May 16, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, Straight-Arrow Virginia Gent By Gordon Lish Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011. Back in the day when I was stepping out and Anatole Broyard kept a one-room city fifth-floor walkup in which I would not infrequently step out in, Tom was living only a block or so easterly and would, damn our eyes, catch me making my way to or from where I wasn’t supposed to have been stepping and, bless his heart, not inform on me, despite his being the straight-arrow Virginia gent he was. Back in the day when there was talk between Tom’s Sheila and my Barbara of the two squads going halvsies on a great big house in Hamptonia, we all were sitting around in said real estate after a Sunday brunchy fress—Tom’s sidekicks Eddie Hayes and Richard Merkin among the newspaperbound bagelbound boasters—and I just so happened to have launched myself into a rapsode bearing on my baseball-playing startlements, this before I was expelled from the school where I’d done the startling, and Tom said he had a couple of mitts, why didn’t we go on out onto the lawn and throw it around awhile, and I said, thanks but no thanks, I having been a catcher when I was doing my startling and would therefore require the glove worn by a catcher if I were to catch a ball thrown by a pitcher known to me to have been a farm-team pitcher for the Dodgers, unless it was the Yanks, whereupon Tom allowed as to how he had happened to have fetched out from the city to Hamptonia the very variety of mitt, and so he had and so we did, humping it out onto the lawn and just as humpily regrouping among the housebound, Tom mum as you’d want that no toss he’d lobbed at me could I, the be-mitted braggart, begin to handle. Read More
May 15, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, 1930–2018 By The Paris Review Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the bitter envy of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, among others. “Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” writes Norman Mailer, in a 1994 review of A Man in Full. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers—he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.” Although Wolfe’s later two novels, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood, won him more accolades from The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award than anything else, his cutting portrayals of America earned him a lasting and well-deserved place in literature. In his 1975 book of art criticism, The Painted Word, Wolfe describes the “Art Mating Ritual” in a way that still feels perfectly current: the artist must perform what Wolfe dubs the “BoHo Dance.” She must move to Lower Manhattan and perform her bohemian disdain of wealth. In short, she must get close enough to the people uptown—“the Museum of Modern Art, certain painters, certain collectors”—to spit on them. When George Plimpton sat down with Wolfe for his Art of Fiction interview in 1994, at Wolfe’s favorite Italian restaurant, Isle of Capri on the Upper East Side (still open—and still relatively highly reviewed on Yelp), “the author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: ‘Shows that I’m versatile.’ ” Although Wolfe’s wide-ranging interests and stylistic leaps were indeed versatile, he did have a singular focus: our hypocrisy, our greed, and our status-obsessed culture. His is an incisive voice we would have been grateful for in 2018 and beyond. Below, read some of our favorite moments from his interview, which subscribers can enjoy in full. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
April 16, 2018 In Memoriam Farewell, Sergio Pitol By Elena Poniatowska Sergio Pitol, the celebrated Mexican author, essayist, translator, and winner of the Cervantes Prize, died in his home last Thursday. He is remembered here by Elena Poniatowska, considered “Mexico’s grande dame of letters,” whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our Spring issue. Sergio Pitol was an Italian nobleman, an aristocrat who knew how to live, a connoisseur of furniture and of flavors, a maker of illusions, a bon vivant, the owner of stables filled with unicorns. He would appear, walking with his cane through his beloved Xalapa like the Marquis de Carabas, and gesture: “Those cane fields, those palm trees, those rivers are mine!” If ever there was anyone who did not shut himself away, it was Sergio Pitol. Perhaps his first confinement, that of his childhood, that of his solitude and his adolescent exasperation, launched him into the world. As a child, he saw himself as a frail, malarial orphan whom no one loved. The torrid landscape of Veracruz and particularly that of Potrero, the sugar mill where he spent his childhood, made him its serf, and he often spoke to the tall green stalks of sugarcane, the dark and fragrant coffee trees, the banana trees that would one day shade his garden in Xalapa where he would walk, cane in hand, accompanied by his dogs. From a young age, he would recount the vicissitudes of his life to trees and water lilies. First, he went to China. In 1962, he was offered a job as a translator from English into Spanish at a foreign-language publisher in Peking. Sergio had dreamed of China, and so he packed his bags. He never asked himself what might happen to him; Sergio knew how to adapt, to live the lives of others no matter how foreign their customs were. From the day-to-day to the age-old, he acquired the knowledge that is forbidden to mercurial tourists. And of course, the Chinese were grateful to him, and his observations on China went on to become a part of the great texts that were read at the time: The Long March, by Simone de Beauvoir; Keys for China, by Claude Roy; Les divagations d’un français en Chine, by Vercors. Surely, Sergio foresaw that China would rise like a giant, eventually destabilize the Western world, and become more open and more flexible than the Soviet Union. Read More
