June 15, 2019 In Memoriam Susannah Hunnewell, 1966–2019 By The Paris Review Photograph by Stephen Andrew Hiltner. The Paris Review mourns the loss of publisher Susannah Hunnewell, friend, colleague, and luminous presence at the magazine for three decades, who passed away on June 15 at her home in New York. She was 52. Susannah Gordon Hunnewell was born in Boston and spent much of her childhood in Paris. She attended Harvard, where she studied English with the playwright William Alfred. She began her career with The Paris Review as an editorial assistant in the summer of 1989. George Plimpton, the magazine’s founding editor, quickly recognized her literary precociousness, commitment to international literature, and “herculean” work ethic, and in her first years at the quarterly she translated Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s Art of Fiction interview from the original Spanish, worked on fiction by Niccolò Tucci, and helped George in editing The Paris Review Anthology (1990) and the first Writer’s Chapbook (1989). Those early years at the magazine were fortuitous in another way: it was during her first summer in the cramped office on East Seventy-Second that she met Antonio Weiss, then the magazine’s associate editor, whom she would marry in 1993. The couple went on to have three sons. So began Susannah’s long affiliation with the magazine. In 2000 Susannah and her family returned to Paris; she became the magazine’s Paris editor in 2005. During this time she conducted iconic interviews with Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Oulipo cofounder and poet Harry Mathews, French provocateur and novelist Michel Houellebecq, and Parisian nonfiction novelist Emmanuel Carrère, as well as with the famed translator-couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. These interviews, at once broad in range and meticulously edited into ideal presentations of the writer at work, show Susannah’s intellectual fortitude, determined inquisitiveness, and editorial acumen. As Carrère later said of their conversation, “The long interviews with writers published in The Paris Review are renowned both for their seriousness and their liberty, but it wasn’t until I met Susannah Hunnewell that I was able to determine what this seriousness and liberty could be. We spent two days together; I would have liked for us to have spent three, four, five … I don’t know of anyone funnier, wittier, or friendlier than Susannah … The result, a few months later, left me stunned and admiring: she had made cuts, of course, rephrased my words, but I had the impression that everything was there. In each sentence, I recognized my own voice. One must have talent, not just that of a writer but that of a musician, to create such a transcription and it’s a rare experience to be its recipient.” In 2015, Susannah, back in New York, became the seventh publisher of The Paris Review. As publisher she was a generous colleague and mentor, integral to the board and staff both. She was known to take the staff out for martini lunches at the Odeon, where she’d grill the new interns on personal histories and professional aspirations—and keep those details committed to memory as the new Parisians’ courses progressed. Last November, in an elegant ceremony at the French Consulate, Susannah became a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literature (she also worked at George, Marie Claire, and the New York Times, and was a founding board member of the Albertine Bookshop). Among her many meaningful efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, it is her long engagement with The Paris Review that defines her literary career. Her three decades with the magazine, a span made better by her intelligence, kindness, and great spirit, have left an indelible imprint on The Paris Review. More tributes to Susannah will appear in the coming days. For now, we remember that not long ago, she referred to the magazine as “our magical world.” It is a world she helped build and one she enthusiastically, big-heartedly shared with others. We will miss her dearly.
June 11, 2019 In Memoriam Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now By Brian Cullman Dr. John at the 2007 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (photo: Derek Bridges) There was a press junket, and at the last minute someone with real credibility dropped out, and I was invited to fill in even though I was only a teenager. A number of us journalists were bused out to a beautiful old country estate. Frank Zappa was there, deep in conversation with a bunch of record collectors. Candy, the publicist, took me by the hand and led me to the back porch. Mac Rebennack was out there in full Dr. John regalia, with a modified turban wrapped around his head, and feathers and rings and voodoo beads, a carved walking stick by his side, and he was slouched there, a walking Mardi Gras, a sitting Mardi Gras, and the makeup on his face was starting to run, with the sun beating down on us like that, and he lifted his eyes and gave me a nod before he lowered his head. And then he closed his eyes. And nodded off. I was seventeen, what did I know about pills or publicists or the dangers of the road, all I knew was that this wasted, beautiful man in front of me was exhausted, his soul left behind in some barroom far away, and he’d gone too many miles, played too many shows, had to explain himself to too many strangers, and I was one of them. Was I supposed to address him as Doctor? As John? I settled for Sir. “Maybe we can do this later, Sir. Seems you could use a little sleep. I can come back.” “No,” he said. “No.” He seemed genuinely concerned, and he opened his eyes and tilted his head, he looked suspicious, like maybe I’d been playing with his beads. “No. I got to edumacate the peoples. Tell them things. I got to.” I said something about getting some rest. He gave me a look. “Listen. How you know I’m not asleep right now?” He stared at me hard. If he had a third eye, it was staring at me, too. “How you know I’m not asleep right now, and you simply part of my dream?” Read More
