These are two sections that got cut from my non-fiction-novel-memoir-travel-book-literary-critical-recovery tome, “The Black Veil.” The first section here (’Veiling and Transvestism’) came about because of my feeling that veiling had (and has) a lot to do with sexuality. I guess this is obvious. And no expression of self or paraphilia of modern sexuality is more concealed than in transvestism. The love of transvestites, as with the practice of transvestism itself, is the ultimate outsider caste these days, excepting maybe furries or plumpers. Because I admire all marginalized constituencies, I wanted to learn some more about the transgender community. Both the transvestites (and transsexuals) and the guys who like them. People familiar with my earlier work will note that transvestites and transgender people turn up in “Purple America” and “Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven,” too, so it’s not like I hadn’t thought about the subject before. Anyway, I asked a writer friend who is an expert on the subject if he would take me to a tranny bar in New York City, and off we went. A rare episode of genuine reportage in my work. (I’m usually too shy.) I really liked this passage, still do, but I think my publishers were genuinely uncomfortable about it, as if it suggested a genuine inner disturbance of some kind (they didn’t mind all the psychiatric hospital passages in the book, however), and I was asked to leave it on the cutting room floor. I’m pretty sure the bar that threw the ‘Tranny Chaser’ events is now closed. Rick Moody
Veiling and Transvestism
The image of the veil in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work seems to issue from an uncomfortable psycho-sexual stratum. So the critics say with respect to “The Minister’s Black Veil:”
We would expect Hooper to display a fastidiousness in his personal relations as well as in his dress. And indeed, the note of tidy womanliness here runs through the tale in a faint, suggestive undercurrent, particularly in the continual mention of the veil. As one parishioner remarks with unconscious acuteness, “How strange . . . that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face.”
Frederick Crews, who wrote an entire book on the subject of Hawthorne, goes on to remark that Hooper is about to marry, that the veil occasions the dissolution of these nuptial plans, which news Hooper greets with his customarily obscure smile, as if relieved:
On the one hand we see that he is already quite prim enough without a woman in the house, and on the other we find that he broods over dark, unspecified horrors that must separate the fondest of lovers. Where have these horrors come from, if not from his own imagination?
The Edward Haviland Miller biography of Hawthorne, the most recent, also features its share of gender-related revelations about the author of the “The Minister’s Black Veil:”
Bronson Alcott, the eccentric philosopher and father of Louisa May, recorded in his journal his impression of “a voice that a woman might own, the hesitancy is so taking, and the tones so remote from what you expected,” and recognized the unconscious seductiveness of this “coy genius, and to be won as a maid is.”
Hawthorne’s “hesitating manner and peculiar half-timid smile” reminded George Duyckinck of a “Miss Codington.” One of his Bowdoin professors recalled that Hawthorne came to his study “and with girlish diffidence submitted a composition which no man in his class could equal.” Emerson reportedly observed that because of Hawthorne’s gentleness he felt as if he were “speaking to a girl.” G. P. A. Healy, who painted one of the famous portraits of
Hawthorne, recalled “I never had a young lady sit to me who was half so timid,” while Fields was “charmed” that Hawthorne “blushes like a girl.”
The oddness of Hawthorne’s masculine presentation is further apparent in the fact of his robe, a large purple thing that Sophia, his wife, made for him, which he liked to wear around when he was writing and even, occasionally, in public:
During her pregnancy, while she was cutting out and preparing a child’s wardrobe, she decided, with the assistance of Louisa, to dress up her husband, her royal child as it were, in a purple robe which made him look “very imperial.” “I wish,” she wrote to Louisa, “you could see him. He does not need any garnishing to make him splendid, but splendid attire becomes him very much.” He wore the robe when he went walking with Sophia — which must have been somewhat of a spectacle in staid Concord. He asked Louisa “to send those pearl buttons — they being all that is wanting to the perfection of the imperial robe.” If he poked fun it was a face-saving tactic of “the artist of the beautiful” ridiculing his delight in masquerade and elegance.
