April 2, 2018 In Memoriam Drue Heinz, 1915–2018 By The Paris Review We were sad to learn that Drue Heinz, who served as the publisher of The Paris Review from 1993 to 2007, died last Friday, in Lasswade, Scotland. She was 103. Heinz was a lifelong patron of the literary arts, cofounding Ecco Press and serving as an active board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the American Academy in Rome, and the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Read More
March 8, 2018 In Memoriam To the Future Readers of Lucie Brock-Broido By Stephanie Burt Lucie Brock-Broido, New York City, 2004. (photo: W.T. Pfefferle) In the far future, when the only readers who cherish and puzzle over Lucie Brock-Broido’s poems are those who never met her, those readers will surely try to imagine what she must have been like in person. Perhaps they will know that she was a charismatic teacher, that she made such an impression in the lives of her students that everybody who knew her (at Harvard, in Cambridge, at Columbia University School of Arts) said there was no one like her. And those readers of the future will try to compile her personal manner from her verse style: gorgeous, elaborate, allusive, sometimes Gothic or haunted, at other times able to revel in beauty, all of it driven by her “propensity for lavish / Order in certain seasons of the year.” She must have been (these readers will assume) an authority figure in an unusual way, a way that drew into itself so many styles—lacy, bejeweled, able to hide at whim, aware of mascara, given to ornament, catlike. She chose rhetoric, chose devices that much of the literary past (the parts of the past run by dudes) believed could not hold power. Those readers will be right. The past, the patriarchal past, was very wrong, and Lucie was right about it. The future readers will quote her sentences to one another, smiling at their discoveries, and realizing how long the sentences continue, unraveling and reknitting themselves into the big closures that her poems so often find. Just to read the poetry is to see—in its hypermetric lines, its cliff-face line breaks, its “gathering / Of foxes oddly standing still in the milk broth of oblivion”—how there was more to her and more in the poetry, more to consider (before reflecting) beautiful, and more to gather into the self for reflection than most poets, and most poetry, have in store. Read More
February 14, 2018 In Memoriam Watching Screwball Comedies with Harry Mathews By Ann Beattie Harry Mathews. Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of his own devising. From 1989 until 2003, Harry served as our Paris editor. In 2007, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, interviewed Harry for our Art of Fiction series. As she wrote in her introduction, “After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language.” Harry died last year just as our Spring issue, with an excerpt from his final novel, was going to press. —The Paris Review Harry Mathews, who died a year ago, on January 25, was born on Valentine’s Day. This is the first time his friends (including those in Key West, who, during the winter, often got to see Harry and his beloved wife, Marie) have had to be without him. About the time he turned eighty, maybe a bit earlier, he had to stop bicycling. He did this grudgingly, berating some of us for our concern (expressed as he was about to cycle off after certain … let’s just say wine-centric dinners). His good friend James Merrill was the person who’d urged the Mathewses to leave wintry New York and come enjoy the sun in Key West. (Merrill, on his own bicycle, was always a delightful sight as he sped toward you wearing his shirt, shorts, argyle socks, and sandals.) Not that Harry needed to imitate Merrill or his other close friend John Ashbery at all: his sense of style was singular, as was Harry. But how did I become dear friends with a person who had specially sewn compartments in his shirt pockets for his cigars? How did my husband and I appear, year after year, on New Year’s Eve to be poured as much champagne as we wished (forget that “wishing upon a star” nonsense; this was excellent champagne) and to watch a screwball comedy that would be midway through at midnight? He shushed us if we so much as whispered to the person sitting next to us. In the background, we’d hear fireworks, the screams, the ubiquitous unmuffled motorcycles, more piercing screams, and soon, very soon, the sirens, as the TV volume was adjusted upward to a near-deafening level. In Key West, certain individuals get the idea that they might, say, blow up a pier to celebrate the New Year. (Or, at the very least, set their neighbor’s garbage can on fire.) Read More
February 1, 2018 In Memoriam Raising a Glass to Fred Bass, the Strand’s Iconic Owner By Brian Ransom Fred Bass with an oil painting of himself painted by artist Max Ferguson. This past Friday, a hundred or so people milled about the second floor of the Strand sipping wine, picking at cheese platters, and talking about death. A celebration of the life of Strand Book Store owner Fred Bass, who passed away earlier this month at eighty-nine, was scheduled to begin in a few moments, but the death on everyone’s lips was not Fred’s. Instead, the chatter concerned the loss of two other New York City staples: the Lower East Side movie theater Landmark Sunshine Cinema had closed that past Sunday, and farther uptown, Lincoln Plaza Cinema was slated to shutter at the end of the month. That the Strand is still standing seems almost a miracle. It has endured nine decades of metropolitan metamorphosis and been passed down through three generations of Bass owners. Of its peers on Book Row—a cutesy nickname for the cluster of used bookstores along Fourth Avenue in the twentieth century—the Strand is the lone survivor. Perhaps one element of its longevity was Fred himself, the tireless figurehead, who one employee described as “not just the Strand’s brain but also its heart and soul.” Photos of Fred topped the display tables. Some of them showed him bouncing a kid on his knee, or grinning with his arm around a fellow soldier during his two-year stint in the army, but many depicted him hard at work. Fred got his start at the Strand at thirteen years old, sweeping the floors of what was then his father’s store. Nancy Bass Wyden, Fred’s daughter and successor, told me later that her father had usually worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for most of his life. “I want to stop,” he would say with a wink, “but my daughter will not fire me.” Legend has it that Fred was buried at sea in a vintage red Strand sweatshirt. Read More
January 29, 2018 In Memoriam Nicanor Parra, the Alpha-Male Poet By David Unger Nicanor Parra died last week at the age of a hundred three. Here, David Unger remembers a collaboration with Parra that seemed doomed from the start. Nicanor Parra. Photo: Fundación Iberoamericana I first began translating the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1973, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, the professor of my graduate translation course at Columbia University. I bought Obra gruesa, an anthology of Parra’s poetry published by Chile’s Editorial Universitaria at the Las Americas bookstore in Union Square. Back then, there were four Spanish-language bookstores on or around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Later, I picked up Poems and Anti-Poems and Emergency Poems, two New Directions collections of Parra’s work. At the time, I was a serious silk-scarf/whiskey-breath poet, best buddies with classmate Frank Lima, a Rimbaud-like, jail-schooled poet. I devoured these three Parra books, then went about looking for poems that had not been translated into English. I found “Último brindis,” a cynical mathematical poem that exemplified Parra’s antipoetry philosophy, and translated it as “The Final Toast.” Read More
January 25, 2018 In Memoriam Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin By Karen Joy Fowler © Marian Wood Kolisch “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004. Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the first science-fiction writers I read. I was in college at the time, breathing the heady air of second wave feminism, when a book clerk handed me The Left Hand of Darkness. Since then, I’ve heard many other readers say the same thing I felt: that book took the top of my head right off. There was more Le Guin to read after that. I’ve been reading her all of my adult life. I read her before I thought of writing myself, and I read her after. I read her for pleasure, and I read her for comfort, and I read her for guidance, wisdom, and inspiration. I read her for poetic leaps and for scholarly discourse. I read her to spend time in the many incredible worlds she created. And then I was lucky enough to get to know her personally. I can’t possibly provide a complete list of what she taught me, by word and example. But here is my starter list. Feel free to add and revise to make your own. Read More