“We’re not living in very romantic times,” the actor Ben Whishaw says in an interview with Claire Marie Healy for AnOther Man, “Because we’re not living in a time where people value not knowing something.”

What makes for romantic times? Perhaps a large dose of it is bound up in mystery. Out of sight, if only by a breath. Just as desire is an active feeling, a going towards and never quite reaching, romance is in relation to the lack of light. Favours a bit of dimness. Can’t be too brightly lit. A fluorescent room has no romance to it. Everything is too obvious, or ready to be analyzed, parsed out, made into something to be used for a purpose. Romance is lilting. Impractical, fizzing over, ribbons untied, air both warm and cool. Offshoot moments, ones you didn’t account for. Ones that lift and drop the veil. Quick passing of hands. Split fruit. A whiff, unable to be placed. Purposeless. It’s not for anything. Which obviously makes it appealing. Mystery, dissatisfaction, a going towards of the moment. Beauty with a touch of decay.

“‘Being romantic is sometimes given a bad press,” the actor says, eating said toast on a thick hot morning in Hackney. ‘Like it’s a fake thing, or an idle, dreamy perspective on something. Less frank, tough, honest... which I think is bullshit. Why is the alternative more real? Life is what you choose to make of it, how you choose to live it – so who’s to say? People need more than just the humdrum... people need other things to be fed.”

Orchidaceous; languor; delphinium blue; frock consciousness; tonic rainbow flickers; enochian magic. This fizzy language is the starlet of Shola von Reinhold’s opalescent novel, Lote (published in 2020). The integration of this kind of vocabulary into a writer’s lexicon is certainly proof of their persuasions. That’s language that feeds. On the cover of von Reinhold’s lavender book appears a peacock in a crowned droplet shape. The image, according to a caption on the first few pages, is from the Splendor Solis manuscript, representing “‘the peacock stage’ of alchemy when the oily black contents of the alembic flare iridescent.”

The weighty novel is told to us by Mathilda, a woman in contemporary England, who is a mysterious, alluring narrator. The very first lines of the book give a crystal picture of her verve, glamour, insight. They read:

“An incensed blond twink said, ‘Excuse me, miss! Where do you think you’re going? This is a members only club.’

Knowing: i. People rarely allow for Blackness and caprice (be it in dress or deportment) to coexist without the designation of Madness.

Ii. People like to presume Madness over style whenever they have the chance

I gathered that my eBay lab diamonds, silver leatherette and lead velvets…”

You get the picture. Mathilda is interested on a surface level in art and literary history, but what she’s actually interested in is the mystery, glamour and thrill that she finds within that history. She habitually cultivates what she calls “Transfixions,” essentially obsessions - historical, cultural - that she reacts to bodily and spiritually, as if taking drugs. They’re very closely related to dreams, but not quite. During the period of her life the book covers, her obsession is the Black modernist experimental poet Hermia Druitt (a poet von Reinhold, the author, invented, but may as well have been a real poet erased from history). The confluence of her obsession with this poet and her desire to escape the drudgery that life un-buoyed by class privilege can dictate, takes Mathilda to a minimalist, jargon-loving artist residency she scams her way into, in the mythical-seeming European town of Dun. 

[Before I go much further with this, I must let you know that this book has yet to be published in North America, which I think is a total shame, but I went to the local bookstore where I live and they had no trouble ordering it in for me from England, so I would highly encourage you to do the same.]

An intertextual delight, the novel oscillates between Mathilda’s lived narrative and excerpts from Black Modernisms, a historical and academic text Mathilda is reading in the story, but which is also written by von Reinhold. It geniusly acts as a double. First, as a site for real histories, anecdotes and analysis of Black and queer artists and writers of the modernist era. But it also allows von Reinhold to re-animate the archive by inserting the imagined or perhaps more fittingly called intuitive, stories, anecdotes and histories of Hermia Druitt. As such, Lote functions as a fabulous fiction if you choose to read it only as such, but is also completely generous in it’s willingness to itself act as an archive. 