A ritualized effeminacy surfaced, too, in Hawthorne’s oddly romantic associations with Herman Melville and others. And perhaps this ambiguity of signs was also a part of the story of my supposed ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, whose own veil, worn constantly in adulthood, was occasioned most immediately by the death of his wife, and who in the maelstrom of grief took up the garb of a widow, the veil, and made it his own. The priestly vestments of his profession, were, of course, androgynous, as they so often are. And then surpassing all this was, no doubt, the recollection of the murder itself. If the Rev. Joseph “Handkerchief” Moody himself did not fire his father’s pistol, as a young man, cutting short the life of Ebenezer Preble, his childhood friend; someone must have done it, or why else repeat this hideous story, why else make it the obsession of all who came after? At the very least, the conjunction of veil and murder is so potent as to be retold for two hundred and sixty years and appropriated by my line of remorseful, guilty ancestors. So let’s make the broad psychic outline clear: feminine garb is punishment for a crime committed with the ultimate of masculine technological appendages, the firearm. By which I mean that the veil is transvestite garb.
According to these surmises, I decided to push my research for “The Black Veil” a little further, toward some advanced threads, including the Show World Center of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, a sex club of the kind now regrettably endangered in Times Square; the adult video parlors of Canal Street; hookers of the Meat Market district, etc. The more I learned the more ashamed I felt, and the more ashamed I felt, the more interested I became in further research and further intoxication at the trough of dark night. Transvestites and transsexuals were the first people to get beaten by roving gangs of toughs, just on general principle. Their lives were sequences of discriminations and prejudices visited upon them by the good citizens of the Americas, they dressed like completely different people in the light of day, or many of them did. They inhabited the United States of Veiling, in no other states did they reside. Therefore, one night last year, I went with my friend Dean, a novelist widely acclaimed as connoisseur of sexual novelty, to a club on Seventh Avenue, NYC, to ascertain just how, in the flesh, the American transvestite did her thing.
Dean is good looking in a ruddy, worldly way, and he was power lifting then, couple hours a day at a gym in Brooklyn. Busting out of his shirt with biceps, pectorals. And, as I say, he had a fair amount of experience as a tranny chaser to the point of knowing that the particular club to which we were heading had once been owned and operated by a child actor from the bygone days of American television. We chatted up the bouncer out front and this bouncer made sure to tell us that, yes, the club had the blessing of the child actor in question; indeed, this former celebrity was known to turn up some nights. Cover charge: fifteen dollars. Taxis struggled along on Seventh Ave., on the approach to the Holland Tunnel, oblivious to the exoticism within the club. A little bit of autumn in the air, a little desperation, as always in the umbrose latitudes of our city.
Since I am near upon middle age and therefore go to bed early so that I can suffer with insomnia much of the night, we had agreed to meet when the club opened. Eleven p.m., or thereabouts. The pickings would be slim, Dean said, because of the hour, and, sure enough, when we arrived, it was like at any other bar, a few distracted guys, thick in their middles, with mustaches, with bad haircuts, milling around Latino she-males who wore the kind of mildly sexy garb that a secretary might squeeze into for a big night at the disco. Nobody was doing much but making idle conversation. In fact, the only interesting part of the tranny chaser phenomenon, at first impression, was the deceit implicit in its milieu. The guys, many of whom were no doubt wearing wedding rings, fashioned disguises of routine heterosexuality, paid their taxes like anyone else, made sure to brush their teeth, to recycle beer cans, but their girls were concealing that extra special surprise underneath. Subsequent researches into the rhetoric of the tranny chaser always turned up variations on this particular turn of phrase, so I use it advisedly: I’m looking for a girl with a little something extra, or, as J. Hillis Miller says: It is the act of unveiling in adultery, fornication, or incest that is the wicked thing. In these cases the wickedness is defined as an uncovering of male nakedness, or of male nakedness by way of female nakedness. Such acts uncover that which ought to remain covered. Men, that is, who are particular to this inclination insist on the robustness of their masculinity, which ought theoretically preclude a homosexual covetousness, even as they are coveting a masculine performance of the feminine and lying awake with night sweats worrying about who will find out.
