Nina Simone
A biographer’s fantasy
By Jordan Alexander Stein
Mural by Orel Ruys and Mr. Bonkone, Paris (2022). Photograph by Jordan Alexander Stein.
About a dozen years ago, when I began research for a book about Nina Simone, most of what there was to read were biographies. At least six had been published in English since her death in 2003, plus a couple more in French, all in addition to her own account, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, published in 1991. The biographies proved to be favorable and often honest about the complexities of their subject, yet I stumbled again and again across the limitations of the genre. Biographies traffic in facts, things that can be consciously, explicitly, socially known—which is also to say, shared. But, for the person living a life, it is not, or not only, empirical facts so much as more subjective thoughts and feelings that accumulate into that life. Looking for somewhere else to establish a rapport between what is documented and what is felt, I turned to fantasy.
Fantasy matters because the lives we live, as Adam Phillips once observed, are animated by the lives we don’t. The power of this elegant observation is particularly well demonstrated by fiction, for example in films like Blind Chance or Sliding Doors, where the whole trajectory of a person’s life and loves hinges on a simple act like catching or missing a train. But off-screen and outside of fiction’s ability to show us two fully realized alternatives in tandem, we are left merely to daydream about the lives we didn’t live. And in such speculative moods, we sometimes cross-examine our experiences to determine which of the inevitable forks in life’s road carry the most weight: the thing we didn’t do, the opportunity that never came, the connection we missed, the better world that wasn’t, the decision we regret, the one that got away––and, above all, the difference it might have made.
The irreducibly subjective aspect of these counter-factual fantasies presents biographers with a significant challenge. While a psychotherapist might be able to help a patient narrate such fantasies, or else bring them forward in the transference dynamic, a biographer instead often works, not with people themselves, but with the miscellany people leave behind. It’s nearly impossible to examine the archives, artifacts, or other remains of someone else’s life and find conclusive evidence of the life they didn’t live. How can an outside observer determine which are the undone things that mattered?
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When I put down the biographies and turned up the volume on Simone’s cover of George Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now,” it was clear immediately that she is expressing so much more than her words literally say. Unmistakably, in these sounds, there is feeling and longing and needing and wanting––evidence of Simone’s sense of a world that is here and about as much evidence as I could hope to get of her sense of a world that isn’t. It does not seem the least bit controversial to imagine that in performing a song, Simone was expressing something from the perspective of a character, the perspective of a life she didn’t live. But it proved more challenging to try to use her performance to capture whatever she may have been fantasizing about in that unlived life.
Though the German word Phantasie means imagination, when Sigmund Freud borrowed the plural, Phantasien, for his own writing, he most often used it to refer to daydreams, or what Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis summarize as “scenes, episodes, romances or fictions which the subject creates and recounts to himself [sic] in the waking state.” In these conscious forms, Freud proposed, fantasy tends to be able to work with, or be worked on by, logical thought. Yet he also made allowance for the possibility that some fantasy could be unconscious, particularly in cases with children and in his late speculative anthropological writing––a possibility that seemed to me especially intriguing.
As I read through the ways various authors had subsequently developed Freud’s theories, I noticed that the idea that fantasy could be unconscious tended to be paired with the assumption that it was expressive––that some amount of fantasy work was happening, as it were, behind most people’s conscious experience, and that from time to time this backstage crew peeked out from behind the curtain. Understood in this way, fantasy could be regarded, in its contents, as true without amounting to a social fact––without, as it were, being true for everyone––and, in its expression, perhaps not factually true though almost invariably honest. Such an understanding of fantasy goes pretty far toward addressing the empirical limits of biography.
How can we know that what appears to be traces of Nina Simone’s fantasy aren’t in fact projections of our own? Certainly, as we wander away from the facts, toward fantasy, things can get subjective.
One of Simone’s most circulated songs, the above-mentioned recording of “My Man’s Gone Now,” from Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967), appears on at least 15 different compilations and reissues. It is iconic in its representation of who she was and what she did. As it happens, this cover is itself an accident, a warm-up or wind-down, spontaneously thrown off during an RCA recording session, captured in one take. Biographer Nadine Cohodas quotes the session producer Danny Davis who praised Simone’s “stamina to deliver with even more intensity and spirit a rare, perfect performance.” Biographer Alan Light calls it “a spare and languid reading,” part of a set “that encompassed blues history.” Both, in other words, succumb to the biographer’s temptation to take the once-off of the perfect performance as what matters. Neither considers that because it can and did happen once, it might have happened many more times, and the part where it didn’t therefore means something too––at the general level of fact that it didn’t, but also in the moment-to-moment choices that, only retrospectively, add up to that general fact. The biographers’ words capture what the performance is for us, but not how the performance felt for Simone. And it’s not their fault, really, so much as what they signed up for. Biography too often requires that facts weigh more than feelings.
In the case of “My Man’s Gone Now,” Simone’s version is not necessarily, in and of itself, a fantasy expression, though I’m suggesting that her act of singing it is one place to look for fantasy’s traces. Singing may also be a better candidate for the evidence of fantasy than writing or other creative acts, at least inasmuch as a performance has a “live” element––something more than words or music, something singular, however maximal or minimal, however spontaneous or rehearsed. This one-of-a-kind-ness that imbues any performance comes from somewhere other than the source material, other than the song as it is written. It’s where the feelings come in. Follow that iteration to fantasy’s door.
