HAVE YOU ANY CLOTHES to sell?

The years make a stain you can’t conceal,

Your fabric’s eaten, you discard

That part of your life for which you cared.

You pluck a thread from your cuff; it winces

Straight to your shoulder. Ambition grieves

In trunks and bags; moth-featured, minces

From closets, beating empty sleeves.

History stagnates in your house.

I smelt the ruinous time, will buy

Your waste of talent. There’s an ooze

Of souls too virulent to die.

Contagious on the baffling walls.

You sit and watch the ceiling crack;

Horror sifts through and softly falls

From worlds beyond the zodiac.

You fear the penitential bone

That growls in your breast, and the mind’s long feather,

The heart that imitates a stone,

And if your hands should grow together

And violence unstring your voice.

I know what hangs behind your stair,

Spoiling that conscience and disuse:

The uniform you never wear,

The fitness and the pride, so vilely

Dishonored, the smiling target mouth,

Innocence ambushed, in the sharp volley

Reeling before the huntsmen of youth.

Therefore I come to mobilize

Your poor blind wounds, as in the coat,

The form betrayed, the defeated eyes,

My brother my groom, my dear recruit.

There will be skirmishing and loot

And fires to light our matches. Let

The enemies of life beware

When these old clothes shall go to war.

Stanley J. Kunitz (1905–2006) was a twentieth-century American poet of Jewish Russian Lithuanian decent. After moving his family to America, Kunitz’s father, a dressmaker, died when he was fourteen, an event that profoundly influenced the poet and his work. Later working as a reporter and editor between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, Kunitz has come to be celebrated for his influence in the symbolist genre of poetry. The poem, ‘The Old Clothes Man,’ was published in Volume 44 of Poetry magazine in 1934. 

Kristin Bjornerud is a Canadian artist based in Montreal.

Published in 2014, Westwood’s self-titled autobiography is, more than most other examples of designer life writing, a case of celebrity autobiography. Westwood is not only an influential designer, but also the ‘godmother’ of punk, and a Dame that embodies a certain English eccentricity we have come to know and love. Name-dropping, quotes from famous musicians and actors, as well as personal letters to the likes of Naomi Campbell, are key ingredients of the book. Vivienne Westwood is also an example of collaborative autobiography; the volume was co-written with Ian Kelly, actor and biographer of fashionable figures such as Beau Brummel and Giacomo Casanova. Their collaboration is perhaps best articulated by Westwood herself in the book: ‘Nothing in the past is entirely true. But you are only in those scenes properly when they are put together. That’s what we should do, you and I, Ian: sew together all the life scenes.’ However suggestive, the sartorial metaphor is rather ill-suited. If the authorship of a garment is always collective, despite the symbolic identity between designer, maker and brand on the label, this is not the case in autobiography, where narrator and subject are usually the same person. Whether explicit or in the form of ghostwriting, then, collaborative autobiography is always bound to raise ethical concerns about the objectivity of the narrative.

Autobiography scholar G. Thomas Couser has indeed pointed out that ‘autobiographical collaborations are rather like marriages and other domestic partnerships’ in that writer and subject ‘produce an offspring that will derive traits from each of them.’² Ian Kelly seems aware of the risks of collaborative autobiography. His attempts to distance himself from his subject and the fashion system at large are implicit in his narrative strategies. This is evident in his use of quotation marks to indicate direct speech from Westwood or members of her circle of family and friends as well as explicit clarifications. For instance, in one passage Westwood explains her love of platform shoes: ‘“[…] Women should be on pedestals. Like art. Sometimes. Or look like they have stepped out of a portrait. I wear them all the time.” (It’s true.)’ Through commentary like this, Kelly establishes himself as an external, objective narrator, trustworthy of honest, impartial portrayal of the designer. However, throughout the book, the extensive use of interviews establishes a format of oral history, text that – by definition – is subjective. Subjective anecdotes such as this are often the very stuff the mythology of fashion is made out of. A premise that makes the reader wonder what degree of truth is to be expected from an autobiography, one that has been called a ‘gossip session’ by the Press Association. Accusations of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy by Paul Gorman, author of the 2001 book The Look: Adventures In Rock and Pop Fashion, have also called into question the credibility of Kelly and Westwood’s account.³

The narrative of Westwood’s autobiography is built on her parallel engagement in fashion and activism, a dynamic she has maintained since her punk years. She and her one-time partner, Malcolm McLaren have been credited with having made fashion explicitly political through the creation of the punk uniform. According to Westwood the pair were, at the time, heavily inspired by Guy Debord’s Situationist ideas, and supposedly originally conceived their clothing as ‘agitprop.’ In London during the Thatcher years, these political messages and motivations became the selling point with the disaffected youth market, de facto turning anarcho-Situationist ideas into a powerful marketing tool. Westwood acknowledges this in the book: ‘But I concluded very early on with punk that it was an immediate marketing opportunity […] punk is to do with an aesthetic but sometimes I think the only good thing that came out of it was the “Don’t trust the government” idea and that meanwhile I do think I looked great!’ Kelly also highlights this ‘shock and sell’ technique that McLaren and Westwood successfully championed – though, despite his claims of objectivity, he fails to point out the limited reach of the scene hosted in the different reincarnations of the shop on 430 King’s Road. In fact, the vast majority of ‘punks’ couldn’t afford clothes sold at SEX or Seditionaries (McLaren and Westwood’s infamous punk boutiques), nor were they influenced by the music of the McLaren-managed Sex Pistols. More often than not, punks would independently purchase commercial or second-hand fashion and alter it through DIY and a make-do-and-mend attitude.⁴ Ben Westwood’s claim that his mother and McLaren ‘were the beginners and enders of punk and that’s all you can say about punk’ – one of the many instances of oral history in the autobiography that is left unquestioned – sounds unrealistic to say the least and fails to recognise the essential cultural context of the movement in its entirety.

