May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y By Chris Kraus Mary McCarthy “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy’s reading, in November 1963, from her novel The Group. Mary McCarthy took the stage of the 92nd Street Y to thunderous applause on a brisk Sunday in November 1963. She was fifty-one and wearing an elegant white dress. “One thing that gave me the courage to go on with this book, which I was working on since 1952, was reading the first chapter of it out loud here,” she said before she began. “And the audience liked it. And I took it up again after this reading I gave that night, for good or ill. So. Uh … I’m assuming that, uh, most people here have read this book, and I don’t have to explain who the characters are, or what happened before. Is that true? No?” The audience laughs. “Is somebody kidding?” Read More
May 12, 2017 Arts & Culture The Kaleidoscopic Flicker By Paula Mejia On Jean Stein’s greatest legacy, the narrative oral history. From the first-edition jacket of Edie. Edie Sedgwick was home for the holidays in California, behind the wheel of a fast car, when she barreled through a flashing red light on New Year’s Eve, 1964. G. J. Barker-Benfield, a friend, was sitting in the passenger seat; his head went through the windshield. He remembers the dumbfounded TV reports of the wreck that totaled Edie’s car: “How did two people step out of this car alive?” Others weren’t so lucky. Eerily, Edie’s brother Bobby had crashed his motorcycle around the same time that night, and he died twelve days later. Barker-Benfield had to get twenty-two stitches, while Edie emerged from the crash with only a broken knee. Not long afterward, Geoffrey Gates ran into Edie at the former midtown Manhattan nightclub Ondine. It was early January. Edie flitted through the party, doing the twist and wearing a cast stretching from her hip to her toe. “The smile was wild … manic,” Gates remembered. “She kept getting up and dancing; one leg sheer white with only a couple of signatures on it just rooted to one spot on the floor, and the rest of her body spinning around the cast as if she were an acrobat. She still had a girl’s finishing-school appearance, but her face and actions showed that something else was coming up very fast.” Read More
May 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Some Sort of Grace By Moira Donegan Two films about queer love frame grief as both intimate and political. Kris Kovick, in a photo distributed with Silas Howard’s What I Love About Dying. When the photographer Peter Hujar died, in November 1987, David Wojnarowicz filmed his dead body lying in the hospital bed. Hujar had grown thin from AIDS: his broad, boyish cheekbones were sunken and covered in an ashy beard, and his clavicle pressed against the limp fabric of the hospital gown. Wojnarowicz panned his camera over the body only seconds after Hujar died, and in the footage, his face still bears the traces of life: his eyes are half closed, but his mouth hangs open, as if it’s about to groan. There’s a fragility to the images of Hujar’s body. The hand resting on the sheet seems strangely narrow; the skin is papery and impossibly brittle, like half-melted ice. Wojnarowicz, a multimedia artist whose autobiographical, intensely intimate work aroused admiration and provoked right-wing censorship during his lifetime, had known he wanted to make a film about Hujar’s death. But he didn’t work on the movie at all before the event; the Super 8 camera only came out after the curtain was drawn back around Hujar’s body in the bed. In another five years, Wojnarowicz himself would die of AIDS, but not before creating some of his most arresting work, much of it conceived in response to the loss of Hujar. Even so, his film was never completed. What survives is a four-minute black-and-white reel, the footage of Hujar’s body intercut with swimming beluga whales at the Coney Island Aquarium—an unexpected juxtaposition, but one that Wojnarowicz felt was fated. In the days after Hujar’s death, he was obsessed with capturing the whales, finally managing to sneak in his Super 8. Grief has a way of provoking strange impulses. In his diaries, Wojnarowicz said that the light of the whales’ twirling white hides against the darkness of the water was one of the most beautiful images he could imagine. Read More
May 4, 2017 Arts & Culture To Have and Have Not By Robert K. Elder New letters shed light on Hemingway’s unrequited love and early life. Letters from 1918 written to Frances Coates, for whom Hemingway carried a torch. Next to the letters is Hemingway’s high school graduation photo, which Coates kept in her dressing room for years. On a recent afternoon in Boston, Betsy Fermano walked through an exhibition titled “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars” at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Among the artifacts—vintage photos, paintings, and handwritten stories from Hemingway—she spotted a family name in a manuscript on display: Coates. Frances Elizabeth Coates was Fermano’s grandmother and Hemingway’s high-school classmate. He used a version of her name—“Liz Coates”—in his sexually charged 1923 story “Up in Michigan,” and her name resurfaces elsewhere in his work. That’s because Hemingway was infatuated with her. The two briefly dated, though almost no one, until now, knew of their history. For Fermano, sixty-seven, a retired development executive, it wasn’t a surprise: she has ninety-nine-year-old letters from Hemingway that no one outside the family knows about. “This is a really fascinating find,” says Sandra Spanier, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. “To find early letters like that—that’s extremely rare. It’s a fresh view of him. It would be of great interest to a future biographer.” Read More
April 25, 2017 Arts & Culture Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star By Emma Garman In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann’s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success. Young authors and tales of youthful experience dominated the market at the time, a craze sparked by Alec Waugh’s autobiographical best seller The Loom of Youth, published in 1917, when he was nineteen. And twenty-six-year-old Lehmann had written a book “of decided quality,” thought Chatto director Harold Raymond, who nevertheless told her that they didn’t expect to make any money. The novel received a few reviews following its publication at the end of April 1927. “This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time,” said The Spectator. “But the story is too sad for popular taste.” Such an assessment was, it seemed, borne out by the less-than-brisk sales. Then a week later, the Sunday Times ran a review by the poet and critic Alfred Noyes, who was an old friend of Lehmann’s father’s, and whose praise was the stuff of debut novelists’ dreams: It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation … The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art. The world took notice, and an overnight literary phenomenon was born. During the summer of 1927, a whirlwind of publicity enveloped Lehmann, to her amazement and mild chagrin. “It’s rather terrifying somehow,” she confided to Raymond, “when a thing you have made yourself, very privately, becomes so very public.” Read More
April 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Jungle Love By Darrell Hartman Why we keep looking for lost jungle cities. An illustration of Colonel Percy Fawcett doing battle with a giant anaconda, from the cover of Exploration Fawcett. Dry, desolate landscapes tend to preserve any evidence of human passage—they cling to artifacts like precious memories. A Tyrolean glacier hugged the 5,300-year-old iceman to its breast. The desert helped the ancient Egyptians launch their earthly vessels into eternity. More recently, Antarctica has joined in. The frozen continent recently coughed up a 104-year-old biscuit left by an expedition of Ernest Shackleton’s—in pristine, “perfectly nutritious” state. The jungle, though, does not take naturally to cultural preservation. The obscuring overgrowth never stops; the landscape digests all. Excavating a 5-year-old site, let alone a 500-year-old one, can be like sifting through a well-advanced compost pile in search of something edible. And yet, we try—especially when inspired by a figure as captivating as Colonel Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was an intrepid British explorer who disappeared in the Brazilian Amazon in 1925, presumably killed by Indians. He’s the subject of a new biopic, The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s 2009 book of the same name. The Amazon’s greatest cover-up, Fawcett believed, was an utterly forgotten civilization named Z. He aimed, in his quasi-invincible, slightly nutty way, to find it. Read More