September 30, 2022 The Review’s Review Nancy Lemann Recommends The Palace Papers and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises By Nancy Lemann Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In my hometown of New Orleans, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, certain men I know go periodically to a Catholic retreat up the river. They go there to repent. Probably they contemplate goodness. And goodness is a lot more interesting than it sounds. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are used as the format for these pursuits. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a womanizer, purportedly—like a lot of the saints. So probably he wanted to repent, too. My friends growing up in New Orleans were all Catholic girls, and I’ve often wondered about their Catholic qualities. They seem to have less vinegar in their veins than Jewish girls (like me). It fascinates me to delineate the character traits informed by their religion. I’m drawn to its organized tenets. I’d read the Catholic catechism just for kicks. But you don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. They are a set of prayers and practices divided into tantalizing rubrics such as Three Classes of Men, Three Kinds of Humility, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, Daily Examination of Conscience, etc. Their goals are constructive: to overcome disordered inclinations; to seek indifference and humility; to elicit courage, discipline, and perseverance. Just take Jesus out of it and there you go. I took Jesus out of all those phrases, which would otherwise include the strange concept that you’re doing all this for his sake—rather than for your own sake, just to be more worthy. I don’t know why you need Jesus to aspire to this quest. So it’s not like I’m some sort of religious maniac. The Spiritual Exercises can get a little weird, though they still speak to me: you’re supposed to ask for shame and confusion. So if you feel shame and confusion, don’t worry, you’re on the right track! Because it’s about remorse—when you know you are bad, it is good. It is half the battle won. I also revel in The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, with its effortless intelligence and command of a wide array of royal facts and concepts, even when at the end Brown suddenly descends into bathos about Queen Elizabeth, as people sometimes tend to do. But I read that book before the queen’s death, so I must now add prescience to Brown’s powers of discernment—the emotional conclusion, the sudden eulogy—though I guess you didn’t have to be a genius to realize the queen was on her last legs. She seemed immortal, though. Like one’s mother, sort of. A few days before she died, I had bought the latest issue of Tatler, which was entirely devoted to the queen, with quaint, sepia-tinted photos telling her life story, etc. I kept thinking, Why did I buy this, and/or, Do I have to keep reading this. But something kept me from throwing it away, for which, afterward, I was glad. Nancy Lemann is the author of “Diary of Remorse,” published in issue no. 241 of the Review.
September 29, 2022 First Person Fairy Tale By Darryl Pinckney “My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats.” Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand, 1953. Licensed under CC0 2.0. When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered. My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper. I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks. My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. As I was tiring of Twain’s lookalike boys and their protector, Miles Hendon, I found in the encyclopedia a black-and-white illustration of a painting of two princes in dark clothes. They had light long hair and looked scared. Princes were unlucky. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. I longed to be unlucky. The two brothers were in a place with a dark staircase called the Tower of London. And, yes, the L volume of our encyclopedia set had so much on London, headed by a drawing of really old London dominated by “S. Pauwls Church.” I studied the narrow houses packed around it. My father couldn’t tell me for sure what “eel ships” were, but they were the largest vessels on the river in the drawing. So that’s where my nursery rhyme jumble of “all fall down” came from. (When did I come across the drawing that had the Globe Theatre marked in it and London Bridge full of houses over the “Thames fluuius”? Much later, when Shakespeare’s history plays were still way over my head.) Read More
September 28, 2022 On Language Deep Emotion, Plain Speech: Camus’s The Plague By Laura Marris Mur de la Peste, Lagnes. Photograph by Marianne Casamance, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. “I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head,” he says, “and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.” Read More
September 27, 2022 On Painting Why Tights and No Knickers? By Sophie Haigney Danielle Orchard, Lint, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. The women in Danielle Orchard’s paintings are usually undressed, or only partially clothed. They might be smoking a cigarette in the bath, or staring at themselves in a mirror, or eating from a bowl of popcorn in bed. Orchard’s settings are often mundane—a bedroom, a boudoir, a kitchen—but these environments are striking in their angularity and irregular perspectives, the paintings’ compositions at once calling to mind the art historical tradition of the female nude and unsettling it. Her painting Lint graces the cover of the Fall issue of the Review and depicts a woman in stockings and no knickers. We talked about Balthus, working with life models, outsize objects, how she made Lint, and the notable absence of pubic hair from the painting. INTERVIEWER When did you start gravitating toward the female nude? ORCHARD The painting program I was in at Indiana University was fairly traditional and very observation-based, and the nude was a learning tool and a formal device: a way to develop the ability to depict volume and line. When I arrived at Hunter College in New York for graduate school, I didn’t want to abandon the nude, but I started to wonder, Who are these women? What is this uncanniness to their nudity? And who am I, as a painter, in this setting? I realized that the nudes I was painting were amalgams of my own experiences, but they were also deeply familiar images from art history. I was identifying with these characters and thinking about how their bodies might mirror my own, or how I might be unintentionally mirroring them. And so I started building a visual language with the female nude at the center. Read More
