House of Leaves

The Exhibits

Johnny says Zampanò never finished these plates. What is left is only a list of instructions, so the reader gets the plan for the pictures and not the pictures.

Exhibit One: a history of architecture

Zampanò wanted pictures of buildings from ancient Egypt and Mycenae through Greece, Rome, the Gothic, the Renaissance, the Baroque and Neoclassicism to today. He wanted the parts of a façade drawn: doorways, pediments, gables, columns, capitals, entablatures.

The reference to “the bibliography in Chapter IX” points back to the long lists of architects and buildings in that chapter’s footnotes.

Exhibit Two: hand shadows

Hand shadows (shadowgraphy) are animal shapes made with the hands in front of a lamp. The two books named here are real hobby books: Phila H. Webb and Jane Corby, The Little Book of Hand Shadows (1990), and Sati Achath and Bala Chandran, Fun With Hand Shadows (1996), which even includes shadows of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Jackson.

The plate joins a serious study of darkness with a child’s game of shapes made out of darkness.

Exhibit Three: radiometric dating

Potassium–argon, rubidium–strontium, samarium–neodymium and uranium–lead dating are real methods that tell the age of rock from the slow decay of radioactive isotopes. They recall the rock sample from the house that the scientists dated as older than the solar system (Chapter XVI).

The Zero Folder

A folder of data Zampanò mentions. The Editors’ note says only “Missing.” Many promised documents in this back matter are missing in the same way.

Exhibit Four: The Reston Interview and The Last Interview

Transcripts of two interviews from the film. Again the Editors report them as missing.

Exhibit Five: Air Force Manual 64-5 (1969)

AFM 64-5 was the US Air Force survival manual, issued to air crews. It teaches how to live through a crash in wild country: shelter, food, direction-finding. Zampanò asks for one page of it. The Editors’ note sends the reader to Appendix II-C, where Johnny’s collages show it.

Exhibit Six: Karen’s anxiety tests

The Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale (by the psychiatrist David Sheehan) and the Marks and Mathews Fear Questionnaire (1979) are real clinical tests for anxiety and phobia. Karen’s filled-in forms and her patient numbers are invented.

Isaac M. Marks and the phobia books

Isaac Marks (born 1935) is a British psychiatrist and a pioneer of behaviour therapy for fear and phobia. Living with Fear (1978) and Fears, Phobias, and Rituals (1987) are his real books. The Encyclopedia of Phobias, Fears, and Anxieties (1989) by Ronald M. Doctor and Ada P. Kahn is also real; the book lists “Ronald Doctor” twice, in two forms.

Appendix I (Zampanò’s papers)

Johnny says Zampanò wrote much outside The Navidson Record. He chose journal entries, poems and a letter to a newspaper to show more of the old man’s personality.

Outline of The Navidson Record and its release history

A list of the film’s parts, from the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” to Exploration #5 and “The End”. One part, “What Some Have Thought”, has a star: it was not in the final release.

The release history gives three dates: the short “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” (1990), the short “Exploration #4” (1991) and the full film (1993). The outline writes “A Brief History Of How [sic] I Love”; the film’s title elsewhere is “Who I Love”.

Possible Chapter Titles

Zampanò’s working titles for Chapters I–XXIII, for example “Echo” (V), “The Labyrinth” (IX), “Science” (XVI), “Passion” (XXIII). The title of Chapter XIII, “The Minotaur”, is struck through in red, like the struck-out Minotaur passages in the main text.

“Staires! or De la Warr or The History of Ash Tree Lane” (Chapter XVIII)

“Ftaires” is “Staires” printed with the old long s (ſ), which looks like an f. It copies 17th-century spelling.

Thomas West, Lord De La Warr (1577–1618), was the English governor of the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1610. Chapter XVIII tells the history of the land under Ash Tree Lane back to those colonists.

“Delial” (Chapter XIX)

Delial is the name Navidson gives to the subject of his Pulitzer photograph, the dying child in Sudan. Zampanò planned to use the name as a chapter title.

“Light dawns and marble heads”

A twist of the old New England saying “light dawns over Marblehead” (Marblehead is a town in Massachusetts). The saying means “at last I understand”. Zampanò notes the phrase and asks what it means, so the joke is on him.

Captain Kittinger (1960)

Joseph Kittinger (1928–2022), a US Air Force officer, jumped from a balloon at about 31 km on 16 August 1960, the highest parachute jump of his time. Zampanò’s entry, two weeks later, makes a pun on “fall” (autumn and falling).

“Tirer comme des lapins”

French for “to shoot (people) like rabbits”: to kill men who cannot defend themselves. The Editors translate it in footnote 433. The phrase is used of soldiers killed in large numbers.

“God grant me distraction”

A bitter change of the Serenity Prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”. Zampanò asks for distraction instead of peace.

