Selby Wynn Schwartz

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

After Sappho

Cloudface

The tombs of poets were wreathed in laurel and etched in glorious verses, while the graves of the ordinary listed as their only accomplishments the names of children produced or a spouse bereaved. So many dead in childbirth, she observed, and so few by shipwreck.

In 1860 Florence Nightingale published Cassandra, an account of what drove young women mad in Victorian families of a certain class. It was not their fragility, it was not their caprices. It was not that they lacked doting mamas or proper chaperonage or private lessons. It was what they were willed into, Florence wrote, that gave them nervous disorders. They stammered and screamed because there was no language in their own language for what they knew.

Those were the stories we were given. When we were children, we learned what happened to girls in fables: eaten, married, lost. Then came our bouts of classical education, imparting to us the fates of women in ancient literature: betrayed, raped, cast out, driven mad in tongueless grief. It was not unusual, we discovered, for women to be dragged across the seas as slaves and then murdered on the threshold. Cassandra was merely one of many.

Was it any wonder that we read Sappho instead? The worst of Sappho's heartbreaks are bitter dawnings of envy, the keen emptiness in her arms where a beloved no longer sleeps, an exile from one beautiful island to another. Sappho has the luxury of growing old in her own bed. Her hair goes white on the pillow, her acolytes listen to her cracked voice singing the memories of those wild silver nights: full appeared the moon/ and when they around the altar took their places. Sappho had many years of long afternoons and celestial nights. Nothing happened to Sappho except her own life.

Actually we should say that Cassandra screams outside language. The scream is to gash the fabric of normal life. to rend it into strange tatters. Then it is open to prophecy. Then Cassandra lives in her own future.

This book is so DELICIOUS and I would like to eat it. 

Then Cassandra said, It is not true that nothing happened to Sappho except her own life. Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future? She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments. There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres. The future of Sappho shall be us.

After Sappho quotes

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