The book is divided and fuelled by a riveting concept: Arcadia versus Utopia. The characters are parted on their persuasions, and the central tension in the book is between these modes, as they are carried out by the characters. Arcadia, by its very nature, is a more easily describable mode. For example, think of The Bright Young Things of the 1920s, dark academia, gothic motifs, merlot and violet colours, roses, lace, metal. Jewels, silks, ornamentation, velvet, posh secret societies and gold-gilded frames. The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. “History-worship and past-lust,” as Mathilda calls it, though she is fascinated by it all the same, dedicated to it, enraptured by it. As is Erskine-Lily, her gorgeously ornamented friend she meets in Dun, with whom she drinks Orion (a pink sparkling alcohol) by the case.

Utopia, as an opposing force to Arcadia, is more difficult to describe, as it is always future oriented, thus has no concrete aesthetic modes, rather a litany of vows for a more just future. It rejects this past-worship. It’s a slippery silvery disposition, with its face to the light of what will come.

Mathilda, Erskine-Lily, and their friends ultimately oscillate between fascination with Arcadia and an acknowledgment of it’s limitations, and that’s where the novel’s tensions lie. von Reinhold has similarly felt these tensions within their own artistic interests. They said in an interview, speaking on Lote:  

“In terms of the fictional world, the story, the form etc, all of that accumulated as a result of being drawn for a long time to certain kinds of fiction and feeling, in spite of the pleasure derived, alienated and compromised  – the compromise of having to divide yourself, partition half of yourself off, in order to achieve immersion. 

I’m partly thinking here of lots of immersive fictional narratives, often first-person, ‘outsider’ perspectives such as Isherwood, Brideshead, The Secret History (these kinds of book seem to frequently be by white men or male narrators who often feel more ‘in the next room’ than ‘outside’) and quite a lot more, which broadly share a kind of qualitative aspect – romantic, arcadian, escapist.

But the suspension, it became clear, was coming at a cost. Not because Black queer people, working-class people, are only capable of escaping into fictional replicas of our own lives but because there’s only so much escape you can achieve in a literary plane that negates your existence, knowingly or not.”

I’d argue that in writing Lote, von Reinhold is partaking in both an Arcadian and Utopian practice. Which it turns out, is very fruitful, and very fun to read.

 In Mathilda’s world, romance does turn to action. Her transfixions lead her to the very real, material reality of having months and months of free rent paid for while she pretends to be producing a project on ‘Thought Art’ at an artist residency. Really, she’s bought herself time to live a life of lucid luxury, like the socialites, artists, and bon vivants before her. Evenings are exclusively for drinking, smoking botanical cigarettes, and discussing Arcadian histories at a local bar. The drink of choice is typically a mysterious kind of cocktail, which can be made in either pink or red. It’s made from the same plant, so says her sometime friend sometime nemesis Griselda, but everyone has a strong preference to either the pink or the red. Mathilda, being frothy and intentionally impractical, favours the pink. Griselda, staunch in her minimalist severity, opts for red.

Romance feeds, so says the actor Ben Whishaw. He played Sebastien in the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, one of the Arcadian texts that von Reinhold finds appealing, if lacking. In the photos that accompany this interview, Whishaw wears a romantic mix of materials that I suspect von Reinhold would approve of. Oiled dark hair, bright lilac frilled shirt, olive paint splattered dinner jacket, shiny leather pants, brocade gewly rings. The sort of rings that, in the cartoon movie of Robin Hood, the fox Robin Hood sucks off of the king’s fingers, as he bows to kiss them. Glamour with decay, thrifty splendour. 

