Philip Graham on Roxane Gay

There Is No Crying Unless You’re Alone in the Bathroom: Roxane Gay on Competitive Scrabble

People slowly filed in with large round cases. One woman’s case was wheeled, like a suitcase. They set their cases on tables and pulled out custom turntable Scrabble boards, timers, tile bags, and racks. They got out their scoring sheets and personal tokens. The games started and the room hushed. —Roxane Gay, from “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically.”

I am terrible at word games of all sorts, always have been. Years ago, before I refused to participate any longer, if I played Scrabble with three other people, I came in fourth; if playing with two, I came in third; though if I played Scrabble one-on-one, at least I came in second. Once, when my wife Alma was in labor with our first child, to pass away the time between her contractions we played Scrabble with our birthing coach and, well, you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?
  
Crushed, utterly crushed in Scrabble by a woman suffering through the pains of giving birth.
  
I am also terrible at Boggle. I have a clear memory of playing with Alma and our daughter Hannah, then ten years old, and failing miserably to come up with a decent list of words. Last again.

No one is perfect, everyone has a weakness, but I am a writer. Language is supposed to be my well-equipped kitchen, words my fully stocked refrigerator. Yet when it comes to word games all I can do is boil water. So there came a time when I refused to continue pushing across a board the tiles of my humiliation. As for the Daily Jumble: Out of my Life! I write books, I told myself, I don’t need no stinkin’ games, and I had no ambitions to write a story, essay, memoir or novel that included the words slojd, immix, or qindarka.

But still, I have often wondered and worried, shouldn’t I be more word-curious? Would I be a better writer if I memorized spelling lists, massaged more whatever lobe of the brain cradles all those obscure words? As for humiliation, it can, on occasion, be good for the soul . . .
  
So a couple of years ago, when I learned during a Ninth Letter editorial meeting that the writer Roxane Gay competes in Scrabble tournaments, a deep vein of curiosity and dread was tapped, and I said “Hey, let’s contact her and ask if she’d be interested in writing an essay about that for us.”
  
Turns out she was, and soon her essay “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically” arrived, complete with a batch of lively footnotes, and we accepted it as close to instantly as one can get in literary magazine editing.

I had never known that Scrabble players could be competitive with a capital C, probably because I had never bothered to consider any such possibility. So for me, learning of the existence of the North American Scrabble Players Association and the Official Tournament and Club Word List was an anthropological experience, a discovery of a pocket community’s culture and local common sense, guided by a deeply embedded and eloquent participant observer. And now I know, just for starters, that there is “a proper etiquette” for picking tiles from the bag, and a particular “procedure” if too many tiles have been drawn.

New in an unfamiliar town with a new job, far from family and her boyfriend, Roxane Gay had begun descending slowly into lonely crazy until she was invited to join a local Scrabble club (there are over 200 in the U.S., she tells us elsewhere). A first-rate writer who is also an actual word game enthusiast, Gay turns this lifeline into a healthy obsession, and before long she’s competing in her first tournament. Call it newbie’s luck, but after Gay’s first few games garner her two losses and only one win, she somehow finds “the delusion of confidence,” declares to a friend that she will win the tournament, and then she does! Reading of her triumph I could imagine cheerleaders standing on the sidelines, swinging pom-pom circles for her (though I’m fairly certain that the bylaws of the North American Scrabble Players Association wouldn’t permit this). This early success, unfortunately, was not a reliable indicator of future competitive Scrabble glory.

Gay peoples her essay with snap portraits of the quirks of fellow players, particularly those she dubs her “nemeses.” Here we find bad sportsmanship, gloating, false modesty, emotional witchcraft and a kind of Scrabble facial vogueing. To attend a Scrabble tournament is to be surrounded by crowds of people who do not want to lose. “Scrabble players love to talk, at length, with repetition, about their vocabulary triumphs,” Gay writes, and she herself is not immune to this habit. We hear of her snagging 90 points for TRIPLEX, she gives us a list of a string of her winning scores (“389-312; 424-244; 352-312; 396-366”), but she’s also not hesitant about detailing her losses and, sometimes, her simply dumb tactical decisions. “Time and again, lower ranked players taught me painful lessons,” she admits, and a good part of the pleasure reading of Gay’s adventures comes from her engagingly self-deprecating persona.

