We too are looking for the light that delights, only we call it literature. It’s that time of the year, and we are reading for Issue 59. The deadline is Sept 30, so get off your ass and send us your best mistakes. We are looking for poetry, fiction, translated fiction & poetry, and graphic fiction. If you’re unsure what to call your impulse of delight, label it “fiction” and send it over. What else? Oh yes: here’s the submissions page.
We have a few things to announce. There are two additions to the TBLM editorial team. Award-winning writers Jayasree Kalathil and Venkataraghavan Srinivasan have joined the TBLM editorial team. Jayasree will handle Translations (Fiction) for Issue 59 and Venkat has been sentenced to the Fiction team. An expansion in the editorial team is always an exciting thing, because the magazine’s editors are its sensory elements; we have gained new senses.
Unfortunately, we also have a departure. We wish to thank Mandakini Pachauri for her time at TBLM over the past two years. She served as poetry editor and poetry translations editor, and her judgment and expertise will be much missed.
In other news: Saranya Subramaniam’s poem ‘Navratri on the Muni’, which appeared in Issue 54 has been selected for publication in the 2023 Yearbook of Indian Poetry (Pippa Rann, UK). This long-running annual volume, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, showcases some of the finest poetry from the subcontinent.
Finally, our former Poetry Editor Aditi Rao invites applications for the Serai Residency, an annual three-week retreat for “artists, writers, educators, and peacebuilders from across the Global South”. This fully-funded Residency includes accommodation, meals, travel and a stipend. Applications close on 5th September. More information here.
Onwards to the colophon. We had published Vesna Main’s story “Sindy and the Artist” in Issue 56 (December 2023). Here, Vesna describes her struggle with a creative problem, surely familiar to every writer: if truth pertains to reality and fact to actuality, then how are these pairs to be reconciled? The choice of her title “Le Mentir-vrai” , after Louis Aragon’s eponymous autobiographical novel, names the nature of this struggle. Le mentir-vrai loosely translates to “truthful lying”. In Vesna’s case, the nominal subject of her novel is the life of the nineteenth-century photographer Eugène Atget.
This struggle to reconcile truth and fact, reality and actuality, goes by many names. René Daumal put it in form of a Zen koan. In Mount Analogue, he described the position of the traveler caught in the jaws of a river crocodile. The traveler struggles. The croc takes pity.
—I shall let you go, if you tell me the truth.
—The truth is that you will eat me.
Colophon: Le Mentir-vrai
VESNA MAIN
—How are things?
—Okay.
—You don’t sound okay.
—Well, I’m a bit stuck.
—Writing?
—Yes. No.
—?
—No, not writing. Stuck. Yes.
—?
—Well, it’s this French photographer, nineteenth century. Love his work. Trying to write a novel about him but feel lost.
—How about the story of you and him?
—What?
—Think why you want to write about him? What is it about you that has attracted you to him?
—His photographs. But that doesn’t make a novel.
—It doesn’t. You need to tell the story of his life. There is always a story.
—Even if I did want to do that, I couldn’t. We know very little about his life. He was a private man.
—So much the better! As somebody once said, you are a writer, invent it.
—But he did exist. If I make up events in his life, or impart thoughts to him, somebody might think they were real, I mean, based on some documentary evidence.
—Who is this somebody?
—A reader.
—A reader should know better. Remember, you once told me that to arrive at the truth, one often has to use fiction. As Verdi said, to copy the truth is good, but to invent it is much better. Or, remember Aragon, and his le mentir—vrai.
—Hmm.
—How about recreating the man in his time? Have you done your research on the period? You need authentic details, the noises and smells of Paris –
—No. No. No. I dislike the idea of doing research to write fiction. Besides, I hate historical novels. They make me think of TV costume dramas. I find them phoney.
—They are very popular.
—So?
—Fine. I know what you mean. But it seems to me you could still do something worthwhile by focusing on the man in his time, la Belle Epoque.
—That cliché has been exploded.
—And rightly so.
—How is it going?
—It’s not.
—What’s the problem?
—Not sure. I have written two different versions of this novel and neither is right.
—Have you thought of doing an entirely imaginary account of his life? Something like la vie imaginaire? There is a French novelist who does that sort of thing. Jean E something…
—But what’s the point?
—A story of an imagined life is just as worthwhile as a story based on documented facts.
—I suppose so.
—Well then, get on with it.
—What’s the problem now?
—I was thinking that some readers – if I ever get any – might confuse my imagined life with a biography and complain.
—That’s their problem. We have already talked about that. You are writing a novel. That’s fiction.
—But there are bits of me in it.
—You don’t mean that!
—There are references to my life. Real things.
—I can’t believe I am hearing this from you of all people.
—?
—It’s not you! It’s a character, a narrator. The Vesna Main in the novel is not you. You may share a name and other things but it is NOT you.
—When I said it, I was using shorthand.
—Oh really?
—Okay. Tell me!
—He puzzles me. I want to know who he was and sometimes I feel I do but then I start questioning my instinct.
—Everyone is unknowable. Nothing unusual about that.
—Of course, but that’s not what I mean.
—What do you mean? Just accept that you cannot know him. That’s what we do with the people in our lives.
—But I am trying to write about him.
