Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black and White by Stephanie Dickinson — Vincent Czyz 

In an illuminating interview published in North of Oxford [northofoxford.wordpress.com/2024/12/19/an-interview-with-stephanie-dickinson/], Stephanie Dickinson characterizes the present literary moment as one that “seems accepting of line-blurring genre-bending works, of story and poem amalgams. We’re comfortable with the intermingling of autobiography and fiction, of lyricism and essay.” This statement, perhaps not coincidentally, broadly characterizes Dickinson’s own writing, particularly the lyrical part; reviews of her work, from readers as well as critics, frequently remark on the striking prose. 

Dickinson is the author of 14 books, an oeuvre that includes a poetry collection (Corn Goddess), short story collections, two novels, a memoir (Girl Behind the Door), and Razor Wire Wilderness, a hybrid of true crime, memoir, and investigative journalism. Her novel Half Girl won the Hackney Award while Blue Swan Black Swan won the Bitter Oleander Poetry Book Prize. She is also the recipient of the 2011 Matt Clark Fiction Prize for short story, and two of her short stories were selected for New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best (2008 and 2009). 

Her book-length fictions tend to be hard to categorize, coming across as neither novel nor short story collection. If I were to venture a label, I’d say that some, such as The Emily Fables and Big-Headed Anna Imagines Herself, are closest to prose-poem collections whose organizing principle is a central character. The writing often has the feel and flow of poetry rather than the progression of plot expounded in prose. Biography, however, shouldn’t go without mention. In Heat: An Interview With Jean Seberg, Dickinson inhabited the mind and verbalized the thoughts of the French New Wave Cinema star. Similarly, in her latest release, Dickinson becomes the voices of two Depression Era celebrities: one black, one white (hence the punning subtitle); one an actress, the other a singer; both women, both possessed of auras that radiated charisma, both gone before their time in the same year: 1937. 

The “postcards” are brief, poetic chapters—only one is longer than a page—from the lives of Jean Harlow and Bessie Smith. The overall effect is of a textual photo album that implies the life of its subject (from childhood to death), the times in which she lived, and the circles in which she moved. There is also a third section, “Houston Insomnia,” identical in structure, which recounts the harrowing ordeal of a young woman who’s just stepped off a bus in the eponymous city. (I can only hope this is not autobiography.) Many of the postcards in the celebrity sections are preceded by a quote or a passage from a work of nonfiction, such as David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, Chris Albertson’s Bessie, and David Bret’s Jean Harlow: Tarnished Angel—a deft complementing of fiction with nonfiction.

The platinum-blond beauty Hollywood and film audiences didn’t seem able to get enough of opens the novella-length book. “Jean Harlow Postcards” is an all-too-common tale of exploitation and abuse, starting with Los Angeles and the male-run film industry. “Flash your breasts—blooms suspended over bone,” Dickinson writes. “Drink fast and try for a slapdash happiness. The bloom doesn’t last, and long before your first gray moment, the Strip asks you to pack up. The music is over. The Sunset Strip lifts you off your feet and throws you over its shoulder. To a bed of luxurious emptiness and violent death.” Harlow, however, who was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, gets no relief at home either, where she’s trapped between the Scylla of an avaricious mother and the Charybdis of her stepfather, a con artist who oozes oily charm. They build a garish mansion with Harlow’s money and eventually wheedle a yacht out of her. They buy the most expensive clothes and live as lavishly as royalty. When her mother coos, “I love you,” Harlow rolls her eyes, thinking: “my body constructed these walls. My long legs shoveled the pond and my ass built her little bridge. In honor of you, Mama Jean, I face the camera like I secretly want the audience in my bed ….”

Harlow was married three times in her short life, was coerced by the studios into having two abortions (wouldn’t want to ruin that figure), had her sight permanently damaged by the klieg lights she was forced to endure during 16-hour film shoots (on the set of Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels), and retreated into her own world, but even that is tainted. “At home she boozed by the aquarium and watched the glittering things. It was so much nicer lying in long strands of daydreams, mouth open, chin raised. “A marbled veiltail actress drifted. Then ghost angels, silent-film stars with long finds, glided past. The oxygen must have been dying in the water. More extras floated on their sides. Black-and-white checkerboards. A few glassfish still swam and had to keep swimming. The fish-girls were sad, sluggish bits of light.”

Her death at age 26—tragic but not terribly surprising given the grift and callousness that surrounded her—stemmed from a doctor’s misdiagnosis and subsequent mistreatment, resulting in kidney failure. The final post card, covering Harlow’s last moments in a hospital bed, is achingly beautiful and finishes with one of the most perfectly wrought endings to a work of fiction I can recall reading. If it’s not quite as good as the last line of Joyce’s “The Dead” or the last handful of sentences in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, then it ranks alongside Alice Munro’s conclusion to “Carried Away” and Carver’s finishing touch to “Cathedral.” It’s worth reading the entirety of “Jean Harlow Postcards” for this last image alone.

“Bessie Smith Postcards” is different in mood and—dipping into Southern vernacular—altered in voice (sensibly enough since it evokes a very different woman). Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not three decades after the Civil War ended, Bessie and her six siblings were orphaned when Bessie was 8. While Viola, the oldest child, did her best to look after the others, Bessie took to singing on street corners for loose change. When a brother to whom she was close dies, her voice is once again haunting the streets to help pay the funeral expenses. 

“Bessie Smith Postcards” doesn’t start with the parentless girl born into poverty in the heart of the Jim Crow South; it opens in Manhattan, where she “was invited to sing at an elegant soiree held by New Times/Vanity Fair critic Carl Van Vechten and his wife in their Fifth Avenue digs. Smith was resplendent in a white ermine coat and was also knocking back whiskeys between every song” (per the epigraph for this postcard, excerpted from Debra Devi’s biography of Smith). 

