During the Reign of the Queen of Persia Read online

  JOAN CHASE was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase is also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991). She lives in Massachusetts.

  MEGHAN O’ROURKE, a former editor at The New Yorker and Slate, is the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, and teaches at NYU and Princeton.

  DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA

  JOAN CHASE

  Introduction by

  MEGHAN O’ROURKE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1983 by Joan L. S. Chase

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Meghan O’Rourke

  All rights reserved.

  Jemimah Patterson, Inextricably Linked, 2011; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chase, Joan.

  During the reign of the Queen of Persia / by Joan Chase ; introduction by Meghan O’Rourke.

  pages ; cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-715-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H3346D87 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2013044733

  ISBN 978-1-59017-739-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Dedication

  PART ONE: CELIA

  PART TWO: GRANDAD

  PART THREE: GRACE AND NEIL

  PART FOUR: AUNT ELINOR

  PART FIVE: GRAM

  INTRODUCTION

  JOAN CHASE is a musical writer, and in a sense her luminous, stark, and startling novel During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, first published in 1983, is a kind of pagan Middle American chorale—a song of childhood, a song of innocence turned (very quickly) to experience. The four girl cousins at its heart grow up playing “in the sun-shot darkness” of a barn that abuts a charnel field where their grandfather allows dead farm animals to rot. They run wild, jumping from hay pile to hay pile in the barn, studying the marriages of their aunts and their gram, playing strip poker; they visit their uncle’s butcher shop, where the “floor was scummy from the tatters of fat”; they do unnamed things with their older (male) cousin Rossie in the night; they eat ice cream and egg foo young laboriously cooked by their aunt Grace; they chew on oat grass the way the men around them do. A great deal happens, and not very much happens. The sun-shot barn standing upon the charnel yard is a kind of central image for the novel, emblematic of Chase’s interest in the collision of the vatic and the grossly embodied.

  One of the most remarkable things about this novel is its idiosyncratic form. It is narrated by a collective “we,” in this case the four cousins, who chronicle the summers they spend together on the Ohio farm of their unsentimental, hard-nosed grandmother Lil Krauss (née Bradley), the title’s “Queen of Persia,” in the 1950s. The cousins are two sets of sisters (“all of us born within two years of each other”) whose collective narration can’t be resolved into any single perspective. The five aunts come and go—pragmatist Libby, ethereal Grace, cosmopolitan Elinor, Rachel, and May—as do the women’s various husbands, but the girls are together so much that “sometimes we thought we were the same—same blood, same rights of inheritance.” The four girls are barely differentiated, though we are given some identifying details: there is the redheaded beauty Celia, her sister Jenny, and their cousins Anne and Katie, whose mother, Grace, is terminally ill for much of the book. (Anne is “the biggest and fastest with the toughest feet,” and Katie is sometimes “bad” for the sake of it, like her grandfather.) The collective first-person narration could easily feel mannered, but here it is essential, a device that allows the book to move forward and backward in time fluidly, in an almost Faulknerian manner, foregrounding sensual perception over the rational armature of recollection, and underscoring the novel’s preoccupation with memory. The book has a dreamlike quality of immersion, as if time were not a river but a pool. Though the novel is divided into five parts, each of which ostensibly focuses on a different character or pair of characters, the divisions feel a bit arbitrary; what is important here is the communal. The adults are the medium in which the children move, the walls they bounce off in their search for understanding the world. One remembers this feeling from childhood.

  Indeed, it’s girlhood that is Chase’s most powerful subject. Until relatively recently the literature of American girlhood consisted most famously of children’s books, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and (if we expand our category to North American literature) L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia animates the violent eros of girlhood, capturing the way it is by turns visionary, antic, sensual, and cruel. The novel is a reminder that innocence and experience are always entwined. From the start, childhood, in this novel’s depiction, is inflected by insinuations, cravings, and rude awakenings. The girls fight and claw; the aunts, provoked, competitive, call one another “bitch” before making up and cooking dinner, leaving the girls to run outside in “the tutelage of the wild and natural world,” while Gram presides. (In her distanced resignation she is more like an old and remote household god than an apple-cheeked template of female warmth.)

  In particular, Chase has a delicate feel for the way that girls—especially those on the cusp of adolescence—are attuned to the lives of the women around them. The girls are close observers of the ways their aunts talk about men, including their uncles Neil and Dan, a butcher who gave up his dreams of living in California to support his family, and of course Grandad, a drinker who seems most at home with cows—the kind of man, we’re told, who might easily enough have killed someone. Menace hangs over the book: There is nothing of the cozy domestic about its multigenerational story. In a review in The New York Times, Margaret Atwood called the novel a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad,” an apt description, though one suspects “gone bad” is a phrase Chase might take issue with. One of the strengths of the novel is the way it holds up the family’s complexities almost without judgment; if the women are victims of their time, an era when feeding and clothing the family took much more hard labor than it takes today, so too, in their way, are the men.

