SELBY WYNN SCHWARTZ
Selby Wynn Schwartz is a writer and scholar based in California, who teaches writing at Stanford University. She is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives (2019), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction and won the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research. Her novella, A Life in Chameleons, which won the Reflex Press Novella Award, is forthcoming in 2023. She talked to TANK about her first novel After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press), which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. A finely interwoven network of narrative threads, it tells the stories of a group of women with the prolific Greek poet at its heart.
Interview by Poppy ColesPortrait courtesy Shakespeare & Company, Paris
POPPY COLES As the title of your book implies, this is a story of the women who came after Sappho; who were her legacy? Why did you use Sappho as the anchor to tell their stories?
SELBY WYNN SCHWARTZ Perhaps there are even three “afters”: the literary sense of writing in the mode of Sappho; the temporality of living many centuries after her death; and the after after – the possibility that these characters must invent new forms in order to fully become themselves and venture beyond the legacy of Sappho. So few women are venerated as artists, writers and thinkers in Western cultural histories; think of whose names are generally carved into the stone facades of grand buildings. Someone like Sappho is rare, and the fragments of her poems are alluringly open to interpretation. She has been a touchstone for many – The Sappho Companion by Margaret Reynolds runs more than 400 pages – and especially for women who were looking, as you said, for “an anchor to tell their stories”. In some small, quite privileged circles of late 19th- and early 20th-century women in Europe, Sappho was not only an anchor but also a kind of animating principle. In that sense, they chose Sappho, and I followed them.
PC There are many important figures in this book. How did you approach researching them and who were the individuals you chose to leave out?
SWS Every book leaves someone out – and these circles were mostly white, often affluent, well-educated women in Europe, so that was already a limited subset of “important figures”. Ada “Bricktop” Smith, for example, who was a prominent Black performing artist and nightclub owner, appears only glancingly in my book. She wrote her own autobiography, and there is a wonderful book of creative scholarship on her life and milieu by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, called Bricktop’s Paris; I felt that these books offered more insight than I could, that the best I could do would be to recommend them. I also left out a significant quantity of Natalie Barney’s lovers, for sheerly numerical reasons; she was prodigious.
PC Research is collective in nature. Can you talk about Anne Carson’s influence on your exploration of Sappho?
SWS Anne Carson is both a classicist who translated Sappho’s extant poems in If Not, Winter and the poet who wrote these lines in “Cassandra Float Can”, from 2016’s Float: Who is Cassandra? For a dime she will tell you that the swimming pool is full of blood. Like spacetime, she is nonlinear, nonnarrative and the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters according to Homer who says that when she stood up to prophesy she shone like a lamp in a bomb shelter. I cannot do any of the things that Anne Carson can do, but I can see the sparks shooting off the page when she plunges thought into language.
PC In the book you mention that that actresses used to faint on stage holding handkerchiefs so that when they fell they wouldn’t get splinters in their hands. Is that true?
SWS I don’t know the real answer to this question, but perhaps instead I can show you the backstage of my writing process? In her biography of Eleonora Duse, Helen Sheehy writes, “Henrik Ibsen noted actresses in Norway ‘always swooned … on the left of the stage and always with a handkerchief in their left hand’, while Italian actresses fainted naturally.” Eleonora Duse, born into a family of Italian actors, was celebrated for her unstilted emotional intensity. She was very close to her mother, who both taught her about the theatre and tried to shield her from its cruelties. From these facts, I imagined that Eleonora Duse’s mother would have taught her that she could faint onstage wherever it felt natural, but that she should try to protect herself as she fell.
PC At first when reading the book, I took note of every person: their origins, their profession, their name changes, but at a certain point I lost track; I stopped trying to discern the different characters and began to read them as a kind of collective. Your use of “we”, like a Greek chorus, encourages that, and encourages readers, particularly me as a woman, to feel that they were part of the narrative. That they had a stake in the stories and in the history you were telling. Does that resonate with your intentions for writing in the way that you did?
