<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-nellie-bly-pittsburgh-pa/"></div>When I received a scholarship to the American Booksellers Association Children’s Institute in Pittsburgh, I was eager to not only take in all the bookseller programming the conference had to offer, but to also explore a city I mostly knew through my father’s lifelong love of the Pittsburgh Steelers and mine of Mr. Rogers. Preparing for the trip, I researched authors who were from, or lived in, Pittsburgh (as I generally do before traveling anywhere) and was amazed at the wealth of writers on offer. I decided to spend my time with the ghost of Nellie Bly, who got her start as a writer in Pittsburgh and took on the pseudonym under which she’d write for the rest of her life.
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, the journalist got her start in Pittsburgh by writing a letter in response to a column in The Pittsburgh Dispatch. When the editor decided to hire her on after Cochrane’s response, he bestowed upon her the nom de plume Nellie Bly, taken from a popular song at the time.
The column that sparked Nellie Bly’s first printed writing was about a father’s despair over his unmarried daughters and what they might do without husbands. Many women wrote in response to his piece, but it was Bly’s letter that caught the eye of the editor and secured her a writing job at the Dispatch. Unfortunately for us, most of her writing from that time is not widely available, as the Dispatch closed in the early 1920s, long before they could make their archive searchable online. Conveniently, Penguin has included that first piece of writing in their collection Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings.
I wanted to read more of her early work, but “The Girl Puzzle,” her first column is a stunner and full of more prescient insight and wisdom than I had anticipated. Much lengthier than today’s letters to the editor, Bly (who signed this letter “Lonely Orphan Girl,” a name I can appreciate) assessed not only the claims and concerns of the original column, but also delved into an area that deserved to be analyzed: that of working class women who were ignored in conversations about female vocation because they had to work instead of marrying a man who could support them.
Armed with “The Girl Puzzle,” I searched for a suitable place to meet with the ghost of Nellie Bly. She wrote for the Dispatch from 1885-1887, and much of Pittsburgh has changed since then. The Dispatch building was on 5th Street near where the Pittsburgh Penguins now play, but heading west on 5th Street takes people over to Market Square, which, while revamped in the 2000s, dates back to colonial times. It’s also home to The Original Oyster House, the oldest bar/restaurant in Pittsburgh, dating from 1870.
It’s a no-frills bar and restaurant, and I snagged a stool at the counter and asked for an Iron City beer, a brewer that’s been making beer since 1861, with perhaps a gap in their continuity during Prohibition. While it was nearly impossible to determine if Nellie Bly had herself sat there and had a beer, I trusted that the 140 years of service at the restaurant meant that plenty of ghosts were hanging around, and that at some point in her years in Pittsburgh, Nellie Bly had stopped in for oysters and beer.
With a cold beer in hand, I pored over “The Girl Puzzle,” and felt as though a young, impassioned Nellie Bly was, in fact, sitting next to me. Her response is a plea for equal opportunity and pay for women, and an appeal to well-to-do women to have sympathy for their poor sisters. She writes, “How many wealthy and great men could be pointed out who started in the depths; but where are the many women?” She decries the way that our American rags to riches tale excludes women, who are barred from many opportunities to work their way up from an errand runner or clerk to a respectable, well-paying position.
While things have changed for women, there is still so much inequality that Bly’s words continue to ring true. As she discusses what jobs would be filled well by women, she writes, “It is asserted by storekeepers that women make the best clerks,” and suggests sending women on the road as traveling salespeople. But, she adds, that it only works if the women are treated equally: “unless their employers would do as now — give them half wages because they are women.”
Even today, some women make half a man’s pay for equivalent work, but women of color are often paid even less. The inequality Bly saw in the 1880s has not yet been alleviated, despite fair pay laws and the continued women’s movement. It is both depressing to know that is the case and encouraging to know that there are centuries of women who saw that problem and did what they could to change it. Bly had her pen, and other women have used their voices and bodies to win suffrage and campaign for more fair treatment.
With that pen, she advocated throughout “The Girl Puzzle” for better consideration for poor women from both their wealthier sisters and all those who would wish to practice philanthropy. She suggests, “Instead of gathering up the ‘real smart young men’ gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life, and be amply repaid both by their success and unforgetfulness” of those who helped them.
In that plea, I see the kernel of what would one day become educational programs aimed at girls, like the many STEM-focused enterprises now at work encouraging girls to become engineers and programmers. It is a long journey from 1885 to the present, and it feels like while much progress has been made, there is more to do. Thank goodness for all those between her time and ours who have thought it worthwhile to encourage and educate girls.
I think too about why Nellie was writing and for what audience. It’s hard not to think about that when seeking out a place she might have gone in her time in Pittsburgh. She spent her earliest years in Cochran Mills, named after her family, but after her father’s death there was a steep fall from financial security. The way she signed her letter, Lonely Orphan Girl, serves as an indication of how she saw herself. In the gap between what Erasmus Wilson wrote to the “Anxious Father” in search for advice for what to do about his daughters and how Bly saw herself, she saw a need for all those in her position to be represented.
Marriage was not then, nor is it now, a panacea for all a woman’s problems. As often happens when I sit down with a literary ghost, I find not only guidance for a writing career, but for the whole of my life. I am fortunate enough to be an educated woman who provides for herself through her labor — the exact fulfillment Bly writes about. While I would not mind a husband, I have no expectation or need to have one to support me and give my life meaning. Knowing that Bly felt the same way and that she valued education and career opportunities more, I feel even more validated.
