Aunt Sybil (Collection of Short Stories and Poems Annotated Book 1)

Here she quotes from the Diary of Anne Frank Anne's thoughts about her father and her feelings of inadequacy, words which may well echo Dorothy Livesay's feelings about her own father. Another note tells of Dorothy's childhood fears and nervous illnesses. She would lie in bed with imagined terrors, and her father would come and massage her legs to help her relax.

He had healing hands and in a few minutes I would fall asleep. The Livesay papers as a whole provide a wealth of material on the father-daughter relationship and its connection to a woman's creativity. The "Autobiography" files, along with the correspondence, offer the best examples of this. Other statements include a description of the author's home on Galiano Island, some comments on love and marriage, and notes on her relatives in England.

Among them is a manuscript headed "Prologue to Ch. I," possibly meant for her autobiography or Darnel , dealing with Livesay's childhood and adolescence in Toronto and relationship with boys. A prefatory remark in this essay summarizes neatly the writer's autobiographical impulse, which is so evident in all her writing. She claims that ". Human beings are not scientists. Memory plays us false; yet memory reveals more than statistics.

The truth is a many-sided prism and all one person can do is flash the daylight on some of the walls he knows best. Of the autobiographical essays a few are concerned with Dorothy Livesay's childhood and youth. Others relate to her experience in New Jersey, her impressions of France, her time in Africa, and two are essays of a general nature on "being in love," and "entertainment.

Evidently, Dorothy Livesay rewrote the same material many times over the years, as if she had selected only a few recollections that could serve as samples of a larger truth. An instance of such rewriting occurs in the essay "Winnipeg made me," which is the text for a lecture? Here she retells of her coming into consciousness as a child in Winnipeg, using scenes from her story "A Prairie Sampler," Another interesting example of the development of Livesay's work is to be found in an untitled essay or letter dated July 2, in which the writer describes a winter journey into rural Manitoba, a recollection which became the basis for the poem "Thumbing a Ride.

A fragment of an essay on Dorothy Livesay's experiences in New Jersey shows the same persistence with rewriting that is evident in the childhood pieces. Any given fragment on that episode says more or less the same thing, often in the same words, and finds it culmination in Right Hand Left Hand.

The essays on France, however, provide a different view of Livesays' writing. These pieces are more lyrical than the others, more descriptive, and generally more linguistically passionate than most of the author's prose. There is a hint of Dorothy Livesay the journalist in the French articles, with detailed descriptions of the setting and lengthy interviews. The same journalistic trend may be found in three pieces on Africa, including a short story, "Not on My Verandah," which describes, more fully than a regular essay would, what the writer makes of the African experience.

Dorothy Livesay can be seen here, as in her New Jersey fragments, empathizing with the natives and others who suffer discrimination. The two remaining essays in this file, "On Entertainment" and "On Being in Love," are examples of the writer's reflections on her own life and family, and what she culls from those reflections when seeking to understand herself.

Dorothy Livesay's journals occupy a separate box in the autobiographical section of the collection. The journal entries contained therein range from notes she made at the age of fourteen, in , to those penned in the Eighties. Written on loose sheets of paper, there is no overall coherence to the entries. It is likely that the entries here, noted down over a lifetime of writing, are only scattered fragments of the whole of Livesays' journals, with the exception of the very early entries The various notes have therefore been grouped by subject rather than date, especially since dates are not always indicated.

Entries fall into four general subject categories: Africa; England and France; her parents; and finally reflective jottings of a general nature. The journal writing Livesay did on her travels abroad is of a specific nature. She speaks mainly of three separate visits to Britain: The bulk of the entries concern Livesay's first journey to Europe, where she describes in detail the voyage itself, people on the ship, her impressions of the wide range of social classes she encounters, and her sense of adventure and excitement. Some of the writing is an apparent attempt at fictionalized autobiography, and the Livesay student may discover that the writer used these journal entries as hopeful drafts for prose writing.

Included in the travel sketches is a make-shift book fragment titled "Touch and Go," a title that reflects both Livesay's uncertainty with life and experience at that time 's perhaps , and her convictions about human sexuality. Curiously enough, in the travel entries Dorothy Livesay is doing exactly what her mother, Florence Randal Livesay, did, whose detailed diary about her travels to Africa is also available in the Livesay collection see "Biography".

Two prevalent and somewhat contradictory characteristics pertinent to Dorothy Livesay's writing are evident in her travel-sketch journals. In one sense, the reader can see Livesay in the act of finding a form for her autobiography, and for her prose-impetus in general. She tries to dramatize and colour what she observes, often with an odd lack of conviction. In the other, the author functions as a journalist, attempting to remain faithful to the reality she is confronted with, not willing to add or detract for aesthetic purposes.

The conflict between Livesay the journalist and Livesay the creative writer continually surfaces and is particularly evident in the few sheets she has concerning Africa. As a teacher and a journalist, as well as a writer concerned with social ist activism, Dorothy Livesay tackles all issues and disciplines at once.

She cannot entirely dramatize, for she is concerned with the social injustices evident in Africa, particularly the problem of race relations. Nor can she be entirely journalistic, for the dramatist in her, and the autobiographer, nags at her to colour the situation she describes with her own brand of human interest. To the Livesay scholar, there is much to find here when considering the position and problems of the narrator. The journal entries under the "General" heading cover a wide variety of subjects, although all of them centre the narrative self within a complex of observations and reflections.

In these notes, Livesay describes conversations with people, sometimes a dream, and reflects on ideas and historical matters. A small segment of these entries concerns the Thirties, and many provide a useful index to a study of Right Hand Left Hand, as well as the Thirties poems. A few interesting comments may be found scattered among the notes, such as a recorded conversation with her husband Duncan Macnair, about whom there is relatively little material in the collection as a whole.

In this segment, Dorothy admits to her husband that being married is "all right for a while," but she imagines she will want something different when she is fifty. Later she considers, after his death, that she has "failed him many times over. The reason for the absence of such unflinching honesty may be found in another entry from this group of papers, which concerns honesty in autobiography. Here she speculates, "who wants to admit the truth about oneself to others? Who even can bear to admit those truths to himself?

Those entries concerning the influence of Livesay's parents on her writing contain some noteworthy comments, particularly for the student of the writer's memoirs. One entry expresses very lucidly the impetus behind her autobiographical strain, and especially her apparent obsession with her father. Contrary to her assertions elsewhere, in interviews for example, here she speculates that she had no encounters with literary people when she was growing up, and therefore her memoirs cannot be of interest. It should be noted, however, that elsewhere Dorothy Livesay makes much of meeting her parents' friends, such as Mazo de la Roche and Raymond Knister and of the effect these meetings had on her.

Her childhood autograph book attests to her having some encounters with famous literary people through her parents, for there she has letters from Edmund Gosse, Frederick P. Roberts, and Mazo de la Roche, among others. See "diaries and calendars". However, Livesay reflects that only by emphasizing her father's influence on her own career and outlook can an autobiography of hers become universally interesting.

Such a work would probe the depths of female creativity and the father complex. Finally, the diary fragments from her early youth to some degree attest to Livesay's emotional sensitivity as a child, and justify her parents' early interest in their daughter's creative abilities. Often Dorothy Livesay complains of being pushed into writing by her parents, but other times she is grateful, It is this relationship which the author can be seen probing, inverting, and analyzing for herself throughout the Livesay collection, and it was obviously of central importance to her.

The key to all of Dorothy Livesay's notes, journals, diaries and autobiographical statements may be her entry for September 13, in which she resolves "not to write many letters to friends or relative, but to make notes each day on the themes I wish to touch in 'the adventures of a writer.

One file in the "Journals" category contains descriptions of dreams. Many of the entries are dated some as early as the 's and contain a description of circumstances in Livesay's life that might have caused her to dream as shown. It is probable that the author wrote down her dreams so she might use them in her writing sometime later. Whether or not Dorothy Livesay actually did base poems or stories on dreams is an open question, one that provides the scholar with a potentially fascinating study.

Dreams were recorded as part of the reality she seeks to transform into art, in the same way that her journalism notes provide her with data for her creative work. The diaries in the collection are distinguished from the journals in that Dorothy Livesay kept diaries intermittently throughout her life, and wrote in them sometimes every day for a stretch of time. The Collection contains relatively few diary books, but enough to determine several points concerning Livesay's life and work. There are diaries from the Twenties, Thirties, Sixties, and Seventies, and then some daily calendars and schedules that show her activities at certain times.

The earliest diaries, dated and , show the young writer in conflict with her own ambitions. Art no longer matters: I must not let it matter," On March 22, ,she writes "I am afraid of exaggeration- -especially in the practical test of storywriting," and on March 9 of that year she comes to the un-Livesayan conclusion that "the question of woman as an artist: This is a fearful truth to accept, but it ought to knock the conceit out of me.

Remarks such as these indicate Livesay's reluctance to express herself totally in her work, and show a certain fear of honesty which runs counter to the autobiographical impulse in her writing. In the diaries, as elsewhere in her papers, the researcher will find an urge on the writer's part to discover the origins of her own inner conflict in the difference between her mother and father. She often hints at a form of repression coming from her parents, and in September , back in Clarkson from France, she writes, "Now I feel alert, very much awakened.

Yet already being home closes me up. Already there's a hand against my mouth. The Livesay student will find fertile soil in this conflict for an analysis of all aspects of the author's work. The later diaries, and , provide much insight into Dorothy Livesay's relationship with Duncan Macnair. In the diary she speaks frankly at times of his attitude to her work, their sexual life, and, on October 24, , she recalls "all the scoldings I endured from my father and then from my husband.

