NOTHING COMES EASY
Transcription & The Void in Andy Warhol’s Factory

Published in Issue 002 of The Whitney Review of New Writing

Everyone knows Edie Sedgwick’s most striking feature was her eyes. For the runner-up, though, I’d like to propose a dark-horse candidate; never mind the legs ~ her voice. Flitty & lyric, dancing through octaves the way Marilyn’s did & Lana’s does, her voice remained when her beauty left, rising through her body like the winding of the wheel of a music box, laughter a girlish ripple: the dimples on her cheeks transfigured into sound. 

She had a peculiar manner of speaking, too, sourced from the speed, perhaps; it pushed her up against the edge of herself, rendered her whole being a quivering mass of expression. Hummingbird hands, eyes a wind-blown lake, she spoke from a place of such vibratory immediacy that, to her brother Jonathan, it seemed she pushed past the present, into the future. She could sense what he was going to say before he said it, he said; it freaked him out, but he envied it. I wanted to learn it, he said. To be in the now, like Christ in the Mount Olive speech. Then to go to England, where sentences are prim, measured, & just blow their minds, he said.

Edie’s energy & the words it summoned frightened the Sedgwick family, but it put out a signal that was received in New York: a city constructed by speech, in every sense. In 1965, Edie & her friends ~ legendary talkers, one & all ~ were open channels. The gusts of wind that swept through them defined the zeitgeist, stamping them as its products, while under Andy Warhol’s watchful eye at the Factory, product after product emerged. 

One such product ~ often sidelined amid the dozens of art films Andy created between 1963 & 1975 ~ is a: A Novel, published by Grove Press in 1968. Essentially a slow film in text, the book is an exact transcription of audiotapes recorded in & around the Factory between 1965 & 1967. Edie is one of its stars, though it centers on Ondine, a whimsical, savage personality dedicated to speed, men, & Maria Callas, aptly described by the poet Robert Mazzocco in 1969 as an ‘East Village prima donna.’ Ondine, like Edie, is entirely uninhibited, a quality that I think intrigued first-time novelist Nicole Flattery about the Factory milieu, as the Irish author’s tone often feels marked by restraint. Nothing Special, which she released this past summer, tells the story of a’s production from the imagined perspective of its real-life transcribers: two high-school girls, unnamed in a’s acknowledgements & written in Nothing Special as Shelley & Mae. Every day, spirited Shelley & blasé Mae situate themselves before typewriters in a corner of the Factory, backs turned from the action, toward a ‘scrap of sky,’ & they type.

Despite Mae’s sullen nature, both she & Shelley light up before the keys, fiercely devoted to the project. They believe themselves the most important artists in New York. This is sometimes cast as pathetic ~ an affect Flattery is somewhat irritatingly preoccupied with exploring ~ yet other times, crucially, it’s cast as true. Shelley’s face, typing, is beatific. As if she were hearing voices sent from Heaven. At times, the words contort her, her long face suddenly cast with an expression of tenderness, a look of indignation, all expertly played out as if she was a silent movie actress. Mae feels it too. As she transcribes Ondine, she muses, I was more like an actor playing him than someone transcribing him. Yet her goals are loftier than merely acting, as she tells Shelley on the subway ride home from a party: I don’t want to be an actress, as you know, she says. She salutes the sky. Somebody has to do the typing. They both start cracking up, elated. 

The typing did damage. At dinner, Mae’s de facto stepfather notices her hands, red, cut & worn. Headphones off, the horns of the city tear into her newly sensitized ears. She begins to accept that it will take her a few hours to return to reality each evening. Yet, in a way, all of that barely matters. What animates her ~ what continues to animate her, through the difficulty, through the pain ~ is belief. When Shelley wavers, Mae does not. I still believed in it, she tells us. I couldn’t have kept doing it if I didn’t. Her belief, it turns out, is total: You couldn’t persuade me it wasn’t worth something. 

Belief, I find, is central to the ability to understand Andy Warhol’s Factory. When Edie lost it, she lost it, & she died within six years. She was looking for something, she said, over & over, & what Andy had to offer was nothing. This has been said in a pejorative sense ~ in a particularly cutting comment recorded in Jean Stein’s brilliant Edie: American Girl, an oral history of Edie’s life released in 1982, Truman Capote compares Andy to a deaf-mute, empty. It’s been said, too, of his directing style: He simply turned on the camera. Andy said he wanted his work to mean nothing, to make no choices in it. He wanted his art to be an open channel. There’s an absence here: Where other directors direct, Andy simply stood back ~ a lifelong Catholic, preferring to let another being’s creation unfurl. 

