Current Issue, #50

one

He and she like to have sex on a Saturday, after a nice sauna. And that is what made the little Kretschmar.

William the Conqueror salted the earth to ensure no further planting. Like Carthage, she will bear no more great heroes. She will go to the cemetery with the small bronze box that contains the wire brush, and she will clean her mother’s grave and cry. And then again wash the white lace curtains that hang flat from their thin, hollow rod. She cares for the house, and for all inside it, but there is much to mourn.

Because there is always the little Kretschmar.

The little Kretschmar sleeps on his side and his parents look on in despair.

Salt was poured on the land and the owner executed, his head on a pike, his house demolished. That is what he wishes could be done, whenever he looks on at the little Kretschmar.

He and she, penitent, chop at the sauna with an axe, and pull out the nails from the broken boards, and burn the wood.

The little Kretschmar is five months old.

two

She imagines one day—afterward—working in the factory, making collectibles of white porcelain. All the little fingers, the ripples in the greatcoat, the nubs of antlers on fauns, the finely whorled mechanisms of a revolver. There are molds, and the clean hot white nothing goes in, and something perfect emerges. A reindeer. A pistol. A general.

She imagines the box of broken parts in the factory. The bent snout. The twisted barrel. The broken arm of a youth.

Even the most careful of fingers can make a slip. And that is why there is the box. The small wooden box with a lid that fits tight. At the end of the day it is taken away, and when it returns it is empty and clean.

There is no room for flawed figures on the shelves of the shop.

At night, when she cannot sleep because of the needs of the little Kretschmar, she imagines a broom sweeping away all the small shards of white dust that gather at the seams of this box of broken parts.

three

Because of their sorrow and shame and disappointment, she and he have grown too large for their wedding rings. Their knuckles pop and snap from the stretching span of their grief. Even the others understand that kind of swelling. It is all because of the little Kretschmar.

It is no wonder the rings have ceased trying, no wonder the flesh grows weak. Soon, they will take them to the shop and make them fit again.

For now, the rings dangle on short strings around their necks. When they lean over the little Kretschmar, the rings swing and dangle. But the little Kretschmar cannot see them, nor can he grab at them. The rings swing in peace as the little Kretschmar rolls to the left, and then to the right.

It is all a reminder of the sauna, of Saturday, of sex and disgust and shame. He will no longer look at her rich, high breasts. She turns away when he unbuttons.

And they avert their eyes from the little Kretschmar when he cries, and tuck the rings inside their shirts.

four

In spring, the night sky turns lavender. The others’ children strike the metal rails of the bridge with sticks. They watch as the mallard ducks swim along the dam in the canal: the father is bright and large, the mother small and dull, the ducklings a happy mass of paddling.

The ripples of brown water.

The heavy dandling heads of the grasses that bend down to sip the damp.

The others’ children cry out and point and grin and leap as the crane glides through the tops of the chestnut trees with dolorous great black wings. Their legs dimple at the knee, rosy and thickening with pork fat. A thick flop of braid.

The others’ children toss handfuls of pebbles into the air and dodge their falling. They are agile, and pleased with gravity, with stones in their palms and the clutching grip of their fingers, with the majesty of this great crane.

The others’ children call out and jump and hoot as the crane climbs upward on the wind to the chimney top, where his wife has a nest, and the five-month-young crane greedily shrieks and flaps for the bit of wriggling fish dropped into its nest of sticks and hope and height.

But in his basket, the little Kretschmar rolls to the left, and then to the right, and moans in his quiet, pink-gummed way.

It is not normal, this sky, which should be blue or white or gray, even pale, but never purple, as the day lengthens into solstice.

Inside, he and she do not read, and they do not speak, and after they eat and then put the little Kretschmar in his basket by the bed, and he is in his house slippers and she with her hair tied up, they commune side by side and look through their window at the sky and at the children whooping along the darkening banks of the canal and they feel their grief gather around them. As though they are stars, suspended, and their shame is a gray cloud hanging in the sky covering them. The sky is something that reminds them of solace, of absolution: the firmament and all it covers. The blue of a nave.

But it is no longer the proper color, this sky. All day they wait for it, for the moment of rest after work, after cleaning the little Kretschmar, and then, after everything, there is the soft, slow moment at the end of the day to consider the great holy blue of the sky.

But tonight it is lavender, and it—like so much else—is not normal.

five

In the afternoons, the sun strikes the window and, inside, she waits for the low, dull thump of a dove mistaking the glass for open air. She shuffles outside to see the soft mass of it, a doughy puddle of blood and cream against the clean-swept granite walkway. A beak open, an eye glazed. He says, Enough is enough. The little Kretschmar rolls to the left, and then to the right.

She comes back in and wipes the chin of the little Kretschmar, who rolls to the left, and then to the right.

Later, he and the little Kretschmar return from Leipzig with black paper, and he cuts out the shapes of hawks and falcons with a paring knife. Not the good knife, not the one from the city that stays sharp. The edges of the cutouts are feathered, and he puts them on the window to deter the doves. These cut black paper warnings are threats that keep away what is not wanted: that is what he wishes could be done when he looks at the little Kretschmar. He will find other doctors.

Listen, he says to her, it can’t go on like this forever. It must stop now.

Inside herself, she locates relief. An untightening in her gut. A loosening in the weary knot of it. The failure of her longing, the sauna, the sky, always those children racing past her along the canal, the rolling to the left, to the right, always a thin ashen grease on her white lace curtains, always more rust on the hollow rods, and the bodies of the doves, still warm, to be picked up—inert—and carried to the box with the tight-fitting lid by the door, which he will remove and return to her, clean and empty.

Yes, she replies to him. I think so.

six

She picks out the black whorled letters on the envelope. She cannot read her husband’s writing. But it is a hallowed note, she knows, like the tomes of monks or millionaires. She will not smudge it. Mashed peas for the little Kretschmar in her hand. The maypole twirls through the open door, a wreath of green limbs twisted around its girth. More peas for the little Kretschmar, who loves them, the gruel thick and warm in his narrow throat.

Later, she walks the envelope to the post. The little Kretschmar in his basket at her waist, covered in a tea towel.

An old man bicycles past, nose like an old, dull pickle, his dog a fluff of brown in a wire cage. She waves at him, ashamed of the little Kretschmar, who must instead be hidden behind a tea towel.

seven

The little Kretschmar sleeps. His sleeping is much like his waking: still, quiet, solemn.

He is a bundle of scent and heat. A thin, warm mush enters him, and later a thin, warm mush departs from the other end. He has no legs.

His chest rises and falls. Along his one arm, angles takes shape: an elbow, a finger, a wrist, a shoulder. Along his other arm, just a stump.

Each day, a little more hair creeps cautiously from his scalp, a scruff of blond and fur.

eight

The Lutheran churchyard, the small, white pebbles, and sympathy at last, and the man with the nose like a pickle lets his thin, brown dog hunt and hustle through the graveyard.

There is a radiance to a mother after delivery, no matter how late it is in coming. She stands in black shoes, in black stockings, in a black skirt and blouse. Her hat is black. Her lips are somewhere in her face, carved like an opening of some kind, like a gate swinging open and shut on black iron hinges.

He shuffles his feet in the stout spring dirt, looking for salt in the clods that clump against his new leather shoes.

The fee has been paid to the Führer’s doctor, and another to the private secretariat, for the pills and the falsified certificate and finally for the plot.

