June 27, 2018 Correspondence An Editorial Exchange: Donald Hall and George Plimpton By Donald Hall George Plimpton and Donald Hall. Donald Hall served as The Paris Review’s first poetry editor from 1953 to 1961. His vast knowledge of contemporary poetry and demand for excellence helped set the Review’s poetry standards high from the beginning. In this undated letter, which is an ars poetica of sorts, he argues with our founding editor George Plimpton about several Beat poets, what makes a poem good or “fake,” and the importance of poetic history. The Paris Review 2 Columbus Circle New York 19, N. Y. Circle 7-2278 8 Rue Garancière Paris 6, France DANton-04-50 Dear George, You are quite unlike anything else on the planet. Open up Vogue, and there is George among the yachts at Newport. Open up my Paris Review envelope, and there is George among Corso, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Dear Podhoretz would probably say that it follows, but I am not so sure. I believe in the sincerity of most of these people. I happen to agree with what most of them feel about America, and I expect that when the war comes Ginsberg and I will be in the same concentration camp. (Forgive me, but I don’t think you’ll be there; it gives me, true or not, some feeling of authority.) But sincerity is easy; it means that you’ll say something and stick to it, even to the point of suffering for it; art isn’t easy, and sincerity never helped anybody to be a great artist. Wait; maybe it helped, but let me say this: the ratio of sincere people to even merely good poems is about a hundred million to one. A sincere person can write a fake poem because he lacks the skill or intelligence or the intense self-knowledge which is necessary; because he is not an artist. Read More
May 7, 2018 Correspondence Tchaikovsky’s Cure for All That Ails (the Stomach) By Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov, Pjotr I. Tschaikowski (detail), 1893, oil on canvas. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, at age fifty-three, after having been discovered by his younger brother, Modest, in bed and suffering from diarrhea and abdominal pains. He had taken cod liver oil in an attempt to ease his stomach. In this letter, recently translated into English for The Tchaikovsky Papers: Unlocking the Family Archive, Tchaikovsky offers Modest his rules for healthy living. TO MODEST ILICH TCHAIKOVSKY [After 1877] [missing text] Remarkably enough, the symptoms you have described to me are the very ones I’ve been experiencing myself recently. Irregular heartbeats, attacks of nerves, depression, heaviness in the chest area, shortness of breath, the urge to cough up whatever it is that’s causing this pressure on my chest. I’ve been experiencing all these symptoms for some time now. The only difference is that you have been seeing doctors, but as for me I simply can’t stand them and all that [missing text] I should tell you that the real culprit in all this is the intolerable stomach which, in the case of some nervous systems like ours is incredibly erratic and capricious in doing its job. If you would like to be rid of your ailment once and for all without any help from doctors, then take the following measures. Read More
September 12, 2017 Correspondence A Friend with a Heart-Shaped Leaf By Patience Gray Courtesy of Nicolas Gray. Patience Gray, the most important food writer you’ve never heard of, spent more than thirty years living in a remote corner of Southern Italy—without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone. Her 1986 cookbook, Honey from a Weed, is one of the most beloved of the twentieth century, yet little was known of her reclusive life until now. This illustrated letter, sent by Gray from Carrara, Italy, in 1966, is excerpted from Adam Federman’s new biography, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray and is reprinted with permission from the publisher, Chelsea Green. As Federman writes in the introduction, Although she enjoyed the attention, Patience was rather guarded about her own life. This applied not only to visiting journalists and food writers but to friends and family as well. There was an “aura of secrecy about her,” a sense that her past was somehow shuttered, which Patience did little to dispel. “Patience loved secrets, secret rooms, dark corners, mysteries and so on,” her friend Ulrik Voswinckel recalled. This aura of secrecy was enhanced by her interest in astrology, mysticism, and her vast folkloric knowledge of edible plants and mushrooms. She shared her workspace in Puglia—to which others were rarely admitted—with a large black snake and often ruminated on the symbolic meaning of the scorpion, which happened to be Patience’s astrological sign. She was born on Halloween. It is perhaps not surprising then that several people, including Paul Levy in his profile for the Observer and the Wall Street Journal, described Patience as a modern-day witch.
