Tell It Slant
Tell It Slant
a novel by BETH FOLLETT
Copyright © Beth Follett 2001
First Edition
This is a work of fiction. While Djuna Barnes appears as a fictional character in the novel, every attempt has been made to render truthfully certain outward particulars of her life. All other events and persons are derived from the author’s imagination.
The published work of Phillip Herring (Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes, Viking, 1995) and the Faber Library edition of Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood have been invaluable resources during the writing of this book.
This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 223 3.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA
CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Follett, Beth
Tell it slant
1st ed.
ISBN 1–55245–081–3
i. Title.
PS8561.O643T44 2001 C813’.54 C2001–900834–1
PR9199.3.F5648T44 2001
Edited by Alana Wilcox
Designed by Zab Design & Typography
Cover photograph by Diana Thorneycroft
Typeset in Galliard CC and printed at Coach House Printing on bpNichol Lane, 2001.
Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
With infinite love
to the dead ones
for their faith
and to my mother
for life
For Justine
Tell It Slant
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
— EMILY DICKINSON
ONE
I am drifting in the dark on night’s blind waters, the vast dark volume of wet and shapeless dreams fathoms beneath me, above me a limitless sky without stars, without moon; drifting within the isotropic realm; then slowly I emerge into a lush green garden, mine or someone else’s, or a yellow room expanding; a man is speaking to me while reclining on a velvet divan but I don’t believe a word he says. And then some other words; and I wake into damp rumpled cotton sheets, black silk strangling my breasts, the light unfolding — grey and dim. What if I had your voice urging me like virtue? What if — words like sleep unravelling — I had walked the breadth of your voice? If words had served you? The cat stares up at me from her furrow between my thighs, no thought of time or dreams or cunning lies. A final image, brief as flame, catches like wind in a sail — your mouth not those hands with straining veins so red from hanging winter washing. Your hands, your eyes, your deep solid ineffable gaze meeting mine, what if — What if in winter those white sheets had let go and we had chased them to the frozen garden and there made a place where secrets could unfurl? And now softly crying, the dream divided, night’s intention disavowed. I am tossed awake by words. I fall back upon myself.
If you had held me once in laughter. If you had spoken of the world split wide open. If the world — I rise, not wishing to wake Robin.
If mother were place not payment.
If daughter were promise.
I put on my bathrobe, go to the kitchen window and look out into this blue morning, a heavy snow beginning to fall. What is a dream? An enormous conspiring genealogy, some incest, yes, and murder. Rampant, frenzied, blind. Standing here in this moment, how the sun’s first rays converge with these dreams, these rivers of words, my ancestors. How they connect to my lying next to Robin in this morning’s half-light while words like pelted tomatoes smashed against the walls of my veins. A dream has its own weight, and in this simple balance I measure the night and the day.
It is said that if one were strong enough she could take the finest most powerful traits of a lost one and integrate them into herself. That if one were wise enough she could eat her dead. Trickster work. To disregard the lines and break the female body down into world without end.
Last night I jerked a suitcase across the floor of our bedroom from closet to bed, tossed in a hapless array of cotton and wool, then stood over Robin. I start this terrible day with the hope that some of my high-handed hollowness might collapse, or that I might find a door. I confess that I have blamed Robin, a useless occupation. I haven’t always understood that truth wants its tempo and so today I will attempt patience. As I am forgotten in the extremity of her memory, perhaps it is possible that today I might be, from time to time, myself.
Tonight she will not come home.
The Nora Flood who is you grows up in Port Credit, about a mile inland from the lake, next door to the elementary school, and each morning you pace your washing and breakfasting and dressing to the beat of the radio program your father, Jefferson, plays. You step out the front door three minutes before nine; that way you are spared mingling in the schoolyard. It mattered then. It still matters, really. You struggle even yet, on your walks through public space, your Nikon camera in hand: Look closer. Press deeper. Now that everything’s gone digital, you can see more clearly those schoolyard years, with their moral imperatives of ones and zeroes, of winners and losers; you have not forgotten just how you learned to be a being out of time.
She must push herself where oral expression is concerned, the teachers report as the terms drag by. My mother Myra has not been inclined to push, and on a rare occasion lies with me instead in the backyard beneath the magnolia tree where we catch its bruised pink petals in our open mouths. Myra stays home, stays out of sight mostly, working in her rose garden while I grow up alone in a dark crib and a playpen and a backyard sandbox, until my fourth birthday, when Myra gets restless and goes to work as a public health nurse. I can read Canada’s Food Guide where it hangs inside a kitchen cupboard — three fruits and at least eight glasses of water a day. Myra drinks her eight glasses straight from the running tap, lips pulled back over impeccable teeth as she gulps the