The letters [A], [B], [C]…

The Editors guess that each letter is a different person who took Zampanò’s dictation. The number of letters shows how many helpers he had over the years.

“Killed an hour”

To “kill time” is a common English phrase for doing nothing while you wait. Entry [B] takes the phrase literally and describes the hour as a murder with no weapon and no body.

Henry Hudson in his shallop; Quesada and Molino

In 1611 Henry Hudson’s crew mutinied in Hudson Bay and set him adrift in a small open boat (a shallop) with his young son. In 1520, on Magellan’s voyage, Captain Gaspar de Quesada led a mutiny; his servant Luis de Molino was forced to execute him.

Both stories appeared in Chapter IX. This entry is the journal passage Chapter IX quoted in its footnotes, and it announces a poem, The Song of Quesada and Molino, by an author whose name is blacked out.

“105 degrees and rising… White Christmas” (April 1975)

On 29 April 1975, US Armed Forces Radio in Saigon announced “the temperature is 105 degrees and rising” and then played Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”. This was the secret signal for Americans to leave the city before it fell. Entry [D] is written like a telegram, where “STOP” marks the end of a sentence.

“Bada-Bing, Bada-Bang” plays on Bing Crosby’s name and on the sound of the bombs.

A son “who is not missing”

Zampanò imagines creating in the dark a son who lives beyond his own invention. The entry speaks of a promise he made and did not keep. It is one of the few places where Zampanò’s own loss shows through.

Lothario and the “covering cherub”

A Lothario is a man who seduces many women (from a character in Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 play The Fair Penitent). The “covering cherub” is the angel in Ezekiel 28:14 who guards a place and blocks the way; William Blake and the critic Harold Bloom used it for a force that blocks a man from what he wants.

In entry [F] the guardian angel of a young man’s affairs becomes the thing that keeps the old man from love.

“A maze. Amazing maze.”

Zampanò plays with sounds: a maze, amazing, “May zing”, M.A.s (university degrees), maize (corn, as in a maze cut in a corn field). He asks the reader to let an old man play.

“That girl” and the garbage

Entry [H] complains about a smell in the apartment and blames the young woman who reads to him. Zampanò is blind and needs readers; he doubts she can also take dictation.

Günter Nitschke and Christian Norberg-Schulz

Günter Nitschke (born 1934) is a German architect who writes about space in Japanese architecture and gardens. Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) was a Norwegian architect and theorist, known for the idea of genius loci, the “spirit of a place”. Both write on how people experience space.

Jacques Derrida, Glas (1974); Leavey and Rand

Glas is a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Its pages run in two columns, one on Hegel and one on Jean Genet, with text inserted in the gaps. Its layout is a model for books like this one. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand made the English translation (1986), which Zampanò must accept when he cannot get the French original.

Jonah in the belly of the beast

In the Book of Jonah, a great fish swallows the prophet, and he lives three days in its belly. The rows of brackets around the words enclose Jonah inside layer after layer, like the house enclosing its explorers.

“Stars to steer by”

An echo of John Masefield’s poem “Sea-Fever” (1902): “a tall ship and a star to steer her by”. Zampanò extends the line to living and dying.

“Kutch Dekta? Kutch Nahin, Sahib.”

Hindi/Urdu: “Do you see anything?” “Nothing, sir.” Sahib was the word Indians used for a European master in colonial India. A short exchange about looking and seeing nothing.

“I have wept much… wandered many roads with my thoughts”

These words come from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: Oedipus tells the people of Thebes that he has wept much and wandered many ways in thought. Oedipus later blinds himself, so the quote suits the blind Zampanò. The next line plays on “eye”, “Aye” and “I”.

“Write it down! Every goddamn word!”

Entry [J] shows the dictation from the other side: the helper wrote down even Zampanò’s angry shouting, because he told her to. The next entry mocks both long and short books.

“Hollywood is the land of the blind”

A twist of the proverb “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” (from Erasmus; used by H. G. Wells in “The Country of the Blind”). Zampanò, blind, lives in a poor courtyard building in Hollywood and expects to die there.

“Why can I sleep no more?”

An echo of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 2), where after the murder Macbeth hears a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.”

“The house is history and history is uninhabited”

This line answers the 1955 entry “Then are we inhabited by history?” Across almost forty years Zampanò’s notes talk to each other.

Prometheus

In Greek myth Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to people. Zeus chained him to a rock as punishment. Zampanò says Prometheus must have been a book: a thing that brings light and is bound.

The struck-out margin note (April 1995)

Helper [P] copies a note from the margin of the Quesada and Molino entry. Most of it is struck through in red: an old man’s thoughts on young men, the stray, war (“I have killed many men”) and the bald gnome Error.

“Error” and his cave echo Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book I), where the knight fights the monster Error in her den. Footnote 173 connects the note back to Chapter IX.