Roxane Gay’s beautifully written essay, dead serious and yet often head-shakingly funny, is a tale not of triumph but of hard-fought parity at best, since over the long haul the odds in competitive Scrabble seem more akin to blackjack or roulette. Those little arenas of board space with their branching designs of tiles serve as a metaphor of fate, which is why they can provoke so many competitors to batty behavior, but they also provide a training ground for coping with life’s larger setbacks or how best to accept the occasional clear sky.

Spurred by Gay’s joy of the fray, I finally gave in to my wife’s repeated suggestions that I download Words with Friends, which is a kind of baby Scrabble. Whether on an iPhone or iPad, the electronic board is for my eyes only, and when the app silently announces that my desperate five-letter flail of JOVID is “not an acceptable word,” no penalty is involved. I can take as long as I want to puzzle out a move, and games can often stretch over several days. I still get whipped fairly regularly. But I’ve learned to shrug off defeat, nurse my wounds, and plot revenge.

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Roxane Gay’s essay, “To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily” was published in Ninth Letter, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2012-13). Her essay has been included in the list of “Notable Essays of 2012” by Robert Atwan and Cheryl Strayed, the editors of the Best American Essays 2013 anthology.

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Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Braided Worlds, the second volume of a memoir of Africa co-authored with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. His short story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design and novel How to Read an Unwritten Language will be reprinted in Dzanc Books’ contemporary fiction e-book reprint series in late 2013.

Graham’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is a co-founder and the current editor-at-large of the literary/arts magazine Ninth Letter. He also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing. His short essays on the craft of writing can be found at www.philipgraham.net

Cara Blue Adams: The Personality of a Translator

Have you seen the Drunk Uncle skit on Saturday Night Live? A Weekend Update visitor played—or perhaps truer to say inhabited—by Bobby Moynihan, Drunk Uncle is a cringe-inducing wonder. New Englandy Fair Isle sweater worn under a windbreaker, lowball glass in hand, hair askew, he steers an innocent reference to sports into racist territory—“Are you ready for some baseball? And eventually some hockey?” “I think it’s football.” “Someone’s gotta watch the white sports”—and moves seamlessly between mangled cultural references and sexual innuendo: “Is that Amazon Prime pumpkin-spiced? You know who’s got a couple of spicy pumpkins? That Sophia Viagra.” Drunk Uncle follows this up by singing “Blurred Lines” and commenting, “The only blurred line I know is our border with Me-hee-co” before beginning to weep.

“All you’re describing is the personality of a translator,” a chic Spanish poet says to the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station when he comments on her preternatural grace as she moves between worlds.

Drunk Uncle has the personality of a translator.

The wonders of Drunk Uncle remained unknown to me until I read “Say Uncle” by Mike Scalise on The Paris Review website. During my tenure as nonfiction editor at The Southern Review I did not have the chance to publish Mike, a major regret. I bring him up because his work is the kind of work I thrill to: funny, sharp, complex, critical but with a genuine warmth. His essays look outward and inward. They introduce me to the delights of things like Drunk Uncle and they introduce me to new parts of myself.

Mike wades into this messy, ridiculous world we live in—and into the messy, ridiculous business of being stuck within the confines of our human selves—and brings back the news. He moves easily between object and idea, humor and depth, immediacy and reflection. He has the personality of a translator, by which I don’t mean slurring and weeping into his bourbon, though if he did I would love his work no less. What I mean is “translator” in the sense suggested by Ben Lerner’s graceful Spanish poet, who in that scene, which takes place at a high-class party in a swanky house outside Madrid, sheds her clothes to reveal a bathing suit and dives gracefully (how else?) into a pool. A person who moves easily between modes.

A good example, which I hope will send you off to read the essay:

What makes Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle so brilliant isn’t just the inappropriateness or the one-liners (though they certainly help). It’s his ability to tap into something inherently lost within the poor guy. Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle, like so many real life uncles, is a man without a time, a symphony of confused identity, raging against his displacement from both parental and youth culture, a failed way station between the two.

