Joy Williams’s cosmic apocalypse

 Already Dead

Joy Williams’s cosmic apocalypse

JUSTIN TAYLOR Bookform

HARROW: A NOVEL BY JOY WILLIAMS. NEW YORK: KNOPF. 224 PAGES. $26.

 

I DROVE ACROSS the Everglades in May. I had originally planned to take Alligator Alley, but someone tipped me off that, in the twenty years since I left South Florida, the historically wild and lonesome stretch of road had been fully incorporated into I-75, turned into a standard highway corridor with tall concrete walls on both sides, designed to keep the traffic noise in and the alligators out. So on the drive west from Boynton Beach, I took the northern route, skirting along the bottom of Lake Okeechobee (which you can’t see from the road) through new subdivisions and past a succession of sugar plantations, the horizon pillared with smoke from the farmers burning cane. Small towns where the only signs of life are dollar stores. Roadside billboards sponsored by the US Sugar Corporation insist that “the air out here is cleaner than congested urban areas.”

On the drive back east a few days later, I took a more southerly route, hoping it would suck less, which it did. This part of the Everglades contains the Big Cypress Reservation, which I’d last visited my senior year of high school, to ring in the new millennium at a Phish show. Here I saw lots of birds and trees, and there were dozens of alligators lounging in a drainage canal between the road and the welcome-center gift shop. There were trading posts and air-boat-tour launches, plus swaths of undeveloped land. No dystopian agribusiness signage. I was able to suspend disbelief and feel like I was in “the wild” for perhaps an hour. It was fun.

When I got home to Portland, Oregon—where that winter we had weathered a highly improbable ice storm that shut the city down for nearly a week, but were not yet familiar with the phrase “heat dome,” which would shut us down for another week come June—I picked up my copy of Joy Williams’s 2001 nonfiction collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. I was thinking of her essay “Neverglades,” in which she argues: “[The idea] that the Everglades still exists is a collective illusion shared by both those who care and those who don’t. People used to say that nothing like the Everglades existed anywhere else in the world, but it doesn’t exist in South Florida anymore either. The Park, which millions of people visit and perceive to be the Everglades, makes up only 20 percent of the historic Glades . . . vanished beneath cities, canals, vast water impoundment areas, sugarcane fields, and tomato farms.”

Williams recounts the dismal history of the draining and poisoning of the Everglades, as well as the belated, superficial, and unsuccessful efforts to sentimentalize and “save” it, which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, a period which happens to coincide exactly with my own childhood in Miami, which may be why I remember the Everglades as having been a viable wilderness during my own lifetime even though this clearly isn’t true. Williams writes that in those waning decades of the twentieth century, “the Everglades, no longer quite existing but still troublingly existent, was increasingly being deemed worthy of love, of being saved.” On its face, this sentence is a recapitulation of the “collective illusion” concept with which the essay opens: that what we call the Everglades are in fact a giant, immersive trompe l’oeil. The powers that be want us to focus our effort on “saving” the Everglades because if we ever admitted to ourselves that it was dead we would probably start asking questions about who murdered it.

That something can be existent without properly existing, caught halfway between being and nonbeing, or between life and death, is a concept much larger than Williams’s straightforward claims about the eradication of the Everglades. The notion of a foundational in-between-ness, of existence itself as a fleeting or fugacious form, has been central to her work from the very beginning. The writer Vincent Scarpa, who has studied and taught Williams’s work extensively, put it to me this way: “That liminal state between being alive and being dead—that’s Joy’s playground.” He reminded me that nursing homes, “these collectives where it goes unacknowledged or otherwise refused that the living are only playing at living,” feature frequently in her work. “But we’re really all in that liminal state, just to varying degrees.” Sure enough, a nursing home is a central setting of Williams’s novel The Quick and the Dead (2000), which also features a petulant ghost. Expand the category a bit and you’ll find hospitals and hotels along with rest homes. Her 1988 novel, Breaking and Entering, is about a pair of drifters who squat Florida vacation homes. Florida itself is sometimes known as “God’s Waiting Room.”

The Quick and the Dead, which is not set in Florida but in the West, is one of the weirdest, funniest, darkest novels you’ll ever read. It lost the 2001 Pulitzer Prize to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, thus fulfilling the promise of Luke 4:24. Williams’s new novel, Harrow, is Quick’s spiritual successor, perhaps even sequel, taking up that novel’s concerns and amplifying them by the full twenty years it took her to write it. Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle. It’s not bullish on green tech jobs or sustainable meat. It would leave Steven “Things Are Getting Better” Pinker and Matthew “One Billion Americans” Yglesias writhing in shame if guys like them were capable of reading novels or feeling shame. Harrow is a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell.

In “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka’s great parable of displacement and delay, the title character is deprived the dignity and clarity of a fully consummated death. After living his life in the Black Forest, thriving as a hunter and eventually dying on a hunt, his “death ship lost its way,” rendering him unable to complete his journey to the afterworld. Instead, Gracchus must sail the seas, making ports of call wherever he can, lying on his bier in his winding shroud (into which he slips “like a girl into her marriage dress”), at once dead and alive, which is to say neither dead nor alive. “I am here,” says Gracchus; “more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.”

“The Hunter Gracchus” figures prominently in Harrow, where it is evoked many times by implication before being explicitly cited and, in the novel’s final section, given a thorough and somewhat contrarian exegesis. (If you’ve read “The Killing Game,” an essay in Ill Nature, you know what Williams thinks of hunters; if you haven’t, I’ll give you one guess.) Like Gracchus or the Everglades, the world of Harrow is neither precisely dead nor alive. It is set during what I will call the periapocalypse, the endless midst of a disaster that has no proper beginning or conclusion. Some great climate calamity has ravaged the environment and provoked a mass die-off of plants and animals. Everything is polluted, debased, used up. The world is, for all intents and purposes, over. And yet it persists: there are cities and governments; cars have gas in their tanks and buildings have electricity. The world doesn’t know it’s dead, only that it’s shittier and scarier and more desperate than it has ever been before. It is a place where “your empathies are obsolete. The battle’s over, the world’s been overcome. Almost everything that’s not us or hasn’t been fashioned by us is gone.”

Sound familiar? Though the novel is hardly strictly realist in its style or its vision, to understand it as in any sense “speculative” or “science fictional” is to fundamentally misunderstand Williams’s project, as well as the science of climate change. At the moment I’m writing this, one of the largest wildfires in the country is burning about three hundred miles southeast of me. The skies in Portland are clear blue and all my windows are open, but I’ve got friends in Manhattan who are wearing N95 masks because the smoke from this fire has been irritating their lungs. Luckily, they’ve already got N95 masks handy because this is month one hundred (or whatever) of a global pandemic caused by a virus that may or may not have been grown in a Chinese laboratory with US government money and then unleashed on the world by virtue of sheer human stupidity. I read a really interesting article the other day about the drying up of the Great Salt Lake and how the biggest problem won’t be the catastrophic habitat loss or the brutal blow to regional tourism (though these will, for the record, be enormous problems) but rather that the exposure of the lake bed, which contains huge reserves of arsenic (a “toxic dustbin” per CNN dot com), will turn the wind carcinogenic as it sweeps across the parched West. Keep those masks handy! Where was I?

