Marcel Proust. Hulton Archive/Stringer.

One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic—I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon. I considered writing about Moby-Dick, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I’m saving Moby-Dick for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves—a long sea voyage, my deathbed. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven’t read Proust suggests you’ve read everything else. I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking—it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust.

Over the next couple of nights I read the “Overture” chapter. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust,” having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. When friends asked what I was reading, I said, “I’m reading Proust, actually,” acknowledging the improbability. “Wow,” said my friend Kathleen, who knows me well. “Do you think you’ll finish it?” “I highly doubt it,” I said. It was more readable than I’d expected, but it wasn’t exactly light reading. That first paragraph was deceptive, in part by virtue of being a paragraph. Later I read that Proust hadn’t wanted In Search of Lost Time to have paragraphs at all. He wanted it to appear as one volume, with no sections, chapters, or even margins. It’s as though he wanted it to be unreadable, more a gesture than a text.

That Friday night, my husband and I stayed in to read, but I was tired and didn’t feel up for Proust. Instead I read My Name Is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, which is the kind of book you can tear through in a couple of hours, and I did, only afterward realizing that thematically, it is not unlike Swann’s Way. Lucy Barton recalls a time when she was very sick and had to stay in the hospital for over two months. Her mother, who she hasn’t seen in years, comes to visit and stays in her room, sitting at the foot of Lucy’s bed and rarely sleeping, only dozing in her chair. Their conversations are often disturbing—Lucy grew up in poverty, with an abusive father, and she is not sure how much her mother knows, remembers, or has willfully forgotten. Their talks stir up the sediment of their grim past, but they are also often joyful: “I was so happy. Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!”

The overture to Swann’s Way revolves around a memory or series of memories—the narrator’s difficulty with going to sleep without the benediction of a kiss from his mother—so overwhelming they seem to encompass the whole of his childhood. These memories, amalgamated in a single scene, come back to him each time he falls asleep:

For a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background … the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so painful to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the slender cone of this irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against the dark background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the décor one sees prescribed on the title-page of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing; as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.

One night, when the family has been entertaining M. Swann—on such occasions our narrator was routinely sent to bed without his kiss—the boy decides he simply cannot go without it, and contrives to summon his mother by a ruse. He sends a note via Françoise, the cook. The ruse fails. He knows he has already angered his parents—they consider the ritual a silly indulgence and do not wish to coddle his delicate nerves—but having gone this far, he is committed to self-destruction: “I had formed a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma, had made up my mind to kiss her at all costs … the calm which succeeded my anguish filled me with an extraordinary exhilaration, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger.”

He waits in the hall for his mother to come up to bed, his heart throbbing “with terror and joy.” She is shocked and tries to send him back to bed before his father sees him, but in an unexpected turn of events, an amoral whim, his father rules in the boy’s favor, sending her in to stay with the child all night: “Go along with him then … you can see quite well that the child is unhappy. After all, we aren’t gaolers.” Alone at last with her he dissolves into sobs. The cook asks, “But, Madame, what is young master crying for?” “Why, Françoise, he doesn’t know himself: it’s his nerves.” His mother cries a little, too, and it seems to be a mutual admission, a giving up: they cannot scare the child out of his fear; he will be delicate forever. He knows this event is “a rare and artificial exception,” it can never happen again: “To-morrow night my anguish would return and Mamma would not stay by my side.” So the night, and its memory, which cannot be separated, are impossibly precious. In retrospect, “the present” is just a memory in real time.

“We aren’t gaolers,” Proust’s father (if we take the narrator to be a stand-in for Proust) had said, but the child did feel like his bedroom was a cell, a place for time to be borne. In the winter of 1940, the Polish artist and writer Józef Czapski was in a Soviet prison camp, and he was thinking about Proust. He was among a small group of officers and soldiers who survived the war; thousands of others were executed. In Czapski’s words—he writes it twice—those others “disappeared without a trace.” To occupy themselves, to keep their intellects sharp, to give “proof that we were still capable of thinking and reacting to matters of the mind,” Czapski and his comrades in the camp delivered a series of lectures to one another. “Each of us spoke about what we remembered best,” be it architectural history or mountain climbing. For Czapski, who had studied painting in France and been friendly with some of Proust’s old friends, that subject was In Search of Lost Time. As the painter and translator Eric Karpeles writes in his introduction to Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, “A prisoner’s constant state of vigilance was surprisingly conducive to the reclamation of memories.” It came back to Czapski there, in the freezing ruins of a bombed convent, the way Combray came back to “Proust” when he was dozing off or when he tasted the madeleine dipped in linden tea. He delivered the talks in French because he’d read the novel in French—they say you should study for a test at the same time of day you’ll be taking the test, should suck a peppermint during both, so the taste brings the knowledge back. “What Czapski remembered best was the quintessential book of remembering,” Karpeles writes.

In preparation for his lecture, Czapski made a series of elaborate diagrams, like crib notes in tiny, neat print, drawn over with lines and circles in different shades of ink. Several are reproduced in Lost Time, and these too are translated, meticulously re-created in color by Karpeles. On one spread of the insert, we see Czapski’s notes on the right, partially in Polish, partially in French. In the middle of the page is a yellow oval with lines around it, a crude sun. Inside, in all caps, underlined in red: “A MORT INDIFFERENTE.” In Karpeles’s version on the left, the same yellow sun, the same thick red line: “INDIFFERENT DEATH.” Some pale script to the lower right of Czapski’s sun circle is almost unintelligible to me; in the translation, it looks like this:

x PRECIOUS WOUND

x A BIT MIRED IN

THE FLESH

These strange visual poems, “a hybrid of writing and drawing” as Karpeles describes them, were meant to serve as an aide-mémoire. The cheat sheets were all Czapski had because, of course, he could not check his quotes, could not fact-check any of his notes. This makes the errors more touching. Karpeles notes a couple: Czapski replaces the word madeleine, the most iconic detail of the novel and one of the most iconic in all of modern literature, with the word brioche. He calls an unnamed character Jeanne. “He has not misremembered her name,” Karpeles writes, “he has simply provided her with one, which Proust had failed to do.” I found a mistake, too. Czapski speaks of finding Proust to be “almost Pascalian,” then refers to a night in Blaise Pascal’s life “that will always remain known as Pascal’s mystery,”

a night yielding an intense vision of a super-terrestrial world which caused him forever after, until his death, to wear around his neck a small scrap of paper on which was inscribed these few words: “Tears, tears of joy.”

