‘With the exception of the early Tropismes, all of Nathalie Sarraute’s books are now available in English. Thanks are due to her publisher and to Maria Jolas who, to quote Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, has put her work “into English of such verisimilitude that it seems merely orchestrated in another key.” Novels are rarely masterpieces, and this is as it should be; it is even rarer to find a translation that is perfect, and this, perhaps, is not as it should or could be.

‘When Nathalie Sarraute published her first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown, in 1948, Sartre, in an Introduction, placed her with such authors of “entirely negative works” as Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and the Gide of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, and called the whole genre “anti-novel.” In the Fifties, the anti-novel became the New Novel and Sarraute its originator. All these classifications are somewhat artificial and, if applied to Mme. Sarraute, difficult to account for. She has herself pointed out her ancestors, Dostoevsky (especially the Notes from Underground) and Kafka in whom she sees Dostoevsky’s legitimate heir. But this much is true: She wrote at least her first pair of novels, the Portrait and Martereau (1953), against the assumptions of the classical novel of the nineteenth century, where author and reader move in a common world of well-known entities and where easily identifiable characters can be understood through the qualities and possessions bestowed upon them. “Since then,” she writes in her book of essays, The Age of Suspicion, “[this character] has lost everything; his ancestors, his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garret with a variety of objects, down to the tiniest gewgaw, his sources of income and his estates, his clothes, his body, his face…his personality and, frequently, even his name.” Man as such is or has become unknown so that it matters little to the novelist whom he chooses as his “hero” and less into what kind of surrounding he puts him. And since “the character occupied the place of honor between reader and novelist,” since he was “the object of their common devotion,” this arbitrariness of choice indicates a serious break-down in communication.

‘In order to recover some of this lost common ground, Nathalie Sarraute very ingeniously took the nineteenth-century novel, supposedly the common cultural heritage of author and reader, as her point of departure and began by choosing her “characters” from this richly populated world. She fished them right out of Balzac and Stendhal, stripped them of all those secondary qualities—customs, morals, possessions—by which they could be dated, and retained only those bare essentials by which we remember them: avarice—the stingy father living with his homely, penny-pinching spinster daughter, the plot turning about her numerous illnesses, fancied or real, as in Portrait; hatred and boredom—the closely-knit family unit which still survives in France, the “dark entirely closed world” of mother, father, daughter, and nephew in Martereau, where the plot turns about the “stranger” who swindles the father out of the money he had wanted to save from the income tax collector; even the hero of the later work, The Planetarium, personified ambition (the plot is a familiar one describing his ruthless “rise in social space”).

‘Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self. This inner life—what she calls “the psychological”—is no less hidden from “the surface world” of appearances than the physiological life process that goes on in the inner organs beneath the skin of bodily appearance. Neither shows itself of its own accord. And just as the physiological process announces itself naturally only through the symptoms of a disease (the tiny pimple, to use her own image, which is the sign of the plague), but needs a special instrument—the surgical knife or X rays—to become visible, so these psychological movements cause the outbreak of symptoms only in case of great disaster and need the novelist’s magnifying lenses of suspicion to be explored. To choose the intimacy of family life, this “semidarkness” behind closed curtains with its Strindbergian overtones, as a laboratory for this kind of psychological vivi-section, instead of the couch, was a sheer stroke of genius, for here “the fluctuating frontier that [ordinarily] separates conversation from sub-conversation” breaks down most frequently so that the inner life of the self can explode onto the surface in what is commonly called “scenes.” No doubt these scenes are the only distraction in the infinite boredom of a world entirely bent upon itself, and yet they also constitute the life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going “eternally round and round,” where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached. Behind the lies and the pretenses, there is nothing but the vibrations of an ever-present irritation—a “chaos in which a thousand possibilities clash,” a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.’ — Hannah Arendt

 

_____
Further

Nathalie Sarraute @ Wikipedia
NS @ goodreads
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
Lessons with Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute interviewed
Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process
Her novels broke with fictional realism, examining human behaviour at its most secretive
THE USE OF SPEECH BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE
Nathalie Sarraute and England
On Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms and why we write
Being Beside One’s Self
Nathalie Sarraute Fiction and Theory
A propos de Nathalie Sarraute
L’objet lumineux dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et l’anti-roman
Le dialogue selon Nathalie Sarraute
Fiction et révélation : Vous les entendez ? De Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et la violence du texte
Eloge de NATHALIE SARRAUTE: Apprendre à dire l’indicible
Buy ‘Portrait of a Man Unknown’
‘PoaMU’ @ Internet Archive

 

_____
Extras

Nathalie Sarraute et le Nouveau roman en 1969

Nathalie Sarraute – pour un oui, pour un non

Un siècle d’écrivain 1995 Nathalie Sarraute

INVITEE : SARRAUTE

Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence

 

_______
Interview
from The Paris Review

You wrote your first novel at the age of twelve, then nothing until you were thirty-two. Why?

