Search Results for: publishing

‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), oil on canvas, Henri Rousseau, 1891. (Imagno/Getty Images)

Adam Morgan | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,861 words)

 

The deceptively slim Reinhardt’s Garden, Mark Haber’s astonishing novella, is composed of a single paragraph, one that meanders across 150 pages and several hemispheres, from the ramparts of an oddly constructed German castle (it’s full of fake walls and trap doors) to a fictional jungle in Uruguay (Uruguay is, in actuality, a country of rolling hills called the Pampas). At the center of this web of fun-house geographies and architectures, lost in that fictional jungle in the year 1907, Croatian scholar and megalomaniac Jacov Reinhardt is searching for his lifelong obsession — not a city of gold or a fountain of youth, like in the doomed adventurers of Aguirre, the Wrath of God or The Lost City of Z, but a man: Emiliano Gomez Carasquilla, “a lost philosopher of melancholy” last seen somewhere in Colombia or Brazil. Melancholy, as Jacov’s long-suffering servant (and the book’s narrator) explains, is “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either,” an elusive emotion Jacov has pursued to the ends of the earth. Read more…

The Name Change Dilemma

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Howard | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,420 words)

Although Tony speaks with an elegant English accent and I with a prosaic American one, although I am a writer and he works in business doing things with spreadsheets that I can’t even begin to comprehend, although he grew up Anglican and I grew up Jewish, and although Tony’s parents are from Uganda and a small island off the south coast of England and mine are from the Bronx and Queens, respectively, when it comes to both everyday decisions and big life things we are usually on the same page.

We both love New York with an obstinate devotion. Recently our friends have started to move to the suburbs. We both give a polite smile when they share the news. Then back in the safety of our one-bedroom, which becomes an inferno in the winter because it’s an old NYC apartment, we make gagging noises and giggle. The suburbs may be nice for other people, but we like it right here.

We both always want to get an extra order of short ribs at our favorite barbeque place in Koreatown and splurge for the fancy bubbly any time we can think of a half-decent excuse. We want to travel the world. We want to live in Brooklyn Heights, in a brownstone overlooking the promenade, after I sell the movie rights to my future bestseller or we win the lottery.. Manhattan will sparkle across the East River. For now, we walk around Brooklyn until the soles of our feet begin to hurt, and choose our favorite blocks. We have so many favorites we lose track.

Last September, we got married.

We agreed on so much, as usual. My parents consented to a pig roast even though we are Jewish. We decided to have the ceremony in their back yard by the Delaware River, where Pennsylvania meets New Jersey, and the party under a tent. There would be fairy lights and a band that got everyone dancing. There would be really good food.

We looked into fireworks, but the price tag shocked us. Who needs fireworks? We didn’t need fireworks.

Reader, the night was magic. Tony’s family came from England and Denmark, and mine came from Baltimore and South Dakota, and friends came from everywhere. There was no feeling like walking out into the backyard and seeing all the people I love in the world, their soft smiles and flowy dresses. My heart exploded into heart dust.

The sun peeked out of cotton ball clouds right as we said our vows under the chuppah my dad had built for us. The river was right beside us, and we made another river of happy tears.

Even though my strapless dress had been tailored not once or twice but three times, my best friend Ursula still had to safety pin my bra into its stiff fabric. Miraculously, it stayed up the whole night.

Our friend Leigh made us a cheese platter and a lemon cake with strawberry jam and buttercream frosting. Our friend Rena wrote us a poem. We had not just delicious-for-a-wedding but actually delicious food. The music was so electric that our friends and family spilled off the dance floor, out of the tent and into the night. The moon’s reflection danced on the river.
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Learning from Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol

Illustration by Jackie Ferrentino

Wendy Gan | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,746 words)

If anyone had told me five years ago that I would become a Kpop fan, I would have laughed in their face. If anyone had told me I would be actually be learning life lessons from a Kpop idol, I would have been even more incredulous. I am in my mid-40s, 20 years into an academic career, a responsible mortgage-payer, and a survivor of a dysfunctional family. I am also in perimenopause, which might help explain why life has taken such a strange turn.

***

I had never heard of perimenopause before, but when a nexus of rather odd physical symptoms from arthritis to sleeplessness to abnormal spikes of anxiety began to plague me, I started to wonder if a new rhythm to my monthly cycle was to blame. Some research revealed potential connections, and the rather sobering piece of information that this shaky run-up to full-blown menopause could very well last up to eight years. If 52 is the average age when most women reach menopause, I would have, quite likely, a good seven years more of this hormonal instability and its physical repercussions to both endure and manage. While I am sure there are worse cases out there, I often do not feel quite myself, and it is disconcerting to say the least. The body that you used to take for granted begins to call attention to itself with various aches and pains, or with strange happenings, like a sudden rush of adrenalin that keeps you awake at night wondering why your heart is pumping with such fury. A work meeting that you would normally take in your stride begins to cause an unusual amount of consternation. Even meeting an old friend for a catch-up can leave you feeling nervous and on edge. Then there are the weeping fits. A sweet animal rescue video as you scroll through Twitter makes you keen in despair. A soppy ending to a television drama makes you sob as if it were the end of your life. And in the midst of the crying, something dislodges, sadness surges and sweeps over you, and it really does feel like the end of your life.

Did I say perimenopause was disconcerting? To be frank, it has been maddening. And hormone-induced depressions (thank you, perimenopause) that hit me unpredictably each month do little to help. Only Kpop keeps me sane.
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Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’

Illustration by Carla Fuentes Fuertes

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,959 words)

In the 1970s, Random House editor Toni Morrison was on a mission to change the face of African American literature. As one of the few Black editors at a major publishing house in the position to green-light writers, Morrison, as the New York Times noted in a 1977 profile, “sat behind a desk stacked stacked high with correspondence and typed loose leaf manuscripts” and signed a group of Black poets, biographers, and novelists who would lay a new literary foundation throughout the decade and into the early ’80s. The stirring, often haunting works of Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters), Henry Dumas (Jonoah and the Green Stone), Quincy Troupe (Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings), and Angela Davis (Angela Davis: An Autobiography) were met with academic acceptance and critical acclaim. Those authors became celebrated “new voices,” but one book Morrison edited during that era slipped through the literary cracks and virtually disappeared. 

