Photo by Nissim Ram
Staff reader Simone Kraus talks with Susan Daitch—author of “The View from Here, Maybe” (NER 44.2)—about a haunted luxury tower, history as clay, the inspiration behind her first novel L.C., and the role consciousness plays in her work-in-progress.
Simone Kraus: Your essay “The View from Here, Maybe” is wonderfully complex. To me, reading it feels as though it has an underlying shape, or rather two underlying shapes: a circle and a sine wave. Both forms imply the idea of something with a repeating pattern. The [hi]story of the tower, named the Vermeer, in the first section “Treehouse” invites the reader to ask what it means to live in man’s engineered environment. Is it progress? Is it a civilized world? Does it carry the seed of its own destruction? Can you talk about why you decided to write about this tower?
Susan Daitch: The haunted luxury tower is a real building and, in part, a true story. The actual building was a hospital which was turned into high-end apartments. As familiar as the signs of gentrification have become, this building was different from others, as if its conversion from one purpose to another stirred up or summoned the familiar signs of haunting: unexplained sounds, smells, footsteps when there was no one there, sightings of apparitions that might have been former patients. Doormen quit, and there was no rush to live in the former hospital, no matter what amenities were offered. I’ve walked past the building a number of times, and the transformation is an odd one, from clinics, surgeries, a morgue to luxury residence, but it remains a blocky piece of architecture, unremarkable but dark and official-looking. There was also a theory that the rumors of hauntings were generated by people in the neighborhood to discourage new residents, though it was the stories told by the actual new tenants that were genuinely eerie. I called the building a tower, because so much of the new buildings going up in the city are towers, though the actual hospital wasn’t, and named it The Vermeer because of the connotations of rarity, stratospheric prices, the ghost of the Gardner theft, but also there is something uncanny about Vermeer paintings: the light usually coming from the left, the sense of quiet and suspended animation.
SK: The Vermeer tower is a golem-like creature doomed to run amok. How did you follow the thread from the tower to Sterling North’s 1963 children’s book Rascal? Were you thinking of combining both stories as you drafted your essay?
SD: That’s a wonderful comparison of the Vermeer tower to the golem, the clay involved in building both. Maybe I should have the word emet, truth, written somewhere on its signage. At the end of “Treehouse,” I imagined the decay of the building, how it’s taken over by plants and animals which, despite the bulldozer of constant development happening in the city, you see all kinds of evidence of nature adapting to urban culture, getting a toehold and expanding from there, whether in the form of sumac growing out of bell towers, starlings who let humans get within a foot of them on a sidewalk, or raccoons who find feasts in subway tunnels. Which led me to Rascal, a story that had a certain attraction for me when I was maybe eleven or twelve because of the child Sterling North’s independence. Because raccoons have re-emerged in cities, they present a portent of the possibility of an environmental takeover, like the imagined demise of the Vermeer tower. That was the link. Rascal was Sterling North’s childhood autobiography, and when I looked more closely at it, his view of nature was one of escape— nature solved problems and was never out of control. Though it’s not part of the book in any graphic way, his brother Hershel was in the trenches of World War I, as far away as imaginable from the north woods of Wisconsin, and the contrast between the two cultures, the lush and sometimes impenetrable North American forests and the death trenches of Europe must have been stark and, as far as is known, unexamined by either of the North brothers. In the face of the latter, Sterling retreated to the former, a kingdom of peace and logic, though neither of those interpretations are strictly true. He came to believe so strongly in nature, he looked at what’s now called the Golden Age of mid-century comics as the opposite, urban and totally evil, of no merit whatsoever. So, that was the trajectory, from the haunted tower to raccoons in the city to Rascal, a raccoon raised in a domestic household who was released back into the wild. The two sections were written one following the next, in the form of a jump cut, but they aren’t as unrelated as they might appear.
SK: History plays an important role in your work. How would you define the concept of history? In 2020, Middlebury College launched an online alumni book club. Pachinko by Korean-American writer Min Jin Lee was the first novel on our reading list. The moderator asked us to comment on the first sentence of Lee’s story: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Being confronted with a sense of confinement and isolation due to strict lockdown measures across the globe, Lee’s statement resonated powerfully with the club members. We began to wonder what “history” means. The study of past events? A collection of facts that future generations will review? Is it politics? Is it something? Context? From my perspective as a translator, I kept thinking about the word “fail.” Fail as in “let down,” “disappoint,” or, “dash someone’s hope.” I checked the existing official German translation of Lee’s novel. Translated back into English it basically says “History has abandoned us.” I wonder if there is hope for our species to have a history without failing.