Oh yeah, Harrow. The protagonist and sometimes narrator is a teenager named Khristen, whose mother believes that she briefly died shortly after she was born, and ought to have gleaned some crucial intel or special powers from her stint in the great beyond. But nobody else, including Khristen, believes Khristen died. Book One of the novel concerns Khristen’s childhood. After her father dies, her mother sends her to a boarding school run out of an old sanatorium somewhere in the Western wilds, where the students recite Nietzsche at the induction ceremony and eat a lot of eggs. (It sounds a bit like Deep Springs minus the ranching.) After the school shuts down, seemingly in response to some periapocalyptic acceleration that goes largely unglimpsed, Khristen takes a train to a hotel where her mother may or may not have attended an environmental conference at some point in the recent (or not so recent) past. But it’s hard to know because, as a woman named Lola tells her, “Time doesn’t have the tolerance with us that it used to. For all the good it did, that conference could have taken place before you were born.”

BOOK TWO OF THE NOVEL BREAKS OUT of Khristen’s perspective and into an omniscient third person. It takes place on the grounds of the aforementioned hotel and a motel that sits beside it. Both structures are on the shore of a toxic lake that everyone calls Big Girl, and to which they tend to attribute some sentience, if not precisely consciousness. Lola, as it happens, is the proprietress of both motel and hotel; the former being for passers-through, such as Khristen. The hotel, aka the Institute, serves a different function, though its denizens are also, in a sense, passing through. “The Institute was not a suicide academy or a terrorist hospice. Or not exactly.” The Institute is populated by militant geriatrics with terminal illnesses who hope to die for a cause that will redeem them for having wasted their lives. This “army of the aged and ill” believes that almost everything we might understand as civic and industrial “recovery” are in fact reversions to the destructive and evil behaviors that precipitated disaster. As one member of the Institute succinctly puts it, “We will bring about the collapse of the collapse recovery.”

They have a special hatred for animal torture conducted under the aegis of scientific research or industrial agriculture. The drug Premarin, for instance, is synthesized from pregnant horses, whose unwanted foals are slaughtered by the thousands. Behavioral scientists wonder whether they can induce psychopathology in monkeys through programmatic rape and violence. Any given Big Mac might contain the flesh of 100 different cows in its measly 3.2 ounces of beef. None of this, needless to say, is invention on Williams’s part. It’s all as real as the arsenic in the lake bed, the phthalates building up in your bloodstream, the little itch in your lungs from the smoke from the fires that are burning as I write this and that may well still be burning when this issue goes to press and perhaps even when you receive it in your mailbox or, more likely, read it on your phone.

Sorry, got sidetracked again. I was telling you about the Institute.

These oldsters, if not exactly a force majeure, were a baffling and bitter anomaly, characterized and dismissed as senile mavericks, lone termites, or perfect examples of why the aged mind was not in the interests of society. They did not consider themselves “terrorists.” That word had suffered considerable manipulation and marginalization and could now only be counted on to describe the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.

Some members of the Institute feel conflicted about their calling. Do their attacks really serve the interest of justice, or even retribution? Do they provide moral instruction to the public? Don’t they mostly take out underlings who, while obviously culpable, are nevertheless cogs in a machine they didn’t build and don’t control, victims of their own constrained circumstances? Moreover, dying sucks and nobody wants to do it, not even the elderly and terminally ill. Lola complains at one point that as the pace of assassinations has dropped off, the Institute has become more like a hospice proper. Many of its targets are now themselves dying of old age.

Khristen takes an equivocal view of their project. “They were flawed and their efforts futile, but living among them when the apocalypse had come and gone, scrubbing the world of grief and love, was what I had been given to know. They had hoped to awaken others, but perhaps we are not meant to awake. Perhaps it is only death’s long instant that arouses us from sleep.” But she lives at the motel, not the hotel, and spends much of her time with Barbara, a drunk, and her son, Jeffrey, a ten-year-old boy who may actually be the sort of divine child that Khristen’s mother once thought she was. Jeffrey is teaching himself the history of the law in hopes of becoming a judge. In his mind, the law is less a career than an existential or spiritual condition, just as it was for Kafka, especially in his later works where (as Philip Rahv, among others, has argued) the figure of the all-powerful and dreadful father is transfigured beyond human shape into a sort of radiantly faceless institutional authority, instantiating us in ourselves through its very refusal to know us or show us mercy.

If all this sounds convoluted and paradoxical, it should, but I warrant it is no less convoluted than the story of a child doomed to save the world through his suffering, a sacrificial lamb whose blood washes clean even as its wrath lays waste, and who is also the general of a galactic war party riding into battle with a sword coming out of his mouth (Revelations 1:16). Etc., etc. “The Bible is constantly making use of image beyond words,” Williams told the Paris Review in 2014. “A parable provides the imagery by means of words. The meaning, however, does not lie in the words but in the imagery. What is conjured, as it were, transcends words completely in another language. This is how Kafka wrote, why we are so fascinated by him, why he speaks so universally.”

In a masterful set piece early in Book Two, Jeffrey has a birthday party at a bowling alley near the Institute. Barbara and Lola get smashed on martinis by the pitcher while Jeffrey shows off his knowledge of English common law to Khristen and the local bowling league grows furious that the party occupies a coveted lane but refuses to bowl. Barbara has been trying to figure out how to tell Jeffrey that his father is in prison for murdering his grandfather and has decided to share this information via the illustration on his birthday cake. But the baker, having gotten the story backwards, depicts the grandfather murdering the father—specifically, the baker has reproduced Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son in buttercream frosting.

This entire episode is—to use a technical literary term—fucking hilarious. It is also emblematic of another of the novel’s key themes, the idea of source decay or legibility loss. Gordon, one of the rare oldsters who has not only carried out his kamikaze mission but survived it, at one point considers “the amount of ink that can fade from a written message without changing what it says. . . . But there comes a moment when the message changes or becomes unintelligible or both.”

People are constantly misspeaking and mishearing in this novel, sometimes correcting themselves or each other and sometimes not. This notion too has its roots in Kafka, whose cosmology is at once entropic and eternal. One thinks of course of Gracchus, trapped between his worlds, but also of “A Country Doctor,” for whom “a false alarm on the night bell once answered—it cannot be made good, not ever”; of “The Kings’ Messengers,” who are forever “racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless”; as well as “The Coming of the Messiah,” a parable brief enough to offer in its entirety: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the last day of all.”

I'M NOT SURE I would describe Book Three even if I could. Khristen leaves the Institute, some new characters are introduced; there’s a large tree with unusual properties; there’s that exegesis of Gracchus I mentioned earlier; and Jeffrey shows back up, profoundly transfigured yet still very much himself, his dream of a judgeship finally fulfilled—or rapidly fulfilled, depending how much time you believe has passed since the end of Book Two, which in turn depends on what you believe “time” and “the passage of time” each mean in the novel’s world, or in general.

Tell you the truth, I don’t want to review Harrow anymore. I’ve read it twice and I used this assignment as an excuse to do a ton of supplemental reading and rereading, and yet my love still surpasses my understanding (Ephesians 3:19), and I think I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t want to evaluate this book. I want to place it in the center of a salt ring and light candles around it. I want to throw it like the I Ching and ruin my life trying to heed its inscrutable, dubious wisdom.

I think of the one entry in Ill Nature that departs from that book’s primary subject. It’s an essay called “Why I Write,” which I assume Williams included because she knew she’d never write a second essay collection. Some days I believe “Why I Write” is the only quote unquote craft essay worth reading. Williams argues that “The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the humble absurdity, the disorienting truth, the exhilarating transmutability, this is the koan of writing. . . . The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

I assume that for a lot of people this claim is risible, perhaps demonstrably false. Good for you if you know better than to credit such provocations, if you’re comfortable enough with your life and your station and the state of things to avoid being gulled by the abyssal mysteries. As for me and mine, we believe it absolutely. More than believing it, we recognize it and, more still, feel recognized by it. It is that same sense of mutual recognition I feel when reading this novel, indeed whenever I read Joy Williams, and that I am now fighting to preserve from my own attempt to subdue it to the demands of my hobgoblin intellect.

