Spotlight on … Renata Adler Pitch Dark (1983)

 

‘Renata Adler’s novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), consist of anecdotes, vignettes, jokes, aphorisms, epigrammatic asides, and longer passages of prose—eclectic inventories of consciousness. Their immediate effect is that of a flea market in Samarqand or Ouagadougou, where the items on display (vintage clothes, military decorations, photo albums, broken appliances) are fractionally different enough, in style and provenance, from their cousins at the local swap meet to look like artifacts of an alternate universe. Adler’s eye and ear for the peculiar are unmatched in American letters.

‘Adler’s fiction has mostly received a less contentious reception than her essays, although an excerpt of Pitch Dark, deemed by a narrow band of cognoscenti to be “about” real people, prompted the gossip columnist Liz Smith to issue her only known work of literary criticism. The two novels range over many subjects treated in her nonfiction, but the difference, I think, is this: The equivocal, insecure, self-doubting cogitations of Adler’s first-person narrators are instantly disarming in ways that Adler, speaking with relentless logic as herself, in polemical mode, is not. No one else has a dog in a fight against yourself, and despite countless minor casualties in Adler’s two novels, the main event in both of them is “I” versus “I.” …

‘Pitch Dark is murky—not in a turgid sense, but clouded, rather, by troubled reflections, ambivalence, regrets. The weather of Pitch Dark is colder. Secondary figures are fraught with shadowed histories. Incidents and asides illustrate a hapless, estranging condition of things: a bitter libel case, a dying raccoon, solitary escape to charmless islands, The Blue Angel, “how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.” A central episode in Ireland resembles a parody of gothic horror. Kate Ennis is an older version of Jen Fein, acquainted with disappointment and less innervated by amusing minutiae. She too writes. And travels, though more to flee her life than for any sort of fun. She often addresses one particular reader, a man she has left, or is leaving, or who is leaving, or has left, her. Her stories are longish and less sanguine in contrast with the ones in Speedboat. …

‘No current literary label appealingly describes the kind of narratives Speedboat and Pitch Dark are. I doubt that any is needed. Their formal design, of self-contained pieces separated by a line space and periodic chapter breaks, is hardly sui generis, having been used in many different kinds of writing for over a hundred years, in collections of aphorisms, feuilletons, philosophical treatises, compendia like Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as well as seed catalogues, political pamphlets, and cookbooks, and works of fiction as diverse as Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

‘The kind of thought debris you find on the Internet describes novels in this form as “experimental,” which is predictive of a certain off-putting difficulty and self-indulgent esoterica. Often, too, it is declared by a gatekeeping sort of criticism that anything that deviates far from a nineteenth-century template is “not a novel.” It seems late in the day for such parsing. But in fact, classifications that formerly reflected a delight in all literary forms and the intellectual pleasure of differentiating them—Mary McCarthy’s essays “Novel, Tale, Romance” and “The Fact in Fiction” come to mind—now serve as filtering screens for the literary market, which is currently dominated by aesthetic conservatism of a depressingly conformist ilk: middle-class marriage saved, or ruined, or attacked by vampires.

‘Adler’s novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness. Their reportorially even tone is quite distinct from the distorting lyricism found in most novels of sensibility; omitting much of what we expect in first-person narratives, Adler gets at the overfull yet depleted condition we find ourselves in now, peripatetic and restless, ever more deprived of the time and mental space to reflect on what we are really doing, or who we really are. They describe what it’s like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do.’ — Gary Indiana, Bookforum

 