I was reminded of Percy Shelley’s corpse washing ashore with a volume of Keats in his breast pocket. Wanting to know more about this story, I googled the phrase “Pascal’s mystery” and found nothing. Had Czapski confused Pascal’s experience with the paschal mystery, or le mystère pascal—no relation? (It’s from the Greek pascha, as in Easter, meaning “passing over.”) It seems likely; he’d also gotten the inscription wrong. It was not just a few words but a longer prayer or poem, a transcription of his vision, that Pascal wrote out on a piece of parchment and sewed into the lining of his coat. Here’s the passage in question:

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I’ve seen it rendered differently; sometimes “Fire” is underlined, sometimes it’s “Fire!” But always, the “tears” line is “Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy”—the word joy is repeated, not tears. Earlier, in his own footnote to the lecture, Czapski notes that he is quoting Goethe from memory, “perhaps distorting his text.” He then quotes (or misquotes?) the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov: “There’s nothing easier than to quote a text precisely, you just have to check the books. It’s far more difficult to assimilate a quotation to the point where it becomes yours and becomes part of you.” “Pascal’s mystery,” those “tears, tears of joy” around his neck, were not Pascal’s but Czapski’s, a semi-invention, a collaborative memory.

In a brief introduction to the lecture, written in 1944, Czapski speaks of “the joy” of that time in the prison camp, the “rose-colored light” of those hours spent giving and listening to lectures, “where a world we had feared lost to us forever was revived.” Others in the camps were having similar, peculiarly happy experiences, somehow between or inside their sufferings. The Polish writer Aleksander Wat, while in Lubyanka, lucked into a Russian translation of Swann’s Way with a Marxist critical introduction. Reading Proust in Lubyanka, Wat writes in his memoir My Century, was “one of the greatest experiences of my life … from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.” Czapski had only dabbled in Proust until bedridden with illness: “I only have typhoid fever to thank for rendering me so helpless over a whole summer that I was able to read his work in its entirety.” I feel a small, perverse twinge of envy—not for the fever or torture or persecution, obviously, but for the life-altering encounter with a book that can happen in a season of despair.

I am always struck by depictions of happiness in wartime, in the darkest conditions—in Chernobyl, in concentration camps. In Family Lexicon, a memoir of life under fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, Natalia Ginzburg writes: “Lola used to remember with great longing the time she spent in prison. ‘When I was in jail,’ she’d often say. She would recount how in jail she finally felt tremendously at ease, finally at home and at peace with herself.” She considered it the “noblest time of her life.” Ginzburg’s father, during bombings, “wouldn’t go down into the shelters … Under the roar and whistle of planes, he ran hugging the walls with his head down, happy to be in danger because danger was something he loved.” When his father returns from a stint in prison, he seems “happy” to have been there. The people in her life treasure their worst experiences; the worst is the best. It’s a form of resistance, to refuse to have pleasure taken away from you. But I think, too, there’s something fundamentally life-affirming about proximity to death. We grow nostalgic for our pain, once it’s safely in the past, because pain’s intensity makes regular life look banal.

Part of Czapski’s lecture concerns Proust’s self-actualization as a writer. In this section he intentionally conflates Proust and the “hero” of the novel, which is probably what we’d now call autofiction, a novelization of the author’s real life. On his way to a reception at the Hotel de Guermantes, Proust has “the sudden conviction of a book existing within him, with all its details, only waiting to be realized.” He enters “a state of feverish clarity.” As Czapski recounts it,

He observes the assembled group of friends from his earlier life, already deformed by age, growing older, bloated or withering away, and then sees young people there emerging among them, a new generation who seem to harbor so poignantly the same hopes his old or dear friends once held. All this he sees with new eyes, lucidly, detached, and from a distance; finally, he knows what he is meant to do with his life.

The force of the realization is such that “death has become a matter of indifference to him.” Czapski uses the phrase once more, at the end of the lecture, this time clearly in reference to Proust, the author, the living (or dying) man. He spent his last years mostly in bed, finishing and revising the novel of his life. Czapski writes: “It’s not possible that he did not understand, given the state of his health, that the enormous and feverish effort required to keep on with his work would precipitate his end. But he had made up his mind, he would not take care of himself; death had become truly a matter of indifference to him.”

“INDIFFERENT DEATH,” as the diagram said. Around that yellow sun, there are echoing paradoxical phrases: “GRANDEUR + MISERY.” “PRECIOUS WOUND.” “DECADENCE OF FORMS OF JOY.” “BLESSED SUFFERING.” “HIS TRIUMPH          HIS DEATH.” A question, encircled: “DEAD FOR GOOD?” And under “HIS TRIUMPH”: “THEY WILL LIVE.” Along with his comrades, Czapski found meaning and beauty in the prison camp (“the hours spent with memories of Proust, Delacroix, Degas seemed to me the happiest of hours”), and they survived. Czapski lived to the age of ninety-six. But he had assimilated Proust’s indifference to death, which is not the same as an indifference to living. It is, rather, an apprehension of existence so luminous that the threat of death recedes into dim corners.

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of The Word Pretty (Black Ocean).

Vintage advertisement from 1972

Last fall, at a party, my husband and I and two friends decided to start a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never did. None of us had been English majors, so we’d missed a lot. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of “stupid classics.” As we went, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid”—we did not mean lacking in intelligence, or bad. For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid.

We were wrong on that last count. The first book we chose to read was Fahrenheit 451. We’d all read some Ray Bradbury as kids, but not this one. A couple weeks later, when my friend Mike texted to say he had almost finished it, I texted back “No spoilers.” He responded with a semispoiler: “It’s … good for this book club.” I opened it up and read the first page:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.

I’m not always against laying it on thick, but I knew from the first sentence that I wasn’t going to like this. After thirty or forty pages, I texted Mike: “This book is so dumb it should be burned.” In the end, all four of us hated it. You might think the book’s central message (censorship is bad) is inherently noble, but nope: Bradbury wrote it in response to critics who had complained that his work was racist, sexist, xenophobic, et cetera. That motivation is present in the text, but just in case you missed it, Bradbury spelled it out in a coda to the book he wrote in 1979:

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

In Bradbury’s view of the universe, white men write good and important books, while “the minorities” and “women’s libbers” try to censor them. Except for one manic pixie dream girl who shakes Montag out of his complacency and is swiftly killed off (I missed her when she was gone), all the women in Fahrenheit 451 are zombie harpies. Montag eventually joins a band of men who have memorized the great books, the only way to save them from burning: “We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here.” They are the heroes protecting the Western canon from being destroyed by cultural criticism. To be very clear, I don’t think we should burn or censor books, even ones I find morally repugnant. But my reasons are different from Bradbury’s (this, again, from the 1979 coda): “For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.” And it’s not just the bad politics; it’s a sloppy, silly book. I commented to the group that it felt like a NaNoWriMo novel that had never been revised, and it basically was—Bradbury wrote the first draft as a short story in nine days, then expanded the story to novel length in another nine. We don’t have a fireplace, but after the book club met, we threw our cheap paperback copy in the trash.