It may be that the greatest achievement of Williams’s late work is its insistence on holding sacred space where despair can abide unharassed by hope. Harrow is a howl of grief for the life bleeding out of a world where “the fouling of the nest was all but complete, the birthright smashed.” To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self. What else do you want me to tell you? As I’ve said, it’s also funny. I really did laugh a lot. Five stars.

Justin Taylor’s most recent book is the memoir Riding with the Ghost (Random House, 2020).

 

The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer

 Annals of Psychology

The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer

How do you live after unintentionally causing a death?

By Alice Gregory The New Yorker 

Until 3:35 p.m. on June 15, 1977, Maryann Gray was happy. She was twenty-two, and had just decided to take a leave of absence from Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Graduate school had been her mother’s idea, and Gray was unpleasantly surprised by how scientific the program turned out to be. Inside the front cover of her statistics textbook was a squashed bug, which she had circled and labelled “Maryann at the end of Stat.” 

There are no self-help books for those who have unintentionally killed someone.

That summer, Gray was preparing to move into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in a neglected area of Cincinnati, which its residents called an “urban commune.” There, she hoped, she would eat curry, burn incense, and talk politics late into the night with new friends. Her father, a businessman, and her mother, a homemaker, who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, were not supportive of the plan. But Gray couldn’t wait to move in. She spent the day painting her new bedroom yellow.

By the afternoon, Gray was sweaty and paint-stained, and she decided to go back to her boxed-up apartment in Oxford to take a swim. The hot, hour-long drive crossed through suburban sprawl and then into emerald countryside. Gray had the windows of her father’s 1969 Mercury Cougar down, and the radio tuned to the news. She was only fifteen minutes from the apartment, driving at the posted forty-five miles per hour along a wooded, two-lane country road, when she saw a pale flash and felt a bump.

The statement Gray gave to the police later that afternoon is written in the neat script a young student might use on a final exam: “A child (blond male) ran into the street from my left, running in front of the car. I tried to go around him (left) but couldn’t get by. I hit my brakes instantly + skidded to the left.” The signature at the bottom of the page looks as though it had been written slowly and with care.

When Gray read the affidavit forty years later, she was surprised by the precision of her account. “There was no way I actually remembered that,” she told me. “Hitting him I remember, and I remember sort of pulling over on a side street, getting out of the car, and there I lose a few minutes.” Gray recalled crouching behind a bush, terrified and hiding. “I remember thinking, What’s that noise?, and then realizing it was me, screaming.” She was still concealed by the shrubbery when the boy’s mother ran out of her house and began to wail. “She was with two women, and her knees buckled. She began to fall, and they held her up,” Gray said. “She wanted to go to him, of course, but they held her back.”

The police arrived about twenty minutes later, and, rather than wait for an ambulance, they put the boy in the back seat of a squad car and drove him six miles to the hospital, where, Gray later learned, he was pronounced dead on arrival. Only after the boy had been taken away from the bloodied road did Gray emerge. A few policemen had stayed behind, and she approached them, with one hand raised. “Like a schoolgirl,” Gray recalled. “I was so young.” Her voice caught. “I said, ‘I did it. I did it.’ ”

She was ushered into the back of a police car, where she sat until a woman who lived nearby approached, offered her a cool towel, and asked an officer if Gray could wait at her house instead. The officer agreed, and Gray sat in the kind stranger’s kitchen, sipping water. It was early evening by the time the Butler County sheriff’s office finished its site evaluation and asked Gray if she would be O.K. driving home. She said no. A professor picked her up and persuaded her to call her parents, in New York. “I said, ‘Mommy, Mommy’—and I never called her that—‘it was an accident,’ ” Gray recalled. Her mother replied, “Of course it was.”

Gray’s father flew out and took care of logistics. He called the insurance company, got the car towed, hired a lawyer, and paid the condolence call. Gray spent the week refusing to leave her old bedroom. “I had what I now consider to be a hallucination,” she told me. “I heard this voice, so clearly, saying, ‘You took a son from his mother and your punishment is that you can never have your own child.’ ” She told her therapist, whom she had been seeing for two years, that she was afraid the accident would ruin her forever.

In the following months, Gray drove slowly and uncertainly. She would see vague figures in the road, slam on the brakes, and then realize that nobody was there. An insect hitting the windshield could send her into a panic. She didn’t know how to act around her new roommates, who treated her with a kind of hesitant benevolence. “Here I was in this house that was all about peace and love and community, and I had just killed a kid,” Gray said. “I really wanted these people to like me and to accept me, so I just tried to act sad but not crazy.”

By the first anniversary of the accident, Gray was packing up her yellow bedroom. She took on odd jobs—at an exercise studio and then at an accounting firm—and lived with a roommate whom she rarely saw. In 1979, she moved to Southern California and returned to graduate school, at U.C. Irvine. In Gray’s telling, her life improved with the elegance and the inevitability of a film dissolve. “It was a new start,” she said. “I felt like I was leaving the horribleness behind.” She loved her academic program, made friends, and went to the beach. But the accident remained with her. She said, “There was this voice: ‘You don’t deserve to feel happy. Look what happened last time you felt happy.’ I lived with a ghost, with this child inside me, speaking to me, not very kindly. But I never talked about it.”

There are self-help books written for seemingly every aberration of human experience: for alcoholics and opiate abusers; for widows, rape victims, gambling addicts, and anorexics; for the parents of children with disabilities; for sufferers of acne and shopping compulsions; for cancer survivors, asexuals, and people who just aren’t that happy and don’t know why. But there are no self-help books for anyone who has accidentally killed another person. An exhaustive search yielded no research on such people, and nothing in the way of therapeutic protocols, publicly listed support groups, or therapists who specialize in their treatment.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, there were nearly a hundred and forty-seven thousand unintentional-injury deaths in the United States. About a quarter were caused by motor-vehicle accidents; the total also includes falls, firearm mishaps, accidental poisoning, and all the other inconceivably varied ways a healthy person’s life might end. The C.D.C.’s reports are broad and terse; they describe how we die, but not why. Of the more than thirty-six thousand fatal traffic accidents in 2015, for instance, we don’t know how many were the result of a single car hitting a tree, how many were head-on collisions in which both drivers perished, and how many were caused by a person who walked away physically intact but psychically wounded.

“As far as databases that track people who inadvertently cause the death of someone else, I’m not aware of any,” a representative for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety told me. A representative of the National Transportation Safety Board said the same thing. Cops, social workers, and hospital personnel receive no special training in how to respond to people who have accidentally caused fatalities, and neither the American Counseling Association nor the American Psychological Association nor the American Automobile Association could, when I asked, name any experts in the field.

Mental-health workers who specialize in the treatment of veterans perhaps have the most relevant professional expertise. Accidental killers often report experiencing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks, hallucinations, nightmares, and what’s known as “moral injury.” William Nash, the Marine Corps’s director of psychological health, told me that such symptoms appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “as pathologized, distorted, inappropriate responses, and that’s crap in a situation like this. If you’re responsible for someone else’s accidental death, guilt and shame are appropriate emotions. They are telling you that you need to do something to atone or make amends for your error.”