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Further

Renata Adler: ‘I’ve been described as shrill. Isn’t that strange?’
Renata Adler @ The New Yorker
Renata Adler, interviewed by Dawn Raffel
Cast in Doubt
Darkness Visible: The film criticism of Renata Adler
New Old Works by Renata Adler
Renata Adler @ goodreads
Her Hatchet Is More Like an Ax: Renata Adler and the Problem with Critics
Renata Adler: Troll or Treasure?
“Fly Trans-Love Airways” by Renata Adler, 1967
Six Possibly True Observations About Renata Adler
Renata Adler By Christopher Bollen
A Gaze Around Renata Adler’s Speedboat
Podcast: Renata Adler Is Back in the Spotlight
RENATA ADLER’S BRILLIANT CAREER
‘A Court of No Appeal’
Something Nice to Do: An Interview with Renata Adler
Tell It Slant by Hilton Als
Renata Adler on Sadness, Selfies, and Losing
Renata Adler: politics and the English language
Podcast: Renata Adler, Queen Of The Culture Wars
An Interview with Renata Adler
72 Minutes With Renata Adler
SONG OF MYSELF: RENATA ADLER’S STAR-MAKING MACHINERY
Harper’s Renata Adler Spectacle
RENATA ADLER: RADICAL INTELLIGENCE
A Dissident Writer in Modern America
Renata Adler, Poet of a Chaotic Generation
Buy ‘Pitch Dark’

 

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Extras

Renata Adler: Speedboat and Pitch Dark

Renata Adler, “After the Tall Timber”

Renata Adler & David Shields with Lucas Wittman

 

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Interview
from The Center for Fiction

 

I guess I’ll start by asking—these novels are being republished. How do you regard them now? Are they old friends? Are they antagonists? Are they strangers?

It’s funny, I almost never read stuff after it’s been published, but because they were going to reprint these, I had to. I think my relation to them is about the same as it was then, which is odd. I mean, whatever they were then, they are now. I think I’ve just written another one.

You’ve written another novel?

Yes.

Oh, that’s exciting.

So it’s funny to have them converge or overlap, but there it is. I don’t know how you feel about publication, but that whole process has so many anxieties of various kinds. But once the books are published, they’re published. There’s nothing you can do about it. You said, how do I—

Do you feel like you’re looking at the work and thinking, “Hey, old friend,” or—

No, I never think, “Hey, old friend.”

Or “Who wrote this?”

Well, sometimes one thinks that. But with these I thought the same form of, “Oh, I see” and “Oh, dear” as I thought at the time.

I feel like the through line in all of your work—the fiction, the nonfiction, the criticism—it’s just fearless. The fiction is like a steel-trap mind and a broken heart.

Oh that’s so nice. And the “fearless” is nice because there is that sort of timid side one has. But this risk and cowardice question—those are very strange questions, aren’t they? Unless you’re a certain kind of writer and you know that people are helpless in a way. In nonfiction particularly, if the writer is with a powerful institution, the writer has the last word in a very scary way. I remember when it was a cultivated thing to do to read The Sunday Times book review or to subscribe, perhaps, to the Book of the Month Club, and perhaps to Reader’s Digest —which is, looking back, the most justifiable of those. [Laughs] But they hadn’t got it right, they just hadn’t got it right. That’s not where I’m going to find it. But for many, many people those things were the last word. It’s like the critics who used to be able to close a show on Broadway. For a lot of people, the last word is what’s published by somebody not fearless but not scared either, just somewhat over-confident, maybe free of doubt. But that’s not us.

But how do you get the courage…you break a lot of rules in your fiction.

Do I? I just wrote and cut and wrote and rewrote and cut and rewrote, and then there’s always that fear, isn’t there, that you’re making it worse when you’re revising. There’s always the fear that maybe an earlier draft was better, and there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s not going to help to hold it up for another year and review it another time because you might make it even worse.

I have a favorite sentence in Pitch Dark, and it’s “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” Every time the word “wait” recurs, it changes, and it becomes a weightier “wait.” I think a serious writer and a serious reader must wait.

Oh, that’s lovely. There’s a kind of editor and a certain cast of mind that says, “cut.” And so they’d say, “Cut to the first wait,” and “What is this other ‘wait’?” I just wanted those. No fewer, no more. But I could imagine a certain kind of editor saying, “You know, people are very busy and one ‘wait’ can do it.” So then you’re in trouble. I’m very glad you like it, is what I’m trying to say.

