translate to arabic:"It was much harder to find books that could help with Mildred’s story.
After reading the review of Vanner’s Bonds mentioning Edith Wharton,
Amanda Gibbons and Constance Fenimore Woolson, I had immediately
looked up their work. Still, because they preexisted Mildred by a generation
or two, their New York sets or their cliques of American expats in Europe felt
outdated. After consulting with librarians, I read, in a haphazard way,
everything I thought could be inspiring, from Emily Post’s Etiquette to Viña
Delmar’s Bad Girl. But my focus, if one could call my slapdash approach
that, was on more or less contemporary American authors whose work might,
perhaps, be pertinent. Among them I remember immensely disparate writers
such as Dawn Powell, Ursula Parrott, Anita Loos, Elizabeth Harland,
Dorothy Parker and Nancy Hale. Only a few of them turned out to be
germane to my work—and none captured the atmosphere of subdued wealth I
wanted for Mildred. Still, even if I can’t say I liked them all, some of the
authors discovered during this intense exploration became the foundation for
my personal canon, as I have written in Before Words—although I never
revealed in my book how I first came to know them.
Writing about Mildred (in any of these versions) was, by far, the most
challenging aspect of my work. There was nothing I could rely on. If none of
the books I read was of help, Bevel’s ambiguous and intentionally vaguedepiction only deepened the void at the center of her portrait. It seemed
certain that Mildred’s role in the musical scene in New York had been more
important than Bevel was willing to admit. But nothing suggested she
suffered from the severe mental issues that destroyed her alter ego, Helen
Rask, in Vanner’s novel.
There were two things I had to suppress from every sentence I wrote about
her. First, the undeniable complexity of her character, which came through
Bevel’s obfuscations and his attempts at making her image more
“accessible.” Second, my conviction that I understood her plight—at least to
some extent. Living with Bevel. The suffocation. The loneliness. Calculating
every action and repressing every impulse.
Facing this dead end, I thought of Harold Vanner. I had loved so much
about his rendition of Helen Rask, and perhaps I would be able to find
inspiration in some of his other female characters.
If the fear I had felt when I left Brooklyn had dissipated after hours among
books and magazines, it returned in a massive wave of terror when I went
through the library cards in the cabinet looking for Vanner’s work. I flipped
back and forth the VAM-VAR drawer, always pausing in the same place and
feeling my heart leap each time I confirmed the void:
Vann, William Harvey. Notes on the Writings of James Howell.
1924.
Vannereau, Maurice. L’Ornière, pièce sociale en 1 acte. 1926.
It was inconceivable that the New York Public Library would hold an
obscure essay by an unknown critic and, also, an unheard-of short play by a
thoroughly unnoted French writer but not one book by the author who should
have fallen between these two names. No Vanner. Nothing. Not a single title.
I asked a librarian. She told me everything they had was on those cards. But I
knew it was simply impossible that one of the largest, most comprehensive
collections in the world would not hold any of Harold Vanner’s books. His
early work had been somewhat successful, and Bonds had been widelyreviewed. There was only one explanation. Bevel, one of the Library’s main
donors, had bent and aligned reality.
Chaos is a vortex that spins faster with each thing it swallows. Working
ceaselessly for days, I had no time left to take care of the house. Dishes in the
sink and towels on the floor, open tins and moldy back issues of Cronaca
Sovversiva, crusts of bread and rotten apple cores, flies and centipedes, inkstained rags and a clogged bathtub. None of this bothered my father in the
least. He would clear the area he needed, wipe some utensils on his shirt,
make a sandwich or work on some components of a page and move on,
leaving everything behind. Those were blissful days for him. He was happy
we were spending time together, working. His joy is the only good memory I
have of that period."