Eternal Friday Night: Hannah Levene on her debut novel Greasepaint
Aimee Ballinger talks to the experimental writer Hannah Levene about butches, musicality and only wanting to write the good chapters.
INTERVIEW BY AIMEE BALLINGER
I first met Hannah Levene in Falmouth in 2009 where we had both just moved to study English. Hannah had a mass of curly hair and Springsteen on her shirt, and I thought she was the coolest person I’d ever met. In fact, she still is. We’ve eaten a lot of eggs in each other’s kitchens in the intervening years and sent a lot of writing back and forth in haikus, journals, letters, emails, pamphlets and now at long last in books. At the beginning of this year, I was lucky enough to slowly make my way through an advanced copy of Hannah’s impressive debut novel, Greasepaint, published by the legendary Brooklyn based queer press, Nightboat Books. I read Greasepaint by torchlight while my baby slept beside me, and oh! what a privilege to be transported to 1950’s New York and onto a barstool in Greasepaint’s Dyke Bar where the jukebox is jumping, the piano is hot, the girls wear their hair pushed back and every night is Friday night. On a zoom call between Glasgow and Norwich, where Hannah currently lives, I tried my best not to let my excitement at her book finally being published gush and spill and slop out all over our conversation, and Hannah was as cool, smart, and collected as she always is.
AIMEE BALLINGER: Greasepaint is set in a fictional 1950’s New York, over a decade before the Stonewall riots of 1969, which I felt gave the novel an atmosphere of naivety. There is a real sense of all this quite revolutionary stuff on the horizon. We as readers know that it’s coming but for your cast of characters it’s barely in the air yet.
HANNAH LEVENE: Yeah, that’s interesting. I wanted the 1950s to be more of a backdrop. It’s not like I’m dropping cultural references from that time or relying on things that actually existed.
It definitely didn’t suffer from – and I only learned this phrase on a podcast the other day and I’ve been dying to use it ever since – ‘space hopper syndrome’.
Oh right, yeah when you drop in a space hopper to show that it’s the 1960s or whatever?
Yeah, it didn’t have that.
The 1950s backdrop places two big queer events on the horizon, the Stonewall riots, and the AIDS crisis. I suppose setting Greasepaint in a time before all of that does give the characters a sense of innocence. During my research I read a lot of lesbian novels published in the 1970s and set in the 1950s, and in these novels the Butch characters are always stuck in the first chapter. You get to hang out with the Butch in the bar and they look wicked, and the writing is so fun, and then the rest of the novel tows the second-wave feminist party line and kind of drags the Butch out into the light of the ‘Lesbian Nation’. It’s so boring!
I figured that if I stayed in the 1950s then I could stay in the bar because that’s where the good chapters take place and I only wanted to write the good chapters.
I agree that there is a naivety amongst the cast of Greasepaint because of the time it’s taking place, but I also didn’t want it to feel like the 1950s was a pre-political time, because it wasn’t like that.
Yeah, it doesn’t feel like that. The characters reminded me of the parents in Sarah Schulmann’s, Rat Bohemia, as in, they’re proper second-generation New Yorkers. They’re the daughters of Jewish immigrants and anarchists and communists, and although they’re from these diverse and complex backgrounds their world is pretty stable by comparison.
I like the allusion to Rat Bohemia. During my research I also read a lot of turn of the century Yiddish anarchist texts. It was so much about people arriving in New York and hanging out, writing papers, getting a movement going. And I was thinking, well who are these people’s kids?
I thought it was interesting how Greasepaint doesn’t focus on one main character. They all felt like otherwise background characters who each got their moment in a roving spotlight. For me it really emphasized this idea of the eternal Friday night and being stuck in the bar. You learn a lot about a lot of people very quickly and in some ways that makes it hard to follow but then there’s nothing to follow anyway, no one character is getting their grand narrative arc.