This material will be of interest to those who wish to corroborate or relate events in Dorothy Livesay's life to her work, and also to any potential biographer. The "Biography" category is distinguished from "Autobiography," for in the latter are papers where Livesay speaks of herself; and is differentiated from "Bibliography," which concerns only the comments and writings of others on the author's work, not her life.

The "Biography" segment of the Collection contains a wide variety of papers from all aspects of Livesay's life, a third of which are strictly related to her political and social activities. It will be evident to the researcher from these files just how active the writer has been socially, both in the community and in international organizations. An interesting segment of this category for the biographical scholar are those papers that deal with Livesay's working career, which includes the jobs she has held other than academic posts, such as teaching and social work.

Also of interest are miscellaneous family documents, such as report cards and certificates. Of her mother, Florence Randal Livesay, there are translations and clippings, as well as correspondence and genealogical charts. Included are some of her father's articles and clippings, a few diary notes and correspondence. The files also contain a very few of Duncan Macnair's poems, reviews and articles.

Since both of these theses are about poetry, they have a great deal of bearing on the writer's work. The "Bibliography" category contains published reviews of Dorothy Livesay's books and edited works; articles about her work, some academic, as well as commentaries and copies of the poet's bibliography as it appears in various directories; clippings on Livesay from magazines and newspapers, covering the years to ; papers regarding the film "The Woman I Am"; bibliographic lists of various kinds; and student essays on the writer's work.

All of this material, excepting the student essays, is in the public domain and may be found in almost any university library, These files are therefore not unique to the University of Manitoba Archives and will not be covered in detail here. It is also probable that these files are incomplete, that is, there are more reviews, clippings and articles in existence than have come to the Department.

A further problem is that many of the articles, as well as some of the reviews and clippings, are undated or in some way are lacking full bibliographic information. Without this data, the secondary sources concerning the Livesayana are of less than adequate use. What the "Bibliography" files here do have to offer however, is a good percentage of clippings and reviews which the researcher may find hard to locate elsewhere, since these types of sources are inadequately indexed in the current Canadian press.

A clipping will not appear in an index, for example, if the publication it is drawn from is too obscure. The Livesay student will be able to gain an overview of contemporary attitudes to Dorothy Livesay's work, and see the changes that have occurred in the public understanding of her poetry and prose over the years. Some gleanings into Canadian reviewing practices may be discerned as well, for newspaper and journal items began to appear concerning Dorothy Livesay with the publication of her first book, Green Pitcher, in Since then, there are clippings and reviews to be found from every year, and these are all arranged chronologically.

Most of the articles and reviews are sympathetic and favourable, but few probe far beneath the surface of her work in their analysis. Of note are the following: As to the clippings contained in these files, the Livesay student will find a far more varied reception to the poet in the mass media than in the literary journals, where the articles and reviews mostly have appeared. It seems that journalists covering a book or a reading for the press are less informed and more inclined to express themselves in clicheed terms than are the writers for the journals.

Invariably a newspaper story will qualify Dorothy Livesay the writer as either someone's daughter, someone's wife, a housewife, and later as someone's mother and grandmother. Seldom is the writer spoken of as a writer only. An interesting study in Canadian literary journalism may therefore be made from these files, and the Livesay student could then attempt to ascertain what influence these clippings may have had on the poet's self-image, and on her work as a result, The "Autobiography" files will show, in fact, that Dorothy Livesay has always faced some form of conflict between her insecure self?

Among the so-called business papers of Livesay's personal life and writings are such important items as her last will and testament, Canada Council Grants and other contests and awards, inventories and catalogues of her papers and poems elsewhere, newsclippings which she kept, two boxes of her financial papers, and three boxes of files relating to her being writer-in-residence in six different Canadian universities.

These include subscription lists, manuscript material, copies, and several operating files. The correspondence is a very large and very rich component of the Dorothy Livesay Collection. Divided into two major sections- -the Family Correspondence and the Professional Correspondence- -it occupies forty-two archival 5" boxes. The Family Correspondence is filed by individual correspondent, that is, the letters of Dorothy Livesay to her father will be in folders separate from the letters her father wrote to her.

In the Professional Correspondence section, no such division exists. The entire exchange of letters between Livesay and the other party are put together in the same folder. Since letters are filed alphabetically under the surname of the other correspondent, no letter in the Professional Correspondence is filed under Dorothy Livesay's name.

Nevertheless, many of her letters are here, most often as duplicates of the original. Indeed, Livesay has managed over the years to preserve copies of a great many of the letters she sent and received. The Family Correspondence contains a number of the letters she wrote to her father when she was a very young child, as well as much of her parents' correspondence, the correspondence of her husband, Duncan Macnair, great sheaves of letters from both her sister, Sophie, and her daughter, Marcia, and even letters from an assortment of fairly distant relatives.

The Professional Correspondence is similarly complete, ranging from a single letter from a onetime correspondent to several file folders of letters covering a correspondence which spans decades. The letters range from strictly business relations through heated exchanges over poetry and poetics to intimate friendships, with many variations in between.

Livesay has always been an avid correspondent, and it is in her letters that one sees her in all her many roles- -poet, friend, confidante, mother, wife, lover, anthologist, academic, applicant and referee for grant proposals, thesis supervisor, concerned citizen and writer of letters to the editor and more. Across these many roles, however, one can hear in her letters both a consistency of tone and distinct changes of voice.

The letters Livesay wrote as a child are charming. Most of them are addressed to her father, John Frederick Bligh Livesay "JFBL" , who was sometimes separated from his family by trips related to newspaper business, and are imbued with a desire to please him. In return, JFBL made up rhymes and stories and drew amusing pictures in his letters to his daughters. One letter, dated March 18, , is written as if it were from Sophie's imaginary playmate Main. The voice in Livesay's letters shifts into a slightly different register in late adolescence.

The desire to please her father is still strong, and a note of barely contained excitement becomes predominant. A self-consciously literary style and a tone of shared complicity between father and daughter also appear at this time, about For example, the letter marked July 24, and signed "Your Fallen Daughter" is a confession of sexual initiation:. You know so many people will be horrified. Oh Lord, I am Jekyll and Hyde all over again. But you have succeeded in keeping one foremost I forget which one. By the time she reaches young adulthood and has transplanted herself to Europe, Livesay's desire to please her father, coupled with his transference onto her of his unfulfilled dreams of being a writer, has blossomed into a playful seduction in which both father and daughter engage.

This "seduction" is characterized in their letters by a teasing, flirtatious tone, frank sexual discussions and confessions, the use of affectionate names and diminutives, as well as a tone of unspecified longing. Livesay's letters contain subtle suggestions that she prefers her father over any number of men her own age, while he writes scathing denunciations of his wife. The daughter co-operates in this devaluation of her mother. She and her mother never got along well, and, at this particular stage in her life, as the potential "traps" of marriage and childrearing loom closer, she attempts to dissociate herself from her mother even further.

The crisis in the father-daughter relationship comes during a trip to England. Dorothy accompanies JFBL, in place of his wife, on an extended press tour of the country. A great deal of anticipation and excitement is evident in the letters leading up to the trip, and Dorothy is very conscious of taking her mother's place:. But thank you so much for letting me come. Mother indeed would have been hopeless, being entirely without a sense of proportion. Her simplicity is refreshing in the home but impossible in society.

While on the tour, they have a disagreement- -he wants her to come with him on a trip to his birthplace on the Isle of Wight on the same day that she wishes to attend a lecture by George Bernard Shaw. An argument ensues and Dorothy stalks out of the hotel where they are staying and remains away all day long. Her father overreacts to her absence, imagining her injured or killed or having taken her own life.

He even goes so far as to write a long letter to his wife assuming all responsibility for his daughter's "suicide. JFBL begins very gradually to turn more toward his wife, largely because she cares for him in his illness and infirmities. It is only during his last couple of years that a grudging respect for her begins to reappear in his letters to his daughter. During his daughter's early working and poetic careers, and during the early years of her marriage, JFBL remains involved in her life, although his influence is primarily related to financial matters.

The budget of the Macnair household is frequently strained, and JFBL is always willing and able to provide funds for emergencies and for house purchases. In addition to his financial backing during this period roughly , JFBL uses his professional influence to promote his daughter's writing career. When each of her first two books --Green Pitcher and Signpost--is published, he writes letters to all his newspaper contacts requesting that his daughter's book be reviewed. He carefully mentions to each editor that of course he expects the book to stand on its own merits and that a "slate" is as good as a "boost," but as General Manager of the Canadian Press his clout with the newspaper editors across Canada was considerable.

The correspondence between Livesay and her father comes to an end with JFBL's death in , but her relationship with him has had an enormous impact upon her throughout her life. His consistent encouragement of and pride in her talents , his example as a journalist, his talents as a literary critic, his financial backing --all of these factors molded her early career. Her fascination with this primary relationship, and with the relationship between her father and her mother, has helped to fuel her lifelong interest in memoirs, autobiography, and documentary.

One difference, perhaps a crucial one, between her father and mother was that her father was a failed writer, whereas her mother enjoyed considerable success and reputation. The father's failure--his confessed inability to tell the whole truth about his life --caused him to deflect his writerly ambitions onto the daughter most likely to succeed where he had not.