SWS There is no exam at the end of this book about names and dates! These are commingled and interwoven lives, threading in and out of touch, composed of what Joanne Winning, in an essay on “Sapphic Modernity”, called “desire, identification, community and dissidence”. Within that collective of characters, there are myriad identities – evolving over time, changing their names or leaving their old lives – but they share a belief in their right to determine their own genders, sexualities, ambitions, artistic forms, relationships and ways of being. They are not alike, but they are all trying to become themselves.
PC How did you incorporate the reader into that commingling?
SWS Perhaps this is a question that only readers can answer? All I can say is that I wrote After Sappho as an inveterate reader. For me, books can be like windows opening through someone else’s words. That finding of another world to dwell in, that early intensity of feeling and imagining, these are the beginnings of the chorus in After Sappho. The “we” is a variegated collective of voices that evolves over time, learning how to move beyond the back gardens where they first secluded themselves with fragments of Sappho. Eventually the chorus arrives at the moment of telling their own stories, writing their own lives, creating their own forms. I hope that readers who find themselves in my book in some way will also feel invited to arrive at that moment for themselves.
PC To me, it felt like an education I had always wanted but was never given. How did researching for this book change your understanding of the presence and position of women within creative history?
SWS I am very touched that you felt this way – although it also makes me wish that everyone were given the education that they wanted and needed and deserved, that in fact this is what education might be. It was a thought experiment, reimagining these women’s histories as if men were not of primary importance in them. I spent more time thinking about how they might have felt, what they wanted, how they related to each other, the kinds of thinking and creating they did that would not be recognised as real or noteworthy forms of work. Elena Ferrante points out that feminist storytelling is not a claim that women are somehow essentially “better” – in fact, essentialising the category of women has a bad history – but rather a resistance to a system that confines some stories to the margins.
PC When reading I kept oscillating between thinking that this book was a story about queerness or feminism, or both. Is there a clear separation between those two things for you? And is there a tension?
SWS I believe strongly in both queer politics and feminism, and I am indebted to thinkers like Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed who explore intersectional frameworks for justice, personhood and coalitional activism. Writing of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in her book Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed says this beautifully: “Queer and feminist worlds are built through the effort to support those who are not supported because of who they are, what they want, what they do.”
PC The composition of language is referred to throughout the book and is used as a way to inhabit and illustrate the lives of the characters. I love the reference to the genitive; can you talk about that in particular and why it was an important linguistic motif?
SWS I’m not a classicist, but I’ve encountered the genitive in German and Latin. As a description of relation between nouns, the genitive is often used to indicate possession or derivation; in English we use words like “of” or the suffix “’s”. If a noun belongs to another noun, or is made out of the stuff of another noun, or comes from another noun, it might take the genitive. The word “genitive” itself evokes genesis, genealogy, genital, generation: words that tie people to established origin stories, which consign people to what they are born into. Perhaps for that reason alone it deserves scrutiny.
PC You describe the book in the bibliographic note as a work of fiction. Why was it important to you to have it be received as such when it has a strong foundation in research and fact?
SWS The truth is that I didn’t know how to describe this book, and I initially piled up lists of partial adjectives or said what it was not. It was only when my marvellous editors at Galley Beggar Press told me that they were interested in publishing my novel that I had a word for it – a pleasingly concise word, and one that signals how much I have reimagined historical facts in weaving this narrative. It is true that I learned a great deal from research – and I have tried to acknowledge my many debts in the bibliographic note – but we may never know how Eleonora Duse felt in that moment before she fainted onstage, whether she thought about the floorboards; I think that her mother taught her to consider the splinters. I also think that Lina Poletti lives on, in spirit at least, in contemporary feminist collectives like Non Una di Meno, LasTesis and Ni Una Menos. That Lina Poletti died in 1971 in a town on the Ligurian coast is a historical fact; that in After Sappho Lina Poletti lives on into our century, that she is among us still in our struggles for justice, is my way of imagining her story as also ours. ◉