The Many Lives of Shola Von Reinhold

The Scottish literary talent meshes the historical with the mystical, in her characters and in the everyday.

By Libby Hsieh

Shola von Reinhold exists in her own time—not only in the way she whips through cocktail bars as if she’s perpetually running late with a large silky bow fluttering behind her, but also in the worlds she creates through her fiction. The Glasgow writer’s literary oeuvre is dotted with Virginia Woolf, Gilded Age camp, decadent social circles, and niche histories, spilling over like strands of pearls. Her debut novel "Lote" has been lauded for its skillful reinvention of novelistic structures: a style that allows readers to do the work in their own imaginations, as if Shola were writing 'with' you instead of 'for' you.

In her latest short story, "The Gardener and The Astronomer," written for Beyond Noise, Shola spins characters in an unnamed city: Opal and Sylvie lounge about a riverside café, projecting a brazen glamor despite the critical stares of those around them. The setting is familiar yet distant, painted with peculiar language that feels almost ancient. In Shola’s worlds, alchemy and folklore tangle with modernity.

Shola resists categorization, crafting an identity that is entirely her own. Treating her public persona as if she were a character in one of her novels, her internet footprint is an enigma. A quick search of her name will reveal gossip-like myths—the stuff you might overhear by candlelight. Apparently, she is a socialite born in the 19th century, an auditioner for the Bolshoi Ballet, a divorcee previously wedded to a Monegasque prince, and a harsh critic of capitalism. (That one is indisputably true.) She gives the impression that she could flourish in any time or place whether that be Golden Age Hollywood or Regency era Britain. Shola’s mythical essence is not an untruth nor an effort to evade, but rather what feels the most real about her - she’s a person in-between, who sees the beauty in unfixed things, putting the 'feeling' back into conversations about queerness, Blackness, and the powers that be. And for all we know, she could really be a couple hundred years old.

LH: What was it like going to New York for the first time during your book tour?

SV: Well, in my head, I was moving there. I didn’t manage to move, but I managed [to stay] for three months. I feel like I’ll go back eventually—by hook or by crook. I ended up staying in the Chelsea Hotel, by hook 'and' by crook. When I was supposed to leave, I missed my flight and had no money to get another one. Absurdly, a few days later, I was cast in a film which covered my flight home. It was all very 'ingenue living by her wits in the Big City'—a little 'too' on the nose!

LH: Have you read "Happy Hour" by Marlowe Granados? It’s like what you describe—schemes all the way through.

SV: To make it even stranger, I met and became friends with Marlowe in New York and we spoke about our relation to slipping through nets and living through loopholes, something both our novels engage with. And we also spoke, of course, about Edith Wharton’s "The House of Mirth", which offers up a certain archetype in that vein.

LH: It’s very chameleon-esque. You can be anything and anywhere all at once.

SV: It’s certainly one my favorite things to read about. I listened to the audiobook of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" when I was there, because my phone and laptop broke and I could only get an audiobook going, often too frenetic to read physical books. I’m currently, finally, starting Henry James’s "The Ambassadors"— which Patricia Highsmith used as a model.

LH: When I was trying to find information about you, there was absolutely nothing aside from, “Shola Von Reinhold is a princess born in 1892.”

SV: Good.

LH: When you’re creating these myths about yourself, are you getting closer to the core of who you are? Or is it a way to explore different aspects of yourself?

Are you sure there wasn’t a Shola von Reinhold born in 1892? Either way, not all these things are myths. Some have proliferated entirely without my involvement. In certain places, like Wikipedia, I’m listed as a princess—correct in some senses—and on another site I trained at the Bolshoi Ballet. In a zine someone showed me from Madrid, ‘Shola von Reinhold’ is mentioned as the name of a collective of artists.

LH: Does ethereality feel the most truthful?

SV: The characters in my book have modulating surface aspects: names and other such interfaces. It’s the way they—like many throughout history—have had to move through the world, for safety, for pleasure, for slipping through the net. It’s a protective veil. I give lots of different ages, depending on what I feel at the time. For the past maybe seven years, me and a friend have kept a pact where we decided we’d never tell anyone how old we are. It’s fun giving much older ages to see how far I can push it.

LH: Do you feel like it puts you in a position of power because people can’t place you?

SV: It gets you outside of other people’s heads and that’s very useful for writing. I have an interest in certain—especially trans—figures, who when they died, no one could find their passports or birth certificates. No one knew how old they were.

LH: Just like in your story—the characters are in a time of their own. It feels so out of time, in an alternate world with references to mythology, in a contemporary city that I imagined was New York. Was that intentional?