There are watering cans, a kind of galvanized aluminum, in dull clusters under the faucet. They are clean, and do not rust, and wait eagerly for the honorable duty of irrigating the clever petunias and weeping marigolds.

In the evenings, on the way home from work, every woman in the town who has lost someone will wait in line for a watering can, and kneel with the thin brass brush from the bronze box to clean and polish a grave in honor of the memory of the dead. It is normal, and the men will wait with cigarettes and house keys.

If the sky is lavender, it is the only part of this village that is not normal.

The little Kretschmar is better this way, where he cannot roll to the left or to the right, where he is in a box with a lid that fits tight, where next spring the tender greens will gather at its seams.

.

About ten years ago, the artist Amy Cutler and I met over e-mail to talk about the idea of collaborating. As part of the discussion, she sent me links to her work, and I can still recall the joy I felt at her precise, vividly memorable images. Amy’s work was new and familiar at the same time—I’d never seen paintings like these, but I also felt like maybe I’d dreamed them just the night before. I recognized but had never met these forward-thinking, innovative women going about their tasks. The beauty, for me, comes through in the care of Amy’s brush, and the craft—how gently and fully she makes these scenes and women. There’s a clear honesty in her view and a sense of solemn community that I would call beautiful.

We didn’t collaborate at that point, but rather years later, due to an assignment from BlackBook magazine: I was given the wonderful job of picking one of Amy’s paintings to use as the inspiration for a story. It was an incredibly fun story to write, because so much of the narrative work had been done for me, thanks to Amy’s painting—I had to find the reason behind the moment, but the gravity and the power of the image were already in place.

I teach a class on fairy tales, and once a semester, I bring in classic fairy tale visuals, such as Gustave Doré’s wood engravings, Arthur Rackham’s illustrations, modern graphic-novel interpretations of the Brothers Grimm, and Amy’s first book. My students pore over her work with fascination, and usually someone is still looking at it after I’ve told them to stop. She is a storyteller, but in the most unusual way, and as a writer, it is pure pleasure to see the moments of crystallized narrative in her work—the worlds that are just next to our own but hers alone. Her latest book, Turtle Fur, a glorious collection of paintings, drawings, prints, and documentary photographs of a sculpture, came out in May from Hatje Cantz.

Aimee Bender: Your work has a real voice, and I think I’d be able to spot an Amy Cutler painting in a lineup. Do you remember a point when your work started to look like “yours” in this way?

Amy Cutler: In 1994, I was in my third year at Cooper Union. I took part in an exchange program at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. Leaving art school in New York allowed me to tune out the voices of professors who were pushing me to “loosen up” and experiment. I knew what I wanted to do, but the rigorous course load was a burden. I just needed time to paint and follow through with an idea without the interruption of weekly critiques and term papers.

Living in Germany came with welcomed isolation. I spoke and understood very little German. I was ten years younger than the majority of the students. I met with my professor twice during my yearlong stay. I brought all of my oil painting supplies and was looking forward to some solitary studio time. At the time, I was painting large- and small-scale canvases. I realized about two months into my stay that the fumes from the oil paint and the solvents were making me sick. This was when I abandoned oil and started using gouache. It was also around this time that I started looking at Persian miniature painting, fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, and medieval art. So the switch in mediums was in line with my interests.

Being in a foreign place where everything seemed strange allowed me to approach my work from a new perspective. The colors, sounds, and personal interactions were all completely new. I had chosen Germany because of my love of fifteenth-century paintings, the language, and my fascination with products made in Germany. Frankfurt also happens to be very close to Hanau, the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm.

AB: Was the closeness to the Grimms’ birthplace purposeful or incidental? Did fairy tales play a direct role in your decision to go to Frankfurt?

AC: I didn’t know about their hometown prior to going, but it was a fascinating bit of trivia to learn. The body of work I made during my stay was based on the fairy tales that I remembered from my childhood. I focused on my memories of the stories. I was interested in the inaccuracy of my memory. Pigs—or should I say pork—were everywhere in Germany. I was a vegetarian at the time, so I spent a lot of time trying to avoid them. As a result, pigs surfaced as a predominant theme in my work. The story of the three little pigs became really interesting once I discovered the class system in their housing scheme. The wolf that terrorizes the pigs also knows Little Red Riding Hood and has eaten her grandmother. Both Maria Tartar and Bruno Bettelheim’s views of the wolf as a threat to Little Red Riding Hood’s innocence . . . But I began to see the wolf’s actions as a tale of retribution. I revisited these stories at face value, taking into account their lack of character development. We know only a day in the life of these characters. I wanted to reenter their world and explore their habits and lifestyles.

AB: “The class system in their housing scheme”—what a good point. How did that impact what you were doing?

AC: It was a window into character development. The pig in the brick house has the clear advantage over the others.

AB: And what was the nature of the shift in your work, if there was a shift at that time?

AC: During that time, I experimented with removing the background in the paintings. I was struggling with the competition between the foreground and the background. The background would often dilute the strength and the intention of the narrative. By eliminating the background, I was able to give the figures in the paintings space to breathe. They were now able to move freely and adapt to whatever the viewer brought forward. I thought of them as performers on a stage.

I wasn’t interested in telling a whole story in one painting. I saw it more as a snapshot from a grander scenario.

At this point I also began to make three-dimensional versions of objects in my paintings. The first piece I made was a dress for a five-headed girl from the painting Villi. I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time, so most of the sewing was done by hand. I remember attaching the five collars of the dress during a long train ride. The act of working on the dress in a public place brought the fantasy full circle: in my mind, if there was a woman sewing a dress for a child with five heads, then by default there had to be a child to wear it.

AB: Yes—then the item suggests a whole story; I really respond to that. You
mentioned the inaccuracy of memory, specifically with fairy tales. How do the tales live in your mind? Are they visual? How were you told these tales as a kid?

AC: The fairy tales of my childhood came in the form of 45s. The records came inside a seven-by-seven-inch illustrated book. The pictures were very stylized and had a truly 1970s vibe. The recordings had several narrators. I can still hear the voice of the toad as he commanded Thumbelina to be his wife and the xylophone that counted out his creeping steps.

My fascination with inaccuracy started as an investigation of psychological archetypes. I was interested in the reasons why I chose to remember certain things and why I had specific unconscious associations with certain people or animals. I was also interested in how these archetypes translate across various cultures, as they all seemed very deeply rooted. The fairy tales served as a starting point to this series of paintings, yet all signifiers were removed. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, wore a blue dress, and there were always more than three pigs. I was not trying to retell the fairy tales, so there was no obvious connection once the paintings were completed. Years later, I revisited the childhood-instant-recall theme when I investigated schoolyard clapping rhymes. In the age of computers, I feel as if a lot of my mind’s hard drive is packed with seemingly useless memories. Nostalgia aside, these excavations have provided a lot of inspiration over the years.

AB: Do you think the fact that you listened to the tales on records let you picture them differently?

AC: Yes. A good example might be my favorite illustration in the Thumbelina book that accompanied the record. Thumbelina has just nursed the swallow back to life and the two escape from the mole’s cave. She is portrayed as a bare-chested girl with a gigantic head, wearing a skirt made of flower petals, smiling, with her arms stretched out in glee, leaning back on the bird in flight. It’s reminiscent of a Bettie Page pinup photo—a very bland image that would have left a very mild impression if it hadn’t been accompanied by a high-pitched, nymphlike voice rejoicing about her new freedom. I’m unable to separate the two.

