We had begun so long ago with our poems after Sappho, carefully styled in fragments, our paintings and blushes all done in likeness. Perhaps at last the future of Sappho would be delivered into our hands like a packet of books knotted up with string. For example we might open a seemingly ordinary biography, its chapters neatly partitioned, and find that it was webbed throughout with the most extraordinary filaments of a life. A life after all did not happen by itself, in discrete units. Thus this biography would be bound together with all of our lives, twined through from preface to index: curling, animate, verdant. In the end we might become the readers of our own afterwords.
When I started After Sappho I got that same kind of breathless feeling that I had when I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power or Emma Cline’s The Girls — that deep-gut reaction to having feminist truths named that had formerly only been experienced — and I luxuriated in author Selby Wynn Schwartz’s lyrical prose; was intrigued by her episodic biographies of women who dared to break the patriarchal molds they had been born into. But as the book proceeded, it began to feel less like a novel and more like a textbook or a series of Wikipedia entries: it read as all surface, no depth; all sizzle, no steak. It became a bit of a slog — despite frequent yummy prose — and while I admire the effort, and appreciate what I learned, this, unfortunately, did not satisfy me novelistically. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
We longed for writing tables that were not in the kitchen, stained with onions; we wanted to read the novels kept from us because they were decadent and suggestive; we wanted to exchange the finger-pricked linens of our trousseaus for travel guides and foreign grammars; we wanted to meet each other in rooms and discuss the rights of women, we wanted to close the doors to the rooms and lie in each other’s arms, the light pouring in the window, the curtains drawn back, the view over the bay running in cerulean and azure swaths into the open sea. We dreamed of islands where we could write poems that kept our lovers up all night. In our letters, we murmured the fragments of our desires to each other, breaking the lines in our impatience. We were going to be Sappho, but how did Sappho begin to become herself?
Covering a period between the 1880s and the 1920s (and mostly centering on queer white women from Western Europe), Schwartz sketches the lives of women artists familiar to me (Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf among others), and many more names unfamiliar. And while I was moved by Sibilla Aleramo’s early experiences of watching her mother dive out the window, and being married off to her rapist (as per Italian law at the time), or learning of Radclyffe Hall and her efforts to convince the British House of Lords that she was as fine a gentleman as any of them, there were so many unfamiliar names, criss-crossing each others’ paths over the years, that the storyline became both confusing and tedious to me. And because these lives are treated at a surface-level, with no effort made at exploring these women’s interiority, the lyrical Greek chorus/fragments from Sappho bits just added to the confusion instead of elevating the material.
Readers according to Colette were like lovers. The best were attentive, intelligent, exigent, and promiscuous. She urged us to read widely and well, to seek out precisely the novels prohibited to us and lie down for hours in bed with them. We should read to gorge and sate ourselves, Colette enjoined us; after a good book we should lick our fingers.
I wish that this book had impelled me to lick my fingers in its aftermath, but despite its initial promise, I lost engagement with this material pretty quickly. Certainly not a waste of my time, but simply not to my taste.
The 2022 Booker Shortlist
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
The Trees by Percival Everett
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:
The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)
After Sappho by Naomi Alderman
Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