Mostly forgotten and long out-of-print, Fish Tales by Nettie Jones is an often shocking, sexually charged novel that has retained the sharpness of its cutting edge in the 36 years since its release. Jones came to Morrison’s attention via another writer of her prose posse, Corregidora author Gayl Jones (no relation), whom Nettie cited as a friend and mentor during the three years it took to finish her book. Fish Tales was published in 1983, the same year Morrison, who had already written four novels including The Bluest Eye and Sula, quit her job to devote herself full-time to writing. Although Random House balked at buying Jones’s book, Morrison, already an empress in the literary world, persuaded the publisher that the work was worthy. “Toni was acquiring strong writers,” said literary agent Marie Dutton Brown, who, in the 1970s held a similar editorial position  at Doubleday. “There was no formulaic fiction on her roster. Toni saw something in Nettie that she thought was worthy of publication.”


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Fish Tales is a 175-page chronicle of Detroit native Lewis Jones, a spirited but troubled party girl who, at 32, is too old to be called a girl, but still behaves like one. After her unrequited lover’s new wife teaches her “to disconnect [her] brain from [her] pussy,” Lewis begins diving into situations without considering the often-chaotic consequences of her actions. She splits her high times between the Motor City and Manhattan during the scotch-on-the-rocks, sexually liberated, drug-saturated, disco-blasting 1970s. Lewis gets her freak on while looking for love from all the wrong people, including her flawed doctor husband Woody, who becomes her patron and funds her bi-state misadventures, a homosexual hustler friend Kitty-Kat, and the snide quadriplegic Brook, the sometimes-mean object of her fire and desire. 

* * *

In the few interviews Jones did in the 1980s, she always maintained that Fish Tales was a truthful interpretation of her own wild life in Detroit and New York. Born on January 1, 1941, in Arlington, Georgia, she relocated to Detroit when she was 5. She was the oldest child and had a younger sister; together, they took a train with their grandmother and arrived at the majestic Michigan Central Station. Her mother, who was already in the city, welcomed them at the terminal. 

“That station was so beautiful,” 78-year-old Nettie Jones told me in the spring from her Brooklyn apartment. “I came with the migrants to work in the factories. I never heard anyone say they came to Detroit to get their children a better education. They all say, ‘Did you hear how much money they paying at Ford?’” Living on Pulford Street, Jones’s family was working-class and her mother was biracial. She has fond memories of roller skating with her sister at the Arcadia Ballroom roller rink, visiting her grandmother’s grocery store, watching movies that included Carmen Jones and Imitation of Life, seeing Billie Holiday at the Paradise Theatre, and visiting Uncle Dix in the Black Bottom when her mama walked her to piano lessons. “He always had a plate of fried fish waiting for us,” she remembered. 

‘Fish Tales’ was published in 1983, the same year Morrison, who had already written four novels including The Bluest Eye and Sula, quit her job to devote herself full-time to writing.

In high school, she became friends with the bougie bunch who usually stayed away from kids who weren’t part of their prosperous posse. “I met up with some of those fancy Negroes and they thought I was one of them because I had light skin and blue eyes,” she said. “They were the children of doctors and businessmen, the old Detroiters. They were the Negroes that were doing very well. There was a separation between us and them, but I did get to see into their houses. In my dreams I was going to become a principal in Detroit and buy a big house and a Cadillac. As you know, Detroit is known for its big houses and Cadillacs.” 

Two stellar books, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham and Negroland by Margo Jefferson, tell the story of the Black bourgeoisie that she refers to. Jones was attracted to that lifestyle, but she still rejected the rules and protocols that went along with it. When Jones was 17, in 1958, she gave birth to her daughter Lynne and married the baby’s father, Frank Stafford; they divorced three or four years later. Still, she continued with her education and, after graduating from Central High, attended Wayne State where she got a degree in 1962. 

In 1963, she married Frank Harris and relocated to Montreal while he was in dental school. After Harris became an orthodontist, the family moved back to Detroit. Jones taught high school. “I’ve been a teacher in my mind since I was a child,” Jones said. “I taught reading, but I failed as a secondary school teacher in Detroit. The whole system was collapsing. Things were falling apart.” It was during this period that Jones began plotting her escape from Detroit, though she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do.

* * *

Aside from keeping a journal, Jones did little writing during those years. As a lover of movies, she’d originally conceived Fish Tales as a screenplay, which might explain why it’s written, as literary critic William O’Rourke noted in 1989, in episodic chapters “comprising of short scenes, the hearts of vignettes.” Jones later described the book as a textual collage. “That was a word I picked up from [artist] Romare Bearden. He said, ‘Black artists are collages, because we certainly make something out of nothing.’ I heard him say that one Sunday during a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum, and it stayed with me,” she said. Much as it did for Bearden, the collage method became the medium through which Jones could depict her own fractured experience. 

Two stellar books, ‘Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class’ by Lawrence Otis Graham and ‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson, tell the story of the Black bourgeoisie that she refers to. Jones was attracted to that lifestyle, but she still rejected the rules and protocols that went along with it.

To open Fish Tales, Jones uses a Jean Toomer quote as an epigraph: “The human fish is intricate and hidden; the appearance of his fins are deceptive.” Yet fish in the context of this novel is a derogatory term some gay men used about women and the supposed smell of vaginas. This becomes clear when Lewis’s best friend, Kitty-Kat, talks about a drag queen who used sardine oil on herself to “smell like an authentic girl.” Lewis meets Kitty-Kat one lonely Christmas when she calls “Dial Your Desire” looking for companionship. Throughout the book, with Kitty keeping her company, Lewis is intoxicated, and her bad behavior, directed toward friends and strangers alike, often leads to “grand drunken scenes” that are decadent, thrilling, and sad. 

Things get worse in the second half when our human hurricane falls in love with Brook. Disabled during a prep school wrestling match, he’s tall and handsome with a number of women fighting over him. “Do you think that you are the first woman that ever did anything for me? Loved me? Wanted me?” he screams at Lewis during one of their many arguments. 

* * *

The poet Brittany Dennison learned about Fish Tales in 2018 through a friend who found it on a list of books that Toni Morrison edited. Dennison, who has since read the book twice, said of the novel, “As soon as Lewis transitions from sex to love, that’s when things fall apart.” Dennison quickly became a fan of Nettie Jones, though others in her lit circle weren’t as generous. “They were kind of blindsided by the amount of fast living that is in the book, but none of that bothered me. The sex and drugs were a part of Lewis’ journey, but I never felt that the writer was trying to be raw just to shock the reader. Nettie’s writing is natural and honest.” 

When the recently released Toni Morrison documentary The Pieces I Am flashes covers of various books she edited on screen, Fish Tales isn’t shown. It’s as though even the woman who’d introduced Jones’s writing to the world had pushed it to the rear of her memory. Still, a small group of readers, both those from back in the day and recent recruits, are fans of the avant-garde Black erotica tale that takes them zooming down, as the jacket copy promises, “life in the fast lane.” 

