September 21, 2015 In Memoriam C. K. Williams, 1936–2015 By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Selected Poems. C. K. Williams, the poet known for his “long, unraveled lines,” died yesterday at seventy-eight. Williams realized, he told the New York Times, “that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.” The Paris Review published three of Williams’s poems in the eighties; this one, “From My Window,” is from our Fall 1981 issue. Read More
September 14, 2015 In Memoriam Bill Becker, 1927–2015 By Dan Piepenbring Becker in 1995. We were saddened to learn that Bill Becker, a longtime friend of The Paris Review, died this weekend at eighty-eight. As today’s obituary in the New York Times explains, Bill was “a theater critic and financier who acquired Janus Films with a partner in 1965, expanded its catalog of art-house and Hollywood classics and broadened their distribution to university audiences and home viewers.” A cineaste and a shrewd businessman, he was instrumental in bringing works by Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, Truffaut, and dozens of other filmmakers to new American audiences, a legacy his son Peter carries on as president of the Criterion Collection. We knew Bill as a familiar face at our annual Spring Revel, and a generous, loyal benefactor. A close friend of George Plimpton’s, he was quick to champion the writers he admired—James Salter credited him with bringing A Sport and a Pastime to Plimpton’s attention. After George died, Mr. Becker continued to support the Review under each of its new editors. We join his colleagues at Janus Films and the Criterion Collection in offering our condolences and our gratitude.
August 31, 2015 In Memoriam Swimming with Oliver Sacks By Sabine Heinlein Oliver Sacks died yesterday at eighty-two. Oliver Sacks swimming in Rhinebeck, NY, in July 2015. Photo: Bill Hayes I met Oliver Sacks at the Blue Mountain Center, an artist and writers residency in the Adirondacks, where we spent August of 2012. The room I was assigned had a pretty view out onto Eagle Lake, but it was tiny—there was no way I could pace in it, and I needed to pace, so I disappeared into the mountains several times a day. I walked and walked, got lost in the pouring rain and knocked on the cabin doors of strangers, hoping to be adopted, maybe. Instead I was given haphazard, passionless directions back to the colony. While I was feeling the dark of the woods pressing heavily on my shoulders, Oliver was writing to the sounds of the loons on the lake. He was seventy-nine then. Read More
August 25, 2015 In Memoriam Cynthia Macdonald, 1928–2015 By Dan Piepenbring Cynthia Macdonald “Wait in the Chair,” a poem by Cynthia Macdonald, appeared in our Spring 2004 issue. Macdonald, who died earlier this month at eighty-seven, taught for many years at the University of Houston; she was also a psychoanalyst. Richard Howard wrote that she drew her poems “from the grotesque.” “Grotesque comes from the grotto,” she said in an interview: “the grotto is, if you want, the hidden part of everybody … all writing comes from the grotto, whether it comes out as overtly odd or very conventional. So I would agree with that definition. I would say I am interested in strange things that happen, because they seem like a sharpened metaphor of what happens all the time.” Read More
July 9, 2015 In Memoriam James Tate, 1943–2015 By Jeffery Gleaves James Tate at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in 1965. Photo: Elsa Dorfman James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Tate’s poems were “always concerned to tell us that beneath the busyness and loneliness of our daily lives, there remains in us the possibility for peace, happiness and real human connection,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Times. Tate was born in Missouri but lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1971. “I’ve imagined that every character and every single event takes place in this town, Amherst,” he once confessed. But John Ashbery once opined that Tate is a “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere.” His poetry is often described as absurdist, and indeed the speakers in his poems come across as bewildered narrators who are as inquisitive as they are clueless—which is all part of their charm. His poetry has also been described as comic, ironic, hopeful, lonely, and surreal; “I love my funny poems,” he said, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.” Read More
June 29, 2015 In Memoriam One More for James Salter By Kate Petersen Photo: Lan Rys We’re concluding our week of James Salter remembrances with this interview by Kate Peterson from 2010. She recalls the experience fondly: Among writers, James Salter was my first hero. Maybe it’s outmoded in 2015 to call someone your hero, but then, if any recent American writer took the idea of heroism seriously, it was Salter. I found his story collection Last Night ten years ago on my own, by chance—no friend or teacher had recommended it, and no social media list of must-reads existed then, at least on my radar. As discoveries go, it was a deliciously private one. The authority of his sentences and paragraphs came from their music, but not only from that. His descriptions seemed to draw power from what had been relinquished. I was dazzled, puzzled. Discipleship is fueled, in part, by mystery; at least mine was. We met for this interview at the University of Minnesota in October 2010. I turned on my tape recorder and flipped to a fresh sheet of notebook paper, but before I could ask my first question, Salter asked one of his own: Bob Dylan had played near here, hadn’t he? I said he had. Did I know his songs? Not well, I admitted. He asked, could I sing any? Though I crossed Fourth Street every day, I confessed I couldn’t; I had been raised on show tunes. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein? Yes, I said. And so, before I knew what was happening, I was singing James Salter a few bars of “Oklahoma.” That evening, Salter read from what became All That Is, his last novel. Then the working title was To Live It Again. It’s a promise at once retrospective and infinitive, and one, Salter often argued, that only books could honor. To learn more about Salter, read his 1993 Art of Fiction interview or one of his stories from the magazine: “Sundays” (1966), “Am Strande von Tanger” (1968), “Via Negativa” (1972), and “Bangkok” (2003) are available in full online. Tell me about your new novel. I’ve been working on it for some years. I’d had the idea for a long time, but I was unconsciously waiting for a line from Christopher Hitchens. He wrote somewhere that “No life is complete that has not known poverty, love, and war.” That struck me, and I began with that. I haven’t followed it through. Poverty doesn’t play much of a part. Betrayal does, and it’s a book that has a little more plot than other books of mine. It’s about an editor, a book editor, it’s the story of his life. Read More