Dean is thrifty, too, and neither of us drinks anymore, so we each had a seltzer and sat on the sidelines watching the joint begin to fill up. The interior: a pair of small rooms, dimly lit in an amber light that would conceal the excesses of makeup that were required there. There was a DJ crammed into a tiny glassed-in booth, over by the door, but not much of a dance floor at all. Dean was a frequenter of the old Times Square bars, Sally’s, Edelweiss, the vanished demimondes of transsexual hookers, and he constructed a forceful argument about the inferiority of this club — there were regulations now, in the Giuliani administration, on how decadent a business of this kind could really be, and so there was an abridgement of the pure expression of transgender madness. These days, the power of that ambiguity was circumscribed by the force of legal authority. Nevertheless, the place was filling up. The she-males would languish against the bar in elaborate simulations of repose that indicated a performance of the feminine superior to that which you might find in many genetic girls, such that one began to wonder, whether gender really might not be largely a matter of your mother telling you, in your infancy, what was what. On the other hand, the frankly carnivorous gazes of the tranny chasers inhabiting that space were not at all unwelcome by the girls themselves. The style of chase favored in the bar, on both sides of an encounter, was wholly masculine. It was trap, dominate, fuck in the way guys like to do it, without anything like a mutually respectful and dignified patience that you associate with heterosexual courtship. Here, the objects of this brutal lust were comfortable, because they remembered this lust from their own boyhoods, as they may even have harbored vestiges of it themselves.
Dean said, Want to go upstairs? I hadn’t even noticed there was such a place, upstairs, although I had seen a couple climb a small spiral staircase leading away from the bar. I thought perhaps there was a V.I.P. room, or that this couple was acquainted with the famously absent child actor/owner mentioned above and were visiting him at his redoubt. No, it was an additional environment, a more intimate space, where the real contact between the patrons and the girls took place. They do lap dances here, Dean said, as we climbed the staircase. Because of our appalling timeliness, however, the little closets and cubbyholes of the upstairs were mostly unoccupied, though a few girls lounged on wrap-around benches that lined two walls by an additional bar. There was, for example, a sort of Barbarella gal in thigh-high silver boots with stacked heels, stuffed push-up bra, black fishnets, and a massive blond wig. She was adorable, silly, probably not a day older than twenty-one. Dean struck up a conversation with her, in a way that I never would have attempted. My normal fumbling with strangers apparently extended to strangers who were transgendered. I told Barbarella she was very pretty. But she got right past the chit-chat to her price. Twenty dollars for a dance. Her accent was heavy, Brazilian. I could see a boy just underneath the B-film vixen, and he seemed like a kid who would have been really good at his piano lessons and who never gave anyone any trouble. Dean, on account of his thriftiness, was not ready to commit to the twenty dollars, so Barbarella took a pass on us and started making time with another young man across the room.
In the interval in which we turned down a lap dance upstairs, a couple of other guys had secured partners and trudged into the room with the sullen intensity of the compulsive. Many of these patrons were middle-aged businessmen and it was almost a shame to see girls of provocation wasting their charms thereupon, but the twenty dollars of a lawyer or Fortune 500 middle manager is identical to the twenty dollars of some charmer from the outer boroughs. The girls didn’t care. As Dean said, They just want to be treated like ladies. In a market economy, prostitution was a good way to evaluate the believability of a masquerade. And anyway the bright light of afternoon is not quite as forgiving of heavy pancake and mascara and beard stubble, nor are the offices and retail operations of New York City. Here in the half-light, they could do better for themselves. Still, the terms of payment made the girls deeply calculating, like cab drivers trolling midtown for a fare. Meanwhile, the lap dances themselves seemed frustrating, since, according to the form, the guys weren’t permitted to touch their muses. Therefore, in the recesses of the upstairs, to distantly audible techno throbs, against a backdrop of seductive murmuring, the girls would writhe against the laps of professional johns in uncomfortable folding chairs. It was unclear whether there was a particular clock on the dance, whether after a certain moment the girls would demand more money, but the ambiguity of the contract seemed irrelevant, since the guys often peeled off additional bills and handed them over. As the lap dancing closets began to fill, a large, weightlifting bouncer took his place nearby. It was his job, all night long, to insure that the guys never touched the girls and that the girls never reached down to get the johns off. It was groin to groin, buckling and thrusting, without further intimacies. Could the guys really find erotic release according to this scenario? It seemed impossible, since the upstairs also encouraged staring, which came naturally enough to me. We stood around watching, as the bouncer stood around watching, as the pool of available men stood around watching. There was no privacy to be had. We watched as the girls peeled back layers, hiked up miniskirts, flung halter tops on the floor, so that you could see their boys’ hips and the residuary knob in their thongs that no amount of female hormones had yet been able to obliviate. One guy in the corner was desperately trying to achieve satisfaction, such that his Asian girl, weighing in at about ninety-three pounds, was athletically cycling through a half-dozen different poses. Abrading the front of him. What would happen to this pair? Dean, with his slightly weary brand of curiosity offered a guess: They’ll negotiate some price for going back to a hotel. Or she’ll take him to her room.