Westwood’s transition from punk to environmental activism is too readily resolved by the designer: ‘what I am doing now, it still is punk – it’s still about shouting about injustice and making people think, even if it’s uncomfortable.’ Yet what is more uncomfortable is, perhaps, her limited vision on sustainability in fashion, which borders on greenwashing and relies heavily on the rhetoric of spectacle – an ironic position considering the designer’s alleged familiarity with Situationism. While her donations to charity Cool Earth, occasional use of eco-friendly materials for her brand’s diffusion lines and advocacy across multiple platforms and events are worthy of recognition, her design house is nonetheless a multi-million global brand that neither makes its socio-environmental standards public nor provides any report or tangible data on its carbon footprint.⁵ Thus the seemingly easy transition from punk to environmentalism is more problematic that she lets on to be and, ultimately, highlights the uncomfortable blurring of political engagement and branding that has characterised her idiosyncratic career. In her autobiography, these ambiguities emerge at different moments through statements such as: ‘What I’m always trying to say is: buy less, choose well, make it last; though sometimes I might as well say, ‘buy Vivienne Westwood!’ While one may agree with a broad-sweeping mantra of ‘buy less, buy better,’ if we are to enjoy the privilege of choice, Westwood’s unabashed self-promotion ultimately undermines not only the authenticity of the persona she and Kelly present in her autobiography, but also her overall credibility as an activist.

Alessandro Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. See R. Mukherjee & S. Banet-Weiser (eds.) Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance In Neoliberal Times, New York: NYU Press, 2012.  ↩

2. G. T. Couser, ‘Making, Taking and Faking Lives: The Ethics of Collaborative Life Writing,’ Style, Summer 1998, 32, 2, p. 335. ↩

3. See http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/sep/02/paul-gorman-vivienne-westwood-plagiarism-claim. ↩

4. See for instance S. Suterwalla, ‘From Punk to the Hijab: Women’s Embodied Dress As Performative Resistance, 1970s to the Present,’ in M. Partington & L. Sandino (eds.) Oral History In The Visual Arts, London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 161-169. ↩

5. See for instance http://eluxemagazine.com/magazine/vivienne-westwood-is-not-eco-friendly/. ↩

It’s tempting to accept the consumer-ready packaging of female writers, musicians, and artists in fashion industry-vetted contexts – whether they appear in ad campaigns, magazine covers or screen-printed on tote bags – at face value. Yet it’s worth questioning whether this packaging serves them and their work as holistically as possible; whether it builds and sustains an audience legitimately interested in the work itself or one that is merely attracted to the glamorous façade.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants born in a highly anti-Semitic climate, Lispector and her family emigrated to Brazil in 1921 when she was only two months old from Tchetchelnik, Ukraine (Russia) to escape the pogroms. Lispector often attributed this early disruption to ‘her sense of not quite belonging, especially to herself.’² While she adopted Brazilian Portuguese as her primary language, her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat took her to temporary homes in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Beginning in her teens, writing stories allowed her to make sense of her inner conflicts concerning gender roles, class struggles, economic status, and her own complicated cultural background; hers was a metaphysically curious writing style, one that often raised questions about the nature of being human in strange and haunting ways. Lispector led a varied and highly productive career – publishing novels, stories collections, children’s books, and even a weekly column for the national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil – and won various literary awards, eventually becoming an undisputed literary legend in Brazil. Yet it has taken decades since her death in 1977 for her singular voice to reach English readers in translation.

For a writer so strongly invested in mining her complex inner world for material, Lispector’s exterior has received a disproportionate amount of attention. Today, it’s rare to encounter reviews of her work that do not reference her ‘glamour’, an adjective frequently associated with her appearance. As Benjamin Moser, one of Lispector’s biographers, points out in his introduction to the recent reissue of The Complete Stories, ‘The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewellery of a grande dame of mid-century Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour.’³

A simple internet search of images of Lispector reveals a woman who exudes the sort of visual presence that, at least on the surface, appears utterly effortless: she was prone to painting her lips a deep rouge and donning statement necklaces, her hair elegantly swept off her face. In many of these images, she gazes off in the distance while a lit cigarette dangles between her fingers. Lispector’s strong sense of personal style (she even moonlighted as a fashion writer) signifies that she was well aware of the power of her appearance to generate curiosity along with higher book sales.

The conflation between displaying genuine respect for her literary talent and obsessing over her distinct brand of glamour is evident in American translator Gregory Rabassa’s frequently quoted description of Lispector: he ‘recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virgina Woolf.”’⁴

Despite the fact that Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (published in December 1943, around her twenty-third birthday) earned her impressive accolades – one critic even called it ‘[…] the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language’⁵ – she maintained a difficult relationship to the press for much of her career. Her hesitation to divulge information about her personal life, along with her distrust toward journalists to tell her story authentically, without layers of projection, led to a mythologising of Lispector that remains tied to the very mention of her name today.

It seems that this impenetrable Lispectorian mystique has only served to add to her appeal. In Brazil, she is a household name, long considered to be one of the country’s most significant writers. Recently, beyond the Brazilian borders, critical interest in her work and translated reissues of her novels and stories have steadily increased over the past decade.