NATHALIE SARRAUTE: My mother wrote all the time, and to parrot her I wrote a “novel” full of all the platitudes I had read in love stories at the time. I showed it to a friend of my mother who said, Before writing novels one should learn to spell! Psychologists would see in that episode a typical childhood trauma. Actually, I think I did not write until much later because I had nothing to say.

At the lycée I liked writing essays because the subjects were imposed from outside. It made me realize how pleasant it was writing well turned-out sentences in a classical style—one was on equal terms with the classics, safe in their company. Whereas in my own writing I jump into a void, without any protection. I stumble and stammer, without anything to reassure me.

The traditional novel, with its plot and characters, etcetera, didn’t interest me. I had received the shock of Proust in 1924, the revelation of a whole mental universe, and I thought that after Proust one could not go back to the Balzacian novel. Then I read Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etcetera . . . I thought Mrs. Dalloway was a masterpiece; Joyce’s interior monologue was a revelation. In fact, there was a whole literature that I thought changed all that was done before. But as I said, I myself didn’t write because I had nothing to say then.

You started writing Tropisms when you were thirty-two; it is a short book of twenty-four pieces, yet it took you seven years.

SARRAUTE: It took five years, which is still long. Then I spent two years trying to find a publisher for it. Finally a very good publisher, Robert Lafont, who had discovered Céline and Queneau took it. He published it in the same collection as Queneau.

How did you arrive at the form for those first short texts?

SARRAUTE: The first one came out just how it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.

And why did you choose the name Tropisms?

SARRAUTE: It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.

How did you know what they were at the time, these tropisms? How did you know when you’d found one?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t always know, I might discover it in the writing. I didn’t try to define them, they just came out like that.

The tropisms often seem to work through a poetic sensibility.

SARRAUTE: I’ve always thought that there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry? Or Francis Ponge? It’s written in prose, and yet it’s poetry, because it’s the sensation that is carried across by way of the language.

With the tropisms, did you feel that it was fiction, did you wonder what to call it?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t pose myself such questions, really. I knew it seemed impossible to me to write in the traditional forms. They seemed to have no access to what we experienced. If we en- closed that in characters, personalities, a plot, we were overlooking everything that our senses were perceiving, which is what interested me. One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it. That’s what I tried to do in Tropisms.

Did you sense at the time that that was the direction your work would go?

SARRAUTE: I felt that a path was opening before me, a path that excited me. As if I’d found my own terrain, upon which I could move forward, where no one had gone prior to me. Where I was in charge.

Were you already wondering how to use that in other contexts such as a novel?

SARRAUTE: Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And afterwards, it was so difficult finding these texts; each time it was like starting a new book all over again; so I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace, as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all the tropisms that develop inside of them. That’s how I wrote Portrait of a Man Unknown.

In effect, one could say that all or most tropisms we might find in people could also be found in a single person.

SARRAUTE: Absolutely. I’m convinced that everyone has it all in himself, at that level. On the exterior level of action, I don’t for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The tropisms would seem to enter the domain of the social sciences as well.

SARRAUTE: Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. My work used to be entirely closed to people. For a long time people didn’t get inside there; they couldn’t manage to really penetrate these books.

Why do you think that is?

SARRAUTE: Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, or who is who. I speak right away of the essential things, and that’s very difficult. In addition, people have the habit of looking for the framework of the traditional novel—characters, plots—and they don’t find it; they’re lost.

That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.

SARRAUTE: There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings. If one takes an interest in what I do, one follows a sort of movement of dramatic actions that takes place at the level of the tropisms and of the dialogue. It’s a different dramatic action than that of the traditional novel.

You’ve said that you prefer a relatively continuous reading of your books. But all reading is a somewhat fragmentary experience. With a traditional novel, when one picks it up again to continue reading, there are the characters and the plot to situate oneself, to discover where one has left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?

SARRAUTE: I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, or know what he’s looking for, what he sees. I have no idea. I never think of him when I’m writing. Otherwise, I’d be writing things that suit him and please him. And for years he didn’t like it, he wasn’t interested.

