Lucy Sante After the Egg Cracked

Lucy Sante, as Ezra Pound said of poetry, is “news that stays news.” This was true during her decades as the prolific critic and writer, Luc Sante, and it has remained true since late February 2021, when the then 66-year-old began to inform first his therapist, then his current female partner, then his son from a previous marriage, then his closest friends via e-mail, and then the world via Instagram that Luc was now Lucy, and that she was transitioning.

How the author of one prior acclaimed memoir, Factory of Facts (1999), came to write a second memoir as a woman is the primary subject of I Heard Her Call My Name, though not the only one. It’s also a more than sidelong look, by an insider, at bohemian lower Manhattan of the 1970-80s, and a taut, precisely written testament to the limits of temporal certitude.

Luc knew a lot, but Lucy knows more and I’m proud to say Sante’s been a friend of mine for twenty years. Read her new book, and you might discover that she’s a friend of ours too. Or, in the words of the great revelator herself: “I lay in pieces for so long, but now I have, as the mafia guys say, been made whole.”

This isn’t the book you originally intended to write, which was a Lou Reed biography. And yet, here’s Lou and Lucy bound together by the title of a Velvet Underground song. Can you walk us through this transition within a transition?

After writing a little obit for Lou on the New Yorker blog, I was approached by Andrew Wylie, Lou’s agent, who was convinced I should be his biographer. It was a whirlwind—the thing was executed almost immediately. I found myself with a big contract. I panicked. Biography is not my style, for one thing: it’s a master-servant relationship; it has set rules that result in those 700-page tomes; you have to hunt down all the kindergarten classmates and orthodontists and assistant sound engineers (and I hate conducting interviews).

Also I knew that my friend Will Hermes already had a contract and that he would do it right. But it was a whole lot of money, and I’d already spent some of it. I felt trapped. Then transitioning came to my rescue. My brilliant agent Joy Harris (Wylie was not my agent) engineered a swap, two books for one. I Heard Her Call My Name is the first; the second has to retain a connection to Lou, so it will concern the Velvet Underground in their own time, an excuse to write a book about NYC in the ‘60s.

I was pleased to see you cite Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac as authors you read when younger. Stylistically and temperamentally you’re very different but in your mutual mother-refracted quests for self-discovery, I do sense some affinities. Also, Kerouac, like yourself, was a son of Francophone immigrants. Anything to this?

I haven’t read any Henry Miller since 1973, and Kerouac only sporadically since teen-hood. I never think of those guys with reference to my writing. I don’t know about influences of substance— I tend to read memoirs for reasons other than soul-baring. Musically, though, I realized at some point that the melody, as it were, was familiar, as if I were a songwriter realizing that my song was a transposition of a Chopin nocturne. It took me a while to figure out what it was: The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Lydia Davis and published by Station Hill Press in 1981:

”I have loved people. I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident; only my innermost being was mad. Sometimes I became enraged. People would say to me, ‘Why are you so calm?’ But I was scorched from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly.”

On second thought, maybe the influence was more than musical.

As a teenager, you aspired to write for Rolling Stone and wrote a fan letter to Thomas Pynchon.

I first picked up Crawdaddy in 1968, when I was in eighth grade. I liked Sandy Pearlman and even more Richard Meltzer and eventually Nick Tosches. I liked Lester Bangs when he appeared in RS--I didn’t know about Creem for a few more years. I started buying the New Yorker to read Donald Barthelme. I found out about the first two generations of New York School Poets: O’Hara and Ashbery were gods, and Padgett and Berrigan were as huge as rock stars. I found out about Pynchon through Crawdaddy— specifically editor Paul Williams’s book Outlaw Blues. (I went on to review Mason & Dixon, with about a week between release of galleys and deadline, and then Against the Day for the NYRB; I made more money selling the galleys on eBay than I did from my piece.)

I rated Ishmael Reed’s first three novels very highly. Besides Pynchon I also actively imitated Ed Sanders’s Shards of God. I was searching for a rock and roll writing style, which I later found in Patti Smith and Kathy Acker. And of course I was reading a lot of dead French people throughout.

Any favorite French writers you feel are underknown by American readers? Years ago, you pushed Jean-Patrick Manchette on me, merci beaucoup!

Didier Daeninckx’s Murder for Memory (as I think it’s called in translation) is excellent, although much of his work is too left-wing-sentimental for me. Many of my old faves wrote in argot, making them essentially untranslatable (Auguste Le Breton, Frédéric Dard, Albert Simonin). Somewhere I have a list of (your fellow Brooklynite) Donald Nicholson-Smith’s favorites, which I keep intending to hunt down (all untranslated).

Speaking of Brooklyn, your long-time friend— and a favorite of French literary critics— Paul Auster, recently died.

I feel very close to Paul in many ways, including what he was trying to do in the City of Glass trilogy— you can see its origins in a story published in the Columbia Review in 1968. I too wanted to write a great, enigmatic, epic city novel, but I didn’t. Paul had the gift of flow and also blarney, in the great 19th-century pulp tradition (in which I include Victor Hugo, e.g.). His novels are at their best when they are entertainments. His best book remains The Invention of Solitude.

Rumor says you’ve read more than 300 George Simenon novels. Any love for prolific American crime writers like Ross Macdonald or John D. MacDonald?

I tried out both Ross (too Freudian by half) and John D. (mechanical, I thought) back when I read a lot of crime novels, but that was upwards of thirty years ago. I haven’t read 300 Simenons, but maybe 100. Pick up any of the non-Maigret romans durs. Pick a long one. I hesitate to give titles, because I have them all in French and don’t know what they are in English. All the ones issued by New York Review Books are good, but their lease ran out and they’re all now out-of-print.

Any favorite New York movies? I’m fishing for a way to get The Little Fugitive in here.

The Little Fugitive is it! Also Blast of Silence, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Across 110th Street, Speedy (Harold Lloyd), Mean Streets, Pull My Daisy, Shadows, Putney Swope.

Tony Soprano said, “Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this.” Having written about the series at length, what’s your favorite Sopranos character?

Livia Soprano. Honorable mention: Uncle Junior.