Yet as Moser points out in his biography of Lispector, Why This World, ‘The legend was stronger than she was.’⁶ This legend overshadowed the woman herself, a fact that frustrated Lispector throughout her lifetime. Writing in 1976, the year prior to her untimely death from cancer, she reflected on the increased attention she had steadily gained over the years as her legend grew:

‘This all leaves me a bit perplexed. Could it be that I’m fashionable? And why did people complain they didn’t understand me and now seem to understand me? […] The truth is that some people created a myth around me, which gets in my way […]’⁷

Lispector correctly believed that the press considered her a slate onto which they could project their own assumptions about what went on in her head, rather than portray her as a multifaceted woman: equal parts writer, housewife, and mother. No matter how much widespread praise Lispector’s writing has attained post-mortem, her literary credibility will forever be bound to this glamorised mythology.

Similarly to Lispector’s experience once she found herself in the public limelight, the fashion and literary worlds alike have, in recent months, created their own sorts of mythologies around other artistic women – from Patti Smith and Iris Apfel to Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion – by collaborating with them, casting them in ad campaigns, and bestowing upon them the title of ‘style icon.’ As fashion and publishing houses alike have increasingly promoted, and ultimately profited from, the commercialisation of these independent, sartorially savvy, women, they have attained a new kind of cultural clout since their heyday in bygone eras. A conflict comes into play, however, when we claim to respect a female writer’s work while simultaneously idolising her desirable aesthetic. This dynamic has been further reinforced in the case of writer – and recently crowned ‘style icon’ – Joan Didion, following her role in the spring/summer 2015 Céline campaign shot by fashion photographer Juergen Teller and released last January.

Didion’s blunt reaction to the New York Times reporter who called her to comment (“I don’t have any clue,” and “I have no idea.”)⁸ suggested a reluctant ambiguity toward the fashion world’s embrace of her as a cultural figure worthy of admiration. Yet while Didion claimed an unawareness toward the buzz surrounding her style, there is no denying that both Céline and Didion benefitted from perpetuating the idea that she – and by extension, her work – were worth discussing anew, in part because of what she wore and how she wore it. As a recent New York Times piece by Matthew Schneier exploring the Didion fashion phenomenon confirmed, ‘According to Nielsen BookScan […] sales of her work in 2015 to date are up nearly 55 percent over the comparable period the previous year.’⁹

Designers and editors alike are clearly not blind to the commercial benefits of aligning themselves with these established, powerful muses whose personal style can be whittled down to singular garments and accessories that signify an insouciant cool: a pair of oversized statement shades for Didion; an old black coat and clean white shirt for Smith; dark red lipstick for Lispector. Theirs is an everyday way of dressing defined by distinctive simplicity, something the image-saturated and seasonally-spinning fashion universe so often lacks.

The ways in which women like Lispector and Didion have been marketed more recently for public consumption – attaining the status of both literary and unconventional style icon, respectively – highlights a tendency for such figures to offer the potential for increased cultural capital, specifically when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. Built as it is on maintaining a perpetual longing for times and places past (e.g. Lispector’s glamorous 1940s style; Didion’s 1970s California cool), this sort of iconic, nostalgic branding generates a significant profit. Other women, especially younger women, will inevitably try to emulate this iconic sartorial or writing style to feel closer to the women – by purchasing a pair of Céline sunglasses to look just like Didion or proudly displaying a copy of Lispector’s story collection on their bookshelf, for example. Yet given the logic underlying the very idea of a ‘style icon,’ which requires that they remain peerless, faultless, and perpetually out of reach, it is no coincidence that for the brand or publisher, this unfulfilled longing for closeness to the idol translates into increased accessories and book sales.

As so often occurs to suddenly embraced entities in fashion’s orbit, these writers’ fashionable auras may inevitably begin to lose some of their lustre over time. Still, the question remains as to whether fashion’s stamp of approval ultimately helps or hurts the female artist in question in the long term. If nostalgic branding encourages consumers to stop short at the glamorous image – to purchase the writer’s work solely on the basis of that image – then it risks less serious critical attention being paid to the work itself.

As the sudden, intense resurgence of interest in both Didion’s older works and Lispector’s translated works in the US have shown, the current expectation for female writers to also embrace themselves as profitable brands puts their work in danger of dilution. If the fashion world continues to ghost these women’s significant contributions to the long male-dominated literary canon on the gendered basis of their distinctly ‘feminine glamour,’ then it will perpetuate the idea that their writing is not capable of speaking for itself – that it cannot be divorced from what the woman wore while she wrote her life’s work.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. C Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler, Água Viva, New Directions, New York, 2012, p. 39 ↩

2. Vieira, Nelson H., “Clarice Lispector.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. ↩

3. B Moser, The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, New Directions, New York, 2015, p. ix ↩

4. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 2 ↩

5. Ibid., p. 125 ↩

6. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 4 ↩

7. Ibid., p. 361 ↩

8. Jacobs, Alexandra. “Joan Didion on the Céline Ad.” New York Times, 7 Jan. 2015. ↩

9. Schneier, Matthew. “Fashion’s Gaze Turned to Joan Didion in 2015.” The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2015. ↩

***

Frida Wannerberger is an illustrator and graphic designer based in London.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, writer and an influential figure of British literature. ‘The Coat’ was published in the May 1914 issue of Poetry Magazine.

1. A Suit
“I’ll make you one,” he said, “and balance it
Perfectly on you.” And I could almost feel
The plumb line of the creased tweed hit my heel,
My shoulders like a spar or a riding scale
Under the jacket, my whole shape realigned
In ways that suited me down to the ground.
So although a suit was the last thing that I needed
I wore his words and told him that I’d take it
And told myself it was going for a song.

2. A Tie
She made
me one
of hard
silk thread,
string-thin,
tight skein
crocheted
by hand,
close-knit
and strict
as cyng-
hanedd,
all a-
glitter
like rain
on fern
or em-
erald ems
or fine
ground jade,
my thin
green line
for which
I grat-
ias
ago
in Lat-
in quotes
(with gen-
der change
in sub-
ject and
tense change
in verb):
nihil
tegit
quod non
ornat,
and trans-
late thus
(to tie
the knot),
“She puts
a shine
on all
she puts
her hand
to.” Love
and thanks
again
to her.