September 26, 2022 Bulletin “That Little Click in the Mind”: Vijay Seshadri Reflects on his Tenure as the Review’s Poetry Editor By Vijay Seshadri Photo by Lisa Pines. This fall marks a transition on our editorial team, as Vijay Seshadri is bidding the Review farewell—at least as our poetry editor, a role he has occupied since 2019. He will be greatly missed. With our forthcoming Winter issue, we will welcome to the role Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, a professor at the University of Chicago who has served as a guest editor of Poetry magazine and is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Underworld Lit. We are deeply grateful to Vijay for introducing us to the work of so many remarkable poets over the last few years, and for being a marvelous colleague and a true friend to the Review. The worst thing about choosing poems for The Paris Review is having to say no. The magazine receives many submissions, and many of those include strong poems that deserve to be in its pages but can’t be accommodated. Turning down poems is probably even worse for a poetry editor who is also a practicing poet and knows how being turned down feels. Guilt, misgivings, second-guessing, paralysis about naysaying, and avoidant behavior are the by-products of the process. And they should be. As a writer, if you don’t identify with the writers who are sending you work, you’re probably hardening yourself against yourself. Other than that, being The Paris Review’s poetry editor for the past thirteen issues has been a terrific experience. Looking back over the more than sixty years since I washed up on American shores, I’ve come to recognize how much literature was the means by which I socialized myself into this country and its civilization. Choosing poems for the magazine and mulling over the choices I made gave me a chance to make that socialization concrete in my mind. I was a descriptive rather than a prescriptive editor, largely because that unusual process of socialization had left me with a vivid sense of the imagined republic of American letters. At least as an editor, I saw my obligations as being almost as much civic as they were aesthetic, requiring me to acknowledge the entire republic rather than stake out a claim in one of its territories. I honored, I think, the multiplicity of American poetry (including translations into American English)—which is easy to do, because there is excellent work across the range of American literary allegiances. There has been something deeply satisfying about engaging with this country as an editor. I was most gratified when I chose poems by poets whom I felt were unfairly neglected or underappreciated. I had the chance to publish long poems, which have a harder time finding homes. I had the chance to experience over and over that little click in the mind, with its attendant rush of endorphins—very much like the click in the mind that comes from finishing a piece of writing you like—on coming across a poem that is undeniable. Maybe my only regret is that I came to the job too late to do full justice to my experience of the poetry of my time, and to some of my deepest enthusiasms. Very early on in my tenure, for example, I wrote to Allen Grossman’s widow, Judith, begging for unpublished Grossman poems. She told me there were none. That was a bitter moment. On the flip side, though, early on I also wrote to Kamau Brathwaite asking for work. The last poem he published before his death was in the pages of The Paris Review. I’ve worked with two excellent editors: Emily Nemens, who hired me, and Emily Stokes, who kept me on after she took the reins. The magazine’s vigilant staff and interns have made the mechanics frictionless, and have saved me from some serious rookie publishing errors. I’m grateful to the magazine itself, an enduring and central force in American culture. And I’m particularly glad that this goodbye letter gives me a chance to express my deep gratitude to Richard Howard, protean and titanic. The first poem I submitted to The Paris Review, in the mid-nineties, when I was about to publish my first book, was a long poem called “Lifeline.” At that time, the magazine had a long-poem prize, named after one of its former publishers, Bernard F. Conners. Richard gave me the prize for my poem, and he and the magazine arranged a reading at what was then the brand-new Barnes & Noble on Union Square for me and a writer who had contributed fiction to a recent issue, from a novel she was working on. That writer was Susan Sontag. It’s hard to convey, a quarter-century later, the enormous cultural presence and authority that Susan Sontag—and, for that matter, Richard and George Plimpton—had in the New York of the nineties. It was breathtaking to stand for half an hour in front of the eminence they had created, facing the huge crowd that had come out for the reading. Looking back to that event and then along the narrative arc that led to my sitting in the chair Richard once occupied, I get another of those clicks in the mind. Vijay Seshadri is the author of five books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections, and a professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
September 23, 2022 In Memoriam In Remembrance of John Train, 1926–2022 By The Paris Review A page from “How to Name Your Baby,” in issue no. 66. John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.” Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page list of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an appreciation of “How to Name Your Baby” online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer recall, with singularly dry humor: One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, “Do not put anything in this box.” By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else. From the Chelsea office, the staff of the Review are thinking of Train, his legacy and “In-box,” his family and friends. He will be missed.