AB: You said you started thinking about Persian miniature painting while you were in Germany—where did you come across these paintings, and what do you think drives the appeal of the miniature?

AC: My interest in Persian miniatures began a year before my trip to Germany. There was a room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with many paintings in tabletop display cases that were supplied with magnifying glasses. Those miniature paintings were like time capsules: condensed worlds that were unlocked only when the viewer came close enough to discover all the details. It’s a private viewing experience. For the paintings to be admired properly, you have to focus on them without moving your body. The perspective in these paintings is usually flattened out and the multilayered story appears as one scene. I liken this flattening to an Audubon painting, where all the important identifiers of a bird are displayed at once. For me, looking at these paintings was about spending time with time. It became a form of visual meditation.

AB: We are let in on a special world somehow. Is that room still there?

AC: Sadly, no.

AB: And how about medieval art?

AC: Medieval art had the same draw for me. The difference was that I was familiar with some of the stories represented in the work—although my Sunday school lessons had not taught me about the absurd and grotesque demises of all of the protagonists. I was delighted with the frank simplicity that crafted very violent stories into small digestible paintings.

AB: You mentioned earlier that when you were developing your work in Germany, you were “struggling with the competition between the foreground and the background.” And just now you spoke about how when perspective flattens out, the story takes place in one scene. This is so interesting to me because you’re talking about narrative, but narrative in painting, and how we “see” a story. Like the five-headed dress indicating a five-headed child. Can you talk about one painting in particular and discuss what you mean?

AC: Castoroid Colony is a good example of a painting in which I have removed almost all of the information from the background and allowed the white of the paper to describe the setting. The composition is stacked and I play with scale to indicate perspective. The painting depicts a colony of extremely skilled bucktoothed women in the process of building a dam. With their teeth, they are able to fell trees and remove the bark. They use their long braids of hair to help with the transport of the logs. The composition of this painting is a bit like an ascending set of stairs that recedes back into space. The foreground is a cross section of an underwater scene, the middle ground gives an aerial view of the log transport, and then there is a horizontal plane with a vignette of women gnawing at the trees. This use of perspective was a very conscious decision to reveal all the steps of the making of a dam.

I trust that the viewer is able to follow and understand the spatial relationships within the painting without every detail having been laid out. I see the absence of a literally described place as an entry point into the painting. By moving away from a dense and restricted background, the figures are able to do all the talking, and the viewer becomes an active participant in the creation of this world.

AB:“Extremely skilled bucktoothed women”
—this really captures something for me. The work ethic of the women in your paintings is always amazing. They are so industrious. They are doing steady, tangible activity, often to make something intangible—weaving sun rays, or mending tigers, or hair-tying some bushes. Where do you think this sense of industry comes from?

AC: I think it comes from my fascination with anything that is meticulously crafted—things that are created by individuals with specifically honed skills. Preindustrial objects have a particular beauty that still carries the mark of the maker. I am especially drawn to methodical work that requires a lot of concentration. I find inspiration in the rhythm and repetition of the movements. There is this sense of ongoing drudgery that lends itself to introspection. I’m interested in the collective separation that keeps a room full of busy people divided. The fact that the body can be employed, but not necessarily the mind.

AB: Does this mirror the act of making the art itself?

AC: I definitely think so. The expressions on the women’s faces are often a bit stern. This is probably a reflection of my own facial expression while making the work. I try to enter the minds of the figures to channel what kinds of emotions will be expressed in their postures and gestures. The process for each painting begins the same way, with quick thumbnails that are then plotted out on larger paper. Once I have some idea of the composition, I then paint the faces. This step in the work could be considered my initiation.

The painting might remain in this state of floating heads until I understand what direction the characters want to go in. This is really my favorite part of the process, before my own repetitive mark making becomes labor. Larger areas of color are painted with a size 4 to a size 10 brush (roughly a quarter to a half inch in width) but the majority of the detail is done using a 6/0 size brush (similar in size to the tip of a toothpick). It’s a very slow and labor-intensive process.

AB: I don’t know if it’s possible to answer this, but are you consciously aware of why you always depict women?

AC: Yes, I am. A lot of my work comes from personal experiences, so using female figures seems like the natural choice. There has been a small sprinkling of men that have appeared in my paintings, but they are always overlooked. Recently someone suggested that men are not missing in my paintings; they merely don’t exist. This explanation seems quite plausible. A few years ago, I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. I love the idea of a fictional utopia of women who are very strong and self-reliant. I attended an all-girls school for six years. It certainly was not a utopia, just high school. But somehow, in retrospect, the absence of boys at school caused the girls to be stronger individuals. My memory of my classmates is more about their personalities and interests, rather than whom they dated or what they wore . . . uniforms definitely neutralized the fashion issue. Maybe that’s what it’s about, a clear and conscious singular identity.

Women’s clothing is also a fantastic vehicle for color. Most of my color palette is found in the textiles I depict. I use fabrics to create a subtext of meaning. Men’s clothing just doesn’t have that kind of flexibility. With women’s fashion, I am able to go wild and push the limits without it being the focus of the narrative.

AB: Since this is the Beauty issue, what do you find beautiful in a painting? Is beauty important to you in paintings?

AC: The notion of beauty in painting can be very irrational and is hard to define. I’ve always been drawn to paintings that have the ability to transcend. A painting that captivates is definitely beautiful, but the variables are inconsistent from case to case. I’m definitely drawn to a more eclectic and somber beauty. I tend to be fixated on things that reflect individuality. To narrow down my focus, I’ll give you examples from two of my favorite painters: Hans Holbein and Hans Memling.

I’m most likely to muse over an extraordinarily large nose in one of Holbein’s portraits or an empathic, exhausted gaze in a Memling painting. These are elements of beauty that appeal to me. Everything else seems to fall into place after those initial seductions. Holbein and Memling are both phenomenal painters and are highly skilled in rendering the human form, but what they both also accomplish is the transcendence of time. As you stand in front of their paintings, you travel back in time. These paintings are just pieces of painted wood, but they are surrounded by a timeless romanticism. Somehow, the soul of the sitter is still present. It’s not about a hyperrealism but an astute attention to detail and balance. You can feel a ghostlike presence that seems like a portal to the distant past. My response every time is always wow. I’m always dumbfounded by their beauty.

AB: Can you recall a moment when you were just going about your life and you came upon something and thought to yourself, Ah! That is beautiful.

AC: Several times I’ve been asked why I paint such ugly women and it makes me laugh. Maybe I should be offended, but I accept it as recognition of my appreciation for unconventional beauty. Much of a painting’s narrative intrigue would be lost if I conformed to what is considered ideal beauty. Imperfection acknowledges the human experience, and that’s what I find interesting. Beauty is found in the details of the receding hairlines and the sagging breasts.

I’ve gone through periods where I’ve been fascinated by a certain type of nose, mouth, or posture. I will seek out a certain type of nostril while riding the subway. It’s a bit like bird-watching. I’m always thrilled by the variety. I rarely work from any kind of reference, so this type of feature hunting is essential to my character development. There is so much wisdom and biography found in an aquiline nose. Prominent bridges, twists, and bumps hold my attention, whereas a generic nose usually has no story to tell. It’s instinctual to seek out symmetry and sameness. When we don’t find it, the imbalance becomes so striking.