3. A Coat
“We’re not a mile off it,” I heard him say, with an ought
Dragging and lengthening out the sound of that “not” ?
For Mr Simpson, though he worked in Magherafelt,
Was from Antrim and glottal and more of a Pict than a Celt.
But an Ulsterman. An Ulsterman for sure,
Calling a spade a spade and the door the dure
And any child he was fitting with clothes the wean.
My father poked his cattle-dealer’s cane
Into the coats on the coatrack for the only one
That took his fancy and when I had put it on,
“We’re not a mile off it,” Mr Simpson said again,
Uneager and sure of the sale; and confidentially then,
“Ulster, you know, is the name for an overcoat.
ThPoetry even gives it.
Ulster.” He paused and he mused. “All over the world
Good cloth and good wear and the whole of your money’s
worth.”
I hear him still when I reach deep into the long
Cold draught of the sleeve of some ulster I’m fitting on
And wish my hand would come through and beyond all that
Deep glottal purchase and worth, like the virtual flight
Of The Red Hand of Ulster beyond the beyond of its myth,
Back to its unbloodied cuff at its unsevered wrist,
Flexing its fingers again and combing the air
And a wild, post-Shakespearean streel of gallowglass hair.

Ayako Kubo is a Japanese illustrator and artist.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an Irish poet and playwright, he received a Nobel Prize in 1995 for Literature. ‘Three-Piece’ was published in 1997.

THE MAN’S CLOTHES WERE new – all of them, cheap and new. His gray cap was so new that the visor was still stiff and the button still on, not shapeless and bulged as it would be when it had served for a while all the various purposes of a cap – carrying sack, towel, handkerchief. His suit was of cheap gray hardcloth and so new that there were creases in the trousers. His blue chambray shirt was stiff and smooth with filler. The coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man. The coat shoulder peaks hung down on his arms, and even then the sleeves were too short and the front of the coat flapped loosely over his stomach. He wore a pair of new tan shoes of the kind called ‘army last’, hob-nailed and with half-circles like horseshoes to protect the edges of the heels from wear. This man sat on the running board and took off his cap and mopped his face with it. Then he put on the cap, and by pulling started the future ruin of the visor. His feet caught his attention. He leaned down and loosened the shoelaces, and did not tie the ends again. Over his head the exhaust of the Diesel engine whispered in quick puffs of blue smoke. The music stopped in the restaurant and a man’s voice spoke from the loudspeaker, but the waitress did not turn him off, for she didn’t know the music had stopped. Her exploring fingers had found a lump under her ear. She was trying to see it in a mirror behind the counter without letting the truck driver know, and so she pretended to push a bit of hair to neatness.

The truck driver said, “They was a big dance in Shawnee. I heard somebody got killed or somepin. You hear anything?”

“No,” said the waitress, and she lovingly fingered the lump under her ear. Outside, the seated man stood up and looked over the cowl of the truck and watched the restaurant for a moment. Then he settled back on the running board, pulled a sack of tobacco and a book of papers from his side pocket. He rolled his cigarette slowly and perfectly, studied it, smoothed it. At last he lighted it and pushed the burning match into the dust at his feet. The sun cut into the shade of the truck as noon approached. In the restaurant the truck driver paid his bill and put his two nickels’ change in a slot machine. The whirling cylinders gave him no score.

“They fix ’em so you can’t win nothing,” he said to the waitress.

And she replied, “Guy took the jackpot not two hours ago. Three-eighty he got. How soon you gonna be back by?”

He held the screen door a little open. “Week-ten days,” he said. “Got to make a run to Tulsa, an’ I never get back soon as I think.”

She said crossly, “Don’t let the flies in. Either go out or come in.”

“So long,” he said, and pushed his way out. The screen door banged behind him. He stood in the sun, peeling the wrapper from a piece of gum. He was a heavy man, broad in the shoulders, thick in the stomach. His face was red and his blue eyes long and slitted from having squinted always at sharp light. He wore army trousers and high laced boots.

Holding the stick of gum in front of his lips he called through the screen, “Well, don’t do nothing you don’t want me to hear about.” The waitress was turned toward a mirror on the back wall. She grunted a reply. The truck driver gnawed down the stick of gum slowly, opening his jaws and lips wide with each bite. He shaped the gum in his mouth, rolled it under his tongue while he walked to the big red truck. The hitch-hiker stood up and looked across through the windows.

“Could ya give me a lift, mister?” The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second.

“Didn’t you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?”

“Sure – I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.” The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer. If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company. If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. And he wanted to be a good guy. He glanced again at the restaurant.

“Scrunch down on the running board till we get around the bend,” he said. The hitch-hiker flopped down out of sight and clung to the door handle. The motor roared up for a moment, the gears clicked in, and the great truck moved away, first gear, second gear, third gear, and then a high whining pick-up and fourth gear. Under the clinging man the highway blurred dizzily by. It was a mile to the first turn in the road, then the truck slowed down. The hitch-hiker stood up, eased the door open, and slipped into the seat. The driver looked over at him, slitting his eyes, and he chewed as though thoughts and impressions were being sorted and arranged by his jaws before they were finally filed away in his brain. His eyes began at the new cap, moved down the new clothes to the new shoes. The hitch-hiker squirmed his back against the seat in comfort, took off his cap, and swabbed his sweating forehead and chin with it.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said. “My dogs was pooped out.”

“New shoes,” said the driver. His voice had the same quality of secrecy and insinuation his eyes had. “You oughtn’ to take no walk in new shoes – hot weather.” The hiker looked down at the dusty yellow shoes.