Even after several books you weren’t discouraged?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. I was always supported, all the same, from the start. With Portrait of a Man Unknown, I was supported by Sartre. At the time Sartre was the only person who was doing something about literature; he had a review. My husband was also tremendously supportive, from the very start. He was a marvelous reader for me; he always encouraged me a great deal. That was a lot. It suffices to have one reader, who realizes what you want to do. So it was a great solitude, if you like, but deep down inside it wasn’t solitude. Sartre was impassioned by Portrait of a Man Unknown. So that was very encouraging. Then when Martereau was done, Marcel Arland was very excited and had it published with Gallimard. He was editing the Nouvelle Revue Française at the time. I always had a few enthusiastic readers. When Tropisms came out, I received an enthusiastic letter from Max Jacob, who at the time was very admired as a poet. I can’t say it was a total solitude.

Did Sartre or others try to claim you as an existentialist?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. He said, I had better write a preface for it, otherwise you won’t find a publisher, because he had become very famous by then. But despite his preface nobody wanted the book, and in the end a small publisher took it. It had only one little notice and was ignored. Later Sartre told me, If you persist in writing like this you’ll sacrifice your life.

Simone de Beauvoir, while she didn’t mind Sartre being surrounded by, or even having affairs with pretty actresses and secretaries, was said to be terribly jealous of women of superior intelligence who got close to him, and she broke your friendship. Is that true?

SARRAUTE: It is true that she separated us completely. But I heard that she couldn’t bear Sartre having an intellectual relationship with anyone, male or female. She caused the break with Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Camus . . . She wanted to be the only one.

But I liked Sartre very much. He had an attentiveness that denoted generosity, and I think he was warm. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was cold and distant, and as they were very close it colored his attitudes too, sometimes. He listened marvelously.

That might explain why some women were seduced by him, despite his physique.

SARRAUTE: I don’t know, as I certainly wasn’t one of them! I liked him as a friend, but found him physically one of the most repulsive men I had ever seen—it was terrible! The physical aspect of a man was always very important to me.

What about your own feminism?

SARRAUTE: I militated for the women’s vote in 1935. I have always been a feminist in so far as I want equal rights for women. But the idea of “women’s writing” shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous. Our brains are not different, but until now women were less educated, so they produced fewer works of art. People always compare women to each other. I was once asked at a conference what was the similarity between Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. I said that there was an enormous similarity: they were both called Marguerite! Otherwise there is not an iota of connection between them.

Some people have seen a feminist bias in your work.

SARRAUTE: Imagine! But I hardly ever think of gender when I write about my characters. I often prefer he to she because he is neutral but she is only female. In The Planetarium there is an old woman who is anxious because a door-handle has been badly put on her door. Well, a young man wrote to me and that “this old lady is me!” He explained that he had just been married and moved to a new apartment, and that he was just as worked-up about some details as my character. You can imagine how pleased I was!

Some time ago I received a doctoral thesis whose subject was woman’s condition in my novels! I was flabbergasted! But if I had wanted to discuss woman’s condition I wouldn’t have written the sort of books I have. Woman’s condition is the last thing on my mind when I write.

To return to tropisms, do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in that domain?

SARRAUTE: I don’t feel I have any imitators. I think it’s a domain that is too much my own.

Would it be possible to use the tropisms in a more traditional novel?

SARRAUTE: I don’t see how. What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all. What could that bring to the description of a character?

As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.

SARRAUTE: He disintegrates before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.

 

___
Book

Nathalie Sarraute Portrait of a Man Unknown
George Braziller

‘Sarraute’s first novel was turned down by Gallimard, despite a preface by Sartre, in which he used the word anti-roman (anti-novel). This is a pretty accurate description. The characters are not named and the plot is at best sketchy. Sarraute has said that the novel is an updating of Balzac‘s Eugénie Grandet, a novel about tight-fistedness and how it is passed from father to daughter. In Sarraute’s novel, an unnamed narrator tells the story of an also unnamed father and daughter, who are also miserly. Initially he struggles to tell the story. He is a writer and trying, like many writers, to do something new, to get away from the Balzacian approach to writing. However, when he is advised to stick to the conventional method which, of course, also involves naming his characters, the narrator considers this approach sensible. However, he then sees the Portrait of a Man Unknown in an art gallery. He has known this painting before. It is hidden in the worst lit part of the gallery and, of course, is a portrait of an unknown man by an unknown artist. This painting resonates with meaning for him, despite the outlines of the picture being vague. He then feels that he can describe the father and daughter, without having to fully portray them à la Balzac, in his own way. And this is what he does, watching them carefully, from afar or from close up. He spends his time following them and watching them but he is unable to get that sense of them that he seeks. In the end, the daughter introduces him to her fiancé, giving him a name (Louis Dumontet) and a description. He realises that the new ways have not worked and he is back to the old, traditional Balzacian novel. Can the new ways work? Sarraute asks.’ — The Modern Novel