I also see in her work a path to success in writing. She wrote a letter to the editor, wanting to express the difference between Wilson’s vision of womanhood and her own, and it turned into a long and successful career for a trailblazing woman. Making the effort to have her voice heard set the stage for what she would do throughout the years, whether as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, committing herself to a mental institution, or striving to beat Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg’s time around the world. That first step — putting words to paper and sending them to an editor — opened the first of many doors she would step through into new opportunities. She gave herself the same push and freedom to advance that she asked for her sisters.
I knew about Nellie Bly’s investigative journalism, and of her world travels, but I did not know that she got her start talking about the female situation. In communing with her and the words she left behind, I felt empowered to use what resources are available to me to do something similar. What that looks like, I don’t yet know, but I know that she is one ghost it is impossible to encounter without being spurred on to new action. To quote Bly one more time, “Let them forego their lecturing and writing and go to work; more work and less talk.” Let us hear that commandment passed down over the last 130 plus years and go to work to change the world.
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Drinking with the Ghost: Nellie Bly in Pittsburgh, PA

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-jack-kerouac-big-sur-ca/"></div>I make the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco at least once a year. The big city of my childhood draws me back for all manner of reasons, from family reunions to baseball games. Usually I speed as fast as I can up the 5 to make it in time for a dinner or a coffee date with an old friend. I planned my last trip a little differently and decided to drive up along the coast, my copy of Big Sur in hand.
If I had been to Big Sur before, it would have been in my childhood, and I don’t recall it. That being the case, I wanted a guide, and Jack Kerouac seemed like an excellent one. I knew that the Big Sur of the 2010s would be different than Kerouac’s of the 1950s and &#8217;60s. I drove north with the hope that remote cabins like the one Kerouac borrowed from Ferlinghetti would still exist, even if I couldn’t gain access to them.
Upon reaching Big Sur, I found Nepenthe, which Kerouac describes as “a beautiful clifftop restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food, excellent waiters and management, good drinks, chess tables, chairs and tables to just sit in the sun and look at the grand coast.” It is still the way that Kerouac wrote, and I was glad to sit outside in the sun and look out over the ocean.
With many miles of winding road still ahead of me in mind, I opted for a non-alcoholic beverage and hoped Kerouac’s ghost wouldn’t judge me too harshly. It seems very out of character to not drink alcohol while in search of Kerouac, but my practical side won out over my romantic inclinations. I opted for their seasonal shrub.
Sitting in the bright sun, I cracked open Big Sur and tried to manoeuver my way under an umbrella to avoid the reflection of sunlight from the pages. It is a perfect book to dive into to not only get a glimpse of this area in a bygone era, but also to see how one writer deals with the aftermath of his success.
Jack Duluoz is the novel’s stand-in for Kerouac, much like Sal Paradise is in On the Road. In Big Sur, the success of On the Road has gotten to Duluoz. He’s in constant motion for much of the book, trying to find a place that feels comfortable, where he doesn’t have to live up to strangers’ expectations of him after they’ve read his book.
He finds that place in Monsanto’s cabin at Big Sur. Monsanto — Laurence Ferlinghetti’s alias —provides a place for Duluoz to get away to write and drink himself as drunk as he wants in the canyons that stretch back into California’s interior from the coast. Bixby Creek, where the cabin sits, is home to one of the most famous sites in Big Sur, the Bixby Canyon Bridge. Owing to its beauty and enduring popularity, I was convinced that there was no way to sneak back into the canyon. Even had there been, I was not confident I would find Ferlinghetti’s cabin.
Sitting in the sun at Nepenthe, I was surrounded by other visitors to the area. Some, like me, were just stopping while driving through. Those who were staying had my envy, though, as I wanted more time to explore this bit of the California coast. I will confess, it’s my first time reading Big Sur, and I am glad to be doing so in its titular location. While not all of the novel actually takes place in Big Sur, I’m pleased to see that much of it does. There are even parts that echo my own travel up to San Francisco from Big Sur.
The depiction of life in Big Sur is deeply appealing to me, as are all accounts of how people lived simply and quietly in places that have now become oversaturated with visitors. I am one of those visitors, so I cast no blame, but I am also glad for my guide to the past. Monsanto tells Duluoz, “‘This is the kind of place where a person should really be alone, you know? When you bring a big gang here it somehow desecrates it…’” “Which is just the way I feel too,” Duluoz adds.
I cannot help being part of the big gang of visitors to Big Sur, but I keep picturing the cabin where Duluoz (fictionally) and Kerouac (in reality) spent their time writing and wandering the canyon, doing small menial tasks that seemed to have turned meditative as they worked. Kerouac writes of the solitude of the cabin and its sudden change when the weather turned nice: “I was amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down the valley which had been mine only mine.” I wish I could see the place in his solitude.
In addition to telling me something of the history of the area, I also enjoy reading about the complications that arise from a successful writing career. Kerouac deals with the pressure of fame and what people expect from him in the aftermath of On the Road, and that too is fascinating. As a bookseller, I have often seen the enduring popularity of On the Road, which teenagers today still buy in volume. I don’t know if they imagine themselves having the same adventure, or if they want Kerouac to speak to them. I can’t judge — I’m sitting with a copy of Big Sur, expecting the same.
