Castle in the Air

published in print in Worms Magazine Issue 8

“The wish for the house was intense, yet I could not place it geographically.”
–Deborah Levy

“The dream world and reality aren’t as far apart as they seem. It takes a person to separate them after all.” 
–Cecilia Pavón

“If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”
–Elaine Dundy 

In The Dud Avocado, a novel written by Elaine Dundy and published in 1958, the narrator, Sally Jay, condemns reading as a substitute for living. When I read this, I thought that maybe I would get a pass for doing so in a rather mystical context. I was seated on a plastic chair in the mountains of Sintra, Portugal, at a café that serves your espresso or wine through a little window. I sat there twice. The second time, in the blue-dark, I was without a book, drinking a glass of red wine and looking out onto the mountain, to the castles lit up in the distance, not knowing anything about them. Behind me I heard American music from the eighties blasting loudly and could see red light flashing between palm fronds. I took my glass of wine, and, wearing decidedly un-party-ready attire (black sneakers and an orangey-red crewneck) I crossed a little bridge over a creek, passed two swaying girls clutching cellphones by compact sports cars and walked to the caterers entrance of a rowdy country wedding. Sally Jay flashed in my mind–in another world, and a better outfit, would I crash?

It was the kind of moment one has alone, when you sense narrative potential, and realise you might tell everyone you know a more robust and thrilling version of an experience–for who could correct you? Maybe this open-aired moment of truth-decorating is where a certain kind of writing thrives: the writing of a twentieth century adventuress. Interested in sharp and swoopy anecdotes, gemstone studded, elaborating on reality. Elaine Dundy says in the afterword to her book that she was prompted to write The Dud Avocado by friends and acquaintances. They urged her to create a novel from the tales she told at cocktail parties in London–tales of 1950s Paris, her bohemian life of glamour, café and bar hopping.

There was once a time where I would’ve read Little Joy, the collected stories of Cecilia Pavón, and my main interest would’ve been parsing which stories are closest to Pavón’s life: the one where she runs a writing workshop in Bueno Aires? The one where she steals Vichy makeup remover from a poet in Berlin? The one where she mentions the artist Amalia Ulman? Now, this doesn’t interest me so much as the impressions I receive from her loose, casual, chatty writing style–the way she compresses her desires into pockets of imagination. How she wishes the “world’s coolest cities were each an extension of the next: Lima, Buenos Aires, Berlin. All next to one another, reachable by intercity bus (one of those ones with on-board movies and coffee carts).” Her belief that “a work of art can’t be trapped in a mansion. It must fly freely through the atmosphere and leave a trail in the air that surrounds our planet.” 

The more widely I read, the more I realise how long this tradition of ‘self-writing,’ as Thomas Clerc calls it in an introduction to the French writer Guillaume Dustan’s works, really is. He writes, “The birth of the autobiographical genre, dating from the end of the eighteenth century, stems from the will to knowledge. But if self-expression replaced a literature of imagination, we can sense that Foucault perceived this as a threat.”

Clerc goes on to describe how Foucault senses that self-expression gives the expresser the “illusion of existence.” Or, maybe more precisely, the illusion of self-created destiny, unaffected by power structures. 

This illusion might be true for a novel like The Dud Avocado, but could it be applied to Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, which uses the self as a way to think about class, gender, and power, among other things? But then again, The Dud Avocado’s paratext doesn’t purport to be a piece of autofiction or self writing, though we may draw those conclusions ourselves, whereas Levy has subtitled Real Estate as “a living autobiography.”

The Dud Avocado isn’t as interested in deconstructing power through the example of the self as it is in engaging in a bit of very fun self-mythologizing. I relate to Sally Jay’s interest in creating an adventure text out of one’s life, an ambient desire for whimsy and spectacle at all times–high expectations without a clear way of getting up there. 

Halfway through the novel, Sally is sulking in a French country home when she realises there’s only one thing her three companions want to do, day in and day out: go to the beach. They ask her what she wants to do instead.