SV: It’s in between time and in between geographical space—kind of a semi-mythical site as well as a metropolis. I’ve been really interested in writing 'through' and 'in between' time. I’ve long been obsessed with period pieces. But the things I currently want to write about don’t really work in a period piece framework. Originally, for this piece, I was thinking about a heterotopia and this anti-temporal idea came when I was thinking about different sites in history—whether it be a cult in the 1800s or one month in a Scottish village in the ’80s—where it was possible to live a wildly queerer life, even if briefly. I’m interested in trying to line up these instances, holding them against each other to see what overlaps and what doesn’t.

LH: Do you think that sense of timelessness creates freedom for the characters?

SV: It creates the ability to talk about something without naming it— whilst very specifically talking about it. I’m not naming, not because I’m scared of it or because it’s awkward to talk about. I’m not naming it because I want other things to slip in. As soon as you name certain things, it’s harder to describe them.

LH: Without naming it, do you find that transness is embedded in the way that you write?

SV: I think naming transness is immensely important. But with this story, in this ‘out of time’ zone, not naming things was supremely useful. The word 'transgender' doesn’t map onto various forms of what you might call transness in different places and throughout different times. It doesn’t even neatly map onto itself in the last 10 years. Then again, most things don’t.

By SHOLA von REINHOLD

Usually, they only met once or twice a month, but they were here for the second day in a row. Opal had called an emergency meeting. Yesterday in Café Cosmopolitan Glamour, she had told Sylvie how, under the low arch in the green wall, the borough where Opal lived, things had become silent, everyone had gone, she could barely remember people having ever been there. She lived high up overlooking many steeples and rooftops and gables – a sea of slate and stone. Opal had become obsessed with watching as the sun rose over these mock waters which for moments unfroze, began to lap and ripple: waves of stone and flint and slate, which, after the sun had risen, became roof again, and the town for the rest of the day gave way to emptiness. She had little to do, only look over the roofs or down at the wasting arches, the weathered edifices that saw no more weather and think how the swoop and scale of the buildings made a kind of a grievous melody. And Opal entertained the idea – because why else would it feel like this looking out – that the architect or at least somebody who’d had a hand in the shaping of this borough, had been constituted like Opal, in other words an undine, a heraldine, a rebis-soul, and so on, depending on the term of the day, each meaning something not quite the same, and so she went to the dead library and found books about the conception of the borough.

Opal found blueprints reproduced and there in abstract, from the cry of those lines, it was evident that town planner had after all been in some way influenced by rebis-souls: the borough itself was practically a rebis-soul in stone, so Opal photocopied the books and showed them to Sylvie at Café Cosmopolitan Glamour and Sylvie who said oh definitely definitely, I mean look at the lines - so familiar to the brooch I told you about three years ago, but Opal didn’t remember which infuriated Sylvie who refused to speak of the matter ever again and said it was Opal’s fault for not listening, but eventually she made Opal come to her flat where she rifled around for an hour and eventually gave her a brooch and explained that these brooches had been something of a fad when she was too young to know the meaning of them: the tail end of a last wave of a full-blown pash – or something that sounded like ‘pash’ in her language which was something between social fascination, religion, fad and subculture. A full-blown ‘pash’, for elevating people like Opal – the undines, as the popular term was then. A small temple had been uncovered beneath a building, carved out of dark blue stone. It was a temple to some ancient ‘hermaphrodite’ – who resembled the undines of that period in many ways. It issued quite a frenzy throughout the city and beyond. There were innumerable fucked-up aspects of this pash like how the undines were considered by some as vehicles for purification aka lustration and so on, so the town planner, by all accounts not an undine, might have been one of those leaders of the pash and had accidentally rendered some of an undine’s soul into the plan; he had made use of certain motifs in the ornamental grammar given at the back. But also, many of the symbols, not to mention the lines of the plans seemed to refer to an emblem on the brooch.

The brooch was made of two flat bronze diamond panels. On one was a gardener with a branch and on the other panel was an astronomer holding a telescope, with their free hands they reached out of their bronze diamonds to clasp shoddily articulated enamel fingers between which was an eight-pointed star with a flower painted inside but then you realised the star was actually the flower and the flower a star.

Opal didn’t know what it referenced and neither did Sylvie only that it was one of many bits of paraphernalia from the period of the pash. Opal worried that it was actually a bit of old fascist memorabilia like when Sylvie had given her a pair of patterned gloves she had found in the basement when the costume institute was shutting down that turned out to be part of the uniform of a club of Lobbyist Imperialist Wives. But Sylvie was confident about the brooch and made her pin it to her hat.

The next day Opal slept until 2 in the afternoon. She wandered around the devoid borough. The rain drove up a wet smell, a dark green breath, that made the borough seem alive again – an illusion, but one that drove such oddly familiar sensations through Opal that even, perhaps especially, after rain passed, she had to get out of the silent borough, and so went under the green stone wall and wandered the city to a museum where she found herself in front of one of those famous Greek vases depicting intercrural sex – in this case one god or another with his cock between the thighs of a winged figure, maybe another god maybe not.