Today, Gray, who is sixty-two, is a recently retired U.C.L.A. assistant provost. Divorced, but still friends with her ex-husband, she tends to an active social life and lives in a sunny two-story apartment in Santa Monica with her dog, Harvey. She never did have children. When I met her on a Saturday morning in April, Gray did not immediately strike me as a “vivid reminder of human fallibility and the capriciousness of fate,” as she has described herself in the past. Instead, she opened her front door in stocking feet, offered me coffee and fresh strawberries, and projected a generally cheerful demeanor. Trim, with curly blond hair, Gray is warm, self-reflective, and easy to talk to.

Gray’s lightness is the result of an unburdening that forced her to think differently about her accident. In July, 2003, not seven miles from where Gray was then living, an eighty-six-year-old man driving a Buick sedan mistakenly pressed his foot on the accelerator and plowed into the Santa Monica Farmers Market. Ten people died, and sixty-three were injured. His attorney called the crash an accident, but there was an outpouring of rage. “People were not just angry with the driver but called him a murderer,” Gray said. “To me, it was so obvious that he didn’t do it on purpose, and I thought the response was so cruel.” (Three years later, the driver, George Weller, was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to five years’ probation.)

After reading about the reactions to the collision in the newspaper, Gray closed the door to her office and wrote a brief account of her own accident. She e-mailed the document, fewer than four hundred words in all, to the local NPR station, and got a call back within an hour. A producer wanted her to read a version of it on the air. “Like most people, I’m horrified and saddened by the devastating car accident,” Gray began. “My heart goes out to those who lost family members and friends. But, unlike most people, my deepest sympathies lie with the driver.” The segment first aired on “All Things Considered,” on July 18, 2003. It was broadcast at rush hour.

The producer warned Gray that she might receive hate mail, but the spiteful feedback she anticipated never came. Friends and colleagues she’d known for decades called her to express sympathetic surprise; she got e-mails from dozens of people who had caused accidental deaths, all of them grateful. One friend introduced Gray to her sister, who had killed a cyclist with her car in upstate New York. They discussed the morbid etiquette of whom you tell about the accident and whom you allow to remain ignorant, and the impulse to game out, pointlessly, alternate versions of the past. It was the first time that Gray spoke about her experience with another person who had accidentally caused a death.

Moved by the response to the NPR segment, Gray registered a Web site under the name Accidental Impacts. It included a link to the segment, reading recommendations (academic books about P.T.S.D., a few memoirs, some psychology-inflected guides to living a meaningful life in the wake of trauma), and short essays she had written on the subject. A few years later, with the help of her tech-savvy personal trainer, Gray opened it up to comments. The design of the site, which Gray says is for “good people who have unintentionally harmed others, in accidents occurring on the roads, at work, at play, or around the home,” is generic, with blue tabs and photographs of natural landscapes running across the top. Gray does nothing to publicize it and rarely posts updates. Still, Accidental Impacts receives an average of sixty hits per day. It readily comes up in a Google search only because, with the exception of a few online message boards, it has no competitors. “There’s nothing,” Gray said. “There’s my Web site. Period.”

Most people who post on Accidental Impacts were involved in fatal car crashes, but there are also cases of guns going off when they shouldn’t have, of boating mishaps, and of momentarily neglected babies. The comments are just as often statements of bitter and disheartening fellow-feeling as they are expressions of solace. In response to a woman whose niece had recently killed a bicyclist, one person wrote, “In my personal opinion and from my personal experience, I truly don’t think there’s anything anyone could do or say to make her feel any better at this moment.”

I spoke to six people who had caused accidental deaths, on the phone and in person, and the tone and the structure of their accounts were eerily uniform. They spoke quickly and compulsively, assuming the role of the sincere and reliable narrator of a realist novel. No detail seemed too small to share: the color of the sky that day, what song was playing on the radio. They spoke of losing time after the accident, and they apologized, often repeatedly, for the minutes for which they couldn’t account. Near the end of their stories, they would take a moment to catch their breath and offer a statement that got at the incomprehensible enormity of it all. Then they would apologize again, this time for having spoken for so long.

On May 9, 1998, Leigh Green, a high-school sophomore living in a Houston suburb, learned that she had made the school dance team. She drove home in her father’s pickup truck to call her boyfriend and tell him the good news. Then she got back in the truck to drive to the mall. She was reflecting on how much her life was beginning to resemble a teen movie when “Let Me Ride That Donkey,” a filthy song by the Florida-based hip-hop group 69 Boyz, came on the radio. In the moment it took her to look down and change the station, she T-boned a Ford Mustang. Inside were two girls from her school, both on the dance team.

Green’s truck spun. “I got out and saw that both girls were unconscious,” she said. There were sirens and screaming. A boy from school saw the accident and came to help. “That’s the last thing I remember,” Green said. “The rest is hazy, just pure shock.”

The Mustang’s driver was taken to the local emergency room in an ambulance and had regained consciousness by the time she arrived. The passenger, a girl named Steffani, was rushed to a trauma center in a helicopter, with extensive internal bleeding and brain damage. Two days later, Green met Steffani’s parents in her room at the I.C.U. Steffani’s father told stories about his daughter; her mother made Green promise to keep dancing. They asked her if she knew the Lord’s Prayer; Green, embarrassed, said she didn’t. They began reciting it slowly, encouraging her to say it with them. “At the time, I didn’t realize what it means to say that prayer around someone at the I.C.U.,” Green said. “And just the fact that they did that with me . . . This is a strange thing to say, but I felt lucky to be able to go see her with her parents.” The next day, Steffani was taken off life support.

Green learned about Accidental Impacts from a therapist, who told her, at the end of their first session, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the resources to deal with this.” Green appreciates the site but isn’t surprised that there’s so little out there. “People just don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “When someone is raped, you can tell them, truthfully, ‘It’s not your fault.’ Well, in my case, that really can’t be said. My brother tells me, ‘You don’t deserve this.’ That’s nice and all, but it doesn’t fix it.” Green explained, “It’s a sob story, with no ‘and then.’ ”

In June, 2012, a forty-two-year-old paralegal living in Illinois, whom I’ll call Patricia, was driving home in the early evening when the sun suddenly hit her eyes. “I felt an impact, but a very strange impact. I thought maybe it was a deer,” she told me. Her air bags deployed, knocking her glasses off and burning her forearms. She pulled over, and ran into the road. There was blood everywhere. Then she saw a man, crumpled; his motorcycle lay beside him. Patricia tried to stanch his head wounds with her clothing. She whispered to him and called 911. A truck driver came upon the scene and pulled Patricia away from the body. “I couldn’t understand what was happening,” she recalled. “He started praying, but he was praying for me. I heard him say, ‘God, protect her. God, look out for her. God, give her strength.’ At that point, I just completely broke down.”

For two nights, Patricia couldn’t sleep. Every detail came back to her: the curve of the road, the “pink matter” ground into the asphalt. Her husband, not knowing what to do, took her to the E.R. Within a few minutes of the initial consultation, she was sent to the suicide unit, where she remained for six days. After her release, friends visited—to cook dinner, to clean the house—but she couldn’t stand how they kept telling her it was “just an accident.” She went to “umpteen” different counsellors, but none were helpful. She sent a letter to the state’s attorney asking him to please put her away. “I spent my whole life volunteering—for animal shelters, for Make-A-Wish,” she told me. “This just negates everything good I’ve ever done.”

Two months after the accident, the motorcyclist’s family mounted a wrongful-death suit against Patricia. Six months later, she was charged with reckless homicide. A trial date has been delayed multiple times. It has been five years since the accident, and Patricia leaves her house only to attend doctors’ appointments and court dates. She is unemployed and has lost touch with most of her friends. Though she wept while talking to me, she became impatient when recounting the loving reactions of friends and family. “Yes, it was an accident, and in a certain sense we were both to blame, but, at the end of the day, I hit him, I took his life,” she said. “No matter how much you want to dismiss it as an accident, I still feel responsible for it, and I am.” She cried, “I hit him! Why does nobody understand this?”

