After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

If you, like me, have a copy of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho that has followed you for half your lifetime—from state to state and apartment to ever-shrinking apartment as your financial fortunes waxed and waned following the vagaries of economic stability under neoliberal capitalist itinerancy—then you have already read After Sappho.

How many pages can one fill theorizing on the meaning behind not owning three-quarters of the versions of the album cover when you buy a copy? Many. (Mine was top right).

If you, like me, have a tattered and annotated copy of Eros: The Bittersweet that served as the backbone for your self-indulgent and admittedly vibe-based undergraduate thesis about the literary value of the aching and then-current alt-pop opus “Sea Change,” then you have already loved After Sappho.

Much like telling me what cool acts you saw open for Beck was a key to unlocking my friendship in college, dropping an Anne Carson reference has always been a shibboleth to gaining my intellectual respect. After Sappho comes into the room wearing her name like a badge.

I love it.

When I think of Anne Carson, I don’t necessarily think of Sappho. Carson is a titan that cannot be defined by one identity or singular concept. However, I do not think it possible to talk of Sappho and not of Carson. What a beautiful tangle.

An intricate web like After Sappho brings in more than nods to the Carsonheads in the crowd, of course; the book links dozens of towering figures of female genius from the turn of the last century—the prominence in actual reality may lead to their shadows darkening your path through various other media. I was served up a podcast highlighting Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and then, having just resubscribed to The New Yorker (goodbye, hopes of completing any book-reading goals), spotted Margaret Cavendish out in the wild. These are lives I recognize exclusively—embarrassingly—from After Sappho. Between never finding Edith Wharton and still never reading Virginia Woolf, I’m starting to think the collegiate 2000’s English Lit assigned canon wasn’t very….good.

I wait, continuously, for Lina Polleti to slide into my life through some unrelated twist of the algorithm. If you take long enough to read something, I suppose, you will inevitably run aground on the reefs of kismet; After Sappho is a long journey that must needs be taken slowly. Each fragment–a word that should quicken the pulse of any Sapphic–gives little runway to pick up speed: the flow state is broken and lost to a different epoch, each scene altering its references across time and humanity. The book reminds you that you are reading a book multiple times of every single page, and each time is a delight, like the realization of body health after a long illness. You’re actually conscious of the act of reading, while still being engrossed in the make-believe on the page—the duality of feeling this runs parallel to the reality ensconced within this piece of fiction—these are true figures from recent history, and the versions we see here are curious doppelgängers that may become the versions that live on in your mind. “Despite all this, in 1928 we were gladdened by the idea that henceforth Virginia Woolf could vote.” The is a delightful sentence from the story that is true in both the world on the page and the historical record; subtly divine. Other comminglings of fact and fiction only highlight the labyrinthine prose–never complicated for its own sake–and its self-recursive and self-reflective waltz. Above all, After Sappho is always beautiful:

[Ibsen] called it A Doll’s House, and he put into its protagonist Nora all of his observations about the wretched state of women in marriages, how they were cossetted with sweets and dresses until they became exactly the frivolous, flighty playthings that men liked to see dancing in drawing rooms. At the end of the play, when Nora’s husband insists that above all she must be a wife and a mother, Nora replies, I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, just as much as you – or, at least, that I’ll try to become one. Then she leaves.

When Rina Faccio saw A Doll’s House in Milano in 1901, tears came to her eyes and stayed there, stinging. Rina Faccio never cried at plays. But Nora, a woman of nerves and bones consigned to the life of an object with its smile painted on, made her weep. Or perhaps it was the moment when Nora left that so moved her: that a woman could leave, even in a play, moved Rina Faccio towards becoming Sibilla Aleramo.

LAURA KIELER, 1874

The end of the play, however, was not the end of the story of Nora. What Ibsen did not mention is that A Doll’s House recounted the life of a woman he knew named Laura Kieler, who was also a writer. The events of A Doll’s House are wrought from the fabric of her existence; there, onstage, twisted into being thrown into hot relief by the gaslights, are her children, her debts, here lies, her dresses, the sententious pronouncements of her husband, her cowering and miserable dependence upon a household that would grant her no more than pocket money to buy sweets.

Once, when Laura Kieler needed money, she sent a manuscript of her novel to Ibsen, beseeching him to recommend it to his publisher. Ibsen disliked the novel and did not see, moreover, why her desire was so desperate, why she was always so fretful and secretive. Receiving Ibsen’s refusal at her onion-stained kitchen table, Laura Kieler flung her manuscript into the fire. Unlike Nora, Laura Kieler could not love: instead, pregnant and terrified, she as sent to an insane asylum.