His failure created a lack, an absence, a space, into which the young woman could insert herself. FRL was equally supportive of her daughter's literary endeavours. When Livesay is a pre-school child, her mother has a column in the newspaper in which she prints the amusing things little Dorothy says and does and the stories she makes up. It is the mother who secretly sends out her daughter's first poems for publication.

Livesay has claimed in interviews that when the first poem appeared in print, she was furious with her mother for snooping into her dresser drawers where she kept her private papers. Her mother continues to act as her "agent" at least until Dorothy has published her first two books. Letters go back and forth discussing the title and arrangement of the book, as well as the publication of some of the poems in various literary magazines in Canada and the United States. FRL sends DL's poems and stories out, keeps track of submissions and payment, and maintains correspondence with publishers.

She also drops in at Faber's to promote her daughter's work. Unlike the father's campaigns, however, many of FRL's promotional efforts on her daughter's behalf produce discord and rancor between parent and daughter. Of course I am always interested in all your literary projects --but don't take up valuable time and space in telling me how "mad" you are bout something I did for you! For her part, Livesay is sharp, abrupt, and impatient with her mother.

Hostility usually lurks below the surface. In an undated letter responding to her mother's criticisms of one of her books probably Day and Night DL writes:. I don't mind your reactions to the book. The last ten years have been "somber" and "grey" to anyone living in the times, and as you have never experienced them, you naturally do not respond to a record of them. Dorothy's sister Sophie, in her letters, also describes their mother as difficult, although it seems she is somewhat closer to her than Dorothy ever was.

British and Irish Literature

Sophie's letters to her parents are much more even in tone. She is emotionally more distant from them. That is to say, for her they are parents, not titans to be wrestled with. Her letters indicate feelings of personal and intellectual inferiority to her older sister. For example, she remarks that Dorothy's first child is probably brighter and better trained than her own child, Gillian, and she writes of her second child, Brenda: If she hasn't the brains, she's the guts" [Sophie to DL, December 30, ].

The letters between Dorothy and Sophie are fairly straightforward discussions of child-rearing, domestic, financial and medical problems, and political events. Dorothy is the more introspective of the two sisters, periodically probing Sophie's memory, as well as her own, for information about their parents' lives. Occasionally the sisters lash out at one another, sometimes over Sophie's vagueness as to travel plans and Dorothy's tendency to intervene and take over such plans.

Dorothy accuses Sophie of being too much like their mother. Sophie accuses Dorothy of being overbearing. Both admit to being difficult. However, neither seems to hold a grudge once she has stated her position and got the matter off her chest by writing it down. There are thirty-eight folders of letters between the sisters, ranging from to The letters between Dorothy Livesay and her husband, Duncan Macnair, begin with their courtship in and end with his death in There are ten folders of their correspondence.

The earliest dated letter from Dorothy, addressed "Ho there, outrider," is about the conflict between writing and political activity due to physical, financial and time constraints and to the extremely small size of the reading public in Canada: In many of these letters from their courtship days, the rhetoric of politics blends with the rhetoric of love and relationship.

At times these two rhetorics co-exist harmoniously; at other times there is a strain. For example, in one letter Livesay discusses the conflict between her communist view of marriage and her traditional romantic views. As a communist, marriage is just a legal and social manifestation of an already existing arrangement But I am quite incapable, so far, of seeing it in only that light. The forms and the ceremonies I abhor; but the relationship and the assumptions seem to me almost holy in a human sense [letter headed Saturday afternoon, Second Beach].

But the conflict between writing and not writing is the issue upon which these conflicts between writing and politics, communism and capitalist conservatism, and many of the other dichotomies in Livesay's life are based:. I am quite sure I am finished with writing poetry, and unless I get hold of a prose project I won't even do that. But first I have to be alone more than has been possible, and second, I have to have music somehow, someway [DL to Duncan Macnair, letter headed Woodlot, Wednesday, January 8]. She writes this letter to her husband in Vancouver from the sanctuary of her father's house in Ontario.

1. Child Welfare and Child Well-Being: New Perspectives From the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being!
2. Sonnet 126!
3. Dorothy Livesay: : Archives & Special Collections : Libraries : University of Manitoba.
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This dilemma of the creative writer --the struggle to gain sufficient time and financial freedom to devote herself to her writing --pervades much of the Dorothy Livesay correspondence. Naturally, since the letters to her husband deal with immediate familial and domestic matters, this theme appears over and over again in these letters, whether they are written before their marriage or after. Livesay's concern remains the same when she is weighing the demands and responsibilities of a husband and family versus her career as a social worker, and both of these against the demands of her writing; when she travels to Europe after World War 11 as a correspondent for the Toronto Star; and when she is working for UNESCO in Paris.

His letters after their marriage usually record where he goes during the day, what people he sees, where he has dinner. He often mentions their cat. There is less content in these letters about his ideas and feelings, as his wife often remarks. He always complains about being tired but nonetheless seems to maintain a fairly demanding schedule of meetings and political activities.

There is a hearty tone in the early letters of both Dorothy and Duncan of setting out as comrades together to change the world. The conviction is often repeated that, as a pair, they can do much in the world. The tone changes considerably after five or six years of marriage. Duncan adopts the stance of the beleaguered man, put-upon by women: Similarly in Dorothy's letters to her husband there is a decline in the amount of political content as accounts of their toddler son's antics occupy more and more lines, and as she feels increasingly alienated from her writing by demands of family life.

The Family Correspondence also contains a large number of letters between Dorothy and her daughter, Marcia, and a much smaller number between her and her son, Peter. The children's correspondence with their father occupies four separate folders, and their correspondence with one another one folder. There are twenty-one slim folders of letters between Dorothy and relatives outside her immediate family, as well as some correspondence between her parents and their friends and relatives. There are also the letters between Dorothy and Anne Campbell. Campbell is a very close friend and confidante and even, during periods when Dorothy is away from her family in Europe, surrogate mother to Dorothy's children.

The correspondence between "Annie" and "Dee" is much more personal and familial than professional and for this reason is included with the Family Correspondence. The Professional Correspondence is an impressive collection of some thirty-three boxes of letters with writers, publishers, artists, editors, educators, students, admirers, and scores of other people individually listed in the Container List. Since Livesay's writing career spans the better part of six decades, one might hope for significant correspondence with other prominent Canadian writers at various stages of their careers --an expectation amply borne out by the thousands of letters in this category.

Included here are twenty-nine letters between her and Margaret Atwood , a dozen with Bill Bissett , sixty with Fred Cogswell , over one hundred with Alan Crawley and family , thirteen with Patrick Lane , seventy-eight with Elizabeth Varley , nineteen with Pat Lowther , ten with John Newlove , eighty-six with George Woodcock , and correspondence with approximately 1, others. In total, the Correspondence forms a very large and significant part of the Dorothy Livesay Collection, offering a comprehensive view of Livesay's life and work from childhood into old age.

Researchers will be able to investigate such diverse topics as Livesay's activities as an editor of various books and magazines, the editorial process for her Collected Poems, her fan mail, her fascination with such subjects as the Japanese-Canadians, Louis Riel, and Isabella Valancy Crawford, and literary influences, alliances and feuds. It will be possible to make biographical connections between the work and the life through an examination of the Correspondence. Any number of topics primarily related to the work will be further illuminated by a reading of the Correspondence.

The Livesay Correspondence is a major addition to the body of Canadian archival materials. This correspondence is filed in alphabetical order by correspondent and contains both in coming and outgoing mail. The inclusive dates are given whenever possible, followed by the number of items in each file. The poetry of Dorothy Livesay, in view of its vast quantity, encyclopedic nature, creativity, and biographical content, and time-span, constitutes one of the vital segments of this Collection. While one could propose that Livesay performed well in her short stories, essays, plays, and other prose forms, none would dispute that it is her poetry that has established her reputation and made of her writing an acknowledged and enduring landmark in Canadian literature.

Fortunately, the Collection reflects that reality. Of the approximately 2, poems excluding duplicates and revisions in the Collection, many have been printed in anthologies, journals, newspapers, magazines, even graduation programs. Because of the large numbers involved, no effort has been made to indicate where and when these poems may have been published.

However, it is certain that many have never been published. The enduring value of the listing herein described is that it brings together into one as complete an overview of her poetry as is presently possible. Livesay was a compulsive poet. Her first impulse in the throes of strong feeling always seemed to be to write - a poem, a letter, a letter to the editor, an article, or a journalistic piece. Her pen was but an immediate extension of her soul. This was a habit which she developed early in her teens, and was no doubt attributable in large part to the example and encouragement of both her parents, writers themselves.

The exception is with the longer, documentary poems which grew by accretion, section by section, with considerable cutting, juxtaposition, and alterations in sequence. Sometimes, too, a single brief lyric poem blossomed into a section of a considerably longer poem. The dynamics of her poetic expression are virtually limitless and respect no subject boundaries. At the risk of stating a sample of her topics with the obvious exclusion of many others, the Collection contains poems written in praise sometimes in criticism of many other writers such as Raymond Knister, Ray Souster, Alan Crawley, Pat Lowther, Archibald Lampman, Gwendolyn MacEwen and many more ; numerous political activist poems "F.

Arguably the largest number of her poems deal with common yet complex human relationships, which seemed to demand her greatest attention, relationships such as marriage and separation, mother and daughter, lovers, chance encounters with strangers, her own feelings towards her parents "I lay between my mother and my father While it is true that many poems in the collection are copies of originals elsewhere - especially of those at the University of Alberta Library - a large number are handwritten originals in pen or pencil scribbled down on envelopes, tearsheets, and any other available scraps of paper.

