by Joshua Cohen
Sanders stood ragged on the creaky stage of Town Hall, in the heart not of Venice but another waterbound Serene Republic. He spoke with the same zeal we expect from Shylock, had the same demands for justice, the same ludicrous faith in the judiciary, and even—I swear—some of the same desires.
Here’s the plot: This country’s middle class, represented by Sanders/Shylock, has given a loan, is coerced into giving a loan, to Antonio, who for the purposes of this version will be played by the banks. This loan is in the form of a bailout. When it comes time to repay the loan, the banks refuse, claiming that they can’t, which only means that they won’t, and so Sanders/Shylock hauls them to court and demands repayment of his bond. That bond, though it’s merely symbolic, is also human flesh, and so it’s deemed too much—too beyond the pale—not just against the law, but also against natural law. The banks claim that to deprive them of their flesh would be to deprive them, and so the republic, of life: Shylock, in his bloodlust, must be a savage. The play ends—Shakespeare’s original play ends—with Shylock on the skids, condemned to wander, without a family, a business, a home.
Exit Bernie, taking no questions:
Follow not;
I’ll have no speaking: I will have my bond.
FROM THE DIARIES
NEW YORK SIGNS: LAST EXIT FOR THE VERRAZANO-NARROWS BRIDGE
Still following the coast, which veered to the north, we reached, after fifty leagues, another land, which was much more beautiful and full of forests. There we anchored, and with twenty men penetrated about two leagues inland, only to find that the people there had fled to the woods. Searching around, we found a very old woman and a young girl of eighteen to twenty, who were crouching amid the grasses in fear. The old woman had two little girls carried up on her shoulders, and clinging to her neck was a boy—they were all about eight years old. The young woman also had three children, all girls. When we came upon them, they began to shriek. The old woman made signs to us that the men had fled to the woods. We gave her food, which she accepted with pleasure, but the young woman refused us and angrily threw whatever we offered to the ground. We took the boy from the old woman to carry back to France, and wished to take the young woman too, because she was very beautiful and tall [di molta bellezza, e d’alta statura], but it was impossible to lead her away because of her crying [non fu mai possibile per i grandissimi gridi]. And so, as we were far from the ship and still had to pass through the woods, we decided to leave her behind.
A letter from Giovanni da Verrazano to King Francis of France, describing his first encounter—as the first European to enter the Narrows—with the native Lenape, 1524. Every Sunday I drive H’s parents’ car over the Narrows to Staten Island for pizza. I want Denino’s. Though H thinks Totonno’s is better, because of its crust. Da Verrazano thought the Hudson River was a lake.
NEW YORK SIGNS: YIELD
A transitive verb, from Old English’s gieldan, akin to Old High German’s geltan, “to pay,” dating from before the twelfth century: recompense, reward; to give or render as rightfully owed, or required; to give up, or give in, to die; to surrender, submit, or relinquish oneself, another, or an object, to another, to an inclination, or temptation; to bear, or bring forth; to produce, or furnish; to give revenue as return from investment; to give up a hit or run, in baseball; an intransitive verb: to be fruitful; to cease resistance, or contention; to give way to pressure, or influence; to give way under physical force; to give place, or precedence; to be inferior; to be succeeded by another; to relinquish the floor of a legislative assembly; a noun: something yielded; the capacity of yielding. Famous usages: “To yelde Jesu Christ his proper rent,” Chaucer; “What say ye, countrymen? will ye relent, / And yield to mercy whilst ’tis offer’d you,” Shakespeare.
NEW YORK SIGNS: SIAMESE CONNECTION
Get used to parking elsewhere and saying “conjoined.”
NEW YORK SIGNS: LIRR
A German friend of H’s who lived in New York while pursuing an indistinct business degree would, every summer, find a very pretty boyfriend who had, or whose family had, a beach house in the Hamptons. Every Friday, she’d go out there, taking the Long Island Railroad, the LIRR, which she’d pronounce in its fullness, not as an acronym but as a guttural word: “I’ll be back on Monday, I’m taking the Ler.” “No to the car, no to the jitney, die Ler is faster—tschüss!”
