Dignity & Tenderness

Researching Louise Fitzhugh for an essay I’m writing, I realized how much she likes to draw people curled up like onions—-at top, Harriet M. Welsch is dancing (as an onion), and at bottom, Hugh and Marcia, Suzuki Beane’s parents, are sleeping. “I want you to feel,” says Miss Berry, Harriet’s drama teacher, “that one morning you woke up as one of these vegetables, one of these dear vegetables, nestling in the earth, warm in the heat and power and magic of growth, or striving tall above the ground, pushing through, bit by bit in the miracle of birth, waiting for that glorious moment when you will be… “

“Eaten,” Harriet whispered to Sport.

” …once and for all, your essential and beautiful self, full-grown, radiant.” Miss Berry’s eyes were beginning to glaze. One arm was outstretched toward the skylight; half of her hair had fallen over one ear. She held the pose in silence.

I just can’t understand why you don’t write, Mali. Don’t take this the wrong way but when I listen to you talking I feel as though I’m reading a nineteenth-century novel. I’m almost certain, too, that if you’d written your story, it would have ended differently. I’m not saying better but differently. Maybe whatever it is that’s stopping you from writing is the same thing that stopped you from leaving Farid? If I had your talent, do you know what I would have done? I’d have left Farid right away, blindness or no blindness, and made him the hero of a great saga. You know what it is you really lack? Cruelty. You have to kill to create. You have to go to war, make up your mind, be decisive, turn the page. You have to be megalomaniac and you have to be fair. It’s not megalomania you’re lacking, Mali, it’s the courage to show it. Take any of the authors you admire, and tell me if they aren’t killers. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens, Proust, Conrad, Kafka … their weapons are different but the fact is they’re all responsible for a thousand deaths. Do you know why the world they invent holds up? It’s because the ground of the other one is strewn with corpses. In their work, tears and blood flow and dry like ink—thick and fast. In a good novel, everything is plucked from real life, plucked mercilessly, everything, absolutely everything, a nose, a hat, a colour, a tree.

- from Dominique Eddé’s Kite, trans. Ros Schwartz

And Acker and Duras and Bernstein Sycamore and Rodoreda and Lispector. Still. This book, people. Phew.

images: (green) from Spectropia at the Morbid Anatomy Library, (skeleton) from the Rider-Waite tarot.