For those who were not acting negligently at the time of their accidents—not drunk, not distracted—it is a tragedy that all but precludes the possibility of a dénouement. Perhaps this is why the aftermath of accidental death is neglected by fiction writers. Violent unintentional deaths fill the pages of centuries’ worth of literature but seldom function as anything more than a grisly plot device. Two men die after a woman with a voice full of money drives her lover’s Rolls-Royce into her husband’s mistress. A feebleminded man inadvertently strangles a young wife in a barn, forcing his friend to shoot him in the head. A girl rides a cyclone into a magical kingdom, dropping her house atop a wicked witch. In each case, the unintended fatality sets off a chain of dramatic events, but the anguish of the culpable character receives at most cursory attention. “That just happened,” Dorothy explains to the Wizard when she finally reaches the Emerald City.

There are exceptions. In 2008, Curtis Sittenfeld published “American Wife,” a novel based on the life of Laura Bush. As a teen-ager, Bush ran a stop sign in Midland, Texas, causing a car accident that killed a high-school classmate. In Sittenfeld’s telling, the crash becomes a precursor to the former First Lady’s lifelong discomfort about her own agency. Years later, as she grapples with the extent of her complicity in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, the accident becomes a data point in her torturous calculations.

In Louise Erdrich’s “LaRose,” published last year, a Native American man accidentally shoots his friend’s son while deer hunting and turns to “an old form of justice,” which requires that he give his own son to the grieving family. The transaction creates new problems—the guilty father uses drugs, while his wife struggles with her maternal longings—but the fact that there is a ritual in place is its own kind of consolation.

To seriously and honestly ruminate on how causing a fatal accident affects a person requires, in a writer or an artist, a rare appetite for nihilism. “People have a hard time believing things are as random as they are, but it seems undeniably the case,” the writer and director Kenneth Lonergan told me. Two of Lonergan’s three films are about accidental killers, and attempt to narrate the experience of being both a victim and an agent of awesome chance. In “Manchester by the Sea” (2016), a depressed New England janitor is forced to return to the town where, five years earlier, he inadvertently set fire to his house and killed his three children. In “Margaret” (2011), a high-school student named Lisa flirts with a New York City bus driver; distracted, he hits a pedestrian.

“Margaret,” which Lonergan based loosely on the experience of an acquaintance, depicts, in his words, “this enormous intrusion into the life of someone who is not prepared to deal with it—not that anyone would be.” The accident occurs thirteen minutes into the three-hour-long film, and Lisa spends the rest of it punishing herself and those around her. She is relentlessly unkind to her mother, seduces her teacher, becomes obsessed with filing a wrongful-death suit against the bus driver, and forges a confused relationship with the victim’s best friend. The accident propels Lisa into a kind of parallel universe in which anyone who might be helpful to her is rendered useless. “Of course, everyone would have something to say,” Lonergan explained. “But it wouldn’t be the right thing.”

Accidentally causing a death is understood to be both meaningless and overwhelmingly consequential—a gruesomely reversed deus ex machina, in which an intractable problem is introduced rather than solved. In 1988, when the novelist Darin Strauss was in the twelfth grade, a classmate on a bicycle swerved in front of his car. He hit her, and she died in the hospital the next day. Twenty-two years later, he published “Half a Life,” an elegant and agonizing memoir that examines the repercussions of the accident and his adolescent reactions to them. “I became aware, at eighteen, that the world is a cruel place, that the randomness of life is profound,” Strauss told me. “If you leave the gas on and burn down your apartment building, you’re branded a villain. But what if you remembered to turn it off, just in the nick of time? In that case, everything ends up fine. But is the guy who has the close call really any better? Morally, I mean. Of course not.”

Strauss was circling a philosophical concept called moral luck. Introduced by Bernard Williams in 1976 and expanded upon that year by Thomas Nagel, moral luck describes situations in which we hold people morally responsible for events that are not entirely within their control. Neither philosopher was the first to consider such situations—Aristotle wrote extensively on the nature of accidents (sumbebekota), and Kant’s most influential works considered the distinction between intention and effect—but their writings served to modernize the problem of accidental death. Williams offers the case of “the lorry driver who, through no fault of his, runs over a child.” Our pity for him, Williams explains, presupposes “that there is something special about his relation to this happening, something which cannot merely be eliminated by the consideration that it was not his fault.” Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, told me, “The conscious choice to impose a risk—even permissible risk, as in the case of driving—opens a person up to moral liability.” He neatly characterized the plight of the accidental killer: “People who are not culpable can nevertheless be responsible.”

Williams defines the torment of the person who causes an accident as “agent-regret,” a type of first-person remorse that is distinct from that of a mere bystander, and which might compel that person to offer recompense or restitution. Williams writes, “It would be a kind of insanity never to experience sentiments of this kind towards anyone, and it would be an insane concept of rationality which insisted that a rational person never would.” He suggests that we need a more nuanced understanding of agency, which acknowledges that “one’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not.”

When examined closely, no life is really one’s own. We cannot control which year and in what city we are born. The phone rings when it rings, and the child scampers into the street where he wishes. In Nagel’s response to Williams, he argues that it is not just our actions that are vulnerable to moral luck but also our intentions, our dispositions, our exertions of will. A German S.S. officer, for instance, might have led a harmless or even an exemplary life had he lived elsewhere, or had the Nazis never come to power. Nagel thinks that the “area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point.” Nagel’s epigrammatic language reads more like Scripture than like philosophy. He concludes, “Everything we do belongs to a world that we have not created.”

In the Book of Numbers, God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites that they are to designate six cities of refuge “so that anyone who kills someone inadvertently may flee there.” The accidental murderer will be protected from the wrath of the “blood avenger,” a family member of the deceased. The rules are spelled out in detail: when a person enters one of these cities, a tribunal determines whether he or she is eligible for sanctuary; those who killed with weapons, for example, cannot remain there. According to Talmudic commentary, assembled in the twelfth century, the roads leading to the cities of refuge were to be well marked, free of obstacles, and wider than regular roads, so that those who have killed another unwittingly could proceed there without delay.

When Maryann Gray, a secular Jew who grew up celebrating Easter and Christmas and reserving Scarsdale tennis courts on the High Holidays, first learned of the concept of cities of refuge, she was overcome with gratitude. “The Torah was talking about me,” she remembers thinking. Gray was struck by the specificity of its prescriptions, which suggested that lives like hers were once contemplated with sophistication by the highest authorities. She became obsessed with the concept, researching it at the library of Hebrew Union College, a seminary with a campus in Los Angeles, talking about it with rabbis, and reading their works.

There is “no statute of limitations on self-imposed pain,” David Wolpe, the senior rabbi of Sinai Temple, in Los Angeles, told me. Gray spoke to Wolpe at the start of her inquiry into the cities of refuge; he explained that their purpose was to allow individuals to share some of their pain with a community. “Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, says that in the collective grief the individual’s grief is assuaged,” Wolpe wrote to me in an e-mail. When “people realize that loss is part of the iron law of life, it helps them reconcile themselves to their own situation.” Most of us will not be forced to assimilate a catastrophic accident into the story of our lives, but rituals and refuge seem so obviously necessary that a world without them looks inhumane.