You’ve said you cut a lot.

Yes.

Do you cut a lot between sentences or from drafts?

I cut a lot and then I put a lot in, and then I can’t tell the difference between an earlier draft and this draft, which seemed crucial to me at the time. So that’s a very strange process, which doesn’t work the same way in nonfiction at all.

Well, facts are very helpful.

Facts are very helpful.

Do you think that a fiction writer has a moral responsibility?

Every fiction writer?

Well, do you feel that you do?

A moral responsibility to be on the side of the good guys and not the bad guys? A moral responsibility not to ruin lives, not to do certain kinds of harm? Yes, I do. But are there a whole lot of fiction writers ruining lives? I mean, Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again. They weren’t asking for it, and they minded whatever it was he did. Okay, so there’s one. But then there’s a kind of person who “writes into” a fiction writer’s fiction, who knows perfectly well that the next book better sure be pretty recognizable. In a way, there’s fair warning. I mean, there are some writers where I wouldn’t want to be the latest girl. [laughs.]

Yeah.

Some people mind that less than others. But I’m not that sort of writer.

Some of the pieces in Speedboat were stories first. Did you know it would be a novel?

No, I did not. I’m not sure I knew they would be stories, either. I was just writing fiction for a change. If you look at an Isaac Babel story, for example, it’s between two and three pages, and what he does is a miracle. You can’t doubt that it’s a story, and that’s just wonderful to be able to do, but I couldn’t do that. So there are different ways people write their stories, and some are more clearly units. I was writing in some unit I didn’t know. I was writing fiction and it began here and it ended there, but I mean I couldn’t just keep turning it out like paper towels or something.

When you put together Speedboat did you write it the way it appears, or did you shuffle it in some way?

Oh, I always shuffle. And there, the computer is just a disaster because the only thing I’ve ever been compulsively neat about is typing. I type with two fingers, and so I would always make a mistake near the end of the page, and since White Out is no use, I would throw the thing out and start again at the beginning. Then along came the computer and I thought it was going to help because you can move everything around all the time and you can change every sentence 50 different ways in seconds. But that’s exactly what I don’t want, because then what was I doing? If the computer can shift everything in a split-second, then what am I doing here? That’s what I used to do so carefully. One of the things that’s almost comically a problem is AutoCorrect, and what AutoCorrect thinks I’m saying.

Grammar correction.

Yeah, yeah.

You have another sentence in Pitch Dark that I like, where you describe young women reading the great books with “a transcendent though far from complete comprehension.” Would you say that in every great book there’s no complete comprehension? That’s a wry sentence but…

It’s very interesting that you should say that, because I now remember that sentence, and it has become true in a new way. About two years ago, I started to have various not-so-serious physical problems, but I really had to lie on the floor, and I couldn’t lift books. So I was reading classics on my Kindle, books that had meant a lot to me and that I thought I knew very well. It turned out that some of the things that had meant the most to me, I had completely misunderstood. So now I thought, “What makes me think I get them now?”

Is there ever a complete comprehension?

No, come to think of it. Young people may in some ways understand better. Those might be the best reading years. And if we said to the writer, “Is this what you meant?” the answer’s not going to help us at all.

No. The writer might feel he’s meant something different at a later time.

Yes, and it’s not that important what he meant.

 

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Book

Renata Adler Pitch Dark
New York Review Books

“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”

‘Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland.

‘Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.’ — NYRB

‘Renata Adler is brilliant, and her character Kate Ennis is lovable in her complete disinterest for making herself lovable. It’s perfect and prescient, a tremendously influential book.’ — Chris Kraus, Slate

Excerpt

To begin with, I almost went, instead, to Graham Island. For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade. In nineteen sixty-four, the dean announced to the trustees that, for all intents and purposes-meetings, sleep, meals, electricity, demands upon her time and one another’s—the students had abolished night.