Paralipomena

“Paralipomena” means things left out of a work and added later as a supplement. In the Greek Bible the Books of Chronicles are called Paralipomenon. The true root is Greek para “beside” + leipein “to leave”; the entry’s dictionary-style note mixes in the Italian verb parare “to defend”, which is a false link. The whole appendix is a set of paralipomena.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the leading English art critic of his time. In this book he names seven principles (“lamps”) of good building: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience.

The dying cats and “Redwood”

Zampanò’s neighbours talk about cats that die or disappear. Johnny’s introduction told of the cats around Zampanò’s building and the claw marks on his floor. “Redwood” is the name the book gave to the dark thing in the house (Chapter XIII); here Zampanò says he saw it once when young.

“I miss you” (December 1996)

The last entry, in Zampanò’s own hand, a few days before his death. It is addressed to an unnamed “you”, and it plays on “something” and “sum’ things”.

Plate: a stained page

A photograph of a stained, nearly blank sheet with a few lines of faded handwriting and strips of tape. The words cannot be read.

Plate: a typed page of the ending

A torn typed page from the close of Chapter XXIII, with handwritten corrections: the ambulance driver’s memory of the calm day and the banging screen door, the fence around the house, and Karen’s warning. The stamp in the margin reads “Returned [Undeliverable]”.

Plate: the Washington settlers and Mt. St. Helens

A burned scrap of Zampanò’s notes. It tells of settlers near Vancouver (a trading post founded by the Hudson’s Bay Company) who found stairs going down into the ground during a blizzard. The building on the spot, says the scrap, was destroyed when Mount St. Helens erupted (May 1980).

The company, the fort and the eruption are real; the stairs belong to the history of such places that Chapter XVIII tells.

Plate: a collage of drafts

Top left: a typed draft on the letterhead of The Connaught, a luxury hotel in London. It proposes a much darker version of the story, in which the house kills both children; red notes discuss the root sense of a word as “to wound, tear, pull to pieces”.

Bottom: a handwritten note (printed upside down) about Navidson’s Hi8 cameras. Only his own exit is on tape, then a burst of static that may hide a visitor. It ends “Read that back to me”, a sign of dictation. Right: paper strips naming The Little Book of Hand Shadows and Air Force Manual 64-5, the Exhibit sources.

Letter to the Editor: “Seeing’s Believing But Feeling’s Probably Best!”

In 1978 Zampanò writes from Venice, California, to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (a real daily paper, closed in 1989). He shows that a dealer named Kuellster sells new Ithaca 37 shotguns as rare World War II “trench guns”. He found the differences by touch, because he has been blind for over twenty years. The dealer had him thrown out as a drunk tramp, and the paper prints an apology.

Ithaca 37 trench gun, Remington Model 10, parkerizing

The Ithaca 37 is an American pump-action shotgun, made since 1937. A “trench gun” was the military version, with a heat shield and a bayonet mount. The Remington Model 10 is an older shotgun that also ejects shells from the bottom.

Parkerizing is a grey, dull, rust-proof finish used on later military guns; “blue finish” is the older glossy dark finish. Zampanò uses these small marks as proof.

The Song of Quesada and Molino

The poem that the 1974 journal entry promised to include “in its entirety”. The page has only the title and the Editors’ note: “Missing.”

“That Place”

A poem about a summer when children do not see the signs of a dragon near their playground: a tail like a garden hose, a bone like a claw. In late August some children go to “that place” and never come back. The pun on “fall” (autumn and falling) returns.

“The Panther” (after Rilke)

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Der Panther” (1902) describes a panther in a Paris zoo pacing behind bars until the world is only bars to him. Zampanò’s poem takes the same title and subject, but his panther hides his pain, waits, and expects the locks to break.

“Love At First Sight” and an untitled fragment

Three lines to a “Natasha”, and a short rhymed poem about the angles of a woman’s wrists. For a blind poet, love at first sight is a strange title.

A barn of “Wyeth red”; Troy

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) was an American painter of lonely farms and barns in Pennsylvania and Maine, in dry brown and red tones. The fragment also names Troy, the city the Greeks burned, as a black finger of charcoal in lake ice.

“a house of leaves moments before the wind”

The short fragment that contains the book’s title phrase. Walls shift and the world seems a house of leaves just before the wind comes.

“La Feuille” and the Apollinaire epigraph

La Feuille is French for “the leaf” and also “the sheet of paper”. The epigraph is four lines by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918): roughly, “My hard formal dreams will ride you; my fate in its golden chariot will be your fine rock, holding as reins, pulled tight to frenzy, my verses, the models of all poetry.”

The French prose that follows: in autumn, in a season of war, a man walks through meadows to a silent oak wood; a black horse watches him. He kept the sheet where he wrote his thoughts, and now knows they were only copied from what someone told him. He must find a clearing; his wife, daughter and son are dead. When he leaves the wood there is only fog, and the horse is gone. The signature is “[illegible]”.