My own drunk uncle, a slick LA-type, was married to my cool aunt (for a while, anyway). He inhaled whiskey, collected wind-up toys, and convinced me at age five that the best way to get rid of my loose front tooth was to let him punch the thing out of my mouth. I’m not saying I want to be that kind of uncle to Crosby. Not even close. What I’m saying is that the netherland of the uncle can yield useful things, such as a kid’s first real opportunity to flat-out dislike a grown-up. . . . This doesn’t apply to all uncles, of course. I’ve found in my adult years that a majority of mine are surprising, fascinating guys. But at even five years old, I was shocked at how unconflicted I felt as I watched my bloody front tooth hit my drunk uncle’s linoleum, thinking something not unlike Wow, this guy: grade-A dickface. Yet even if I didn’t realize it then, he proved himself in that moment a helpful primer; a durable example of the type of person I later knew to steer clear of.

See what I mean? That’s what I want as a reader: the news. The real news. The news I can’t get anywhere else. The news as brought to us by Drunk Uncle, singing Robin Thicke and crying into his bourbon.

In 2008 I joined the editorial staff of The Southern Review and spent close to five years there, first as managing editor, then as fiction and nonfiction editor, and ultimately as co-editor of the magazine. While publishing Mike Scalise will remain a dream, in those years I did have the pleasure of editing many other stellar essayists, including Bonnie Jo Campbell, Ted Sanders, Caitlin Horrocks, Abe Streep, Albert Goldbarth, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Their work is diverse, but to a person they, too, have the personality of a translator. The essays I chose at The Southern Review move easily between modes. 

The novel is capacious—of course, of course—but so is the essay. In a way it ranges more freely. I mean, sure, you have Moby Dick and War and Peace, but how many modern novels contain taxonomies and treatises?

But the essay: well, now we’re talking.

In the “The Playroom,” Ted Sanders maps his childhood playroom in a very local geographical memoir. Megan Snyder-Camp’s “The Skelleton of this Monster on the Sand” draws from Lewis and Clark’s journals, interspersing quotations and lines of her own poetry. Aisha Sabbatini Sloan’s “The Strong Man and the Clown” ranges widely in subject: Fellini, the Venice Biennale, whales, Pinocchio, the experience of growing up in an interracial family, intergenerational estrangement. I read her essay and want to go watch Fellini; I read the essay and begin to ask myself difficult questions:

In Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Giulietta Masina’s character dreams that a man in a red robe is whispering to her. He asks her to help him drag a rope from the ocean. She looks up to see a boat full of people with strange markings. A black man with a beard stands in profile, holding a sword, and he looks back at the beach toward her. In another dream, a door opens to a room full of people frozen in time. There is a black man, dreadlocked hair held by sticks in what looks to be a Japanese bun, a white woman with white face paint, a short white man in his underwear with his mouth open, women in veils. I wonder how blackness lived in my grandfather’s subconscious. If one kind of blackness ever held the place of another.

Another great and capacious essay than I chose for The Southern Review is Albert Goldbarth’s “Annals of Absence,” later selected as Poetry Daily’s prose feature. The essay moves from Chauvet Cave’s thirty-two-thousand-year-old paintings to that grimly nutty German existentialist Werner Herzog to Wordsworth to the death of Albert’s colleague, Peggy Rabb. Take in the leap here, the translation from the hand visible to our eye to a hand as seen by physics: 

Absence. . . . I look at my hand, this hand that’s writing with a Bic pen in an everyday dime-store notebook, and was scraped along its outer edge when it tried to brace against a fall the other day (it looks like gray-tinged bacon), and was tended to by my wife, with soap and water, antiseptic cream, a Band-Aid, and a touch of spousal sympathy from her hand, just as light as a moth-wing's brush. However, I’ve read enough in lay texts on twentieth-century physics to know between the atoms, and in the atoms, this hand is mainly empty air: a tiny spritz of elements held in an overwhelming void.”

The hand reoccurs though the essay: Albert’s hand, Peggy’s hand waving goodbye, “palm out, her fingers extended, something like a star a child would draw,” the handprints in the cave. The final line encompasses them all: “The hand is here because it isn’t.”

These essayists make translation look easy. That’s one thing I like about them. Another: they also know where translation—of objects, of personal experience—fails. They send us back to the world to look again. They send us back to ourselves to look again. They translate with the knowledge that no translation is perfect.

Unless, of course, it’s done by Drunk Uncle.

