January 9, 2018 Redux Redux: Amos Oz, May Swenson, Gerard Kornelis van het Reve By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, to soothe your cabin fever, we bring you Amos Oz’s Art of Fiction interview from our Fall 1996 issue, Gerard Kornelis van het Reve’s short story “The Winter,” and May Swenson’s poem “From a Daybook.” Amos Oz, The Art of Fiction No. 148 Issue no. 140 (Fall 1996) INTERVIEWER Does it ever snow in the desert? OZ Oh yes, every two or three years. And then you should see the expression on the faces of the camels crossing the desert! That is when I understand the real meaning of the word bewilderment! But even without snow, it is bitterly cold in winter, a savage place at dawn, when stormy winds seem determined to sweep away the whole town into the desert. Read More
January 9, 2018 History The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain By Gary Scharnhorst Lamano Studios Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.” In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly in extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell … the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. Howells replied skeptically, “Even you won’t tell the black heart’s-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day.” Read More
January 9, 2018 Stolen An Inspired Theft By Ann Beattie Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our series Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Long, long ago, in the faraway kingdom of Virginia, a tall, somewhat-handsome man came to town. He had a rather well-known art gallery for a time in New York City, though in those days the word gallerist had not yet been invented, so he was just thought of by name. This man had come with his daughter, an equestrian, to visit several artists who showed at his gallery. This was a time so distant that Banksy, while certainly more than a gleam in his father’s eye, was not yet a star. Read More