NEW YORK SIGNS: R TRAINS RUN EXPRESS
Until they don’t.
NEW YORK SIGNS: STOP
The German friend told H and H told me: What TV and movies call a “restraining order,” real courts in real life call an “order of protection.”
LETTER TO RUTH MAY RIVERS
© AMERICAN PATCHWORK SERIES/PBS
Still from footage shot of Boyd and Ruth May Rivers by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long, at the Rivers’ home in Canton, Mississippi, August 30, 1978
DEAR RUTH MAY RIVERS,
There aren’t many great moments of film related to blues music and, of those, there are precious few that are performances: The better musicians tend to stiffen up when not just heard but seen. Two moments that come to mind have to do with Robert Johnson (of whom only two photographs are extant). In the late 2000s, friends of a Memphis businessman named Leo “Tater Red” Allred bought a dilapidated movie palace in Ruleville, Mississippi, which had formerly belonged to a man named Bill Jackson. These friends found a cache of old film canisters on the premises and, knowing Allred to be something of a local historian, duly passed them along. They turned out to be reels filmed by Jackson himself: footage of football games and parades. But two of the reels were outliers: One showed the day-to-day life of white inhabitants of Ruleville; the other showed the day-to-day to life of black inhabitants of Ruleville. Apparently, Jackson got the notion to drum up community interest in his theater by using it to show the community to itself. He’d screen these hometown movies during the breaks in double features—screening the white reel at the white showtimes and the black reel at the black showtimes. In both the white and black versions, citizens of Ruleville relax on a weekend noon: They mug for the camera, they socialize, they shop. But a curious figure was discernible in the black version: a behatted busker strumming his guitar, with a harmonica braced near his mouth. He’s playing his heart out, it seems. He’s playing soundlessly. The man appears to be, or bears an eerie resemblance to, Robert Johnson. Once this suspicion was announced, the press and experts swarmed like weevils: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were convinced, but Robert Lockwood—the only guitarist to have studied with Johnson—claimed it wasn’t him; cineastes noted that one of the reel’s wide shots had caught a glimpse of the theater’s marquee, which advertised Blues in the Night, a noir musical directed by Anatole Litvak. That movie premiered in December 1941. Johnson, of course, died in August 1938, but still—the Johnson estate ignored this debunking; some wishful academics accused the skeptics of sabotage; some self-appointed researchers online even suggested that, if the man in the film wasn’t the blues master himself, it might be the devil that owned his soul.
The second Johnson moment is also marked by absence. John Hammond, Jr., a formidable white blues musician and the son of the record producer, talent scout, and civil rights activist John H. Hammond, served as the producer and Delta dragoman to a 1991 U.K. Channel 4 documentary entitled The Search for Robert Johnson. In it, Hammond managed to track down a woman named Willie Mae Powell, a permed, prim geriatric in oversize oval glasses and floral prints who, in the flower of her youth, had dated Johnson briefly. Though Johnson might’ve dated half of black female Mississippi in the 1930s, only “Willie Mae” was immortalized in song—Johnson sings her name twice, as the only words of the fourth and final verse of “Love in Vain”; the remainder of the verse is just howls and meows, yearning vowels sung in a train whistle’s falsetto. Powell had not seen Johnson in over half a century and had never before heard the song—not in th
e decent Rolling Stones cover, not in the execrable Todd Rundgren cover, and, most pertinently, not even in the glorious Johnson original, which Hammond proceeded to play for her on-camera. Upon hearing her name sung for the first time, Powell cried. I cried too—I cry every time I reload the clip.
I should say, Ruth May, that my concern is not to resurrect the women who were the subject and the object of the famous blues. Women certainly don’t need that advocacy from me: At least, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey don’t need it, and neither, for that matter, do you. Instead, I mention these instances of celluloid Johnsoniana because the mere potential of their existence appears to make a human out of a legend. Whereas the stunning video clips—six of them—that the Lomax Collection produced of you singing along with the singing and guitar-playing of your late husband, Boyd Rivers, at your home in Canton, Mississippi, in 1978, do the very opposite: They appear to make a legend out of a human. Out of the approximately six thousand films and video clips and approximately ten thousand audio recordings that archivist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and his father, John Lomax, made throughout the American South for the Library of Congress, for themselves, and for posterity, between 1933 and 1996, yours are among the very few to accomplish this: They make two legends out of two humans.
