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
January 25, 2018 In Memoriam Ursula K. Le Guin: The Rabble-Rouser with a Gentle Smile By Neil Gaiman Ursula K. Le Guin. Photograph: William Anthony/The Nation The thing about Ursula K. Le Guin was that she didn’t actually look like a rabble-rousing, bomb-throwing, dangerous woman. She had a gentle smile, as if she was either enjoying herself or enjoying what the people around her were doing. She was kind but firm. She was petite and gray haired, and she appeared, at least on first inspection, harmless. The illusion of harmlessness ended the moment you began to read her words, or, if you were so lucky, the moment you listened to her speak. Read More
January 4, 2018 In Memoriam Aharon Appelfeld: You Cannot Be a Writer of Death By The Paris Review Aharon Appelfeld. You know, God is everywhere. He is in the human heart. He is in the plants. He is in the animals. Everywhere. You have to be very careful when you speak to human beings because the man who is standing in front of you has something divine in himself. Trees, they have something divine in them. Animals of course. And even objects, they have something of the divine. —Aharon Appelfeld, The Art of Fiction No. 224 Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s foremost contemporary writers, died today at the age of eighty-five. Appelfeld was the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, many of which derived their inspiration and force from his childhood in war-torn Europe. He was born in Romania, where he was apprehended by Nazi-allied forces at the age of nine. His mother and grandmother were shot, and he and his father were eventually sent to the Transnistria concentration camps. Appelfeld described his internment there as a kind of transformation: “I became a small animal. It was the wish for life, the wish to survive.” In 1942, he managed to escape; he spent two years in hiding. At one point, he lived in the forest among a band of thieves, and, later, in the home of a Ukrainian prostitute. He joined the Soviet army, spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy, and finally immigrated to Palestine in 1946, at age fifteen. Nearly a decade later, after spotting his father’s name on a list of survivors, they were reunited in Israel. Read More