For our next pick, the members of the SCBC all agreed we wanted something we knew would be good. We went with Frankenstein, which John had read before, but not in twenty years or so, so it seemed like fair game. I was amazed by how different the novel was from my received ideas about it. I had not expected the monster to be so articulate, or to have read The Sorrows of Young Werther (my reaction bordered on jealousy—I haven’t read that!). I could also never quite decide how to picture the monster. If I’ve seen a movie version of a book before I read it, I inevitably picture the actors from the movie; I saw and heard Anthony Hopkins in my head while reading The Remains of the Day, though I’ve never actually seen the movie, just the trailers. But I didn’t picture Boris Karloff or the boxy, bolted head of Halloween masks. Mary Shelley’s description of the creature didn’t match: “his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness.” Victor Frankenstein “had selected his features as beautiful”—but is appalled at the uncanny living result. Once it escapes, the monster bounds around the snowy Alps like a yeti, so I pictured something hirsute, like an Edward Gorey drawing, with perfectly round yellow eyes. The one thing I thought I knew, the monster’s physicality, I had gotten wrong. Almost everything about the book defied my expectations.

Our third selection was my definitive “stupid classic”: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. From the first sentence, I was delighted: “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.” I laughed out loud; it’s like a better, funnier version of the not-beautiful-woman-who-is-still-somehow-beautiful trope. I loved the next sentence, too: “At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life.” Montag’s “symbolic helmet” is as terrible (I get that it’s a symbol, thanks) as “silent symbols of the after-dinner face” is great. I read on mostly for the prose, which is full of these anticlichés, these totally surprising phrases: one man is described as “about as emotional as a bagpipe” (I was not sure, at first, if this meant very emotional or not emotional at all); another as having “a kind of black, sneering coolness … but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan.” Two old friends are described as “thorough respecters of themselves and of each other.” A woman’s face betrays a “flash of odious joy.” I found the writing hilarious, appropriately full of contradictions, but also often beautiful:

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-colored pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.

I wrote to a friend at the time that I was enjoying the writing a lot, but didn’t really care about the story per se, the whole “devil inside” thing. This was before I got to the last twenty pages, the chapter titled “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.” Up to that point, the plot had pretty much aligned with the version I’d absorbed through cultural references and cartoons: the doctor transforms into a smaller, uglier, more evil person after drinking a magic potion in his laboratory. In this changed form, he’s free to roam about doing his sinister deeds; he can always change back and be innocent again. In this last chapter, Jekyll explains why he began his experiments. From youth he’d been aware of “a profound duplicity of life.” He was “in no sense a hypocrite,” he says, doing good actions while thinking dark thoughts. Rather, “both sides” were real: “I was radically both.” As Mr. Hyde, he discovers, he can give himself over completely to darkness: “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” He is completely free as Hyde, he believes, and completely free of consequence: “Think of it—I did not even exist!”

Then comes a moment that stunned me: One night Jekyll turns in late and wakes in the morning with “odd sensations.” Nothing in his room looks amiss, yet “something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be.” He has the feeling that he should not be in his own room, with its “decent furniture and tall proportions,” all present and accounted for, but in the dingy “little room in Soho” where he sometimes sleeps as Hyde. The displacement is not in the room but in his body—he looks down and sees not the “large, firm, white and comely” hand of Jekyll but the “corded, knuckly, dusky” hand of Hyde. He has gone to bed good and woken evil.

Initially, Jekyll explains, the more difficult part of the transformation had been going from Jekyll to Hyde, but the more he transformed, the more this reversed: “I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.” Eventually, he can’t sleep at all without spontaneously converting: “if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened.” He cannot escape Hyde because Hyde no longer needs the potion, only Jekyll does, and Jekyll has run out of supplies. He is Hyde now, the evil “knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye.”

I had no inkling of this part of the story, which now seems to me infinitely richer and more complex than I’d imagined—it’s no longer simply about good versus evil, but rather any kind of unwanted or frightening change. I can read the final pages, which Jekyll narrates with the knowledge that it’s his last chance to “think his own thoughts or see his own face,” as a metaphor for aging or addiction or illness, the approach of death as a loss of the self—Jekyll’s last moments as the moments of lucidity when you recognize yourself as you are and remember the self that is disappearing, and can fathom the gap in between. The biographical note in my copy of Jekyll and Hyde tells me Robert Louis Stevenson died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-four. I’ve read this part over and over: “The kindly author went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, abruptly cried out to his wife, What’s the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed?—and fell to the floor.” It was his last transformation.

“You think you know, but you have no idea.” That’s the catchphrase for an MTV show called Diary that I’ve seen exactly once. In that episode, we follow Lindsay Lohan around for a day to see what her life is (supposedly) really like. Every time it cuts back from commercial, we hear Lohan saying that catchphrase. I think it should be the tagline for Stupid Classics Book Club, too. I thought I knew, but I had no idea. It was trendy for a while to publish lists of classics that “you don’t have to read.” In 2018, GQ named twenty-one books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Bible, that “you don’t have to read,” with suggestions for what you should read instead. Lit Hub published a list of “10 Books to Read By Living Women (Instead of These 10 By Dead Men).” Since when is it poor form to die? I find these lists incredibly tiresome. Of course, you don’t have to read anything. Some books will be triggering or make you deeply unhappy; there just isn’t enough time. But if you want to speak or write knowledgeably about them, you really do have to read them. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. I’m glad I read Fahrenheit 451 even though I despised it. Now I know exactly how it’s bad, and I can hate it for the right reasons.

When I was younger, as a teenager and in my twenties, I often took for granted that “good art” was good—I was, if anything, overly trusting of authority—but I didn’t take the time to actually experience that art’s goodness for myself. The older I get, the more likely I am to think That’s underrated about stuff that’s completely established canon. (Sylvia Plath? Underrated! Led Zeppelin? Underrated!) It’s not that these artists don’t get enough attention; it’s more that when something good is widely appreciated, we take it less seriously. Popularity itself makes art feel like a joke; we assume if it’s famous, it must be obvious. In high school, I wasn’t impressed by the boys who owned Led Zeppelin albums (my friend Catherine might say they weren’t rising to the challenge of modernity), so I didn’t pay attention to Led Zeppelin. Now I listen to Led Zeppelin and think, Excuse me, this fucking rules.

On the first day of April this year, I felt an itch for some vernal ritual, some formal celebration of National Poetry Month and spring, though spring is my least favorite season. The Waste Land seemed just the thing, so I found a recording of T.S. Eliot reading the poem on YouTube and played it on a loop all morning like background music. It sounded so good, I opened the poem in a browser tab and vowed to keep it open all month, to dip into at random, whenever I wanted some gorgeous, contextless language. I first read The Waste Land in college, but I felt like I had never really read it—the way my instructors talked about it, I just assumed I wouldn’t understand it, so I didn’t bother trying. I’m sure they meant well, intending to prepare us for the difficulty, but instead they scared us off. I now feel lied to, like they just wanted to keep The Waste Land for themselves. The back of the copy I bought at my college bookstore pulls the same trick, deepening its aura of obscurity: “When The Waste Land was published in 1922, initial reaction to the poem was decidedly negative. Critics attacked the poem’s ‘kaleidoscopic’ design, and nearly everyone disagreed furiously about its meaning. The poem was even rumored to be a hoax.” Can a poem be a hoax? John Ashbery used to show his classes unlabeled poems by Ern Malley—the invention of two Australian writers who hated modernist poetry—and Geoffrey Hill—an actual modernist poet—and have them guess which one was the spoof. They were right about half the time, because, of course, they were only guessing. Ashbery liked the fake poems, which were designed to be confusing. But poems that are not a little confusing have no mystery. Maybe all good poems are a bit of a hoax.