April 16, 2018 In Memoriam J. D. McClatchy, Darlingissimo By Henri Cole J. D. McClatchy. Photo: Henri Cole. We must have met in 1980, when I was twenty-four. I was a graduate student in New York City. Sandy was teaching in New Haven. This was before email, Facebook, and Twitter. Poets wrote letters and talked on the telephone (landlines!). Sandy had just published his first collection of poems, Scenes from Another Life, and he and his partner had invited me to dinner in New Haven. They were being kind to a young fan who’d published only one poem. I was not really a poet yet or out of the closet. There was also a young Mexican poet at the table, who would later drown while swimming in the Pacific. After a delicious dinner cooked by Sandy, a joint was passed around. There was not any talk of AIDS yet, as there would soon be, like a hatchet falling through the room. But a profound sense of freedom. Openness. New friendship. “I cannot remember a moment of my life when I didn’t know I was gay,” Sandy said. For him, being gay was simply a fact, like being a poet. This was the era of new formalism, and Sandy was “a painstaking and brilliantly adventurous craftsman,” to quote Stephen Yenser, “the epitome of the writer with savoir faire” and “outrageously candid.” His poems were eloquent yet rueful, a combination I loved. He was not afraid of being difficult. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” Wallace Stevens wrote in “Man Carrying Thing.” In my own poems, it was the “raw power” he praised. Sandy wasn’t prim. I think he was the first real man of letters I knew. A gay man of letters—what a fine thing to be, I thought. Could I be that? He was always up to his ears in teaching and projects, running between this task and another: “I still feel like the baby Achilles, being dipped by my heel into the waters of busywork,” he wrote. Read More
April 12, 2018 In Memoriam What Do Poets Talk About? By Chris Ware J. D. McClatchy with his husband, Chip Kidd. J. D. McClatchy, one of America’s foremost men of letters, died in his home Tuesday at the age of seventy-two. He was the author of eight volumes of poetry and a string of acclaimed opera librettos. He also was a prolific editor, anthologist, translator, critic, the longtime editor of The Yale Review, and the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won too many awards and fellowships to list with brevity here. His poems appeared frequently in The Paris Review, and his Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 2002 issue. I first met him when I was twelve or thirteen years old. He sat down next to me on my parents’ couch and complimented my dress, pinching the fabric between his fingers to feel it. I jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and breathlessly told my mother that one of her friends was being inappropriate with me. She laughed warmly—Sandy, as his friends called him, was both very gentle and very gay. I last saw him two years ago at the Miami Book Festival. A mutual friend asked if, now that I had published a book, I considered myself a writer. I found myself flustered, unsure how to respond. Luckily, Sandy stepped in. “A writer is only a writer when they are writing,” he said firmly, then winked at me. It’s an answer, an understanding, a confidence that I have carried around in my pocket ever since. —Nadja Spiegelman As the spouse of one of my closest friends, Chip Kidd, I got to know Sandy McClatchy as one might know, well, a friend’s spouse. Chip and Sandy met in the early nineties, Chip and I having been friends for a few years before and I first learning of Chip’s infatuation when he mailed me a color-xeroxed eight-by-ten-inch publicity photo of Sandy with the words PROPERTY OF C.K. written diagonally in red across its lower quadrant like bubble letters on a school spiral notebook. Though I felt like I’d been passed a secret note in math class, I offered up my heartiest of congratulations because Chip had been single for a while. Privately, however, I was worried: Chip and I really only talked about comics and dumb stuff; this guy was a poet and opera librettist. What do poets and opera librettists talk about? What was I going to talk about if I ever met him? Read More
April 9, 2018 In Memoriam Cecil Taylor (March 25, 1929–April 5, 2018) By Brian Cullman Cecil Taylor. One New Year’s Eve, long ago, I was wandering around with friends and noticed a small handwritten sign on the door of Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue. I went to look—TEN THIRTY P.M.: CECIL TAYLOR FREE CONCERT. It was 10:15. We walked in. There were about thirteen, fourteen others there, a mix of jazz fans, retired postmen, and churchgoers, all spread out in various pews. There was a Steinway grand set up on the altar. At ten thirty sharp, Cecil Taylor appeared, sat down, and began playing with cheerful gravity. The music was so small at first that it seemed like it was in miniature, but slowly it grew until it filled the church to overflowing, and the joy was contagious. People were laughing, and the sound kept expanding until we could hardly stand it. A few minutes after midnight, Taylor stopped for a moment, took off his sunglasses, and bowed his head. “Happy New Year!” he said. “To all of us. Everyone. Happy New Year.” And then he continued playing.