“I said I didn’t know–gaiety, laughter, song-and-dance, shoes in the air. And they asked me what that meant and I said, ‘Oh, just have a good time.’”

She’s then accused of having no inner peace. But oh, I understand her.

There’s a story in Little Joy called A Post Marxist Theory of Unhappiness, in which a woman sits by her phone and is entertained by her friends’ stories of their romantic trysts, while having none herself. It’s set in a vague semi-futuristic world, where there is no marriage and no jealousy. The narrator reads the diary of her grandmother, from a time when marriage still existed, and thus, the possibility for infidelity.

“Infidelity was nothing more than a superficial tool. An artifact without specific attributes they used for various means according to their needs at any given moment in time. Something imbued with new meaning each time it occurred.” 

Pavón describes the ideology of this imagined society as completely separate from any sort of tradition, schedule, cycle, where all action is directed instead only by in-the-moment desire, which, the narrator says, results in an experience of infinity at all times. Whereas her grandmother was bound by time: daily, weekly, monthly time. “A marriage,” the narrator explains, “was one of the most stable ways of organizing time.” In finding various lovers outside her marriage, the grandmother sought to “multiply time”.’ I think Sally Jay and this grandmother have twinned ambitions. A night out on the town is a similar tool. Is the multiplication of time its own fantasy space?

Sally at one point takes up with a painter named Jim who lives in a loft. Jim, being from Delaware, transplants his own countryside landmarks on top of Sally’s cosmopolitan Paris.

“His studio, unpromisingly wedged into the heart of the Boulevard Raspail, somehow became his farmhouse; the Select [their favourite bar] his General Store; and the dear Old Ancient [local bohemian legend] the Crackerbarrel Sage.”

Right off the bat, Deborah Levy writes about this idea in Real Estate. “The wanderer sometimes tries to recreate what has been left behind, in a new place.” As if life were comprised of certain pillars, or marking posts for each of us, and we may be able to overlay one emotional landscape onto another physical one–our internal immovable habitats.

The castle that I was gazing upon from the foot of the mountain while being chastised by Elaine Dundy through the decades, happened to be the Palace Pena. According to the castle’s audioguide, the Palace Pena overlooking Sintra was created by King Ferdinand II as a romantic fantasy palace. Up close it looks more like a fairytale castle than any other castle I’ve ever seen, even in photos. It’s storybook-like, red and orange, with spiky towers and a large clock face. It sits on huge lilac coloured vaulted arches. There are spires, palms, the promise of secret courtyards, and sprawling grounds of gardens built upon the mountain. It’s not an ancient ruin–it’s a 19th century castle, built on and around the 16th century monastery ruins that attracted this ‘Artist King.’ Apparently created out of an amalgam of influences, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Islamic, Romanesque Revival, Medieval, etc. the very building of the castle was an attempt to recreate a fairytale fantasy. The era in which it was built is now called the Romantic period. This relatively contemporary palace looks out onto the unadorned, stoic Moorish castle only a kilometer away, on the next mountaintop, some parts medieval, and some parts of which go back to the 5th century. 

Deborah Levy has the aspirations of a 19th century Portuguese king. I didn’t realise how much I needed to read about a fifty-nine year old woman yearning lusciously for her future, a future that she sees as wide open and hers for the taking. The central force of the ‘living autobiography’ is Levy’s desire for an imagined property. She longs for a large house with an egg shaped fireplace, a pomegranate tree, a fountain. She wants pink feather slippers, the idea of wolves, and a smoking pipe. 

I suppose it shouldn’t be so surprising to me, the idea that someone like King Ferdinand II, someone so far removed from my experience of time, had the capacity to be nostalgic, trying to recreate for himself the idea of the castle in his dreams out of various aesthetic gestures. 