—You have his photographs. That’s him. That’s more than we have of most people we come across in our lives. We have to surmise, invent, interpolate.
—Right.
—In any case, what does it matter what he was like as a person?
—It does if I am writing about him.
—But if he is a character in a novel, then it is up to the writer to create him.
—Yes.
—So, what is it this time?
—I will have to give up. It’s just not working.
—What’s the problem?
—I don’t know where to start?
—Ask yourself why you want to write about him.
—Well, I like his photographs and –
—You want to champion them –
—Oh, no! Not at all. I’m not Berenice Abbott –
—Who?
—Never mind. What I want to say is that apart from liking his photographs, there is something about the man –
—But you keep saying you don’t know anything about him –
—Well, what I sense about him intrigues me –
—And that’s what?
—His commitment to his work . Oh yes, and even more, his readiness to live in poverty –
—I seem to recall you once telling me that’s what you lack. You like your creature comforts.
—Exactly.
—Well, that is a good connection between the two of you. He has what you lack and desire. Isn’t that what makes some people fall in love?
—You can’t say I am in love with him.
—Wouldn’t be the first time. Weren’t you once in love with a dead poet?
—Don’t tell me there is something else worrying you.
—Okay, if you don’t want to know.
—I do. I’m listening.
—There is no story.
—?
—I am trying to tell you that I appreciate your support and find it useful and it’s all very well to include myself, speculate with this and that, and comment on the photographs, but so what? What is the story? Where’s the tension?
—Two things. You always say you don’t care about the story. It’s the writing that matters.
—True but publishers want a story.
—Learn from your man: be yourself, stick to what you believe in.
—And what’s the second thing?
—You said you didn’t know where the tension is. But you have it: the tension of the story is the writer not knowing how to write this novel. Make it a story about writing a novel. That’s more than enough.
—Some publishers are allergic to novels about writing. They see it as navel gazing.
—Be your own woman. Ignore the demands of the publishing industry.
—You might see it like that. But if I introduce tension, should it not be resolved? The readers want resolution.
—And you have it. The completed novel is the resolution.
—Hm. Not sure.
—And besides, remember: neat endings belong to the era of positivism. Not to our sceptical age. Many readers have learned not to expect them.
—If you say so.
—I do and I also want to say: get on with it. Write. Stop worrying. Write. Write.
—So, what’s wrong now?
—I was thinking: what’s the point of writing a novel about someone known for his photographs? We should just look at the photographs. In any case, he wanted his private life to remain private.
—True.
—So? Why write about him?
—I know what you could do.
—Yes?
—Forget about the historical character. Just use what is interesting about him. You have told me about his commitment to his art, his single—mindedness, his conviction, or at least his projection of his conviction, that he knew what he was doing as a photographer. That he suck to what he believed in and didn’t need anyone’s advice. There is also his interest in what was going on in the political life in France at the time. Dreyfus, Jaurès, and since it’s fiction, one could imagine him admiring Louise Michel. It could be a novel that is a study of an artist who is living in turbulent times, who is socially conscious, rigorous in his approach to his art and, above all, committed to creating a body of work that will give meaning to his life while, at the same time, being painfully aware of the inevitability of failure.
—What’s the problem now?
—I need a framework, a narrative framework. Something to give me a structure, something on which to peg my story of Atget.
—One of those, I—found—a—manuscript—in—my—loft—and—here—it—is … too false. Mise en abyme doesn’t always work.
—No, not that kind of device.
—There must be a way. How about: two people, a man and a woman talking about the photographs … they fall in love.
—Oh no. Not a bloody romance.
—You could make it more interesting. How about … I know: the man has a memory of the woman, but she doesn’t remember him …
—L’Année dernière á Marienbad?
—No.
—Then what?
—He starts showing her the work of your photographer and … she remembers … and
—Or she doesn’t but she becomes interested in the man or … we don’t know if she does or doesn’t … she might be pretending but she falls in love …, yes, she falls in love, oh yes, but … not with the man, she falls in love with the photographer.
—Look what I’ve found.
—What? The book?
—I will read you a paragraph on your man. ‘He will probably remain something of an enigma, for his work can be read in so many different ways. It would be quite possible to arrange a dozen exhibitions of his work, each one suggesting a different kind of photographer.’
—Spot on.
—And your book?
—It’s a book. Perhaps even mine.
—Why didn’t you say? Wonderful.
—Well –
—Well, what? Now you can move on.
—No.
—Why not?
—I will miss him.
—So, it is a love story.Submissions Call for Issue 59
——
VESNA MAIN is a graduate of English and Comparative Literature. She holds a PhD in Elizabethan Drama from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her book-length publications include a collection of stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt 2018), Only A Lodger… And Hardly That (Seagull Books, 2020), a novella, ‘Bruno and Adèle’ in Shorts III (Platypus Press, 2021) and Good Day? (Salt 2019), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Her latest novel, Waiting for a Party, will be published by Salt in November 2024. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, Main lives in London and in a small French village.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Banner image: Eugène Atget: L'Éclipse, avril 1912. Wikimedia Commons.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Crow & Colophon. Subscribe for free to receive updates about The Bombay Literary Magazine and notes of a literary persuasion.