AB: I would love to see that certain type of nostril! There’s one more area I’d like to address here. Tiger Mending is a painting I love a lot and know very well; years ago, BlackBook paired us together and asked me to pick a painting of yours to base a story on, and I chose Tiger Mending. I had such a great time imagining the story that led up to the moment captured in the painting. You’ve mentioned elsewhere that a Persian miniature was the starting point for this piece—what was it?

AC: I was looking at a book of Mughal paintings and I came across Akbar Slays a Tigress That Attacked the Royal Entourage, an illustration by Basawan from the Akbarnama (1590–95) that depicts the violent slaughter of a tigress and her cubs. The work venerates this heroic act. But to me, it represented a battle over territory and it made me think about the aftermath and the casualties of war. It was 2003, and the United States had just invaded Iraq. NPR was playing in the background. I was listening to one thing and looking at another that in some way were the same. I guess this is where I applied my utopian bandage. I drew an image of peaceful women putting the pieces back together. Tiger Mending was first conceived as an etching. Four women came to stitch the tigers back together, while, off on the horizon, the “heroes” on horseback triumphantly wield their sabers in the air.

I created the painting months later. I changed the composition and decided to remove the figures from the horizon. I imagine that your “Tiger Mending” story would have been much different if you had seen the etching.

AB: I think so, though I’m sure there are hints and layers of the etching in the painting that still impacted how I saw it. Have you referenced the Mughal paintings again?

AC: No, that was the only time I directly responded to a specific painting. But the tigers did return to my painting in 2008. I was looking through some old sketches and came across a drawing of a woman collecting stripes from a tiger’s back. Realignment was the result. Then, recently, I reread your “Tiger Mending” piece and was surprised to find that I had taken the idea from a line in your story: “The fur was matted and the stripes hung loose, like packing tape, ripped off their bodies . . . She smoothed the stripe back over.” I was so embarrassed that I had forgotten where the image came from, but at the same time I was very excited because it seemed like a conversation between my painting and your story.

AB: I love that—the back and forth happening on its own. The whole discussion, then and now, has been such a satisfying experience for me. One more thing—the image is also a tattoo, right? What a great statement, for your painting to be reproduced on someone’s body.

AC: Yes. Very recently, images of two Tiger Mending tattoos surfaced online. I was so grateful they were actually labeled Tiger Mending or I would have never found them. I was blown away. First, just by the fact that they exist, and then by their beauty. Akbar’s hunting expedition took place in 1561, and in 2010 one of the tigers reappears on someone’s body. I love the idea that these tigers have traveled so far and have meant something different to each person they encounter. In many ways, they have been brought back to life by the story that evolves as it moves forward . . . open-ended.

I disembark the train at Bridgehampton on the coldest morning yet this winter. As I make my way down the platform, tote bags full of his books, I spot him, standing at the top of the stairs, hands in pockets, shoulders squared, wearing dark sunglasses. I wave a hand but he remains still. Embarrassed, I fix my eyes on the concrete, hurrying toward him. When I come within a few feet, I see that he’s relaxed his posture, and we each reach out a gloved hand. “Well,” he says, doing a kind of mock grouchy-old-man, “it must be you.”

A year after my first correspondence with James Salter, we are finally meeting. Later that night, when I return to New York City for a faculty holiday party, my colleagues and I will laugh as a few share crushing stories of encounters with elder writers whom they’d admired: venerable poet X grumble-coughing at one young poet after he’d expressed affection for a particular poem; novelist Y drunkenly scolding a (now Pulitzer Prize–winning) essayist for interrupting his intermission at the ballet.

But James Salter is nothing but polite, if a bit subdued, as he drives me the quarter mile from the station to his Hamptons home. Behind the wheel of an old compact Benz that seems as fitting to his person as his wool pants and navy blue parka, he asks me about the train ride and comments on the weather. It occurs to me only later, on the dark ride back to the city, that he may have been as nervous as I was.

The house is a simple, light-drenched cottage that he and his wife, Kay, built in 1985, after renting a few different houses in the area. (These were the early years of his second life, with a second wife twenty-some years his junior.) It is a house in which I feel immediately comfortable—spacious but thoughtfully proportioned, tidy but not immaculate. The walls are lined with bookshelves, but not all of them, and not in the imperious way I’ve seen in other writers’ homes, as if the books preside over the people.

Kay Salter appears, fresh and brisk, and welcomes me with a smile and handshake. She is a warm host, taking my coat, offering tea, asking me about my novel and my teaching. A journalist and playwright, Kay tells me that she is working on her first novel and that she commutes to the city often, as she will this morning, making use of a pied-à-terre as a writing office. “So he can have the solitude here,” she says, and I remember something from an interview about his preferring a completely empty house.

Thanks very much for your essay, which I just read, a bit late—apparently we’re deeper in the woods here than I thought . . .

I agree with the comments about Hemingway always writing about sex, or something to that effect, meaning it was a subtext. He wrote a startlingly sensual English, very male and very sensual, alive to the senses, and sex, as we like to call it, is sensationally alive, both in the flesh and/or in the mind. I don’t like Hemingway, in part because he looms and also I don’t like the man. He’s a type you run into.

Women have more or less tipped the cart over—you probably don’t realize that because you’re, I assume, just a kid—and some confusion is the result. I don’t mean that it shouldn’t have been tipped, there is no should or shouldn’t. I always liked Robert Phelps’s citation—he must have been quoting someone—first the flesh, then the spirit.

Again, with thanks. JS

We sit down to tea and talk for a while without pencil or paper, the digital recorder I’ve borrowed switched to the off position and nestled in a fold of the tablecloth between us. “Oh let’s not start that,” he’d said, “we’re just getting warmed up, we’re going to talk about you for a bit.” He asks about my book, how is it going with sales and so forth. I demur, not wanting to bore him with debut-novelist drama, though he nods gravely, knowing better than I the frustrations of literary publishing—having bounced from publisher to publisher over the years and bearing the “writers’ writer” label that must over time start to feel like a branding of one’s hide. The subject moves to teaching, which he did in spurts in the eighties at Iowa, Williams, and Alabama. “It can be enjoyable, but it was a lot of work; you earn your money. I don’t want to discourage you, I mean, it was glorious—the students were interesting, I met many writers, [Frank] Conroy brought everyone [to Iowa]. But your own writing? There was precious little writing going on. And that, in the end, is what you’re graded on.”

I notice a few books stacked at the end of the table and ask how he decides what to read these days. “These days? Well, let’s see . . . these days.” He says this in a way that makes clear his age—eighty-five years, with attendant fatigue—is central to “these days.” We talk briefly about Ivana Lowell’s memoir (“This is a good book”); essays by M. F. K. Fischer (“Not as good as I remember them”); and a library copy of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I ask him what he thinks of Diaz’s novel, and he says, “We were at the Institute Alliance Française for a panel on Jean Genet, and across the street there was a line all the way around the block. We asked the people—mostly young people—what they were waiting for, and they said Junot Diaz was speaking. That was impressive.”

It’s awfully kind of you to write. I am thirty-seven years old, so am not sure if that qualifies as a kid these days. I teach a fiction workshop . . . and I notice that a certain phobia of physical-sensual writing has crept in for literary women—a bubble-wrapping of their intellectually perceptive, emotionally remote female protagonists from sex, really anything sensual; as if the full-force entry of women into intellectual life has come at the expense of bodies. I like Tan Dun’s words: “If you are too sophisticated, you lose courage.”