When reading Shakespeare, you can be pretty sure that any familiar phrases originated with him. This isn’t quite so with The Waste Land. Many of Eliot’s lines are famous on their own, but the text is so allusive, you might recognize a line from its source material instead—take “hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frere!” (the last line of Eliot’s first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” and the last line of Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du mal). Another reference to Les Fleurs du mal in “The Burial of the Dead” is less obvious: line 60, “Unreal City.” Eliot’s line note is “Cf. Baudelaire: ‘Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves.’” It’s not quite a translation of the line, but more of a shorthand for it. Reading The Waste Land again recently, the phrase reminded me of something, but what? Not Baudelaire. Was it reminding me of itself, the first time I read it many years ago? No, it came to me—“unreal city” is a bit of a verse from an Okkervil River song called “Maine Island Lovers,” on an album released in 2003, which I listened to obsessively in grad school. Sometimes, lately, I get a glistening feeling that references, which are often, in any case, unintentional, are not one-way but reciprocal, that Eliot is referencing the Okkervil River song as much as the other way around. In the right mood, reading The Waste Land, I can feel unhooked from time, like Proust’s narrator of Swann’s Way dozing in his “magic” chair—the poem seems to allude both backward and forward, to reference the future.

This is why it’s worth reading the classics—to spend enough time with a text that a reference to it isn’t just outside you, but connected to your intimate, lived experience. You become part of the weave of the fabric.

Read earlier installments of Mess with a Classic. 

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of The Word Pretty (Black Ocean). 

Irving Nurick, illustration from the 1920s

In her 2008 review of Cecily von Zeigesar’s Gossip Girl novels, Janet Malcolm quotes the eponymous narrator’s “opening volley”: “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.” I’ve never read the books myself, but on the CW show, which I was briefly obsessed with, we hear Kristen Bell’s voice-over during the title sequence: “Gossip Girl here! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite.” The actors playing these trust-fund teens aren’t just good-looking; they seem like genetic impossibilities. Blake Lively is perfectly cast as the, in Malcolm’s words, “incandescently beautiful” Serena van der Woodsen. She’s 5’10” and usually wearing heels. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan of the blog Go Fug Yourself used to call her “Boobs Legsly.” Serena and her friends and enemies (there is often little distinction between the two) have not only lucked into the 1 percent, they are also having an unfair amount of fun.

Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. When Emma Bovary arrives at La Vaubyessard, the chateau of the marquis, for dinner and a ball, the opulence blows her bourgeois mind: “The red claws of the lobsters overhung the edges of the platters; large fruits were piled on moss in openwork baskets; the quails wore their feathers; coils of steam rose into the air; and, grave as a judge in his silk stockings, knee breeches, white tie, and jabot, the butler conveyed the platters.” Party scenes are full of these lists of foods and drinks and flowers, overloaded sentences that embody abundance, the fulsome displays of affluence. See Nick Carraway’s first party at Jay Gatsby’s: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York … On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” Was Flaubert the first to use this listing trope, appalled by the excess? Jane Austen’s balls are disappointingly devoid of visual detail, as if the evidence of money was just assumed. (Austen’s novels adapt so well into film because the dialogue is all there, and costume and set designers can supply the surrounding lushness.) A truly expensive party should feel otherworldly; the marquis’s ball, by putting her in “contact with wealth,” leaves Emma utterly changed. It makes “a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains.”

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the element of unreality is achieved by the tableaux vivants, elaborate live reenactments of Botticelli’s Primavera and Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra. With their “happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers of gauze,” the tableaux “give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.” Lily Bart appears as Mrs. Lloyd, the subject of a Sir Joshua Reynolds painting—the guests are titillated and a little shocked (“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up”), so I always pictured something more typically male-gaze-y than the actual portrait, not a woman reclining but standing up, fully dressed, and carving her husband’s name in a tree. In any case, it casts the necessary spell to carry Lily and Mr. Lawrence Selden away from the party, “against the tide which was setting thither,” past faces that “flowed by like the streaming images of sleep,” so they can kiss and whisper of love. Classic parties often have a watery quality. Nick Carraway is surrounded by “swirls and eddies of people” he doesn’t know. It’s the wet, blurry view through the bottom of a glass.

In his review of Making It by Norman Podhoretz, James Wolcott mentions an after-party for a Commentary symposium where critic Alfred Kazin “found himself in a bobbing sea of familiar faces.” Making It, Podhoretz’s memoir of his ascent to so-called fame in the fifties and sixties (he was the editor of Commentary, which earned him entry to the world of the literati) was widely reviled upon its first publication, according to legend. Wolcott calls it “a book that would live in notoriety, which at least beats total obscurity.” I wanted to root for the memoir, as an underdog, until I read parts of it; its naked egotism really is embarrassing. The passage of interest to me describes the parties: “One met most of the same people—the family—at all these parties, but there was usually enough variation in the crowd to breed other invitations to other parties.” Parties, like genes, exist to self-replicate. This partly explains why they all look the same. In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Brenda is pleased with a party because it is “exactly what she wished it to be, an accurate replica of all the best parties she had been to in the last year; the same band, the same supper and, above all, the same guests.”

Parties also serve a clear function, establishing and reinforcing hierarchies. “Parties were sometimes fun and sometimes not, but fun was beside the point,” Podhoretz writes, “for me they always served as a barometer of the progress of my career.” The day his New Yorker review of the new Nelson Algren comes out, he receives an invite to a fancy party by telegram. He attends shindigs hosted by Lillian Hellman and Philip Rahv and Mary McCarthy and (“at last!”) Hannah Arendt. There is a brief and fairly innocuous description of one of Arendt’s famous New Year’s Eve parties, which so infuriated her that she stopped having them for a few years. Podhoretz, for a while at least, got mileage out of being insufferable: “Enemies are all to the good at an early stage of a critic’s career, helping as they do to spread his name around.” A Vanity Fair piece about “the party of the century,” Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, quotes Parisian aristocrat Étienne de Beaumont: “A party is never given for someone. It is given against someone.”