Most of the typewritten originals and copies of drafts are signed and dated and come in multiple copies and revisions. Though no effort has been made to differentiate originals from copies and to sequence drafts of a poem in its developmental stages, versions of the same poem have been assembled together for easier study. When the University of Manitoba acquired the poems they were in no order of date or title. To create that order has been a major task. It was decided to sort the poems chronologically, with an alphabetical index of titles and first lines. The chronological order manifests Livesay's biographical, intellectual and poetic development.

The peril of this approach is the difficulty of proving that the date written on the document is the date of creation. Many dates may indicate the time of revision, of submission for publication, or of actual publication. The sizeable minority of undated poems may cast doubt upon a sorting even by decade, but for these we have followed such clues as the date of events described and the presence of an address or other circumstantial evidence.

Most of the poems bear a simple title. The researcher, however, must be aware that, as should be expected in so large a collection extending over a period of almost sixty-five years, several different poems may bear a common title eg. When this common title is "Untitled" or "Fragment", the poems, like those lacking a title, are identified by the first line. Some of the untitled poems are pages detached from longer poems, scattered segments of works now difficult to reconstruct. The Index is intended to make alphabetic identification as easy as possible.

Whatever the interest of the researcher and scholar in Livesay or Canadian poetry at large, a careful study of this collection of poetry will bring lasting rewards. There is much to be mined and understood here, much to be written, and much to be published. Vancouver" 5x "Words For a Chorus" 3x Speak through me, mountains. Give me the sinews, 2x Take me for the breath.

We are the ones without a stone. The Dorothy Livesay Collection contains approximately one hundred nineteen short stories, most of which were written by Livesay. The number is an approximate one for at least two reasons. First, there are a few cases in which the characters and circumstances of one story are carried over into another story or chapter of a projected longer work. For example, there is a sequel to the story "Frustration" which is headed simply "III. Some are nearly complete; some are just fragments or extensive notes for a short story.

Two stories which are fairly well-developed diminish toward the end into mere notes for continuation. Many of the short stories were written in the period between and , when Livesay was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. A few of them, such as "In a Cafe," "The Last Climb," and "A Sojourn en Pension," based upon her experiences as a twenty-two year-old student in France, seem to have been written several years after her return to Canada.

Two copies bear her married name and her North Vancouver address. Two other stories were written during the 's. Many are undated, so it is difficult to state when Livesay more or less abandoned the form. However, some of them bear addresses and it may be possible to ascertain an approximate date of composition by checking against other data in the Collection, Livesay's address or addresses on envelopes attached to letters in the correspondence files, or records of house purchases in files pertaining to financial matters.

Some of the early storiesare dated and, by comparing types of paper used and the handwriting, it is possible to state that Livesay's greatest period of productivity with the short story form perhaps her most creatively productive time overall was the late Twenties and Thirties. It would appear that Livesay gradually abandoned the short story and pursued instead poetry, autobiography in several forms and journalism.

The question arises as to why her prose was not published in book form until the collection of stories based on her childhood in Winnipeg was published by the littleknown Peguis Publishers in , almost fifty years after some of those stories were written. A Winnipeg Childhood is discussed in the essay on "Autobiographical Fiction". Livesay's prose may have remained unpublished in the Thirties for financial reasons.

It may be that the material was too personal, too autobiographical, to be published around the time it was written. In a letter, Livesay's mother compliments her daughter on a recently published story but questions the necessity to write about the particular situation upon which she believes the story is based:. I'm sorry you "used me" in your lettle story in S.

You should not do these things, for there wd. Some of the stories treat the subjects of women's disillusionment with men, marriage, and the economic system, and their fears about their own inevitable fates, and as such may have been too controversial to be well-received. It may have been the fact that in the early Thirties Livesay herself had begun to question the relative value of writing and the role of the writer in society, and she may have neglected the stories.

Furthermore, there was a twelve-year hiatus between publication of Livesay's second and third books of poetry--the Depression, war, her own marriage and childrearing intervening in these years. Still other possible reasons for Livesay's declining productivity in the short story form may have been related to her increasing notoriety and reputation as a poet.

Commitments relating to poetry may have simply overshadowed her prose writing. Finally, it is likely that her preoccupation with autobiography also edged out the fiction impulse. The demarcation line between these two forms is never entirely clear in Livesay's writing, and her zeal for both autobiography and documentary may have ultimately satisfied her urges toward prose. Dorothy Livesay's short stories deal with five main areas of content. First, there are the stories about very young children, most of which were written when she was about seventeen or eighteeen.

The main character is usually named Elizabeth or Zee, and she has a younger sister Sylvie. In some of these stories, the father is referred to as "Big Bear," a name and role Livesay's own father assumed in play with his children. These stories often portray an intense relationship between a father and his daughter; the mother plays a much less significant role. The wife and mother is dead.

The story is simply the brief thoughts of all three characters after a family quarrel. Given what we know about Livesay's feelings about her own parents, and the tensions of that household, one might see this story as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the death of her own mother. If this were so, then it would seem that the conclusion this experiment reaches is that argument and strife in the family would not cease with removal of the mother. The little girl loves to dress up for her father, and she likes to comb his hair with the special combs he has bought expressly for this purpose.

A disagreement between the parents about authority over the child results in the father breaking the combs in a rage and turning his anger on his daughter. Another of the stories untitled concerns the birth of a baby brother. She has the idea that it is supposed to be kept secret. The story "First Love" depicts Zee with a crush on a little boy who is loved by all the little girls in the neighborhood.

He is gentle, unlike the rest of the boys his age. A second category of short story in the Livesay Collection is the story about an artist. These four years have left him ambitious but not over-confident: He needs to feel there is someone backing him, he says. He has such a mentor in his friend the local doctor, but the story is about his attraction to the young woman who is the community's school teacher.

The story ends before the two of them get together, with the merest of possibilities that there may be a certain shared something in their eyes. Because the story ends in typical Livesay fashion with a very open and indeterminate conclusion, it is difficult to say just what is being suggested. Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive; there is some overlap between them. For example, a third category of short stories, stories about a young woman studying France, overlaps with the category of stories about an artist.

The emotional atmosphere is charged, and when they reach their destination the girl is sick to her stomach. The man kisses her twice while they are on t1he mountaintop, and then the pair descends. The woman is returning to her own country in a week's time. The story consists of minimal sketches of madame and her paying guests, including a general who is writing his memoirs. It is set in the area where Madame de Sevigne wrote her memoirs. A fourth category includes stories about the plight of people during the Depression.

Several of these were published in Right Hand Left Hand and will be familiar to most researchers. The characters are usually drawn from the lower classes, the poor and uneducated, and their speech reflects their origins and ongoing difficulties. Livesay seems to have a very good ear for dialogue, accurately capturing the grammars, rhythms and accents of her characters. In some cases the well-written dialogue is the feature, which saves these stories from becoming simple morality tales.

The story "Two Women" is about two young women who are sharing living quarters. Both are employed in jobs that are dull, monotonous, low-paying and lacking in future prospects. One day the woman who works as a shoe clerk waits on a much older woman who is mentally unbalanced, almost totally, childishly, dependent upon her husband, who brings her into the store to buy shoes for her.

When the clerk gets home after work that night, she finds that her roommate, who had been coping better than she, has had a nervous breakdown. But not all the stories in this category are about poor people. She drowns herself in English Bay. Her death is the last straw, the catalyst, which allows the newspaper reporter who had encountered her that afternoon in Stanley Park to quit his job and leave the rat race to become a writer.

A fifth and final category of short stories, in some ways the most interesting of the Collection, encompasses the stories about women. That is, "Bride" does not really "fall in love" with Tom; she simply substitutes him for her father. However, she seems to capitulate at the end of the story. Now she was an old woman, yellow and worn. Apparently he has been visiting her for a period of ten years, but neither he nor Sheila will give a sign of interest or need to the other until one day when, after an emotionally charged scene in which Sheila mends a tear in his coat, he leaves, and she suddenly runs after him, only to be interrupted by her boss right at the crucial moment before she can speak.

Following this failed last-ditch attempt to speak seriously to Sam, she feels as if her only hope is out of reach. But she still desperately longs to have a child. She becomes very attached to the child of her boss's wife. Soon after, however, her partner becomes detached and seems bent on dashing her "enthusiasm.

The story ends with "she had decided. But the nature of the decision is not clear. It is an incomplete story about a young girl whose older sister is getting married. The younger sister is full of emotions about this pending event. Her parents are overburdened by life and are very strict and harsh with their daughter. In order to get out of the house to meet her date, she has to pretend that she is going over to a girlfriend's to work on a map for her homework, and even at that her father and brother barely let her out of the house.

The mother is simply weary. The girl fears her father, her brother, and the boy she is supposed to meet. At the last minute, she ends up running over to the safety of her girlfriend's house instead of meeting the boy. A doctor, the issue of free medicare, and a woman who induces her own abortion are the crux of the story "Thaw. The doctor is moved to vote with his conscience, to alter his previous public stand against community health care, and to side with those people in town who are pushing for universal access to medical care.

The number and range of short stories in the Dorothy Livesay Collection are impressive. The subject matter is varied, dealing with characters of all ages and of both sexes, and Livesay's approach is almost invariably fresh and new, containing insights into many kinds of relationships from a woman's point of view. There is a very frank treatment of women's sexual desire which conflict with the effects of social conditioning and the compromises and circumstances of women's lives in the earlier part of our century.