Re: Hemingway, and in general, I am interested in how or whether you think the quality of the man and the quality of the work are related. And what “very male” means in writing, or “very female” for that matter. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The essay was called “Sex, Seriously: James Salter Trumps the Great Male Novelists.” Published in the online magazine The Millions, it was, ostensibly, my response to a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay by Katie Roiphe, “The Naked and the Conflicted,” in which she asserts that our twenty-first-century young literary men have lost their sense of sexual potency; that is, their belief in the power of sexuality to ignite, and to immortalize. “[I]nnocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex,” Roiphe wrote. “Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.” Her observations resonated, and I argued in my response that we should look not to Roth/Bellow/Mailer/Updike (Roiphe’s touchstones) for this lost potency, but rather to Salter.

The book—A Sport and a Pastime—appeared in our apartment about five years ago. My partner, J., reported that a friend of his, a frustrated corporate writer, had given him two of Salter’s books (the other was Light Years), saying, This is the kind of writer I want to be and endowing them with a kind of tragic longing. J. seemed to avoid the books as if they were contagious; I decided I had to read them.

It’s been said of John Cheever that, as a teacher, he had one of two words for you when he read your work: Yes or No. With Sport, for me, there wasn’t much else to say but Yes. Even more striking was the sense while I read that I should be repulsed, that it was a book I should find objectionable. As a woman. This is pornographic. This is misogynistic. But I did not. Oh, no. Not at all.

One legacy of the novel may be that it features, as Chris Offutt wrote in a 2004 interview with Salter in these pages, “the greatest anal sex scene in literature.” I prefer a different assessment, from the 1967 New York Times review: “Arching gracefully, like a glorious 4th of July rocket, [Sport] illuminates the dark sky of sex. It’s a tour de force in erotic realism . . . a continuous journey of the soul via the flesh . . . This is a direct novel, not a grimy one. Salter celebrates the rites of erotic innovation and understands their literary uses. He creates a small, flaming world of sensualism . . . We enter it. We feel it. It has the force of a hundred repressed fantasies. And it carries purpose: Salter details lust in search of its passage into love.”

But really I prefer, simply, Yes.

Salter’s short stories are perhaps his most masterful work. In Dusk and Other Stories the prose is superfine, more demanding; Europeanist, in both subject matter and sensibility. The stories in Dusk (written between 1967 and 1987) are populated by peripheral artists, or otherwise not-quites, compelled to wander Europe, longing for greatness and purity, the romantic and the brutal. (“Europe gave me my manhood or at least the image of it,” Salter once wrote.) Many of the stories were written while Salter lived in Aspen, in the midst of a divorce and building a new life, his own wandering days behind him; yet there is a rawness in the stories, the same sensual force of Sport. The protagonists of Dusk may be lost and longing, but the pulse of desire throbs—inexorably, consolingly.

A second collection, Last Night, was published in 2005. In these chilling stories, the lush eros of Sport and Dusk and of his 1975 novel, Light Years, is displaced by the starker truths of life lived. Whatever had compelled the sexes to erotic celebration and tenderness, quests for greatness and purity, is now submerged; foregrounded is the tragedy of isolation, male from female, self from self. What persists is the compulsion of desire—desire as all we have and all we are. The prose leans toward severe, and yet every word seems to burn and glow, an argument for beauty as bare essence. As a rendering of post-romantic adulthood, Last Night is a lamentation. There is brutality in these stories, both quiet and feral, but we feel it ultimately as loss—for all of us, male and female, anyone who has known or longed for sensual abandon, anyone who has loved to love.

As to the quality of the man and the quality of the work, there must be a connection, though perhaps not of the obvious kind. Men with what might be thought of as faults or vices can be wonderful writers. Alcoholics aplenty, thieves, murderers, slave owners are among them. Philanderers too numerous to count. So it is not the virtue of Sunday school or even the Ten Commandments, although I myself admire the cardinal virtues—prudence, fortitude, justice, and mercy.

As to “very male,” I think male characteristics are too well known to discuss. I was looking for a wonderful sentence from Isak Dinesen that succinctly describes it, as I recall, but couldn’t find it.  [ He later e-mailed it to me: “The love of woman and womanliness is a masculine characteristic, and the love of man and manliness a feminine characteristic.”]

Are there great women writers? Are they different than men? Oh, yes.

“Well, then,” he says. “I suppose we should get to it. What do you have on your agenda?”

Despite the eight typed pages of questions, follow-up questions, and page references with which I’ve armed myself—and despite the hospitable kindness of my hosts thus far—I grow nervous and begin to wish Kay (who’s now en route to the city) were still in the house. I’d watched recent interviews in which Salter seemed irritated by his interviewers’ lines of questioning, and, with the recorder now on, I watch him lean back in his chair, and I perceive a kind of armor flip into place like a welder’s mask. Acutely aware of my inexperience as an interviewer (Remember, it’s an interview, not a conversation, a journalist friend warned; Just think of it as a conversation, advised another), I proceed cautiously—perhaps too cautiously.

Half an hour in, I feel him begin to stonewall. Precision is all for James Salter, and if the semantics are mushy, if the question fails to get at something true, it is simply not to be answered. This morning he is prone to silent staring—a look somewhere between doubt and weariness—rubbing his hands over his face, cutting himself off in midsentence with “Let’s just leave it at that,” and responding curtly to my questions with “That depends” or “Possibly.”

By noon, I’m not sure what we’ve covered, if anything. There is too much to read and not enough time, on this we agree. He has been working on a new novel for almost ten years; he struggles with energy and productivity. He invokes Roth’s hyperproductive daily regimen, the one Roth (eight years Salter’s junior) himself has described. “Can this be so?” Salter asks, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” The tone of the conversation slips intermittently into futility; the specters of resignation and mortality hover. I’ve asked him about the “manhood” he found in Europe (“Ah, but I’m a romantic writer, remember—I don’t really know what that means”); about this word pure, which infuses all of his work (he laughs off the question, referencing Chekhov’s protestation that asking What is life? is like asking What is a carrot?). I’ve come here to talk about these things—about romanticism, about manhood (and womanhood), about purity—but how? How to talk about them?

Oh God, I think. I am Richard Yates’s Frank Wheeler, talking talking talking the hell out of that which is better left unspoken, better lived and experienced than discussed.

I take a breath. The jig may be up. Really, I am no interviewer. Okay, well: what, then, is something true?

The truth . . . is that I have been watching an awful lot of Mad Men and this notion that we—the Gen X literary set—watch it to celebrate how far we’ve come, how progressive our gender identities, is, I feel, hogwash. Salter is an octogenarian white male, a former fighter pilot who flew in Korea; who wrote an erotic tale, a hundred repressed fantasies, of rich boy and poor girl; whose descriptions of women almost invariably offer legs, breasts, hair, shoulders, skin to evoke character essence. There is nothing “right” about my looking to him (or to Don Draper, for that matter, who would be just Salter’s age if he were both real and alive today) for insights into sexual essence. At the same time his stories and novels move me—as a woman—in ways I have struggled to understand.

He is also—I remind myself now—a man who has deeply, expressively loved another man and shared that love, in the form of their unedited letters, with the world.

