by Chris Kraus
Love,
Chris
“The Wicked Witch of the East”
Chris reached Tennessee and Eastern Standard Time on December 20. She needed to stop driving and stayed two nights in Sevierville. She went hiking through wild mountain laurels in the national park and bought an antique bed for 50 dollars. On the morning of the 22nd she reached Sylvère in Paris. Peaceful and contented, she pictured them returning to Sevierville together for a vacation but Sylvère didn’t understand. “We never have any fun together,” she sighed into the phone. Sylvère replied gruffly: “Oh. Fun. Is that what it’s supposed to be about?”
Chris wrote Dick two letters from Sevierville.
“Dear Dick,” she wrote, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…”
She’d begun to realize something, though she didn’t think much about it at the time.
Frackville, Pennsylvania
December 22, 1994: 10:30 p.m.
Central Motel
Dear Dick,
All day and into this evening I’ve been feeling lonely, panicky, afraid. Tonight I didn’t see the moon at all until about 8:30 but suddenly, driving north on 81, THERE IT WAS, deep & huge like it’d just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I’m wondering if you feel as I do—this incredible urge TO BE HEARD. Who do you talk to?
On the road today I thought a little bit about the possibility of creating great dramatic scenes out of material that’s diaristic, vérité. Remembering Ken Kobland’s video Landscape/Desire—all those motels, everything flattened to a point where you don’t expect a story and so just settle in for the ride. But there has to be a point, to give some point to this shifting landscape of flapping laundry, motel bathroom tiles. Perhaps the aftermath of something? But aftermath rarely is that way. You never sense the “aftermath” because always, something else starts up along the way.
To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera. Oh well. I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick. Signals through the flames. Not waving but drowning—
Chris
December 23 was the brightest clearest winter day on the road across the Poconos into upstate New York. Dark red barns against the snow and winter birds, Cooperstown and Binghamton, colonial houses with front porches, kids with sleds. Her heart soared. It was the image of American childhood, not hers of course, but the childhood she’d watched as a child on TV.
Four thousand miles away Sylvère Lotringer sits reminiscing about the Holocaust with his mother on rue de Trevise. She serves him gefilte fish, kasha, sauteed vegetables and rugelach in the tiny dining room. There’s something comical about a 56-year-old man being waited on like a child by his 85-year-old mother, but Sylvère doesn’t see it this way. He’s started taping their conversations because details of the War remain so hazy. The Paris roundup following the German Occupation, the escape, false papers, letters coming back from all the relatives in Poland stamped “Deportee.”
“Deportee,” “Deportee,” she intones, her voice like steel, rage keeping her so vibrantly alive. But for himself, Sylvère feels only numbness. Was he there at all? He was just a child. Yet all these years he’s been unable to think about the War without tears springing to his eyes.
And now he’s 56 years old, and soon he’ll need another plastic hip. He’ll be 63 before his next sabbatical. The young Parisians in the street belong to a bright impenetrable world.
Chris arrived to an empty house in Thurman, the Southern Adirondack town she and Sylvère discovered when they were looking for an “affordable estate” seven years ago. They’d come upon it one November driving down from a Bataille Boy’s Festival in Montreal that co-starred Sylvère and John Giorno. Leaving Montreal they started screaming about which bridge to take, and hadn’t spoken since. Chris’ own gig at the Festival had been furtively arranged, a Bataille Boy’s favor to Sylvère, but when they arrived her name was not on the program. Liza Martin took her clothes off to an enthusiastic prime-time crowd; they put Chris on at 2 a.m. to read to 20 drunken hecklers. Still, Sylvère didn’t understand why she was unconsolable. Hadn’t both of them been paid? On the Northway near Elizabethtown a pair of falcons flew across the road: a fragile link between themselves and Liza Martin’s g-string and The Falconer’s Tale of medieval France. They stopped to walk, and Sylvère was eager to share something, so he shared her enthusiasm for the Adirondacks and two days later they bought a ten room farmhouse in the Town of Thurman just west of Warrensburg, New York.