What struck me was the very beginning of the novel, when the reason for his trip to the isolated wilds of Big Sur is explained. He writes of the aftereffects of On the Road’s popularity: “I’ve been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers … Teenagers jumping the six-foot fence I’d had built around my yard for privacy.” Not many people write work that affects their readers so much, and it appears as much a hassle as a blessing. To be clear: there are a lot of authors I, too, love. But even writing a letter to them often feels invasive. In the 21st century, it’s easy to follow a favorite author on Twitter or Instagram, but I feel weird tagging them, unlike the unruly legions of Kerouac fans.
The kinds of things I write — this very essay, even — don’t exactly inspire the kind of reaction Kerouac’s writing did. With that in mind, I don’t expect to learn how to deal with overwhelming success and popularity, but I still have lessons to learn from him and how he encountered the pressure of his newfound fame.
Going away to the woods is a classic American trope, although we find it in the ancient hermits of Europe and the Middle East too; but for Americans, we look back to Thoreau and Walden as an ideal for the restorative powers of escaping from society, even temporarily. And, to be honest, even Thoreau wasn’t so great at actually escaping, with his frequent visitors and the amenities they brought him from civilization. Kerouac falls into a similar mold, with his escape to Big Sur and the eventual encroachment of the city. He not only returns to San Francisco to get the perks of the big city, like bars and friends, but he then brings them back with him to Big Sur, ruining the solitude he had so enjoyed previously.
What lesson does he have for me in that narrative? I see that not only is taking time away to clear one’s thoughts and give creative work space to ferment important, but so is drawing boundaries. I can learn from Kerouac and Duluoz’s mistakes, and make wiser decisions about how and when to let others into the space I’ve carved for myself.
All of that feels a little intense for my reaction to a novel read while enjoying a drink and lunch along one of the most beautiful stretches of California coastline. Nevertheless, spending my own time in solitude here has led to some of the same mental fermentation that Kerouac’s time in Big Sur did for him, I think. I enjoy watching the couples and families and groups of friends at Nepenthe, but I am still alone with my thoughts among the crowd.
After I finish up my meal, I walk to the edge of the patio to look down on the water. In that moment, my solitude in the crowd is amplified. No one else stands along the bit of railing I’m using. It’s just me and the ghost of Jack Kerouac, both of us longing to be alone here in this beautiful place.
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Drinking with the Ghost: Jack Kerouac in Big Sur, CA

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-john-fante-los-angeles-ca/"></div>It&#8217;s a sunny day when I slip down to the cool dimness of the King Eddy Saloon. It’s been in operation since 1933 and has played host to a number of Los Angeles authors over the years. On my walk to the King Eddy, I spot a mural on its west alley wall, that pays homage to some of those greats. Charles Bukowski was immediately recognizable and is one of the most famous drinkers to grace a stool at the King Eddy. But I’m not here to visit Bukowski. Rather, his literary hero, John Fante.
I’ve been reading Ask the Dust, and when Arturo Bandini, the protagonist, goes for a drink at the King Eddy, I knew I had to go. Much of the action in Ask the Dust revolves around the Columbia Buffet, a restaurant that does no longer exists, if it ever did — I searched for it in the Los Angeles City Directory for 1939, the year that Ask the Dust was published, and sadly found no record of it.
In one early visit to the Columbia Buffet, Bandini is given a beer by Camilla, the woman with whom he has a tumultuous affair throughout the book. In an act of pride and spite, he pours the beer out: “I felt devilish, vicious. I got her attention and poured the beer into the spittoon.” I’m in no mind to waste beer though, so I get an ice cold one on this warm LA day and sit down with John Fante’s ghost.
Ask the Dust is a great time capsule of Downtown Los Angeles in the 1930s. Walking around the neighborhood where I work, I am frequently struck by the juxtaposition of buildings from the early 19th century and the new construction that feels incessant in downtown LA. Fante writes of old hotels that go down the side of Bunker Hill and a Grand Central Market that I know is vastly different than the one I frequent.
I love to imagine Fante’s downtown Los Angeles as I walk through the neighborhood, replacing new skyscrapers with modest hotels and houses. I envision the commercial buildings that have been repurposed for 21st century lofts as instead full of workers scurrying around the banks or the Red Car terminus. I love Los Angeles in all its eras, but there is something that draws me back to the 1930s and 1940s especially. Maybe I’m jealous of the way the Red Cars covered Los Angeles so thoroughly (not to say that the Metro doesn’t get me where I need to go most of the time). Maybe I long for a different pace of life and cost of living. Whatever it is, it has me reading and revisiting Ask the Dust.
To be clear, Fante doesn’t paint a rosy picture of Bandini’s life in the late 1930s. For most of the novel, Bandini is a struggling writer who runs through his money far too quickly for his stomach and his landlord’s liking. When Bandini goes to the King Eddy, he meets women who get paid for the drinks they entice him to buy for them. Fante writes, “So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile.” It’s a small form of prostitution, and I do not doubt that for more money, any of the women he speaks to that night would have gone to bed with him.
When I visit the King Eddy, there are no women working the crowd. It’s early in their day and I’m the only customer in the bar, so it’s not hard to concentrate on my book and my visitation with Fante.
