The Galley Beggar Q&A: Selby Wynn Schwartz
I. THE BOOK…
Tell us a little bit about After Sappho: What is the novel about? When is it set? And why that title?
At its heart, the book is about trying to find a shape for your life that hasn’t already been prescribed as your inevitable, cramped destiny. If, from the moment you are born, people look at your body and decide that you must be docile, expendable, subordinate, shapely, and self-abnegating, and you have other ideas – many other ideas – then you might find yourself drawn to Fragment 19 of Sappho, which contains the lines, but going/for we know… after/and toward. Essentially, this is a book about the desire to write your life for yourself, preferably in good company.
Its characters are a constellation of turn-of-the-century women living in Europe and the UK: as feminists, artists, and writers, they wanted to say for themselves what their genders & sexualities & artistic practices & political rights should be. It’s difficult to invent a new form for yourself, so these women looked for models – and there are notoriously few, so they began to style themselves after Sappho, the legendary poet of Lesbos. In that sense, it’s also a book about being an inveterate reader.
There must be nearly a hundred women in the pages of After Sappho – and, although this is a novel, the women are also historical figures. What first led you to them?
There is a verb in Italian, intrecciare, which means ‘to inter-braid’; it’s a word you could use for weaving a wreath. The women who are my characters were already historically intrecciate, and I imagined other intricate ways of intertwining them.
I have loved Virginia Woolf since I first read her when I was young, so perhaps that is the origin story; but the first women I researched for this book were Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Lina Poletti. Once I began reading about the Divine Sarah walking her crocodile on a jewelled leash in Paris, I was enthralled.
Four people you especially focus on are Virginia Woolf, Natalie Barney, Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo. Can you tell us a little more about these women, and why they appealed to you so much?
Sibilla Aleramo is famous for writing a book in 1906 called Una donna [A Woman] that we might now call autofiction; like Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she blurred the boundaries of autobiography and the novel, singular self and narrative other. In 1908, at the first National Congress of Women in Italy, Sibilla Aleramo met Lina Poletti – a young poet, playwright, and scholar – and they plunged into an intense romantic interlude that dissolved when Lina began courting the actress Eleonora Duse.
As if that weren’t enough dizzying amorous drama to keep track of, there is Natalie Barney; I’ve actually never counted the number of women in After Sappho, but I can tell you that I had to leave out half a dozen of Natalie Barney’s girlfriends. As a wealthy, confidant, witty, highly sociable expatriate in Paris, she was often at the centre of the circle of women who dreamed of reviving Sappho.
And what can I say about Virginia Woolf, except that she was the first one who showed me that writing can do this?
“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.” (To the Lighthouse)
After Sappho might be described as historical fiction – but it also feels immediate and vital; it’s about the present and the future as much as the past. Do you agree with this (and, if you do, can you expand a little)?
Recently I re-read Christa Wolf’s Cassandra, and she writes (in the essay ‘Conditions of a Narrative’): ‘Shouldn’t an experiment be made to see what would happen if the great male heroes of world literature were replaced with women?’ (It was with unkind zeal, I admit, that I excised Gabriele D’Annunzio from my book.) After Sappho is this kind of Cassandra experiment, re-imagining ‘history’ as what women might have thought & felt & created. I think our Cassandras are still telling us to listen to what has been suppressed in our histories.
In After Sappho, your characters love to subvert conventional gender roles. For example, one passage about Vita Sackville-West begins: ‘Julian? The host enquired when she entered. Vita, actually, said Vita Sackville-West, I’ve been Vita all week, very kind of you to ask.’ Can you tell us a bit about this? (And maybe also about how some of your characters – for example, Radclyffe Hall – seem to struggle much more with this than Vita S-W.)
There is a range of gender identities, gender expressions, and sexualities in the book, which raises a question of how to write respectfully about people who had different words for themselves than we have now. Radclyffe Hall, for example, was so invested in the identity of ‘sexual inversion’ that she asked the sexologist Havelock Ellis to write an introduction to her novel The Well of Loneliness. Yet whatever they called themselves (Radclyffe called herself John, for the record), it’s clear that all of them wanted the right to determine which name they would be known by, who they would love, what they would wear – and the right to change these elements over time.
(… On the above, do you see this – the kind of quest and right to one’s own identity and life – as one of the central themes of the novel?)
Yes! And I believe that this should also hold true for people who are not mostly well-educated white women with comfortable incomes in Western European cities. I am continually inspired by the work of transfeminist collectives like Non Una di Meno in Italy, LasTesis in Chile, and Ni Una Menos in Argentina.
Something Judith Butler said in an interview last year has stayed with me: “Queer was, for me, never an identity but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity – opposing the police, in fact.”
WE’D LOVE TO KNOW A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT THE STRUCTURE, TOO. AFTER SAPPHO IS WRITTEN IN CONVENTIONAL CHAPTERS – BUT THOSE CHAPTERS ARE QUITE UNUSUAL, IN THAT THEY ARE DIVIDED INTO A SERIES OF TITLED SECTIONS (WE LIKE TO DESCRIBE THESE AS ‘CASCADING VIGNETTES’). HOW DID THIS COME TO YOU – AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO THE NARRATIVE?)
When I read Anne Carson’s Short Talks a few years ago, it illuminated for me how an idea could be strung obliquely between sentences. I longed to be able to write in that glancing and chiseled form! Unfortunately, I’m not Anne Carson; I’m not even a poet. So, in my failure to be Anne Carson, I made these ‘cascading vignettes.’