Dear J Salter:

I received Memorable Days, which I’ve finished and have been rereading in sections over the past weeks. Thank you for sending it. I read it hungrily, and with envy . . . the notion of a “pure voice” in one’s life moved me . . . It’s a rare and beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing it with us.

His correspondence with the writer and critic Robert Phelps began in 1969. “These are love letters,” writes Michael Dirda in the foreword to Memorable Days (2010), a collection of some two hundred letters over twenty years; and indeed they are. Phelps dwelt in literature, and in the wonder and heartbreak of a writer’s life. “I saw in him the angelic and also something, call it dedication, for which I yearned,” Salter wrote in his memoir, Burning the Days (1998). “I longed to know him . . . I have never passed [the Chelsea Hotel] without remembering [our first meeting] in the manner of a love affair.” Upon Phelps’s death in 1989, Salter wrote to his widow, Rosemarie Beck, “I loved Robert. I love him still and always. He was an anchor to seaward for me and one of the few pure voices of my life.” To Phelps himself he wrote: “You are my beacon, my idea of life,” and “Yours is the correct life.”

The bulk of the letters is literary talk—books, plays, screenplays, stories, films, travel plans (and fantasies), personalities, and gossip; to read them is to take a whirlwind tour through a pantheon of the great uncanonized—Colette, Glenway Wescott, Cyril Connolly, Marcel Jouhandeau, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Brigid Brophy, Violette Leduc, Cesare Pavese, Paul Léautaud. Phelps introduces to Salter, the late-blooming autodidact, “some of the marvels of my life,” and Salter is for Phelps (a literary Europhile) the American romantic he’s been missing. “The most romantic writer we have,” Phelps wrote. “You restore a sacredness to profaned aspects and relations . . . you are tender, and unperverse.” A free-flowing passion infuses these exchanges, an amorous purity, to use Salter’s word. I miss you. I am lonely. I love you. The light is where you are, Robert. “From the first moment, I recognized him for what he was,” Salter wrote in Burning the Days, which was to say, bisexual, and living a painful double life. (While Phelps never detailed these struggles explicitly, according to Salter, they were “not difficult to perceive.”) But the love between the two men in these letters is not in the sexual realm; it is somewhere else—somewhere in the light where art and longing meet.

I begin again. “When we first corresponded . . .”

“Yes.”

I remind him of the Roiphe essay. Yes, yes, he remembers. What, I ask, does he truly perceive in all this evolution of the sexes?

He takes a moment, genuinely ponderous, to consider, then speaks slowly, deliberatively. “It’s very hard to look at culture qualitatively—this is better, this is not better. The culture is what exists. You say take it or leave it. This is it. The same thing applies to these questions about masculine, feminine. Sex. Homosexuality. I mean all of this has evolved. Is it good? I don’t think the question fits the situation.”

“Okay, forget good or bad,” I say. I think now about what brought me here—lamentation, the compulsion of desire, lust in search of its passage into love. “What about . . . real? What about . . . loss?” I swallow a ridiculous lump in my throat. Is my voice shaking? What is it in his work that does this to me, and why is it so difficult to speak of?

“I think your young men have made a real attempt to accommodate themselves to . . . women’s freshened ideas of themselves. Is this a permanent situation? I don’t know.”

I don’t either. “Is anything a permanent situation?”

“Well. That’s a good question. Is anything permanent.” But he says it like a statement, followed by a thick pause. Then a burst of energy, somehow fierce and reluctant at once. “Yes, yes, sure. I believe . . . the sexes are permanent.

“Now, you’re going to say, Oh for Christ’s sake, this guy is stuck with archaic ideas. But I believe . . . maleness and femaleness are qualities, there is something unadulteratable . . . there is something that cannot be . . . something immutable at the center of them.

“And I think this is so obvious.

“But, I understand this attitude isn’t acceptable, and I don’t express it. Is it in things I write? Well, I suppose so, inevitably, since it’s what I feel. You can’t write . . . you can’t be false to your own feelings. Are these ideas crude and . . . no. No, I believe . . .”

He detours now into praise of a female writer—Nora Ephron—whose pluck and wit he finds appealing (“She has unclouded vision”), particularly regarding the sexes. This lightens the mood, but not much.

How strange, I think, how remarkable: the difficulties, all the shadows, in affirming an unqualified heterosexuality.

“You know, I think I’ve already belabored this. I don’t think it merits that much.” Let’s be careful now, he seems to be saying. Let’s be truthful. Okay, I think; let’s. It merits something. We both believe it does.

If it is possible to be exhausted and energized at once—well, of course it is—here is where we’ve arrived. It’s after 1:00 PM. The orange recorder light blinks.

“Well, then,” he says. “Shall we go have some lunch?”

The day has brightened and warmed. Before lunch, we’ll tour the Hamptons in the Benz. “Since you’ve hardly been here,” he says. “I’ll show you around a little.”

Driving through a tony section of East Hampton, our next subject seems inevitable. “I want to ask you about something you might find . . . disagreeable,” I say.

He nods, pulls down the sun visor.

“I want to ask you about money.”

“Ah, but why are you considering this disagreeable?”

Something opens up now, a looser, easier feeling. Maybe it’s the sun, the feeling of motion and speed. I’d hesitated to ask, but on some level I sensed we have in common this relationship to privilege—close up but never fully inside.

As we drive, he speaks at length, goes into a kind of storytelling mode:

“Money. Well. At the military academy, the big figures were not the ones who had money. There was no money; it’s like the priesthood. Those were formative years for me. The heroes at West Point were the athletes. That was influential, unquestionably, to me, because I wasn’t a football player, or a boxing champion, and I wanted that feeling of manhood. That was why I became a fighter pilot, you know.

“And in the air force there was also no money. So that lasted a long time in my life. I was thirty-two when I left the military. Now, when I got out, this was a different world. Suddenly money was important. It’s the trump card in a lot of ways. But I never quite accommodated myself to that, I suppose. Because all of that time, the twig was bent a different way.

“Now, intellectually, I understand all this, but I still have trouble with it. So I’ve never been tremendously comfortable with rich people. Why is that? I don’t know. Some of my good friends have been rich, but that aspect of it is difficult for me. It represents a certain kind of achievement and position that is inaccessible to me. And whatever achievement I have is invisible to them.”

“And yet you’ve managed to live a very rich life,” I say. “You have three homes [in Aspen, Bridgehampton, and Manhattan]. You’ve traveled the world; you’ve lived in Europe. You’ve enjoyed fine things. Somehow you’ve disentangled ‘riches’ from ‘wealth’ in your life.”

He laughs. “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that.” I sense that he enjoys my comment, even as he begs off. “I wasted a lot of time, making money.” He is referring to the fifteen years he spent writing screenplays (including the acclaimed Downhill Racer, with Robert Redford), the majority of which were never produced. “And I mean, we don’t drink great wines; we don’t travel first class. I remember Joan Didion said in an interview, ‘I would love to go off and go to the Bristol Hotel.’ Well, see, that’s another life.”

We drive down a wide street lined with English-style hedges and, behind these, mansions, one after the other. “They call this Gin Lane; you can imagine why. The parties.”

“And you are invited to these parties?”

“Oh, no. I must be giving you a wrong impression. This isn’t our world at all.”

It’s an odd statement, given that he’s just pointed out the former homes of John Irving (a friend) and George Plimpton (who first published Sport), along with the house of Jean Kennedy Smith’s (also a friend). “You said you considered Robert Phelps’s life to be glamorous . . .”