“Didn’t have no other shoes,” he said. “Guy got to wear ’em if he got no others.” The driver squinted judiciously ahead and built up the speed of the truck a little.

“Goin’ far?” “Uh-uh! I’d a walked her if my dogs wasn’t pooped out.” The questions of the driver had the tone of a subtle examination. He seemed to spread nets, to set traps, with his questions. “Lookin’ for a job?” he asked.

“No, my old man got a place, forty acres. He’s a cropper, but we been there a long time.” The driver looked significantly at the fields along the road where the corn was fallen sideways and the dust was piled on it. Little flints shoved through the dusty soil.

The driver said, as though to himself, “A forty-acre cropper and he ain’t been dusted out and he ain’t been tractored out?”

“‘Course I ain’t heard lately,” said the hitch-hiker.

“Long time,” said the driver. A bee flew into the cab and buzzed in back of the windshield. The driver put out his hand and carefully drove the bee into an air stream that blew it out of the window.

“Croppers going fast now,” he said. “One cat’ takes and shoves ten families out. Cat’s all over hell now. Tear in and shove the croppers out. How’s your old man hold on?” His tongue and his jaws became busy with the neglected gum, turned it and chewed it. With each opening of his mouth his tongue could be seen flipping the gum over.

“Well, I ain’t heard lately. I never was no hand to write, nor my old man neither.” He added quickly, “But the both of us can, if we want.”

“Been doing a job?” Again the secret investigating casualness. He looked out over the fields, at the shimmering air, and gathering his gum into his cheek, out of the way, he spat out the window.

“Sure have,” said the hitch-hiker. “Thought so. I seen your hands. Been swingin’ a pick or an ax or a sledge. That shines up your hands. I notice all stuff like that. Take a pride in it.” The hitch-hiker stared at him. The truck tires sang on the road.

“Like to know anything else? I’ll tell you. You ain’t got to guess.”

“Now don’t get sore. I wasn’t gettin’ nosy.”

“I’ll tell you anything. I ain’t hidin’ nothin’.”

“Now don’t get sore. I just like to notice things. Makes the time pass.”

“I’ll tell you anything. Name’s Joad, Tom Joad. Old man is ol’ Tom Joad.” His eyes rested broodingly on the driver. “Don’t get sore. I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“I don’t mean nothin’ neither,” said Joad. “I’m just tryin’ to get along without shovin’ nobody around.” He stopped and looked out at the dry fields, at the starved tree clumps hanging uneasily in the heated distance. From his side pocket he brought out his tobacco and papers. He rolled his cigarette down between his knees, where the wind could not get at it. The driver chewed as rhythmically, as thoughtfully, as a cow. He waited to let the whole emphasis of the preceding passage disappear and be forgotten. At last, when the air seemed neutral again, he said, “A guy that never been a truck skinner don’t know nothin’ what it’s like. Owners don’t want us to pick up nobody. So we got to set here an’ just skin her along ‘less we want to take a chance of gettin’ fired like I just done with you.”

“‘Preciate it,” said Joad.

“I’ve knew guys that done screwy things while they’re drivin’ trucks. I remember a guy use’ to make up poetry. It passed the time.” He looked over secretly to see whether Joad was interested or amazed. Joad was silent, looking into the distance ahead, along the road, along the white road that waved gently, like a ground swell. The driver went on at last, “I remember a piece of poetry this here guy wrote down. It was about him an’ a couple of other guys goin’ all over the world drinkin’ and raisin’ hell and screwin’ around. I wisht I could remember how that piece went. This guy had words in it that Jesus H. Christ wouldn’t know what they meant. Part was like this: ‘An’ there we spied a nigger, with a trigger that was bigger than a elephant’s proboscis or the whanger of a whale.’ That proboscis is a nose-like. With a elephant it’s his trunk. Guy showed me a dictionary. Carried that dictionary all over hell with him. He’d look in it while he’s pulled up gettin’ his pie an’ coffee.” He stopped, feeling lonely in the long speech. His secret eyes turned on his passenger. Joad remained silent. Nervously the driver tried to force him into participation.

“Ever know a guy that said big words like that?”

“Preacher,” said Joad. “Well, it makes you mad to hear a guy use big words. ‘Course with a preacher it’s all right because nobody would fool around with a preacher anyway. But this guy was funny. You didn’t give a damn when he said a big word ’cause he just done it for ducks. He wasn’t puttin’ on no dog.” The driver was reassured. He knew at least that Joad was listening. He swung the great truck viciously around a bend and the tires shrilled.

“Like I was sayin’,” he continued, “guy that drives a truck does screwy things. He got to. He’d go nuts just settin’ here an’ the road sneakin’ under the wheels. Fella says once that truck skinners eats all the time – all the time in hamburger joints along the road.”

“Sure seem to live there,” Joad agreed.

“Sure they stop, but it ain’t to eat. They ain’t hardly ever hungry. They’re just goddamn sick of goin’ – get sick of it. Joints is the only place you can pull up, an’ when you stop you got to buy somepin so you can sling the bull with the broad behind the counter. So you get a cup of coffee and a piece pie. Kind of gives a guy a little rest.” He chewed his gum slowly and turned it with his tongue. “Must be tough,” said Joad with no emphasis. The driver glanced quickly at him, looking for satire.

“Well, it ain’t no goddamn cinch,” he said testily. “Looks easy, jus’ settin’ here till you put in your eight or maybe your ten or fourteen hours. But the road gets into a guy. He’s got to do somepin. Some sings an’ some whistles. Company won’t let us have no radio. A few takes a pint along, but them kind don’t stick long.” He said the last smugly. “I don’t never take a drink till I’m through.”