Dickinson recreates the party, and we get a good look at the contrasts Smith, going from abject poverty to performing for the obscenely wealthy, embodies. At how she doesn’t fit in, how social decorum—not to mention race and gender roles—stopped her from doing exactly nothing, how imposing she was (about six-feet tall and possessed of that powerful voice), how uncowable (later, we are told, she angrily confronts—and scatters—a passel of KKK members). “The soiree folk,” she observes acidly, “were stupid with their food, as if they were ashamed to be eating lobster with garlic, eggs in aspic, shrimp, oysters on the half shell, scallops, and washing it down with Chablis. The male Van Vechten thought he could rub his money off in a field holler, and the female Van Vechten, that half-midget bunch of bones and wrinkles doused in tomcat perfume, tried to hug my neck.” Smith’s voice here is earthy and serrated, unlike the refined silk of Harlow’s, and Smith makes no attempt to hide her contempt for the pretensions of her hosts. 

Most of the postcards in this section are named for the songs Bessie became known for, including “Soft Pedal Blues,” “I Cried and Cried the Blues,” and “Weeping Willow Blues.”  (The postcards in the previous section were generally named after the films Harlow had starred in.) While only a handful of vignettes from Smith’s life are paired with passages of nonfiction, the Empress of the Blues is no less well-depicted and comes across as a storm of emotions, anger not the least of them. She has experienced the gutter as well as the penthouse, but it’s the former that moves her to sing: “I sing for the passed-out and their jake-leg liquor, for the girl twisted into the sheet hardly breathing, for her bruises, ugly purple and yellow, the knuckles hard on the mouth. My voice is the raggy curtain letting in the glorious stench of the alley.” This is a woman, after all, who was once thrown out of a recording session for spitting on the floor between songs.

While driving Smith through Mississippi on a 90-degree night of “armpit-humidity,” her fiancé plows into a truck stalled on the highway. Bessie is thrown from the car and her arm nearly shorn from her body. Smith is taken to the hospital but doesn’t survive the operation to amputate the mangled arm. “That rangy child outside the white Elephant saloon singing for nickels waves goodbye” and we wave back, not—as Dickinson has written the last paragraph—with a sense of finality or oblivion, but of seasonal return, of something eternal passing from one vulnerable form to await the next vulnerable form. Yes, there’s a personal apocalypse on this sultry Mississippi night, and something that moved through Bessie Smith is loose in the world again, but it’s not lost. 

The third section, “Houston Insomnia,” is the story of a young woman in the midst of transplanting herself to Houston, where a job working with special education students awaits. Education, however, is not her calling. She’s “a lover of books and strong coffee, of fruity words and glistening sentences, the wet red of a girl’s lips reading aloud and paragraphs scribbled in the dialect of flesh.” The Houston gig is her first “real job” after getting her MFA in poetry.

Unfortunately, she wanders out of the bus depot in Houston at 4:00 a.m., an hour at which little is to be trusted. The man who approaches her is “looking for the marks … the ones who never learned to say no, the fatherless girls who move to the city to be noticed, the ones already damaged [i.e., like you, shot at age 18 and now 24, your left arm paralyzed and disguised by a fringy lace shawl], already shouldering a visible weight of regret and mistakes.” The incident bracketed by the author is autobiography; Dickinson was herself severely wounded by a shotgun blast when she was 18 (and has written an unforgettable account of the experience [orcalit.com/to-the-newly-wounded-by-gunshot/]). 

Dickinson’s character winds up—as it was easy for her to see in hindsight—kidnapped and subjected to repeated sexual assaults over the course of two days. Her ordeal bears a striking resemblance to an episode in Denis Johnson’s Angels, perhaps his best novel, in which a woman, newly arrived in Chicago, is accosted by a stranger. Both women are lured with promises of local guidance, both accept the drugs they’re offered. (In the case of Dickinson’s heroine, its crystal methedrine, the banned substance Walter White synthesized in Breaking Bad.) Johnson was one of our finest contemporary writers, but Dickinson’s account is no less harrowing, no less believable, is similarly razored to hurt us while drawing our attention to the mesmerizing quality of the red that wells up out of the wound.

As is the case with many of Dickinson’s fictions, Harlow-Smith Postcards is a narrative display of compressed lyricism suffused with melancholy. The trio of women whose lives she sings are vulnerable and sensitive, often gifted, a type to which Dickinson seems drawn. 

In the same interview cited above, Dickinson discloses that she has metastasized ovarian cancer and is now “facing … mortality.” Let’s hope modern medicine performs its magic and we have Dickinson among us for decades more. But if that’s not possible, let us honor the words she’s bequeathed to us by reading them. 

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Dickinson’s list of works:

Corn Goddess (poetry), Road of Five Churches (stories), Half Girl, (novel), Lust Series (prose poetry), Port Authority Orchids (a novel in stories), Love Highway (novel), Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, (fictional interview), Flashlights Girls Run, (short stories), The Emily Fables (prose poetry), Big-headed Anna Imagines Herself (prose poetry), Girl Behind the Door: A Memoir of Delirium (memoir), Razor Wire Wilderness (non-fiction), Blue Swan/Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries (prose poetry), Harlow-Smith Postcards in Black & White (prose poetry)

Vincent Czyz is the author of two short story collections, one of which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press, two novels, a novella, and an essay collection. He is the recipient of two fiction fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and the Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. He has placed stories in Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Indiana Review, Tampa Review, Georgetown Review, Tin House, and Copper Nickel, among other publications.