Let’s call it writing for its own sake. Not only because it is a book of poetry—my first form, my first love, both text and subtext of so many youthful notebooks of secret writing—but also because of the circumstance of its release. No one will ever be able to buy this book, or to review it. No one will ever recommend it to a friend. Such mechanisms are rendered moot, inoperable, by the very nature of its creation. For me, this has become almost entirely the point. To be freed from the apparatus, the machinery of publication: It represents a liberation. It brings me back to a condition of…innocence is not the word I want, but maybe artlessness. It recalls the ways I wrote when I was young. It reminds me that before I ever thought about engaging with a reader, I had to write first for an audience of one. To explore, of course, the febrile nature of the language, as well as my relationship to it. But also, equally essential, to activate a conversation with myself.
Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America’s most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman’s wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine.
As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she’d get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn’t an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself?
I simply looked out the window with a natural, recurring, reflexive interest at the field where the cows liked to stand and occasionally walk, very rarely run, and when something I saw struck me, I made a note of it. Was it communication before it was published?
So, don’t let the bright summer colours confuse you; this is a book about friendships, grief and the reality of long-term relationships. You’ll tear through it, but you’ll still have to pause from time to time to have a bit of a cry.
Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It’s a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the “real” world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it’s hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
Whether you believe in ghosts or you scoff at the idea of a spirit world, this novel will satisfy your cravings with lots of hair-raising moments and one or two moderately-explicit eyebrow-raisers, along with an intriguing back-story that includes a bit of mystery. But it’s not all boo-who: author Clarence A. Haynes injects enough excitement and humor to keep even the most sober-minded reader entranced with a plot that’s twisty fun.