“Yeah?” Joad asked.

“Yeah! A guy got to get ahead. Why, I’m thinkin’ of takin’ one of them correspondence school courses. Mechanical engineering. It’s easy. Just study a few easy lessons at home. I’m thinkin’ of it. Then I won’t drive no truck. Then I’ll tell other guys to drive trucks.” Joad took a pint of whisky from his side coat pocket.

“Sure you won’t have a snort?” His voice was teasing.

“No, by God. I won’t touch it. A guy can’t drink liquor all the time and study like I’m goin’ to.” Joad uncorked the bottle, took two quick swallows, recorked it, and put it back in his pocket. The spicy hot smell of the whisky filled the cab.

“You’re all wound up,” said Joad. “What’s the matter – got a girl?”

“Well, sure. But I want to get ahead anyway. I been training my mind for a hell of a long time.” The whisky seemed to loosen Joad up. He rolled another cigarette and lighted it. “I ain’t got a hell of a lot further to go,” he said.

The driver went on quickly, “I don’t need no shot,” he said. “I train my mind all the time. I took a course in that two years ago.” He patted the steering wheel with his right hand. “Suppose I pass a guy on the road. I look at him an’ after I’m past I try to remember ever’thing about him, kind a clothes an’ shoes an’ hat, an’ how he walked an’ maybe how tall an’ what weight an’ any scars, I do it pretty good. I can jus’ make a whole picture in my head. Sometimes I think I ought to take a course to be a fingerprint expert. You’d be su’prised how much a guy can remember.” Joad took a quick drink from the flask. He dragged the last smoke from his raveling cigarette and then, with callused thumb and forefinger, crushed out the glowing end. He rubbed the butt to a pulp and put it out the window, letting the breeze suck it from his fingers. The big tires sang a high note on the pavement. Joad’s dark quiet eyes became amused as he stared along the road. The driver waited and glanced uneasily over. At last Joad’s long upper lip grinned up from his teeth and he chuckled silently, his chest jerked with the chuckles. “You sure took a hell of a long time to get to it, buddy.”

Excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath, a novel by John Steinbeck published in 1939 by Viking Press.

Betty Goodwin (1923 – 2008) was a Canadian artist and printmaker.

A LONG DRESS.

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every colour. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

A RED HAT.

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

A BLUE COAT.

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular colour that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.

A PIANO.

If the speed is open, if the colour is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving colour and there is no colour, not any colour. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.
This is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing.

A CHAIR.

A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even. It addresses no more, it shadows the stage and learning. A regular arrangement, the severest and the most preserved is that which has the arrangement not more than always authorised.
A suitable establishment, well housed, practical, patient and staring, a suitable bedding, very suitable and not more particularly than complaining, anything suitable is so necessary.
A fact is that when the direction is just like that, no more, longer, sudden and at the same time not any sofa, the main action is that without a blaming there is no custody.
Practice measurement, practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal, in showing that there is wearing.
Hope, what is a spectacle, a spectacle is the resemblance between the circular side place and nothing else, nothing else.
To choose it is ended, it is actual and more than that it has it certainly has the same treat, and a seat all that is practiced and more easily much more easily ordinarily.
Pick a barn, a whole barn, and bend more slender accents than have ever been necessary, shine in the darkness necessarily. Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation.
If the chance to dirty diminishing is necessary, if it is why is there no complexion, why is there no rubbing, why is there no special protection.

A FRIGHTFUL RELEASE.

A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged.

A PURSE.

A purse was not green, it was not straw colour, it was hardly seen and it had a use a long use and the chain, the chain was never missing, it was not misplaced, it showed that it was open, that is all that it showed.

A MOUNTED UMBRELLA.

What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange.

A CLOTH.

Enough cloth is plenty and more, more is almost enough for that and besides if there is no more spreading is there plenty of room for it. Any occasion shows the best way.

MORE.

An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil.
Wondering so winningly in several kinds of oceans is the reason that makes red so regular and enthusiastic. The reason that there is more snips are the same shining very coloured rid of no round colour.

A NEW CUP AND SAUCER.

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.

OBJECTS.

Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than three, two in the centre make two one side.
If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the best example is all together.
The kind of show is made by squeezing.

EYE GLASSES.

A colour in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley.

CUTLET.

A blind agitation is manly and uttermost.

CARELESS WATER.

No cup is broken in more places and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is Japanese. It shows the whole element of angels and orders. It does more to choosing and it does more to that ministering counting. It does, it does change in more water.
Supposing a single piece is a hair supposing more of them are orderly, does that show that strength, does that show that joint, does that show that balloon famously. Does it.

A PAPER.

A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool.

A DRAWING.

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

WATER RAINING.

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

COLD CLIMATE.

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.

MALACHITE.

The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.

AN UMBRELLA.

Colouring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot.

A PETTICOAT.

A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.

A WAIST.

A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.
Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom.
A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.
A woollen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left.

A TIME TO EAT.

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.

A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER.

A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same colour than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

A FIRE.

What was the use of a whole time to send and not send if there was to be the kind of thing that made that come in. A letter was nicely sent.

A HANDKERCHIEF.

A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry.

RED ROSES.

A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

IN BETWEEN.

In between a place and candy is a narrow foot-path that shows more mounting than anything, so much really that a calling meaning a bolster measured a whole thing with that. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.

COLORED HATS.

Coloured hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.

A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

A BROWN.

A brown which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing.

A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE.

A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
A little lace makes boils. This is not true.
Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top.
If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head.
A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window.
Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning.
I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading mention nothing.
Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for.
Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.

A SOUND.

Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.

A TABLE.

A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change.
A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.

SHOES.

To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes a steady midnight. It is pus.
A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine.