Livesay's successful manipulation of her material to incorporate political, social, and ideological concerns without destroying unity or aesthetic effect is a considerable achievement. Her use of dialogue is adept. If there is any criticism of Livesay's technique in the short stories, it is that she often seems to end a story before really dealing with the issues it raises.

The endings are sometimes abrupt, sometimes overly ambiguous, with an apparent lack of resolution of the tensions and conflicts of the characters. Occasionally these endings create a sense of melodrama. However, many of the early stories are quite similar in content to the poems of the same period. The woman trapped in her role, her desire to escape, her ambivalence toward "capture" by the male, her identificationwith nature are all treated in both stories and poems, and the resolution, if it can be called such, is also quite similar in both.

There are violent emotions, windows flung open, imaginative flights up into the air or a literal drowning in English Bay in the desire to escape the strictures of society through uniting with nature and the elements. And the endings of the stories are not unlike the endings of poems in content and style. The somewhat abrupt, ambiguous ending of many of Livesay's stories is essentially comparable to the closure of the lyric poem. Although many have strong autobiographical connections, most of them succeed as short stories and do not become bogged down in their own content, as sometimes happens in the longer works of autobiographical fiction.

Livesay had greater control over her material in the short story form than when she ventured into autobiography. There are five manuscripts of extended prose fiction by Dorothy Livesay in the Collection. All five center around a female character and a love relationship which develops at a crucial stage in her life. Of the five, to date only A Winnipeg Childhood has been published in its entirety. A Winnipeg Childhood is a collection of linked short stories tracing the life of a young girl, Elizabeth, from early childhood until the age of eleven.

But he is not Panda. He knows nothing about the reasons for this event. For many weeks, the woman, now avoiding the store, ponders the disappearance and replacement of Panda. The woman tells the story, up to this point, to a few friends, some of whom are already familiar with Panda, due to the MMSs.

One friend begins referring to the replacement cat, the large cat with a pink nose and clumps of ungroomed fur, as Ersatz Panda. Other friends do not comment on the story or refer to the incident. The one friend continues, from time to time, to refer to Ersatz Panda. The woman thinks that this may have something to do with the fact that he, like the woman, was born and raised in the city. It drapes itself across a counter and stares dreamily into the ceiling.

The woman asks the person at the second store about the orange cat. The orange cat is a girl. The person at the second store says that this is very strange. She says that KC does not in fact belong to the second store but has for a long time been visiting it. The person at the second store found this very strange. The person at the second store believed that the man who claimed that KC was his cat had taken her, but then, after several months, KC reappeared. And she has continued to appear at the second store. The woman observes that KC seems to know she is being discussed.

But now, as winter coasts into a long, slow spring, the woman becomes willing to return to the first store. He adopts a beatific hen pose. Narration is the act of organizing discrete events into a series. Narration could simply be the act of juxtaposition, repeated, doubled and tripled. Narrative could be merely decorative, I sometimes think. In the above story, Ersatz Panda is the name given to a cat of mysterious origins. Of course, we understand that the cat has no true name — at least, no proper, given name.

Some of these relations are mediated by MMS. This story is interesting mostly because we know so little about what has happened. The story is also interesting because people in the story have so little to say about what occurs. And I think, at some level, I relate this story simply — and only — because it includes this word.

These examples euphemize grimmer transpositions of mostly inedible materials soil, paste. It seems so unfair. To return briefly to the story, which, in spite of its already having ended here, may be continuing elsewhere, the woman finds herself returning to the first store, warming to the somewhat retiring Ersatz Panda, a black tuxedo cat with a broad face and very pink nose. It was even difficult to write about. I mean, consider the situation: A beloved cat is replaced by a terrifying phony.

But I should be precise: I was thinking about fate. This rings true to me but I have to unpack it. What I think this means is that everything that will happen is already determined. This is why fate is weird. It is a pattern. Es rever nid loterofd na ega mina ot nide nettal fefil ru oyt u obag nih tyre vesti.

Panda herself was just a delay, an adverb attached to the arrival of her replacement, since her replacement was her truer self. She was an image I sent to people without knowing the extent to which she already was an image. When he showed up, at first I worried there was something wrong with the store. Later, I worried there was something wrong with me. The truth is, a year and a half ago, I started making videos of this bodega cat.

I made these videos from a swamp of loneliness and fear. I had already made up my mind. I refused to die, because dying would mean I had capitulated. I tried to imagine a human being who was not cowed by failure. I imagined a person whose consciousness was a happy bobbing speck of fluff, a haze of light shimmering above the hood of a recent midsize vehicle. I did want this person to be, if not stupid, then mildly lacking in imagination.

It was necessary that the person have no imagination. The strangest thing was, it worked. Not that I lived in bliss, per se, but that I began to live among some other people. A very small black cat with white circles around her eyes walks along the top of a green box of dish detergent. The cat lowers her head and furiously grooms her cheek. The cat looks up. Her eyes are an impetuous dark yellow. They are the color of the petals of black-eyed Susans. The yellow of pre-Bloomberg taxicabs. After Panda disappeared and the videos stopped, there came the period during which, as I mentioned, I stopped going to the first store at all.

During this time, there were several miracles. From what I have been able to ascertain, my downstairs neighbor is retired. He does not seem to be entirely single, but he lives alone. The first thing I noticed about him was a laminated sign he put on his mailbox. The sign had a bright red border. Later, an identical but slightly larger sign appeared on the door of his apartment. This sign included additional information, that it was possible to obtain CD mixes and some sort of spiritual advising I forget the exact wording at this location.

Sometimes, when I left the building in the morning, the door to the apartment was ajar and my neighbor could be seen working at his computer, his back to the door. The apartment was filled with boxes, stacked floor to ceiling. Over the next six months, more signs were added to the door. The new signs included numbers indicating passages in the New Testament. Sometimes a brief portion of the passage in question was also included.

There came to be many of these signs. The front door was painted white. For some reason, my neighbor never put his signs up again after this. It was an unusual miraculous! In the three years I have been living in this building, I have never seen any attempt to improve it. All the windows are cracked and the floor tiles are coming up in the hallway. The place sways when a truck goes by.

Another sequence of events that seemed to result in something one could call a miracle was an interaction I had with the FedEx guy. When the FedEx guy comes to deliver things, he always calls me. I did all the things you might expect, running around and checking behind corners and whatnot. I went outside and looked down the stairs leading to the basement. I put it on those stairs, you know? And there were people walking by, so I pretended I was looking for a buzzer, you know? And I found this old part of a broom and I put it on there? I was running outside to the basement staircase. There was indeed the head of a yellow plastic broom sitting on something.

The final miracle is more complex. It was a Sunday and I was walking in my neighborhood with my friend, the person who named Ersatz Panda. He and I had just had a big breakfast and were moving slowly. We went past a row of garbage cans and on one can was a black and white cat. It was a mostly white cat, with a black ear. It was sunning itself, panting lightly.

My friend reached out to engage this cat. Anticipating his touch, it inclined its large, flat head. I exist for him. The other thing you need to know about me is that I have been the victim of some pretty extreme forms of deceit. Not scams or frauds but romantic infidelity. This is why I feel reasonably comfortable with the notion that narrative could be merely decorative. A narrative might just be something you casually attach to your real, lived life — a tail made out of a necktie or an unattractive paper hat.

And now I know this. My greatest desire has always been to take people literally. The miracles I mention above take their form s as miracles, as such, from the fact that some negative expectation of mine was not fulfilled. Other people might have less tenuous relationships with the notion that events like these could come to pass.

But to me they are extraordinary. They indicate that my life will not be an unremitting disaster. He is my closest friend.

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It is a repetitive action and therefore non-narrative. However, inside the repetition, something has changed. I used to think that what disrupts repetitive living is fate. Now I think that what disrupts living is other people. Maybe Panda was sitting outside her store, contemplating the seductive greenness of an overturned Heineken bottle.

Maybe this contemplation was interrupted by the seductive approach of some eligible cat. Maybe Panda, vacating her post for love, sent out word via local cat networks and a viable replacement a needy case was found. It also depends on forms of agency that make no sense, regarding cats. Cats make concerted choices; they go adventuring; they know how to read; they return; they give themselves complex names pertaining to their ancestors; they enjoy dancing; they sniff flowers; they cross-country ski; they live forever.

Maybe it is a combination of the two. Or, given the parasites known to dwell in cat feces, parasites allegedly capable of migrating into the human brain, maybe not. And I will send it to my friend. Or, rather, it is their use of hyperbole and allegory that makes them accurate. The city really is the dream of skyscrapers, big bucks, and mobility dangled before the exploitable immigrant, which also makes it something of a nightmare.

Yet both authors are uncharacteristically comic, even zany, when it comes to American tableaux. Though she was born in Rochester, New York, she lived somewhat less than half her life within her country of origin. In an early instance of the mix of extreme privilege and social uncertainty that would define her life, Florine, along with her four siblings, was whisked off to Germany as a young child after her father abandoned the family. It is not known whether her mother, Rosetta Walter Stettheimer, was aiming to save face or cash, or both. Florine briefly returned to the US in the s, to study at the Art Students League, the first school in New York to permit female students to make drawings from nude models.

She was otherwise in Vienna and Paris and other places European, often in the company of her chic sisters, Ettie and Carrie.

There were performances of the Ballets Russes, discussions of the vitalism of Henri Bergson, careful examinations of canonical Continental paintings. Then, with the outbreak of the Great War, the Stettheimers decamped to New York, which became a permanent home. Florine Stettheimer would leave the US only once thereafter, to vacation in Canada. In she was forty-three, with an impressive education but no career.