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Cara Blue Adams’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, The Missouri Review, Epoch, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. In addition, her nonfiction appears in The Little Magazine in America: A Contemporary Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Ploughshares. She has been named one of Narrative’s “15 Below 30” and awarded The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize and has received fellowship and scholarship support from the VCCA, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Until this year, she co-edited The Southern Review. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Coastal Carolina University.

“A little Key may open a Box, where lies a bunch of Keyes”: Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America, 1643

In 1636, Roger Williams fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he was wanted for heretically preaching the separation of church and state and condemning the King’s charters, which allowed colonists to take land from the natives without paying for it. Under cover of a blizzard, he escaped capture and disappeared into the woods south of Salem, in modern day Rhode Island, where the local Indians gave him food and shelter. He would later write

                                                      Gods providence is rich to his,

                                                      Let none distrustfull be;

                                                   In wildernesse, in great distresse,

                                                      These Ravens have fed me. (17)

In gratitude to God, he named the city he founded there Providence, on land for which he paid the Narragansett chiefs in full. In gratitude to the Narragansett Indians, perhaps, or at least as a result of his time with them, he learned to speak their language, observed how they lived and died, and published his findings, not wanting to “lightly lose what [he] had so dearely bought in some few yeares hardship” (A3).

 

The result, A Key into the Language of America, is the first recorded attempt at an English-to-Native-American language phrasebook. Though more practically useful for the English colonists than the illiterate natives, Williams’s Key also stands as a salvo in his lifelong struggle to keep colonists’ dealings with natives above the belt; if the English settlers could talk to the Indians, at least, maybe they’d be less likely to swindle and slaughter them. “For want of this, I know what grosse mis-takes my selfe and others have run into” (A3), Williams writes, alluding to, even as he glosses over, the often grisly costs of miscommunication and distrust between the colonists and the Indians. What effect access to these translated phrases had or was intended to have on native-settler relations is an interesting question, but this isn’t Phrasebook Daily, and Williams purposely wrote something that wasn’t just “a Dictionary or Grammer,” judging those formats to be “not so accommodate to the Benefit of all, as I hope this Forme is” (A8). 

The form Key does take attests to his intent to hammer into his readers the humanity of these so-called barbarians (even as he calls them barbarians himself), beyond giving both parties a common language. By way of anecdote, ethnographic observation, moralizing doggerel, theology, tutorial, list, comparison, and translation, Williams systematically cobbles together a demonstration of a way of living, of approaching the world’s pleasures and challenges, of cohabitation. In A Key into the Language of America, language and the world it’s wielded on through reference and performance are intercut so as to make the Narragansett way of speaking inseparable from what it is to be a Narragansett. Williams calls this slippery form “Implicite Dialogue,” which he distinguishes from dialogue, a form which he uses elsewhere, but passes over here “for brevities sake” (A8). I’d call it an essay. “A little Key may open a Box, where lies a bunch of Keyes” (A3): Williams lays on the “key” metaphor pretty thick, but as a description of his structure—nested, shot-through with little insights—and as an articulation of one of the ways an essay can proceed, I think it fits perfectly.

The way Williams structures this book is enchanting and remarkable and central to his life’s work of shifting colonial perceptions of Indians, so that will be my chief focus here. A Key into the Language of America consists of 32 chapters, each of which has a handy title, from “Of Salutation” to “Of their Death and Buriall,” which he intends to be used like any phrasebook: “Whatever your occasion bee either of Travell, Discourse, Trading &c. turne to the Table which will direct you to the Proper Chapter” (A8). But where things get interesting is in the shape each chapter takes, at once formulaic and free-wheeling. First we get a straightforward list of words and phrases in Narragansett and their English translations, relevant to the subject at hand:

Of Salutation.
Askuttaaquompsin Hou doe you?

Asnpaumpmauntam I am very well. (2)

 

The translated words range from the obvious to the obscure, the pointless to the pointedly specific—sometimes so much so that a single phrase suggests a whole story, like the best micro flash fiction: “Mauchinaash nowepiteass. My teeth are naught” (15). “Cummachiteouwunash kuskeesuckquash. You spoile your Face” (192). At times, it’s the loaded juxtaposition of phrases on the list that suggests a narrative: “Nkeke Commeinsh. I will give you an Otter. Coanombuqusse. You have deceived me. ... Misquesu Kunukkeke. Your Otter is reddish” (162). When Williams feels the need to elaborate on any of the translations, wants to relate a relevant anecdote, or sees the opportunity to squeeze a sermon in, he inserts a prose block labeled “Observation” right between items on the phrase list:

Tuckowekin Where dwell you? 