Many don’t ‘get’ it. I want to tell them, there’s nothing to get. I want to tell them, don’t think of nothing in the negative. What if, here, it isn’t a lack, but the presence of the void? What if the void prompts the search, ever-present, ever-galvanizing? What if it’s the source from which life flows? Flattery’s epigraph in Nothing Special is a quote from Ondine: You may think I’m not searching, & He — Drella — may think I’m not searching, but I’m searching. Which one of us, who isn’t searching, for God? 

To encapsulate a time, I think ~ as Ondine & Edie & Andy & the typists did, as Jean Stein did ~ is an act of worship. The German word zeitgeist marries spirit & time ~ & I, personally, don’t think such a thing emanates from us. I think time is God’s medium, not ours. When Edie & Ondine opened themselves up, readied themselves for nothing but whatever came, they made themselves servants to the zeitgeist. It flowed through them. If Andy created anything through his films, it was as much blankness as possible, so that spirit could come through. If what he’s offering is nothing, it’s a nothing whose charge is accessible through belief. A shiny, perfect nothing, a holy nothing ~ a sweet nothing, if you will. Though Andy’s world is undoubtedly emblematic of the Fall, where a nonbeliever would shrug, a believer can sense its aims of divinity. Access its reverie.

Flattery believes. She feels it. She’s at her most enlivening when describing the moments that everything falls into place, that the channel is fully open & whatever ~ time, spirit ~ is coming through. The party was at a gallery opening in the West Village, she writes. Occasionally, a delicately beautiful face appeared out of the darkness, like a dream. Everyone danced energetically like planets moving around the sun. I was scrambling to relearn everything I knew about people. Over the course of the four preceding pages, she’d described four things as nothing: the content of the tapes she transcribes; the experience of rapture; her own existence; & Andy Warhol’s. Even the title, one I thought disappointingly mundane at first, suggests the deeper themes at work. I’d read Nothing Special & thought, oh. Nothing special. But, as it turns out, Flattery took that phrase from Warhol, who styled it as The Nothing Special, & envisioned it as a talk show ~ about, an Atlantic writer writes, well, nothing in particular. 

Nothing in particular, also, is the heart of a: A Novel. Conversation flies from topic to topic, landing, skidding, taking off again. Reading it with pencil in hand this summer, I wrote some of the topics on the pages’ headers: Movies, money. Gossip. Drugs. Opera. Opera cont’d. Joining Edie & Ondine were characters like Dorothy Dean (witty, acerbic, black, an early dissident in the emerging cult of identity politics), Brigid ‘the Duchess’ Berlin (‘My mother wanted me to become a slim, respectable socialite; instead I became an overweight troublemaker’), & Billy Name, who named a, for Andy, amphetamine, & as an homage to e.e. cummings. He compared the novel to the automatic writing of André Breton, as it was automatic talking. (The book has also been seen as an answer to James Joyce’s Ulysses, though I like the first comparison better.) Name also insisted that Grove Press publish the transcript exactly as the typists handed it to him, errata & all. (This is why a lament in some reviews of Nothing Special ~ that the typists weren’t named in a, boo hoo ~ feels besides the point to me. They were in the book.) 

Many of these characters also appear in Edie: American Girl. Compiled over the course of a decade ~ a heroic expression of belief, devotion ~ this peerless oral history describes not only Edie’s life but the time’s. Reading it, I periodically felt a rush of gratitude, a thrill that this document exists. Conjured by Edie’s absence, the book invokes her presence, which was total. She was once rejected from an official theatrical role because of it; she used so much of herself with every line, Norman Mailer said, that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances. Mailer also notes that she wasn’t disappointed. Everyone knew, after all, that she belonged at Max’s Kansas City, among the throng of voices, open, wild, lost in it. Lostness one of her signatures, exaggerated later on, when, gone from New York, lying in an empty pool, nodding off to footage of her old life in a scene from Ciao! Manhattan, she looks up & moans: Are those really their voices? Her eyes bright, high, unnerved. Or did they come from somewhere else? 

ANDY WARHOL
a: A NOVEL
Grove, 1968
451 pages

NICOLE FLATTERY
NOTHING SPECIAL
Bloomsbury, 2023
240 pages

JEAN STEIN
EDIE: AMERICAN GIRL
Knopf, 1982
455 pages