“You Shall Be My Roots”

The last poem: a tree speaks to its roots. It promises shade, fruit, shelter and comfort, and to remember them even when nothing is left.

Appendix II (the second edition)

The Editors say readers of the “first edition” sent so many questions that Johnny agreed to add this material. The book pretends to have an earlier edition and a public that reacted to it.

Sketches #175079, #001280, #046665

Ink drawings on notebook paper and on envelopes: a figure in a vast dark space, a staircase in a room, the hallway with “Exploration #4” written on it. The envelopes carry notes on the cubit, the Fibonacci numbers, and the nautilus shell’s spiral as a symbol of perfection, plus the name of Christian Norberg-Schulz.

Polaroids #081512

Thirty Polaroid photos of white farmhouses, fields and country roads, two of them black. They match Johnny’s trip to Virginia in search of the house on Ash Tree Lane.

The Pelican Poems (1988)

Short poems Johnny wrote in the summer of 1988 while he travelled through Poland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. Each poem ends with a place, a date and the person he gave it to or left it for: a waitress, a flute player, strangers on a train.

“Pelican” is Johnny’s name for himself. His mother’s letters tell that he travelled with a Pelikan pen (a German fountain-pen brand). In old Christian art the pelican feeds its young with its own blood. Other recurring figures are Easle, Patter, Quisling and Stave.

“A Palimpsest of Austere Pelican Jake”: Prospero

A palimpsest is a page written over an older, erased text. The poem quotes Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (5.1): he has set “roaring war” “’twixt the green sea and the azured vault”, that is, he has raised storms between sea and sky.

Eurydice; “Juvenile Metempsychosis”: Gloucester, Romeo, Lear

Eurydice is Orpheus’s wife in Greek myth; he lost her when he looked back. Metempsychosis is the passing of a soul into a new body.

In King Lear the blinded Earl of Gloucester says “I see it feelingly” and believes he falls from the cliff at Dover. Johnny’s poem borrows both the “feelingly” and the fall, and ends with a choice between Romeo and Lear.

Hyperion; Hawthorne; the Petitgas hat store

Hyperion is a Titan of light in Greek myth and the title of two poems by John Keats. “Hawthorne bread” plays on the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The hat store in Copenhagen is a real old shop name; the poems use place names from Johnny’s route.

“Not with a bang but an alarm clock”

A twist on the end of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (1925): “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” The same page mentions “a semiotic Eliotic dream” with Marcel Proust “bumbling around unread”.

“The Present 1815 Calamity of Conscience”: Waterloo

The Battle of Waterloo (June 1815, in Belgium) ended Napoleon’s rule. The French phrases “ce champ sinistre” (“this sinister field”) and “la fuite des géants” (“the flight of the giants”) echo Victor Hugo’s long poem on Waterloo, “L’Expiation”. “Brobdingnag” is the land of giants in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The poem was written for someone in Brussels, near the battlefield.

“Melonology On A Melon”; Carcassonne; a bullfight in Madrid

One poem was written directly on a melon in Paris. Others come from the walled city of Carcassonne in southern France and a bullfight in Madrid, with a matador’s cape.

“Quisling is history’s name”

Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945) led the Norwegian government that worked for Nazi Germany. His name became an English word for “traitor”.

Tarot, transubstantiation, “a bird, a plane… the paraclete”

Easle reads tarot cards (the Hanged Man, the Moon). Transubstantiation is the Catholic teaching that bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, often shown as a dove.

“A bird, a plane, no…” plays on the old Superman line “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”

Greece: Paxos, Mycenae, Olympia; “Dear Elihu”

The late poems come from the Greek island of Paxos, from Mycenae and from Olympia. Elihu is the young man who speaks last to Job in the Book of Job, after the older friends fail.

“The Reason (II)”: Jacob, Esau and an Edison phonograph

In Genesis, Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a meal. In the poem an auctioneer cries “Sold” and the prize is an ugly phonograph by Thomas Edison. “Currents” plays on Edison’s work with electric current.

“More than a café — un verre d’eau” (Paris, 1990)

Un verre d’eau is French for “a glass of water”. The last Pelican poem, from 1990, is signed at a café called Le Clou (“The Nail”) on rue Danton, Paris. In the poem a nail is the one point that fixes the house.

Collage #1

A pile of objects and scraps. It holds two Edgar Allan Poe postage stamps, the US Air Force Ground-Air Emergency Code (the page from AFM 64-5 that Exhibit Five asks for), a scrap of the Sheehan anxiety scale, Karen’s project number, and a label from Virginia, “Peanut Capital”.

There is also the saying “A room without books is like a body without a soul”, often credited to Cicero, and a Jack Daniel’s whiskey label.