Excerpt

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hopefully Mizu was looking in. Last I checked, French MUBI isn’t showing the ‘Twin Peaks’ marathon. French MUBI has a history of being very persnickety. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for ‘Shifty’. ** scunnard, Great, groovy, let me know whenever. Thanks, pal. ** Hugo, Yes, the game looks very up my alley. Even film editing/post-production is gruelling compared to novel writing, and with game building … I can’t even imagine. That is quite a dream. Sadly, as I’ve said, I almost never ever remember mine. They flee the second I become conscious. Well, yeah, he clearly wanted it to be read, but published? That seems like a stretch. Your thinking about words is real ‘writer thinking’, I think. I guess non-writers can aspire to diligent, meticulous expression too though. Thank you about ‘God Jr.’ I’m proud of it. I don’t … think I know that Emily Youcis video, but I will certainly check. Thanks. I like that squib from your poem. I admire it. Its costuming and rhythm are very impressive. I hope the totality pans out. Needless to say, ‘In Youth is PLeasure’ -> ‘Lord of the Flies’ meets ‘Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers’ causes the (my) mind to reel in the ecstatic sense. If you can pull that off, wow. Heavy encouragement. The second novel also sounds very promising. That’s exciting stuff and news. Thank you for my percolating. ** Carsten, Congrats on the submission. As always, keep part of yourself braced by the fact of how subjective and political the editorial selection can be, just in case. But great! Hopefully they’re wise. A well connected friend of mine who’s done TV and film work and who is in the LA art scene was our casting director. We told her what we were looking for vis-a-vis the characters, and she sent out feelers to people thought might be right. She sent us the info and pix of those who interested in trying out, and, if we liked someone, and if we didn’t already know them, we had them film a short video of themselves answering a set of questions. If we liked that, we met with them, talked, had them read a little dialogue. We were specifically looking in the LA art world for people. Almost every performer in the film apart from the extras are either artists, art students, art world scenesters, or the children of artists. That was our method. ** Bill, Oh, that is a coincidence. Ed could be very nice. He could also be very catty and backhanded, which no one is talking about right now for understandable reasons. We’re solidifying the SF visit right now. I should know early next week. But I hope to get to see you. Should be wholly possible. ** Steve, We go to LA on the 15th for a few jet-lag recovery days then up to SF. That’s fantastic news about your radio show! Holy shit, that’s great and exciting! Will you change the show in any way for the new context? ** Misanthrope, Good: your doctor lock-in. I gave in and am seeing a doc for my toe shit on Tuesday. I keep forgetting that now that I’m a legal, visa-toting Parisian I have French health insurance, i.e. free doctor visits, so I don’t have that excuse anymore. May we both stay at least 90% alive until we see the professionals. ** pancakeIan, Her writing is really terrific. And she’s wonderful in the Waters films too, of course. Of course I know Angelo Badalamenti from his Lynch scores. Amazing composer. Amazing that you knew him. RIP. I took a google peek at Celebration, and, yes, I get you. I have a friend in LA who’s a higher-up person in Disney’s publications division, and, for a few years Disney was going to force and her a ton of other Disney employees to move to Florida and live in some ‘magical’ community to be built for them, and she was horrified and going to quit, but then they changed their minds. Actually, the rent prices here are lower than in Los Angeles as well as in New York and London and probably a lot of other big cities. Not that it’s cheap to live here, mind you. ** Darbz 🎃, Pumpkin! Halloween is only months, albeit too many of them, away! Good thinking re: the bat SFX. Hm, maybe we’ll pop a few bats into our new film, come to think of it. Gosh, obviously I would love the Louis Wain post if finishing it becomes a pleasure for you. Of course you can include your collage! All the better. You can make the post however you like. Thanks!!! No, I only ever played a primitive normal piano when I was a kid. My parents had a Grand Piano in the house, so I did practice on that. Yeah, my weird pedo piano teacher. She was very strange. Um, my only recent awkward conversation was on instagram with some guy who was trying to pressure me to make a film with him, but I don’t know if that counts. I don’t think I have too many awkward conversations only because I usually just ask questions and listen if it’s not a good friend. No, your grammar made utter sense to me, but you know I aspire to read and write in strange grammar, so I’m not the best judge? ** julian, Hi, j. I like ghost stories too. I can get very addicted to those ghost investigation reality TV shows if I’m not careful. Oh, a friend was staying overnight at my house. We went downstairs in the middle of the night to eat because we had the munchies. There was this porthole window in the door between the kitchen and the kind of ‘pantry’ room in our house, and, when we were going back upstairs, which necessitated walking through the party to the stairs, we both saw this figurative smoke/fog thing walking around in the pantry through the porthole window, and it seemed to approach the window and look at us, and we freaked out and spent the rest of the night acting weird in the kitchen. Never saw it or anything like it again. And we were, let’s just say, very baked. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. I understand. I hope the negative phase passes. I don’t know what to suggest you can do to break it. I know with me, bad periods will just abruptly end for the tiniest, most casual reason that doesn’t seem like it would make any difference, which I guess makes me think I just psych myself into negativity and that the world itself is ultimately not significantly less good or bad than it usually is during those dark periods. I don’t know why. I don’t know. Strange stuff and so awful when you’re in them. As may not surprise you or anyone around here, I get complaints somewhat regularly about the p.s. being a single dense paragraph and not broken up for easier readability. But I like that challenge. But then I guess I would. Anyway, kind of a meh criticism you had there, but sorry. ** Steeqhen, Important to remember how pleasurable typing can be. I can’t remember how Pikmin 2 ends. Well, actually now I do thanks to you. I think I rarely totally finish games. I play until I know it’s about to end, and where I can guess how it’s going to end, and I bail at that point. Same with most novels, actually. I don’t know The Civil Wars. I know Joy Williams, if it’s the same JW, because when I search for the writer Joy Williams, the recording artist Joy Williams comes up and hogs the search results. ** Alice, Hi, Alice! It’s really good to meet you. Thank you for entering. I would need to give your question a degree of time and thought that rushing through the p.s. doesn’t allow me in order to give it a considered and worthy answer. But I will say, briefly, that I think I agree with that statement, yes. I think my work is infused with empathy at its core, and that’s crucial to me, although I’m not sure so many people seem to realise that about my work. I can completely relate to your thinking/feeling as you develop your novel. That rings entirely true to me. That’s a beautiful quote by Kathy. Long story short, yes, I do feel similarly to what I understand of how you describe your attitude and thoughts about your own writing. I would even say that self-knowledge is very important and maybe even necessary? I’m sorry not to speak more lengthily. It’s very interesting to be inspired to be thinking about it. Thank you. If there’s anything else you want to talk about, I’ll do my best, and it would be a pleasure. Anything else you can say about your novel? ** Uday, Ashbery is my favorite writer in the English language, so yeah. Luckily I got to know him and become kind of friends with him. Lita Ford, wow. I too have never understood people’s desire to live outside big cities. I don’t even understand the desire to get a ‘summer home’ in the country or to ‘retire’ to some supposedly idyllic place. I just can’t relate to that dream at all. ** Okay. I haven’t spotlit a book by the great Nathalie Sarraute in a long time, and today I have spotlit her first novel, which is generally thought to be the book that inspired and started the Nouveau Roman movement. So, a pretty key book. Have a look and think, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