Only so much of this you could watch. Dean was polite and generous, in that he was willing to sit around with me when I was unable to initiate conversation with anyone in the bar. But I could see that I was not good company. I found the masquerade of the feminine as depicted in that nightclub sort of routine, as if, with all this energy that inhered in the tranny chaser scene, we had done nothing more than imagine a pick-up joint full of wanton New York receptionists. (But I was informed enough to understand that most transsexuals considered that they were born with female souls. Though this belief contained some serious intellectual difficulties for me. I didn’t believe, for example, that an idea of female essence existed, I didn’t believe that man could possess knowledge of the interior of the other sex, and it therefore followed that gender dysphoria, as described by experts, wasn’t an articulation of the feminine, it couldn’t be, but rather a negation of the masculine.)
I thought I had learned everything I needed to know, and I was downstairs getting ready to take leave when we beheld, across a crowded room, the Radcliffe Girl. Her ambitions were far more interesting than the post of receptionist. She didn’t simply want to be in the bar, she wanted to own the bar, or maybe she wanted to replace Anna Wintour at Vogue, or Tina Brown at Talk, and, along the way, she wanted to make men yearn and suffer. Her chestnut hair, just a bit shorter than shoulder length, was pulled back, and she wore a black sheath minidress, black fuck-me pumps. No stockings. A discreet lipstick, very little makeup. Her demeanor was both insouciant and resolutely aristocratic, as if, after she had danced a few lap dances, the driver might pull around front with the Mercedes, and she would head home for a nightcap. And in the morning, there would be her squash lessons over at the club.
The attraction was tribal. I mean, I could have easily seen her in Connecticut — she was very Greenwich — or perhaps at my boarding school class reunion; in fact, she looked a little like my famous classmate, the failed actress, Catherine Oxenberg. Except that this Oxenberg imposter would more likely incline toward restraints. Dean, being extremely good at all introductory conversation, made a direct attempt on the Radcliffe Girl soon after we caught sight of her and waved me over. This is Veronica, he said. The Radcliffe Girl didn’t really make eye contact, because she was checking out the room and seemed impatient about any exchange that might impede the possibility of a dollar. Where did you say you grew up? Dean ventured. Wisconsin, the Radcliffe Girl said. Farm country? he asked. She said, Well, yeah, I guess. And then, as if to indicate scant tolerance for niceties, she said, Do you want me to spank you? Even, Dean, the object of this overture, was non-plussed. We were standing at the base of the spiral staircase. She motioned upstairs, I’ll show you how I do it. It appeared, in fact, that she was carrying a small whip that we hadn’t really noticed before. It was part of her role. Dean, for the sake of the story, followed, and I followed Dean, and she found a chair upstairs, turned it around backwards, Sit here and I’ll paddle you. With this. Displaying her weapon again. Clearly, the beating part of the transaction would introduce a little pleasure into the proceedings for the Radcliffe Girl. Dean asked how much. Twenty dollars. Dean said he just didn’t want to pay just now. Stunned silence in our auditrix, after which a look of such contempt overswept the features of the Radcliffe Girl that it was inspiring to behold. She kicked the chair aside, as if she should have known better. She removed herself from the likes of us.
When I left, Dean came with me. And then later he went back. I made for the express stop on the Seventh Avenue subway, at Fourteenth Street. The train was leaving just as I entered. The platform was therefore mostly empty and I made for the far end, though it was late. The repetition of a certain familiar, then, a spokesmodel of the guilty and afflicted and dispossessed, should have been predictable, because the hour was so late and the platform so empty. Nevertheless, to me the repetition was frightening enough on that night as to be figmentary, as to be only the creation of my imagination. The faceless guy. The hooded guy. Of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority. A homeless guy or schizophrenic guy, or some sad metropolitan citizen who went abroad in the subways with a hood pulled entirely over his face. The repetition of him, on this night, it was amazing, but wasn’t it like all symbolic repetitions–as of the thunder in the mountains, Longfellow says — going back to the first faint stirrings of history, the reiterations of family, as in Donatello’s genealogy in “The Marble Faun,” of which Hawthorne says, The earlier and very much the larger portion of this respectable descent (and the same is true of many briefer pedigrees) must be looked upon as altogether mythical. I was going home to my lover, who was sleeping, to promise that I hadn’t consorted with any she-males, and I might have laughed over my adventure, but then I came upon him, my familiar, with cowl drawn down over his face, and an omnipotence of God was upon me, I think I can say, the actual fear of the actual God, God in the trappings of a man on the platform lurching hither, his face entirely covered with a hood, past a bench, around a stairwell, I was ashamed, ashamed at my complacency, and then afraid of the confluence of symbols and shapes, as in this filthy and sequestered familiar, to whom I couldn’t talk, as though the talk would be across such a divide that he wouldn’t understand, and what would I have said?
