eventual glorious afterlife,” he noted. “Typically, for example, streets would not be named after someone until after they’re dead,” but the last street that Hugo lived on was given his name in anticipation of his 80th birthday, celebrated with a parade below his final apartment’s balcony. Somewhere between 2 and 3 million people reportedly turned out for his six-hour funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, a crowd roughly equivalent to the entire population of Paris at the time.

This is the continuing paradox of Hugo today.

To massively compress the story of Les Misérables’ legacy, there have since been hundreds of translations and so many adaptations as to have “a depressing effect on attitudes towards his book,” writes Bellos, so that “serious readers have often turned up their noses at a work they assume to fall below the level of great art.”

Hauteville House still draws 20,000 visitors a year, roughly half English and half French speakers. A retired French couple I met after the tour admit — while they knew some of Hugo’s life’s story — they had never read one of his massive novels in full. But after tracing the narrative told by his fantastical house, they left wanting to try.

“I think one can have never read Hugo and understand this house ultimately as one of his great, great works,” said Duluc. “And I find the visit has been a success when people leave with the desire to read.”

* * *

Emma Jacobs is a multimedia journalist based in Montreal and author of the illustrated book The Little(r) Museums of Paris.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Brian Trapp, Alison Kinney, Kate Wagner, Willy Staley, and Suzannah Showler.

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The Myth of Making It

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  7 minutes (1,849 words)

I think maybe I thought I made it a couple of times. Both of them had to do with jobs. Both were fleeting feelings — very much tied to age and stage of life — and I’ve never felt the same way again. I don’t know what “making it” would even look like now: maybe having enough money to buy a house (see: acquire an “asset”) and not be immediately broke? I’d probably still feel dissatisfied because I didn’t write some book or win some award or, like, live around enough trees. That lack of internal contentment, I think, is the problem. It’s what makes grasping at outside validation so fruitless. An already mythical idea, “making it” becomes ever more elusive when measured externally — by accolades, wealth, any sort of acquisition. It becomes as fungible as those things are, whether according to your own circumstances or to the world’s. You’re either competing with yourself to outdo what you’ve already achieved, or you’re competing with someone else for a bigger share of some pie (and there’s always someone else). Or maybe you aren’t consciously competing with anyone; you just have this kind of profound insecurity that follows you from triumph to triumph, serving only the market you buy into, in order to stave it off, but no one else.

Take Tyshawn Jones, who’s only 20 and has already been named Skater of the Year by Thrasher magazine, but who can’t stop talking about what he doesn’t have. Or actress Kirsten Dunst, who’s been nominated for award after award, but still feels uncelebrated. Or Bill Hader, whom The New York Times Magazine recently confronted about his show’s success. (It received 17 — 17! — Emmys nods.) The Barry creator conceded the win, but also acknowledged the difference between external praise and the way he berates himself internally. “It never ends,” he explained. “That’s the thing.” That’s the thing with making it, it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Because implicit in the promise that you’ll succeed is the assurance that you never will. 

* * *

If the god in On Becoming a God in Central Florida is ambition, then the devil is an alligator. In the first episode of the Showtime series, which takes place in a 1992 that looks like 1982, a sweaty, mulleted version of Alexander Skarsgård named Travis Stubbs gets pulled into a pyramid scheme that obsesses him to such a degree that he can’t sleep. Starved of rest, he hallucinates a glowing white moose in the middle of the road (idk) and crashes into a swamp, where he is promptly consumed by a gator. Before his soul is claimed, his wife, Krystal (a big-haired, heavily lacquered Kirsten Dunst), balks at the millionaire idols he flashes in front of her face, accusing him of buying into a fantasy. In their wood-paneled bungalow, their newborn asleep, Krystal motions to their surroundings and says, “I know this is inconceivable to you, but this is more than I ever expected.” As irony would have it, the show arrived around the same time as an interview in which Dunst expressed dissatisfaction with a career that her character would likely be barely able to conceive of. In the viral clip taken from her appearance on SiriusXM’s In Depth with Larry Flick, Dunst confessed she had never felt empowered in her three decades of acting. “I’ve never been recognized in my industry. I’ve never been nominated for anything,” she said, adding, “I just feel like, ‘What did I do?’” As if to prove her point, Reuters tweeted and then deleted a post about her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, describing her as “best known for her role as Spiderman’s girlfriend.”

The truth is that Dunst has been recognized. She’s been nominated for multiple Golden Globes (the first at age 11!), for Cannes Best Actress, for an Emmy. She just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for god’s sake. “I know that all you have is your work at the end of the day and that’s all people really are about,” Dunst told Flick. “I’m, you know, intelligent enough to know that and have perspective.” But she’s worked for three decades and what does she have to show for it — $25 million and a few award nods? Equivalent actress — this isn’t a science, but bear with me — Anne Hathaway is seven months younger, has worked 10 years fewer and has an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy. Oh, and apparently she’s worth $35 million. As Dunst said, “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Mmm. It’d be nice to be recognized by your peers.’ You know what I mean?”

