Episode 7: Arifa Akbar and Ed Caesar
Our guests this week are Chief theatre critic at The Guardian and author of Consumed, Arifa Akbar, and New Yorker writer, Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain.
If you would like the read the extracts discussed in this episode go to linebyline.substack.com.
Comments and feedback to @tds153 on Twitter. Line by Line is produced by Ben Tulloh with readings by Deli Segal. Music by Dee Yan-Key.
Extract One
Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.
Miss Peg in London, he had assured her mother, "with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be," would have "lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to ‘take her out'." By "out" he meant into the tabernacles of "society": his world of discourse teems with inverted commas, the words by which life was regulated having been long adrift, and referable only, with lifted eyebrows, to usage, his knowledge of her knowledge of his knowledge of what was done. The Chelsea street that afternoon however had stranger riches to offer than had "society." Movement, clatter of hooves, the sputter of motors; light grazing housefronts, shadows moving; faces in a crowd, their apparition: two faces: Ezra Pound (quick jaunty rubicundity) with a lady. Eyes met; the couples halted; rituals were incumbent. Around them Chelsea sauntered on its leisurely business. James to play: "Mr. Pound! . . ." in the searching voice, torch for unimagined labyrinths; and on, to the effect of presenting his niece Margaret; whereafter Mr. Pound presented to Mr. James his wife Dorothy; and the painter's eye of Dorothy Pound, née Shakespear, "took in," as James would have phrased it, Henry James. "A fairly portly figure”—
Fifty years later, under an Italian sky, the red waistcoat seemed half chimerical — "that may be imagination!” — but let us posit it; Gautier wore such a garment to the Hernani premiere, that formal declaration (1830) of art's antipathy to the impercipient, and James would have buttoned it for this outing with didactic deliberation.
Extract Two
No attempt was made to chase them away. They were simply treated as non-existent. The customers had withdrawn from the world while they communed with their food. An extraordinary cripple was dragged in, balancing face downwards on a trolley, only a few inches from the ground, arms and legs thrust out in spider fashion. Nobody took his eyes off his food for one second to glance down at him. This youth could not use his hands. One of the scugnizzi hunted down a piece of bread for him, turned his head sideways to stuff it between his teeth, and he was dragged out.
Suddenly five or six little girls between the ages of nine and twelve appeared in the doorway. They wore hideous straight black uniforms buttoned under their chins, and black boots and stockings, and their hair had been shorn short, prison-style. They were all weeping, and as they clung to each other and groped their way towards us, bumping into chairs and tables, I realized they were all blind. Tragedy and despair had been thrust upon us, and would not be shut out. I expected the indifferent diners to push back their plates, to get up and hold out their arms, but nobody moved. Forkfuls of food were thrust into open mouths, the rattle of conversation continued, nobody saw the tears.
Lattarullo explained that these little girls were from an orphanage on the Vomero, where he had heard — and he made a face — conditions were very bad. They had been brought down here, he found out, on a half-day's outing by an attendant who seemed unable or unwilling to stop them from being lured away by the smell of food. The experience changed my outlook. Until now I had clung to the comforting belief that human beings eventually come to terms with pain and sorrow. Now I understood I was wrong, and like Paul I suffered a conversion — but to pessimism. These little girls, any one of whom could be my daughter, came into the restaurant weeping, and they were weeping when they were led away. I knew that, condemned to ever- lasting darkness, hunger and loss, they would weep on incessantly. They would never recover from their pain, and I would never recover from the memory of it.
Extract Three
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as "Beth Israel North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.