The restrained structure of the Arcadian template allows for mystery, gothic and romantic heady struggles, because the boundaries are clearly laid out. There are clear societal rules. There is either the restrained structure of academia, or the rigid rules of Old Money, or manners, proprietary, etc. And so the conflict is derived. Arcadians probably like boundaries. It’s very satisfying to push against a clearly defined conservative boundary. It gives you a sense of being a rebel quite easily, especially in the case of the aforementioned white male narrators, without much risk at all. And of course we all love to feel the illusion of risk. In contemporary life, with everything ever expanding, its ever harder to feel that rush of pushing against something solid. This is not to say the Arcadian mode is better, but rather it’s more clear cut. The world now is in a constant flux of mediation and unravelling, vastly confusing. 

Perhaps that’s why it’s appealing to watch Fran Lebowitz speak. The old world, the pre-internet, pre-globalization world is all physical, local, much easier to understand. Much more limited, of course, but understandable in it’s limitations. Watching Fran speak is sort of soothing because she has no awareness of the internet, so all of the dynamics that exist therein do not exist for her. She’s not limited by self-consciousness because of this. But Arcadian thinking also produces a kind of anxiety to the modern mind, because, as T.S. Eliot says, the individual is at the confluence of history, whether we like it or not. Fran may be able to omit the online world from her realm of experience, but the rest of us cannot.

In a conversation in Interview magazine, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris says of Fran,

Fran Lebowitz is, in her own way, Arcadian in nature. The 1970’s are her 1920’s. The recent past is always getting ever further away. Harris also mentions that Fran is great to have dinner with. Both of these things, obviously, can be true. That’s what’s appealing about not being so didactic in opinion. You can critique someone and party with them all the same.

In a lot of contemporary fiction there are no such Arcadian boundaries. The formal constraints are blasted open. As a result there’s a kind of free-falling, a searching for order, and one thing that appears as a branch down this rabbit hole is morality. I’ve wondered over and over why I can read and consume very quickly Sally Rooney’s writing, and on the whole enjoy it, but find nothing really sticks about it. In two reviews for Bookforum, one that is about Normal People, and one about morality in contemporary fiction, Lauren Oyler makes arguments which pointed me in the direction of a reason for my indifference.

She writes: “The educated millennials in Sally Rooney’s novels often worry about being “good people” and question whether their friends and lovers are bad ones, and their comments suggest that self-development is just a matter of figuring out your own essential goodness or badness.”

And also: “The unwavering neatness of her books leads to pat lessons and characters totally lacking in mystery.”

The result is a sort of banality in it’s moral correctness, total void of mystery, or, to me, any real romance, though literal heterosexual romance is supposedly the centre of both novels. This is certainly a matter of personal taste. These are not characters I’d care to have dinner with, even if I do, on the whole, approve of their moral correctness. They’re uber conscious characters, but to what end? Are they supposed to be our role models, or are they simply a realist reflection how we all are, uber-conscious and stewing, inactive, unmysterious, self-reflexive to the point of nausea? Is this the humdrum Whishaw talks of?

One thing I appreciate in Lote is it’s not so interested in goodness and badness. Mathilda’s internal world isn’t psychoanalyzed through a template of brain mapping. Her internal world is much more mystical, and in fact we’re left in the dark on much of her history. Personally I don’t mind this, I don’t need to know the psychological reasons she is making all her decisions. One can intuit this, if one desires. Mathilda has names for her own patterns of thought, which make her self-aware and a little magical. Naming is powerful. Similar to having a group of friends and dubbing them the Bright Young Things, or the Bloomsbury Group, and suddenly you’re a secret society for the history books to reference.

I wonder if this morality that Oyler is interested in interrogating has any correlation with T.S. Eliot’s modernist idea of impersonality. Writing at the same time as von Reinhold and Mathilda’s Bright Young Things (but no doubt having a lot less fun), modernists like Eliot were interested in redirecting individuality that they feared was a product of the cultural fragmentation occurring at the time. The first world war had just occurred, secularism was on the rise, the large cultural narratives that had previously been guiding principles of Western society seemed to be fading, and replacing them was increasingly fragmented, individualist writing. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Eliot writes that art and poetry only have value in relation to the past, and calls for the “extinction of personality.”