A DOG.

A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

A WHITE HUNTER.

A white hunter is nearly crazy.

A LEAVE.

In the middle of a tiny spot and nearly bare there is a nice thing to say that wrist is leading. Wrist is leading.

SUPPOSE AN EYES.

Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so.
All the seats are needing blackening. A white dress is in sign. A soldier a real soldier has a worn lace a worn lace of different sizes that is to say if he can read, if he can read he is a size to show shutting up twenty-four.
Go red go red, laugh white.
Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get.
Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton.
Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful.

A SHAWL.

A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talks.
A shawl is a wedding, a piece of wax a little build. A shawl.
Pick a ticket, pick it in strange steps and with hollows. There is hollow hollow belt, a belt is a shawl.
A plate that has a little bobble, all of them, any so.
Please a round it is ticket.
It was a mistake to state that a laugh and a lip and a laid climb and a depot and a cultivator and little choosing is a point it.

BOOK.

Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care.
Suppose a man a realistic expression of resolute reliability suggests pleasing itself white all white and no head does that mean soap. It does not so. It means kind wavers and little chance to beside beside rest. A plain.
Suppose ear rings, that is one way to breed, breed that. Oh chance to say, oh nice old pole. Next best and nearest a pillar. Chest not valuable, be papered.
Cover up cover up the two with a little piece of string and hope rose and green, green.
Please a plate, put a match to the seam and really then really then, really then it is a remark that joins many many lead games. It is a sister and sister and a flower and a flower and a dog and a coloured sky a sky coloured grey and nearly that nearly that let.

PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.

Rub her coke.

IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK.

Black ink best wheel bale brown.
Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat.

THIS IS THE DRESS, AIDER.

Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let.

All images by Ishiuchi Miyako from the publication Frida (2013), taken of a collection of Frida Kahlo’s intimate possessions that was discovered in 2004, unopened since the artist’s death in 1954.

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was written and published in 1914 by Claire Marie, New York.

HE WAS JAPANESE, A painter, about forty. He started talking to me in the foyer of a gallery, while I was waiting in a line to store my coat. ‘What did you think?’ he said, meaning, I presumed, the exhibition. ‘This is the entrance,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said.

It was not his exhibition – I should make that clear. When I say he was a painter, I mean that he worked mostly in a pet emporium on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway which housed rabbits bred to look like miniature Dalmatian dogs, in the windows, and which offered on site-grooming sessions and appointments with an animal nutritionist. The animal nutritionist was him, and he kept a canvas in the back, for when shifts were slow. Some of his paintings were OK, had been sold for quite good money in the Nineties – at least, that was what he told me. Now none of them made anything but he kept a brush in his front pocket, all the same, and sketched portraits of society ladies’ spaniels and chinchillas to pay rent. He said, often shaking off some flaky residue of fish food from his arms – he was always paranoid he smelt residually of ‘pond’ – ‘You cannot be a primadonna, about this.’

I didn’t have a pet, but pretended that I did. A cat. ‘Leopold,’ I said. The emporium was en route to my office in the English Literature department and most mornings, I would get a question about him, or an earnest ‘Say hello to the little feline guy.’ I had shown him photos of my friend’s cat in Seattle. ‘He looks well hydrated,’ he would say. ‘That’s unusual, for Manhattan.’

I started going round to his for dinner at the end of autumn, when the leaves were on the point of falling, when the runners started wearing fleecy swathes of cotton bonded to their ears and hands. He avoided corn, and gluten, also dairy – foods that he decided made him ‘fatally apocalyptic.’ He strained his own nut milk using a mesh pouch which he had bought online, and stored batches of red quinoa and adzuki beans in his fridge. Otherwise he seemed to me to eat nothing other than expensive, coarse, dark things – eighty five per cent or higher chocolate, tarry black coffee, wine. He bought tapered cigarettes in lurid pastel colours and rationed them for ‘torpid days.’ ‘I feel this voltage twitching between us,’ he said, on the third or fourth time I went to his house, ‘but I can’t. I’m exercising discipline in my attachments.’

‘The last girl,’ he said. ‘She called me all the time.’

In this there was no risk – I didn’t have his number. We had always arranged seeing one another in the street, outside the shop, and still went out sometimes, at weekends, to over-bright bars which sold drinks which were half cocktails, half desserts – I gave in to the temptation of the tiramisu amaretto, every time. When I went back to the UK, after my time in Manhattan was over, he found and sent a message to my faculty address, asking me to forward him my details, and, if you can believe it, I received a Christmas card from him that same December, with a picture of a lizard wearing a red Santa hat, specks of glitter coming off the front. ‘Greetings,’ it said, inside. Every year now, without fail, he writes to me and sends me something. Last year it was a pyjama shirt, with stripes in pink and blue. I didn’t know if he had been saving it for someone else, or had just wrapped it up several months before he sent it. When I opened up the package, there were moths.

Alice Blackhurst is a writer and scholar based in Cambridge, UK.

Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer and artist based in London.

Brenda Hillman is an American poet and writer. ‘String Theory Sutra’ was published in Pieces of Air in the Epic in 2005.

Sarah Charlesworth (1947 – 2013) was a New York-based artist, these collages are from her series ‘Objects of Desire’, 1983–8.

MABEL HAD HER FIRST serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs. Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion – that it was not right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not RIGHT. And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction – the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people – set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking – “What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!” – their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean, water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive; and her own drawing-room so shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as she touched the letters on the hall table and said: “How dull!” to show off – all this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room.

What she had thought that evening when, sitting over the teacups, Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came, was that, of course, she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even – fashion meant cut, meant style, meant thirty guineas at least – but why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And, getting up, she had taken that old fashion book of her mother’s, a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire, and had thought how much prettier, more dignified, and more womanly they were then, and so set herself – oh, it was foolish – trying to be like them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest and old-fashioned, and very charming, giving herself up, no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.