Yes, I fucking do know what you mean. Because I am you, but much much poorer and much much less famous. In her SiriusXM interview, Dunst wondered whether she played the game enough, but then admitted she always does what she’s supposed to. “It’s not like I’m rude or, like, not doing publicity or anything,” she said. Her frank bewilderment was achingly familiar. I have had the same conversations over and over and over again. I do good work, I show up, I promote. But I never get awards. When a stranger says they know my writing, I am genuinely shocked. From where I’m sitting, Dunst has made it. But then: Hathaway. In North America, wherever you’re sitting, you’re always aware that someone else is doing better. 

The cliché is that money can’t buy you happiness, but it’s increasingly obvious that what can help make you happy is not knowing how much more everyone else has and not storing your value in your savings account. This year’s World Happiness Report named Finland the most contented country on the planet despite it trailing both Canada and the U.S. in gross domestic product. The highest-ranking countries had not only healthy incomes but also robust social support systems, freedom, and generosity, none of which have much to do with making you feel accomplished but are rather about making you feel as worthy as everyone else. In Scientific American, Finnish well-being expert Frank Martela explained Finland’s position in the context of human beings’ impulse to compare. “If everybody else is doing better than you, it is hard to be satisfied with your life conditions, no matter how good they objectively are,” he wrote. “By not displaying, let alone exaggerating, their own happiness, Finns might help each other to make more realistic comparisons, which benefits everybody’s happiness.” 

The American Dream, that anyone can work hard and ultimately come out on top, is like an anti-happiness plan: A good life is not measured by social support or freedom or empathy, but by material gain. Showing off your wealth shows off your success, which shows off your value as a human being. This goes double for artists, whose livelihoods are that much harder to secure. Triple for marginalized communities, who have to work that much harder than everyone else. While all of this striving is a boon for capitalism, it’s a disaster for the people living under it.

I don’t want to add patriarchy to this whole thing, but why not. It’s the part that genders success so that Dunst complains about recognition, while men complain about money. It makes sense if you think about what guys are traditionally supposed to be: powerful breadwinners. This is where Tyshawn Jones lives. In a sprawling profile this weekend, The New York Times Magazine called him New York’s first skateboarding superstar. But even though this kid barely out of his teens has claimed the highest honor in his field — Thrasher’s cover and Skater of the Year Award — won a sponsorship deal with Supreme, cofounded a hardware and apparel company, opened a restaurant, and even designed his own shoe, none of it is enough. He doesn’t have a Vogue cover, for one thing. That’s power. And he doesn’t have Nyjah Huston money. “Everybody don’t like him, but I respect him,” Jones said. “He one of the only niggas who really got rich off skating, like really rich, like $2 million crib, like Lamborghini — I think that’s tight. There’s skaters who can’t even get by with $500 a month.” There’s a big gap between $6 million (Huston’s reported net worth) and $6,000, but Jones isn’t comparing down, he’s comparing up. That’s what successful people do. 

So it’s either about recognition or it’s about money, money or recognition. But both come second to the end goal of making it, the Platonic ideal of the Valuable Citizen. Self-actualization, community, autonomy … those things are nice, but they aren’t particularly profitable for a capitalist society. Material is. And measuring success materially keeps success perennially elusive because the standard of comparison is always shifting under your feet. This insecurity keeps the gears of patriarchal capitalism turning as we stumble over one another to feed them and ourselves. The market exploits and perpetuates the constant feeling that we’re not good enough, or, in Jones’s case, not secure enough, by convincing us it has the answer. Every payday or product whispers to us that we’re that much closer to making it — whatever it is — without ever actually allowing us to get there.

* * *

“Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face / My feelings can’t describe it / Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face / And I just cannot hide it.” The 1992 CeCe Peniston song “Finally” is about love, but in On Finding God it’s about making it. The dance hit blasts right after Krystal decides to take over her husband’s dream, the one that turned him into gator food. The animal now lies skinned in her garage, but what might have acted as an exorcism has instead resulted in transference. If the alligator was the devil claiming Krystal’s husband’s acquisitive soul, Krystal now appears to have inherited it. But this time around she’s not the one being sacrificed; she’s all in on the scheme, and everyone around her serves as the oblation. 

This is success in America now, where the closer we get to whatever its manifestation is — whether it’s wealth or acknowledgment or something else — the further we get from our humanity. The only way to get out of it is to fundamentally understand that making it is a myth. Rather than making a pact with the devil, which is to say, buying into validation we know will never be enough, we have to reject the premise of the pact. Bill Hader, as insecure as any of us, chooses to coexist with his self doubt. While this may be disappointingly human to some, his is not a fantasy life based on comparison — it’s him at his most honest. As renowned dancer Martha Graham famously observed, it is here that an artist’s magic resides: “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Migrant in the Mirror

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 8 minutes (1,940 words)

In Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator, called Little Dog, describes the moment that he comes out to his mother. It is a gray Sunday morning inside of a Dunkin’ Donuts; he is 17 years old and in love with a boy named Trevor. After relaying some of the conversation exchanged between him and his mother, Little Dog’s narrative moves backward and forward in time, presenting the history of his queer sexuality. There was a little boy in the sixth grade named Gramoz; he and his family were immigrants just like Little Dog’s family. Little Dog followed Gramoz around, wanting to become his shadow. Years later, a college professor will use Othello to argue that gay men are narcissistic, and Little Dog will think back to his love for Gramoz:

“Could it be…I followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself?…Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty…but to make sure…we are still here. That the hunted boy we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.”

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