To be sure, the Lomaxes had made their share of stars before, but this had much to do with timing. Lead Belly’s Lomax recordings (done at Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana, 1933–34) and Son House’s Lomax recordings (done at Clack’s Grocery in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, 1941–42) were released to the public coincident with the folk revival and were championed, and plagiarized, by the likes of Bob Dylan and other avatars of the acoustic white counterculture. To put it plainly, then, Alan Lomax got to your husband too late—in the disco era—which is why even now, twenty-five years after your husband died in 1993, his talent remains unrecognized. Boyd Rivers was—as I’m sure you’ve always known—the most commanding(-sounding) and yet most vulnerable(-sounding) blues artist of the second half of the twentieth century. That this accolade is earnable by an oeuvre of just the six videos for the Lomax collection and eight audio recordings (done for an enterprising German record label in 1980) is not unprecedented. Henry Sloan—who was, according to lore, the éminence grise and griot of Dockery Plantation in Dockery, Mississippi (which spawned Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, and Tommy Johnson, among others)—left no recordings; Robert Petway left only sixteen tracks; William Harris and Dan Pickett left only fourteen apiece; Luke Jordan and Buddy Boy Hawkins left only twelve apiece; King Solomon Hill’s awesome immortality rests on eight, four of which are alternate takes; Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas cut six (two of which are classics: “Motherless Child Blues” and “Last Kind Words Blues”); Cecil Augusta played a single song for Alan Lomax’s recorders (“Stop All the Buses”), then vanished.
Enough. I want to explain what I got from your and your husband’s recordings and I hope you will forgive me. Blues music, to my mind, is not just dangerous to all law-abiding, churchgoing folk, but dangerous to man in general—to men, and especially to white men. There is something attractive, almost demonically attractive, about that slough of self-pity and lament—all that woe-is-me-poor-boy-long-ways-from-home lugubriousness can lead, in my experience, to the imputation of a certain romance or even heroism to bad-feeling. There is a sense in the blues—more than that, there is lyrical confirmation—that music is a man’s sole comfort and consolation, that music is all a man has left to turn to, once a woman has done him wrong. This is pigheaded, obviously. It is isolating and chauvinistic and dumb. But it is also the truth. Or it can be. Gospel music is sung with a choir, a congregation. Whereas the blues are sung when you have no congregation and your family’s dead and your lover’s gone skipped town with your best friend—the blues are sung when you have nothing else to say or even live for.
This, I’m confessing, was my own immature take, until I saw—until I heard—your performances. All of the other clips in the voluminous Lomax archive of “field” recordings feature men, solo men, or men in duo, buddies bucking each other up, but yours present a couple. Your husband introduces: “My name is Boyd Hillard Rivers. This is my wife, Ruth May Rivers. We’ve been married fifteen years and ever since we’ve been together we’ve been trying to sang.” And you did, the two of you in your livingroom with imitation-wood paneling and zebra-hide-patterned carpet; you dressed up in a vest, slightly shy about opening wide to show your gold teeth, until the spirit took over and reassured you; your husband massy and booming, as he stomped his feet in time with his thumb-picked downstroke and shook an organ-like storm surge out of his Gibson SG. As you two went at it in harmony, in octaves, and then with you going low and him going high to meet in unison, I had my epiphany: The blues can also be shared. It can also be sung together. Sadness doesn’t have to be solitary or solitarizing: There is a way of making it mutual, even mutual between husband and wife.