EXHIBIT K: MESSAGES FROM THE COUNTRY
Thurman, New York
December 23, 1994
Friday, 11:30 p.m.
Dear Dick,
I got here before dark in time to see Hickory Hill and the two humpbacked mountains west of Warrensburg come into view.
Warrensburg looked as timelessly rundown as ever—Potter’s Diner, Stuart’s Store, LeCount Real Estate lined up along Route 9… that total absence of New England charm that we find so appealing. I drove 12 miles along the river, past Thurman Station to the house to find Tad, a friend who stays with us there. But he wasn’t in, so I went down to the bar in Stony Creek to find him.
The O’Malley’s trashed the house before leaving, as I expected. The entire Town of Thurman looked just as bad. The new zoning gives everyone the freedom to do anything. Now there’s an ugly little homemade subdivision right next door. No one’s crazy enough to waste money gentrifying the Southern Adirondacks. It’s a diorama of A Hundred Years of Rural Poverty, each generation leaving relics of its failed attempts to make a living from this land. Tad and I had drinks and then came back to unload the truck. He’s been living here since the O’Malley’s left.
But I wanted to tell you how exhilarating it felt to step out of the truck and feel the cold dark air around Stony Creek’s four corners. There’s just one streetlight so you can see every single star. Five hundred people 15 miles away in all directions from anything. Unlike California, upstate New York doesn’t lend itself to spiritual retreats or communes. People like Tad who moved here 20 years ago found out the only way they could make it through eight months of winter was by turning into locals themselves.
But that was earlier. My hands are dry and dirty and I’m tired. So Dick, I guess we’ll pick this up later.
xxxxo,
Chris
Thurman, New York
December 24, 1994
Saturday, 10:30 p.m.
Dear Dick,
Right now I’m sitting up against some pillows on the floor of the front-north bedroom looking up at the bed I bought in Tennessee—this stupendously beautiful thing I’ve been working on tonight, massaging with rags dipped in walnut oil, then shining. It’s made of poplar, “the pauper’s hardwood,” and Tad says you can tell it’s old because the curves were made without electric tools. There was a lot of pleasure in this, rubbing in the oil and feeling with my hands how it was made. I’ve always wanted something like it.
Tonight I said to Tad we’re starting a Shaker commune here: no sex and we work without ceasing. I’ve been enjoying the comfortableness of the time here with him very much. Tonight I felt tremendous admiration for Tad, his brave cheerfulness. It’s Christmas Eve and here we are alone, he much more so than me: no tree no families no plans. And Tad is such a sentimentalist. Last year his ex-wife ran away with their three children to Australia. Now he’s downstairs finishing a woodwork project, not feeling sorry for himself at all.
I realize I haven’t told you anything about this place—will I be able to make you understand? It’s so different here from California. At the hardware store this morning Earl Rounds asked me where I was living. I said, across the road from Baker’s. Oh, Earl said, the old Gideon place.
No matter who else comes and goes this house will always be “the old Gideon place” to the locals. The Gideons were an older couple from Ohio who bought the house when it was the Great Dartmo
uth Tract, a farmhouse/dude ranch on 125 acres. This was in the 1970s and people must’ve still taken “family vacations” though of course the place was closed eight months a year. One night in January Mrs. Gideon ran screaming, naked across High Street and pounded on Vern Baker’s door for several freezing minutes ’til he woke up and let her in. Exposure. Two days later the Gideons packed up and drove away never to be seen again. Did they go back to Ohio?
Last New Year’s Eve a New Jersey oil company executive walked off into the woods at Harrisburg wearing nothing but a cashmere cardigan, slacks and loafers. He died quickly of exposure.
Down the road from Baker’s there’s Chuck and Brenda. I loved Brenda, she was my Hick Correlative—a manic depressive chain talker who threw her energy into buying up distressed slum houses. Chuck, an otherwise unemployable alcoholic, renovated them. She owned about 15 of them, even got a HUD grant to build apartments in Minerva, but everything collapsed when she refinanced them. She and Chuck began a 1500 foot addition to their house to accommodate her four children. But it’s five years later and the two kids by her first marriage have long since moved out, back to Warrensburg with their father, because they couldn’t stand Chuck and Brenda’s screaming. Now she’s working as a chambermaid and selling Amway products. All that’s left of Brenda’s empire is a pink Jacuzzi with brass faucets gleaming in an unheated shell of plywood nailed to 2x4’s. If you live here long enough everything becomes a story.