In Darryl Pinckney’s essay “The Fast Lane,” published in the November 8, 1984, issue of the New York Review of Books, he critiqued Fish Tales alongside Jay McInerney’s influential Bright Lights, Big City. Pinckney, a noted literary critic and novelist of High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), wrote, “The city, as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place, has in turn been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane the passive observer reduces everything — streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines — to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics. The hand — or drug — that raises the loser up will abandon him in mid-flight and he will crash.” As a survivor of that lifestyle, I can assure you the crashes can be deadly.

Bright Lights, Big City became the touchstone of ’80s fiction while Fish Tales, published by the same house, sank into obscurity. “McInerney’s second-person narrator loses everything, but the second chance is implied,”  Pinckney told me recently, 35 years after his review ran. “Nettie Jones’s book is much darker and it is a woman’s story, a Black woman’s story, as well. Her comedy is deadly, while his is charming. The books went together in my mind because of thinking about them as ‘fast lane’ novels, that aspect of city life, night time, clubs and drugs, as they were back then. You could say Jones’s scene was the scene McInerney’s scene came from. Hers is edgy and dangerous and his is cleaned up and expensive. Hers is closer in mood to certain gay novels of the late 1970s, a sort of victorious bohemianism, often ending in tragedy, because sin must be paid for by someone in American literature, at least in those days.”

Pinckney gave Fish Tales a mixed review. He was unhappy with its ending, which I thought kept in line with the unpredictability of the crazed characters. Upset, Jones contacted him, and the two went out for cocktails. “Nettie was grand, in a huge hat, just like the one Zora Neale Hurston is wearing in a famous photo,” Pinckey recalled via email. “She was grand, voluptuous, and beautiful. We went out, ran around, had a great time. I moved to Europe, but maybe that was only a part of why we lost touch. I heard from her again some years later. She was living with her daughter in New Jersey. I’m not sure, but I think she says she was writing something new.” Neither can remember if they ever discussed the review.

Jones’ second and last published book was Mischief Makers from 1989, but she has been working on a third novel for a number of years. “Nettie is like the female Ralph Ellison when it comes to finishing that book,” friend and fellow writer Dr. Glenda R. Taylor said. “I’ve read a lot of it over the years, but she’s been working on it for forever.” The book, which was originally titled Detroit: Beauty in This Beast, but is now called Puma, is one that Jones began in 1996. In the intervening years, she worked as a teacher, and little work was done on the manuscript. Recent illnesses have also hindered Jones’ writing.  

Taylor and Jones met in the winter of 2009, and Taylor interviewed the novelist for a series of YouTube videos the following year. “I think what made me what to talk to her was that Nettie is unfiltered. She’s not always politically correct and she doesn’t mind saying it from the top of a mountain.” She prefers Jones’s second book, a period novel about three biracial sisters (Native American and Black) coming of age in the “beautiful wilderness” of Leelanau County, Michigan, and Detroit. “Truthfully, Fish Tales was a little jarring for me. Nettie was writing about subjects that I’d never read about before. I just couldn’t relate to the people in that book.”

* * *

While “eroticism is as old as humankind itself,” as Charles L. Blockson states in his essay “African-American Erotica and Other Curiosities,” it was not always openly depicted in our literature. When Fish Tales came out in 1983, there were no mainstream Black erotica markets. The groundbreaking Erotique Noire/Black Erotica edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis dropped in 1992, and a decade later, into the new millennium, Zane’s nasty novels became standard subway reading. In 2001, Carol Taylor began publishing her Brown Sugar collections, including stories by Nelson George, asha bandele, Rebecca Carroll, Miles Marshall Lewis, and myself.

While I believe that Fish Tales fit perfectly into the erotica category, there are others who thought it was smut. “Some people have tried to label Fish Tales pornographic, but I don’t agree,” Brittany Dennison said. “Jones wasn’t writing about hard cocks and bouncing breasts, but a sexuality that was much more true and real. Yes, there are times when the reader becomes a voyeur and the book can be disquieting and uncomfortable, like peeking through a window and seeing an orgy, but we see the world through Lewis’s eyes, and it’s honest and scary.” 

‘As soon as Lewis transitions from sex to love, that’s when things fall apart.’

At the time of its release, some critics were dismayed by Lewis’s sexuality and so-called counterculture behavior as though Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Clarence Major had never existed. One reviewer described Fish Tales as an “an excursion into perversion,” Jones recalled. “When I heard that I thought it was interesting. I suppose it was perversion, but it was also the truth.” 

Two years after it was published, Jones told the New York Times that Fish Tales, “dramatizes my reality blended with heavy shots of my fantasies and my fascinations.” While that could describe the writing process of many other novels, Jones’s honesty in conversation and on the page is blunt. To me, Lewis was written in the grand tradition of wild women in pop culture and real life artistic bohemia, ladies whose lights shine bright until the moment that darkness descends in the guise of liquor, sex, drugs, and mental illness. 

From the first time I read Lewis’s story, she reminded me of real and fictional “wild women,” including Zelda Fitzgerald, singer Betty Davis, Holly Golightly, Dorothy Parker, and blaxploitation princess Pam Grier as Coffy, code switching from lovestruck femme to blade-welding woman in a heartbeat. Certainly, both the writer and lead character shared a lust for life that could be as exhilarating and scary as a high-wire act on the sharp edge of a razor blade. Still, no matter how crazy Lewis was, there was an urbane complexity that made her, at least to me, attractive and interesting. 

Back in the ’80s, when I was a young man roaming free through the New York City nighttime landscape, those were the sort of Black women I was most attracted to. They were cool, chic, creative, and maybe a little crazy. These kinds of sisters — actresses, writers, bass players, nightclub doorwomen, or computer programmers — were never mentioned in the trendy texts of the times that included Bright Lights, Big City or Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. But in real Big Apple life, they were always a part of the scene: at SoHo gallery openings; on Lower East Side and Greenwich Village subway platforms; on the dance floor of Danceteria, the Ritz, and the Garage; or throwing back shots at a Black Rock Coalition shows at CBGB’s and Wetlands.   