Matnowetuomeno I have no house. 

Observation.

As commonly a single person hath no house, so after the death of a Husband or Wife, they often break up house, and live here and there a while with Friends, to allay their excessive Sorrowes.

Tocketussaweitch What is your name? 

Now annehick nowesuonck I have forgot my name.

Which is common amongst some of them, this being one Incivilitie amongst the more rusticall sort, not to call each other by their names but Keen, You, Ewo He, &c. (4)

Carson Vaughan: On Balance

I can still see his words scribbled in red ink across the margins, the chicken-scratch hieroglyphics of my favorite professor. Stop editorializing, he wrote. We’d spent the past six months researching and reporting on the traditional roles of women in Native American culture, and now, for the first time, our professor—a Pulitzer finalist in journalism—was delivering his verdict on our work. As he talked, I quickly scanned the room, pleased to see my draft wasn’t the only one bleeding, but still unable to quell the waves of dry heat pounding my temples and washing down my neck. In journalism school, that word—editorializing—coupled nicely with words like murder and treason.

I knew my professor was right. I worked hard to expunge any shred of editorial voice from later drafts, and the result was a story much more fitting for our objective: not to rebuke the evils perpetrated against Native peoples or to publicize my own beliefs, but to objectively report on the issues facing contemporary Native women. I graduated college believing in the power of a good story objectively told, a story crafted around its subjects, not its writer. I still do.

But at the same time, I craved the voices I read in my favorite novels, the manic energy of the evangelist on campus, a diversity of language and especially of structure that I hadn’t found even in my favorite feature articles. So I applied to MFA programs in creative nonfiction, and later, after enrolling at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, joined the staff of Ecotone, our award-winning literary magazine.

As nonfiction editor, I search for work that adroitly balances objective reporting and subjective discovery, essays and stories that show an equal respect for the internal and the external. I look for writers who aren’t afraid to probe the world around them while simultaneously mining the world within; who are eager to physically hunt for the story, but also know when to bring it home, to employ their own reasoning and their own bias and their own interiority to connect on a more human level.

In describing their purpose, most literary journals tend to eschew language that might be perceived as exclusionary; ultimately, most of us are looking to publish the best work, regardless of form or genre. Ecotone is no different. Our primary goal is to publish quality work, the type of work that makes us—as readers and writers—reevaluate the way we interpret and interact with our surroundings.

But Ecotone is distinct in that David Gessner, author most recently of The Tarball Chronicles and My Green Manifesto, founded the magazine with a focus on place and our relationship to it. Indeed, Ecotone’s motto is “Reimagining Place,” and inherent to that idea – and the definition of “ecotone” as “a transition zone between two communities” – is an emphasis on the world beyond the self. That emphasis has carried through the magazine’s eight years of publication and through two changes in editorship. As Ander Monson wrote in his Ecotone essay, “Facing The Monolith,” “I sees world through eye. And what we see and say about the world says a lot about ourselves.”

I often find that writers who submit to Ecotone forget this. In my two years as nonfiction editor, I’ve read hundreds of stories and essays that fall squarely on one side of this embrace. Because the magazine’s title implies an environmental theme, the majority of the submissions we receive deal in some way with the natural world, but too many forget that describing nature alone is not enough; topic does not negate the need for a deeper theme. A story about the Chinese elm (Ulmus parvifolia) must connect to something greater than the Chinese elm. Similarly, those who write of the internal landscape often forget to look up, to find the universal theme in their personal story.

One essay that exemplifies this balance is Jill Sisson Quinn’s most recent Ecotone story, “The Myth of Home,” from issue 15 of the magazine. Here, Sisson Quinn uses Lake Michigan as a bridge to dismantle our ecological bias, and in turn what it means to be at home in any one setting. In describing her surroundings—the ring-billed gulls, the hint of salt and decay in the air, the “sun-bleached cladophora, algae woven by waves into one giant page,” and of course the sheer size of the lake and the fact that one cannot scan it shore to shore—she soon recognizes her inability to meet the lake on its own terms:

I wish to be indigenous to every place I visit, to see it as earth entire. How nice it would be to shed the compulsion to compare one landscape to another, to analyze, evaluate. To simply hear what the land says. To no longer have to choose, or love or hate, to let down my guard and feel the power of the sea in this Great Lake.