In the last essay of Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins, she writes about Dante’s verbs for dissolving selves and interchanging spirits: inluiarsi, for example, ‘to be as him,’ ‘to be in him.’ It strikes Ferrante that for Dante there isn’t an inleiarsi, a becoming her. The narrative structure of After Sappho is my experiment with that verb in its plural form.
OK! Tell us a bit more about the composition of After Sappho. When did you start writing and how easily did the writing come?
It takes me a long time to teach myself something well enough to write about it, so in a sense I started this book years before I ever wrote a draft. When I did start writing, quite intensely, it took me a year.
Do you have a daily writing routine? When and how do you get things down on paper?
I like to have a coffee before sitting down to write, and it helps me to be surrounded by books. But if I lose the thread of a piece, I go for a walk with a notebook.
and Editing. Do you edit as you go, or do you wait until you’ve got a full draft in front of you? (… How much do you cut? Or rewrite?)
I love the beginnings of things – before I’ve created any frustrating narrative problems for myself – and often write them in a happy rush. Then everything becomes more complicated, and I have to edit things in or out, and it’s time to go walking with a notebook.
Tell us about one of your bad writing habits. Any tics?
When I first finish a piece, I’m childishly proud of it; I think it’s perfect and gleamingly brilliant, and that feeling lasts for a whole day. So I’ve learned to wait two days before asking anyone for feedback.
OK. Other writers. Name some favourites.
Besides Virginia Woolf, I love Anne Carson (especially The Albertine Workout, ‘Cassandra Float Can’ from Float, and the Anna Xenia poems), Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Assia Djebar’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, Luis Sagasti’s Fireflies, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Igiaba Scego’s La linea del colore, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life, Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks, Jean Frémon’s Calme-toi, Lison, the Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante, and everything by Natalia Ginzburg.
When I was writing After Sappho, I was especially grateful for books that were poetic forms of scholarship, like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Anna Livia’s Minimax, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Bricktop's Paris.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve just finished Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19; before that I read Olivia Laing’s Everybody and To The River, Sawako Nakayasu’s Some Girls Walk Into the Country They are From, and Francesca Melandri’s Sangue Giusto. Next in my pile of books are Vi Khi Nao’s Swimming with Dead Stars, Dacia Mariani’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza, and Jen Bervin’s Nets.
Do you ever imagine your ideal reader?
I haven’t – in part because I thought a handful of people in my little circle would ever read this manuscript. But now that I’ve met Elly and Sam, I think they might be ideal readers: they are so generous & rigorous & attentive & open. And I am extremely grateful that they’ve gathered other like-minded readers around Galley Beggar Press.
II. THE WORLD…
What gets you mad?
I grew up protesting against wars, injustices, oppression, and environmental crises. I’m an optimistic person (in the sense of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark) and fairly self-righteous, so I believed that after a certain number of protests, it would become clear to everyone that the imperialist militarized white supremacist hyper-capitalist carceral extractive cisheteropatriarchy frankly wasn’t going that well and should be stopped. Sadly, that hasn’t happened yet.
What makes you happy?
Being with people I love, swimming in the sea, reading in the sunshine.
What are people missing? Is there something we should all know about?
I think many people do already know this, but Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life is fantastic. Item #1 in her “Survival Kit” is “Books.” (Item #10 is “Bodies.”)
What are writers for?
My friend Emile DeWeaver, the writer and activist who co-founded Prison Renaissance, just sent me a chapter of his forthcoming book on dismantling white supremacy and envisioning prison abolition. The chapter is titled, “The Imagination Challenge,” and that might be a good answer: writers are for imagining things for us in the face of dispiriting challenges, and for challenging us to imagine things differently.
Any cause for hope?
Those in power always have more money and more resources, but those in coalitional solidarity for justice always have cool artists, fierce wit, and better dancing.
III. ON A DIFFERENT NOTE…
Tell us something fun to do (in one sentence).
It’s wonderful to see live dance performances again!
What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Someone I dated once told me that what was wrong with my writing was exactly what was wrong with me. Although this may well be true, it was supremely unhelpful.
You’re in charge of everything. What’s the first thing you do? And what’s the big signature program you’d put in place to make the world better? (NB: No violence! This is a peaceful takeover.)
Probably everyone should answer this question by stating that we are hereby handing over all climate policies to Extinction Rebellion, Minga Indígena, Fridays for Future, and a global activist coalition of their choosing.
But while that coalition is saving our planet, I might try inverting our values of labor. Why are exorbitant amounts given to hedge fund managers or right-wing politicians, for example, when they produce nothing that matters in terms of care, art, education, dignity, nourishment, beauty, or justice? People who make soup or dances or gardens or stories, people who teach or heal or care or create or mend: shouldn’t they be richly compensated for their work? (I’ve just realized that this is also the basic premise of Virginia Woolf’s feminist story ‘A Society,’ from 1921.)
You’re not a writer, you’re a musician. What band would you be in?
I have a no musical talent, but I think I could manage the merch table for the Italian indie-punk band Maria Antonietta. (The band is animated by Letizia Cesarini, who published a book in 2019 called Sette ragazze imperdonabili about seven ‘unpardonable’ women – from Emily Dickinson to Marina Cvetaeva – who have inspired her.)
Coffee or tea?
A strong coffee with lots of milk.
Chocolate or crisps?
I don’t like chocolate, which often provokes disapproval until people realize that they can have mine for themselves. I do enjoy oil-cured Moroccan olives, sheep-cheese, and sardines.
How will the universe end?
And on the eyes/black sleep of night. Sappho, Fragment 151.