October 16, 2024 Letters John and Yves Berger on Painting By John and Yves Berger Detail from Rogier van der Weyden, Annunciation Triptych, c. 1440. Public domain. In the Rogier van der Weyden, Mary is reading about her future life in the Bible. Van Gogh paints the Bible as a still life. Read More
September 17, 2024 Letters Letters to James Schuyler By Joe Brainard Excerpt from a December 1965 Joe Brainard letter to James Schuyler, used by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. The artist and writer Joe Brainard and the poet James Schuyler, both central figures in the New York School of poets and painters, met in 1964. The two soon became close friends and confidants. Brainard’s letters to Schuyler included here span the summer of 1964 through 1969 and were written while Brainard was moving from apartment to apartment in New York City and spending summers in Southampton, Long Island, and Calais, Vermont. You can read an interview between James Schuyler and the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249, here. Schuyler and Schjeldahl were nominally meeting to discuss the poet Frank O’Hara, but the interview became a wide-ranging conversation about poetry, New York in the fifties, and the cast of characters that surrounded them. Read More
August 27, 2024 Letters Letters from Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene By Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene Izu Peninsula from Mount Echizen. Photograph by Alpsdake, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Usami, Izu Peninsula November 26, 1980 Dear Shirley and Francis, My thoughts have been very much with you as more and more reports come in about the earthquake in southern Italy. Of course, I know that you are not there, and that is a relief, but I’m sure you must have friends in the vicinity, and (though the reports in the Japanese press have not mentioned Capri) your house may also have been damaged. I hope that the tragedy, unspeakable as it is, has at least not directly affected you. I am writing from my room in a building overlooking the sea. It is dusk and the mountains are dark against the bluish-gray sky. It is one of the loveliest places in Japan I know and I have bought a tiny apartment on the ninth floor of a building recently erected on one of the hills overlooking the bay. Today has been clearer than I have ever seen it here. The islands that are normally concealed by mist, sea-spray or whatever it may be, are clearly visible even now. But there is a terrible irony in all this: Japanese seismologists have predicted that the next major earthquake in Japan will be here. Read More
August 21, 2024 Letters Hearing from Helen Vendler By Christopher Bollas Helen Vendler in her home in Cambridge. Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell. Earlier this year, the visionary poetry critic Helen Vendler died at the age of ninety. After her death, the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas—author of The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among many others—collected a correspondence between himself and Vendler that unfolded over email during the last two years of her life, which began as Vendler was clearing out her office at Harvard in 2022. These emails, which have been selected and edited by the Review (with spelling and punctuation left unchanged), touch on the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry; the experience of aging in all its forms; and the growth of a friendship, and understanding, between Bollas and Vendler. January 22, 2022 Dear Christopher Bollas, A friend of a friend quoted, in an email, your generous notion that what I do as a critic of poetry has a resemblance to the work of analysis. I take that as an amazing compliment. I don’t know where you said that, but I did see that one of the steps in your career was a PhD in English at an exciting time at the U. of Buffalo, and that you’ve written a series of books with intriguing titles, which (“now that I am old and ill”—Yeats) I may not get to immediately, but hope to see a couple of them once I finish the interminable task of clearing my office (now that we once again have access after the Covid ban). Yours truly, Helen Vendler Read More
August 12, 2024 Letters Five Letters from Seamus Heaney By Seamus Heaney Tom Sleigh, Seamus Heaney, and Sven Birkerts. Courtesy of the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979. To Ted Hughes March 14, 1995 Dear Ted, Matthew’s letter jolted me. And not because of its frank address to money matters and its real interest in moving things along on the Schoolbag front. It made me wince that I had not long ago written to you, to thank you for—among other things—the new Selected and the paperback Pollen. When I saw “Chaucer” in The New Yorker a few weeks ago I reeled for joy. The emerald and the laundry. They were like the streamers of spring, of the Shelleyan spark scattered, new life from huge sorrow. The poem began and ended with immense promise. And in between all was exalted. And then I opened the “uncollected” section of the new book and found myself like canvas in a big wind. Which I could not rebuff. The poem about the vision of your mother and her sister and you mistaken for her brother—well, I suppose that [is] what the poem is about all right, but what it is is sheer poetry. And it is wonderfully placed as a prelude to what follows. I was deeply moved to find “The Earthenware Head” again, a poem which had stayed in me from the moment I read it years ago. But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of “Black Coat” and “The God”—like a “Prelude” turned inside out. The total engagement of those poems is exhausting and beautiful because of the total candor and the unleashed, justified anger. Intelligence rampant, as it were. So head-on, and not just with the “you” of the poems; as much, more, with the ring of “them” at bay around the poem-hearth. It is all really quite heartbreaking to contemplate. The positive truth in it all is that your book is as lightning-packed for me in the final pages, in the nineties, as it is/was for the me who read the early poems in the sixties. Those Sylvia poems and “Opus 131” and “Lines about Elias” set the guy-ropes thrumming. Groundswell and emptiness. Your courage and endurance and fecundity and brave solitude count for everything. When I read the poems, I just want to dwell in the daunting feel of them, but even if blurting out impressions is a kind of misrepresentation of the reality of the experience of reading them, I still want to let you know how gratefully shaken I was when I went through them. And there’s all the rest of the book as well. Gaudens gaudeo. (And I was proud of T. Paulin the other night on The Late Show. I’m sure somebody must have told you that he said—rightly but so strangely in the context of that rabid gossip arena—that you were to be revered. As poet and as example of good behavior. The verb was both unexpected and elevating.) Read More
August 7, 2024 Letters Four Letters from Simone to André Weil By Simone Weil From Sample Trees, a portfolio by Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand in The Paris Review issue no. 212 (Spring 2015). When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.” The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.” Read More