The midcentury Manhattan party has its own mythology, captured most iconically perhaps in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—the movie more than the novella. For all that’s terrible about the movie (the book is racist, too), the party scene is truly great. My favorite part is the shot of a woman standing by herself, laughing her ass off as she looks at her reflection in a big mirror with a gilt frame—she even touches the mirror lightly with her fingers, the way you’d touch a man’s arm when he made you laugh in conversation. Thirty seconds later, we cut back to the woman; she’s still looking at herself, but now she’s sobbing, with mascara all over her face. It captures that late-night razor’s edge between chaotic fun and chaotic disaster. It’s an improvement, I think, on the scene in the novella, a “stag party” where the only women in attendance are Holly Golightly and her six-foot-tall, jolie laide model friend Mag Wildwood (“She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty”). You can see what lines inspired the woman with the mirror in the film. In the novella, while Mag is in the bathroom, Holly implies Mag has a venereal disease, and Mag returns to find all the men have gone cold. This pushes Mag over the edge: “Since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.” But the mirror woman in the movie isn’t Mag, just a random partygoer—as V. S. Pritchett writes of Emma Bovary, “her periods of depravity do not single her out as an exceptionally deplorable human being, but rather make her part of the general, glum strangeness of the people around her.”

When I mentioned this scene to my husband, John, he said he always thought Breakfast at Tiffany’s ripped off its parties from The Recognitions. He pulled our copy of the long (956 pages) William Gaddis novel off the shelf, located one of the scenes in question and then told me four times to be careful with the book (it’s a first edition). The scene he bookmarked features “a Village party”:

—I couldn’t quite stand a Village party tonight. Could you Arny? There’s always so quite ha—

—Hideous, Herschel supplied.

—I wasn’t going to say that, silly. I was going to say harrowing. I couldn’t stand one tonight, that special Village quality of inhuman ghastliness and dirt … Arny please don’t have another drink.

There’s a definite resemblance, the same forms of pretension—money was important, but not as important as social status or as taste. The apartments holding the parties were often small, and the cramped quarters help create a sense of overfullness and festive abundance that would require more cash if set in larger rooms. Gaddis’s Otto, a playwright, sees the party, any party, as an opportunity to be seen: “Otto (thinking only of what it looked like to see Otto entering a room) entered.” Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically. As someone blabs at Otto about Swinburne and “de Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant of course” (“It’s like a masquerade isn’t it … I feel so naked, don’t you? among all these frightfully masked people”), Otto looks around the room “with restrained anticipation”: “He was looking for a mirror.” He wanders through the party, compulsively mentioning his latest play, which interests no one. There is more a sense of grim desperation than of excitement and possibility. Guests vie for dominance and attention; there’s a bizarre, pervasive homophobic paranoia, like a version of the Red Scare; the party ends when there’s nothing left to drink. (In youth, parties are a setting for fun; they provide alcohol and drugs and a place to consume them. In adulthood, parties are not a means to getting drunk but an event you need to be drunk to endure.)

Otto is an introvert, but he’s choosing to play an introvert, too—his mask, his party persona. He retreats to the bookcase: “When among people he did not know, Otto often took down a book from which he could glance up and note the situation which he pretended to disdain.” Here he can half-read and half-observe—and, he hopes, be observed observing. Possibly, Capote did lift this from Gaddis. Here’s the unnamed narrator in Breakfast: “I was left abandoned by the bookshelves; of the books there, more than half were about horses, the rest baseball. Pretending an interest in Horseflesh and How to Tell It gave me sufficiently private opportunity for sizing Holly’s friends.” Or maybe by 1958, when the novella was published—Gaddis’s novel came out in 1952—the bookshelf-hoverer was already a cliché of party fiction, if not actual parties, a detail as familiar as ice cubes clinking or dogs barking in the distance. If all parties resemble other parties, the way all party people resemble other party people, then all parties are intertextual, they reference each other. Amusingly, my husband John plays on this particular cliché in his 2010 novella Under the Small Lights, in which a character pulls a book off a shelf at a party. The book is Gaddis’s The Recognitions.

Where are the parties in nonfiction? I skimmed Gore Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest looking for dirt on Anaïs Nin’s salons—Nin and Vidal were friends, kind of; he writes of even his closest friends with a measure of contempt—but while he alludes vaguely to parties, and describes hanging out with various literary celebrities in various cafés and bars, these encounters are usually mild, often a little awkward. The cover of our trade paperback of A Moveable Feast advertises tales of “the wild young years of the Lost Generation in Paris,” but it’s not a wild book. When Hemingway meets Scott Fitzgerald, you think the partying is about to get good, but Hemingway depicts Fitzgerald as a melancholy hypochondriac who can’t hold his liquor: “Scott did not like the places nor the people and he had to drink more than he could drink.” They go to Lyon together to retrieve a car Fitzgerald has left there, and Hemingway is annoyed that drinking literally all day while they drive across France in an open car in the rain should have any effect on his companion—Fitzgerald becomes convinced he’s going to die of something called “congestion of the lungs” and keeps insisting that Hemingway take his temperature. Hemingway’s solution is to order him double whiskeys. There are no parties qua parties. Even Podhoretz only mentions them in passing, as a way to drop some names. It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much.

In the last episode of Gossip Girl, everyone gets married—more Shakespearean comedy than Whartonian tragedy. But most classic, post-Austen party fiction ends badly, the way “the metal years” end in Penelope Spheeris’s LA music documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Emma Bovary swallows arsenic. Lily Bart OD’s on her “sleeping draught,” probably meant to be laudanum. There is more at stake at these parties than having a good time. John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934, might be the most tragic of the bunch. It begins with a Christmas party “in the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club,” which is “so crowded it did not seem as though another person could get in.” The usuals are there (“the Whit Hofmans, the Julian Englishes, the Froggy Ogdens and so on”), interchangeable “terrible people” getting “gloriously drunk” on “drug store rye” (“It was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it”). The fun ends when Julian English throws a highball in Harry Reilly’s face. Over the next three days, self-destructive to the point of insanity, Julian stays trashed, trashes his marriage to his wife Caroline, then takes a bottle of Scotch and a package of cigarettes into the garage and starts the car. The next day, Caroline is wretched with grief, “a tunnel you had to go through, had to go through, had to go through, had to go through”—grief becomes a kind of never-ending hangover.

I have noticed one of the symptoms of a bad hangover is guilt. You regret all the toxins you’ve consumed, of course, but also the things you’ve said and done while your inhibitions were lowered, your temper shortened. I think of the end of Gatsby’s party, when “most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.” The neurologist Oliver Sacks called the guilt of a hangover “penitential depression.” The guilt is there even when you can’t remember much of what happened. An old friend used to text me in the morning after parties: Did I do anything horrible last night? I’d text back, Of course not. But how would I know if she had? I was poisoned, too.

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of The Word Pretty (Black Ocean). 