Collage #2

Jack London stamps, a Days Inn card from Williamsburg, Virginia, a Pelikan 4001 ink box, a Lipton tea label, an ad for the Whisky a Go Go club in Los Angeles, and a coin with a labyrinth. The torn headlines read “God has no mother” and “Carthage must be destroyed” (Cato the Elder’s famous demand to the Roman Senate).

Obituary of Donnie, a pilot (1981)

A local newspaper notice about Johnny’s father, with his last name removed. He was a crop duster, a mail pilot in Alaska and an airline pilot. A medical test found he had had a silent heart attack. The FAA then suspended his pilot’s licence, so he took a job with a trucking company. He died when the truck he rode in caught fire.

The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute

The psychiatric institution where Johnny’s mother lives. The Editors say Johnny changed many names in the letters. She signs “Mommy”, later “Mom”, “Mother” and “P.”

The Director and the foster families

After Johnny’s father dies, the boy passes from one foster family to another. The Director of the institute gives Pelafina news of him, and at one point asks her to write less, because a foster mother objects to the letters.

Goethe: “Wouldst shape a noble life?”

Lines by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the great German poet, in an old English translation: cast no backward glances at the past and act as one new-born. The phrase “cast no backward glances” returns in a later letter.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary (“COED”); Ponce de León

Pelafina sends Johnny a Concise Oxford English Dictionary and later tells him to “get thee to your COED” for hard words. Juan Ponce de León (1474–1521), the Spanish explorer of Florida, is linked by legend with the search for the Fountain of Youth; she says her son’s first letter did what he could not.

Marine Man Raymond; Mars; Solomon

Raymond is Johnny’s foster father, a former US Marine. Pelafina calls him, in Latin, a man “who has usurped a father’s power”. She says Johnny’s love of fighting comes from her own family, whose coat of arms would need the symbols of Mars, the Roman god of war. King Solomon is the Bible’s richest king.

Old English: The Seafarer and the Viking “Mead Halls”

“Micel biþ se Meotudes egsa, for þon hi seo molde oncyrreð” is from the Old English poem The Seafarer (line 103): “Great is the terror of the Measurer (God), before which the earth turns aside.” A mead hall is the feasting hall of a lord in poems like Beowulf.

Lear’s storm, Hecate, “eye of newt”, Clytemnestra

After Johnny is hurt, Pelafina escapes in a thunderstorm; the Director says she “outdid Lear”, who raged on the heath in the storm. Staff put her in a “canvas suit” (a straitjacket).

Her curse on Raymond calls on Hecate, Greek goddess of witchcraft, and Acheron, a river of the underworld, and borrows the witches’ recipe in Macbeth (4.1). Clytemnestra is the Greek queen who murdered her husband Agamemnon. “Semper fi” (always faithful) is the motto of the US Marines.

“Fuit Ilium”; “Ira furor brevis est”

Fuit Ilium is Latin, “Troy has been”, meaning Troy is no more, from Virgil’s Aeneid (2.325). Ira furor brevis est, “anger is a short madness”, is from Horace (Epistles 1.2). Pelafina adds that in her case the madness is not short.

Claudius and Ugolino

Claudius in Hamlet takes the place of the boy’s father, and Hamlet kills him in the end. Count Ugolino, in Dante’s Inferno (Cantos 32–33), was locked in a tower with his sons and starved; in Hell he gnaws the head of the man who betrayed him. Both are warnings to a false father.

Hawthorne’s Faith; Apollo, Odysseus, Hermes

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) the hero’s wife, Faith, wears pink ribbons in her hair. Pelafina compares Johnny at summer camp to three Greek figures: Apollo the archer, clever Odysseus, and Hermes the fast messenger god.

“Tore me to pisces”; the Styx

“Pisces” (the zodiac sign of the fish) is a pun on “pieces”. In Greek myth Thetis dipped her baby Achilles in the river Styx to make him invulnerable, but his heel, where she held him, stayed weak. Pelafina would dip Johnny twice, so that even his heel is safe.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense”

Old French, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it.” It is the motto of the Order of the Garter, the highest English order of knighthood.

The Battle of Maldon

“Hige sceal þe heardra…” is the most famous passage of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon (about the year 991), spoken by the old warrior Byrhtwold: the mind must be harder, the heart bolder, the courage greater, as our strength grows less. The same lines return in the Quotes (p. 653).

“Non sum qualis eram”

Latin, “I am not what I was”, from Horace (Odes 4.1). The English poet Ernest Dowson used it as the title of his poem “Cynara”. Pelafina writes it after a winter in which her illness returned.

Orpheus looking back

Orpheus brought his dead wife Eurydice up from the underworld on one condition: he must not look back. He looked once and lost her. Pelafina notes that Johnny, leaving after his visit, looked back twice.

“Si nunca te fueras”

Spanish, “If only you never left.” Pelafina uses Spanish, French, Italian and Latin phrases through the letters.

The New Director

The kind old Director leaves, and Pelafina finds the new one cold and suspicious. From here the letters grow more afraid of him.

