Here is Bishop entering a small backcountry store during a stop:
The store had been raided, sacked. Oh, that was its normal state. It was quite large, no color inside or cloud-color perhaps, with holes in the floors, holes in the walls, holes in the roof. A barrel of kerosene stood in a dark stain. There were a coil of blue cotton rope, a few mattock heads, and a bundle of yellow-white handles, fresh cut from hard ipé wood. Lined up on the shelves were many, many bottles of cachaça, all alike: Esperança, Hope, Hope, Hope. There was a counter where you could drink, if you wanted. A bunch of red-striped wicks hung beside a bunch of rusty frying pans. A glass case offered brown toffees leaking through their papers, and old, old, old sweet buns. Some very large ants were making hay there while the sun shone. Our eyes negotiated the advertisements for Orange Crush and Guarana on the cloud-colored walls, and we had seen everything. That was all.
As with the earlier passage, we get a sense of the eye moving deliberately from thing to thing, only here—and perhaps this is an indication of maturity, or greater self-confidence in the presented “I”—discriminations supplant what were formerly approximations. The handles are “yellow-white,” and the toffees are seen “leaking through their papers.” The eye lingers now, engages more with the grain of things. But the enumeration also feels—as it can in Bishop’s numinously charged poetry as well—like a way of holding other aspects, or awarenesses, at bay.
This description also violates many of the standard precepts for lively writing—almost, we feel, deliberately. “It was quite large … ” “A barrel of kerosene stood … ” “There were a coil … ” And on and on. Yet the perceptions themselves—the barrel standing in the stain, the odd invocation of “cloud-color”—flex against the bonds of the rudimentary sentence structure. We finish the paragraph with the feeling that we have been and have seen, even if the impression itself is humble and in some primary way gravity-bound.
A prose style is a metaphysics, and the fact that we do not just now pay much attention to writers’ styles only means that we are letting our relation to things—the things which are the case—get muddled. In Bishop’s work—and this is one of the reasons she is so prized by readers—there is no such confusion. We come away from whatever we read, poetry or prose, with a sense that the world has been seen steadily, indeed with the kind of heightened (or restricted) focus that we feel we may possess in our finest moments. The writing confers an impression of control, of elusive materials caught into place; of specific things known because observed with great care.
But by the same token we rarely feel that the “I” of these pieces ever acts upon the world, or in any way even ruffles the surface of things. This sensibility would never presume; its reticence is Prufrockian. To act, to interfere, to get caught up in any sort of business with other people—this would be almost hubristic. It would presuppose a volitional self, and Bishop’s is not. Recall her famous poem “In the Waiting Room,” wherein she reports her experience—she is almost seven—of realizing “you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth,/ you are one of them.” Reading her prose I often think that it was all she could do to hold that precious awareness intact through her life, that there was scarcely enough surplus to use for living. Bishop’s great achievement was to turn what would be in a less grounded person a serious psychological deficit into the cornerstone of her art. In her work self-effacement is somehow transmuted into what feels like an extraordinary humility before life—not just things and beings, but the underlying—or in-dwelling—force that makes them possible. “I’m just looking,” she seems to be saying, but as we look with her we feel the world recharging itself for us.
*
The final piece in the book, “In the Village”—called a story, but by Bishop’s own admission a scarcely modified work of autobiography—is the narrative of life in a Nova Scotian village as seen through the eyes of a little girl. It is, more particularly, the account of a mother’s return from a stay in an institution—before the collapse that would return her there for good. “Unaccustomed to having her back,” writes Bishop, “the child stood now in the doorway, watching.” The mother is being fitted for a dress; she wants to come out of mourning for her husband. But suddenly the dress seems all wrong and she screams. The daughter is transfixed; in her imagination the scream hangs over that village “forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies.” And if we look, following the risky path of the explanatory conceit, for some way of understanding that limpid, detached, slightly stunned quality in Bishop’s writing—where it comes from—we might linger meditatively on the image of that little girl standing in that doorway, observing as the dressmaker “was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass.”
Anaïs Nin. Photograph by Soichi Sunmi. Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, UCLA.
Anaïs Nin
All the Rest Is Origami
Ana Castillo
—for Monsterrat and for Ronnie
I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD and an avid reader of Anaïs Nin when she finally won the success and fame that she had dreamed of all her life. Born in 1903, Nin had worked in the midst of male writers who had achieved renown long before she did. In her fiction and journals she faithfully wrote her observations and experiences from her feminine, if not feminist, perspective. Nin had loved passionately; in everything she did, she remained devoted to her art and lived to tell all about it.