© Duke University Press, 2024
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We’re often in the domain of fantasy when we come across an expression that seems true without obviously or actually describing social reality. When Simone covered Judy Collins’s “My Father” on Baltimore (1978), she was very likely aware that she was not singing about her own father. Earlier, at an RCA recording session in 1971, Simone tried to perform the song but interrupted herself on the grounds of nonrecognition. Partway into the second verse, having sung of a father who worked the mines in Ohio and promised the song’s “me” that “we” would someday live in France, Simone stops playing piano and announces, “I don’t want to sing this song. It’s not me. My father always promised me that we would be free, but he did not promise me that we would live in France. [Laughter]” Someone in the recording booth patches through to ask, “How about Brooklyn?” and Simone replies, “No, my father knew nothing about New York, at all. He promised me that we would live in peace, and that, maybe I’ll still get. Okay we’ll have to skip that one.”
More than one boundary seems to strain here: between the performance of a song and the biography of the performer, between “It’s not me” and “he did not.” By 1971, Simone wasn’t speaking to her father, but in this recording she was certainly speaking about him and, to some extent, for him. Michael Boyce Gillespie observes too that whatever boundaries were straining in this 1971 session strain further following J. D. Waymon’s death in the fall of 1972. From then on, he writes, “traces of ‘My Father’ appeared as a part of her own autobiography when reflecting on him. In an article for Jet Magazine that detailed her performance in New York City at Town Hall (3.8.85) where she made her NYC concert debut in 1959 the allusions to the Judy Collins song are evident, ‘My father used to say to me, “One day, I promise you, you will see the world. You’ll go to far distant places…Along the way, you’ll have your joy and you’ll have your pain.” I’ve experienced some of that.’” It’s become difficult to tell who is speaking for whom. But the point isn’t to sort it out.
These slips of position can get psychic work done. They allow what maybe happened to substitute for what maybe didn’t, and vice versa. They allow whatever was present for Simone to be there, to register, even if what’s present for her isn’t anything we who are not her can agree was there. It’s possible to say that Simone jumbled the song’s lyrics with her own experience. But it’s also possible to say that her attraction to the song in the first place was an attraction to what it expressed, even if she didn’t have occasion or, perhaps, any conscious desire yet to express herself in its terms. These possibilities offer opposed explanations, but they may equally be true––and in any case, we have no way to prove whether they are. And so, it is going to be more accurate in the long run to say that the expression is still real, still at some level true, but not for everyone involved, at least not in the same ways.
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How can we know that what appears to be traces of Nina Simone’s fantasy aren’t in fact projections of our own? Certainly, as we wander away from the facts, toward fantasy, things can get subjective. And if we let things get subjective, we might in the end reposition the thing we’re studying so that it sits at an angle that reflects back the good light in which we’d prefer to see ourselves. In so doing, we might distort the thing we’re studying and the knowledge that our study makes about it. We might.
But what’s the actual alternative here? Making knowledge isn’t the same as making truth. We can treat our projections responsibly without pretending––indeed, by not pretending––that responsibly means objectively. The things biographers and other scholars try to know about Nina Simone can never be known perfectly, and can never quite be known in the way she knew them, because we’re the ones trying to do the knowing, because our ways of knowing are ineluctably partial, and because ethical listening requires that we make room for some amount of subjective opacity. To insist otherwise, to insist that we really can know something, participates in its own fantasy––the one where reality brooks no alternative meanings.
At moments, as we study Nina Simone, we may want to nail down what happened and guess about what it might mean, as the biographers do; that’s cool, and there are good reasons to do this. But at other moments, if we’re going to capture the how and not just the words, we should try to listen for the fantasies that don’t become biography’s facts. We should listen for what Hortense Spillers has called “the singer’s attitude toward her material, her audience, and, ultimately, her own ego status in the world as it is interpreted through form.” And by implication: We should listen too for the parts of her unconscious the ego may not know, as it is interpreted through form as well as whatever doesn’t accede to form. Nothing is just about what it adds up to, important as the latter may be. And so our task is in not letting what things add up to blot out the something that is part of the process even if it isn’t apparent in the final equation.
This, as I would like to imagine it, may have been what attracted Simone to recording a cover of a Richie Havens song that begins,
Step out in the night
When you’re lonely
Listening for the sounds
That your ears don’t hear
This, as I would like to understand it, is an ethics of listening.
Adapted from Jordan Alexander Stein, Fantasies of Nina Simone, © Duke University Press, 2024.
Jordan Alexander Stein is professor of English and comparative literature at Fordham University, where he is also affiliated faculty in African and African American Studies. His prior publications include Avidly Reads Theory and When Novels Were Books. He has also talked about Nina Simone and fantasy on the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast.
Further Reading
Bass, Alan. Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros. Stanford University Press, 2000.
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books, 2012.
Cohodas, Nadine. Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone. Pantheon, 2010.
Gillespie, Michael Boyce. “Nina Simone, ‘My Father/Dialog’.” ASAP Journal, April 2, 2020. http://asapjournal.com/nina-simone-my-father-dialog/.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1967. Reprint, Norton, 1973.
Light, Alan. What Happened, Miss Simone? A Biography. Crown Archetype, 2016.
Phillips, Adam. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Picador, 2012.
Scott, Joan Wallach. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773–797.
Segal, Hanna. Dream, Phantasy, and Art. Routledge, 1991.
Simone, Nina, with Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You. 1991. Reprint, Da Capo Press, 2003.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole A. Vance, 73–100. Routledge, 1984.
Stauffer, Jill. Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. Columbia University Press, 2015.
Published February 2025