“Rompido mi muñeca”

Spanish, roughly “my doll (or wrist) is broken”. Muñeca means both “doll” and “wrist”, and rompido is a non-standard form of roto. A later letter mentions an old Spanish doll.

The fishing boat in Alaska; “your Haitian”

At 14 Johnny works in a fish cannery in Alaska. He writes to his mother about a fishing boat that sank, and about a Haitian man who did not reach the life raft. Pelafina quotes three of his phrases back to him.

The check mark code; Daddy Warbucks

Pelafina asks Johnny to put a small check mark in the corner of his next letter, so she knows a secret route works. Daddy Warbucks is the billionaire in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.

The Spanish doll in the attic

Pelafina writes of ribbons that bind her like a Chinese doll and blind her like an old Spanish doll she once guarded “in the gables of a fantastic attic”. Dolls and ribbons return in her later letters.

Sisyphus; “your only Mary”

Sisyphus in Greek myth must push a stone uphill forever; a Sisyphean task never ends. Pelafina signs “your only Mary”. This may echo Mary, Queen of Scots, whose secret letters from captivity were read by her jailers.

“Fortes fortuna juvat”

Latin proverb, “Fortune helps the brave”, found in Terence and Pliny.

Mrs. Havisham’s wedding dress

In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Miss Havisham, left on her wedding day, wears her wedding dress for decades; in the end it catches fire. Pelafina fears her mind will “go up” the same way.

The pills: madder, azure, celadon, gamboge

Four painters’ colour names: madder (red), azure (sky blue), celadon (pale grey-green), gamboge (deep yellow). Pelafina calls the colours of her pills “the flag of tyranny”, and she hides them instead of taking them.

The hidden line: “My dear Zampanò…”

The odd sentence starting “So many years destroyed” is an acrostic: read the first letter of each word and it spells “My dear Zampanò who did you lose?” Pelafina’s letter here names Zampanò, whose papers Johnny edits.

“La grima!”

Lágrima is Spanish for “tear” (from crying). Pelafina splits the word in two.

The “professional actress”

Johnny writes about his visit in April, and Pelafina remembers nothing of it. She decides the New Director hired an actress to play her.

“Esprit de l’escalier”

French, “staircase wit”: the clever answer you think of only after you leave, on the stairs. The term comes from the philosopher Denis Diderot. In this book the word “staircase” carries extra weight.

“Busca me, cuida me, recuerda me”

Spanish, “Look for me, take care of me, remember me.” The book misspells recuerda as “requerda”.

The coded letter of May 8, 1987

On April 27 Pelafina explains the code: take the first letter of each word. The next letter looks like nonsense, but read that way it is a message to Johnny. It says that attendants and other men rape her at night, and she begs him to save her.

A second hidden line sits in the capital letters inside words (elevAted, nulliFied…): they spell “a face in a cloud, not a trace in the crowd”.

June 23, 1987: the ancient tree

The lines start to tilt on the page. Pelafina compares her hands to an ancient tree’s roots and speaks of a crippled life of 900 years. She signs only “P.”

“Yo soy una extraña en esta lugar sin ti”

Spanish, “I am a stranger in this place without you” (esta lugar is a grammar error for este lugar). The letter runs sideways; the August letter is printed upside down: “Burn brightly. Still. Why do I feel I will never see you again?”

“The New Director” (September 24, 1987)

The words “the new director” repeat, grow, shrink and run together into a black block, and the signature “P.” breaks into many copies. The page shows panic in the layout.

December 26, 1987: “Dell’oro, del oro, deloro”

The words fall across the page. “cHrIStmas” hides the capitals HIS. Italian dell’oro means “of gold”; it recalls “bambino dell’oro”, her name for Johnny on his birthday (p. 592). Spanish dolor means “pain”.

January 3, 1988: “It was an accident”

Pelafina repeats that it was an accident: she burned Johnny when he was four. “Forgive me” is then repeated until the words pile into a black mass.

January 11, 1988: “Dear” and the alphabet

A block of “dear dear dear…” in which larger letters spell DEAR. Below, the alphabet has Johnny’s name in the place of its middle letters, and a short rhymed verse runs diagonally.

March 19, 1988: what happened when Johnny was seven

Pelafina tells how, before she was sent to The Whalestoe, she tried to strangle Johnny, calling it a gift of love. His father stopped her. The half-moon cuts on the back of Johnny’s neck came from her long nails.

“JOHNNY IS TRUANT” (limerick)

A five-line comic verse (a limerick) about Johnny, whose family name Truant means a child who stays away from school.

September 19, 1988: “Johnny, Johnny…” and the word list

Johnny’s name repeats in a scattered shape. The next page is a column of words that narrows downward. It mixes Paris place names (Cardinal Lemoine, Porte Dauphine, Place de la Concorde, Gare Montparnasse, Pompidou, Pigalle, Jardin du Luxembourg) with rare words from the coded letter and from Johnny’s Pelican Poems.

