The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox
by Nisi Shawl
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted December 27, 2024
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Nisi Shawl's new novella is a combination of memoir, in the form of diary entries, as well as speculative fiction which includes a form of magic. The main character, Marlene Bianca Todd, is fictional, but she is based on a real person. Mardou Fox was a pseudonym given to Alene Lee by her lover Jack Kerouac in his novel The Subterraneans, and she was the basis for Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. I have not read those, only On the Road and The Dharma Bums, but it has been decades ago for both. Alene Lee knew quite a few other Beat writers and musicians, working at a publishing company where she typed manuscripts of works by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. She did write poetry and stories too, but I'm not sure if any were published until after her death. I might be wrong about that.
Marlene's diary, or diaries, are in four sections, three different time periods, but all in late summer or fall. The first section is "Glimmer," which starts on August 25, 1941, when Marlene is a few months shy of her tenth birthday. She lives with her mother and two younger sisters, Esther and Clarice, the latter being a half-sister. Here it is Clarice that gives her the nickname Mardou, a combination of the first part of her name, with a form of the French word for sweet. She also has a younger sister, Wanda, who lives with her grandmother in California, and older sister Marian is on her own, working as a secretary in New York. As it was with Alene Lee, Marlene is of mixed race; her mother is black, her father Native American. He is in a hospital facility due to psychological problems stemming from his military service. Or, is it possible he 'suffers' from the same thing as Marlene? Later in life Marlene discovers Clarice has similar experiences, along with a man she falls in love with, but they each refer to it in a different way. The first time it manifested for Marlene I assumed it was just a dream. She was outside their apartment building in the middle of the night, when she realized she was floating, her feet almost but not quite touching the ground. She looks up to see the smiling face of a woman she does not recognize (I figured it was the moon), but the experience lasts less than a minute, with the woman obviously hearing someone else call her away. The next morning Marlene discovers clues that tell her she had been at that spot the night before, but that didn't mean the other things she experienced had actually happened. But they had.
Marlene becomes more circumspect in telling anyone else about her 'dreams' after she confided in her school counselor, who revealed the information to her mother, then others learned of it, including Marian. She knows they think she is crazy, maybe the way they thought her father was crazy, and the same for Clarice later. That period of diary entries ends abruptly, with the second section, "Glare," beginning on September 7, 1953. She is now in New York, originally living with Marian, but later in a small apartment of her own. This is when she begins her relationships with the Beat generation, one of the men being Leo Percepied, the personification of Kerouac in The Subterraneans. Adam is Allen Ginsberg, Frank Carmody is William S. Burroughs, but another character seems to be a combination. The real life Anton Rosenberg, a musician, could be both Julian, whom Marlene marries (definitely fictional), as well as Rafael, her angel, her one true love. Rosenberg at one point was called "The Angel of The Subterraneans."
Almost everything else about Shawl's story is fictional. Marlene was able to publish several children's books under her own name, as well as poetry as Mardou Fox. One book was My Blues Ain't Like Yours. Speculation time: is it just coincidental that Alene Lee died in 1991, then a novel published the following year, from a different author, Bebe Moore Campbell, was titled Your Blues Ain't Like Mine? Another odd thing; I've seen pictures of both Lee and Campbell, and they look a lot alike. Yep, probably just coincidence, but I would like to read that book. The third section starts with one of her stories, "Down on the Farm," followed by the next diary entry dated September 22, 1953. Her relationship with Leo is fraught with arguments and recriminations, which was the case from the very beginning, with him stealing some of her writings. Then Adam sends Rafael to her apartment since he has nowhere else to go, which of course angers Leo. It is difficult for Marlene to balance her personal relationships with her work, but on top of that she also has the worry of Clarice now in a mental hospital, with the possibility of her being subjected to electroshock therapy. Marlene knows she must use her 'magic' to rescue her sister.
The fourth section, "Glow," skips to September 29, 1963. What Marlene can do she calls either "going outside," or going "over the fence." Shifting into another plane of existence, or another time. While over the fence, she could observe other people but they could not see her, with maybe one exception. In her first experience, the woman she saw was herself from the future, and later she experiences the same event in reverse. Rafael could do it too, but he called it "walking between." It was how he disappeared (for eight years) when he was a suspect in a murder, which he did not commit. Together they learn how to travel "outside" even further, such as from San Francisco to Venezuela. The combination of Alene's experiences as part of the Beat generation, along with Marlene/Mardou's otherworldly travels, gives the story a dream-like quality, while at the same time illuminating the perils of being a woman of color within the dominant white world. Not only do I feel like re-reading it right away, I also want to research more, and read more of the Beats. A fascinating woman, living during a fascinating time. A fascinating story, highly recommended.
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