SD: There is a tendency everyone probably feels to a certain extent, that history, both the personal and the global, can be whacked into any imaginary shape (Holocaust deniers, election deniers, climate deniers). We live in an age of revisionism. History can be like clay—back to the golem again. Now you see it, now you don’t, emet erased with the jab of a thumb. As Groucho said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.”
I still cycle back to Dziga Vertov’s theory of the factory of facts, created by what you do with the camera, there are no neutral assemblages of images or words, the character of the recorder, the problem solver, the translator, all of these have a certain amount of power and credibility.
SK: I am a translator. I was excited to discover your first novel L.C. in which history and translation are intertwined. It opens with the preface to Dr. Willa Rehnfield’s translation of Lucienne Crozier’s secret diary. It says: “Translating a work never intended for publication, written by an unknown woman, the translator is compelled to make decisions which, naturally, never entered the writer’s mind.” Your book was published in 1986. A novel that features a female translator was a rare thing at that time, I think. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to explore the meaning of translation against the backdrop of revolution and upheaval. What was your inspiration for L.C.?
SD: L.C. was my first book, and I was thinking of a book as an object, literally, how would it look different physically over time, if different parts were added to it? So, I started with the core piece, L.C.’s journal of the Paris Revolution of February 1848, and then as it went through different (fictional) translations in 1968 and 1984, each translator would give a different version of the core story. The bias of each translator percolates through each iteration. When I was in college I found Eleanor Marx’s translation of Madame Bovary somewhere in Butler Library at Columbia. She was Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, and would later kill herself in the same way Emma Bovary did, by drinking poison. Concurrently, I read another more contemporary translation and was struck by the differences. I think you can really tell the Marx translation was written by someone who lived in the nineteenth century, whose lifespan overlapped Flaubert’s by twenty-five years. While working on L.C. I went to a translation conference and was struck by how William Weaver talked about his translation of Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Since Italian nouns have gender in a way that English does not, he translated the male reader and the female reader as the reader and the other reader. I’m not sure how that problem could have been solved, but something important in the novel was erased. So, those were some of the things I was thinking about when I wrote L.C., how a book isn’t necessarily finished, even when it exists as a print object in a particular language.
SK: What are you working on now?
SD: I’ve been working on a book that’s sort of speculative fiction, very different from previous fiction and essays. For several years I’ve been going to a series of talks, “Scientific Controversies,” curated by Janna Levin at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and this book is particularly influenced by the dialogues about genetic engineering and consciousness. The possibilities of genetic alteration, which traits, qualities, diseases, and disabilities can be eliminated or enhanced, is historically treacherous ground. The Eugenicist follows the investigations of a character who works as an Adjudicator for a company engaged in genetic alteration. A file crosses the Adjudicator’s desk that is urgent but missing critical information. Its contents present a case of two genetically engineered children whose consciousnesses appear to have been switched, but the file contains contradictions and missing information that must be found and filled in, information that can only be ferreted out with risk to the Adjudicator who has her own identity to protect. If consciousness can be compared to an internal movie where we are the director and main actor, what happens when someone else steps in to alter the script? Consciousness marshals experience, determines pleasure and pain, is integral to empathy. If it could be genetically downloadable, if one’s interior movie could be transferred to someone else, the results might encourage more compassion but could also turn ominous.
SK: I wonder if the two children are able to have a subconscious mind or subconscious thoughts! Is the Adjudicator genetically engineered, too?
SD: That’s a great question. Writing this book led me to many of the discussions about what consciousness is or might be, from Anil Seth who works on consciousness as part of an evolutionary process, to Frans de Waal and questions about animal consciousness. I have exactly zero answers as to any possible definition, but can say for the two children whose consciousnesses were switched, yes, the subconscious has to come with consciousness.
I can’t tell you about the Adjudicator because that would be a huge spoiler!
Simone Kraus, a nonfiction reader for NER, is a translator and writer who splits her time between Germany and the Czech Republic. She is the author of Prag in der amerikanischen Literatur: Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth (Peter Lang, 2016), a book focusing on the literary representation of Prague in the works of Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth. Simone’s work has also appeared in literary magazines, including literaturkritik.de and New England Review.
Susan Daitch is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories, most recently Siege of Comedians, from Dzanc Books. Her work has been the recipient of a New York Foundation of Arts Grant, an NEA Heritage Award, and two Vogelstein Fellowships. She lives in Brooklyn and is working on a book about eugenics and consciousness. Her work “Three Essays,” which first appeared in NER 42.1, was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2022.