Like Emily Segal writes in Mercury Retrograde:

“we return amnesiacally to certain mood boards (Jane Birkin, Bianca Jagger, Joan of Arc) and certain decades or rather certain looks, give us amnesia. That’s why the old dictum that you shouldn’t wear a retro look if you were alive when it was originally in style needs to exist: it’s an exhortation to remember, to ‘never forget,’ to make sure somebody’s paying attention, if only out of an orthorexic fear of erring (or looking old). The people who manage to remember, who resist the amnesia, hold down some linearity, without which it would be much harder for the avant garde to pop off – because its time-distortions, its tempo remodulations, would have no available referents.”

Really, what I want to know is what King Ferdinand II’s mood boards would have looked like. Levy is quite good at creating covetable mood boards in her books. 

This ‘unreal estate’ as Levy calls it, is a comfort and thrill she returns to in her mind when traversing her real living situations. If we all at least partially live in our minds, then it warrants that retreating into the fantasy we keep up there is very much a real part of life. She also tells people about this unreal estate, and so it becomes even more lived in, as her “best male friend” chastises her for wanting to be so alone, or as others feel prompted to share their fantasies with her. Is Levy’s robust unreal estate, being so enthusiastically envisioned by her and written about, more real than King Ferdinand II’s palace, which is now a tourist fantasy? 

Fantasy always seems to exist unattached to real-world time. Deborah Levy’s house has no geographic location nor does it have a decade. Like Neverland, our fantasies hover eternally in the night sky, forever young and forever ancient, castles in the air. I’m looking for them, those pockets of eternal imagination, in literature and in life. 

There were about ten months between when I first heard of The Dud Avocado and when I actually read it. During those months, I had the idea of the novel as a series of trysts. I realise now that by not reading it, I was prolonging those trysts into infinity. As I completed the book however, it wrapped up with an unsatisfying dead end: party girl abruptly and randomly turned wife. But that’s what’s nice about fiction – the Neverland of her Parisian trysts really does go on and on, because a book is revisitable, dippable, so long as it’s in print.

Pavón is looking for these castles in the air, too. From her short story Autopoiesis (1999) :

“I’ll never forget those parties. They were on Thursday nights. We were all single, so we could stay as late as we wanted. In Alejandro’s tiny living room, there was a white fur rug and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling [...] Alejandro was my humble, vernacular guru. I learned from him that dancing is better than going to therapy. But it wasn’t just any old dancing; it had to be the way we did it. We danced in a rather tender way that could induce a state of deep introspection in us. We would smoke weed and dance for three, four, five hours, and nobody was allowed to talk. [...] The apartment, by virtue of being so white and empty, felt like a temple. Later, my guru would take out mint chocolate chip ice cream bars from the freezer, and we would eat them while we made ridiculous jokes, none of which I remember now, obviously.”

Of course Levy’s unreal estate is an example of her castle in the air, but actually I’m quite fond of another instance of it in her book, which is her imagined café. When Levy became single, she discovered that rather than a domestic motherly duty, it could be a cheeky, sophisticated pleasure to cook for her teenage daughters, their friends, and her friends.

“They even joked that I should start a café called Girls & Women, and promised they would help out in the holidays. ‘So what would you have on the menu for a starter?’ I asked them. They reckoned the perfect entrée for Café Girls & Women would be Vodka & Cigarettes.”

She adds to her café’s menu throughout the book when she tastes something particularly appealing. Guava ice cream with chilis and salt sprinkled atop. And she can keep adding, amending, shifting, living through eras of Café Girls & Women without ever having to reprint the menus. It’s possible for an idea to keep you company.

While sky-high touring the Pena Palace, I overheard a man ask his ten year old daughter if she knew the difference between a castle and a palace. I hadn’t realized there was a difference. A castle, he said, was functional. Built for defence purposes, with moats, peep-holes, windows for cannons. A palace, like the one we were in, was built to display beauty and wealth. One structure is elementally linked to its purpose, the other an echo of it, always a replica, a gesture, a fantasy. They both ultimately share a sensibility, but a palace, no matter the intention, can never be a castle.