The thing about a famous dive bar is that their bartenders should (and often do) know the literary figures that drive tourists there. The bartender on duty this afternoon is no exception. He knows Ask the Dust and knows it drove me to the King Eddy. He even plays “El Paso” on the sound system as a tribute to Camilla, the Mexican girl Bandini loves.
We trade tips on literary themed bars in Los Angeles before I settle in to drink my sweating beer. After a day in the sun walking around downtown Los Angeles, it is so nice to take a swig of a cold drink. Cheap beer though it is — in tribute to Bandini’s poverty — it is still a perfect accompaniment to my day.
I love the way Fante writes, but I am not wild about Bandini himself. He strikes me as a little delusional because he views himself as “the great writer” and that over-confidence makes him unlikable.
However, I see in Bandini my own desires to be a writer and my own daydreams of getting published. Bandini succeeds in selling work without even trying — the H.L. Mencken stand-in, Hackmuth, turns a long letter from Bandini about his life into a short story that he publishes in his magazine. That success is both encouraging and not. I would love to be published almost as an accident, the result of a letter so interesting that it needs to be shared with the world, but even Fante’s own history of successes and rejections are more realistic.
Fante went through seasons of feast and famine, counting on projects that never quite materialized. That’s an existence I recognize. Although, unlike Fante, I have a day job that means my writing work is never entirely responsible for my financial well-being. Bandini’s own boom-bust cycle seems to be informed by Fante’s experiences, but based on the personal correspondence at the back of my edition of the book, I think Bandini had more delusions of grandeur than Fante did.
Reading the novel and the ancillary material provided at the end made me wonder about Fante and his fictional alter-ego. Bandini can be cruel and perverse in his desire to both have and hurt Camilla. Fante seems to have had a good relationship with his wife, Joyce, and in his letters, he keeps a pretty encouraging tone regarding his work and potential opportunities. While reading through the letters provided, I found this note to his cousin Jo, “I think the writing in Ask the Dust is superior to that in [other stories about] Bandini, but that the story in Bandini was much closer to me than that in Ask the Dust.” Knowing that Ask the Dust isn’t a clear reflection of Fante makes me like and trust him more.
Perhaps for someone with a less sunny disposition than me, that admission might have the opposite effect. I want the writers with whom I sit down, even across the years, to be authors I would legitimately enjoy meeting and talking with over a drink. Fante’s words to his cousin, and his style of writing create a sympathetic figure in my mind. Bandini may be a jerk, but his voice and story are conveyed beautifully, and it is the craftsmanship behind the characters that draws me to King Eddy’s.
Fante’s handling of his fictional women does leave me curious how he would react to me. His letters show a man who is supportive of his wife and her creative work, praising the poetry she sent to the Atlantic Monthly. However, both Camilla and Vera, the two main females who interact with Bandini, are written off as crazy and primarily motivated by their desires for men. Vera, who offers herself up to Bandini is looked down upon by him for not being Camilla and for being so available to him. Camilla is driven crazy by her love of pot and her love for the dying bartender with whom she worked, but who has rejected her.
Both women are treated poorly by Bandini, even as he wants them. He seems unable to view them as individuals full of their own desires. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but in our current social and political climate can I really afford not to think critically about how male authors portray women. I never stop thinking about it as I encounter the world, so I carry that reservation with me into the dimly lit bar.
As my beer can empties, I pull back from my feminist critique to remember all that I sincerely enjoy about Ask the Dust. Fante’s downtown feels as alive to me as my own. It is a surprise to walk out of the King Eddy and be faced with modern cars and contemporary shops featuring electronics and toys, sights that vary from his day. His writing is a monument to a life that has disappeared, or is disappearing, and I can appreciate it as such.
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Drinking with the Ghost: John Fante in Los Angeles, CA

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-sophia-de-mello-breyner-andresen-portugal/"></div>Recently, my job took me to Porto, Portugal. Never one to look a travel gift horse in the mouth, I decided to make the most of my trip and visit with a literary ghost. There are fewer of those in Porto than in Lisbon, but it doesn’t mean that the northern city is devoid of literary life. Pessoa and Saramago are the Portuguese writers I know best, but neither of them were from Porto, nor did they ever live there. Instead, I dove deep into Porto’s literary life and found Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, a poet who won major prizes, like the Portuguese Writers’ Society prize for poetry in 1964, served in Parliament, and is beloved in Portugal. She’s a native of Porto, and in her collection of short stories, Exemplary Tales, she sets some of her stories in and around the coastal city.
There isn’t much available in translation to English by Sophia, as she’s commonly known in Portugal, and my Portuguese is too poor to understand and appreciate her in her native language. I placed a special order for the 2015 translation of Exemplary Tales by Alexis Levitin and tucked it in my bag for a weekend in Porto. Taking her with me offered a window into a history that I knew very little about prior, but was eager to learn. Sophia doesn’t shy away from illustrating moments in Portuguese politics and social life, often giving her stories a very distinct sense of time within the scope of Portuguese history.
As soon as I read “Beach” and “Homer,” I knew I had to go to Foz do Duoro, the beachside neighborhood near which she was raised. The beach of both of these stories is not named, but sitting on a seaside terrace sipping port, it’s easy to imagine her here, too, in her youth, watching the ocean break against the rocky shore.