* (restored)
—-

 

Filmography:

Variety (1983)

 

Smithereens (1982)

 

Tempest (1982)

 

Downtown 81 (1981)

 

Polyester (1981)

 

Subway Riders (1981)

 

Underground U.S.A. (1980)

 

Seduction of Patrick (1979)

 

Final Reward (1978)

 

Desperate Living (1977)

 

Female Trouble (1974)

 

Pink Flamingos (1972)

 

Multiple Maniacs (1970)

 

Books and Stories:

1. How To Get Rid Of Pimples: The Actual Cure

2. Garden Of Ashes

3. Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls

4. Putti’s Pudding (w/ Vittorio Scarpati)

5. Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

6. Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings Of Cookie Mueller (anthology)

7. Drugs (w/ Glenn O’Brien)

 

Tribute Sites:

 

The Cookie Mueller Fan Club
https://www.facebook.com/groups/CookieMueller/

Courage, Bread and Roses: A Tribute to Cookie Mueller
http://www3.sympatico.ca/brooksdr/jw/cookie/main.htm

Quotes About Cookie:

 

1) “Cookie Mueller was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.” — John Waters, 1996

2) “The first time I saw Cookie she was having a yard sale on her front porch in Provincetown. She was a cross between a Tobacco Road outlaw and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen….