But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror – the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.

“But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected – Rose herself being dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.

We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books she had read ages ago, suddenly came to her when she was in agony, and she repeated them over and over again. “Flies trying to crawl,” she repeated. If she could say that over often enough and make herself see the flies, she would become numb, chill, frozen, dumb. Now she could see flies crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck together; and she strained and strained (standing in front of the looking-glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that – she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer. (Envy and spite, the most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)

“I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing up a poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out of anything. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went (again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!” For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. THIS was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false. Miss Milan’s little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes
and cabbage cooking; and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on, finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there – a beautiful woman. just for a second (she had not dared look longer, Miss Milan wanted to know about the length of the skirt), there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a grey-white, mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender, and true. Miss Milan said that the skirt could not well be longer; if anything the skirt, said Miss Milan, puckering her forehead, considering with all her wits about her, must be shorter; and she felt, suddenly, honestly, full of love for Miss Milan, much, much fonder of Miss Milan than of any one in the whole world, and could have cried for pity that she should be crawling on the floor with her mouth full of pins, and her face red and her eyes bulging – that one human being should be doing this for another, and she saw them all as human beings merely, and herself going off to her party, and Miss Milan pulling the cover over the canary’s cage, or letting him pick a hemp-seed from between her lips, and the thought of it, of this side of human nature and its patience and its endurance and its being content with such miserable, scanty, sordid, little pleasures filled her eyes with tears.

…

She faced herself straight in the glass; she pecked at her left shoulder; she issued out into the room, as if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would have done – Rose would have looked like Boadicea – she looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered like a schoolgirl and slouched across the room, positively slinking, as if she were a beaten mongrel, and looked at a picture, an engraving. As if one went to a party to look at a picture! Everybody knew why she did it – it was from shame, from humiliation.

…

But in her yellow dress to-night she could not wring out one drop more; she wanted it all, all for herself. She knew (she kept on looking into the glass, dipping into that dreadfully showing-up blue pool) that she was condemned, despised, left like this in a backwater, because of her being like this a feeble, vacillating creature; and it seemed to her that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swansdown, she would have deserved that; and she thought that there was no escape for her – none whatever. But it was not her fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family of ten; never having money enough, always skimping and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and the linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little domestic tragedy after another – nothing catastrophic, the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her eldest brother marrying beneath him but not very much – there was no romance, nothing extreme about them all. They petered out respectably in seaside resorts; every watering-place had one of her aunts even now asleep in some lodging with the front windows not quite facing the sea. That was so like them – they had to squint at things always. And she had done the same – she was just like her aunts. For all her dreams of living in India, married to some hero like Sir Henry Lawrence, some empire builder (still the sight of a native in a turban filled her with romance), she had failed utterly. She had married Hubert, with his safe, permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts, and they managed tolerably in a smallish house, without proper maids, and hash when she was alone or just bread and butter, but now and then – Mrs. Holman was off, thinking her the most dried-up, unsympathetic twig she had ever met, absurdly dressed, too, and would tell every one about Mabel’s fantastic appearance – now and then, thought Mabel Waring, left alone on the blue sofa, punching the cushion in order to look occupied, for she would not join Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering like magpies and perhaps laughing at her by the fireplace – now and then, there did come to her delicious moments, reading the other night in bed, for instance, or down by the sea on the sand in the sun, at Easter – let her recall it – a great tuft of pale sand-grass standing all twisted like a shock of spears against the sky, which was blue like a smooth china egg, so firm, so hard, and then the melody of the waves – “Hush, hush,” they said, and the children’s shouts paddling – yes, it was a divine moment, and there she lay, she felt, in the hand of the Goddess who was the world; rather a hard-hearted, but very beautiful Goddess, a little lamb laid on the altar (one did think these silly things, and it didn’t matter so long as one never said them). And also with Hubert sometimes she had quite unexpectedly – carving the mutton for Sunday lunch, for no reason, opening a letter, coming into a room – divine moments, when she said to herself (for she would never say this to anybody else), “This is it. This has happened. This is it!” And the other way about it was equally surprising – that is, when everything was arranged – music, weather, holidays, every reason for happiness was there – then nothing happened at all. One wasn’t happy. It was flat, just flat, that was all.

Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert – they were all the same poor water-veined creatures who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. That wretched fly – where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer? – struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That made her feel ashamed of herself!

She would go to the London Library to-morrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person. She would be absolutely transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be called Sister Somebody; she would never give a thought to clothes again. And for ever after she would be perfectly clear about Charles Burt and Miss Milan and this room and that room; and it would be always, day after day, as if she were lying in the sun or carving the mutton. It would be it!

So she got up from the blue sofa, and the yellow button in the looking-glass got up too, and she waved her hand to Charles and Rose to show them she did not depend on them one scrap, and the yellow button moved out of the looking-glass, and all the spears were gathered into her breast as she walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said “Good night.”

“But it’s too early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who was always so charming.

“I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she added in her weak, wobbly voice which only sounded ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I have enjoyed myself enormously.”

“I have enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway, whom she met on the stairs.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself, going downstairs, and “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she thanked Mrs. Barnet for helping her and wrapped herself, round and round and round, in the Chinese cloak she had worn these twenty years.

‘The New Dress’ is a short story by Virginia Woolf, written in 1924, it is thought to be an early chapter for her novel Mrs. Dalloway, however it was instead published in 1927 in the New York literary magazine The Forum.

Domenico Gnoli (1933 – 1970) was an Italian painter based in New York.