In “Beach,&#8221; she describes an evening at a seaside club in the 1940s, and while I couldn’t find one of those (nor did I think I’d be admitted if I had), I did find a place to sit and feel the presence of the ocean as she describes it. Appropriate to my own experience of asking her ghost to tell me tales of a time long gone, she writes of a man “who had come to sit with us” and how he “spoke on, mixing his words with time, the night, the tumult of the sea, the breath of the breeze among the leaves.” Speaking of poetry to the young people in the story, this man explains obliquely his understanding of time and the immortal elements of the world. It foreshadowed my own experience sitting with Sophia.
I wandered the road alongside the beach in Foz, stopping to traipse onto the sand where I could. There is a restaurant and bar tucked in between the road and the ocean, hidden by lush foliage. Praia da Luz was my spot to sit and enjoy the beach about which Sophia wrote. I ordered a ruby port, after trying to use my limited Portuguese and only confusing my waitress. Port seemed to be the only appropriate drink while in the town that shares its name with its prized export.
“Homer” tells the story of Buzio, a man who roams the beaches and the beachside neighborhood, begging for bread. Walking to the bar where I sat down to read, it was easy to imagine him striding down the beach toward me, clambering over the rocky outcroppings that make the sea break dramatically around Foz. She writes of the beach in that story, “And all along the length of the beach, from north to south, till lost to sight, the low tide was exposing dark rocks covered with shellfish and green seaweed framing the water. And behind them, three rows of white waves were breaking incessantly, gathering up and unfolding, constantly crashing down and constantly rising again.” The beach does not seem to have changed since her day — the waves crashed again and again over the rocks that dotted the shore. There is a thrill in realizing an author I’ve enjoyed has stood in and seen the same place I am. Knowing that Sophia was inspired by all that I saw, while sitting on a patio drinking port as the sun set over the Atlantic, made my evening magical.
One of the great things about this collection is the introductory notes by Cláudia Pazos-Alonso that gave me context on a well-known Portuguese figure who is fairly obscure in the U.S. Sophia’s Catholic faith is evident in her stories, providing searing indictments of many of the culturally religious who do not heed the lessons of the God they profess. Her anti-Salazar stance comes through her work as well. If, like me, you aren’t familiar with Salazar, he was the dictator who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He heavily censored writers and employed secret police to question dissidents, both of which played a part in Sophia’s life as a popular writer and vocal dissident of his regime.
Salazar’s rule and its impact were new to me, but Sophia was an excellent guide through the lives of those who resisted through various means, including those religious who did not agree with Salazar’s demand for a toothless faith that eschewed the political in favor of the social. Sophia’s own life demonstrated that dichotomy, and in “The Bishop’s Dinner” and “Three Kings” she creates allegories of those who show true commitment to the tenets of their faith and those who chase after false idols. The bishop of Porto, who was exiled during Salazar’s rule, even wrote an introduction to “Three Kings,” connecting the real life consequences of resistance to the fictional.
Sophia writes in “The Bishop’s Dinner”: “And he saw that it was as if all the things that the man owned had formed a thick wall around him, separating him from reality.” In this story, she accuses those who value their good place in society over the true demands of their faith, and it felt as current and condemnatory now as it must have to her initial readers. That self-absorption and comfort found in one’s possessions and social status is not unique to Salazar’s Portugal, but is a universal condition.
I came to these stories expecting to discover a new-to-me writer — not to have my own practices questioned. Sophia’s allegories feel like an unexpected call to action that I didn’t expect when looking for a book that would help me envision life in Porto in another era. What a treat to read something that cuts through the metaphoric walls I’ve erected around my own self in order to insulate me from the world. I want to see through my possessions, through my roles in society, and allow myself to be transformed and convicted as some of the characters in “The Bishop’s Dinner.” When I sat down on the beach patio with a drink, I didn’t know I was going to be challenged. I hope that I am a self-aware enough reader to always come away from reading with something new and transformed within me.
Sophia gave me glimpses of the past, and I could see young people in the fashions of the 1940s lingering around a beach club while I explored the beach and its environs. In addition to that aspect of the past her works provided me, I loved that she gave me enthusiasm to be both genuine in my beliefs and more ardent in my stance against rulers who do not operate with their citizens best interests at heart.
In our present era of resistance for those who see and despise the policies of the current political administration, it is encouraging and illuminating to read fiction that tells the story of those resisting in times past. Salazar’s rule was not so long ago, and in reading Sophia, I found a new voice to champion long-term resistance through art. Sophia said “A poesia é necessariamente política” or “Poetry is necessarily political.” She did not see her art and her work of dissent as two separate parts of her life, but essentially intertwined. That encouragement that creating art is an act of resistance was a beautiful lesson to take in while enjoying all that Portugal now has to offer.
As I continue to write this series, I find myself thinking about what each writer leaves me. Sometimes it’s very practical writing advice, sometimes it’s a window into history, or sometimes it’s an appreciation of a new author. With Sophia, I read through her book, wondering what she would tell me. The call to resistance and authenticity are a big part of what I hear Sophia tell me as the two of us sit together while the sun slowly slips into the expanse of the Atlantic. I also carry with me a sense of wonder as I think about how she used her fiction to indict the people and practices she disliked with a deft hand that made its impact greater than a political screed.
I watched the sun set over the Atlantic in good company, with a writer whose poetry shines through even in her prose, and whose very life serves as a lesson in how to use art to resist.