In her short nonfiction book Ongoingness—a single long, fragmentary essay—Sarah Manguso writes a meditative exegesis on her own diary, a document nearing a million words that she has added to daily, obsessively, for twenty-five years. This practice felt like a necessity, a hedge against potential failures of memory, and a way to process the onslaught of time: “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” It started when she was a teenager. She went to an art opening with a dear friend, drank wine from a plastic cup, looked at paintings—“It was all too much,” the moment was “too full.” She wouldn’t have time to “recover” from the beauty of the day, she realized, since tomorrow would offer only more experience: “There should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.” (I’ve often thought there should be a little buffer between months: a monthend.)

When Manguso became a mother, this anxious relationship to time changed:

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.

I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.

 

Manguso stopped worrying so much about “lost memories”—being pregnant makes you forgetful, and when you have a small baby, most days feel the same. But aging also changes us; we’ve moved farther to the right on the timeline of our lives (that’s how I picture it, like a side-scrolling video game), a line whose end point is death. At some point you can assume there’s more time behind than ahead. Manguso mentions reading an essay by a ninety-year-old writer, the last thing he ever published, that issued a “terrible warning.” She paraphrases the warning and does not name the writer, so I googled a few vague words and was surprised to find the essay right away: “Nearing 90,” by William Maxwell. “I am not—I think I am not—afraid of dying,” Maxwell writes;

When I was 17 I worked on a farm in southern Wisconsin … The farm had come down in that family through several generations, to a woman who was so alive that everything and everybody seemed to revolve around her personality. She lived well into her 90’s and then one day told her oldest daughter that she didn’t want to live anymore, that she was tired.

This remark, he writes, “reconciled me to my own inevitable extinction.” He has few regrets, and many happy memories, but if he wanders too deep into nostalgic reveries, they can keep him up all night. This is the warning Manguso refers to: the past can act as a kind of trap. Maxwell adds, “I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living”—a thought I find beautiful and comforting. With so little to look forward to—he died at ninety-one—Maxwell took solace in looking back. Manguso, for her part, is finally able to take solace in forgetting: as time piles up, she loses access to specific moments, but begins to accept that life is ongoing, not discrete but continuous. It’s more and more and more until it’s over.

Because I had just read Ongoingness, when I started reading Frankenstein I was thinking about time. (Well, I am always thinking about time.) Time is weird in Frankenstein, in part because of the nested narratives. First there’s the epistolary framing narrative, the letters that Captain Walton writes to his sister on his voyage toward the North Pole. He and his crew rescue a man at sea, a man who turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. Victor then takes over the narrative, basically telling his life story, starting from birth (to the captain, but also to us). We get to the monster part in chapter 5. After many months of self-seclusion, subsumed in his studies of “natural philosophy,” chemistry, and other dark arts, “on a dreary night in November” Frankenstein brings his gruesome humanoid to life. His fascination with this project instantly dissolves: “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He runs from his creation to his bedroom and, unbelievably, tries to go to sleep, and, unbelievably, succeeds, only to be woken by the monster peeking in through his bed curtains, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Again Victor runs away, this time out into the courtyard. By morning, the monster is gone. Then something like two years go by with no monster in sight; he’s on Frankenstein’s mind, but he’s not in the story.

We meet the monster again in chapter 10. Frankenstein’s young brother has been murdered, and their beloved servant girl executed for the crime. Victor is sure, though, that his creation is to blame. The doctor has been been wandering around gazing at the Alps—the “glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature,” these “sublime and magnificent scenes” providing modest consolation to his suffering. And suddenly there is the monster, “the wretch.” Victor goes off: “Do you dare approach me? … Begone, vile insect!” The “daemon” responds quite calmly, and in high formal register: “I expected this reception … all men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!”

Then another embedded narrative begins; the “abhorred devil” takes Frankenstein back to his “hut upon the mountain” and tells his own tale. We learn, in the monster’s words, what he’s been doing all this time—taking shelter in a hovel behind a cottage, and observing the family inside through cracks in the walls. From this poor, compassionate family—the father is blind—he learns something of humanity, and language; he learns even more from a “leathern portmanteau” he finds that contains some books, among them Paradise Lost and “Sorrows of Werter”! (Never mind how he learns to read; we don’t even know why he’s alive.) Like Napoleon and half of Europe in the late eighteenth century, Frankenstein’s monster gets a touch of Werther Fever: “I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sunk deep.” Werther’s suicide causes him to weep, “without precisely understanding it.”

Because of this nonlinear storytelling, we’re left to puzzle out just what Victor was up to during his monster’s intellectual coming of age. It’s tricky in part because the emotional texture of their experiences was different. The monster’s years feel richer, thus longer, to the reader; they held more joy. But from inside the experience, Victor’s years full of fear and regret would surely have felt longer than the monster’s happy ones; pain elongates time. On the other (other) hand, these were the first two years of the monster’s existence; time is elongated in childhood in part because each day accounts for such a large proportion of one’s lifetime so far. (There’s also a theory that because children’s hearts beat faster, “their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults.” Would this apply to Frankenstein’s monster? Maybe, if his love for the cottagers quickened his pulse.) Can there be true simultaneity in fiction? In what sense do narratives that unspool at different times “happen” at the same time? Some of Shakespeare’s plays seem to operate on two contradictory time scales, a phenomenon critics have dubbed “double time.” But then, there’s no true simultaneity in the real world, either. Here’s Wikipedia’s enchanting ur-voice on the relativity of simultaneity: “According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense that two distinct events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space.” (At one point, the monster quotes from Percy Shelley’s poem “Mutability,” which makes no sense at all, since the narrative takes place before the poem was written.)

The novel’s chronology is further complicated by the fact that Mary Shelley wrote the first version before her husband Percy’s death by drowning in 1822, but the version we commonly read now is a revision first published in 1831. Mary’s mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died ten days after her daughter was born. When the author of Frankenstein was sixteen, she met Percy Shelley, who was already married, but they ran away together anyway, which earned her the same bad sexual reputation that her mother had had. In her biographical introduction to a critical edition of the novel, Johanna M. Smith writes that Mary (Shelley) “never entirely escaped the social effects of her early indiscretion,” “even though she married Percy in 1816, within a month of his wife Harriet’s suicide”—as if this latter move were the epitome of discretion. Mary and Percy weren’t destined for happiness—three of their four children died very young, and in 1822 she had a miscarriage. Then, on July 8, Percy died in a shipwreck. Famously, when his body washed up onshore, his face unrecognizable, he had a book of poems by Keats in his breast pocket. His clothes must have been very close fitting.

In the final paragraph of her introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley claims to have changed very little:

I will add but one word as to the alterations I have made. They are principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story, nor introduced any new ideas or circumstances. I have mended the language where it was so bald as to interfere with the interest of the narrative; and these changes occur almost exclusively in the beginning of the first volume. Throughout they are entirely confined to such parts as are mere adjuncts to the story, leaving the core and substance of it untouched.

