Next Comes

Treason, with colored markers for final edits.

This handsome volume is also a celebration of my long and fruitful collaboration with the estimable Sarabande Books, long-time publisher of short stories, essays and poetry—a particularly rich field. Winner of many prizes, with a long list of new and accomplished writers, Sarabande has made me proud with three earlier collections of short stories and my memoir, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters. Always meticulously and sensitively edited, with some of the most beautiful designs in the business, Sarabande makes me proud every time they honor me with their consideration.

Sarabande’s Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader showcases three areas in which I’ve made my mark: plays, short stories, and novellas. These vital forms have been the best fits for my shorter works, and often I’ve turned with relief and gratitude to these no-less demanding forms in between bouts of longer writing—novels, biographies and memoirs.

I like to write about risk… and risk, by its very nature, seems best suited to shorter forms.

For example, Treason, performed off-Broadway at the Perry Street Theatre, is my version of the life of Ezra Pound, one of the poets glorified by English departments for the past 100 years. His long, unreadable poem The Cantos—I know it’s unreadable because I’ve spent months ploughing through it—established old Ez as a saint in the English Department heaven. His outspoken anti-semitism during World War 2, when he preached that gospel on the Italian radio, doesn’t seem to impinge on his literary reputation although he was very nearly hanged for it after the war. Only the intervention of some heavyweights saved him, and he was consigned instead to a decade at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, where his acolytes continued to throng around him.

But it was not his political betrayal of his country that drew me. Rather, it was his sustained, decades-long betrayal of three women who loved him: his wife, his mistress and his daughter. None of them ever received the thanks they were due, from old Ez or any of his many supporters, for keeping him alive, fed and emotionally supported. I was only able to find one expression of his perhaps remorse: “I never made anyone happy,” he said at the end of his life.

Women continue even today to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of supposed male greatness, always more imagined than real.

Why? I wrote Treason to find out.

The play didn’t have the desired effect; the New York production in spite of my efforts focused on Old Ez with a magnificent performance by a well-known actor while the three women—again!—faded into obscurity.

Well, that’s show business. Maybe on the page the play will read more or less as I intended it.

And then my short stories—they run along the knife-edge of risk: a woman living alone in the wilderness who encounters a bear, a young girl—a sculptor—growing up in her father’s shadow who gains his admiration after many years. I believe my readers will find much here that resonates with the trials and successes of their own lives.

Finally, my novella, Upstate. When it was originally published, I felt obliged to apologize to Edmund Wilson whose memoir by that title was still current. I doubt if anyone these days will notice or object to the similar titles.

This is a frightening story, frightening to me as the writer and to the reader. It is the bare, raw tale of a woman’s rage, inexcusable, always, and totally understandable. At some point—and we’ve all been there—the indignities we’ve put up with, both large and small (“Mrs. America” is a catalogue) bring us to the brink of action.

As the old song states it, “Tear it down, slats and all…”

You, my kind reader, will have to decide if you have ever been to the brink as has my narrator.

I think if you are honest you will admit, at least to yourself, that you have.

In Writing Sarabande Books Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader 20 Favorites of 2020