“safe”

A page with the single word “safe” above a line.

November 1, 1988: the New Director is the Old Director

With new drugs Pelafina is clear again. The doctors tell her she wrote few of the letters she remembers, and she realises the “New Director” was the same kind Director all along.

Saint Elizabeth and Bedlam; Emily Dickinson

St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., and Bethlem Royal Hospital in London (“Bedlam”) are old, famous asylums. The Director quotes Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is a pain — so utter —”, which says the mind covers the abyss with a trance to walk around it.

“Differance”; Victoria Lucas; Anaxagoras

“Differance” is Jacques Derrida’s coined word différance, meaning both “difference” and “deferring”. Victoria Lucas was the pen name Sylvia Plath used for her novel The Bell Jar (1963), about a young woman’s breakdown. Anaxagoras was a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BC who held that Mind orders the world.

Four months in Europe with a Pelican pen

Pelafina’s letter confirms Johnny’s 1988 trip across Europe with a backpack and a Pelican pen, the trip of the Pelican Poems.

The Director’s letter; Dr. David J. Draines

A typed letter to Johnny: his mother’s condition may be worse again, and the Director will retire at the end of March. Dr. David J. Draines will take his place. The Director’s own name is blacked out.

The luggage; the Sibyl of Cumae

Pelafina asks for a suitcase in amethyst, heliotrope or lilac, because she expects to leave. The Cumaean Sibyl was a prophetess of Apollo who asked for long life but not youth; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land opens with her wish to die. Pelafina calls herself that “old Sibyl”.

The last letter from the Institute; the receipt

Dr. Draines writes that Pelafina Heather Lièvre died on May 4, 1989, aged 59, by her own hand. The letter offers a coffin and a plot in Wain Cemetery at extra cost. A receipt shows that Johnny later claimed “one jewelry” that she owned. Lièvre is French for “hare”.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician and religious thinker; the Pensées (Thoughts) are his notes.

C. G. Jung, “Mind and the Earth”

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung compares the mind to a building with floors from different centuries, and under the cellar a cave with Stone Age tools. The deeper you go, the older the layer.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Through all windows, I see only infinity.” From Baudelaire’s poem “Le Gouffre” (“The Abyss”), in The Flowers of Evil (1857).

Anton Chekhov, Notebooks; Marcel Proust

Chekhov notes a professor who says the commentaries on Shakespeare matter more than Shakespeare, a joke on books like this one. Proust, in Time Regained (the last volume of In Search of Lost Time), calls a book a vast cemetery where the names on the graves are worn away.

Goethe; Wallace Stevens, “United Dames of America”

Goethe: “Everything near becomes distant”, in the translation of Eliot Weinberger. Stevens: there are “not leaves enough” to crown and cover the actor who will speak our end.

Neapolitan proverb

“What you are I was, what I am you will be.” The words of the dead to the living, often cut on old graves: a memento mori (a reminder of death).

Pliny the Younger on Vesuvius (Letters VI)

In AD 79 Pliny the Younger watched the cloud from Mount Vesuvius, the eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. He wrote that the cloud looked like an umbrella pine tree. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, died in the eruption. The Editors give the translation of Joseph Jay Deiss.

Homer, Iliad Book 2, in five languages

The same passage in Greek, Italian (Rosa Calzecchi Onesti), German (Johann Heinrich Voss, in old Gothic-style spelling), Russian (Nikolai Gnedich) and French (Paul Mazon). The Greek army swarms to the assembly like bees from a hole in a rock, and Rumour, messenger of Zeus, blazes among them. Footnote 442 gives Robert Fitzgerald’s English.

The page makes a small Babel: one text, many languages, and a swarm of voices.

University of Virginia plaque (Proverbs 24:3–4)

“Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established…” The words are from the Book of Proverbs in the King James Bible.

Izumi Shikibu

A Japanese court poet of about the year 1000. In this short poem she digs for wild orchids and wants the deep root, not the flower. The translation is from The Ink Dark Moon by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani (see the Credits).

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.19.84

“We must speak also of the labyrinths, the most astonishing work of human riches, but not, as one might think, fictitious.” Pliny describes the Egyptian and Cretan labyrinths.

Galileo, Il Saggiatore (1623)

In The Assayer, Galileo says the book of the universe is written in mathematics; without it one wanders in a dark labyrinth.

John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book 2)

In Hell some of the fallen angels sit apart and argue about fate and free will, and find “no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.” On p. 653 a second passage describes Lethe, the river of forgetting, and its “wat’ry Labyrinth”.

Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (1913)

De Wolfe (the book spells her “Elise”) was an American actress who became one of the first professional interior decorators. She writes that a home expresses the woman of the house, and men are always guests there.

Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

The French writer Marguerite Duras (1914–1996): a house is a place to keep children and men from their wish for adventure and escape; men are like children, and women love them that way. Barbara Bray’s translations are in the footnotes.

Chekhov, “Misery”; Pliny the Younger again

In Chekhov’s story “Misery” (1886) an old cab driver whose son has died can find no one to listen, and at last talks to his horse. Pliny then describes the darkness of the eruption: not a moonless night, but a closed room with the lamp put out.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The ancient Mesopotamian poem, one of the oldest works of literature. Enkidu dreams that he is led to the house of darkness, from which no one returns, where the dead eat dust. Gilgamesh weeps and says the dream shows that life ends in sorrow.

Walter Savage Landor, “Memory”; Sylvia Plath, “The Night Dances”

Landor (1775–1864), an English poet: Memory is the mother of the Muses, and she has left him. Plath (1932–1963): a child’s gestures flake away through “the black amnesias of heaven”.

Joseph Teodor Korzeniowski, Lord Jim

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski is the Polish birth name of the novelist Joseph Conrad. In Lord Jim (1900) the narrator says he misses countless shades that colourless words cannot give.

The Battle of Maldon again

The same Old English lines that Pelafina sent Johnny in 1984 (p. 601), now with the Editors’ translation.

Albert Einstein, Relativity

From Einstein’s note to the 15th edition of his popular book: objects are not “in” space but are spread out in space, so “empty space” loses its meaning.

Derrida, Glas: “Let us space”; O. V. de L. Milosz

Derrida’s Glas appeared in Zampanò’s notes (p. 545). Oscar Milosz (1877–1939), a Lithuanian-French poet: “The odor of silence is so old.”

The echo poems: Frost, Yeats, Wordsworth, Bishop, Herbert

Robert Frost, “The Most of It”: a man cries out for an answer, and gets only his echo and a great buck swimming. W. B. Yeats, “The Man and the Echo”: an old man asks if his words caused harm, and the echo gives back his words. William Wordsworth hears a mountain echo as a voice from beyond the grave. Elizabeth Bishop, “Chemin de Fer”: an old hermit shouts across a pond, and the echo tries to confirm him.

George Herbert, “Heaven” (1633) is a dialogue with Echo, whose answers (“Leaves”, “Holy”, “Light”) end each line. All of them tie back to the Echo myth of Chapter V.

Derick Thomson, “Return from Death”; Simone Weil

Derick Thomson (1921–2012) was a Scottish Gaelic poet. Simone Weil (1909–1943), the French philosopher and mystic: “Love is not consolation, it is light.”

Stevens, Robinson, Thoreau, Rilke

Wallace Stevens asks what the house is made of if not the sun. Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”: no one can really tell the story of a house. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: a room should be tall enough to keep some darkness under the roof for shadows. Rilke, “Autumn Day”: “Whoever has no house now, will never have one.”

Ezra Pound, Canto CXVI

One of the last of Pound’s Cantos. The old poet admits he “cannot make it cohere”, and ends: “If love be not in the house there is nothing.”

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

The last quote is from the film written by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson. Luke wins a poker game with a worthless hand and says “sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” The line answers Pound’s “there is nothing”.

“Contrary evidence”

The Editors give no comment beyond these two words. Johnny wrote early on that the film seemed not to exist; these pages show things that point the other way.

The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII (1886)

Bancroft (1832–1918) was an American historian of the West; volume XXVIII is his History of the Northwest Coast. The photo shows a library copy with an old drawing on its edge. Zampanò cited this volume in Chapter IX, and the settlers’ story of p. 551 belongs to the same region.

Magoo-Zine: “Rescue: The Navidson Record” (1993)

A comic-book page by “Tyler Martin” that retells the rescue: a gun fired in the dark, the wheelchair, the endless hallway. It shows the film in popular culture.

Mazerine Diasen, “Another Great Hall on Ash Tree Lane” (1994)

A dark painting shown at an invented New York arts festival.

Sarah Newbery, “Conceptual Model of the Navidson House”

A model in a wooden box: paper stairs, maze plans and dry branches. The label places it at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (real), in 1993.

“Man Looking In/Outward” (“Exploration #4”, 1991)

A blurred still frame from the short “Exploration #4”, from the “Talmor Zedactur Collection”: a light and a dim figure in darkness.

Credits

The real publisher’s permissions for the modern poems quoted in the Quotes (Bishop, Plath, Frost, Pound, Yeats, and Izumi Shikibu from The Ink Dark Moon). Mixed in: thanks to the invented “Talmor Zedactur Depositary” for a VHS copy of “Exploration #4”, and photo credits for the interior pictures.

“What miracle is this? This giant tree.”

A last unsigned short poem: a tree so tall it does not reach the ground, whose roots must hold the sky. It turns upside down the image of roots from “You Shall Be My Roots” (p. 565) and Pelafina’s tree letter (p. 623).