Ibsen felt badly about this. But still, sitting on his beautiful terrace in Amalfi, he took her life for his play.

The above pull quote was long, so congrats if you read it—data shows that most people skim or skip, referencing back if the surrounding text piques their curiosity. But the length and context is important as it shows the weave between each seemingly independent vignette. Even when the characters change, the theming remains the same. Or a reference remains, spread across decades to emphasis the change, or lack, in material circumstance. Nora the character inspires, Laura the writer wilts. The commonality is through Ibsen, who only grants agency to the woman he can control completely. Even if the illusion grants succor, its cost is still dehumanizing.

The tangled tale continues later, separately:

Eleonora Duse never met Laura Kieler, the woman whose life Ibsen took for his character Nora. But in 1891, when A Doll’s House premiered in Milano, Eleonora put her own life into Nora’s with such force that the keys around her neck jangled violently. Eleonora knew what it was to close the door on a man who doubted that you were fully a person….Now she told younger actresses, Our lives are full of tiny cruel splinters, there is nothing that will blunt the fall.

Here again is Kieler, with a the chain of thought back to Nora and Laura running through another woman, Eleonora Duse. Her monologue here, her advice to the youth— “Our lives are full of tiny cruel splinters, there is nothing that will blunt the fall”—is poetic, wonderful, and is actually a flowering bloom that was planted pages—ages—earlier:

All through the century of Eleonora Duse’s birth, Ibsen noted, every actress in Scandinavia fainted on the same side of the stage every time. If there was a dramatic moment, the handkerchief went to the left hand, the actress went to stage left, and then there was a fainting. 

But in Italy, actresses were unpredictable. If they felt the fainting come over them, a wavering took them wherever they stood, and when they sank to the floorboards, tiny cruel splinters went into their palms….Eleonora’s] mother told her, It doesn’t matter where you faint, stage left or stage right, but put the handkerchief in the hand you will fall on, to blunt the splinters.

These are, what, a dozen paragraphs torn from the book like roots from the soil? Everything is interwoven, exquisite, each paragraph of After Sappho layered in this way.

Recursive, referential. Insightful, foreboding:

Originally Agamemnon was a story about Cassandra, but she was exiled from it by the history of literature. She was made a foreigner in her own story. On the border she stands waiting, century after century, while all of the other characters come home.

…

Everyone, including Agamemnon, was always telling Cassandra not to speak of this. Her mouth was full of madness and birds, the chorus was dismayed by all the blood and small bones.

The reader is to be forgiven for thinking that, while the narrator is to become Sappho, the author already embodies Cassandra. Each motion and movement on the page begets the next with such fluidity that I can’t help but want to read it again. After After Sappho, what hope is there for another story to come close?

Those were the stories we were given. When we were children, we learned what happened to girls in fables: eaten, married, lost. Then came our bouts of classical education, imparting to us the fates of women in ancient literature: betrayed, raped, cast out, driven mad in tongueless grief. It as not unusual, we discovered, for women to be dragged across the seas as slaves and then murdered on the threshold. Cassandra was merely one of many.

Was it any wonder that we read Sappho instead? The worst of Sappho’s heartbreaks are bitter dawnings of envy, the keen emptiness in her arms where a beloved no longer sleeps, an exile from one beautiful island to another. Sappho has the luxury of growing old in her own bed.

This is the truth that Cassandra speaks, the truth that After Sappho shows, scene after scene: Women wanting to be treated like people and instead being treated as things “…too flighty, too simple, too angelic, too ignorant, too cunning, too hysterical, too impure, too modern, too housebound, not propertied enough, not married enough, not old enough, not educated enough, and not dependably inclined to vote for the same men who had been voting against us for most of our lives.” Suspended above the burden of exclusion gleam shards of Sappho, lodestars to Lesbos, to a reality where one can write as though the world was hers to enjoy as much as, and in the same way as, anyone. To be Sappho is to be a woman who moves through the world as a person and not an object.

For her Sappho was La Tisseuse de violettes, the weaver of violets; there was no way for Renée to translate the impossibly delicate phrases without crushing them bruised in her hand.

This is how it feels to review After Sappho: yanking out lines and hacking down their sublime context, flattening the violets, drying them out so they are easier to store on a shelf. 

If you, like me, prefer Sappho to Phaon, then you have already picked up After Sappho.