“Well, I was intrigued by how well he was connected to a lot of things that seemed galaxies away from me—Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times. That was rather glamorous, I thought; and doubly glamorous because he was threadbare, he was simple, himself. He had certain elegant tastes—he had velvet trousers, he liked Tanqueray, he knew something about the forks on the table; but as he admitted readily, he came from, wherever it was, a small town in Ohio.”

“But didn’t you ever consider your own life glamorous? You were also having dinner with Saul Bellow, and Edna O’Brien. Susan Sontag was an admirer. You were hanging around with Robert Redford.”

We come to a stop at an intersection, and he turns to me, looks down over the rims of his sunglasses. “Ah yes, but I knew those people, you see.”

Lunch at 75 Main in Southampton. We talk of food, travel in France, holiday plans. I muse inwardly at the fact that he has ordered a burger and fries, and I am picking at an elaborate salad. He returns to the subject of what he is reading, specifically the memoir by Ivana Lowell, the adopted daughter of Robert Lowell and biological daughter of Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood. Lowell, he tells me, described being sexually abused by her nanny’s husband when she was six years old, not primarily as trauma, but rather as an episode of empowerment over an adult male. “I found that very interesting,” he says.

We revert to talk about teaching, his concern about the quality of what young writers are required to read, and about other writers of “my generation.” He asks about the Brooklyn literati, and I tell him that I am not much a part of that—that, like him, I am a literary late bloomer, and essentially an autodidact.

“Autodidacts, in my experience, tend to be unreliable,” he says. He looks away, tracing back some line of memory. He tells me that he never shows his drafts to anyone. “Too embarrassing.”

We pass on dessert but linger over coffee, and suddenly it’s two and a half hours later and near time for my return train. He pays the check, ushers me to the car, stepping aside to open doors, and we rush off. Back at the house, it becomes clear I won’t make the train, so we plan for the next bus, which leaves in twenty-five minutes.

“How are we doing then?” He gestures to my pile of questions, tea-stained pages scattered on one side of the table.

We sit again, still wearing our coats, and I flip through the pages. I realize we haven’t focused as much on Memorable Days as we’d planned when we initially arranged the interview, and I want to hear more about this love, this passion, between him and Robert Phelps.

“There is a lack of an appropriate word in English. The word love may be too suggestive of something I don’t think we’re referring to here. There is no component of sexual attraction in what I am expressing. Robert Phelps I can’t speak for, though I can say that I never felt I was desired. At the time I didn’t reflect about it. The letters are extemporaneous. It seems to me evident in the letters themselves that they have no self-consciousness. It’s what’s great when you first fall in love—you’re not thinking about it.

“His importance to me was his feeling about what writing meant, and what certain writers and books meant. There was no one like him in my life. I was by myself, in a figurative sense, and it was important to me to write to him. You write your best letters to people you feel will understand them. Just as in talk. He understood every word, and more.”

He has described Phelps as an angel, and as a saint. Perhaps James Salter himself is no saint in life—I suppose I know too much of his personal history to go in for that—but on the page, on Salter’s page, the mark of the autodidact seems to me that of a kind of chasteness. A solitary boy (only child), man (fifteen fish-out-of-water years in the military), and artist (“I was by myself; there was no one like him in my life”) cultivates a priestly reverence for words as both truth and consolation; he understands his vocation as beholding, apprehending, rendering—the holiness of a pure soul, the ecstasy of the flesh, and the desolation of estrangement from these.

A final question.

“Now, you’re going to say none of this is conscious, you can’t make any claims,” I say, sparring gloves up a little, mimicking his previous anticipation of my counterresponses. My question comes out long and winding; he is patient and even helps me along. We both toss out and trip over words like evolved, sensitive, advanced. The essence of my question is Where does it come from? —this finely tuned knowledge of the way in which the sexes are, must be, cannot be, so deeply desire to be. His higher-profile peers— Mailer, Roth, Updike, Bellow—have a way of notoriously alienating the female reader, sexually and psychically, with male protagonists of the piteous, wretched variety. Salter, not so. How? Why?

“Well, that covers a lot of ground, many years.

“As a boy, you are superior to and afraid of girls at the same time. Then, I suppose, you continue that way for quite a while. Then there comes a point in life when the superiority fades. Because you see and understand more. I think there’s always a little bit of fear. I mean you are simply not of the same stuff. You are a man. And she is a woman. Yes, a great deal is the same. But you can’t be made the same. There are fundamental, unalterable things that stand between you; I don’t mean things to be overcome, but that were placed there to make your . . . your absolute adoration of each other greater than anything . . . it just doesn’t go in a straight line. I mean, you’re afraid. Here, again, the word is not quite adequate—but you feel a trembling, and it’s not mere passion that makes you tremble.

“In the writing, it comes down to Will it be embodied somehow in what you’re writing? All writing is, in a sense, an approximation—that’s why I sometimes go to other books, Gogol, or Dostoevsky—you say to yourself, Ah, of course, it’s so simple. Just tell . . . the . . . truth. Can you do that? Try.

“But I don’t think I know more than anybody knows, really. In fact, there’s only a certain amount you can know, and I don’t know any more. If I did, it would be truly remarkable. I can’t believe that I know something that other people don’t know.”

I beg to differ, but not out loud. I think through my bookshelves: Rilke. Sherwood Anderson. Jack Gilbert. Cavafy. The romantic writers are fading into the past. And echt romantic—tremblingly sensual, direct, not grimy—truly rare.

The bus leaves in nine minutes and counting. As we gather papers and bags and keys, I ask—because I just have to ask—how it was meeting Matthew Weiner (the creator of Mad Men), who introduced Salter for the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award he received just a few weeks before.

“Well, he was as nice as could be. Open, intelligent.”

“I’m sure he’s read your books.”

“Well, no, he hadn’t. Or, he said his father had A Sport and a Pastime on a shelf where the children couldn’t reach it.”

Later, I watch a video clip of the introduction, which Salter himself didn’t see or hear, as he was backstage. Weiner confesses that, in preparation for the awards, he “placed [him]self in a Salter immersion program.” “The one thing that I’ve learned about James Salter over the last few weeks is that he is interested in the truth,” Weiner says. “His investigation of the desire or the ambition to be better, to be honest, to find love, to kill one’s enemies, to not be alone, is unflinching and brave.”

“Have you seen his show?” I ask. Salter lowers his chin, shakes his head gravely. I tell him that he might be hard pressed to find a literary writer under the age of forty who doesn’t watch it.

His eyes open wide in mock, and to some degree genuine, fascination. “Please, more.” In the car, we decide together that the appeal may be nostalgia for an apparent (glamorized) simplicity—each sex tightly and explicitly packaged. “Of course that had its own problems, you understand. It wasn’t Arcadia. And neither is this now. It’s just a different part of the thing. It may have an appeal because it looks simpler, because it’s past.”

In the dark, in the cold, on the shoulder of the Montauk Highway, we shake hands —“Well, the day went quickly,” he says, “It was a pleasure”—and I hurry onto the bus seconds before it pulls away. I scribble notes all the way back—notes of a most memorable day. The three hours flash by like no time at all.