We are certainly undergoing, in the previous decade and this one, increasing fragmentation due to the internet. We exist in many different narratives, each of us, depending on our algorithm and who we follow. There is, of course, the total amplification of personality. So I wonder if this return to morality as the baseline for guidance in contemporary fiction, has anything to do with Eliot’s urge to find a new form of tradition to follow, to sew the fragments back together? And what, in this case, does morality actually mean, as a guiding principle?

Speaking of the archive and the extinction of personality, in 2019, over a thousand letters by T.S. Eliot written to Emily Hale (also a writer, and his romantic interest, though never his wife) were finally unveiled at Princeton. They’d been donated and were supposed to be kept unopened until fifty years after death. So, these thousand letters by Eliot were opened for the public, but an interesting note here - Eliot burned all the letters that Hale wrote in response to his, so now all the archive leaves for us are Eliot’s words. And remind me who it was that was interested in the extinction of personality? 

A few days ago my friends were doing this exercise where they were trying to think of three characteristics in several of our friends that would sum them up as totally as possible, so that if another person also possessed these three characteristics, there would be some sort of twin-like bond. The triangulation of my personality, they deduced, was a Jewish writer who likes to party. This makes Fran a good candidate for twinnage. The part in Pretend It’s A City I liked the most was when she talked about parties. She says she loves parties because they’re one of the only things in life that is actually supposed to be fun. 

She also talks about social scenes. More specifically, the concept of “hanging out.” Once again her Arcadian nature flares up here, “no one hangs out anymore!” that kind of thing. Even though it seems unlikely her version of hanging out has been totally wiped out, there is something romantic about the idea of a clearly defined but ephemeral, consistent social scene that exists in the physical world. Regular bars, cafés, the notorious apartment everyone gathers in. The idea that someone is a fixture of a neighbourhood, that’s appealing. Holds things down. But these clear definitions only come with a looking backwards. In the heat of the moment, things are much less neatly outlined.

What we favour and think we’re losing in time is maybe just transforming into another version of what we like. Fran, in this same train of thought, talks about how things used to be so much better during these hangouts because you could smoke inside. You would never miss anything to go smoke outside. You could still be in the thick of the conversation, not having it jilted and pockmarked by entrances and exits. We make our own constraints for glamour. Recently I was talking with a friend about how much we miss leaving a bar to go smoke. We’ve never lived in an age where smoking inside was permitted, and so our concept of revelry is based around our experience: the secret feeling of slipping out of the group to go share a cigarette with someone and have a private moment of exchange, bumming off of some sexy stranger, just feeling elusive and a little out of your skin in the cold or heat.

Lote is largely concerned with the pursuit of revelry, of consistent, gold-violet-hued hanging out. The main subjects of Mathilda’s fascination, Stephen Tennent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Nancy Cunard, etc. are members of a social scene, for sure. The Bright Young Things who traipse around America and Europe partaking in lavishness and decadence. Somehow they always know someone with a castle or country house to spare. The Bloomsbury Group, which Virginia Woolf was associated with, is also of interest to Mathilda. Hermia Druitt, von Reinhold’s semi-fictional poet, factors into both of these groups. The riotous parties in large ivy-laden estates and tag-alongs to endlessly poured champagne streams are only dampened by the Arcadian conservatism that occasionally rears its head at Hermia Druitt’s, and several of the other members, Blackness and queerness. This is what Lote contends with. But in the primary narrative, von Reinhold’s assertion of Mathilda and Erskine-Lily’s pleasureful nights of decadence is deeply gratifying to read. One particular drink of choice, a drink of the fore-partiers, is the Pousse-Café, a layered shimmering multi-coloured drink in a tall glass.

