January 18, 2023 Document Plan for a Journal By Italo Calvino Writing box, Auckland Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. In an interview collected in Ferdinando Camon’s Il mestiere di scrittore: conversazioni critiche (The Writer’s Craft: Critical Conversations), Italo Calvino described a dream for “a completely different sort of journal.” This journal would be something more like the serialized novels of Dickens and Balzac, with writers working on commission on a wide range of topics and themes. It would employ the “I” of Saint Augustine and Stendhal. And it “should be a kind of Peanuts but not a comic strip, serial novels with a lot of illustrations, an attractive layout.” At the Review, we’re fascinated by ideas for what magazines can be—no matter how outlandish. And so we were delighted when we came across Calvino’s four-page plan for a journal, from a typescript dated 1970, translated by Ann Goldstein and published below. It’s eclectic, wildly ambitious, smart but not too self-serious, and totally unrealized. What else could you ask for? This journal will publish works of creative literature (fiction, poetry, theater) and essays on particular aspects and problems and tendencies exemplified by the works published in the same issue. It will follow the discourse of Italian literature as it unfolds, through the work of writers who are young or not so young, new or with something new to say. The journal will make it clear that it’s a discourse—many discourses together, which can be articulated in a general conversation—that runs from book to book, from manuscript to manuscript, and will find the thread of this discourse even where it seems to be merely a messy tangle. Read More
January 5, 2022 Document Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death By Elias Canetti Photo of Elias Canetti courtesy of the Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO). Collage Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. 1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. — Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. Read More
August 27, 2021 Document Notes on Chuck Close in Rome By Henri Cole A page from Henri Cole’s 1995-96 notebook In 1995, the poet Henri Cole traveled to Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. While there, he spent time with the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, who died last week, aged eighty-one. Recently, Cole came across a notebook in which he had recorded his impressions. Read More
January 20, 2020 Document August Wilson on the Legacy of Martin Luther King By The Paris Review On this archival recording, playwright August Wilson celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with a reading at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on January 21, 1991. Wilson reads poems and selections from the plays Fences and Two Trains Running (which had yet to be produced), and participates in an extended audience Q&A. Before reading from Fences, set in Pittsburgh in the fifties, he reads the play’s introduction: Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers’ ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and moneylenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true. The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tar paper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream. That they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon. By 1957, the hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the industrial might of America. War had been confronted and won with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel. Life was rich, full and flourishing. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and the hot winds of change that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous and provocative decade had not yet begun to blow full. Listen to the full recording from the event below:
December 24, 2019 Document Robert Lowell Dressed as Santa By Saskia Hamilton Harriet Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell on the steps of 239 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts, Christmas 1959 (Courtesy of Harriet Lowell) In 1959, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were feeling restless with their Boston life. It was the year of the publication of Lowell’s Life Studies: Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”) Lowell won the National Book Award for the collection, but the publication also coincided with a manic episode. “I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again. So it is. Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in July. By the fall and winter, still recovering, he was writing little, working mostly on translations. In the meantime, Hardwick was writing essays for Harper’s that would go into her collection A View of My Own, including “The Decline of Book Reviewing” in October (the article that would inspire the founding of The New York Review of Books in 1963), and, in the December issue, “Boston: The Lost Ideal,” an excoriation of the city they lived in and a longing for the one they would move to the following year: “In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality.” When Frederick Seidel traveled to their Boston home to interview Lowell for The Paris Review in March 1960, he described the sounds of the street outside: “Four floors below the study window, cars whined through the early spring rain on Marlborough Street toward the Boston Public Garden.” In the Christmas of 1959, Lowell, dressed as Santa, gave their daughter, Harriet, a doll with a velvet hat. The gift was actually from Elizabeth Bishop. He wrote to thank her on January 4, 1960 (Harriet’s third birthday): “Three marvelous bottles of wine from S. S. Pierce made you seem just around the corner, while Harriet’s ‘Anna Karenina’ doll, dressed in the white boots you brought her, made you exotic and far away.” Saskia Hamilton is the editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019) and the author most recently of Corridor (Graywolf, 2014). She is an advisory editor for The Paris Review.
October 30, 2019 Document From the Notebooks of John Cage By The Paris Review John Cage. Photo: Betty Freeman. To put it mildly, John Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is no ordinary account of days gone by; a plain record of events would be too simple for such a daring and meticulous artist. The product of thirty years, Diary allows us a glimpse of the late twentieth century through Cage’s eyes. His insights and observations reveal a generous, openhearted view of the world in tumult. In keeping with this openness is the book’s methodology: using a number generator based on the I Ching, Cage would allow chance to determine each entry’s word count, left margination, and typeface. Like much of Cage’s oeuvre, the complexity of this process melts away in the experience of the work. Here, for instance, is the first page of Part II, which was originally published in the Winter–Spring 1967 issue of The Paris Review: At first glance, it scans as chaos. In practice, it reads like poetry, though the typographical pyrotechnics lend it a unique tactility, as though the letters are swelling off the page. In 2015, Diary appeared in a single volume for the first time, published by Siglio Press. A new paperback version has just been released, now with a selection of pages from the unpublished ninth installment in Cage’s project (he had planned ten parts in all but completed only eight by the time of his death, in 1992). Six facsimile pages from Cage’s notebooks appear below. Read More