There is no extra-Biblical evidence that cities of refuge ever existed. But Gray does not want to believe that they were merely a figment of an antique but ethically progressive imagination. “If I had been exiled to a city of refuge, I might not have needed exile from myself,” she once wrote. She was moved by the idea that, in such cities, a person like her could participate fully in society without shame. “I love that there was a way of recognizing the true devastation that’s been wrought, the harm that’s been done, without condemning the individual,” she said. “That’s what I’m looking for—to live in the world with acceptance and with opportunity, but also with the acknowledgment that in running over this child something terrible happened and it deserves attention.” ?

Published in the print edition of the September 18, 2017, issue, with the headline “Accidental Killers.”

 

Vinyl Is Selling So Well That It’s Getting Hard to Sell.

Vinyl Is Selling So Well That It’s Getting Hard to Sell Vinyl

Left for dead in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format. Getting them manufactured, however, is increasingly a challenge.

By Ben Sisario NY Times

Within the Indianapolis office of Joyful Noise Recordings, a specialty label that caters to vinyl-loving fans of underground rock, is a corner that employees call the “lathe cave.”

There sits a Presto 6N record lathe — a 1940s-vintage machine the size of a microwave that makes records by cutting a groove into a blank vinyl platter. Unlike most standard records, which are pressed by the hundreds or thousands, each lathe-cut disc must be created individually.

“It’s incredibly laborious,” said Karl Hofstetter, the label’s founder. “If a song is three minutes long, it takes three minutes to make every one.”

This ancient technology — scuffed and dinged, the lathe looks like something from a World War II submarine — is a key part of Joyful Noise’s strategy to survive the very surge of vinyl popularity the label has helped fuel. Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. After growing steadily for more than a decade, LP sales exploded during the pandemic.

In the first six months of this year, 17 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, generating $467 million in retail revenue, nearly double the amount from the same period in 2020, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sixteen million CDs were also sold in the first half of 2021, worth just $205 million. Physical recordings are now just a sliver of the overall music business — streaming is 84 percent of domestic revenue — but they can be a strong indication of fan loyalty, and stars like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo make vinyl an important part of their marketing.

Yet there are worrying signs that the vinyl bonanza has exceeded the industrial capacity needed to sustain it. Production logjams and a reliance on balky, decades-old pressing machines have led to what executives say are unprecedented delays. A couple of years ago, a new record could be turned around in a few months; now it can take up to a year, wreaking havoc on artists’ release plans.

Kevin Morby, a singer-songwriter from Kansas City, Kan., said that his latest LP, “A Night at the Little Los Angeles,” barely arrived in time to sell on his fall tour. And he is one of the lucky ones. Artists from the Beach Boys to Tyler, the Creator have seen their vinyl held up recently.

“It’s almost how I feel about playing live music,” Morby said in an interview. “I now count every show as a success. ‘Wow, we pulled it off — no one got Covid.’ Now I know what it’s like for the world to completely stop. So even if it’s going to be a little late I’m still grateful for that.”

For Joyful Noise, the vinyl crunch has also presented a puzzling problem. Up to 500 V.I.P. customers pay the label $200 a year for special editions of every LP it makes. But the production holdups mean the label cannot predict which titles will be ready during 2022.

“How do we in good conscience sell this for next year,” Hofstetter said, “if we don’t know when these records will show up?”

The label’s solution is to make lathe-cut singles for each of the eight albums it intends to release next year, as placeholder bonuses while its customers wait. Doing so will cost Joyful Noise money and time — Hofstetter groaned as we calculated that eight records with five minutes of music per side, cut 500 times each, would take 666 hours of lathe work — but the label sees it as a necessary investment.

Others are just as frustrated. Thrill Jockey, a Chicago label for indie-rock connoisseurs, wants to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year with a series of reissues, but its founder, Bettina Richards, said she has no idea which titles can be made in time. John Brien of Important Records, which releases work by contemporary composers, recently declared online that “vinyl is dead,” but clarified in an interview that the format is too essential to abandon.

Not even the biggest stars are immune. In an interview this month with BBC Radio, Adele, whose album “30” is due Nov. 19 — and is sure to be a blockbuster on LP — said her release date had been set six months ago to get vinyl and CDs made in time.

“There was like a 25-week lead time!” she exclaimed. “So many CD factories and vinyl factories, they bloody closed down even before Covid because no one bloody prints them anymore.”

Music and manufacturing experts cite a variety of factors behind the holdup. The pandemic shut down many plants for a time, and problems in the global supply chain have slowed the movement of everything from cardboard and polyvinyl chloride — the “vinyl” that records (and plumbing pipes) are made from — to finished albums. In early 2020, a fire destroyed one of only two plants in the world that made lacquer discs, an essential part of the record-making process.

But the bigger issue may be simple supply and demand. Consumption of vinyl LPs has grown much faster than the industry’s ability to make records. The business relies on an aging infrastructure of pressing machines, most of which date to the 1970s or earlier and can be costly to maintain. New machines came along only in recent years, and can cost up to $300,000 each. There’s a backlog of orders for those, too.

Exotic problems pop up that would never interfere with a release on YouTube or SoundCloud. “We had a raccoon infestation,” said Caren Kelleher of Gold Rush Vinyl, a boutique plant in Austin, Texas. “That set us back a week.”

The limits of this infrastructure are being tested as major artists — and super-retailers like Walmart and Amazon — increasingly push vinyl. It is not hard to see why: At a time when CD sales are vanishing and streaming has left artists complaining about minuscule payouts, a new LP, especially if offered in eye-catching colors or in collector-baiting design variants, can sell for $25 or more. As some see it, releases by top pop acts are gumming up the production chain, crowding out the smaller artists and labels that have remained loyal to the format all along.

“What worries me more than anything is that the major labels will dominate and take over all of the capacity, which I don’t think is a good idea,” said Rick Hashimoto of Record Technology Inc., a midsize plant in Camarillo, Calif., that works with many indie labels.

Others say the big labels are just a convenient target. The real problem, they believe, isn’t celebrities jumping on the vinyl bandwagon but that the industrial network simply has not expanded quickly enough to meet growing demand.

“Am I mad that Olivia Rodrigo sold 76,000 vinyl copies of her album?” said Ben Blackwell of Third Man, the record label and vinyl empire that counts Jack White of the White Stripes as one of its founders. “Not at all! This is what I would have dreamed of when we started Third Man — that the biggest frontline artists are all pushing vinyl, and that young kids are into it.

“If someone is mad that that prevents some other title from being pressed,” Blackwell continued, “it feels a little bit elitist and gatekeep-y.”

Still, there are worries that the renaissance may be at risk if further delays frustrate consumers and artists — or if vinyl comes to be treated as just another merchandise item, like T-shirts or key chains, from which fickle fans will simply move on.

Among old-school record types, there have long been suspicions that many new fans buy vinyl for a collectible thrill but never actually drop a needle.

“We noticed during Covid that we got a lot more mail-order complaints like, ‘The jacket has a 10th-of-an-inch bend on the corner,’” said Brian Lowit of Dischord Records, the Washington label behind post-punk icons like Fugazi. “We ask them if the record is playing well and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I just keep it in the shrink wrap.’”

For artists, especially ones without major-label backing, sticking with vinyl has now become a question about whether it is worth the trouble.

“Right now vinyl feels legitimizing,” said Cassandra Jenkins, a singer-songwriter in Brooklyn whose last album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” was a surprise vinyl hit — it started with a pressing of 300 copies and eventually went to 7,000.

“It’s an investment for an artist,” she added. “I want these objects that I can sell, so I am going to invest in that.”

For some musicians like Jenkins, that investment has now begun to affect the creative process. After the release of her last album, in February, she began working on follow-up material. But the long turnaround time for vinyl meant she had to get started immediately, with a tight deadline, to get her music in the manufacturing pipeline.