August 24, 2017 Correspondence Malcolm Cowley Learns to Love the Bomb By Malcolm Cowley Malcolm Cowley. From a 1945 letter from Malcolm Cowley, who was born on this day in 1898, to literary theorist Kenneth Burke. R.F.D Gaylordsville, Connecticut August 24, 1945 {NL} Dear Kenneth: It’s my birthday and a slow cold rain is falling and in general it’s a good day to write a letter, except I haven’t much to say. The atom bomb. We can’t keep it out of our minds. It gets worse as time goes on and we learn more about its effects. The Japanese say, of course they may be lying, as today’s radio announcer piously suggests, but then again they may be telling the truth, and they say that people in the Hiroshima area continue to die from radioactivity, they lose their red corpuscles and peg out—and the Japanese say they can’t afford to send their doctors to Hiroshima for fear of losing them too—and they say that people just a little burned by the bomb found the burns growing worse as time passed, and pegged out, so that the death toll (what a horrible phrase) was 30,000 in the first week and 30,000 more the second week—and you get a new picture of the way radioactivity will wipe out the world not in a good healthy smash, as you pictured it, with a new sun appearing in this constellation, but rather in a slow leukemia, the world simply made uninhabitable. Some people will certainly get so frightened by this picture that they’ll go off into the jungle of the mountains and live by raising roots, in the hope that when the next war comes it won’t be worth while wiping them out. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will want never to use the atom bomb again, but there’s always one bad apple in the barrel, always one mad scientist or mad dictator, and in the long run I don’t see much hope—but in the short run we’re living in the great imperial republic of the twentieth century, we’ll be rich, we’ll all have three automobiles, we’ll have to have them, by law, whether or not we want to sleep with Mae West, we’ll have to sleep with her, we’ll have to eat too much and then take expensive cures to be slenderized, we’ll have to eat extensively denatured food expensively renatured with expensive vitamins, we’ll have to have a good time, by God, so we might as well grit our teeth and eat, drink, and be expensively merry, for tomorrow we’ll be blown sky high. Read More
August 9, 2017 Correspondence Life’s Dull: A Letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis By Philip Larkin From left: Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Hilary Amis. From a 1979 letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis. Larkin, who was born on this day in 1922, and Amis enjoyed a long friendship. In their respective Writers at Work interviews, both Larkin and Amis spoke about their working relationship; the two shared unpublished writing with each other. In Amis’s case, Larkin provided “very constructive suggestions” on the “feeble” first draft of his novel Lucky Jim. Dear Kingsley, I write at 4:30 on a Sunday—well, this one, to be precise—what you might call the arse-hole of the week. Lunchtime drink dead, not time for six o’clock gin. Tea? Don’t make me cross. Sorry you are feeling lowdown; I sympathise. I don’t know that I ever expected much of life, but it terrifies me to think it’s nearly over. I mean there can’t possible now be any good bits like going to Corfu with some busty ex-Roedean girl WHOSE FATHER GIVES HER LOTS OF MONEY and who loves being pocked (‘it’s better every time, oh darling’), or being a novelist. I don’t want any of that swearing. I mean, you’ve become what I dreamed of becoming, and I don’t suppose you ever dreamed of being a librarian. If I’m so good why don’t they pay me enough money to go to some southern beach and lie on my belly (or someone else’s)? Eh? Now there can only be don’t normally take on anyone over 55, like to do a few tests if you don’t mind, am returning it because it isn’t really up to your own high standard, afraid I must stop coming Mr Larkin hope you find another cleaning lady to AAARRRRGHGHGHGH TV seems awful these days. I got one last December, and it was all right for a bit, but now the novelty’s worn off I suppose and there seems nothing but chat shows and non-comedy and B-films and NEWS—God how I hate news—I can’t watch it—to see these awful shit marching or picketing or saying the ma’er wi’ noo be referred back to thu Na’ional Exe’u’ive is too much for me. Why don’t they show NAKED WOMEN, or PROS AND CONS OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN GIRLS’ SCHOOL oh for God’s sake Phil can’t you NO I CAN’T For God’s sake keep writing dear man, for life’s unexciting. Penelope Fitzgerald’s prize-winning bum, Philip
August 8, 2017 Letter from Our London Editor Against Argument By Adam Thirlwell Teju Cole, Zürich, 2014, from the exhibition “Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper,” on view at Steven Kasher Gallery from June 15–August 11. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. 1 When I was a kid, I always wanted to inhabit the Wild West. It was the most exotic place. And now, I guess, I do. 2 I never had a definition of my country, or my identity. Everything has been a series of oxymorons. I grew up in Britain: savage and polite, a European island. Within that, I grew up in London: the British capital, and the pure international. But we also lived in the north London suburbs, neither countryside nor city, and I went to a private high school that was basically Jewish and Hindu, with perhaps the occasional Muslim or Sikh or very rare stray goy. We were rich but not exorbitantly rich: we were rich but intellectual. Moreover, if I was definitively Jewish, I was also definitively half Jewish. For me, this series of oxymorons represented a kind of ideal state: placelessness was my idea of a utopia. Read More