On who owns these Arcadian modes, and how they have been held captive by whiteness and class privilege, Malachi, Mathilda’s friend, says:

“Between the ‘assimilation’ and the fantasy there was another space which was not about championing the thing that speaks against you - though that can be a literally fatal trap - but instead about showing your ability to embody the fantasy regardless, in spite of, to spite, and in doing so extrapolate the elegance, the fantasy, Romance, or whatever it was, abstract it and show it as universal material to be added to the toolbox. “Look! Look: it does not belong to them. Maybe we should not want it because they weaponized it, but it was not theirs in the first place.”

Malachi and Mathilda’s mission: “Generation after generation of unused froth and frivolity would be finally uncorked in us!”

Productivity is the least romantic thing I can think of. I have recently been annoyed by my own austerity. The confines of pandemic living leave little room for fulfilling spontaneity, and from one extreme to the other, routine and austerity and productivity are easy moulds of solid meaning to form around. This current age is seemingly obsessed with it, orders life around it, as it has likely for some time. But it’s part of our vernacular in a different way now. The grind, hustling, etc. If you’re busy, that’s the greatest thing you can be. If you’re not feeling productive, then you feel like you’re losing, or at least losing traction. Losing your grip on… something. I feel it all the time. On some evolutionary level, we must know that if we’re not being productive, our society has no safety net to catch us. We’ve evolved so far, quote unquote, in human history, and yet we can’t decide on how to allow everyone in our collective civilization to be housed, fed, cared for. It’s stupid, and cruel, obviously. And so, we feel the dreadful need to be productive because it is the only way to have a safety net, which is your own personal income, that you’ve supposedly earned through whatever means. And if you have a safety net pre-established, I presume you feel guilty for not being productive because there are others out there who don’t have a safety net, and so you feel the need to be productive out of solidarity with them, even though you being productive to assuage your own guilt over your financial stability doesn’t do anything, actually, for anyone who doesn’t have financial stability. But at least you’re busy and can say you’ve “earned it.” And what about if you’re financially stable and not too productive in the money-earning sense, and don’t feel guilty about it? Then you’d do great in Arcadia, I’d venture.

Richard Bruce Nugent was an important writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. His novella Smoke Lilies and Jade, which von Reinhold references often in Lote, begins with these lines:

HE WANTED TO DO SOMETHING…TO WRITE OR DRAW…OR something…but it was so comfortable just to lay there on the bed…his shoes off…and think…think of everything…short disconnected thoughts…to wonder…to remember…to think and smoke…why wasn’t he worried that he had no money…he had had five cents…but he had been hungry…he was hungry and still…all he wanted to do was…lay there comfortably smoking…think…

von Reinhold writes in Lote that “at 18 [Nugent] announced his artistic intentions, foremost that he no longer wanted to work.”

A typical Arcadian world exists outside of the concept of productivity, because everyone is bankrolled. It’s very alluring to inhabit. There’s all this time for drinking, parties, eating, going to bars, dancing, wearing furs, developing complex personal histories. The friction of a group. Aesthetics are essential to this Arcadian sensibility too, they bolster the spirits. The Secret History is partially a delight to read because it’s fun to think about expensive whiskey in cut crystal glasses, houndstooth coats, skulls with flowers in their mouths plucked from antiquity in large, looming wooden libraries. The fervorous study of Ancient Greek (no one ever asked The Secret History kids what they were going to do with an arts degree). The appeal of The Secret History is watching the wealthy kids get increasingly darker, more lurid in their consumption, and buck at the gorgeous material offerings of their lineage. But as von Reinhold knows, that’s only satisfying up until it becomes a touch revolting. 

“One of the first things Malachi and I learnt was that, as miserly as they are, rich people will happily prop up their own kind for years.”

