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.
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