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Drinking with the Ghost: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen in Portugal

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-mark-twain-virginia-city-nevada/"></div>Just outside my hometown of Reno, Nevada is a mining town almost untouched by time, aside from the crowds of tourists and shops that provide them with souvenirs and knick-knacks. The sidewalks are still boardwalks and there are hitching posts for horses outside most businesses where on previous trips, I’ve even seen people actually hitching their horses. It was while writing for a local newspaper in this little boomtown of Virginia City, Nevada, that Samuel Clemens first took the name “Mark Twain.” 
During a trip home to visit family, I wanted to spend some time with a literary ghost, so I made my sister drive me up to Virginia City so we could go drink with Mark Twain in all the bars we could. It was a bit of a literary bar crawl, as so many of the saloons there claim that Mark Twain once drank there, along with other luminaries of the Comstock Lode, the underground vein of silver that made this town the fastest growing city in Nevada at the time. 
As Twain wrote in Roughing It, his chronicle of his time out West, “Six months after my entry into journalism the grand ‘flush times’ of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years… Virginia had grown to be the ‘livest’ town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced.” It has quieted some, but there are still bars lining the streets and the opera house still has shows regularly, even though they no longer boast talent like Jenny Lind, the Swedish songbird who took America by storm in the 19th century, and who performed within those walls.
The oldest saloon in Virginia City has been updated, but not in the hipster fashion it would have been in a bigger city. It serves a clientele of tourists and locals alike, and I found myself feeling like a cross between the two — an out-of-towner that had once been from those parts. Originally opened in 1862, the Washoe Club reopened in 2010, but has held onto many of its fixtures from the 19th century. The bar back feels authentic to 1862, even as a more modern cash register sits alongside an antique. When it was founded in the 1860s, it was a private social club, graced by the newly minted millionaires of the silver mines and their guests, like Mark Twain himself. A sign painted on the wall boasts of that legacy. It also is purported to be haunted (complete with an exhibit devoted to its ghost), so it feels like a perfectly fitting place to commune with a literary ghost.
In Roughing It, you can see Mark Twain develop his purpose as a writer. It was encouraging to me, as a writer finding her purpose, to witness someone undertake the same journey that I am on. Twain details his path to becoming the city editor at the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise, counting previous jobs he’d held, including grocery clerk, riverboat captain, pharmacy clerk, and my favorite, a bookseller who couldn’t find time to read while manning the shop. Same, Mark Twain, same. It’s reassuring to see that one of the great American writers took a while to find his way to writing, and that, according to him, he kind of fell into it. He had written letters to the paper which were frequently published, and they asked him to come be their city editor. I think a lot of writers today, myself included, would be thrilled to have someone ask them to come be a professional writer, and for Twain, it established his raison d’etre. It’s likely that he did more to get that position, but he recounts the experience with his trademark wit.
Twain writes about the difficulty in filling his columns when he started writing for the Enterprise, and his gratitude for the murder that happened his first day, which gave him something to write about. He filled his required columns with that incident and a few others, and wrote, “When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.” That creation and confirmation of vocation is something I understand, and am glad to know that Twain had a moment of realization that writing was to be his career. 
I settled in to read about Virginia City in its heyday with a whiskey, thinking it was the most rough and tumble mining drink I could have. My sister, very kindly, let us sit in silence so I could read and drink with Mark Twain, and allowed me to read aloud to her as I found passages I particularly enjoyed. It was a nice change of pace to have someone with me as I visited with a ghost, so that the excitement I feel when I read and connect with an author in a place they had once frequented could be communicated immediately. 
Twain captures the thrill and seemingly endless growth of Virginia City at its peak. He writes:
Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, “hurdy-gurdy houses,” wide-open gambling palaces, political powwows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a board of alderman, a mayor… a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. The “flush times” were in magnificent flower!
His facetiousness regarding the abundance of vice and its corresponding institutions compared to the idea of building a church is part of his famous humor, and it’s a delight to see it on full display here in his burgeoning career. 
Despite having grown up in this area, and knowing about Roughing It for as long as I can remember, thanks to my mom, I had never read it. It was only now as I thought about making an intentional pilgrimage to the places of Mark Twain’s history in Virginia City that I decided it was time to pick up my mom’s copy. It was easy, on previous trips, to find locations tied to Twain, thanks to the abundant signage around the town marking where he and other luminaries had once visited or dined or drank. Now though, I was eager to see Virginia City as it was during Twain’s time here. His descriptions brought to my mind vivid images of dusty men straight out of the mines, teeming the streets on their way to spend the abundant money of the mining boom. 
After finishing my whiskey, we migrated down the street to the Silver Dollar Saloon, famous for its mural of a woman whose dress is made of Virginia City silver dollars. I was there for another reason — it is housed in the building that was once the home of the Enterprise, and where Twain worked when he wasn’t out on assignment collecting the news and hobnobbing with the locals. 
Both bars were dim and quiet in the early afternoon on a Saturday. Most people strolling the streets weren’t ready to drink at noon, I suppose, but I had a mission, so Twain and I were sipping whiskeys for lunch. Walking down the street, it was odd to go from Twain’s version of crowded, boisterous Virginia City to the modern day. Tourists have replaced miners, and while the boardwalks were crowded, it didn’t have the same energy or crowdedness that Twain had put into my mind. 