In 1985, a year after Bright Lights became my personal manifesto and author McInerney a literary hero, I fell in love and lived with a woman very much like Jones/Lewis for the next four years. She too was from Detroit and was smart, sarcastic, and sexy, but also overly critical and quite volatile. In 1989, after literally kicking me in the ass with her high-heeled shoes when I turned my back on her during an argument, we broke up. I flew solo for the next 24 months, until I met music publicist Lesley Pitts. A voracious reader, she introduced me to the short fiction of Flannery O’Connor, the essays of Fran Lebowitz, and Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales

Though I considered myself well-read, I’d never heard of Jones until Lesley mentioned her. She had lost her copy of Fish Tales by the time we met, and the book was then out of print. I went on a used bookstore treasure hunt and found it at the Strand. The book’s colorful cover, illustrated by George Corsillo, resembled a trendy clothing store ad for Trash & Vaudeville or Zoot in the East Village Eye. A dreamy pop art portrait showed a light-skinned Black woman floating through a glass of bubbly along with a fish, a pair of pink pumps, and a strand of pearls. The woman looked as though she was being waved into Area or the Michael Todd Room. That evening, I surprised Lesley with the book. “I can’t believe you found this,” she said. I felt like I’d passed a test. After rereading it, Lesley suggested that I check it out. 

* * *

Fish Tales was written, published, and marketed as “literary,” but a creepy, noir darkness floats through the text like a black cloud. During the writing process, Jones looked to friends such as Gayl Jones and Marie Brown for guidance. Decades later, Brown remembered, “I read through various drafts of Fish Tales, and it was a one-of-a-kind story. There are very few originals out here being published, but that’s not always a good thing in publishing, because people act like they don’t know how to market it or get it reviewed. From the beginning of reading Nettie’s work, I was aware that she wasn’t writing in the tradition, but she kept working. She was determined to get published.” 

Brown has been a leading literary agent since 1984. She and Jones first met a few years before she began that career, when Brown was editing the short-lived Black women’s magazine Elan. They lived together briefly in Brown’s uptown Sugar Hill brownstone along with culinary writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. Over the years, many artists and musicians have lived under Brown’s roof. “Marie Brown has nurtured many artists and musicians as an editor-agent-friend among other titles,” Jones said. “She gave me knowledge of that new world of publishing that I was entering. Marie let me stay with her in Harlem when she first moved there. So many famous people passed through. She advised me. She was ‘the other editor.’ I owe Marie big time as do many others.”

‘Nettie was grand, in a huge hat, just like the one Zora Neale Hurston is wearing in a famous photo.’

Brown’s now-grown daughter recalled to her mother that Jones made her put away her dolls because the toy’s faces disturbed her. “Nettie was not part of the New York literary world,” Brown said. “There were a group of women that included Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others who socialized, worked together, and supported one another, but Nettie was an independent. Besides me and Gayl Jones, she had no friendships in that world.” 

Certainly that would explain why Jones hasn’t been anthologized, studied, or talked about as much as the others. While I’m not sure that Nettie Jones’s readership is large enough to be considered a cult, there’s something about her work that touches those of us who have read her. “Nettie didn’t get a lot of reviews and profiles when the books came out, but she became a word-of-mouth writer, the kind of writer that people tell their friends to read,” Brown said.  

* * *

“Some people are born writers, but that’s not me,” Jones told me. While we were on the phone, I looked at her big eyes in a Fern Logan photograph taken many years before our conversation. Her stylish attire reminded me of my mom’s friends during that same era. Jones appeared seductive and smart, but her eyes seemed as though they could stare into your soul. “I’m no Brontë sister or Ralph Ellison,” she said. “I wrote Fish Tales the way I did because I allowed myself to be free and to listen and to take down what I needed. Some writers are afraid of freedom, because they’re concerned with what mama may think. The first agent I had worked with Rosa Guy and Louise Meriwether, but she read three pages of Fish Tales and quit. I guess I was a little rough, but when Gayl got the book to Toni, she warned her about the language.” 

The Detroit section has two chapters that describe the city before and after the 1967 riot that devastated it in ways still being felt today. Jones was living in a lush apartment house where she witnessed the burning city from her 12th-floor window. “It was heartbreaking, but the riot is often used to illustrate when the city began to change. Detroit had begun to change long before that. The truth is much more complex,” she said. Jones received a master’s of education in 1971, and later that year relocated to New York to take graduate courses at the New School for Social Research. She also took classes in copywriting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. 

“Going to school was just an excuse to get to the city,” Jones said. “I wasn’t in love with either of my husbands. The first one I married because of the baby and the second one, we made a deal if I put him through school then it would be my turn. He didn’t mind me going to New York. My daughter refused to come with me on my adventure. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘OK, bye.’ She was 13, so of course I was a disgrace in the eyes of the neighbors. Family life wasn’t a happy place for me.” 

At 30 years old, Jones began life anew in the big city of dreams among the gleaming skyscrapers, wondrous museums, great restaurants, and those artistic feelings that began vibrating through her body once she settled down in a grand apartment on 21 West 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, five flights up with a skylight. 

“Originally, I was staying on 21st Street, but the person I was renting from wasn’t paying, so the marshals came and kicked me out. My friend Jack Arnold Clark took me in as his roommate. He was the queen of queens, but I was in love with him. He was 6’5” and he made me throw away most of my clothes, because he says they were too Detroit,” Jones said. Although New York City was going through its rotten Big Apple phase of high crime, rampant decay, and near bankruptcy, Jones was living the damn near high life. “Jack was a master cook, and I would go to Jefferson Market for our food. Jack didn’t allow cans in the house or anything frozen. We had an interesting life, me and the charming queen.” 

In addition to the “gorgeous” life she was living with Jack. “I was just drinking scotch, but other people were smoking weed and sniffing coke,” she said. “That was when I began living the story that would become Fish Tales. I was living it, but I didn’t realize it at the time.” Her husband Frank came to visit often, but in 1976 the couple divorced, though they remained friends until his dying day. “I wanted a divorce, because I got tired of being an adulteress. He was probably being one too, because our sex life was not good. When you’re a couple, that’s vital.” 

Jones never finished her classes at the New School, and, with her newfound free time, began to write. “Since I was home, Jack suggested I needed a project and somehow I decided that project would be writing,” she said. Jones began writing regularly, but after an argument with Jack, the two friends had a falling out. “He was a psychiatrist, so he should have known that I was crazy. I had started writing a book that I dramatically threw into the flames of the fireplace when I left. Truthfully, I don’t think there was much.” 

After traveling back to Detroit, she met Todd Duncan, a professor at Wayne State University specializing in American literature who soon became her mentor, lover, and the inspiration for brilliant quadriplegic character Brook that Jones created for Fish Tales. In 1980, Duncan introduced Jones to Gayl Jones when the shy, complicated writer was teaching at the University of Michigan, five years after Morrison edited the manuscript that would become Corregidora. In an article Morrison penned for Mademoiselle, she wrote of Gayl’s work, “I shuddered before the awesome power of this young woman.” 

‘Some writers are afraid of freedom, because they’re concerned with what mama may think.’