Part Two
Through the process of writing “The Black Veil,” I kept a journal of appearances of the word “veil” in whatever book I happened to be reading at the time — from sacred to profane examples. What you have before you was the result. Since “The Black Veil” was finished before I was much conversant with web searches and before the Amazon “search inside” feature, this catalogue was compiled by hand, the old-fashioned way. It’s sort of an homage to the “Extracts” section of “Moby Dick,” which was a shadow presence in “The Black Veil,” despite the fact that the book is otherwise mostly about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nobody was as impressed with this catalogue as I was, however, and again my publishers, looking to make shorter what was already a pretty long manuscript, suggested the cut. I put a great deal of work into assembling these quotations, however, so I’m glad to have them out in the world. Rick Moody
Veiling and Literature
“At length Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two stone tablets of the Testimony in his hands, and when he came down, he did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with the Lord. When Aaron and the Israelites saw how the skin of Moses’ face shone, they were afraid to approach him. He called out to them, and Aaron and all the chiefs in the community turned towards him. Moses spoke to them, and after that all the Israelites drew near. He gave them all the commands with which the Lord had charged him on Mount Sinai. When Moses finished what he had to say, he put a veil over his face. But whenever he went in before the Lord to speak with him, he left the veil off until he came out. Then he would go out and tell the Israelites all the commands he had received. The Israelites would see how the skin of Moses’ face shone, and he would put the veil back over his face until he went in again to speak with the Lord.” –Exodus, 43:29-35
“And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many.” –Matthew, 27:50-54
“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having a great priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in fullness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our body washed with pure water: let us hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver not.” –Hebrews, 10:19-23
“Look, for I shall tear away from all around you the dank cloud that veils your eyes and dulls your mortal vision. You are my son, do not be afraid to do what I command you, and do not disobey me.” –Virgil, “The Aeneid”
“There was a door to which I found no key: There was a veil past which I could not see: Some little talk awhile of me and thee there seemed — and then no more of thee and me.” –The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
“Bi the derc veil of forgeting thei ben scatered . . . and with . . . myche wondering disturbid.” –John Wycliffe
“I will pluck the borrowed vaile of modestie from the so-seeming Mist.” –William Shakespeare
“When at any time my condition was veiled, my secret belief was stayed firm, and hope underneath held me, as an anchor in the bottom of the sea, and anchored my immortal soul to its Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea, the world, where all the raging waves, foul weather, tempests and temptations are. But O! then did I see my troubles, trials, and temptations more clearly than ever I had done.” –George Fox
“Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see;
Hail, th’incarnate Deity;
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.”