That’s a good way of putting it. It’s hard to follow but there’s nothing to follow. There was a limitation that everything had to happen in the first chapter, and as you say nothing is happening but there is definitely a feeling of trapped-ness. They’re trapped inside the first chapter, that is itself trapped inside the bar, or maybe it’s the deli. All of the places can shift into any other place because –
– all of the places are just extensions of the same place, because it’s the same crowd of people inhabiting them.
Yeah!
And what is a place if not the people in it?
That’s exactly it. In Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg explains how once the butch leaves the bar they become unreadable, they go to pieces in a way and can no longer transfer themselves to other people in the way that they want to. That’s why it was so important for all of the characters to be so anchored in the bar and entangled with one another; they allow each other to exist! It could never have been a novel about one butch, because one butch doesn’t exist.
How did the musical element come about? Is that what these queer bars would’ve really been like, with the piano playing and the songs?
I was reading more broadly about the history of Jews in New York and the history of queers in New York and music is where they kind of intersect, like they all meet on Broadway. There was also so much music in the butch books I was reading, especially in the bars although it would mostly come out of a jukebox rather than a piano.
I thought that might have been the case. I loved how the inclusion of the piano placed Greasepaint in this old-worldly lineage of queer nightlife. Like Christopher Isherwood writing from the clubs in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, like Cabaret almost!
I suppose I was borrowing from what was probably a gay male lineage of piano bars.
Greasepaint values sound over sense, and musicality over grammar.
Tracing the Yiddish-American origins of the Great American Songbook, highlighting the role of the jukebox in the collective life of bar-butches, and making the most of the gay abundance of musical theatre in tandem with the rousing rhetoricians of Yiddish-anarchism. The performers in Greasepaint are Jewish, or they’re black, and they meet in music and in politics as the B.O.P, the Butch Piano Players Union. This crossover of queers and communists in America during the 1950s would’ve been perceived as a singular threat and put on a blacklist, but it’s not like they’re revolutionaries all waiting in the bar for what would come to be known as gay liberation. All the characters are exhausted, and the bar isn’t enough, but they’re all holding onto these little hopes for change. Towards the end the character Sammy Silver has a rant about how fucking tiring it is to try hard all the time to change the world. I didn’t want to shy away from the characters talking about revolution, even if that revolution felt far away.
I also think that the heavy presence of the anarchist parents contributes to the feeling of the characters being otherwise secondary characters that you’re homing in on. They have a lot to live up to, or a lot to push back against depending on how you look at it.
It adds to the confinement. How do you rebel against anarchist parents apart from by being queer? And sometimes even that doesn’t work. Sammy Silver is frustrated by being so loved by her parents. She dresses like a boy and goes to these bars and her parents are just like, ‘you look just like my brother used to!’ or ‘you look like me when I was young!’ The smothering comes from all sides and that’s why the novel ends with an overflowing.
I guess all that they can do is become frustrated, overflow and then just go back to capacity again. There’s nowhere else for them to go!
The anarchist historian, George Woodcock talks about how anarchism is like water running in an underground stream, it’s always right there under the surface and at certain points it finds little spots to burst through the ground. It has spurts of action and then it returns to the source. I suppose I had that in my head, this idea of saturation and drowning at times, and damp and discomfort and slipperiness at others and this idea comes up throughout the book.
Without going too heavy handed on the water stuff, it definitely feels like the characters were always there and you tapped into them. Like you found a water source and tapped in a faucet. They have always existed, and you just found them and let them flow out like water.
That’s exactly what I wanted to do.
You made them exist! And they all make each other exist and then we let them exist more by reading them!
We want to know them and they want to be known. That’s ultimately what it is all about.
All of the characters in that bar just so desperately want to be known. They all make each other exist. They all constitute one another.
If Greasepaint can be read as a song the characters are all singing together then it has been successful as an anarchist novel based on collective resonance. A novel not built on a central tenet but an indivisible anarchist uncentering of butchness resounding inside of Yiddish.
Thank you, Hannah. I really loved Greasepaint and I can’t wait for other people to love it too.
Hannah Levene lives in Norfolk, UK. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University, focusing on the composition of new butch literature.