Jones shared her work with Gayl, and the two began a long friendship that would see them through several dramas in their lives. “When I read Gayl’s work I was inspired, because her books were so different,” Jones said. “Gayl didn’t tell me how to write, but she did advise me.” Known to be shy, Gayl accepted Jones for who she was. “Gayl never had any fear with me. I seem to have a way of getting close to people that others can’t get close too. She advised me to simply write and not throw away any of the pages. When Fish Tales was finished, she gave me a list of editors to contact. I think Toni was third on the list, so I didn’t contact her until I was rejected by the first two.” 

Without an agent at the time, Jones sent Morrison the manuscript in the mail and it was accepted. Another writer would have been enormously thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with the premier Black editor, but Jones wasn’t impressed with their working relationship. “Toni was my editor, but I only met her once, and that was only because my agent, Julian Bach, who I acquired after the book was sold, insisted,” she said. In addition, Jones felt she should’ve been paid more than $3,000 fee she was paid. “That’s $1,500 before publication and $1,500 after. Things were very different back then, and none of us was going to get rich publishing novels.” 

Jones later realized that their relationship could have been better. “I was not what she was used to handling, because I didn’t know she was the queen. Toni was a literary lion and I didn’t act accordingly, but if I knew then what I know now, I’d be, ‘Yes, yes’m, Ms. Morrison.’” We both laughed. While the Jones women remained friends, Gayl hasn’t published a book since 1998. A week after her novel, The Healing, was released, she and her Black militant husband Bob Higgins were involved in a stand-off with police after a decade spent in hiding. Higgins committed suicide while Gayl watched from across the room as she was being held by police. “I had eaten dinner with both of them at that same table,” Jones said. “She hasn’t published anything since, but I know she is still writing, because that’s all she knows how to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was publishing under an alias.”

* * *

The jacket copy for Fish Tales compared the book to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which Jones described as “disgusting.” Though far-fetched, it was a sign that she had strayed into a different landscape than her contemporaries. “I was sick and tired of these books that told the same damn story over and over,” she said. “I kept wondering, when do we move ahead and push our stories forward.” Fish Tales was not protest fiction, and Jones seemed guided by Albert Murray’s influential essays in The Omni-Americans. He thought the fictions of James Baldwin and the Black Arts Movement scribes portrayed “Negro” life as one-dimensional and narrow. In his mean-spirited and funny critique of Claude Brown’s bestselling ghetto classic Manchild in the Promised Land, he wrote, “The background experience of U.S. Negroes is a rich source of many things. But many people insist that it is the only source of frustration and crime, degradation, emasculation, and self-hatred.”

“There’s a real divide between what Nettie Jones and Gayl Jones were writing, compared to what Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were doing,” mystery writer and creator of the character Nanette Hayes, a jazz musician detective, Charlotte Carter said. “In Nettie’s work there is a dreamy quality to it that pulls you in as well as the feeling that there is nothing between you and Lewis’s voice.” While Jones’s writing was inspired by the minimalism of lost generation honcho Ernest Hemingway and the eroticism of D.H. Lawrence, Carter also saw a bit of Norman Mailer in the freaky-deaky prose. “Everything comes down to sex. It’s the thing that gives life to you, destroys you. It’s redemptive, it’s religion, it’s a yardstick to how liberal you are and how hip.” 

A few days later, when I was talking to Jones about the sex in her work, she laughed. “A lot of women writers were prudish,” she said. “Those writers were coming on like nuns. I knew I wasn’t the only one who had a baby at 17, not the only one who drank. They acted like they ain’t never spread their legs or turned their butts up.” 

 In the end, it was liquor that became Jones’ worst enemy.  “I think I would’ve been a lot more successful if I hadn’t been drunk all the time,” Jones said. Having had my own battles with the bottle, spending much of the ’90s “in my cups,” as the old folks used to say, I’m not here to pass judgment. No one aims to become an alcoholic, but with enough practice it can happen to anyone. “I cared for no one other than me and my God when I was intoxicated with Jack Barleycorn,” Jones said over email, referencing Jack London’s alcoholic memoirs. “God was going to love me anyway no matter what I did. Narcissism running rampant is a power for many successful human beings, but I have been sober for years after many years of striving to kick this monkey off my back.” 

In addition, she is being treated for manic depression, which she described as a  a chemical condition exacerbated by “memories of childhood molestation by a school teacher, statutory rape by my first husband and father of my child, rejection by my family, expulsion from school in the last semester of my secondary education, stress of always having to wipe out these head starts to madness by being extraordinary as a woman.”

Back in 1991, after I finished reading Fish Tales, I put it back on the shelf and didn’t think about it for two decades. Even in 2002, when I read Carter’s brilliant stand-alone noir Walking Bones (2002), a book that was influenced by Fish Tales and featured a protagonist named Nettie, I had, like so many others, forgotten. “I first read Fish Tales in the ’80s, and though it left a huge impression, I don’t remember thinking about it consciously when I was writing Walking Bones,” Carter said from her Lower East Side apartment. “Lewis was messed-up, articulate, bohemian, and free, and a part of that great artistic milieu that I was so caught-up in when I was younger. She was a Black woman in a world that most people don’t think of Black women in, and there isn’t much writing about us in that way. She was not the standard Black woman character.” 

The irony of Charlotte Carter’s last line — and a fact that I wasn’t aware of until recently — was that Jones, though Black herself, never set out to write an “African American book,” but instead was attempting to craft a “colorless” novel. “I wanted to present my characters as human beings, their character not determined by their color,” Jones said. In an effort to keep race out of the conversation, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed writer even opted to forgo her author’s photo. “I refused to have a photo of me, because I did not wish to have anyone not buy my book because of my race.” 

It was all for nothing because graphic designer George Corsillo hired a light-skinned woman to pose on the cover, and she became Lewis’s avatar. “I hated that cover and I actually went to Random House and asked it to be changed, but the production director literally begged me not to make this move. The book was in final production, so I gave in, but that picture defeated my desire to not include color on the cover or contents.” Most critics, with the exception of Darryl Pinckney, didn’t pick up on the “racial blurring” of Jones’s characters and, obviously judging the book by its cover, referred to Lewis as Black. 

“One of the remarkable aspects of this novel is that race doesn’t matter,” Pinckney wrote in 1984. “There is no sociology; even with descriptions of reddish hair on legs, curly heads, and broad noses it is hard to tell who has rhythm and who hasn’t.” Though Jones lived through the civil rights era in American politics and the Amiri Baraka–founded Black Arts Movement that included women writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, she refused to carry the banner for Blackness with the same zeal as her soul sistas. 