She is understood to have led a life of comfort and leisure, if of questionable romantic and professional fulfillment. The contradictions were many, but increasing quantities of family money seem to have made them more interesting than tragic. Starting around , Stettheimer entered her mature period. She stopped painting post-Impressionist mediocrities and got weird. She festooned her studio with cellophane and Victorian lace. She gilded liberally, filling her canvases with lithe little bodies en pointe. She was at once a consummate Continental decadent and a patriotic American modern—a hyper-feminine late bloomer and visionary, the ultimate outsider-insider.

She became a satirist of artistically inclined upper classes, as well as a depicter of nationalist pageantry. She was not a bad poet. She showed infrequently and was nearly forgotten after her death. Wanda Corn and Michael Leja—two art historians who have, to their credit, shown a greater tolerance than most for the minutiae of the interwar period in the US—have little to say about her. Stettheimer designed iridescent cellophane scenery and feathered and sequined costumes for the show, making something of a splash.

We could well think of Stettheimer on similar terms: This way of looking at Stettheimer may not endear her to contemporary American audiences, who seem to enjoy her work mainly for its flowers, stars, large-eyed maidens, and ubiquitous crystalline frills. Indeed, in one of the very few extant photographs of Stettheimer, taken ca. Stettheimer thus favored an eccentric exoticism—one in which fauns, George Washingtons, and other stock figures were caricatured and fetishized—over related contemporaneous avant-garde movements, even as she maintained a rather straightforward relationship to the sensuality of paint.

For Stettheimer did not just daub, she built her faux-naive pictures with an artfully wielded palette knife which is why it is remarkable that her substantial canvases sometimes look like finely delineated New Yorker covers in reproduction. Stettheimer has also been said to have roots in the European Symbolist tradition, and there are clear parallels between her work and the oneiric images of Odilon Redon, for example.

However, to the synthesis of the symbol she clearly preferred the ambivalence and deferral associated with allegory, the effect produced when a thing in a picture does not represent that thing, purely or exclusively, but rather points to something else.

For it is difficult to understand or, for that matter, see Florine Stettheimer, without examining her allegorical depictions of America. An important political fact of the era during which Stettheimer resettled in New York was the increasing prevalence of attempts to define American identity, as well as domestic policy, with recourse to types and categorization. The use of statistics by the government during the Progressive Era, while ostensibly indicative of a turn to objectivity, was also linked to attempts to limit access to US citizenship and the protections it entails, as well as to jobs, reproductive rights, freedom of movement, and so on.

This was followed by the Emergency Quota Act of and the Johnson-Reed Act of , which restricted immigration from most parts of the world. Though Stettheimer was born in America, she was raised a European. Her status as a native daughter who had to become American in middle age was, in itself, a challenge to the essentialism of nativist views. The Manhattan cityscape that dominates the top half of the canvas functions as a painting within a painting.

A bit like a birthday cake, parade float, or theatrical backdrop, this seductively vulnerable skyline justifies the guns mustered to protect it. Like the red, white, and blue banners employed throughout the scene, it signifies both power and peace. Despite its consummate charm, the city appears secondary to the enlarged seal of New York City occupying the bottom margin. Featuring a pair of allegorical figures, this doubly significant seal is a supposedly collective image, an icon for the municipality. The Dutchman, no hardened colonist, possibly an early twentieth-century Dutch naval officer, is jaunty with ribbons.

Meanwhile, the Native American employs a union shield as a bizarre breechcloth, while wearing a flag-themed headdress. It presents an Oz-like America seen, gleefully and somewhat ignorantly, from the exterior, an advertisement for a theatrical production full of esoteric, and perhaps ultimately inaccessible, cheer. To the Memory of P. Barnum shows a more complex and less ambivalent response to the question of American identity, filtering its visible forms through a beauty contest reimagined as a hybrid event incorporating a circus.

Stettheimer presents a pageant of human types watched over by recognizable individuals, including herself at upper left, smiling and well made up, next to writer Edna Kenton and photographer Edward Steichen. At lower right, an impresario who may or may not be a slenderized Barnum oversees bathing beauties tanned and pale, as well as, at center, children in feathered headdresses, a Rudolph Valentino—like figure leading a horse that may or may not be a Lipizzaner, and, at left, an all-black band in elaborate uniforms over which the painter has obviously lingered.

The beauty contest is a pretext for various kinds of showmanship, which Stettheimer organizes according to genre, race, and gender. A seemingly endless supply of palm fronds and dripping red, white, and blue crystals mediate the carefully divided scene, in which everyone stays in his or her corner, as the show goes on.

With the exception of Stettheimer and her artist friends, who are legible as themselves, everyone plays and represents a role, a mere type, suggesting that their identities within this convocation are at least partly performative. Yet, here Stettheimer also limited herself to satirically depicting contemporary norms rather than upending or abandoning these norms for something else. Though the painting presents a quasi-democratic social sphere in which Americans ostensibly gather to have fun, there remain real divisions and inequalities within the collective setting.

Indeed, so many shows go on simultaneously that it is difficult to determine the actual nature of the contest or what is at stake, and for which participants. The scene is, additionally, unrelentingly festive and self-congratulatory, though there is something unsettling about the many knowing smiles exchanged: The costumes and sets she designed to great acclaim for Four Saints in Three Acts clearly influenced these late paintings, which are setlike in their composition and contain lacy elements recalling the cellophane she used in these designs.

Even their satirical elements feel resigned to the vapidity of glamor, and recognition of a certain emptiness in New York social life may be as close as Stettheimer came to openly acknowledging the divisions of her new-old homeland. This patriotic work—celebrating the foundational myth in which Pocahontas rescues John Smith—had a number of strange features: The curators of the Jewish Museum show chose not to include the twenty-two maquettes Stettheimer produced, instead devoting space only to the two earlier stage design projects.

However, such speculation verges on armchair psychology and almost certainly misses the point, which is that Stettheimer struggled with questions regarding power and assimilation throughout her American career. Wealth allowed Stettheimer to be at once candid, utopian, hermetic, escapist, appropriative, and in violation of good taste, and she grew into this fact from on. She assumed an American identity of a kind, as a woman who could, at least in theory, buy whatever she desired.

Yet, in spite of her wealth, Stettheimer depicts herself in her final, unfinished painting of , The Cathedrals of Art , standing on the side of folk culture. Stettheimer is standing on the side of folk-influenced American Art , as the right-hand column reads, rather than on that of the more lucrative high-modernist Art in America , on the left. This article appears in the print edition of Art in America , September I recall, as a girl of eight or nine, discovering a photograph of my mother taken a few years before I was born. In the image, my mother stands in a white room.

She is laughing as I had never seen her laugh in life, completely taken by elation. Surrounding her are large-format photographs, presumably waiting to be hung on the walls. Some are still wrapped in paper, but two—showing beautiful women—are visible. One of the women is also laughing, almost as much as my mother.

I later learned that this long-haired, gently disheveled, smoking and ring-wearing figure was the singer Janis Joplin—though for now she was just an anonymous subject who reminded me a little of myself. When I brought the picture to my mom, she told me that the photographs were by a man named Richard Avedon.

In Avedon, a. This was a standard mother-daughter conversation. There were many unusual objects in our Upper East Side apartment, and I was a wily sleuth. As we ascended the steps together, I believed that the building belonged to us. Only we knew about the unfinished blocks at the tops of the grand columns—meant to become figures personifying the four great periods of art, from Ancient to Modern, but never carved.

This was the power of the museum: It could hide a flaw in plain sight and look magnificent while doing so. She was a specialist in European drawings and prints, and her office was accessible via a secret door in the wall of one of the galleries, which she opened using a key, often in full sight of gawking tourists. The smell was of ancient papers, leather, inks, and resins. She liked to purchase these odds and ends at European flea markets. I had no idea what they meant to her.

Later, museum closed and workday done, we exited the departmental warren and descended through the empty, darkened building. We passed shadowy busts and portraits, obscure arms and armor, sacred objects visible only in outline. These walks, sometimes up or down staircases inaccessible to the public, would reappear in my dreams. Sometimes it would be impossible to find my way out of the museum; or a work of art might come, disconcertingly and messily, to life. In reality, we always reached an exit without incident.

This was her place. These are my most vivid childhood memories. Of course, there were privileges: However, it was the incidental things I cherished: These moments impressed upon me the dignity and solace of work. The institution encompassed my mother; it seemed to support her at every turn. Dinner conversation with my father revealed a different side of the job: There were also regular updates on Brooke Astor, the late heiress, with whom my mother lunched from time to time—and here the tone of the report shifted.

Astor was extraordinary; the chauvinist was forgotten amid reflections about Mrs. Sometimes celebrities appeared, requesting tours. There was the week of Brad Pitt. It was, after all, her first big job. My mother changed her first name as well as her last in marriage, and my father left behind Yonkers and his working-class roots. My mother had the physical gifts that permit self-transformation: She was slender, with sweet, symmetrical features and beguiling brown eyes.

She met Andy Warhol. Even Kurt Cobain seemed to be modeling himself on the Factory magus. By this time, my mother and I disagreed on many topics. Not least among these was my appearance. All my clothing was deemed too tight. Meanwhile, I was athletic, verging on Amazonian, or so I felt.

