November 28, 2017 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls By Linda Simon Photo courtesy Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs division). In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls. Read More
November 27, 2017 Arts & Culture The Original Single Lady By Joanna Scutts On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment, preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first book. The following day, the New York Times would sound a note that would soon become familiar, calling it “amusing, sensible, worldly wise and very practical”—not gushing words, perhaps, but perfectly suited to both the book and its author, a plain, good-humored magazine editor in her midforties, who would soon be America’s most famous “bachelor girl.” But this description won’t quite do, still less the sour-sounding “spinster.” The best word for who and what she was is the one she coined herself: “Live-Aloner.” It explains her by the choices she made, not the husband she happened to lack. It was a status that depended on equal parts knowledge, pluck, willpower, and self-indulgence—all of which she would share with readers in her book: the bluntly titled, wildly popular self-help manual Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. For a celebratory occasion like this Saturday night, a single lady needed rituals. First came a long soak in the bathtub, and with it the habitual prayer of thanks that she wasn’t at that moment being jostled onto a train at Grand Central Station by commuters bound for the suburbs. After the bath came whatever lotions and perfumes she most loved, whether they were gifts from admirers or treats she’d bought herself. Then, wrapped in a summer-weight negligee (single women ought to own at least two, to be changed with the seasons), she might pour a glass of sherry or shake up a cocktail from the small stash of liquor she kept on a pantry shelf—something her teetotal parents would never have done, but which was now not only acceptable but a marker of a single woman’s sophistication. With glass in hand, she could apply her makeup—another formerly scandalous practice, now perfectly commonplace—and choose what to wear for her evening out. Read More
November 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Black Friday, the Poem By Sadie Stein In honor of Black Friday, we bring you a poem and also deals. Everything in our store (except subscriptions and prints) is ten percent off with the code “NOVEMBER.” Who do you know who might like a Paris Review T-Shirt (or a baby-sized onesie) for Christmas? “The New York Gold Room on ‘Black Friday,’ September 24, 1869.” —E. Benjamin Andrews 1895 While most of us know Black Friday as the nightmarish commerce-fest following Thanksgiving—a term coined in Philadelphia in 1961—in fact the nom de guerre dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1869, the robber barons Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, resulting in financial crisis and scandal. E. C. Stedman, a poet and broker(!), wrote the following: One Hundred and Sixty! Can’t be true! What will the bears-at-forty do? How will the merchants pay their dues? How will the country stand the news? What’ll the banks—but listen! hold! In screwing up the price of gold To that dangerous, last, particular peg, They had killed their Goose with the Golden Egg! Read More >>
November 22, 2017 Arts & Culture On “Oh! Susanna” By Anthony Madrid Regarding “Oh! Susanna,” there is little point in discussing the verses nobody knows. Let us confine ourselves to the verses everybody knows: Well, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee I’m gwine to Louisiana · my true love for to see It rained all night, the day I left the weather, it was dry the sun so hot, I froze to death Susanna, don’t you cry Oh! Susanna! · oh, don’t you cry for me I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee The piece is not, as I assumed all my life, an anonymous folk song. It was written by Stephen Foster in 1847, published in 1848. He also wrote “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”—and pretty much every other song ever used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture What Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist? By Taylor Plimpton Armed women in one of the main squares in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. Take, for instance, his claim that during his time serving as a reporter and war correspondent, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. One might expect Kapuscinski to have a particularly informed response to the question that seems to be on so many people’s minds these days: What, if any, is the social or political responsibility of the artist? Or, to put it another way: Should writers be writing for a cause? Penned thirty-five years ago, Shah of Shahs is Kapuscinski’s retelling of the most notorious revolution that he ever experienced firsthand—the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The book is a brilliant, nuanced portrait of a country and its corrupt leader in the tumultuous days leading up to and following his removal from power. Yet, upon close examination of the text, it seems that the author’s allegiance isn’t to any political party or ideology or cause—he is as harsh a critic of the powers that toppled the Shah as he is of the Shah himself. Instead, his allegiance is simply to art, and to the truth. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture “Girl Poisoner Moron,” or Why Was Everyone So Bad at Murder? By Anne Diebel Women from Essipoff’s list: Mary Baker Eddy, Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, and Ma Barker. In 1938, Marie Armstrong Essipoff, a journalist, editor, and memoirist, was helping Theodore Dreiser research murders committed by women. She had been collecting newspaper clippings on “misspent lives,” and she sent a letter to Dreiser highlighting a few she pulled from her files in a “hasty survey” she’d done that morning after being woken at the “crack of dawn,” meaning ten thirty A.M. “Skeletons, gobs of flesh, knives, etc. etc. furnished on request,” she added. Essipoff concluded the letter by inviting Dreiser out to Great Neck, New York, where she lived with her husband, Dmitry—“who is, after ten years, still the most delightful man I know.” Six years earlier, Essipoff had published a memoir about her ten-year marriage to the writer Ben Hecht, brilliantly titled My First Husband, by His First Wife. Their union involved many literary parties, some shocking theater productions, and an experiment in nonmonogamy. (Essipoff granted Hecht two nights a week with his mistress, who didn’t “believe in marriage” yet soon became his second wife.) After their divorce, Essipoff became the first editor of the Chicagoan, a short-lived literary magazine modeled on The New Yorker, before moving to New York. Essipoff told Dreiser she was planning “off and on” to write these cases “into mysteries myself someday,” though she noted that this did not preclude his using them. If the fifteen murderesses Essipoff listed are any indication, average people used to be pretty bad at premeditated murder: overly reliant on poison and sloppy about hiding their tracks. And Essipoff delighted in their macabre ineptitude. Read More