“Except it’s not Greek,” said a voice.

And Opal turned and saw a man standing there, behind her looking, not at her but at the label below the vase and then, yes, at Opal.
“It’s from here,” and went on to say it was found during the period of the blue temples being dug up, found among those very temples and still concluded to be Greek: something that made its way here in those days, but that this was nonsense, it did look a bit Greek but no, the subject matter was entirely from the same world and life of those temples; and then he was saying something, had she heard correctly? about recreating the scene on the vase.

The man had obscenely bluish veins everywhere. Opal said,

“Excuse me?” and must have looked so confused because this person with gold wire hair and bluish veins and green tinted glasses pointed to the badge on Opal’s hat which Opal had forgotten about.

“You’re not...?”

Opal wondered if this was a bit sinister but decided it was all terribly ravishing like something out of a Genet novel.

He took her to a night-café (open in the middle of the day) called The Gardener and the Astronomer. Above it hung a sign which depicted what was surely a version of symbol on the brooch. Not the same but the same lineage, a faint semiotic branch. Older or younger it was hard to say. Here the gardener and astronomer were not holding hands but locking tools in combat – telescope and trowel making a heraldic escutcheon.

Inside, green mirroring green frosted glass green leather, cosmologically painted ceiling, and a lot of bespectacled men, but also there were several other undines, more than she had ever seen in one place. Unfortunately each was flocked. The man from the museum ordered himself an almost thick, pitch black drink in a long glass and Opal a blue one. He began talking about natural philosophy.

“Are all these men here natural philosophers?” she said, which made the man laugh. But eventually he said,

“Some of them, actually, are philosophers but not all natural philosophy, and some are students and some are more … ”

“And what are you?”

“A natural philosopher.”

“And they are all interested in undines?”

“I despise that term…” said the man. “But yes … you see you’re right there in plain sight in the manuscripts…Androgynes, Alchemical Angels, Hermaphroditus.”

Opal said she had never seen such manuscripts.

“You wouldn’t have. They are new. Newly dug up. Every day another one comes up. I have a few originals in my private collection.”

The man offered to show her.

Upstairs was an attic bedroom with various alchemical instruments and devices. And there were the wings which Opal was supposed to put on like the figure on the vase. The wings were suspended by invisible threads from the rafters and hovered just over the bed. They were in span about eight feet and were also connected to four blue velvet cords that Opal was supposed to operate to make the wings flap. The leather harness through which Opal put her arms and to which the colossal wings were conjoined gave a bit too much of bdsm-out-of-a-packet feel which Opal found annoying because it was more Icarus twink than what she had signed up for: angelic being as seen on the vase and now some manuscripts and which Opal was at least curious about momentarily inhabiting since in some way it was a part of her history ... but maybe she was being a purist. Still it became evident from the clichés the alchemist started pouring he was more interested in sex-out-of-a-packet than anything approximating what she had had in mind. Unless his imagination was so powerful as to...as to upholster these clichés and the leather straps with sufficient finishing details as to render them something else by which point why did Opal need to be there at all and what a pity he had gone to such lengths with the wings but anyway all of this had distracted Opal from the fact that that tracery of obscenely blue veinwork had become more obscenely blue – almost synthetic – showing up beneath the spirals of gold wire like candy floss and before she knew it she could literally taste candyfloss. She jumped away immediately, almost bringing the wings down from the rafter and saw an ethereal blue vapour escape her mouth.

The man said it was his essence, not a euphemism, literally his essence, his pneuma ... he was after all a humorist as well as an alchemist he explained...and said something about cambium being a humour.

Opal interrupted to ask if that was one of the four humours
He sighed and sank in front of an antique crystal ball on his desk which overlooked a philosophical garden. He, sulking (showily), said,

“No it is not one of the four humours it is one of the first humours, the radical humours – innate to the body – a nutritive sap – a liquid semi-ether some would have it – called cambium which nurses the body’s invention of a sweet milk-like concoction called chylous which provides nourishment to the parts of the body that officiate the four humours - one being as you must know, hot sweet blood ... out of blood is prepared another humour called spirits – a most subtle vapour which is also semi-ether – between soul and fluid – the soul conducts the spirits around the body...”

And then he stopped and looked at Opal and said,

“Now given that the soul conducts the spirits but the spirits need the much more earthly but still semi-etherious chylous to start with would you say the body operates on the principle of materialism or idealism?”

Opal didn’t know and the man looked extremely disappointed.

Never mind, all you need to know is that out of the spirits is then exuded something called pneuma – a kind of more refined spirit-vapour and it is that which you just inhaled – it is that which the alchemical angel – the hermaphrodite – the undine as you put it – is said to call forth from the blood ... because the offices of the humours are influenced by celestial as well as ...

Opal had stopped listening, she had remembered something Sylvie had told them about fucking with dead knowledge systems.