In the Silver Dollar, I got another drink, and settled in to read more about Twain’s early writing career. I wanted to find advice from him to me, and in his recounting of advice from his first editor, I found a good lesson for my own writing. “Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported,’ or ‘It is rumored,’ or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts.” It’s great journalistic advice, and a sharp reminder to me in writing nonfiction. Twain is an exemplary storyteller; I found myself falling deep under his spell as I read, caught up in the tales of a boomtown, rather than often taking the time to step back and analyze how I was reading his work. A couple whiskeys and a lot of stories later, my sister and I examined the Silver Queen’s dress, and went back out into the bright midday sunlight. 
Now that the Comstock Lode no longer produces droves of silver, the town has to survive somehow, and its historic preservation is the key to drawing crowds of visitors willing to spend their money on tours and fudge. No judgment, of course, as I too have a box of fudge as a delicious reminder of my time in Virginia City. 
What I also have is a deeper connection to the greatest literary representative of the place where I originate. Other authors have sprung up from Nevada’s chalky soil, but none so important or lauded as Twain. I know that I will always live in his shadow, and that’s still a pretty great place to be.
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Drinking with the Ghost: Mark Twain in Virginia City, Nevada

orphan-dunbar-nelson

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-alice-dunbar-nelson-new-orleans/"></div>Heading to New Orleans, I knew I had to do some searching to find the right author to spend time with in the city. The most famous New Orleanian writer I know, Anne Rice, is still alive, although her work certainly lends itself to the idea of hanging out with her ghost. I wanted to spend time with someone who was different from the old white men with whom I have previously visited, and so after some research, I chose Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a fin-de-siecle African-American author originally from New Orleans. I knew she could bring a perspective I was interested in, that of a woman of color in a time that was generally less kind to both women and Black people. Dunbar-Nelson was a poet and journalist, and part of the first generation of people born free in the South after the Civil War. Her work, which largely focused on the experience of being a multi-racial woman, was not widely distributed even during her life.
In preparation for my trip, I combed the stacks at the bookstore where I work for anything by Dunbar-Nelson, to no avail. I called a number of New Orleans bookstores, and no luck there either. One highlight for me was coming across a bookseller at Beckham’s Bookshop in New Orleans who was eager to tell me a bit about Alice Dunbar-Nelson, an “interesting New Orleanian,” as he described her, and I think he was right. A Black woman writer in her era was unusual, and for her to not only make a living as a writer, but to marry and divorce a few times made her stand apart from many of her peers.
Thanks to the wonders of the digital age, I bought and downloaded a few of her works on my Kobo app (gotta keep that indie spirit alive!), and brought her with me everywhere I went in New Orleans. I wanted to sit and grab a drink with Ms. Dunbar-Nelson, so I picked up Violets and Other Tales to see if she had any recommendations. Though it turns out most of her favorite places don&#8217;t exist in the 21st century, her words led me to an intersection that is home to a famed New Orleanian bar.
In “Anarchy Alley,” she describes life on Exchange Alley in the French Quarter. “It is Bohemia, pure and simple, Bohemia in all its stages, from the beer saloon and the cheap bookstore, to the cheaper cook shop and uncertain lodging house.” Seeing the French Quarter through her 19th century perspective was far more romantic and picturesque than the glut of souvenir shops and street hawkers I saw before me, though I think it’s impossible for those elements to negate the innate charm and beauty of New Orleans.
She continues describing Exchange Alley and its attractions: “Plenty of saloons — great, gorgeous, gaudy places with pianos and swift-footed waiters, tables and cards, and men, men, men. The famous Three Brothers’ Saloon occupies a position about midway the alley…” The Three Brothers’ Saloon no longer exists, but near where it once stood is the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, which certainly meets her other qualifiers, and is renowned for the literary greats who drank there, although it is only Ms. Dunbar-Nelson with whom I want to visit. It is in that great, gorgeous bar that I sat down to drink with her and get her perspective on a city that I longed to see in its heady 19th century glory.
A live jazz band was playing (how could there not be) and the bar was crowded with professionals enjoying happy hour after work at the start of a weekend close to Christmas. The bartender was as attentive and swift as the waiters of old, and got me a Sazerac, which seemed only appropriate in the city in which it was invented.
I found a spot to sit — no small feat in a bar packed to the gills — and settled in to listen to jazz and have a peek into the world of old New Orleans through Dunbar-Nelson’s eyes. I read two of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short story collections, which provided me with glimpses of life in and around New Orleans and across class lines over a century ago.
There are a few stories that overlapped in the collections I read, Violets and Other Tales, and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. One of those is “A Carnival Jangle” which tells a tragic tale of mistaken identity during Mardi Gras. But before the tragedy hits, she vividly brings the spectacle of Mardi Gras to life:
There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of jester’s noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets swarm with humanity, — humanity in all shapes, manners, forms, — laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel. It is Carnival in New Orleans…
As a visitor in December, I did not get to experience the wild jumble of humanity that Mardi Gras brings, but I was content with the view she provided. During her short story, I felt a whirl of activity and sensations in her description of Mardi Gras — and a Mardi Gras from the past at that. No drunken frat boys or sorority girls yelling from the balconies, but rather the wild crowd of yesteryear. I was eager to see what else she could illuminate, and delved further into her work.