Cookie was a social light, a diva, a beauty, my idol. Over the years she became a writer, a critic, my best friend, my sister. We lived throught the peaks and the dread together in Provincetown, New York, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Positano.

… in 1988 Cookie got sick. …in August 1989 the effects of AIDS had robbed her of her voice… On September 14th her husband Vittorio Scarpati died from an AIDS-related illness and after that Cookie kind of gave up. She died on November 10th in the hospice of the Cabrini Medical Center.” — Nan Goldin, 1990

3) Any time she walked out the door, her life was a story. I mean, everything she did. I mean, she’d say ‘I’m going to go get the milk’ and something lunatic would happen to her. So her life was like that all the time.

 

Cookie in her own Words / Quotes and Passages from her stories:

1) Yeah, life is tough in the real world. Actors wait on tables, ballet dancers work as topless go-go girls, artists wash dishes, and that’s not even the worst part. Someday you might bring your garbage on the subway, someday you might even shit in your own bank. (“Another Boring Day”)

2) A few weeks later, I accidentally got a job working two days a week as a housekeeper. The house was spacious and warm with all kinds of stuff to make work easier…. The only real problem was Wendy, the woman who lived there with her husband, Chris.

She was there most of the time, so I couldn’t totally relax when I cleaned. She stayed in bed though, all day, lying in her flab…

I didn’t blame her for lying in bed. She couldn’t walk. She was crippled from an accident in Mexico when her husband Chris haphazardly ran over her legs with the Volkswagon camper.

I felt sorry for her. Had it been me I would have divorced and sued this Chris person. He kept insisting that the reason she couldn’t walk was a psychological disturbance. He sounded like that misogynist idiot Sigmund Freud….

I cleaned around her.

One day I found some wild photos of Wendy and Chris. I think one of them left them out especially for me. There was a picture of Wendy spread-eagled, inserting huge bowling pins into her vagina. There was a picture of Chris trying to stick silver balls up his ass. There were pictures of the two of them and some other girl. She was tied up and they were all over her….

Because of these snapshots, I was prepared for anything, and sure enough, the day after… Wendy called me up to her bedroom….

“Cookie,” she said, “you might as well know that Chris and I aren’t getting along very well.”
“Oh?”
“I think it’s my legs. They’re not really pretty anymore…. Anyway, I want you to help us put our marriage back together again. You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, sure, whatever I can do to help,” I said, and thought oh no.

“Well, I’d like you to come over here tonight, around 2 in the morning, and get in bed with Chris. I’ll be sitting in that chair over there, and I’ll just watch. We’ll play it by ear, okay?”

“I don’t know, Wendy…” I said. Wild horses couldn’t drag me into bed with that husband of hers.
“Please, it would really help out,” she said.

I went back downstairs and stood there for a couple of minutes. Was she joking? I hated threesomes. Somebody was always getting left out. I didn’t want to fuck her husband, I didn’t want to fuck her. I didn’t want to be an upstairs maid!

…I went back upstairs.
“Look, I don’t think that’s my cup of tea,” I said.
“I thought you were wild,” she said.
Why does everyone think I’m so wild? I’m not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.
“You’re supposed to be so wild,” she almost screamed.
“Well, I’m all finished for today,” I changed the subject. “I relined the stove with tin foil, and…”

She sighed, “Oh, go away.”

I did. I went home and didn’t go back… Too bad. I needed that money for Christmas. I wanted to buy everybody something special. Oh well.
(“Provincetown—1970”)

3) “The worst part is there’s no flattery involved in rape; I mean, it doesn’t much matter what the females look like; it doesn’t even seem to matter either if they have four legs instead of two. Dairy farmers have raped their own cows even.
‘It’s great to fuck a cow,’ they say, ‘you can fit everything in… the balls… everything.’
So I guess it just depends on your genital plumbing as to how you see the following story.
(“Abduction & Rape—Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland, 1969”)

4) “I accidentally burned a friend’s house to the ground once. The friend didn’t approve.”
(“British Columbia—1972)

5) “Aren’t you supposed to do some scene where you get fucked by a chicken?” Divine asked me.
“Fucked by a real chicken?” Mink asked me.
“How?” asked Bonnie.
“In the script it says Crackers cuts off the head of a chicken and he fucks me with the stump,” I said.
“Oh that sounds easy,” Divine said.
“Yeah, that’s pretty easy compared with what you have to do,” I said to Divine.
“Chickens scratch pretty bad,” David said. “Even without their heads.”
“Bird wounds can be dangerous,” Van said.

