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
July 4, 2019 Document George Plimpton’s Illegal Fireworks Display By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s founding editor George Plimpton was a man of many enthusiasms, but fireworks were chief among them. His lifelong affair with pyrotechnic explosives began when he served as a demolitions expert in the U.S. Army. He even wrote a book on the subject—Fireworks: A History and Celebration. Needless to say, he loved the Fourth of July. George could be counted upon to supply and launch fireworks for all manner of occasions: weddings, celebrations, and, of course, Fourth of July parties, such as one held in the late sixties on Martha’s Vineyard, which Rose Styron—poet, activist, wife of founding editor William Styron, and member of The Paris Review’s extended family—recalls as particularly full of misadventure. In celebration of this year’s Independence Day, we called her up to hear the story. Read More
November 7, 2018 Document Selections from Leonard Cohen’s Notebooks By Leonard Cohen Two years have passed since Leonard Cohen’s death on the eve of the 2016 American presidential election, and to no one’s surprise, the world remains steeped in the miserable mix of darkness and fleeting hope that the poet-songwriter articulated so well. The Flame, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Cohen’s parting gift: a collection of poems, lyrics, drawings, and pages from his notebooks. Cohen’s son, Adam, writes in his foreword: “This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet … It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.” Below, we present a selection of images from the book. Read More
February 2, 2018 Document James Joyce’s Love Letters to His “Dirty Little Fuckbird” By Nadja Spiegelman James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. On Nassau Street in Dublin, on June 10, 1904, twenty-two-year-old James Joyce saw (as clearly as he could see, since he was not wearing his glasses, and his vision was poor) the twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle, then a young chambermaid, sauntering by. Nora would later tell the story of their first meeting often, though she often told it differently. Sometimes she said Joyce wore a sailor’s cap, and other times she said he wore a big white sombrero and a long overcoat that hung down to his feet. Joyce proposed a date, and Barnacle agreed, but though Joyce went to the appointed place at the appointed time, she never showed. He wrote to her, “I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!” A few days later, on what was likely June 16, 1904—the date on which Joyce would later set Ulysses—they had their first proper date, though it was far from proper. Joyce took Barnacle east, past the docks and the harbor, to the deserted area of Dublin known as Ringswald. There, to Joyce’s surprise and gratitude, Barnacle slipped her hand down his trousers and “made me a man.” By October, the couple had eloped to Zurich. Although the couple did not officially marry until 1931, their unconventional relationship was passionate till the end. The letters below were written when Joyce returned to Dublin alone for the first time, in 1909, in an attempt to get Dubliners published. They are delightfully, shockingly dirty. Read in full, they are also quite charming. In the absent spaces, we can hear Nora’s enthusiastic, just-as-naughty replies, and the longing of a man who wants nothing more than to be home. This correspondence was first published in 1975 in the Selected Letters of James Joyce, now out of print. These letters, or excerpts of them, have been floating around the Internet for some time now, but they merit multiple joyous re-readings. Happy birthday, James Joyce. May we all find a soul mate whose farts we would know anywhere. 3 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin My darling little convent-girl, There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire. Today I stopped short often in the street with an exclamation whenever I thought of the letters I wrote you last night and the night before. They must read awful in the cold light of day. Perhaps their coarseness has disgusted you. I know you are a much finer nature than your extraordinary lover and though it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be fucked by me yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty. When I got your express letter this morning and saw how careful you are of your worthless Jim I felt ashamed of what I had written. Yet now, night, secret sinful night, has come down again on the world and I am alone again writing to you and your letter is again folded before me on the table. Do not ask me to go to bed, dear. Let me write to you, dear. Read More
January 24, 2018 Document Arthur Miller’s Sassy Defense of the NEA By The Paris Review Arthur Miller In the spring of 1995, then House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed supporters of federal funding for the arts and humanities, asserting that Arthur Miller had written some of the most significant plays in American theater without receiving governmental aid. The first page of Miller’s reply, originally published in The Nation, appears below: Letter courtesy of the Harry Ransom Archive at the University of Texas at Austin.