In Jenkins’s case, the pressure had a positive effect. She recorded an EP of new material, due by the end of the year on vinyl only. Another release, “(An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” with outtakes and a new track, will come out on CD and digital formats next month — with vinyl to follow in April.

“It oddly pushed me into making more music than I would have had we the more luxurious deadlines of yore,” Jenkins said.

And her next project?

“This year, it was really important to me to have vinyl,” she said. “Maybe next year it won’t be.”

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. @sisario

Writing, Eleanor Rigby

How one of the Beatles’ greatest songs came to be.

By Paul McCartney The New Yorker

October 18, 2021

My mum’s favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day. That’s the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps “in a jar by the door.” I was always a little scared by how often women used cold cream.

Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I don’t even know how I first met “Eleanor Rigby,” but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy. Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. I still vividly remember the kitchen, because she had a little crystal-radio set. That’s not a brand name; it actually had a crystal inside it. Crystal radios were quite popular in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.

Eleanor Rigby may actually have started with a quite different name. Daisy Hawkins, was it? I can see that “Hawkins” is quite nice, but it wasn’t right. Jack Hawkins had played Quintus Arrius in “Ben-Hur.” Then, there was Jim Hawkins, from one of my favorite books, “Treasure Island.” But it wasn’t right. This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it’s sometimes very difficult to pin down.

It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future. I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally.

St. Peter’s Church also plays quite a big part in how I come to be talking about many of these memories today. Back in the summer of 1957, Ivan Vaughan (a friend from school) and I went to the Woolton Village Fête at the church together, and he introduced me to his friend John, who was playing there with his band, the Quarry Men.

I’d just turned fifteen at this point and John was sixteen, and Ivan knew we were both obsessed with rock and roll, so he took me over to introduce us. One thing led to another—typical teen-age boys posturing and the like—and I ended up showing off a little by playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” on the guitar. I think I played Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and a few Little Richard songs, too.

A week or so later, I was out on my bike and bumped into Pete Shotton, who was the Quarry Men’s washboard player—a very important instrument in a skiffle band. He and I got talking, and he told me that John thought I should join them. That was a very John thing to do—have someone else ask me so he wouldn’t lose face if I said no. John often had his guard up, but that was one of the great balances between us. He could be quite caustic and witty, but once you got to know him he had this lovely warm character. I was more the opposite: pretty easygoing and friendly, but I could be tough when needed.

I said I would think about it, and a week later said yes. And after that John and I started hanging out quite a bit. I was on school holidays and John was about to start art college, usefully next door to my school. I showed him how to tune his guitar; he was using banjo tuning—I think his neighbor had done that for him before—and we taught ourselves how to play songs by people like Chuck Berry. I would have played him “I Lost My Little Girl” a while later, when I’d got my courage up to share it, and he started showing me his songs. And that’s where it all began.

I do this “tour” when I’m back in Liverpool with friends and family. I drive around the old sites, pointing out places like our old house in Forthlin Road, and I sometimes drive by St. Peter’s, too. It’s only a short drive by car from the old house. And I do often stop and wonder about the chances of the Beatles getting together. We were four guys who lived in this city in the North of England, but we didn’t know one another. Then, by chance, we did get to know one another. And then we sounded pretty good when we played together, and we all had that youthful drive to get good at this music thing.

 

To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan and I hadn’t gone to that fête? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around—in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing—and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know. As it happened, though, I had a school friend who knew John. And then I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make the Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they might lead.

And, as if all these coincidences weren’t enough, it turns out that someone else who was at the fête had a portable tape machine—one of those old Grundigs. So there’s this recording (admittedly of pretty bad quality) of the Quarry Men’s performance that day. You can listen to it online. And there are also a few photos around of the band on the back of a truck. So this day that proved to be pretty pivotal in my life still has this presence and exists in these ghosts of the past.

I always think of things like these as being happy accidents. Like when someone played the tape machine backward in Abbey Road and the four of us stopped in our tracks and went, “Oh! What’s that?” So then we’d use that effect in a song, like on the backward guitar solo for “I’m Only Sleeping.” It happened more recently, too, on the song “Caesar Rock,” from my album “Egypt Station.” Somehow this drum part got dragged accidentally to the start of the song on the computer, and we played it back and it’s just there in those first few seconds and it doesn’t fit. But at the same time it does.

So my life is full of these happy accidents, and, coming back to where the name Eleanor Rigby comes from, my memory has me visiting Bristol, where Jane Asher was playing at the Old Vic. I was wandering around, waiting for the play to finish, and saw a shop sign that read “Rigby,” and I thought, That’s it! It really was as happenstance as that. When I got back to London, I wrote the song in Mrs. Asher’s music room in the basement of 57 Wimpole Street, where I was living at the time.

Around that same time, I’d started taking piano lessons again. I took lessons as a kid, but it was mostly just practicing scales, and it seemed more like homework. I loved music, but I hated the homework that came along with learning it. I think, in total, I gave piano lessons three attempts—the first time when I was a kid and my parents sent me to someone they knew locally. Then, when I was sixteen, I thought, Maybe it’s time to try and learn to play properly. I was writing my own songs by that point and getting more serious about music, but it was still the same scales. “Argh! Get outta here!” And, when I was in my early twenties, Jane’s mum, Margaret, organized lessons for me with someone from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she worked. I even played “Eleanor Rigby” on piano for the teacher, but this was before I had the words. At the time, I was just blocking out the lyrics and singing “Ola Na Tungee” over vamped E-minor chords. I don’t remember the teacher being all that impressed. The teacher just wanted to hear me play even more scales, so that put an end to the lessons.

When I started working on the words in earnest, “Eleanor” was always part of the equation, I think, because we had worked with Eleanor Bron on the film “Help!” and we knew her from the Establishment, Peter Cook’s club, on Greek Street. I think John might have dated her for a short while, too, and I liked the name very much. Initially, the priest was “Father McCartney,” because it had the right number of syllables. I took the song to John at around that point, and I remember playing it to him, and he said, “That’s great, Father McCartney.” He loved it. But I wasn’t really comfortable with it, because it’s my dad—my father McCartney—so I literally got out the phone book and went on from “McCartney” to “McKenzie.”

The song itself was consciously written to evoke the subject of loneliness, with the hope that we could get listeners to empathize. Those opening lines—“Eleanor Rigby / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream.” It’s a little strange to be picking up rice after a wedding. Does that mean she was a cleaner, someone not invited to the wedding, and only viewing the celebrations from afar? Why would she be doing that? I wanted to make it more poignant than her just cleaning up afterward, so it became more about someone who was lonely. Someone not likely to have her own wedding, but only the dream of one.

Allen Ginsberg told me it was a great poem, so I’m going to go with Allen. He was no slouch. Another early admirer of the song was William S. Burroughs, who, of course, also ended up on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper.” He and I had met through the author Barry Miles and the Indica Bookshop, and he actually got to see the song take shape when I sometimes used the spoken-word studio that we had set up in the basement of Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square. The plan for the studio was to record poets—something we did more formally a few years later with the experimental Zapple label, a subsidiary of Apple. I’d been experimenting with tape loops a lot around this time, using a Brenell reel-to-reel—which I still own—and we were starting to put more experimental elements into our songs. “Eleanor Rigby” ended up on the “Revolver” album, and for the first time we were recording songs that couldn’t be replicated onstage—songs like this and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” So Burroughs and I had hung out, and he’d borrowed my reel-to-reel a few times to work on his cut-ups. When he got to hear the final version of “Eleanor Rigby,” he said he was impressed by how much narrative I’d got into three verses. And it did feel like a breakthrough for me lyrically—more of a serious song.