March 25, 2019 In Memoriam Letters From W. S. Merwin By Grace Schulman Grace Schulman shares snippets from a lifetime of correspondence and friendship with the poet W. S. Merwin, who died on March 15, 2019. A young W. S. Merwin. (Credit: Estate of W. S. Merwin) “We must not vanish all at once; it’s too hard on the survivors,” W. S. Merwin wrote in a letter to me late in his life, referring obliquely to the passing of his contemporaries, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell. In the dark hours following Merwin’s own vanishing on March 15, I thought of how he first appeared in my life. Our friendship began in 1972, during my first week as poetry editor of The Nation. Inside a box of submissions was his packet of poems with the usual stamped self-addressed envelope. Besides my predilection for his poetry, I’d known that he’d held my job at The Nation in 1962, and that he’d written for them an eloquent plea for the containment of nuclear power. His poetry came on October 14, 1972, a date I remember because exactly two years before, during the Vietnam War, he had famously refused to sign a loyalty oath before a reading at the State University of Buffalo (SUNY), and went home refusing his badly needed check. Still, knowing what I did, I was unprepared for the lines I read: I have to trust what was given to me if I am to trust anything it led the stars over the shadowless mountain what does it not remember in its night and silence what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time Over the din of office typewriters, I heard the music and silence of those lines, the surprise of faith in one who is accustomed to doubt, the rhetorical questions suggesting all memory, all hope. He’d sent that poem, “The Gift,” along with others from his forthcoming book, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, hoping that The Nation might feature them before the book appeared in 1973. It had been The Nation’s practice to print one poem at a time, often as filler. I asked the publisher, James Storrow, Jr., for space to print not just one but the cluster Merwin sent, and when he looked askance, I read him the closing lines of “The Gift,” Read More
March 18, 2019 In Memoriam Two Memories of W. S. Merwin By The Paris Review W. S. Merwin, one of the greatest poets of a fading generation, died last week at the age of ninety-one. Merwin was a frequent contributor to The Paris Review, and over the years we have published thirty-six of his poems, a short story, an essay, selections from a travel journal, and an Art of Poetry interview. Below, two short memories of his dedication, both to his work and to the earth he carefully tended, from those who knew and loved him. Photo: Tom Sewell Lament for the Maker The sun was setting in Hawaii on a spring day in 1995, when W. S. Merwin invited me into his study to hear him recite a new poem, and since he did not care to turn on the lights I listened to the last stanzas of his “Lament for the Makers” in near darkness. His study had a sacred aspect—its door was to remain locked whenever I house-sat for him and his wife, Paula, during their travels to the mainland and then to their place in the Dordogne. This atmosphere was heightened by his melodic voice, which in my mind bore traces of the hymns he had composed as a child for his Presbyterian minister father in Scranton, Pennsylvania. A palm frond crashed into the ravine beyond the lanai, on which a pair of sleeping chow chows did not stir. William recalled his departed poet-friends: “One by one they have all gone / out of the time and language we / had in common which have brought me”—and here his voice began to crack: “to this season after them.” “Beware the ides of March,” a soothsayer warns Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s drama, and when news arrived today that William had died in his sleep, at the age of ninety-one, I remembered him telling me that for years he always traveled with a paperback edition of the Bard—which tuned his ear to deeper sources of the English language. But it was the jagged music of the Scottish poet William Dunbar that inspired “Lament for the Makers”: fifty-two rhyming quatrains, one for each week of the year, mourning the passing of his mentors and friends—Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir and Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, and on and on, including his teacher at Princeton, John Berryman, all of whom heard the clear note that “never promised anything / but the true sound of brevity / that will go on after me.” Read More
March 18, 2019 In Memoriam Poem for Merwin By Matthew Zapruder Merwin’s Garden (Photo: Matthew Zapruder) There is no poet whose work has meant more to me than W. S. Merwin. Last December, I went to Hawaii for a series of conversations with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift. The trip was organized by the Merwin Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the ongoing preservation of the poet’s writing, ideals, and now legacy. They also work on maintaining and preserving the palm garden in Maui that he built, along with his late wife, Paula. When you go there, it feels more like a forest, filled with palms of so many different varieties, many of them rare. It’s an unexpected, completely singular place. I hope it will survive and continue to thrive now that he is gone. I got to see Merwin, and sit and talk with him and his editor, Michael Wiegers, and Lewis, on the lanai overlooking the garden. Toward the end of his life, Merwin lost his sight, though he was completely aware of what was going on around him. This is a note I wrote in my journal right after: At one point there was a bird in a tree and I knew if I described it carefully enough he’d be able to tell us what it was, so I looked for a while and then said, what is that bird with the grey feathers and orange beak and a little bit of red in its tail and a crown, and he said, that’s a female cardinal, and I think she is about to have babies, so if we put a blueberry on the railing of the lanai her mate, the red cardinal, will come and get it. Merwin put two blueberries on the railing and the red cardinal came. Long before the trip, I had begun a poem for him, but couldn’t seem to finish it. It was only after visiting the garden, and then sitting with him, that I was able to. Indeed, I finished it that same day, right after we sat together on the lanai. In the garden is Paula’s gravestone, where Merwin will also be buried. On it is the inscription “Here We Were Happy,” which, along with many other thoughts and things said during this trip, made its way into the poem. Poem for Merwin for a long time you planted one every day and now the garden is a clock on forest time Read More
March 15, 2019 In Memoriam W. S. Merwin, 1927–2019 By The Paris Review W. S. Merwin. We’re sad to report that W. S. Merwin, one of America’s finest poets, has died at age ninety-one. The recipient of nearly every literary award imaginable, Merwin was incredibly prolific over the course of his long career, and this shows in the amount of work he contributed to The Paris Review: thirty-six poems, a short story, an essay, selections from a travel journal, and an Art of Poetry interview. “The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about,” Merwin tells Edward Hirsch in his interview. “It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again.” Read More