Jones is well aware of her own Blackness, but she’d prefer not to be referred to as African American. Old-school in that way that my own grandmother was, Jones still uses the words “Negro” and “colored” to describe herself. “Most people don’t say colored anymore. That has become an evil word,” she said. “I don’t use African American or Afro-American, because it’s too political and it’s too limiting. I’m not ashamed of any part of me, I just don’t want to give up the other parts. I’m not ashamed of my dark skin grandmother and I’m connected to all of those nice women in Congress. I’m from Detroit, which means I am of the world.”

After publishing Mischief Makers in 1989, Jones returned to the world of academia. She taught fiction at the University of Michigan and later at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She sometimes included fellow Detroit writer Donald Goines on the reading list. 

“I loved teaching, and the students loved me, because they were free. I didn’t ask them to do stupid things,” she said. Since retiring from academics in 2010, Jones has a had a few major medical setbacks, but “for me the research never ends,” she said. “That’s where we create our stories, our dances, our poetry, our journalism. Everything I look at, it’s like, how can I use that. At this point, I just do it automatically.” Meanwhile, she’s still writing, fighting, and observing the world through her piercing eyes. 

 

* * *

Essayist / short story writer Michael A. Gonzales has written about books for Catapult, Longreads, CrimeReads and The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Root, Brown Sugar, Killens Review, Art Decades, Bronx Biannual, The Darker Mask and Black Pulp. In addition, Gonzales has written about music, visual art and film for The Village Voice, New York, Wax Poetics, HYCIDE, Pitchfork, Newark Bound and Vibe. Upcoming projects includes work in Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre and Gimme the Loot, edited by Gabino Iglesias.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Steven Cohen

 

Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’

Graffiti on a wall in South Central Los Angeles, 1992. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

On March 16, 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins went to a local convenience store in South Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. Owner Soon Ja Du accused the teenage girl of shoplifting, an altercation ensued, and in a split-second captured on video, Du shot Harlins in the back of the head. She died with two dollars in her hand. A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but against their recommendation, the judge sentenced the Korean-born woman to a $500 fine, probation, and community service.

Harlins’ murder, which occurred two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers, was a major contributing factor to the city’s 1992 uprising—LA’s deadliest year—which resulted in 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, and more than 800 million in material losses. By the end of the unrest, known as Saigu among Koreans, rioters had looted, set fire, and damaged more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, based on the murder of Harlins, is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of two southern California families forever connected by violence and tragedy. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the novel is centered on Korean American Grace Park, a naïve and dutiful daughter who lives and works in the Valley with her secret-keeping parents, and Shawn Matthews, an African American ex-con whose sister was murdered by a Korean grocery store owner.

A new shocking crime sends the Parks and Matthews on a collision course to face their shared history against the backdrop of an already tense city on the cusp of more racial violence. Taut and razor-sharp, Your House Will Pay masterfully examines themes of racism, revenge, incarceration, grief, shame, injustice, and social movements. Read more…

Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler

Penguin Press

In the fall of 2011, Peter Hessler arrived in Egypt, with his family — twin toddlers, and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang. The two had met in China, where Hessler first landed as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, details his two years teaching English. Two other books, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, followed. After leaving China in 2007, the family settled in southwestern Colorado, where they are now based. A few years later, they decided to wipe the slate clean and move to Egypt. But just as they planning their move, the Egyptian Arab Spring started, sending the country down the chaotic path it has followed until today.

Hessler’s latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, chronicles both the revolution itself, and the lives of the people they met during their five years in Cairo. It’s a deep look at what is, in some ways, the oldest country in the world, and it bears the hallmarks of Hessler’s work: vivid scenes, elegant narrative arcs, and a long lens that examines the links and gaps between Egypt’s troubled present and its ancient past.

Today, Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his 2007 National Geographic story, “Instant Cities,” and in 2006, Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist. In 2011 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving Egypt, his family returned to Colorado again, before decamping this year for another stint in China, where Hessler plans to teach at Sichuan University, 20 years after he first taught at Fuling Teachers College. Frank Bures spoke to him about the value of language, learning from John McPhee, and what your garbage man can teach you.

***

Frank Bures: You built your career writing about China, but how did you start writing in the first place?

Peter Hessler: My first interest was in 10th grade. I had an English teacher in high school who thought that I had some talent at it, and encouraged me. She was the one who made me think seriously about becoming a writer. That was one of the reasons I ended up at Princeton, because they had a good creative writing program. I was encouraged there by Russell Banks, who was my teacher and a thesis advisor, and also John McPhee.

I originally was interested in fiction. I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication. Later, after I took McPhee’s class, I started doing a little freelancing. In grad school overseas I started shifting towards nonfiction, partly because I couldn’t sell short stories. It was hard to publish them, whereas I could publish my travel pieces and essays and get paid for them, and that was encouraging. But I was still unsure when I joined the Peace Corps at age 27. I’d published a lot of travel pieces, but I’d never held a job in journalism, and the kind of stuff I published wasn’t enough for me to support myself.

I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication.

FB: What kind of travel pieces had you done?

PH: The New York Times used to have these essays. The first one I wrote for them was about taking the Trans-Siberian train. Because after I finished grad school at Oxford I traveled for six months, and I consciously researched stories along the way, thinking that when I got home I would write pieces, and possibly write a travel book. I wrote the train essay, and just sent it to a name on the masthead at the Times, and by some miracle they read it and published it. After that I started doing some stuff for them as a freelancer.

FB: When did you start thinking about books?

PH: When I joined the Peace Corps, I wanted to learn Chinese and become a better writer. But I didn’t think I was going to write a book about that experience. I felt I was too young, and I really was. I didn’t have the maturity to write a book, nor did I really have the material at that point. But I did take a lot of notes. It was my way of processing what was going on. I would write about experiences I had, or encounters with people, things on campus, but just in a diary format. And I tracked a lot of my students’ writing because they were such beautiful writers, and I thought they were fascinating people.

Then with six months to go, we got Internet for the first time, and I got back in touch with people. If it had been any earlier, it probably would’ve been a distraction, but at that point it was good to start thinking about the future.

He said, ‘It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.’

I had written to John McPhee throughout my time there, and he had written back often. But now we were on email, and I remember writing to him because I was thinking about applying for journalism jobs, and applying for an internship at Newsweek in Beijing. John wrote me a long letter, telling me: “You should write a book about Fuling.” Because he’d read these letters. He said, “It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.”

That was a powerful moment, because I hadn’t thought about it. Once I got that email and started thinking, it immediately made sense. When I went back through all my notes in my diaries, I realized, “I’ve really got a lot of stuff here.” But I could also see what I needed: more detailed descriptions of the landscape, and some deeper observation of the community and of the city.

FB: Did you write the book then?