Sylvère and I bought this house from a young couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d inherited it from his parents, Long Islanders who bought it as a hunting camp. No one here remembers them and I doubt Sylvère and I will leave much imprint either.
Dick, I’ve never been much of a journal writer, but it’s been so easy to write to you. All I want is that you should know me, or know a little about what I’m thinking, seeing. “And the moon of my heart is shining forth,” a Japanese courtesan named Lady Nijo wrote at the end of her confessions. I’ve never thought writing could be such a direct communication but you’re a perfect listener. My silent partner, listening so long as I stay on track and tell you what is really on my mind. I don’t need any encouragement, approval or response as long as you are listening.
Tonight I read a strange and creepy book about Elaine and Willem de Kooning. Really it’s a portrait of a period that believed in the utter worthlessness of women—“art tarts” and a few “girl artists” all orbiting around the big Dicks. Put it together with Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A Secret History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America and it’s impossible to understand how we got from there to here. Stranger than the fall of the Gang of Four after the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I’ll close for now,
Love,
Chris
For Christmas, Tad gave Chris a diary: a blank book with Edward Hopper’s picture of a tough young woman in a straw hat and flimsy dress leaning up against a pillar on the cover. Looking for trouble?
Chris walked along Mud Street Christmas morning past Josh Baker’s trailer wondering if she could describe this place to Dick as well as David Rattray wrote about East Hampton. Could Dick even understand her feelings about Thurman? It was different from his Wild West adventure because she’d lived here, taught school, knew half the town and could never float above the surface of it.
That night she was invited to spend Christmas with her friend Shawna’s family in New Jersey. She drove down alone, experiencing every blurry alteration in the landscape with a chill. That night she sat up late in the living room writing her first diary entry. Impossible to write alone. The diary begins: Dear Dick.
Somewhere on the trip across America she’d made a promise (to herself? to Dick?) to write him every day whether she felt like it or not. In the vast scheme of human effort, this wasn’t much to do. (As a teenager she’d gotten through rough visits to the dentist by thinking about the bravery of China’s poor and lower middle peasants.)
William, Shawna’s dad had just come back from Guatemala with a Quaker group. After Christmas dinner the family gathered round to hear highlights of the torture testimonies he’d recorded. These tapes got her thinking. The testimonies, though they recounted incredible atrocity, were uniformly clear and undigressive—as if each speaker were somehow part of a larger person. Was it the unifying force of narrative? Was it because all the speakers belonged to the same rural Indian community? Chris was not a torture victim, not a peasant. She was an American artist, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was her specificity. By writing Dick she was offering her life as Case Study.
Shawna’s husband Jack was such an asshole. William was recounting his brief meeting with the American activist Jennifer Harbury, who’d gone on a hunger strike and chained herself to the steps of the American embassy in Guatemala City. Shawna and Chris were awestruck. “Excuse me, Bill,” Jack oozed. “Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Jennifer a Harvard educated lawyer?” He was speaking in the same seductive gravelly voice, reeking of sincerity, that he used on frightened actresses. “I mean, she comes from bucks. And don’t you think if Jennifer really cared about her husband she would’ve found a quarter million to throw at El Capitano? Isn’t that how it works down there? If she wanted him released she wouldn’t’ve made this public scene…” Jack Berman obviously was an expert on what constitutes a Virtuous Woman. Someone who keeps her mouth shut and respects the rules of “privacy.” Jack’s five ex-wives were all paragons of virtue. Bill was stumped and Chris, for once, was virtuous because she didn’t want to ruin Christmas.