  Of course, in this sense During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a novel of place—specifically, of the ways that place shapes character and fates. The book tells the broader story of the changing demographics of rural America in the 1950s, and does so with an authority that grows organically out of Chase’s own life. She was born in Wooster, Ohio, which a
ppears to be the model for the town described here; her father was out of work during the Great Depression and the family moved around in Ohio while she was a girl. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia lightly evokes a world where “lopsided buckboards vied with flying Oldsmobiles for the right-of-way” and one still saw “the black-canopied buggies of the plain people, whose faces reflected the timeless, ordered certainty of their innocence.” (The novel quickly leaves any such certainty and innocence behind.)

  Chase did not begin writing in earnest until after she married and had children; living in Vermont with her husband, she joined the Writers Workshop at the University of Vermont, and in the 1970s began working on what became During the Reign of the Queen of Persia while her children were at school, writing in a large closet she’d made over into a study. (Her husband, the writer Alec Solomita, notes that the closet was, if not “a room of her own,” a practical choice: “In the cold Vermont house, it was the place she could work in and stay warm with the help of a space heater.”) And in such ways novels are made. Of her three books, Chase is probably best known for During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, for which she received a PEN/Hemingway Award. She also published The Evening Wolves (1991), a novel concerning a family whose mother has died, and Bonneville Blue, a story collection. Neither achieved the commercial or critical success of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. In both novels, one detects the influence of Faulkner, a writer she read deeply for years before she began writing.

  After the success of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Chase struggled to find a subject for her second novel. It would seem that she regarded herself as an intuitive rather than “professional” writer; as she said in an interview, “I did not approach writing as a career. It came along as a way of expressing myself, the first way I’d found suggestive enough, private and leisurely enough, to be worth the effort of approaching the complexities of living and giving voice to the situation. I never thought of writing as a way to earn a living but as a way of exhausting myself, engaging with my material, using everything I could find, inside and out.”

  During the Reign of the Queen of Persia feels like precisely such a novel: less a plotted story than a deeply felt and powerfully inhabited symphony. Such a novel needs something to ground it, and here, unsurprisingly, it is the large opposing forces of sex and death. The novel opens after the death of Grace, as the girls, now teenagers, find themselves irresistibly drawn to sex. Celia, the eldest of the four, has suddenly become irresistible to men, though she floats through her own life almost tremulously, with all the indifference and unselfconsciousness of a nymphette. Boys tumble in and out of the house, to the chagrin and fascination of the girls and Celia’s own mother, Libby. One of the themes here is the danger romance poses: As Libby repeatedly warns the cousins, all too often a boy abandons a girl once he’s had his way. And even if he doesn’t, as Gram warns them, what happens next isn’t any good either. A girl who falls in love is likely to become a wife and a hardworking mother who forgoes her “promise,” a word that Gram—more given to cussing and gambling than to heart-to-hearts—uses with great gravity.

  And so sex in this novel is the real truth of love. Sex is the charge that turns love, all too often, into hardship and conflict for both men and women. Lil plays Bingo every night, ignoring her husband, skittering away from home even on the night that her daughter Grace finds out she is dying of cancer. Lil likes to tell the girls she exited childhood at the age of eleven, when her mother sent her to help out a woman who was dying of tuberculosis. A sudden gift of money from a rich uncle changed her fate, allowed her to buy a farm and educate her children (rather than force them to work); her husband, one presumes, is allowed to stay on to milk the cows and keep things running. But the spouses are never reconciled, and till the end Grandad is a violent, unpredictable, malevolent force. One of the novel’s finest aspects is its depiction of the way the girls take this for granted, and both follow him around in fascination and avoid him with the delicate, self-preserving instincts of wise children.

  But Chase is a melancholic in spirit—which is to say that she is alive, as an artist, to the intertwined nature of beauty and grief. After its long opening set piece about Celia’s suitors, the novel folds back in time to detail Grace’s terminal illness. It is here for me that the world Chase explores comes most alive, that its paradoxes and tensions are heightened, and that her poetic sensibility comes into focus, bringing a kind of high mythical shimmer to the fields and farmhouse and lives it describes.

  Grace’s slow diminishment seems to make every piece of sun more beautiful and every shadow more threatening. Certainly it lends gravity to the girls’ impressionistic narration, one that might otherwise seem more incidental. The novel doesn’t shy away from portraying the violent ugliness of dying, a process that seems slower and more difficult than it should rightfully be, though it also leads Grace to an internal clarity everyone around her is half in awe of. “I have come to know that living and dying are a single event when considered by the mind of God,” she says, at one point—and it’s the work of this powerful novel to make you understand something of what she means.