I have not read the original 1818 version, but according to Anne K. Mellor’s biography of Mary Shelley, the two are quite different, because Shelley’s worldview had changed. Her layers of grief—their dear friend Lord Byron died two years after Percy from what was likely septic fever—combined with her “financially straightened circumstances and her guilt-ridden and unshakeable despair” to convince her “that human events are decided not by personal choice or free will but by material forces beyond our control.” Shelley’s “new vision of nature’s relationship to humanity is registered in the novel itself,” Mellor writes. The characters become pawns of fate; they can’t quite be blamed for destroying their own lives: “In 1818 Victor Frankenstein possessed free will or the capacity for meaningful moral choice … In 1831 such choice is denied to him.”

I wondered whether Shelley’s misfortunes in the 1820s were also responsible for the novel’s obsession with loneliness. Everyone in the story, in particular the three men who take control of the narrative in turn—if the monster can be called a man—longs desperately for companionship. Walton writes, in his second letter posted from Archangel, a Russian port on the White Sea: “I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend, Margaret … You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.” He does not expect to find one on the ocean, but he does, in Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein left his lifelong friends behind to attend university; it may be his isolation that leads him astray. The monster’s loneliness is especially keen. He calls the poor cottagers, who are ignorant of his existence, his friends: “When they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joys. I saw few human beings besides them, and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of my friends.” When he works up the courage to approach them, they cower in fear and chase him off. The monster realizes he is doomed to solitude, people will never accept him; so he demands that his creator provide a companion for him, a girl-fiend, like Adam asking God for Eve. At first, moved, Victor agrees, but then decides in good conscience he can’t and reneges. The monster gets revenge by killing all of Victor’s friends, so the doctor, too, must suffer alone.

Could Shelley have woven these themes into her revision, to force her characters to suffer alone as she suffered? It doesn’t appear so. The word friend appears 134 times in the 1831 version, and 131 times in the original. So mourning and loss were always part of the horror in her horror story. It had come to her, as she describes in the introduction she wrote in October 1831, like a transmission, and kept her awake: “When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reveries.” I think of her lying there (“the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through”) like William Maxwell in a parallel insomnia, lost in his past. In the morning, she transcribes “the grim terrors” of her “waking dream.” She envisions it as “a short tale,” but Percy pushes her to “develop the idea at greater length.” It becomes the story of her life. Frankenstein, her “hideous progeny,” was “the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” It’s as though she had a premonition of her bleak future.

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of The Word Pretty (Black Ocean). 

Sylvia Plath in April 1954, as a student at Smith College (Photo: JUDY SNOW DENISON)

When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it. I love Plath’s poetry, but what if I didn’t like this story? I read The Bell Jar so long ago, when I was fourteen or so, that I couldn’t remember anything about it. But I read The Catcher in the Rye at around the same time, and I remember that book clearly. Had I only meant to read The Bell Jar, and never finished it? Oh God, I thought, what if none of Plath’s fiction is good?

I decided to read The Bell Jar again before addressing the new old short story. The first, striking sentence—already suffused with death—gave me hope: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” By the end of the first paragraph, I was nervous again: “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” Then, a hard return and a single-sentence paragraph: “I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” Plath’s journals and letters are often unintentionally funny in their absurd dramatics—in 1956, after lending some books to a friend who returned them with underlining in pencil, she wrote in her journal, “I was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien.” (I actually threw back my head laughing, alone on my couch.) The silliness of calling being executed “the worst thing in the world,” a kind of understatement by overstatement, is rendered sillier by giving it its own paragraph. Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work.

Having read the whole novel, I can confirm that Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work. Regardless, The Bell Jar is justifiably a classic. I had feared it would feel adolescent through and through. There are certainly plenty of cringe-y moments—Plath was very of her time, a sheltered WASP—and over and over she uses foreignness as a metaphor, to represent the exotic or dangerous or wrong. Esther Greenwood “collected men with interesting names.” For “interesting,” read not American. When she loses her tan, she looks “yellow as a Chinaman.” I cringe to even type that—it’s unforgivable by today’s standards, reminiscent of Mickey Rooney’s horrifying yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (released the year before Plath turned in her manuscript). But if you can get past that, The Bell Jar shimmers with insight, is very funny, and does those wonderful things that poets’ novels do—it moves unpredictably, with the kind of I’m-not-entirely-sure-what-I’m-doing quality that can make for very good dancing. At one point, a brute of a man forces Esther to tango, despite her protests that she doesn’t know how; he says, “You don’t have to dance. I’ll do the dancing … Pretend you are drowning.” And though the book can feel naive and sheltered, it’s about how women are sheltered, how their lives are so proscribed (or were, at least, in the fifties) that even making a choice is just choosing between different levels of passivity, between being dragged across the dance floor or remaining in your seat. (Later, the woman hater throws Esther into the mud and tries to rape her. “It’s happening,” she thinks. “If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen.”)

The Bell Jar is also not just autobiographical but meta, which may be the defining characteristic of the poet’s novel, a category I’ve been thinking about since reading Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, by the poet and translator Anna Moschovakis, early last year. The Bell Jar, like Eleanor, and like 10:04, the poet and critic Ben Lerner’s second novel, is about someone writing a novel. (Lerner’s begins with a young writer celebrating his massive advance.) Moschovakis said on a podcast that she likes only those novels that are aware they’re made of language. A meta-novel necessarily calls attention to the fact that it’s a written thing, constructed out of words, and not a rubric for something nonlinguistic, the way some novels feel like novelizations of the movies they hope to become. Meta-novels, like poetry, are always reminding you they’re made of language—a line break that creates an ambiguity, a non sequitur, an eye rhyme or even a regular rhyme that halts the way your brain tries to visualize the story and makes you look at words as symbols again. It may be, too, that poets are self-conscious about writing novels, and hide that self-consciousness by highlighting it (one train of self-consciousness may hide another).

My favorite meta-moment in The Bell Jar is in chapter 10, when Esther sits in her mother’s breezeway with a typewriter and endeavors to begin her novel: “From another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a doll’s house.” She creates a “heroine” (“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise”), names her Elaine, and makes of Elaine her own doll, as Plath has done with Esther—nested dolls. “Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother’s waiting for something to happen,” Esther types. She notes that Elaine has six letters, like Esther—and, of course, like Sylvia, although Plath originally published the novel, because of its potentially hurtful nature, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. My other favorite moment seems almost accidentally meta. Esther goes skiing with her annoying boyfriend Buddy Willard, and she knows she’s not ready to go down the big slope yet, but Buddy insists; “It never occurred to me to say no.” She hasn’t learned how to “zigzag,” so she aims “straight down.” She, as her real-life doppelgänger did, is about to break her leg in two places: “I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.” This so beautifully encapsulates Plath’s whole life it stabs me in the heart.