December 26, 1994
On Monday Chris drives to JFK to meet Sylvère’s plane from Paris. Their plan is to go from JFK to their other (rented) house in East Hampton, deal with a basement flooding problem, pick up some books Sylvère needs for the semester and then drive back to Thurman where they’ll spend the rest of Christmas Break. The plane’s due in at 7:30 but they don’t leave the airport ’til much later because Chris arrives 10 minutes late, Sylvère wanders off to find her and they circle around the terminal looking for each other for two hours. They fight about this all the way to Riverhead. Exhausted around midnight they settle into the Greenport Waterfront Inn motel (off season rates). For the first time since leaving California Chris fails to write to Dick. She and Sylvère still seem 4,000 miles apart; the distance drains her. But finally when Sylvère takes off his clothes they’re back on common ground: he’s wearing a homemade moneybelt stuffed with hundred dollar bills that his mother, a retired furrier, sewed on the eve of his departure. By June they hoped to pay down their most expensive mortgage. They count out the money on the bed—25 fresh one hundreds—they’re thrilled! They’d only been expecting 20.
And then they made love twice, Chris told Dick the next morning when she finally wrote her letter. Sylvère wanted to collaborate on details but Chris wanted to tell Dick about other stuff, about her visits with her girlfriends Ann and Shawna.
“Dick,” she wrote after sending Sylvère out for coffee, “this house business is so absorbing I wonder when I’m ever going to get back to the tedium and humiliation of the movie. I guess I will. Would it be enough to write to you? Yes, I don’t know, maybe—”
Maybe she told Sylvère how estranged she felt or maybe he sensed it. Because the next day, December 28, against his better judgment, Sylvère found a way of inserting himself back into the story.
EXHIBIT L: A VISIT TO SYLVÈRE AND DICK’S MUTUAL FRIENDS BRUCE AND BETSEY
Bruce & Betsey’s Guest Room
Mount Tremper, New York
Wednesday, December 28, 1994: 12 a.m.
Dear Dick,
Well the house was a disaster and I was too tired to write to you after 12 hours siphoning floodwater out of the cellar, then packing-shopping-driving. We’d meant to drive straight through to Thurman but we started talking about you in the car and Sylvère had this idea that maybe we could stop and visit your friends Bruce and Betsey in Mt. Tremper. I m
ean, they’re sort of his friends too (though if they find out about these letters, they won’t be). It seemed so outrageous and farfetched, but when Sylvère called Bruce from a pay phone he said, “Of course! You’ll spend the night!”
Next Morning:
It’s 7:45, Sylvère’s gone to get some coffee and I’m writing here in bed under a pile of wooly blankets. In fact it’s beautiful: a maple tree, a frozen river, woods and winter chickadees seen through warpy glass French windows. Twenty years ago the place would’ve been an ideal setting for group acid trips.
Sylvère tried so hard last night to bring you into a final gasping conversation. The visit up ’til then had been so bourgeois and impersonal…shared platitudes about country houses, academic life, the advantages and disadvantages of commuting. Just as we were heading up to bed Sylvère had the nerve to pop the question: What did Bruce and Betsey think of you? Betsey remembered something smart you’d said: I don’t believe in the evil of banality but I believe in the banality of evil. What’s Dick got to do with Hannah Arendt? I wondered, while Betsey and Sylvère speculated on the banality you’ve embraced since moving to California. Sylvère gave the usual rap about America’s mythic hold on Europeans—why doesn’t he extend himself to you? He sounds so glib. “All my life,” you said, “I’ve thought about moving to the desert”; and “The nihilism beneath things here is terrifying.” Anyway Dick I like you so much better than these people. Bruce asks questions but never listens to the answers. Betsey blathers on to fill the void. She looks a little like the model Rachel Hunter: thin and busty, flat ass and masses of great hair, she’s read everything Bruce’s read but he has the career. Do you find these people charming Dick? Bruce looks even older than Sylvère, the two of them remind me of the kind of aging rock & roller/supermodel couple you see around East Hampton—kind of dumb and self-absorbed. I don’t know why I dislike them so much, Dick. But I do. I guess I’m disappointed? After all, Sylvère and I came here on a mission, and that mission was to be close to you.