  —MEGHAN O’ROURKE

  DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA

  To Chris and Melissa

  I want to express my thanks to the Yaddo Corporation and the Ragdale Foundation for the time they gave me, and to the Vermont Council on the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council for project grants. To Hayden Carruth and Ted Solotaroff—inexpressible gratitude.

  PART ONE: CELIA

  IN northern Ohio there is a county of some hundred thousand arable acres which breaks with the lake region flatland and begins to roll and climb, and to change into rural settings: roadside clusters of houses, small settlements that repose on the edge of nowhere, single lane bridges, backwater country stores with a single rusting gas pump, barns advertising Mail Pouch in frayed and faded postings. These traces of human habitation recede, balanced by the luxuriant curving hills, cliffs like lounging flanks, water shoots that rapidly lose themselves in gladed ravines. Fields of wheat or oats surrounded by dark trees seem to unreel as part of a native flair. Occasionally, gloomy forgotten farmsteads loom. There are a few proud spreads, fastidiously tended enclaves of the Amish and the Mennonites.

  Deep into the country originates the hump of railroad lines circling the market town that is the county seat; a small denominational college distinguishes it as the center of culture as well. The downtown square is a brisk trading area, its broad avenue resolving into a central square which, framed by three-story buildings, seems as though it is entirely walled. Within the sandstone blocks, stripped off the hillsides and mined from mountains to the south, glistens still the jewel dust of crushed quartz. All the streets are brick-paved. A dark earthen red, they bear the imprint of their manufacture—Metropolitan, Canton, 1905 Cleveland Block, Egyptian, Sciotoville.

  On Saturdays in the 1950s, there was a policeman to direct traffic; the sidewalks were crowded with country people, lopsided buckboards vied with flying Oldsmobiles for the right-of-way, the clip-clop of horses sounding on the brick, drawing the wagons and the black-canopied buggies of the plain people, whose faces reflected the timeless, ordered certainty of their innocence. Stone-hewn, stone-blind Samsons of bulging strength ornamented the county courthouse, adding to the general impression of stability and sanctioned self-interest. When we lived there, on the farm which was right on the edge of the city limits, we thought it the very center of the world, and the green and golden land and wooded hollows which began two blocks over from the railroad loop and then rolled off to obscurity formed a natural barrier to the rest of existence, which we dismissed as the outer darkness.

  Our Uncle Dan had his butcher shop on that town square. It was on the backside, beside the newsstand, beyond which the city buses loaded. When we went inside after the picture show or from shopping at Fitchberg’s Dry Goods, we’d finger pennies out of the cup he kept on the shelf and have a round po
p of colored gum from the machine while we waited for Aunt Libby to drive from our farm to pick us up. If Uncle Dan was busy with a customer he wouldn’t say a word to us, wouldn’t seem even to recognize us, going on with his practical and patient advice to any of his familiar clientele; he knew them all—their eating habits, the states of their gallbladders, pocketbooks and marriages.

  There were the four of us then, two his own daughters, two his nieces, all of us born within two years of each other. Uncle Dan treated the four of us the very same and sometimes we thought we were the same—same blood, same rights of inheritance. Some part of each year, mostly summers, all four of us lived with Uncle Dan, or rather with Gram, for he lived with her too. Gram was the queen bee—that was what Uncle Dan called her. That, or the Queen of Persia, the Empress herself. Or just Queenie for short. Our pony was Queenie too. Uncle Dan said they had a lot in common, and although he didn’t say exactly what, we knew Queenie was nearly impossible to catch, had thrown every one of us, racing for the barn. We knew she had what was called a high head.

  At last, after Uncle Dan had satisfied Mrs. Wheeler or Mrs. Smucker and they had left the shop, he would look over the rim of the porcelain display case and say, “And now what can I do for you busybodies today?” His hat was perched at a jaunty slant over his lacquered, vein-domed head. “Today’s specials: pickled pigs’ feet and blood pudding.”

  “We have to wait,” Jenny would say, sounding like her mother, Aunt Libby, ignoring her father except for the fractures of light in her black and almond-slanted eyes.

  “Can we see the meat?” we’d ask.

  “Vultures,” he’d say, and then go before us into the back room and open the heavy door to the walk-in cooler. From that small room issued the cold and bloody reek of a consuming rawness. We’d breathe one enormous breath, perhaps our last, and step inside to confront the stiff, hanging carcasses. The air congealed, prickly cold on our bare summer arms. Under our sandals the floor was scummy from the tatters of fat and bristles of hair rolled in the sawdust. We’d shiver going out, and look sideways at Uncle Dan. He would latch the door, standing before us, shorter even than we were, yet fearless—in his blood-smeared apron and his sailor hat, dressed for anything.