“Brahms,” he said, in explaining to a colleague why he did not attend that autumn’s campus concert series. “All of it was Brahms. All, every. Eight. Things. Of Brahms.”

Though he was my friend, I did not see Leander Dworkin often. We found that our friendship was safer on the telephone. Sometimes we spoke daily. Sometimes we did not speak for a year or more. But the bond between us, I think, was less stormy, and in some ways more intense, than Leander’s relations with people he actually saw. Once every few years, we would have dinner together, or a drink, or just a visit. Sometimes alone, more rarely with someone with whom he was living and whom he wanted me to meet. One night, when we had gone, I think, off campus for hamburgers. I noticed, on Leander’s wrist, several thin, brown, frayed and separating strands, like a tattered cuff of rope. Leander said it was an elephant-hair bracelet, and that Simon, his lover, had given itto him. It was frayed because he always forgot to remove it, as he ought to, before taking showers. Elephant hairs, it seems, are talismanic. It was going to bring him luck. Elephant-hair bracelets are expensive; they are paid for by the strand. In the following year, Leander wrote many poems, and at last received his tenure. When we met again, months later, the frayed strands were gone. In their place was a thin, round, sturdy band of gold, which encased, Leander said, a single elephant hair. When I asked what had happened to the old bracelet, he said, “I lost it, I think. Or I threw it out.” For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life. The woman was in love with him, he said. She was married to a real-estate tycoon. Her name was Leonore. He was anxious for me to meet her. I knew that, in addition to his appetite for quarrels, Leander likes triads, complications, any variant of being paid for. But I looked at the bracelet, and I thought of Simon, and I thought, Leonore plays rough.

It was as boring, you know, as droning, and repetitive as a waltz, as a country-and-western lament in waltz time. It was as truly awful as a vin rosé.

Well, what did you pull out ahead of me on the road for, from a side street, when there were no other cars in sight behind me, if you were going to drive more slowly than I did?

It was early evening, in the city. The TV was on. We watched The Newlywed Game. The moderator had just asked the contestant, a young wife from Virginia, What is your husband’s least favorite rodent? “His least favorite rodent,” she replied, drawling serenely and without hesitation. “Oh, I think that would have to be the saxophone.”

He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again. Is that where it begins? I don’t know. I don’t know where it begins. It is where I am. I know where you are. You are here. She had left him, then? Years ago, he had smoked, but not when they met. So she stopped, as people do when they are in love. Take up cigarettes, or give them up, or change brands. As people do to be at one at least in this. Long after that, she began to smoke again.

So he knew she had left him?

Not knew, not left. Not right away, or just at first.

Why don’t you begin then with at first?

Look, you can begin with at first, or it seems, or once upon a
time.

Or in the city of P.

Or in the city of P. In the rain. But I can’t. It is not what I know how to do.

Well, you must get these things straight, you know, resolve them in your mind before you write them down.

From the moment she knew that she was going to leave him, she started to look old. There was about her a sudden dimming, as in a bereavement or an illness, which in a way it was. He. They. Look, I would start short, if I could, with something shorter. The story of the boy, for instance, who did not cry wolf. Except that, of necessity, we can have no notion of that story, since the boy of course is dead.

So is the one who did cry wolf.

True, but he lasted longer.

Probably. I suppose that’s right. He knew that she was going to leave him when she began to smoke again.

You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I’ve learned the silence, too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’s more like late one afternoon, and it’s not just unsaid, it’s gone. That’s all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this time. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wisps and signs. Like a spinster who did know a young man once and who imagines ever since that she lost a fiancé in the war. Or an old fellow who, having spent months long ago in uniform at some dreary outpost nowhere near any country where there was a front, remembers buddies he never had, dying beside him in battles he was never in.

Hey, wait.