Far away from the white feminist movement on the West Coast that had discovered an appetite for her diaries, I was living in Chicago with Mexican parents who said, you cannot leave this house until you’re married. You must work and help out in the household. Lofty goals like college, art, writing were useless to my factory-employed mother and father. But I, like many women, simply as a stepping stone to freedom, married—the inimitable actress Maria Felix comes to mind. My young husband was no Hugo Guilar. Although he was nice enough, and, as I look back, sincerely adored me, he was mostly unemployed and unambitious, and I couldn’t get divorced fast enough. In the seventies, living my new independent life free of parents and husband, I was surrounded by mostly male artists, the writers of my own Latino community. I continued to read everything that was published by and about Anaïs Nin. Her conversations with Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller rang true for me in my own search for literary meaning. I must say, however, that mine were never quite as interesting or held as much depth as those of Nin and her male intellectual acquaintances—Antonin Artaud, Gore Vidal, her therapists Otto Rank and René Allendy, to name a few. I was hungry for similar discussion and in her works I felt a little less alone. I was hungry too, like many women, for validation of my right to write. Since there were no established U.S. Latina writers twenty years ago, I chose to read books by women from various cultures and countries who told their stories in a world that hadn’t yet heard them, and had not wanted to hear them. Other women who kept me company by the time I was twenty-four years old—burned out from community organizing, looking for a paying job, disillusioned with my Latina activism—were the wondrous Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston, who warned me that it would take twenty years to be heard, and Toni Morrison, who said that African-Americans, like Mexicans in the United States, believed in ghosts too. I even strained a potent line from The Female Eunuch by which to make a plan for myself. Germaine Greer let me know that the most important thing I had to attain as a woman was happiness. It’s a lot harder to come by than you might think—if you are determined to rock the testosterone-filled boat of the new world order.
But it was Anaïs Nin to whom I kept returning over the years, not because I identified so much with her life. I didn’t. And maybe partly because I didn’t. Like the romance-novel junkie, after I did laundry, tended to the beans on the stove and put the baby down for his nap, I would return to Nin’s writing—whatever was available; I couldn’t get enough of that woman’s fanciful life.
I didn’t even like her experimental fiction
writing style—although I read everything. But through Nin’s lush use of language, she indulged, indulged, indulged her relentless exploration of her inner life. Her external life too, was ardently portrayed, rich with fascinating characters, surroundings, travels—Paris in the thirties, post-World War II New York, Fez, Mexico—and always, her tenacious commitment to writing as art.
Recently, an extensive biography by Deirdre Bair was published that seemed to fill in the blanks for many of us who had wondered about certain details regarding Nin’s life. Who paid, for example, for Nin to have that magical lifestyle she led all her adult life? Who was the father of the stillbirth in her diary account of “birth story”? How did she resolve her issues with her father’s abandonment for which she underwent psychoanalysis for years? To say that Bair was less than sympathetic in her treatment of these questions is an understatement. The paradigm she seemed to fix on with regards to Anaïs Nin, the “major minor writer,” as she refers to Nin in the introduction, was that of woman centered vs. self-centered. But as I see it, although the blanks were filled in, Bair may have made some prejudiced assumptions. As in all stories, as listeners we must keep in mind that it is not only important what is being told to us but what is being left out and why. Certainly Anaïs Nin knew this very well. She rewrote incidents and apparently enraged more than one person portrayed in her diaries. She, of course, omitted a lot. So, too, did her biographer with her determination, I feel, to judge Anaïs Nin’s life. She referred to Nin’s first abortion, for example, as monstrous, when Nin not only did not want to have children, she wasn’t even sure who had gotten her pregnant. In fact, there was a strong possibility that the man involved was not Nin’s husband, maybe not even the cad Henry Miller, and just possibly it might have been her own father, as they were having an affair at the time.
“After you’ve f----- your father, all the rest is origami,” a writer friend of mine told me recently when I asked her about Anaïs Nin. My friend knew Nin during her last decade.
Very soon after the white feminists of her day embraced Anaïs Nin for her woman’s perspective as an artist, she came under suspicion. How could a true feminist, for example, be financially dependent on a man all her life, they queried, not to mention her ongoing emotional dependence on men—including her father. So maybe Anaïs Nin did not go out and get a job—a lie she told her second husband when she got money from the first to contribute to her second household. (Nin, as it turns out, was also a bigamist.)
But half a century ago she believed she could stand her ground intellectually with men. Long before feminists were discovering the joys of the orgasm through the Hite Report and Masters and Johnson, Nin was entrenched in her own personal research. Despite the fact that abortion is legal at the end of the twentieth century in this young country, many women who label themselves feminists find the subject morally troubling. Yet six decades ago Anaïs Nin took control of her body and determined that she would not become a mother, did not have to, not for her husband’s sake and not for society’s sake. She thought of herself as beautiful and sensual and surrounded herself with beauty and sensuality. And though some may judge her now as a simple narcissist, I admire her because unlike so many women—especially those who consider themselves above superficial social consciousness, unfettered by pressures of fashion—she considered herself downright lovely!
Unlike the work of other women writers who taught me how to write, I must say that Nin’s creative writing efforts did not influence me much. But her determination to claim the right to her own body, her soul and mind—at a time when there was no movement to support her—did. Even now, nearly a century after her birth, women—at least those from the Catholic culture she and I share—can’t do that without paying a hefty price.