By age twelve, I was already passing my mother in height. I played three sports. My face came from my father. Only later did I understand how fully one can reinvent oneself in New York City, particularly with a good partner in metamorphosis, as it were. I continued to grow away from her, at first physically, then creatively. I became obsessed with drawing, a pursuit my mother discouraged vehemently when a high school teacher suggested I apply to art school. I would go often to the museum on Friday afternoons to work on my sketches. After I was accepted at Harvard, the polar opposite of art school, my mother began taking me with her on research trips, perhaps because I was a good sounding board or perhaps to keep an eye on me.

This episode took place on a volcanic beach, where we were walking. Our host, Monsieur Gaby, and I stood on the shore, watching with mounting horror. Eventually all was well, but in that petrifying moment I saw clearly and for the first time the distance between my mother and me. Later, after my mother had staggered back to land, we all stood staring at one another. I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time.

Gaby, meanwhile, seemed ready to depart. We piled into his SUV. As the vehicle bounded up the lush mountainside, I reflected on what an odd couple we must appear: This play about an averted coup is gorgeously, strangely formal and slow—a dramatic rendition of an actual early seventeenth-century incursion. Offstage, revenge killings ensue, but neither Violetta nor the vast majority of the Venetians know anything of this.

Venice is unaware that it has been saved. And any appreciation of light at the end of this drama does not come with added symbolism. The light is simply present. In other words, it records non-existent events of a plot that does not unfold. It displays the trace of a transformative will that in fact recedes curiously from the stage, rather than setting narrative in motion. After he is betrayed by those to whom he has confessed, Jaffier makes a desperate petition to the sun, sky, ocean, Venetian canals, and blocks of marble.

He describes these inanimate things, calls their names and curses them, but to no avail. The historical event collapses inexorably, quietly and mechanically, on his head. This, according to Weil, is a moment at which eternity enters human time. The play is now infrequently staged, not least because of its incompleteness. And it is indeed difficult to think of a proper theatre and audience for its arabesques of meditative avoidance of action, leading to a non-event including lovely light.

Yet, if there is such a theatre and such a setting, it might well be the Serralves Villa, as reimagined in the exhibition of artist Nick Mauss. With long bands of daylight striping the walls and floors, accompanied by equally expressive passages of shadow, the Villa lushly affirms its own existence.

Its citations of classical architecture, along with its modern styling, suggest a complex and highly civilized relationship to the notion of history. It permits the visitor access, if not to eternity, then to other planes of vision. Additional pictures, patterns, and outlines now appear within the Serralves Villa.

Sybil Myra Caroline Grant (nee Primrose)

They may also simply be possible. The image of what appears to be a pencil sketch has been enlarged in steel. It rests solidly against a wall. One feels a foolish urge to rush over and attempt to fold it in half. Surely it will resist. And yet one now feels an identical urge, with respect to the immaterial shadow cast by this sculptural form.

The act in question is equally impossible. We must place ourselves conscientiously, depending on our willingness or unwillingness to be included, to have our own bodies potentially interrupt or join this scene. The use of printed fabric, too, is a way of disrupting commonplace relationships to the surface on which a picture rests. Patterning, repetition; these gestures trouble the primacy of a single image.

Indeed, the print on fabric threatens to become merely decorative, a drape or unrealized garment. It refuses the high seriousness of portraiture. Everywhere there is a tension with, if not outright opposition to, lyrical treatment of history. Indeed, this is a tension Weil herself certainly felt. Rather, the Villa is engaged as a varied surface, a permeable given.

Everything we notice here, we are asked to notice as if we have already been looking at it. Everything is new, because we had not yet recognized that we had already been seeing it. The power to take this extraordinary home for granted a power we never knew we possessed is returned to us. The question that remains is, what will we do with this weightless liberty? I do not pose the above question idly. For of course this art making is also occurring in the present of , a historical moment of so outlandish a form that it begs for reconciliation with some era or event of the past. The Serralves Villa contains numerous images of itself, numerous reflections, within it.

These change with the changing time of day and the passage of visitors. Clearly there are numerous examples of the way in which the Villa multiplies itself internally, by way of images produced by the coincidence of society and the physical world. How beautiful they are…! But he does not reproduce them, holding them up so that we may step into a romantic dioramic recreation of the scene we already inhabit. He does not elaborate images in such a way that we are shocked or amazed by the accuracy of his gesture.

Rather, his drawing—for much of his work, even the work that is not explicitly drawing, is drawing, and he is a person who can draw anything—favours a recessive articulation. To the viewer he offers a line that takes the form of a beautiful event that the viewer does not know he or she has not lost the power to take for granted. One example of this mode of articulation are the dance figures Mauss has also included in the exhibition. What could be more artificial than these representations, with their unusual, typographically performative arrangements of text?

And yet they are participatory images; they show and tell us what will happen, should we dance. They are not representations of dances, they are dances. In this sense, they recede from the eye as drawings and come to seem more like speech or gestures, i. Of course, these dance figures are not original drawings by Mauss; they are reproductions.

He has not quite written these words, although he has also not quite not written them. Similarly, the shifting locations and material statuses of the surfaces on which Mauss writes and draws contribute to our sense of his mode of drawing as a deliberate retreat from a kind of drawing that could be claimed or exploited, as such. In spite of this retreat, his drawings hardly cease to appear. They become ever more durable, more multiple, more fascinating, and more ubiquitous.

The non-existent white ground of the so-called pencil sketch enlarged in steel I whimsically pretended to wish to bend earlier causes the viewer to attempt to compose a picture using a support that flickers in and out of view. The act of perceiving the steel sketch itself may even become lost in this flickering deliberation. Yet, this does not mean that the play ignores the existence of political crises or their seriousness and insolubility.

Without idealizing human nature, the play imagines a place and a role in the material world for human nature—and ties this place and role to human politics. The play imagines that one way human consciousness and creativity can function is as a labour of ensuring that the ongoing human appreciation of beauty—a sometimes unconscious appreciation we all hope to have the luck of not needing to be reminded of by way of crushing deprivation, harm, or disaster—can merely continue.

Perhaps there is some way of indicating what Weil has conceived of as nearly un-representable events: Or perhaps the entire play could be revised to consist in the enactment of that single sentence of appreciative pleasure. The Literature of Uncounted Experience. To the extent that the world is made up of narrative discourse these days, it seems to have two fundamental ingredients or axes: But to the extent that narrative is still with us, it seems to manifest itself via plausibility, a quality, and syntax, a quantity.

In other words, narrative has to have some persuasive valence and it has to put things in an order; these are the minimums. We are also apparently living in a time that flatters and elevates the minimum, a curious aesthetic point in itself. Take, for example, the news, a narrative form. It has lately taken one of the more dramatic turns in our newest era of turns, implosions, inflations, and drops. And we could talk, in particular, about a turn, in style and tone, of one of the most read organs of narrative discourse in the English language, the New York Times.

Uncertain mental paging backward suggests one signpost of the shift to a buoyant new reportorial voice and enthusiasm for visual media, i. No more would the Gray Lady focus myopically on incremental, event-based coverage; up-to-the-minute announcements, Baquet noted, are available all over the Web. More recently, in January of this year, the Report appeared. They frequently do not clear the bar of journalism worth paying for, because similar versions are available free elsewhere. To return to my original contention, the Times now deals in plausibility, not fact.

And it arranges this plausibility, employing a fun, multimedia syntax. These two gestures suffice, at a minimum, to give it a new narrative style. A sea lion has been rescued in a fuzzy sling! Losing your house keys is, paradoxically, healthful! In spite of myself, I often tremble as I come to the end of the briefing email. I may be distracted. If we are readers of realist novels, struggling with the gooey concept of the merely plausible, we might take a long view. We might indulge in some soft epochal categories. Each of the aforementioned figures has its own peculiar relationship to the act of narration.

And another obvious tendency allies them: Each labors to reproduce culture. Or is it that everything now is about this, including elections? The teenager longs, weeps, rages, and ironizes, as the curtain of the most American of centuries falls on a pharmacologically managed excess of anxiety and deficit of attention. And now we seem to wonder if we should bother awakening into the next hundred years who, anyway, is in charge of narrating it?

The troll, broadly defined, is not a critic or satirist, so much as a weird method actor. The troll has traditionally participated by defining participation itself in an ambiguous if not absolutely negative light. The way I think feels nothing like what I am doing here. All the same, I am interested in the aspects of narrative that occur at the intersection of technique and reflection, and in prose, though of course not all narration occurs in prose. Plausibility probably seems, at face value, like an extremely, even depressingly, insignificant quality of narrative.

But plausibility, as a mere or minor way of addressing what is the case, of reducing the copula from hard-and-fast equivalency to a dotted line, offers us something by way of method that should not be ignored. Much as the troll proceeds from categories in which truth and the sublime are not merely under erasure but the tortured disillusionment leading to said erasure itself constitutes a risible piety, those who manipulate the plausible begin from an analogous point of liberty—a liberty that may also double as disaffection, alienation, boredom, despair.

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Yet those who play upon plausibility rather than actuality rescue contemplation from foolhardy ideals as well as from paranoid excoriation and embarrassingly principled condemnation. Or, rather, in the weird light of the subjunctive, such writers might, under the right conditions, permit contemplation to occur.

Plausibility need not, for example, be a species of pandering…. I interviewed the writer Dodie Bellamy over the summer, and she said something to me that stuck. Narrative does not have to be about moving things forward. It can be about going farther into what one has wanted a word or a sentence to be able to do, describing that wish. One could narrate writing itself, though of course the act of writing has a tendency to become a bit different from what is being talked about.