I realized: The two individuals who comprise a couple must try to make each other feel less alone and it might be that the best way to do that is to join voices against that common condition—to mourn that common condition in such a way as to reinforce each other’s strength. Boyd Rivers: “Tell me how do you feel when you come out?” You: “Come out the wilderness?” BR: “When you come out?” You: “Come out the wilderness?” BR: “When you come out?” You: “Come out the wilderness?” BR: “Tell me how do you feel when you come out?” You: “Come out the wilderness?” Together: “Leaning on the Lord?”
What is truly evil and bluesing in this world is not what one individual does to another, but what the world does to all of us: It makes us die. Your accompaniment of your husband, your husband’s accompaniment of you, showed me the power that comes from having made a deal with a solid partner—not by midnight at the crossroads, but in broad daylight in a quaint tidy livingroom—a deal to resist despair.
I send you my very best wishes,
Joshua Cohen
FIRST FAMILY, SECOND LIFE
ON THOMAS PYNCHON
PINCO DE NORMANDIE SAILED TO England with William the Conqueror. His son, Hugh, held seven “knights’ fees in Lincolnshire” and four “bovates in Friskney.” Four centuries later, his descendant Edward Pynchon was ennobled and granted a coat of arms “per bend argent and sable, three roundles with a bordure engrailed, counterchanged.” By then the Pincheuns had settled snugly into gentry life in Essex. Nicholas Pinchon became high sheriff of London in 1533, and his son, or nephew, John married Jane Empson, daughter of Sir Richard Empson, a minister to, and casualty of, the doomed regime of Henry VII. John’s son was also John, and his son was William Pynchon, who in 1630 sailed with John Winthrop to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which he was elected treasurer. He established the towns of Roxbury and, while pursuing the fur trade, Springfield, where he deposed the accused witches in the trial preceding Salem. He served as model for Colonel Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1650 wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, whose critique of Puritan Calvinism caused it to be burned in Boston and to become the New World’s first banned book, though only nine copies survived the pyre. (Among those who voted against the censure was William Hauthorne, Hawthorne’s first colonist ancestor.) This was the proto-American literary debut of a family that later included the Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823–1904), president of Trinity College, Hartford, and author of The Chemical Forces: Heat–Light–Electricity…An Introduction to Chemical Physics; Dr. Edwin Pynchon (1856–1914), author of “Surgical Correction of Deformities of the Nasal Septum”; and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., born in 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge.
Anyone who’s written at the end of so long and distinguished a line has been faced with a choice: either embrace the legacy or attempt to disassociate from it. (Hawth
orne added the “w” to distance himself from John Hathorne, cruelest of the Salem magistrates.) This, of course, is merely a more public version of the decision of whether, and how, to transmute individual experience into prose. Thomas Pynchon—the most private, or publicly private, of American novelists—has been considering such disclosures for half a century now, in the way he’s handled both his famous family in his work and his own fame in life. The single overtly autobiographical statement he has provided to date appears in the introduction to a collection of his early and only short fiction, Slow Learner:
Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. […] For in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.
I’ve read that introduction a dozen times, and most of Pynchon’s novels at least twice, yet I’m still not sure what to make of this assertion. I’m still not sure whether V. (1963)—which takes as its premise the search for a mysterious, free-floating signifier that might be a woman named Victoria, and/or Veronica, and/or an incarnation of the goddess Venus, and/or the city of Valletta, and/or Victory in WWI and/or WWII—becomes any clearer with the knowledge that Pynchon wrote it after serving in the Navy and attending Cornell, where he audited lectures by that shapeshifter Nabokov (Vèra handled correspondence and gave the grades). Nor am I sure whether The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)—which concerns the machinations of a certain Yoyodyne, “one of the giants of the aerospace industry”—is enriched by the information that between 1960 and 1962 Pynchon lived in Seattle and worked for Boeing as a technical writer for the Bomarc interceptor-missile project. Then again, it strikes me that Pynchon’s defense-contracting stint finds direct expression in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), that treatment of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. But I’m still confused as to whether I should read the hero of that novel—Tyrone Slothrop, an American G.I. whose erections foretell the ground-zero impacts of V-2s in London—as an embodiment of John Winthrop or, because Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop is portrayed as having published a controversial theological treatise called On Preterition, as a surrogate for the author himself.