–Charles Wesley
“How frequently too will the honest but unenlightened representative be the dupe of a favorite leader, veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” –James Madison
“We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever . . .”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley
“When minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all understanding, they are thus God’s beloved ones to whom He gives His wisdom in sleep.” –G. W. F. Hegel
“I turned round hesitatingly, and looked up to Heaven for direction; but there was a dimness came over my eyes that I could not see. The appearance was as if there had been a veil drawn over me, so nigh that I put up my hand to feel it. –James Hogg
“For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins forever new.” –Herman Melville
“Where might one escape this veiled look, which leaves one with a deep feeling of sorrow as one walks away, that introspective look of the man deformed from the outset, a look which reveals the way in which such a man speaks to himself — that gaze which is a sigh! ‘I wish I were any else but myself!’ this gaze sighs: ‘but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I escape from myself?” –Friedrich Nietzsche
“A low English phaeton was drawn up before the door of the post office of a French seaport town. In it was seated a lady, with her veil down and her parasol held closely over her face. My story begins with a gentleman coming out of the office and handing her a letter.” –Henry James
“To avoid the contingency of being recognized she veiled herself, and slipped out of the house quickly. The sun was resting on the hill like a drop of blood on an eyelid by the time she had got up the road opposite the Amphitheatre, which she speedily entered. The interior was shadowy, and emphatic of the absence of every living thing.” –Thomas Hardy
“Most seamen lead, if one may express it so, a solitary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them — the ship; and so is their country — the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance.” –Joseph Conrad
“The jackal moans when it is hungry, every fool is foolish enough to be unhappy, and only the wise man rends the veil of existence with laughter.” –Isaac Babel
“Under a transparent veil, Hawthorne records his bitter conviction that a writer of tales is a kind of vagabond.” –Newton Arvin
“Give me an underground laboratory, a couple of atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil about to be turned into a chimpanzee and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.” –S. J. Perelman
“The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world.” –W. E. B. Du Bois
“White Island Light is lost in mist,/Veiled in wild storm the distant shore.” –Oscar Laighton
“Vicky had expected, from veiled remarks overheard in the last two years, that her room would be put to good use with the children growing, and even as it was she shared her bed with Joan, the oldest.” –Dawn Powell
“But the movement of the car passed like a veil between them and he brought his heels sharply together and lifted his right hand and she saw his lips open as he spoke, either “Heil Hitler” or “Aufwiedersehen,” and that was all.” –Kay Boyle
“The bride stood up in white satin covered with a veil. An ornament in her hair caught the sunlight and sparkled brightly in the cold wind. The bridesmaids were dressed in dark crimson gowns with low necks. They carried armfuls of chrysanthemums. One of the men stood in the snow taking pictures of the bride, then of the bride surrounded by the bridesmaids, and so on, until nothing more was possible. Now, this bride with her gauze and glitter was the genius of poetry.” –Wallace Stevens
“To have seen a specter isn’t everything, and there are death-masks piled, one atop the other, clear to heaven. Commoner still are the wan visages of those returning from the shadow of the valley. This means little to shoe who have not lifted the veil.” –Neal Cassady
“But one thing we do demand, and that is that neither you nor anyone else should come here with veiled insinuations about me or my household.” –Halldór Laxness
“Little short on money for the beautiful veiled Arab whores who come to your room for 3 dollars but O they are passionate & sweet.” –Jack Kerouac
“Fo-Hi had removed the cowled garment and was now arrayed in a rich mandarin robe. Through the grotesque green veil which obscured his features the brilliant eyes shown catlike.
“So,” he said softly, “you speed the parting guest. And did I not hear the sound of a chaste salute?”
Miska watched him, wild-eyed.” –Sax Rohmer
“James Joyce has taught us the word epiphany, a showing forth — Joyce had the ‘theory’ that suddenly, almost miraculously, by a phrase or gesture, a life would thrust itself through the veil of things and for an instant show itself forth, startling us by its existence.” –Lionel Trilling
“She told her interviewer of ‘the Land
Beyond the Veil’ and the account contained
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained
Windows, and some soft music, and a choice
Of hymnal items, and her mother’s voice.”
–John Shade
“here come the veils most dear from left and right they wipe us away then the rest the whole door away life above little scene I couldn’t have imagined it I couldn’t” –Samuel Beckett
“Paul emerged with a stubborn slowness. He stared at his mother as though she were a stranger. Wariness veiled his eyes when he glanced at the Reverend Mother, but this time he nodded to her, the nod one gives an equal.” –Frank Herbert
“On his way down the corridor, Peter glanced into the room that held the casket of Eduardo Sainz, and saw a young woman kneeling beside it, her veil drawn. Her pale face had a brooding, madonnalife quality that attracted his interest, and he paused while her lips moved in silent prayer. Their eyes met. Peter nodded uncomfortably.” –E. Howard Hunt
“It was therefore natural for me to imagine what his penis would be if he smeared it for my benefit with so fine a substance, with that precious cobweb, a tissue which I secretly called the veil of the palace.” –Jean Genet
“I spent a thousand empty years today
Hiding behind a veil of tears.”