Sisson Quinn’s focus on the external organically ushers in a focus on the internal, and in the process she avoids both navel-gazing and the didacticism of pure fact.

Paul Crenshaw’s essay, “Girl On The Third Floor,” from Ecotone’s Abnormal issue (14), strikes a much different note, but like “The Myth of Home,” it balances the I with the eye (to appropriate Monson’s words) and also with the imagination. As a child, Crenshaw lived with his family in a rented house on the grounds of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Returning to the facility twenty years later, Crenshaw grows fascinated with the story of a young girl said to haunt the upper floors of the hospital. In vivid prose, the author blends the history of the sanatorium with his return to the estate. Using the details he’s uncovered, he imagines the solitary life of the young girl:

It would have started with a cough, a dry rattle that shook her shoulders and made her parents exchange worried looks, until the day she began to cough blood. They lived on a dusty road in the middle of soy fields in the middle of the state in the middle of the country and one day a long black car pulled up in front of the house amid a cloud of dust that settled on the long rows of crops. A nurse got out.

Crenshaw delivers a fascinating meditation on history and childhood, “the notion that we are all trapped by … random forces beyond our control, forever looking back with the sad silly sense that if we could just understand the tragic world we survived as children we could somehow be better adults.”

To me, these two essays represent the range of Ecotone nonfiction, and the quality of work the magazine aims to publish. When I turn on the lamp in my study and dive into a stack of fresh submissions, I still hear the voice of that professor, still feel his words staring back at me. I ask myself if the author has let the subject breathe, if he or she has written the piece with an editorial hand, and if so, whether the story justifies it. I ask myself if the author’s presence informs and complements the subject, and I ask myself if that subject reaches beyond itself.

When the answer is yes, I read it again.

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Carson Vaughan is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he teaches and serves as nonfiction editor of Ecotone. His work appears or is forthcoming in Salon, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion, Truthout, Bluestem, and other publications.

Mirror, not a Makeover: Oscar Wilde's Scornful Letter

In 1997, James W. Pennebaker, professor of psychology, asked his test subjects to “write [their] very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of [their] life.”  Encouraged by the positive results, he then suggested a writing program in which participants write for 15-20 minutes between three and five times.  Oscar Wilde, writing a century earlier, had already discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing, though his 55,000-word manuscript, hand-written over three months and later named Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, slightly exceeded Pennebaker’s recommendation.  Ostensibly a letter to Alfred Douglas, the man with whom Wilde was convicted of having ‘improper’ relations, the manuscript vacillates between addressing the reader and abandoning him altogether, between paternal magnanimity and lover’s scorn, between boastful arrogance and humble resignation.  In this regard, the letter reads as a memoir in the traditional sense.  If we excavate memoir’s distinguished etymology, past the French mémoire, past the Greek memeros, past the Latin memoria, we hit bottom at proto-Indo European’s monosyllabic mon -- to think or to worry.  As opposed to the sanitized retelling of the past that defines memoir today, the genre used to mean a re-experiencing, ‘worrying a scab.’  In the original sense, the memoir author searched for meaning, stumbling and bumbling along his path to understanding.  Seen through this lens, Wilde’s manuscript is less a letter and more a struggle to come to terms with the most traumatic experience of his life.

The choice to write a letter is peculiar because the threateningly public nature of correspondence was all too apparent to Wilde.  Before his arrest, blackmailers had obtained Wilde’s letters but failed to extract money from him.  During Wilde’s trial, the prosecution relied heavily on two letters written from Wilde to Douglas as evidence of the former’s ‘gross indecency.’  And the epistolary fallout didn’t end in prison, as Wilde learned that Douglas planned to write an article about Wilde with selections from his letters; Wilde was irate: “But that you should seriously propose to publish selections from the balance [of my letters] was almost incredible to me.”  Based on this track record of overexposure, Wilde had no reason to believe that this correspondence would remain private.  His decision to write a letter, therefore, makes more sense if we think of his intentions as introspective, not epistolary.  

