Some literary characters slip surreptitiously into your consciousness, then quietly make themselves at home. This proved true for Nisi Shawl, a writer celebrated in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, who years ago happened upon the character Mardou Fox, the centerpiece of—and love interest within—Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novella The Subterraneans.
Mardou is based on a real-life figure, Alene Lee, a Black and Native American writer who staked out her own place in the Beat Generation orbit. She is the love who, in The Subterraneans, inspires the Kerouac avatar, Leo, to “go home.… And write this book.”
In later years, Lee would reflect that reading Kerouac’s raw pages was shocking. “These were not the times as I knew them,” she recalled. Not her thoughts, not her words. By way of response, she chose silence as a safe space. Consequently, she’s remained largely a sketch in Beat lore.
Lee died in 1991 at the age of 60. In the decades since, bits and pieces of her life and writing have emerged. Now Shawl has composed her own reassembling. The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox offers a vivid reimagining, the story of a Black bohemian: sharp, inquisitive, and free.
Shawl’s novella is suffused with magic—permeable passageways between past and present, between waking and dreaming. Her protagonist, Marlene “Mardou” Todd, represents a tribute to Lee’s creativity and intellect, but also to her open heart. We meet the character on the cusp of her 10th year. Already, she is filling her journal with observations and secrets, understanding, even then, that she must protect them.
Set in New York (with a brief excursion to the West Coast), the narrative returns the story from San Francisco to its Greenwich Village origins. Moreover, Shawl develops vital context, rescuing her character from the isolation of Kerouac’s narrative. While we witness the hot flame of her initial coupling with Leo, that is not this story’s center, but a complication. Through Shawl’s expanded lens, we tap into Mardou’s complex family of origin; peer over her shoulder at her low-level magazine job; and eavesdrop on lunches with her older renegade sister, Marian. Most crucially, we celebrate her stolen moments, which appear in visions and versions on the page.
I’ve been shambling after Mardou, that shadow figure, for years. Earlier this fall, I emailed Shawl a set of questions about the arc of their journey toward Mardou: What went into the process of this dreaming, speculating at each critical crossroads, What if?
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
When did you encounter The Subterraneans and Mardou Fox?
I first read The Subterraneans when I was in my 20s, which would have been the early to mid-1980s. It was a Grove paperback, cover illustrated with a stylized, silhouette-ish take on a man and a woman standing back-to-back. Look hard, and you can tell the woman’s Black. I remember that escaped me, though.
What was it about her that struck you?
At the time, and for a long time after, I knew nothing of Mardou’s racial background. The group of friends I hung with had a few get-togethers with Edie Parker, who had been married to Kerouac for a short time—mostly as a way to get him out of jail. So that was my most personal connection. Later, I learned that the model he had used for his heroine in The Subterraneans was a woman and an author, and then she began to mean something more to me, something real. I was struck by her isolation, an African American among a bunch of whites, a woman among a bunch of men. Those were positions my own life and choices had familiarized for me.
How long have you been considering creating a new universe for her?
Once I learned how many ways we were similar, I knew I wanted to work with her story. Not just to amplify it, but to expand it and immerse myself in its implications. This was decades after my initial exposure. 2016, I think? Around this time, I published my novel Everfair. Bill Campbell, of Rosarium Publishing, wanted to start a line of novellas, and since The Subterraneans was a novella, I thought my response could be one as well.
As far as the universe I created for this work, I wanted something similar in feel to Everfair—not the same milieu, but depicting a timeline very slightly skewed toward a positive outcome. I wanted my Mardou to succeed. Also, I had been writing a series of stories about the Five Petals of Thought, an imaginary philosophical system that came to me in a dream. I needed to include that as well. So I did.
How did you settle on writing the book as a journal?
The idea was to give this marginalized figure her own voice. Of course, nothing I wrote would be the actual, authentic voice of Alene Lee, but my character had to be seen and heard to speak for herself, in contrast to the self-centering effects of Kerouac’s narrative. There was also another, more personal incentive for the journal format: I had never done it before. Trying new stuff is how a writer learns and grows.
What was most challenging about recasting her world?
So often a period suppresses the history of communities and tendencies the majority disregards or actively frowns upon. Uncovering that stuff was a true challenge. I had a lot of help from Samuel R. Delany. He was essential in teaching me about the gay and well-to-do Black cultures of New York during that period. I depended a lot on his memories. I also used photos and old maps I found on the internet. And the section of the book set in San Francisco’s North Beach is based on a huge amount of research. The Villa Rosa Motel where Mardou stays was a real place. The descriptions I found of the post office where Raphael collects his royalty checks forced me to rewrite that whole scene. The bookstore, Open Books, is pretty much City Lights, circa 1963.
What did you most hope to give to her or, rather, to give back?
I am pulling for Alene Lee’s work to get the attention it deserves. She was a great writer. Her life, too, was rich and interesting. Though others have long held center stage in the public’s imagination, let’s make sure she has her time there now.
You dedicate the book to “Aunt Cookie—a sharp Black Beat.” Was your aunt part of your inspiration for this story?
Aunt Cookie’s physical beauty was very similar to Alene Lee’s, and I kept her always in my mind’s eye while writing. Aunt Cookie is on the short side, like Alene was, and during the 1950s and 1960s she played the bongos and wore black leotards and made abstract sculptures. Crazy, man!•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