PH: No, I didn’t write the book until I left. I went back to my parents’ home in Missouri, and I decided I would take about half a year. I was 29 years old and I had never held a job. I had college debt, so I felt a lot of pressure. I was applying for journalism jobs at the same time, sending out resumes to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, pretty much anybody who had a China bureau, and I got form rejections across the board.

When I finished the book, I sent a resume to Amazon, because they had sent me a recruiting thing when I was in Fuling. I had no idea what it was. I guess my life could’ve been pretty different. I sent them a resume, but they never wrote back.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else. After a couple weeks of this sort of thinking, I finally sent the book out to agents, and a couple of agents were interested. I went to New York and met with them, and I ended up signing with a young agent named William Clark. He sold the book to HarperCollins, and it happened very quickly. It wouldn’t be considered a big advance, but it was enough to pay off all my college loans, and suddenly I realized, “I can just go back to China on my own. I don’t need a job. I’ll just go and figure it out.” And that’s where Oracle Bones starts, in that I was just showing up, and I had a part-time assistant position at The Wall Street Journal, for $500 a month, and that gave me a base.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else.

It took a while for River Town to come out, because I took a long time editing it. But there was a lot of stuff going on that year and people were starting to get interested in China. So I very quickly had a lot of work. After about a year I got a break with National Geographic and The New Yorker. I was on the ground there for just a little more than a year when I sold my first story to The New Yorker in 2000. Then a week later I sold my second story to them, and we were pretty much off and running.

FB: It was a great time to be writing about China.

PH: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was at the right place in the right time. But it did take some faith, because it was very discouraging earlier, when I was rejected for those jobs and living at my parents’ house. I didn’t grow up with any money, so I couldn’t rely on anything else. And the college debt weighed on me.

FB: Was there anything you learned from John McPhee that influenced the way you write, or think about writing?

PH: There were huge numbers of things that I learned from him. There’s technical stuff. Probably one of the best examples is a “set piece.” He’d teach us that in his course, and show us an example from his writing. It’s something, actually, that a lot of journalists don’t learn, because you only do it in long-form writing, but it makes you think differently about the structure and organization, and that was a really useful lesson to have as a young writer. The example he gave came from his Alaska book, where he’s on his trip through the Alaska back country, and they see a bear. The thing shifts to maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words about bears, and it’s no longer in his experience. It talks about the nature of bears, things they do, and their size. There’s all this, of course beautifully written, but it’s a way of getting background information in an interesting way. It also allows you to step away so the voice doesn’t get stale.

McPhee had a lot of technical lessons, but I think the most important thing was the deeper ways of thinking about writing. One of them, for me, was that you can do fascinating creative writing as a nonfiction writer. I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing. My parents didn’t get The New Yorker, so I didn’t realize there were these other ways of writing nonfiction, and that it could be just as dynamic and fascinating as fiction, and just as artistic.

FB: How did you and Leslie choose Egypt?

PH: There are a couple things. We wanted something different from China. We wanted a different kind of challenge, and something that would give us a new perspective. We wanted to study a language that would be fascinating and rich. I like the idea of a place with a long history, and especially with ancient history because I like archeology. But we also needed it to be a place that would interest The New Yorker. I couldn’t go to Portugal, right? I mean, how many stories about Portugal are you going to write for The New Yorker? I had to be able to support my family.

We thought about India, but I didn’t like the way that there wasn’t one language that unified it, and it seemed like maybe it was too close to China in some sense. So we eventually settled on the Middle East. It was going to be Damascus or Cairo, because those are good places to study Arabic. We were leaning toward Damascus for a while, but once the Arab Spring started it was clear that Cairo was the place. But we’d never been there. We showed up in Cairo with these kids, and neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.


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FB: Having kids myself, I can’t imagine a move like that.

PH: When I look back, it’s totally crazy. Leslie and I, maybe we’re delusional or something, but we’re also pretty calm people. It helps, too, if you’re doing this with somebody else who’s totally on board. It was definitely a hard first year. I mean, I think the whole thing was hard, because it’s hard with little kids to do something like that, and it’s hard to be in the midst of this chaotic political period. It was very intense. But it’s an engaging place. The people are likable, even though Egypt has problems on a level that we had not experienced in China. There’s serious dysfunction in many aspects of Egyptian society. But it was a phenomenal experience, and I was also fortunate in that I did get to know individuals who brought some light to what was going on, and not just in the sense of understanding. They were engaging, positive people that I liked to spend time with. Sayyid, and Manu and Rifaat, our teacher. We loved it.

FB: What’s your feeling about the importance of learning the language of a place where you’re writing about or living?

PH: To me, it was fundamental. I’m not interested in writing in-depth about a place where I’m not at least doing my best to learn the language. In Egypt I didn’t become fluent like I was in Chinese, but I was very conversant, comfortable with somebody like Sayyid. I could spend a lot of time with him and his family and understand what’s going on, and that was really important to me.

FB: With Egyptian Arabic, what did you learn about Egypt that you wouldn’t have learned without that?

PH: There’s the deep religious nature of the language, and the impact of religion on the language itself. It’s fundamental to that language. I think that that’s pretty rare in the world. There aren’t that many cultures where you have the religion so deeply embedded in the language. It’s a huge part of what you’re saying when you’re using these terms all the time.

I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing.

The language also makes you think a lot about the Pharaonic world, and the ways in which it lasted or didn’t last. There are remarkably few Pharaonic words in Egyptian Arabic. It’s quite striking. There are probably more Turkic words than there are Pharaonic words. But it’s also striking that a lot of those Pharaonic words are very foundational, like the vocabulary for agriculture has a lot of Pharaonic stuff in it, and the word for women, the word for water, the word for land, the Nile, the river. These are things that have deep roots, and those survived the adoption of Arabic.

FB: I love how in both The Buried and Oracle Bones, you’re writing about the distant past and the present, and finding connections and divergences. Do you think that was one of the reasons that you were attracted to Egypt?

PH: I definitely liked the idea of this place with an incredibly rich ancient history. I think there are always some people who say, “Well, that’s not really relevant to what’s going on today.” But I don’t believe it disappears. There are too many echoes that you can see. Also, it’s not just whether things stay the same. I’m not saying that everything is static, but more what I’m saying is that the ancient Egyptians were brilliant politicians, and a lot of what they did politically we see echoes of. For example, their use of nostalgia. Even 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they were already writing nostalgically about the past, and the perfect political world of the past. That’s an effective political strategy. It’s what Trump does now. People do this all over the world.

FB: What’s your sense of the difference between how people in China and Egypt relate to that distant past?