In her stories, I visited with bay and bayou dwellers, whose lives were foreign to me through both the lenses of distance and time. Knowing that Dunbar-Nelson was African-American, I read her stories trying to figure out if the characters were as well, curious for a glimpse of New Orleanian life for Black people at the turn of the century. Her stories occasionally specify that someone was Creole, presumably mixed-race with that distinction, or that they were of Spanish or French blood, but I never felt certain whether her characters looked like her or not, which is a distinction that reads differently today, when people purposefully seek out diverse representations in literature. It makes me wonder if that is a result of a push from her publisher to make her characters as accessible as possible to the widest audience by never clarifying much on race, or if that was an intentional choice of Dunbar-Nelson’s.
She writes more explicitly about issues of class, with poor people and their fates drawn out in several of her stories. In “Mr. Baptiste,” the story’s namesake is a homeless man who lives on the kindness and good graces of the people in the neighborhood he roams. They feed and house him in exchange for the fruit he obtains from the dockworkers at the port in New Orleans. His possessions are meager, but in his story I see a recurring theme of New Orleanian generosity: “And madame, who understood and knew [Mr. Baptiste’s] ways, would fry him some of the bananas, and set it before him, a tempting dish, with a bit of madame’s bread and meat and coffee thrown in for lagniappe.” Children are given extra candy as a lagniappe, or a banana to go with the coal they retrieve for their families. It is a New Orleanian precept, and throughout Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, characters give and receive lagniappe. I love this idea of giving a little extra, or lagniappe, just for the sake of it. Other characters do not receive that same bit of kindness, and are left to their destitute fates in her immensely readable stories. I visited Commander’s Palace, queen of the New Orleans culinary scene, and the first place I learned about lagniappe as a visitor many years ago. The little lagniappe to start my meal reminded me that the New Orleans of Dunbar-Nelson’s time persists.
Dunbar-Nelson not only brings scenes from New Orleans and its environs to life through her vignettes, but she also provides some astute commentary on the world through her characters and even through the introduction in which she addresses her reader. In “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin,” a friend of the young man who wishes to buy the titular violin chastises him, saying, “You are like the rest of these nineteenth-century vandals, you can see nothing picturesque that you do not wish to deface for a souvenir; you cannot even let simple happiness alone, but must needs destroy it in a vain attempt to make it your own or parade it as an advertisement.” It almost feels like an admonishment to the Instagram generation (of which I am  a part), who cannot see anything lovely without wishing to pose with it or manipulate it for the sake of more likes on social media. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I feel as though that derision applies not only to a young man of the 19th century, but also to his successors in the here and now. Sitting at the Café Du Monde, taking a picture of my beignets before eating them, I saw that I was not alone in this pursuit and that crowds of fellow tourists couldn’t eat their sweet treat without first documenting it and showing it to the world.
She also gives some sound advice to the women who read her work. She cautions, “Why should well-salaried women marry? […] no troublesome dinners to prepare for a fault-finding husband, no fretful children to try her patience […] She has her cares, her money-troubles, her debts, and her scrimpings, it is true, but they only make her independent, instead of reducing her to a dead level of despair.” It feels revolutionary to have a woman of that era, particularly one who married several times, advise women to delay marriage if not altogether avoid it. As an unmarried woman, it felt like I was getting direct advice from an older, more experienced mentor as she extolled the virtues of singleness.
My drink finished, I set aside Dunbar-Nelson’s words and prepared to go out into the New Orleanian night, with visions of the past filling my mind. I appreciated her frank words and the characters who wandered the streets of the New Orleans with me. She is an under-appreciated writer who captures the spirit of New Orleanian life at the turn of the century, and I am so grateful for the time I spent with her and the perspective on her city she gave me. Her insights may have been from over 100 years ago, but she showed the enduring spirit of New Orleans and its people.
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Drinking with the Ghost: Alice Dunbar-Nelson in New Orleans

orphan-rilke

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-rainer-maria-rilke-cafe-sperl/"></div>It is a rainy day in Vienna when I escape into the warmth and dryness of Café Sperl for my planned assignation with Rainer Maria Rilke. Making plans with dead authors is easy — I can meet with them at the time and place of my choosing, as long as I have my book in tow. For my meeting with Rilke, I resisted buying a book at the bookstore where I work, and instead sought one out in Vienna as a memento of my visit. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-rainer-maria-rilke-cafe-sperl/#more-5704" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Drinking with the Ghost: Rainer Maria Rilke at Café Sperl

orphan-chandler

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-raymond-chandler-musso-franks/"></div>Welcome to “Drinking with the Ghost,” a recurring feature in which I seek out a bar (or other drinking establishment) to commune with the spirit of a late author. It won’t be supernatural, and I won’t be using a Ouija board or séance; instead, I’ll be using the author’s written words to connect with them and to bridge the distance of time between us in the space we share. My hope is that you won’t just visit these bars and drink vicariously through me, but that you’ll take yourself out for a visit with an author in their favorite watering hole. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/drinking-ghost-raymond-chandler-musso-franks/#more-5036" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Drinking with the Ghost: Raymond Chandler at Musso and Frank’s

Katie Orphan is a manager at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming book&nbsp;Read Me L.A.from Prospect Park. Prior to selling books for a living, she graduated from the University of Sheffield and Whitworth University, where her advisors turned a passion for literary tourism into a serious pursuit. When not reading and recommending books, Katie can be found with her family, on a hiking trail, or traveling wherever she can.