By this point I was excited about the short story, “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.” And then my expectations were subverted again—it’s disappointing. At the level of the action, there’s not much going on: a girl gets on a train, she meets a woman, the woman is mysterious, the train is mysterious. Eventually we, and Mary, understand that it’s a train toward death, if not literal then metaphorical: the bleak, non-chosen future. At the level of the prose, too, there’s not much going on: a lot of flat descriptions, a lot of ROYGBIV: “She took the seat by the window, slipping out of her red coat first and hanging it on the brass hook next to the windowframe … A lady in a blue jacket, carrying a baby wrapped in a soiled white blanket, paused at Mary’s seat for a minute, but then continued to the back of the car.” Then comes another woman “lurching down the aisle,” “an earth-colored brown satchel in her hand,” “her blue eyes crinkled up in a mass of wrinkles.” The two walk to the dining car and order ginger ale and coffee. The older woman warms her hands with “the cup of steaming brown liquid.” They go back to their seats and the woman buys a bar of chocolate; Mary helps herself to “the flat brown candy.” All these color words do create a fantastical atmosphere, like that of a children’s book (Plath described the story as a “vague symbolic tale”), but it’s boring, and just bad writing. It was written in 1952, ten years before The Bell Jar, while Plath was at Smith, and it reads like an unpublished story that someone wrote in college.

It’s curious to read her journals from the same period in which she wrote the story, in the late fall and early winter of 1952. She exhibits the wild mood swings of the depressive. In one entry she describes a luscious meal in detail (“Swordfish and sour cream broiled … Hollandaise and broccoli. Grape pie and ice cream, rich, warm. And port, sharp, sweet … Good scalding black coffee”); she loved food. She’s so optimistic and impatient for the future that “a lifetime is not long enough.” In the very next entry, she despairs: “If ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now.” In mid-November, she’s writing images that reappear in “Mary Ventura”:

I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon drawing upon a passionless phlegmatic River Styx … and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train …). The orange sun was a flat pasted disc on an [sic] smoky, acrid sky. Hell was the Grand Central subway on Sunday morning.

The next paragraph begins, “Tomorrow I will finish my science, start my creative writing story.” In that story, Mary Ventura, a name Plath borrowed from a real friend, rides a train to hell; outside the air is “thick and smoky” from forest fires: “The train had shot into the somber gray afternoon, and the bleak autumn fields stretched away on either side of the tracks beyond the cinder beds. In the sky hung a flat orange disc that was the sun.” She’s the same writer as in her journals, but the writing is totally different.

I’ve always thought of some writers as“cold” and others as “hot,” my classic examples being Plath versus Anne Sexton, Plath the controlled ice queen and Sexton the sexy, messy one. But it’s only Plath’s poetry that’s chilly; her journals and letters are lusty and overabundant with feeling, with overabundance. (In a funny but mean review of her recently published volume of letters, Jeffrey Meyers describes the “awkward” size and binding of the “massive volume,” just one of two, the second of which will appear “to stupefied readers next fall.”) It’s hard to square Plath’s prose with her poetry, the way it is hard to square her image in photographs—the beaming, teacher’s-pet cuteness—with her deep, resonant voice on those spellbinding BBC recordings, where she sounds absolutely merciless, a dark sorceress. But her icy poetry is still intense, still burns to the touch—“black and glittering,” as she writes in “Burning the Letters,” from Ariel; “My veins glow like trees.” In comparison, “Mary Ventura” feels lifeless, lukewarm.

Over dinner the night I read the story, I told my husband regretfully that I hadn’t liked it. He reminded me of The Original of Laura, the unfinished work that Nabokov wanted destroyed but that his son published anyway. Dmitri Nabokov claimed that his father appeared to him as an apparition and “said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess—just go ahead and publish!’ ” The “manuscript” was actually a stack of 138 handwritten index cards, so they subtitled it A Novel in Fragments. Nobody liked it. In a review for the Guardian, Martin Amis wrote, “Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” In the Wall Street Journal, Alexander Theroux wrote, “It is a pity that [Nabokov’s] instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form. English professors may assign The Original of Laura to their students someday, but it is really better suited to a college ethics class.” One thinks, of course, of the hated Go Tell a Watchman, too. I saw an article about a couple who had named their child Atticus and were considering changing it, although he was five or six.

I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds of the ethics of posthumous publishing here—most of Plath’s work was published after her death. (I’m not sure what should happen to our desires after we die. I’d like my corpse to be plundered for organ donations and the rest of it cremated, but if I die before my mother and she wants me buried, fine—grant her that measure of happiness.) In the introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems, Ted Hughes notes that toward the end of her life, she was in the habit of saving and dating her drafts:

I have resisted the temptation to reproduce the drafts of these last poems in variorum completeness. These drafts are arguably an important part of Sylvia Plath’s complete works. Some of the handwritten pages are aswarm with startling, beautiful phrases and lines, crowding all over the place, many of them in no way less remarkable than the ones she eventually picked out to make her final poem. But printing them all would have made a huge volume.

We now have huge volumes of Plath’s life output, both what was intended for publication and what was not. I don’t mind that it exists, but I don’t want to read it, not all of it. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath is over seven hundred pages, including a twenty-five-page index, an index that renders it useful, accessible. I would never read the book from cover to cover, but I love to dip into the index and scan for compelling entries, of which there are many. What did Plath think of tarot cards, tattooing, Elizabeth Taylor (which one, the writer or the actress?), Dylan Thomas, To Catch a Thief (“Motion picture”), Leo Tolstoy, the Eiffel Tower, Harry Truman? Thanks to this index I can read everything she wrote in her journals about her father, about her mother, about Jane Baltzell, later Jane Baltzell Kopp—an old classmate of Plath’s when she was at Cambridge on a Fulbright. She’s the one who wrote in Plath’s books so enragingly, and she’s “the blond one” at the fateful party where Plath gets “very very beautifully drunk” and meets Hughes and bites him on the cheek. I can read everything she wrote about the real Mary Ventura: “I knew I would never have a friend quite like her … I love Mary … Mary is me.”

There are eight citations for Marianne Moore, but just one for Marilyn Monroe. I don’t know what Plath thought of Moore yet. (In his review of the letters, Meyers writes that Plath went from “hero-worshipping” “almost every published author” in college, calling Auden “the perfect poet,” to “trashing the competition” while at Cambridge, including “her hated and more successful rival” Adrienne Rich—I guess this is supposed to reflect badly on her, but it sounds like every poet I know.) But I read the one entry on Monroe, who, in October 1959, came to Plath “in a dream, as a kind of fairy godmother”: “I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure … She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Monroe killed herself, overdosing on barbiturates, in August 1962, while Plath was finishing The Bell Jar. That Plath felt connected to Marilyn Monroe—as I’m sure Monroe would have felt connected to Plath, if she’d had a chance to read her—has magic. This dream sparkles, like Pinocchio’s blue fairy godmother, floating in through the window. This is the magic that’s missing from “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.”

I don’t read Plath’s journals in full because I don’t want to exhaust these discoveries—a protective gesture. I’m saving something of her for myself, but also from myself.

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of The Word Pretty (Black Ocean).