The next morning, I receive an e-mail:

Dear Sonya, It was a long day for you. I hope the trip back was okay. Perhaps I was too dismissive of the idea that I know more than others about women, men, and their deep feelings regarding each other. It’s the “knowing” I have trouble with. I’ve jotted down a lot on the subject. I think I understand a lot of it. And, of course, I’m always drawn to it. I know I have a man’s point of view, but not exclusively. À bientôt. —Jim

In the mid-eighties—say, 1986—near the beginning of what we call the Culture War, I was contacted by a local newspaper and asked what I thought about “political correctness.” With some indignation, I responded, “It doesn’t exist. It is the invention of right-wing ideologues.”

As Jake says to Brett in the last line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, it was “pretty to think so.”

At about the same time, I was teaching an upper-division course in fiction writing at Illinois State University. The class had an unfortunate mixture of students. Half of them were male undergraduates interested exclusively in the creation of fantasy/science fiction. Their notion of the genre was depressingly adolescent, macho, and vulgar, more or less like them. The other half were assertively feminist/lesbian grad students. They were friendly, bright, and fancied themselves—armed as they were with two or three works of French feminist theory—to be on the cutting edge of . . . something.

Obviously, this was a mixture unlikely to produce happy results. The men deeply resented the women’s “theoretical interventions,” and the women could barely function they were so angry about the “masculinist” (as they’d learned to say) assumptions made by the men. Each class was one long sputtering of rage.

I concluded that the only possible solution to the problem was to meet separately with the two groups, and that’s what I did.

Meeting with those young men was misery, but my sessions with the women were only marginally better. I tired quickly of self-righteous polemics draped with the beer-soaked brown sheet of domestic melodrama. It was difficult for them to understand the fiction-making process as anything other than a platform for the aggrieved plaints of victims. Nevertheless, I thought enough of their native intelligence that I tried something unusual: I gave them a story of my own to read and comment on. I hoped that, at a minimum, they would see the usefulness and interest of moral ambiguity, and they’d have the author right there to account for it.

The story was “Metaphysics in the Midwest,” and its central character is an alcoholic adjunct professor at a community college who makes himself a sort of midnight guru for extracurricular seductions of his female students. The other plot element, a mostly surreal one, has to do with the professor’s relationship with a young boy with whom he plays a statistical baseball board game late at night, perched atop the boy’s bed, just beyond his mother’s ken. At the end of the story, the professor brings one of his students over to meet the boy, raising the full set of troubling sexual connotations such a scene invites.

When I arrived in class, there was a grim silence. Undeterred, I asked, “What did you think about the story?”

“We didn’t like the story.”

“Why?”

“We didn’t like the professor.”

“What do you mean you ‘didn’t like’ him?”

“He’s a child molester.”

Beyond missing the obvious fact that the professor is not an actual, living person, what they were most upset about was not that he is a child molester and a drunken betrayer of public trust, but that he is charming. His real threat is that he is trying to seduce the reader, in this case my feminist students. (A bad idea—I don’t know what he could have been thinking.) I explained as best I could that many works of fiction try to understand the inner life of morally dubious people. Iago?  Orestes? Richard the Third? Faust? Onegin? Don Juan? Conrad’s Marlow? Vronsky? Milton’s Satan, for God’s sake?

Nothing.

Scrooge?!

I even explained the theory behind such characters, “ironic distance,” as well as Keats’s call for poise before uncertainty, good old “negative capability.” But my students had no capacity for poise, and whatever I said only seemed to throw more suspicion over the entire Western narrative tradition.

Later, I was confronted by a colleague, a mentor to the women, who said, “A story like yours is not funny to people who have experienced sexual abuse themselves.”

To which I replied, simply, “Your students read like Stalinists.”

At last, I’d met the politically correct: they were the very people I worked among every day! I understood that their way of reading meant something bad for the rich wickedness of art, but I didn’t understand what, exactly, these women were a symptom of.

And then, nearly ten years later, I read Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, one of those spirit-restoring works that you read with gratitude simply because, for once, someone of superb intelligence and uncompromising honesty has bothered to tell you the truth.

Not the least thing for which I am grateful to Hickey is, as Roland Barthes puts it, the “pleasure of the text.” Hickey’s prose is mordant, witty, resourceful, and always fluid. He has that rare ability of the prose stylist: the nose for the right phrase delivered at the most telling moment. But Hickey’s rhetorical facility is not a thing apart from his argument; in fact, it is his argument.

Hickey argues that from romanticism through the 1920s, the West experienced “the greatest flowering of unruly images in the history of man.” This was “the longest sustained period since the Renaissance during which institutional and pedagogical control over the arts could be considered nominal at best.” What made this period wonderful, and wonderfully dangerous, was not beauty in some ideal sense, but beauty understood as the power to persuade, to seduce with suspect pleasures, to “destabilize the status quo,” and all, yes, in a market of ideas and images in which desire is the lingua franca. If you were a participant in this market, you did not want art because it was good for you, or because it could instruct you; you wanted it because it encouraged you to live in ways you couldn’t have imagined without it.

Enter the “therapeutic institution.” Hickey traces the origin of the therapeutic institution to a hierarchical command that art’s unruliness, its dissemination of desire, be brought under a novel form of control: tolerance. Art was not only tolerated, it was also funded, but not for its unruliness. It was given a place amid the limestone-and-marble world of the haut monde, in museums, universities, philanthropic foundations, and state art programs, and celebrated for its form. Unfortunately, in the process it lost its rhetorical power. Hickey writes, “Alfred Barr [appointed first director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929], in the service of inherited capital, proclaimed the absolute subordination of content to form . . . consolidated and activated the powers of patronage to neutralize the rhetorical force of contemporary images.”

Henceforth, art would concern itself only with form and the vague notion that art is somehow “good” for you, like a balanced diet. The works themselves, encountered on the authorized walls of the institution, are now aloof and no longer seek to persuade us of anything. Instead, they make demands of us—“acknowledge me!” “understand me!” “appreciate me!”—all while pretending that we are not even there, at least not as persons with whom any diplomacy is required. Nor does the work need to appeal to us for legitimacy; the very walls of the institution provide all the legitimacy required. Finally, sealing off any potential leakage of meaning, the work is policed, as needed, by “right-thinking creatures who presume to have cleansed its instrumentality with the heat of their own righteous anger.” In other words, my former students.

Happily, Hickey not only understands the therapeutic institution, he is also one of those necessary souls who remembers better reasons for the presence of art among us. For Hickey, art is “never not advertising and never apolitical.” What it advertises and what makes it dangerous is the uncomfortable fact that it uses its pleasures, and its perversions, to valorize social options so that the rest of us might live. His main example is Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of gay extremity (anal fist fucking, etc.) in his X Portfolio. At the end of his discussion of Mapplethorpe, Hickey asks, What does art seek? He answers:

[P]leasure and control—but deferred, always deferred, shunted upward through concentric rituals of trust and apprehension, glimmering through sexual, aesthetic, and spiritual manifestations, resonating outward from the heart of the image through every decision to expand the context of its socialization, suspending time at every point, postponing consummation, and then, suddenly—at the apogee of its suspense—swooping back down, circling rapidly inward upon an image now flickering in wintry glamour at the intersection of mortal suffering and spiritual ecstasy, where the rule of law meets the grace of trust.

Now, that’s rhetoric.

Toward the end of the semester, one of the feminist/lesbian graduate students came up to me and said that I’d at last persuaded her of something. “You’ve shown me that I’m not an artist. I’m a propagandist,” she said.

I smiled and offered no objection to either her insight or her new occupation.