Plausibility is a gentle mist that squires us around. Someone is talking in these essays. Or, rather, someone is writing. I struggle here to express to you the elegance of the thought that is presented in Calamities. I think of the staircase, that fantastic human invention. I guess I would like to ask you to think of a staircase that has some sunlight on it. There is no anxiety in this writing about conviction. A step is offered; you go down. Syntax rises to the occasion, as style. There is something that I want narrative to do now, which is, simply, to believe that I am here and will read, that my presence as a reader is a plausible one.

The writer and artist Madeline Gins, for one, often worked with a fantastic sense of obviousness in this vein, so clear and energetic. And if the New York Times began exploring this sort of story form. The driver exited his vehicle to take a selfie with the animals. Is all still vanity? Four hundred years ago, Dutch and Flemish painters produced hyperrealist still lifes of flowers, food, and luxury goods, seemingly fixing these gauds beyond time.

So-called Vanitas images symbolize the brevity of human life, as well as the ephemerality and essential emptiness of earthly pursuits. This tantalizing tension between human mortality and human ambition maintains today: High-net-worth individuals spend ever more in hopes of liberating their physical selves from senescence and death, while the rest of us obsessively save our memories to the cloud, convinced that the digital records that compose us will act as viable substitutes after we are dead.

Meanwhile, the online graveyard grows. To be vain is to mistake the changeable for the permanent, to love an image in the place of embodied presence, as the drowning victim Narcissus did in myth. Vanity is a conceptual error at once semantic and ontological, in which an item belonging to one category the body is presented as if it belongs to another the numinous. Vanity may be the category mistake to end all category mistakes, a tragic misapprehension that is, all the same, associated with a non-negligible supply of pleasure and fun.

Indeed, vanity often assists in crucial ways in our identification and interpretation of value, particularly when it comes to those endlessly seductive, sometimes troubling, sometimes anodyne items: Though we should perhaps know better, we hope that new purchases and proximity to beautiful, costly things will bring us increased vitality. In this sense, little has changed since the s, when opulent still-life paintings repurposed the failure to fully recognize our mortality as subject matter. As Barthes and Alpers note, the author of the Vanitas painting always seems just about to step into the image, to seize an oyster or disturb a precarious table setting.

The skill necessary to convey this opposition—between the ephemerality of experience and the overwhelming sensual presence of the physical world—ups the ante: The effort lavished on the delicate, shining surfaces implies that the painter may not believe in his own fleeting nature so much as his vicarious immortality, as guaranteed by the liveliness of the very work he was engaged in painting.

The eternal present of the Vanitas image is animated not merely by the voluptuous objects it contains but by the illusion of an eternally living artist, who forever seems to hover just beyond the frame. What is vanity now, and does it equate with mere selfishness or indicate a more complex balance of rational belief and carnal experience? Cryogenics labs offer to reanimate us into a future of improved technology.

Luxury spas promise the approximation of youth. These endeavors—often described in terms of service, even obligation, to the entire life-loving species—are buttressed by antiaging researchers who seem driven to prove that the more privileged among us are in fact no longer absolutely mortal. The populations of many countries are disproportionately aged and aging, which poses challenges to the configuration of cities and economies as well as questions about representation and inclusion ; collective resources are already being strained, even as wealth is distributed with an unevenness that rivals the early nineteenth century—a statistic that becomes more disturbing the longer one ponders it.

The ways in which we recognize and deny death are embodied in the material things with which we surround ourselves. The permanence or impermanence of such traces, which depend on the viability of servers and compatibility of files, software, and hardware, is debatable; indeed, the update could be the double-edged sword upon which our digital identities fall.

Yet perhaps posterity is of lesser consequence to us than it once was. In this case, it is not merely our conception of mortality that has been destabilized, but also our sense of time, in that we have begun to favor ephemerality and inhabit the present—on Snapchat and beyond—in new ways. This issue of Triple Canopy features artists, writers, and critics who are thinking and working in the midst of these paradoxes. The futility of human striving meets the plenitude of digital memory, and acts of self-representation contrast with attempts to comprehend the situation of the human species, prompting us to ask: How will solutions to the perceived problem of mortality be shared out, fairly or otherwise?

What framing device will replace the all-comprehending selfie stick? In the mid-eighteenth century, the term bureaucracy entered the world by way of French literature. Yet bureaucracy quickly developed a nonsatirical life of its own once the French Revolution got under way. The Terror was, of course, infamously bureaucratic, with dossiers the way to denunciation, condemnation, and execution. On July 2, , as legend has it, a voice rang out from the interior of the Bastille into the street below: As this series of apocryphal events intimates, the Marquis de Sade occupies an unusual place in French letters.

He is at once the paradigmatic aesthete to end all aesthetes, a supreme materialist and spendthrift, an aristocrat determined to organize his life around complexly choreographed orgies and the eccentrically appointed locations necessary for these performances , and an iconoclast, if not a revolutionary. Though the paper trail that emerges from his early life includes at least three accusations of flaying, stabbing, poisoning, and other unusual forms of physical and emotional abuse—leveled by prostitutes and other women poorly protected by the law—Sade has been held up as a beacon of sexual liberation during an era benighted by Christian repression and hypocrisy.

Susan Sontag and Julia Kristeva have praised the freedom of his writing and thought. His writings are extraordinarily, pruriently concerned with acts that can be accomplished only by people working in groups who follow, in an orderly fashion, arbitrary rules and regulations. These secular constraints not only defy common sense but fly in the face of what we usually think of as basic respect for the sensations and lives of others.

The writings of the Marquis de Sade describe dispassionate intimacy in the plural. In this sense, they foreshadow the social world of the contemporary office. Like the word bureaucracy, sadism is a neologism that has taken on a life of its own. His sadism is less concerned with pleasure in the pain of others than with a lack of feeling regarding the pain of others. The libertine looks dispassionately down upon the flayed corpse in which he has just succeeded in ejaculating and experiences clarity.

The corpse cannot, reasonably, be the object of affections or emotion; it holds no spell of either generosity or dependency over the Sadean character who has just made use of it. A corpse, even if nominally endowed with life, can inspire nothing other than apathy in the libertine. Anyone can be a libertine, provided she or he is willing to be systematic.

Here again liberation through apathy, rather than through cruelty or enjoyment, is key. This experience will, therefore, culminate in their absolute liberation from moral order. Sade never completed the manuscript, so we do not know what will happen to the libertines on day —but it seems to be a matter of little difference if they were to walk away from their fortress of horrors with plans to reconvene the following year or if the secluded castle were spontaneously engulfed in flames, taking all occupants to their deaths. Manuscript notes suggest that sixteen people will survive the events at Silling and return to Paris, but who knows what, in a final draft, might have occurred.

But beyond their appetites, appearances, and aristocratic titles, we know little of the friends save what they do in the fortress. And because what they do in the fortress is determined by a set of laws drawn up at the outset of their macabre vacation, plus narratives supplied by ancient procuresses invited expressly to narrate acts of debauchery, our psychological understanding of the four friends remains limited.

We know that they are very rich, highly sexed, extraordinarily well organized, and thoroughly apathetic. Of the victims we know significantly less: Within this desert of spiritual detail, one piece of familial backstory is supplied. At the opening of Days , we learn that each of the friends has raped his own daughter and that each has married the unfortunate daughter of another one of the four friends.

This arrangement guarantees that Christian marriage has been reimagined as an enterprise of debauchery. Yet this brief peek at a previous arrangement among the four provides a key to the meaning of other relentlessly formal coital permutations set up later on: It is, rather, a novel about the apathy of coworking, a description of how individuals collaboratively create codes for behavior and imagine actionable scenarios in an enclosed space—i. What does this happy office have that other offices also share?

The four friends form an executive committee, which is overseen by the four procuresses, four duennas, and four storytellers, who operate like a toothless board of directors. There is no mobility within this hierarchy. A kitchen staff of three is exempt from the orgies so that it may concentrate on preparing food.

This dispassionate accounting seems to require that the author catalogue the preferences of the four libertines so that each friend is scientifically differentiated. Elsewhere in his notes, Sade complains of his own tendency toward confusion and repetition, an imperfection he planned to correct with a more stringent accounting.

There are bedrooms for sleeping, a dungeon for torturing and murdering, a stage for communicating tales of debauchery. All present arise at ten AM, and debauchery and dining occur at fixed intervals until two AM. There are designated months for certain activities, as well as designated apparel. All present are made aware of their hourly tasks, but only the libertines know of the torture and slaughter with which the four-month fiscal year will end. There is an unusual amount of eating of shit. In some psychoanalytic readings of the practice of coprophilia, excrement represents money.

Certainly scat functions as a rarity in everyday sexual economies. All sex acts are preordained and coordinated by statutory schedule. The victims of the libertines cannot choose whether or not to have sex, but even the libertines are not free to choose when, whom, or how they fuck. The only emotional reaction manifested by the libertines is that of impatience, inspired by delays in sexual activity worked into the schedule set at the beginning of the novel. These delays have a speculative function.

Such delays are not directed at any particular libertine. They are impersonal, general, and purely pragmatic. Office work sets into tension, in close quarters, the ambitions of the individual and the destiny of the group. Office workers rub elbows with one another and gather at the water or kombucha cooler, rolling chairs collide and become entangled, sweaty softball tournaments are organized. It is possible that the success of the individual can become the success of the group, but it is more likely that in order for an office to succeed, individuality must be undermined, in that it must always directly serve the plural.

Here is a rationale for the current vogue for open-plan work spaces, in which one has little privacy unless urinating, defecating, or making coffee.