The text's dramatic shifts in tone reveal an unsure narrator still working things out. At times, he’s congenial, offering almost paternal advice.  He opens the letter by acknowledging that he will say “much that will wound your vanity to the quick,” but he implores Douglas to accept the criticisms for his own benefit.  After deriding Douglas’ vacuous personality and intellectual failures, Wilde writes, “I am not saying this in bitterness at all, but simply as a fact of companionship.”  Although Wilde constantly emphasizes his magnanimity, the cracks begin to show.  Throughout the letter, Wilde’s mood shifts from the indicative aimed at Douglas to the imperative aimed inward:  “And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you.  I must do so.  I don’t write this letter to put bitterness in your heart, but to pluck it out of mine.”  The line “I must do so” reveals a writer still struggling for closure, a scorned lover who remembers his ex being bad, but maybe not that bad.  And in periodic bursts, Wilde’s acridity is hardly even veiled: “But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.”  These tonal inconsistencies belie Wilde’s claims that he’s moved on.  Moreover, the letter’s scrupulous style also reveals an author worrying his scab.  

Wilde’s meticulous -- borderline obsessive -- attention to detail further splinters his confident veneer.  Although historians argue over the conditions imposed on Wilde’s composition, many agree that the prison warden allowed him to write only a few pages a day, and that he couldn’t refer to previous pages.  Although Wilde had no notes to consult, no receipts to reference, he lists every minutiae of the ways that Douglas wronged him.  The price of a particularly lavish hotel stay, the itinerary of a quarrel five years past, the transcript of a damning letter: these details clung to Wilde’s memory and leaked into his manuscript.  By the end of the letter, Wilde is cataloguing the lavish “Savoy dinners” he bought Douglas: the “luscious ortolans wrapped in their crinkled Sicilian vine-leaves,” the “amber-scented Champagne--Dagonet, 1880, [that] I think, was your favorite wine.”   This obsession with the past, especially the trivial details therein, demonstrate that, as hard as Wilde may try to retell his story, he is still re-experiencing it.

Wilde concludes his letter with cautious optimism.  A dozen pages before the end, he describes his religious revelation and the profound wisdom that results from misery.  All references to Douglas, whether pronominal or tangential, disappear, and when the recipient returns to the text, it is for Wilde to lecture him on the mutability of the past: “If people tell you that [the past] is irrevocable, do not believe them. . . I have got to make myself look on [the past] with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. . . It is only to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character.”  Wilde admits the ‘uncertain moods’ of his letter, but the previous pages seem to indicate that Wilde’s come to terms with Douglas and the harm he’s caused.  So what are we to think that, after 55,000 words of condemnation and renunciation, Wilde ultimately reconciled with Douglas?  That Douglas, the man who seemed so incorrigible, so vacuous and vain, proved himself doubly so when he publicly repudiated Wilde a decade after the playwright’s death?  Unfortunately, this tragic outcome leaps from the pages of Wilde’s manuscript.  In his constant vacillations and painstaking details, Wilde shows us that writing is a mirror, not a makeover.  However therapeutic the craft may be, it’s powerless to change certain realities, no matter how eloquently we may try.  

Color Theory for The Essayist

“In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes,” wrote Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his younger brother Theo, on September 9th, 1888. Theo was in Paris, and Vincent, in Arles, where he has been making good use of the light of Provence since February, painting a masterpiece a day at the height of his love affair with color. This was his second letter in two days about the night café. He continued, “Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens.” Van Gogh has included a watercolor sketch of his painting, which Theo did not need in order to see the night café in reality or on the canvas or as a sentiment after reading the two letters.

The letters of September 8^th and 9^th form an essay in which Van Gogh explores, through the night café, the process of painting and the relationship between color and psychology, as his endeavor had always been to paint pictures that moved people because they “contained something straight from [his] own feelings.” His unremitting yearning to connect even with the lowliest of souls gives the essay direction, and the need to find salvation both for his fellow humans and for himself gives it hope.

“I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green,” he has written in the first letter, establishing emotion in contrasting colors from the very beginning. “Everywhere it’s a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.”