Being scrappy isn’t so impressive, and can in fact be a bit sickening, when you’re coming from a lineage of Old Money, propped up by your estranged wealth-hoarding parents. Rejecting the concept of wealth but loving your dozens of beautifully tailored shirts and gold cufflinks is a contradiction that only works when you’re willfully ignorant of where the shirts are coming from. Like Fran says, she hates money, but loves nice things. Don’t we all?

In a recent episode of the podcast High T, they make a very good point, while discussing Bridgerton, about Regency era England (where the show, as well as Jane Austen fictions, take place). It’s a chilling point to consider. Similarly to The Bright Young Things bounding party to party, Regency era England is defined in the broad cultural imagination as a period of balls and restrained dancing, sighing around who you’re going to marry, what sort of dress is most flattering. All that idleness, all those families who are juggling their wealth and trying to figure out what sort of marriage will benefit them - where is all that money coming from, the money that allows them those titles, and to not actually work but rather play these social games? It’s coming from the transatlantic slave trade, that’s what props up the entire economy of lounging. Really gives a different edge to the lazing around in the drawing room. As von Reinhold describes it, these sorts of pat images without full context are examples of “glimpses of Arcadia: The Grand Ahistorical Mythical Paradise.”

This is why Mathilda is majorly concerned with Escape. To her, escape means to be clever enough to enjoy these luxuries without the family backing, social status, or any sort of net to allow you to have these things. She ingenious about it, as is Erskine-Lily. Again with the interest in boundaries, she considers “whether the pleasure of escaping work was greater than that of never having to [work] at all.” But to her Escape is not just escaping work. I appreciate von Reinhold’s interest in mystery, for they never lay it out clearly, but the reader can imply that the Escape Mathilda refers to is Escaping the limitations of her means, her past. To escape “the drabness that underlies everything,” as she says. Mathilda and Erskine-Lily are interested in true thrift and cleverness in order to maintain their tastes. Stealing, impersonating, conducting mysterious ongoings. 

Lote is interested in adornment, ornamentation. To ornament a life is to find something worth experiencing. It might be sort of against more spiritual arguments, physical idol worship. But can we honour through consumption and through objects without rotely falling prey to consumerist tendencies? The line seems thin. But von Reinhold makes a convincing case. Mustn’t there be a world possible where beautiful objects aren’t linked to capital? Erskine-Lily, Mathilda’s friend she meets in Dun, dressed all in gold and basking by a large fountain, later reads her an excerpt from the Book of Luxuries: 

“Where we consider angels to be spiritual messengers, we might well think of the Luxuries as sensory ones, communicating with the aesthetic aspects of the soul. They are described as having skin like black marble and parti-coloured wings that far outstrip any peacock. They wear immensely gaudy-sounding robes (not unappealing) and outrageous jewel-encrusted slippers (tremendously appealing).”

Ultimately the Escape Mathilda is looking for leads towards a sort of Utopia. von Reinhold’s Utopia presents an alternative to this heightened anxiety of productivity, which is linked to the Lotus-eating opulent parties, in it’s communist perspective. Hermia Druitt, as told in the Black Modernisms text, gave a sort of lecture wherein she describes the Utopia: “The Free Children Utopians would feast on the tops of their towers tonight and in their gardens and in their communal palaces.” Universal gardens, Localized ballet, no more landlords. This is the vision she presents us. A Utopia that is decorative, generous, glamorous, communal. That “reache[s] out and encase[s] Arcadians.”

Drunkenness, intoxication, romance, seduction, longing, dreaming, transfixing. All allow us to slip out of logical consciousness and into something so much more frothy, stretched, lucid, unconcerned with order and more interested in another plane, one that’s untied by earthly means. Or maybe more concerned with earthly means, the real earthly means, the ones that are not imposed arbitrarily but bodily.  

Perhaps it’s all worth being less serious about. As Erskine-Lily insists, “They call the universe ‘kosmos’, meaning decoration, surface, ornament: something cosmetic. Like make-up. Like lipstick! Like rouge. The cosmos is fundamentally blusher.”