PH: It was a huge difference. The Chinese are much more comfortable with it, and there are a couple reasons for this. The main one, of course, is they see their history as an unbroken line. It’s a very powerful thing to have that link. Egypt does not have that. The other huge difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself Pharaoh was somewhere in the second century BC, and from that point until 1952. there was not a single Egyptian leader.

FB: What was the biggest challenge as a writer in Egypt?

PH: It was getting enough language, and being able to do that while the revolution was going on and while I had small children. I couldn’t study all the time the way I had in Fuling. In Egypt I was having to go report on stuff, and I had kids to take care of.

FB: In Oracle Bones you say that in writing narrative nonfiction stories, you’re collecting fragments and organizing them into stories. Some of your stories have arcs that span years. How do you know when a fragment, or something that you’ve collected, is part of that story?

PH: It’s an instinct you develop over time. It took me a while to get there, but by the time I left China I had a pretty good sense of this. When I was in Colorado, for example, and I was reporting on the uranium industry in my corner of the state, and I ran into a town where everybody was telling me to talk to the pharmacist, because he knew everything. That confused me, because why would a pharmacist be somebody who knows a lot? Then I talked to him and realized, well, there’s no medic, there’s no hospital anywhere near here, so he’s basically like a doctor.

I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start.

He also mentioned the story of some loner in town who died and left him half a million dollars, and at that point my instinct kicked in and I thought, “There’s something going on here.” So I left him out of the uranium story, with the idea that I was going to pursue this. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I thought there was something there. You get those instincts over years of writing stories and books. The same thing in Egypt when the garbageman, Sayyid, kept bringing me stuff from the neighborhood and he knww so much about people.

FB: Do you typically start with an idea?

PH: It’s usually either a person or a place. It’s almost never an idea. I don’t start with themes or issues. Partly that’s my instinct, but partly it’s also deliberate because I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start. Maybe you’re fitting them into a larger narrative or idea that isn’t appropriate. So I tend to start either with a place or a person, and then the issues and the themes are secondary. They come in as I get to know the person or the place.

So I get to know Sayyid. Then I start to learn about him. Then that leads me into the informality of Cairo and the self-organization of those communities. Then it also leads me into gender relations, because I start to get to see how him and his wife interact. It leads me to issues of education, because I realize that this incredibly intelligent person is illiterate, and I get to know what his children are doing in school, and educate me in new perspectives. But it all starts with him.

FB: And now you guys are going back to China. Where are you going to be?

PH: We’re going to Chengdu. I’m going to teach for a year at Sichuan University. It’s been 20 years since I taught in Fuling.

FB: Is Chengdu near Fuling?

PH: It’s close. I wanted to teach in Fuling, but I wasn’t allowed for political reasons. I could do it in Chengdu. I’ll also be tracking down my former students and seeing what they’re up to, and revisiting Fuling.

FB: Are you going to write a sequel to River Town?

PH: I suspect some kind of follow-up book. But, I don’t know. I always wait until I’m into it before I really know what form it’s going to take. I do want to build on that experience, and I want to try to write something about how this place has changed and what it feels like on the ground, both for the people involved and for me as an observer. I’m also interested in my former students, who were a remarkable generation, because they were born around the time that Mao died, and they grew up with the changes. I’m curious to know more about their perspective on what they’ve seen and what they’ve lived through, because they’re middle-aged now.

FB: Is your plan to be there for a year?

PH: Right now, I think we’ll be there for five years. I’ll do one year of teaching, and then transition to writing full-time and reporting. Leslie is finishing her Egypt book, and then she’ll transition to writing. We also want our children to learn Chinese.

FB: How did you guys meet?

PH: I was working at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant, and she was a journalist, or a correspondent for them in China. I was the lowest guy on The Journal totem pole, and she had a real job, back in ’99. But we didn’t date then. We were in the same circle of friends, and then in 2003 we started dating.

FB: Can you say what Leslie’s Egypt book is about?

PH: It’s about women factory workers in Egypt. She reported on the factory in Alexandria. She has really good stuff, and she’s partway through it now.

FB: That will sit nicely on the shelf next to Factory Girls.

I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it.

PH: I think the two books will be interesting. My book and her book also will be interesting because we’re looking at Egypt from slightly different angles. There are some cross-themes, and it was fun to have these projects being researched at the same time. It helps, I think, both of us to have all these conversations while we’re doing research.

FB: Do you guys read each other’s work, like Joan Didion and John Dunne?

PH: Pretty late in the game. We don’t do it as we’re working. I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it. Actually, for this last book, she didn’t read it until pretty late in the process because I think she was feeling a lot of pressure for her book and trying to get it going, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to throw it on to her. She needed to focus on her thing, but I think that was a little bit of an unusual time, just part of the whole challenge of doing these projects with young children. We’re both very supportive, and it helps a lot in terms of the reporting, because each of us is learning things that help the other person.

FB: With two writers in the family, how do you balance your life and work?

PH: I guess that develops kind of naturally. It’s all we ever knew together, because both of us were writing from the time we met. The hardest thing about having two writers is probably financial, and lack of stability. Neither of us have a steady paycheck, but we had kids so late, and then both of us had the good fortune to start in China, which was a good place to get established. Though we would never write together. We have no interest in that. We are not a team of writers. It’s an individual sport, like running.

***

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology. He writes about travel, culture, language, science, outdoors, narrative, and belief for publications such as Harper’sAeonLapham’s QuarterlyThe Washington Post MagazineOutside, and the Best American Travel Writing

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera”

Michael Putland / Getty, Photo Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (3,497 words)

 

In 1993, interviewers from the psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope stood on Viv Stanshall’s stoop, wondering if he would answer the doorbell. Stanshall’s friend, who set up the meeting, was just beginning to apologize when she turned and gasped: A frail and obviously drunk Stanshall, according to the article, “staggering down the road clutching a carved stick and a white plastic carrier bag containing a freshly purchased bottle of Mr. Smirnoff’s elixir,” lurched toward the house.

“Vivian, you look awful!” the friend said. “Where’s your shoes?”

Read more…

‘To Be Polite By Ignoring the Obvious’: Jess Row on Unpacking Whiteness in Literature

MirageC/Getty

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,662 words)

Despite the recurring cycle of conversations on topics such as the need for fully-funded MFA programs, the financial challenges of sustaining oneself as a writer, and the lack of diversity in all levels of media, the issue of whiteness in publishing — and the privileges that come with being white in publishing — continues to justify our scrutiny. We are aware that white people hold much of the power in the literary world, but how do we assess this fact critically, understanding that whiteness is not just a factor in the economics of writing, but in the writing itself? Novelist Jess Row investigates this question in his latest book, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. In his own words, “American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress.” 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