In Aix-en-Provence, not quite an hour east of Arles, I learned about contrasting colors. After a couple weeks of figure drawing at the Atelier Marchutz, Alan gave his traditional color theory talk, sitting on the long wooden bench with a large palette balanced on his knee. On it, he had squeezed each of the eight colors we were allowed to use at the studio, which included white, but excluded black. Alan started with the cadmium red, ultramarine blue, and lemon yellow, and explained to us that mixing two primary colors, say yellow and blue, would result in a secondary color, green, which would be the opposite of the one primary we did not use, red. The primary color and its contrast made a complementary couple, and if we were to mix equal parts of the two, we would end up with a dark grey.

The temptation was to use this grey in shadows as we painted, but if we did, and I had, John, who was co-teaching the class, would materialize behind us, and, very gently, tell us to look harder. The more I looked, the more I noticed the complimentary colors abounding in the shadows.

Van Gogh has written, “The white clothes of the owner, watching over things from a corner in this furnace, become lemon yellow, pale luminous green.” With this sentence the letters start to take shape as a personal essay, where the narrator is not only describing his surroundings but also reflecting on them. Van Gogh is speaking directly to his brother, but he also, always, has an ongoing conversation with himself. The owner’s clothes do not change color in reality, but they do on Van Gogh’s canvas, as he heard the unspoken dialogue between the owner and the customers. The once-white-now-green clothes set off the other colors at the café, the pinks and blood-reds. Van Gogh painted the owner standing next to the billiard table, surrounded with the regulars slumped at the tables as if they were extensions of the chairs they sat on. The lack of ownership in the lives of the customers, the hopeless fact that they have nowhere else they’d rather be, the heavy metaphor of their homelessness, became visible in Van Gogh’s painting. By establishing a contrasting relationship in color, he was able to convey what he really saw.

A few paragraphs later he wrote, “It’s a colour, then, that isn’t locally true from the realist point of view of tromple l’eoil, but a colour suggesting some emotions, an ardent temperament.” As he considered, in writing, the act of translating life into art without forswearing truth, Van Gogh was a narrator who was in full command not only of his brush but also of his philosophy.

Art historians have suggested that the colors in the Night Café shout at each other like drunks, a fitting simile. Just like the drunks need one another even if it is only to pick a fight, the contrasting colors need each other for their effect to find meaning. Over the years, Van Gogh has intently observed nature and knew that there was an inherent balance beneath all contrasts, that it meant hope and salvation, that it meant love, it meant homecoming.

It is not surprising, then, that in his letters in which he talks about painting an abstract homelessness, Van Gogh also talks about furnishing his own place, turning it into An Artist’s House, where “everything from the chair to the painting [has] character,” in other words, creating a space where he can belong and can have company. The meaning of homelessness can only be grasped fully when the idea of homecoming stands next to it, and even though it always does, we cannot see it, because our sight is crippled with our worries. One has to paint homelessness to find home. And you do not have to be Vincent van Gogh to do that. When I painted regularly, I was surprised again and again that I always ran out of yellow paint first. There was more light in life than I could see with my intellectually impaired eyes.

The company Van Gogh expected in Arles was Paul Gaugin, a fellow misfit. In his second letter, he wrote to Theo that he bought twelve chairs, a mirror, and two beds, one in walnut that would be Gaugin’s, and one in deal that he would paint for himself. He wrote, “From the start, I wanted to arrange the house not just for myself but in such a way as to be able to put somebody up.” Van Gogh, a lonely genius who understood the homelessness of the night café people, if not better, more eloquently then they themselves did, was going to do for himself in real life what he did for the café regulars in his painting.

I have often turned to art to understand writing better, and Van Gogh, with his hundreds of paintings, was always there to instruct me on color, on the infinite variations of gold in wheat fields, on the contrasts that spoke quietly of the meaning that I, as a product of the 21^st century urban life, had given up on. I had started reading Van Gogh’s letters in order to get to know him better, but ended up having a deeper understanding of my own psyche. As he wrote about color theory with a decisive casualness, I gained the courage to go deeper in my writing. It is as much in his paintings as in his letters that Vincent van Gogh taught me to trust the complexities of contrasting emotions, that even if hope was not readily present, balance was to be found, that all I had to do was to follow the creative urge to its limits, because the yellow light was complemented and made complete only with its purple shadow.


(All quotations are taken from Vincent van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (Vol. 1-6) Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker; available online at http://vangoghletters.org/vg/) 

Nazlı İnal is an MFA student at the University of Iowa. She blogs sporadically at The Ways of Black Ink.