All right. There was, of course, a public world as well. I was there, in Montgomery, Alabama, on a summer’s day in the late seventies, when the Attorney General of the United States, a Southerner himself, spoke at the ceremony in which a local judge, who had worked for more than twenty years, with courage and humanity and in virtual isolation, on the federal district court, was promoted to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, like the district court under the local judge, had been a great court, decent, honorable, articulate and brave. The Attorney General himself had, for some years, been a member of it—quite often, as it happened, in dissent. Here he was, though, in the late seventies, the Attorney General, Old Mushmouth, as the wife of one of the court’s more distinguished judges had always, somewhat injudiciously and in his absence, called him, here he was, the Attorney General of the United States, speaking at the inauguration of a great federal district judge into a great federal appellate court. He mentioned the Ku Klux Klan. He alluded to it several times, the Klan. And each time, he referred to its membership, the members of the Klan, he called them. Clamsmen. No question about it, that’s how he pronounced it. Clamsmen. It was no reflection on the Attorney ·General. True, the judge’s wife had never thought much of his diction. True, in the court’s most important decisions, he had been so often in dissent. But years had passed. He had come to speak well and to do honor. And this business of the Clamsmen, well, it may have had to do with molluscs, bivalves. Even crustaceans. I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism.

Alone. What an odd gloss we have here on Alone at last. Since alone at last, for every hero in a gothic, every villain in a melodrama, traditionally assumes a cast of two.

You know I hate wisecracks.

So do I.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. If anyone happens to be reading this in Paris, I’m doing a bookstore reading/event for J’AI FAIT UN VOEU (‘I Wished’) at 7 pm this evening at Les Mots a la Bouche ** kacper, Hi. Oh, that’s good. About the realism. Otherwise, why bother, I guess? I obviously encourage more writing and drawing by you. And not just because I might get to see them at some point. ‘Girl with Basket of Fruit’ is a great one. I think if I had to choose a favorite Xiu Xiu, it still might be ‘A Promise’. Have a fine, fine day. ** David Ehrenstein, I suspect twinkaliciousness was at least one of the main goals. Everyone, I continue to encourage you to give what support you can to Mr. Ehrenstein via the gofundme page set up for him. I’ll be chipping in again as soon as I pay my rent and replenish my bank account a little. ** Dominik, Hi!!! So that’s what your soul looks like. Very interesting. Oh, no problem, you were probably reading in between the lines into my fantasy life, which is the best part of me anyway. I think I’ve decided to read the friendliest part of the book — the little section describing the night I met George. I’m not at all sure I can read it effectively, but I’m going to try, unless I chicken out. Everything and everyone should extrude melted cheese and guacamole, especially Harry Styles, for your sake. Love making everyone who shows up at my reading tonight a total pushover who speaks, or at least comprehends perfect English, G. ** T, Oh, wow, you’ve been visiting this place for a while. Yeah, isn’t there just something kind of perfect about that Peter O’Toole moment? Every psychiatrist should play it for their patients. The CIA should hack Putin’s cellphone and make it pop up on every text and email and site he looks at. Etc. No, ‘ergodic’ literature has never graced the blog that I can remember. Dude, if you wanted to make such a post for here I would doff my entire head to you as if it were merely my cap. That would be amazing! Thank you for wanting to. Place d’Italie, sweet! How’s Calais? Are you new to its hoped-for virtues galore? I need a Monster Truck today in particular very badly, how did you know? I hope your Thursday is like a spontaneous star-studded noise and experimental music festival being held 1 1/2 minutes walk from your front door. xo. ** Steve Erickson, Teens on Tumblr know best, god knows. I’m happy you were driven to look further into her films. Awesome. ** Thomas Moronic, Mr. T! Yay about your imminent arrival! Yes, text me when you’re here and ready and let’s meet up ASAP! I should be pretty free in the upcoming days. Safest trip and arrival! Love, me. ** Right. Today I spotlight the second of the only two novels by the very talented Renata Adler. Have you read it? Are you interested in doing so? See you tomorrow.