–Randy Newman
“She may be wearing an enormous feathered hat with a black lace veil pulled down over her eyes. In TV clips, the child sings and dances with coquettish facial expressions and suggestive movements of her body. Except for her prepubescent figure, she resembles a midget woman.” –Joyce Carol Oates
“They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on Earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin’s birth”
–Emerson, Lake and Palmer
“Absorption of the feminine by man, veiling the feminine in woman, androgeneity settles its accounts with femininity–the androgyne is a phallus disguised as a woman: not knowing the difference, he is the sliest masquerade of a liquidation of femininity.” –Julia Kristeva
“I know the screens of life you have left us: veils that rise in front of us, framing the world in neat pieces. Until we have grown tall enough to look over the next veil, we believe the little we see is all there is to see. From veil to veil, the bitter taste or surprise in disenfranchisement keeps on renewing. –Trinh T. Min-Ha
“Sometimes she was an ancient Briton, one of that old Celtic tribe who painted themselves blue, or she dreamed of Mardi Gras, fabulous celebrations, the holiday makers behind incredible disguises, her own blue skin almost ordinary among the brilliant hues and shades of the gaudy, garish celebrators. Or was a huntress, a warrior, the bright blue cosmetics of her pigmentation there for war paint and terror, the honorable acceptable hues of murder. Or at court at masquerades, or gloved at beaux arts balls behind soft veils or holding a lorgnette against her eyes like a stiff, slim flag.” –Stanley Elkin
“Project X lifted the veil on one kind of experiment conducted by the military. We have now examined that in a little detail, although it would take a long time to describe all the forms of radiation and chemical warfare agents tested, in varying doses, on monkeys in the Primate Equilibrium Platform.” –Peter Singer
“Or it was another time, really early in the morning, when the air was partly asleep, partly adance, but in veils, trembling with heavy moisture. Here and there, the air broke into a string of beads of pastel colors, pink, pale green, small rainbows, really small, and very narrow. Daddy walked rapidly. I bounced in his arms.” –Harold Brodkey
“The woman looked somewhat beyond middle-age and was large, unusually so, shaped like bronze bell, and seemed the picture of solitude and loneliness. She wore a long, black dress with hat and gloves, and her face was covered with a black veil. I could not make out her expression, because of the veil, but she appeared to be looking back out to sea, gazing in the direction we had come from, as if making her final goodbye to her poor, drowned niece.” –Russell Banks
“She raced across the street, this frightful creature, and like the carefree child he used to enjoy envisioning back when he was himself a carefree child–the girl running from her swing outside the stone house — she threw herself upon his chest, her arms encircling his neck. From beneath the veil she wore across the lower half of her face — obscuring her mouth and her chin, a sheer veil that was the ragged foot off an old nylon stocking — she said to the man she had come to detest, “Daddy! Daddy!” faultlessly, just like any other child, and looking like a person whose tragedy was that she’d never been anyone’s child. –Philip Roth
“Rothko looked into himself so far, but no further, as if he wished to veil himself from himself, or as if he could only bear to be with himself for so long.” –James E. B. Breslin
“. . . a veil like a mosquito net whisked over the flooded cranberry bogs and twisted Wisconsin trees and the lakes in Minnesota mirrors reflecting nothing all flew off her dozing face sucked out the window the veils which had been put on all her life coming off now one at a time till she got to the final black one which would not come off . . .” –Susan Minot
“She loves West Tenth Street on an ordinary summer morning. She feels like a sluttish widow, freshly peroxided under her black veil, with her eye on the eligible men at her husband’s wake.” –Michael Cunningham
“Her nurse’s uniform was starched, white-white, a petite size eight, with a tiny white cap perched on her short, tight, nappy curls, dyed blonde not quite down to her dark roots. White silk stockings veiled her long thin legs.” –Shay Youngblood
“Feigning to describe this or that, the veils or the webs, of saliva, for example, the text veils itself in unveiling itself, describes, with the same exhibitionistic modesty, its own proper texture.” –Jacques Derrida
“Yes, she understood she was dying. And so on, until I told him that she couldn’t see well because she had developed cataracts, and that a light, yellowish film had veiled her eyes. I had said it in passing, not thinking that cataracts were a particularly serious impairment.” –André Aciman
“Once again she bobbed forward before retreating. I saw, floating over her head, one corner of a sort of Jackie veil.” –Allan Gurganus