I thought about Hitchcock’s The Birds, but those were seagulls and I knew just how powerful seagulls could be. Compared to them, chickens were jellyfish.

“I’m not worried about some little scratches,” I said.
(“Pink Flamingos”)

6) I met all the German film stars, people I’d always wanted to have beers with: Udo Kier, Bruno Ganz, Klaus Kinski, and the German filmmakers (Fassbinder, Herzog, Schroeder). I was in Aryan heaven.
(“The Berlin Film Festival—1981”)

7) Biography and Education: I received most of my education traveling and working various inane jobs such as: clothing designer, racehorse hot walker, drug dealer, go-go dancer, underground film actress (otherwise known as independent feature actress), playwright, theater director, performance artist, house cleaner, fish packer, credit clerk, barmaid, sailor, high seas cook, film script doctor, herbal therapist, unwed welfare mother, film extra, leg model, watercolorist, and briefly as a bar mitzvah entertainer, although I’m not even Jewish.

I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely. I wrote a novel when I was twelve and put it in cardboard and Saran Wrap, took it to the library and put it on the shelves in the correct alphabetical order. When I was eighteen, I left college for Haight-Ashbury and wound up a drug casualty, not unlike a bag lady. I learned a lot in the mental hospital, where I had shock therapy that didn’t work except for eradicating from my memory all the contents from novels I had read in the last twelve years.

A few of the films I appeared in have attained a cult status and I am told that I have a fan club in Los Angeles.

I have a twelve-year old son, who I believe has taught me the most.

I used to write poetry, but now I feel that poetry is archaic unless written specifically as song lyrics. I believe that my short stories are novels for people with short attention spans.

I live with my son in Manhattan and pay the rent as a journalist.
(“Cookie Mueller, born 1949, Baltimore, Maryland”)

 

Photos:

 

Clips

Stumbling Onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller on Film

Sylvia Miles, Ronee Blakley, Cookie Mueller at The Chelsea Hotel

Cookie meets Edie the Egglady

cookie mueller “secrets of the skinny”

COOKIE- a new film by Liz Rosenfeld

Justin Vivian Bond Reads Cookie Mueller at Low Life

Dreamlander: The Legend of Cookie Mueller (Opening Sequence)