George Martin had introduced me to the string-quartet idea through “Yesterday.” I’d resisted the idea at first, but when it worked I fell in love with it. So I ended up writing “Eleanor Rigby” with a string component in mind. When I took the song to George, I said that, for accompaniment, I wanted a series of E-minor chord stabs. In fact, the whole song is really only two chords: C major and E minor. In George’s version of things, he conflates my idea of the stabs and his own inspiration by Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music for the movie “Psycho.” George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement. And, of course, there’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in “Psycho.” ?

Published in the print edition of the October 25, 2021, issue.

  

The Vatican has three jail cells, one prisoner

The Vatican has three jail cells, one prisoner — and suddenly, a surge of people on trial

For years, the Vatican’s justice system has been equal parts limited and obscure. 

By Chico Harlan Stefano Pitrelli Washington Post

VATICAN CITY — It's one of the few parts of the Vatican readily accessible to the public: a small office, steps inside the city-state's border, where Catholics can purchase certificates of papal blessings for special personal occasions. Throughout a typical morning, customers stream up to the counter, ordering prayers for baptisms and anniversaries, giving their credit cards to nuns behind plexiglass.

Then, just before lunchtime, another worker emerges from a backroom, wearing a black sweater and clerical collar.

It’s Monsignor Carlo Capella, the Vatican’s only prisoner, finishing his morning shift.

For years, the Vatican’s justice system has been equal parts limited and obscure. The church has tended to emphasize spiritual penitence instead of penitentiaries. The city-state’s has just three cells. Its tribunal has rarely held criminal trials. And even when there is a high-profile conviction — like Capella’s, in 2018, a five-year sentence for possessing and sharing child pornography — little is known about what comes next.

Capella’s daytime work-release program, previously unreported, was observed by The Washington Post and confirmed by his lawyer, who said the unpaid office job was aimed at his “rehabilitation.”

“As for the rest, it’s like a normal penitentiary situation,” said Capella’s lawyer, Roberto Borgogno. “There’s just no risk of riots.”

But long criticized for shielding its own, the Vatican is suddenly conducting trials at a frequency without precedent in the century since its creation as an independent city-state.

Its first sex abuse trial ended last week, absolving two priests — a decision that will be appealed.

First Vatican sexual abuse trial absolves a former altar boy who served the pope

A much larger-scale case is just starting, examining the potential financial crimes of 10 people, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, involved in a Vatican mega-investment in a London luxury property. Lawyers in that case are arguing that Vatican prosecutors badly overreached, while committing procedural violations. The trial will probably drag on for months, if not longer.

But the very existence of that trial and others speaks to broader changes — some made under outside pressure — that have increased the possibility of prosecution inside the city-state.

The Vatican has been pushed to join more international agreements, and, since adopting the euro, to apply tighter financial rules, including against money laundering. Pope Francis has also issued a series of orders on transparency and the handling of public contracts, expanding the Vatican’s powers in criminal matters while lifting certain statute-of-limitations measures.

Months into his pontificate, Francis decreed that even Holy See diplomats stationed abroad could face trial in the city-state’s courts. That determination eventually led to the trial of Capella, a priest-diplomat who had been stationed in Washington shortly before his indictment.

“We now have a lot of norms and rules that we didn’t have before,” Monsignor Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said during an interview in a meeting room overlooking St. Peter’s Square.

The detention center itself is tucked away in a corner of the city-state’s 110-acre territory, away from the tourist traffic, in a wing of the barracks belonging to the Vatican’s police and security force. According to lawyers and people who have seen the area, each cell has its own toilet, as well as an immovable iron bed and a table anchored to the wall. The windows have bars but the glass can be opened. Several people noted the food was good.

The facility can be used both as a jail, for pretrial detention, and as a prison for convicts. The Vatican is allowed to transfer criminals to Italy; indeed, after one of the highest-profile crimes committed in Vatican territory, the attempted assassination of John Paul II in 1981, the shooter served his sentence in an Italian prison.

But in other cases, the Vatican has kept its offenders in-house — including two people convicted in separate document-leaking incidents, whom the church worried might represent a security risk.

Before Capella, those leakers had been the Vatican jail’s most famous onetime residents. One was a Spanish priest, Lucio Vallejo Balda, sentenced for passing documents to journalists, and granted clemency by Francis in 2016, halfway through an 18-month prison term. The other was Paolo Gabriele, a former butler of Pope Benedict XVI.

Gabriele had been such a fixture that he’d even hold the umbrella for the pontiff when it rained. He said he was just trying to protect his boss, hoping to shed light on corruption and other nefarious activity, by stealing documents from the apostolic palace. But his leaks ended up triggering a major scandal, puncturing the Vatican’s reputation for airtight secrecy, and were seen as a possible component in Benedict’s ultimate decision to step down.

Gabriele spent time in a Vatican cell after his arrest and for two months of an 18-month sentence — before Benedict showed up for a visit and said he was pardoning him. In sparse accounts, the former butler portrayed the life of a Vatican prisoner as harsh. He said that while on trial, he was put in a room so small he couldn’t fully stretch his arms. He said the light was on constantly. Initially, “even a pillow was denied me,” he said.

Pope Benedict XVI arrives for a general audience in St. Peter's Square in May 2012, with his personal secretary, Georg Gaenswein, at his side and butler Paolo Gabriele in front of them. (Alessandra Tarantino/AP)

Others familiar with the facility tell a different story.

“It was a luxurious prison,” said Ambra Giovene, the lawyer for Gianluigi Torzi, one of the 10 facing charges in the ongoing trial. She said the comforts were deliberate, as a way to make Torzi cooperative.

Torzi was temporarily detained for 10 days last year after being interrogated and then arrested. (He exchanged a hello with Capella in the barracks courtyard during his detention.)

None of the 10 now on trial are currently in detention.

Another lawyer, who represented Balda, said the priest’s experience was “very positive.”

“At the time he was the only inmate, the poor guy. Whatever he asked, whatever he needed, [the guards] were always helpful,” Balda’s lawyer, Emanuela Bellardini, said. “I didn’t have even one problem when I needed to meet him.”

Historians note that there was another era when the Catholic Church conducted justice on a far broader scale — in the open, and often brutally. When the Papal States held territory across part of what is now Italy, one common punishment was a form of torture in which criminals were suspended by rope at their wrists, sometimes with weights attached. Some convicts were exiled to row aboard papal ships. More noble accused offenders would be kept at Castel Sant Angelo, but the benefits of their aristocratic status had limits; they could be tortured and executed on-site.

The Holy See’s territory of today is multitudes smaller, and begins down the road from the still-standing fortress. That is where Capella is now confined. His lawyer, who said Capella was unwilling to be interviewed, said his client was allowed to walk on a predetermined route within the city-state. But he couldn’t cross the border into Italy.

“[The Vatican] has the advantage of being very small, so control is granular,” Borgogno said. “Everyone knows who comes and goes. There’s no problem checking that he respects his limitations.”

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.

Capella, before his conviction, had said his behavior had been “repugnant” and blamed it on a period of crisis after moving to Washington, where he had little fulfilling work to do.

His new job, in the office that sells papal prayers and also deals with charity, was something Capella only became eligible for after he’d served a “sizable chunk” of his sentence, Borgogno said. Borgogno called it a role of “bureaucratic nature.”

He was just dealing with paperwork, Borgogno said.

But the “desk job” was important.

Without it, the Vatican’s lone prisoner would be in de facto solitary confinement.