“And with each step my heart broke for the person I wold never find, the person who’d love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrified, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever. But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.” –Denis Johnson
“I shrink beneath my veil of half-matted hair.” –Fran Gordon
“Despite the fact that she wore western-style slacks and a blouse, Maha glided away as mysteriously as if wreathed in veils.” –Jacqueline Diamond, “How to Marry . . . A Real-Live Sheikh”
“No, Ray displayed none of the usual neurotic psychopathic behaviors that initially ignited my imagination, my curiosity, my rescuer fantasies; that made me want to rip off the veil of his psyche and find out what lonely monster lurked underneath. Ray, it seemed to me at the time, had no veil.” –Laura Zelig
“The first probe into the unknown had been made. But the amnesiac veil had scarcely been pierced. What was to follow, none of the three knew — and at this point, only the doctor was aware of what had been uncovered.” –John G. Fuller
“Jonathan hung up his veil.” –Margot Livesey
“The notion that we have lifted all the veils can’t be true. We would leave no new universes for our descendents to discover.” –Edward Harrison
“And then the Beckmann, the painting of the fish, the drawing in Acie’s bathroom, the painting, the snowman, veil my focus like a scrim. Maybe Acie’s the one after all.” –Susan Wheeler
“The latter looked as though she had just demanded the defoliation of El Salvador, while Clark had the veiled smile of a ventriloquist talking through his dummy.” –Edmund Morris
“In twenty-four hours — it was only slightly more than that since Gilbert and I had parked at the curb outside the day before — my confusion at the Zendo’s significance had doubled and redoubled, become veiled in successive layers.” –Jonathan Lethem
“The veil acknowledges the stigma that is our common ground, our point of adjacency with one another, our ‘us’ness. . . .” –Charles Bernstein
“A corked bottle, a fortified city, a veiled woman, are vessels whose contents are sealed
against dirt and loss. To put the lid on certifies purity.” –Anne Carson
“What the enemy wants is for women to shed their veils, moral boundaries to be broken
and an end to the role of religion in our laws.” –Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
“The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.” –Gary Dahl
“They were beside me,
they sat in black taffeta, in veils, leather chaps,
felt hats, lace. ‘Closer’ they call, ‘closer.’
‘And my body I give to you,’ ‘my body
I would betray for you.’”
–Peter Gizzi
“Before you duck inside, dear matchstick painter, and disappear from view for what will be at least two hours, we beg leave to ask what might at first seem a frivolous question, but which will eventually make sense: if you were to compose your own story — forgetting for a moment the small fact that you cannot exactly write — would you choose this Saturday night, outside of this cheap theatre, through this veil of frogs in which to introduce your heroine?” –Sheri Holman
“The sun and moon were likewise city property, they circled it faithfully in winter and summer alike, at times pale and weary, veiled by mist and lacy clouds, or just the opposite shining briskly, joyfully, triumphantly. It was a matter of pride to belong to such a city, to be a piece of it, striding its streets like a farmer measuring his fields. –Adam Zagajewski
“Here, potentially, was a way for Phoebe both to honor Roberta and Leonard’s thinly veiled wish for a daughter who fiddled and to fly in the face of the high culture-low culture dichotomy by which they defined themselves.” –Lucinda Rosenfeld
“Mrs. Dumbrowski had the gamey, stray-cat smell of fear and meanness on her. It was difficult to encounter so early in the morning and made it hard for Bena herself to eat. Not that the food was such a chore to refuse — warm cream, graying butter, bacon thinner than a wedding veil.” –Heidi Julavits
“I woke up having had an almost wet-dream about Thumper. She was doing this crazy Margaretha Geetruida Zelle dance, veil after colored veil thrown aside, though oddly enough never landing, rather flying around her as if she were in the middle of some kind of gentle twister, these sheer sheets of fabric continuing to encircle her, even as she removes more and more of them, allowing me only momentary glimpses of her body, her smooth skin, her mouth, her waist.” –Mark Z. Danielewski
“When I opened my eyes and looked over my twin’s face to see Adelaide in a darkness as pervious as a ratty veil, my sister-in-law was facing away from us, her leaky eyes pointed toward the ceiling.” –Darin Strauss
“She succumbs to an afternoon doze, to a dream lightly veiled in which she reaches to the
piecrust table by her bed — a mahogany table brought to her by Captain Percy from an island with shores more exotic than the muddy banks of the Mississippi, where she is stranded with her children, with slaves working her fields, the first crop of cotton coming on.” –Maureen Howard
“The soft petals brush against the window screen, disappearing behind a blue veil as Louise pulls a jumper over my head. My clothes are fresh and smell of morning.” –Alexandra Styron