People remember actress and writer Cookie Mueller

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** julian, Hooray for other adventures. No, I don’t think I believe in ghosts. I was sure I saw one when I was about 15, but later I remembered how stoned I was when I ‘saw’ it. That’s about it for me and ghosts. Yeah, but of course even if I’d tried to get into the VU gig, I’m virtually positive they wouldn’t have admitted a kid like me. ** scunnard, Hey. Yeah, I’m not anti-AI at all, but I think if Carlsen’s stuff was AI-based and not ‘handmade’ it would be a whole lot less interesting. Sure, I’d be happy and more if you want use something from my gif novel work. Just let me know what you’d like when the time comes, and we can sort it out. They’ve been exhibited in various configurations before. Kier just used part of one in his recent gallery show. Thanks! ** Misanthrope, There were people setting off fireworks on my street until dawn’s early light. Yes, I remember the dangerous-y post football match ‘celebrations’ in Manchester. Walking home was more dodging than walking. Dude, just go to the doctor and get the whole problematic shebang looked at in one swoop. No? ** _Black_Acrylic, Fangoria! Me too. ** Carsten, Hi. Yes, it’s a helluva conundrum. Dude, obviously, teach if that gig comes through. You are greatly needed. Luck galore with the submission. ** Bernard Welt, Hello there, B-man. Holy fuck, the gall bladder eruption — if it erupted, I don’t how gall bladders go bad technically. What shoots one’s gall bladder to hell? In your case, at least, do you know? Excellent suggestions to Carsten, thank you. I should’ve remembered Schneebaum. I reminder you talking him back when. And ‘Eating Raoul’, of course, duh. Yeah, weird about Ed White. He did hang on for a very long time after his multiple heart attacks and considering his girth. Yeah, all those guys are gone, it’s so strange. I don’t how often you were in NYC back then, but I remember the days when John Ashbery would invite Brad and Donald and Tim and me to parties, and there would be Barthelme and Denby and Merrill and Ed and David Kalstone and on and on just right there drinking their drinks, all nice and talkative. Lucky us. Padgett’s bio of Dick Gallup is really nice. I’m reading it right now. Small scars are the coolest. I hadn’t thought of sciatica, but eek, yes. I don’t mind aging so much but it’s so relentless. Big love to you, maestro and buddy. Carsten responded to you if you didn’t see it. ** Sypha, Haha, Sam Smith is pretty inexcusable but a mere drop in her bucket. ** pancakeIan, Glad you dug the work. Yes, the kind of creepy eroticism is a big part of why it’s as interesting as it is, I think. Seaside, that’s the name. I know of Celebration, but I’ve never peeped at it. I will, thanks. Yeah, luckily the poetry canon as officially okayed by schools contains some actual awesome ones, although they don’t help you understand why they’re particularly awesome, I guess because they think all the poets they teach are just pieces of the canon. I remember thinking ‘meh’ about Emily Dickinson in school, and it wasn’t until years later I figured out why she’s so incredible. ** Bill, I’ve yet to see anything AI-generated, at least that I can remember, that had any depth or mystery and subtext whatsoever. But I supposed they’ll figure out a way how to fake that too. So many people are pointing to ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ as a major reason why they became comfortable with their gayness. It’s interesting. At the time, my main reaction was basically, ‘oh, Ed’s stopped being experimental’. ** Hugo, I was definitely intrigued by the evidence of your friend’s game. And wished to play it. And maybe hopefully will someday. ‘A girl died of a stroke after trying to flirt with me’: I immediately see a fictional construct in that idea’s future, but I’m weird. I knew DFW a bit, and I knew people who were close to him, and that now accepted interpretation of his leaving ‘TPK’ out because he wanted it to be published is pretty spurious. People who knew him see it as him displaying his failure and a reason why he did what he did. Who knows, though, ultimately. The Leve thing is a mystery. But he did drop the finished mss. off at his publisher then go straight home and kill himself. ‘The Sluts’ partly took so long because there was no internet as it currently exists when I started it, and it took a few years for that context to become the context of the novel. I literally had to badger the author of ‘Wrong’ to even mention ‘God Jr.’ in the book. He didn’t think it fit into his anarchist/ punk/ queer overview and didn’t want to include it. So he tossed in that brief mention at the last minute under duress. Two novels at the same time, wow, nice. I think I couldn’t do that, but then, yeah, I worked on ‘The Sluts’ while I was also writing ‘Guide’, ‘Period’ and ‘My Loose Thread’. Anything you want to say about the novels? Or the long poem? No pressure. I always find it really hard to talk about what I’m working on until it’s close to finished. ** Steve, I knew Robin Zander’s son was a singer, but interesting that there’s impending evidence. Curious. I personally don’t think any singer could top Robin Zander, but maybe the common DNA will help. Glad things are moving along with the estate at least. I haven’t seen ‘L’Amour’ in many decades. How does it hold up? ** Steeqhen, Hi. I’m happy his stuff broke through with you. Nice story/image about the snails. I had dinner with friends the other night, and an ant got stuck in some melted/stiffened cheese, and I spent about half of the dinner carefully freeing it from the goop and transferring it to the ground, where it probably got stepped on with minutes, but at least I tried. Cool: ‘About Ed’. Using the blog as personal life/thoughts outlayer helpmate makes theoretical sense, yes. ** HaRpEr //, Hi! I’m sorry you’ve been feeling down, but I’m glad you’re back. What a great Berrigan quote. Wow. Feel better, pal, and do feel free to talk here about whatever would help. ** Nicholas., There you are. I think I detect a new tone, it’s true. And the encoding as well. Not the code(s) themselves, don’t worry. Well, it’s morning, so the last drink I drank was coffee. Enjoy the pleasurably lengthy walk(s). xo. ** Uday, I can imagine Nina Simone’s voice evolving those pix. When I was a kid I saw ladybug and thought it looked candy-like delicious, and, oh my god, it so wasn’t. Ed White story … When I was an up and coming young writer and made my first trip to NYC as a writer to do a reading, Ed held a dinner party for me, and he told me he would invite anyone I wanted to come, and I said John Ashbery, who I revered and had never met, and, sure enough, Ashbery was there at the dinner, and he was drunk on arrival and got incredibly more drunk during the dinner and had to be carried down the stairs and put in a taxi, but I met John Ashbery, which was huge, and that was extremely kind of Ed to have done that. ** Okay. I have revived a very old guest-post concerning the wondrous Cookie Mueller for you today, and please fully enjoy yourselves. See you tomorrow.