“The problem with Anaïs,” my friend who knew her said, “is that she lived too long.” The feminist community had found Nin outdated—what a critic today might feel an impulse to call a border-feminist. Someone else might say that perhaps she had been born too soon. Nin herself told a new audience that she had wanted to live the dream. For her, that meant finding true erotic and psychic fulfillment as a woman. Because she chose to document her journey and her quest, other women were also able to believe in such a possibility—a woman like myself—who at forty-three years of age is still pursuing the dream. Ever without guilt.
Gatsby’s Glasses
Siri Hustvedt
I FIRST READ The Great Gatsby when I was sixteen years old, a high school student in Northfield, Minnesota. I read it again when I was twenty-three and living in New York City, and now again at the advanced age of forty-two. I have carried the book’s magic around with me ever since that first reading, and its memory is distinct in my mind because unlike many books that return to me chiefly as a series of images, The Great Gatsby has also left its trace in my ear—as enchanted music, whispering, laughter and as the voice of storytelling itself.
The book begins with the narrator’s memory of something his father told him years before: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” As an adage for life, the quotation is anticlimactic—restrained words I imagine being uttered by a restrained man, perhaps over the top of his newspaper, and yet without this watered-down American version of noblesse oblige there could be no story of Gatsby. The father’s words are the story’s seed, its origin. The man we come to know as Nick Carraway tells us that his father “meant a great deal more” than what the words denote, and I believe him. Hidden in the comment is a way of living and an entire moral world. Its resonance is double: first, we know that the narrator’s words are bound to his father’s words, that he comes from somewhere he can identify and that he has not severed that connection, and second, that these paternal words have shaped him into who he is: a man “inclined to reserve all judgments”—in short, the ideal narrator, a man who doesn’t leap into the action but stays on the sidelines. Nick is not an actor but a voyeur, and in every art, including the art of fiction, there’s always somebody watching.
Taking little more than his father’s advice, the young man goes east. The American story has changed directions: the frontier is flip-flopped from the West to the East, but the urge to leave home and seek your fortune is as old as fairy tales. Fitzgerald’s Middle West was not the same as mine. I did not come from the stolid advantages of Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I remember the large, beautiful houses on that street as beacons of wealth and privilege to which I had no access. I grew up in the open spaces of southern Minnesota in one of the “lost Swede towns” Fitzgerald mentions late in the book, only we were mostly Norwegians, not Swedes. It was to my hometown that Fitzgerald sent Jay Gatsby to college for two weeks. The unnamed town is Northfield. The named college is St. Olaf, where my father taught for thirty years and where I was a student for four. Gatsby’s ghost may have haunted me; even in high school, I knew that promise lay in the East, particularly in New York City, and ever so vaguely, I began to dream of what I had never seen and where I had never been.
Nick Carraway hops a train and finds himself in the bond trade and living next door to Gatsby’s huge mansion: a house built of wishes. All wishes, however wrong-headed, however great or noble or ephemeral, must have an object, and that object is usually more ideal than real. The nature of Gatsby’s wish is fully articulated in the book. Gatsby is great because his dream is all-consuming and every bit of his strength and breath are in it. He is a creature of will, and the beauty of his will overreaches the tawdriness of his real object: Daisy. But the secret of the story is that there is no great Gatsby without Nick Carraway, only Gatsby, because Nick is the only one who is able to see the greatness of his wish.
Reading the book again, I was struck by the strangeness of a single sentence that seemed to glitter like a golden key to the story. It occurs when a dazed Gatsby finds his wish granted, and he is showing Daisy around the West Egg mansion. Nick is, as always, the third wheel. “I tried
to go then,” he says, “but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.” The question is: in what way are two people more satisfactorily alone when somebody else is present? What on earth does this mean? I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element—the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves. It is as if Nick’s eyes satisfy this third element, as if he embodies for the lovers the essential self-consciousness of love—a third-person account. When I read Charles Scribner III’s introduction to my paperback edition, I was not at all surprised that an early draft of the novel was written by Fitzgerald in the third person. Lowering the narration into the voice of a character inside the story allows the writer to inhabit more fully the interstices of narrative itself.
The role of the onlooker is given quasi-supernatural status in the form of the bespectacled eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, and it is to this faded billboard of an oculist in Queens that the grieving Wilson addresses his prayer: “You can’t hide from God.” When his friend tells him, “That’s an advertisement,” Wilson doesn’t answer. He needs an omniscient third person, and he finds it in Eckleburg, with his huge staring eyes. Nick is not present for this conversation, and yet the quality of the narration does not change. It is as if he is present. Nick’s stand-in is Michaelis, a neighbor of Wilson’s, who has presumably reported the scene to the narrator. Together Michaelis and Nick Carraway form a complementary narration that finds transcendence in the image of Eckleburg’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes, an element very like the third-person narrator of nineteenth-century novels, who looks down on his creatures and their follies.
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