The Paris Review Literary Cities Archives

January 17, 2019
Literary Cities

On Beirut, the Unsung Capital of Arabic Modernism

By Robyn Creswell

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arabic Modernism was a literary movement of exiles and émigrés who planted their flag in West Beirut during the mid-’50s, when the Lebanese capital became a meeting ground for intellectuals from across the region. West Beirut, a neighborhood known as Hamra, was “the closest the Arab world could ever get to having its own Greenwich Village.” For a brief twenty-year period, until the outbreak of civil war in 1975, Hamra was a contact zone for artists and militants from the far Left to the far Right, nationalists and internationalists, experimentalists and traditionalists. In this highly politicized bohème, journals of ideas flourished, and each coterie had its own café. Local banks were flush with deposits from the newly oil-rich states of the Gulf, helping to finance a construction boom that quadrupled the built area of the city in the decade following World War II. This intellectual and economic ferment turned Beirut into a magnet for disaffected thinkers from within Lebanon as well as from neighboring countries. It was a place with all the characteristics of what Roger Shattuck, in his study of the early Parisian avant-garde, has called “cosmopolitan provincialism”: an eclectic community of outsiders living on the margins and snitching tips on taste, style, and ideas from elsewhere.

The Arab Modernists, like many artistic groups of the early and mid twentieth century, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement. Shiʿr (Poetry), a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, was founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal, a Greek Orthodox Lebanese with shrewd editorial instincts, who lived in America from 1948 to 1955 and took the moniker for his new journal from Harriet Monroe’s famous “little magazine” of the same name. Shiʿr published forty-four issues over eleven years (1957–64, 1967–70), including manifestos, poems, criticism, and letters from abroad. Under al-Khal’s editorship, Shiʿr was an energetically internationalist organ; its openness to foreign literature was one of the ways it defined its “modernity.” The magazine had correspondents in Cairo, Baghdad, Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, and it published a range of verse in translation. The physical magazine was also a stylish object, printed in book-size format with single columns of type and wide margins. The cover was minimalist, featuring only the title in austere and angular calligraphy. Particularly during the early years of Shiʿr, its design was remarkably consistent, elegant, and understated. In addition to the magazine, al-Khal established a publishing house, Dar Majallat Shiʿr, which printed criticism, original poetry, and anthologies of foreign verse. He and his wife, Helen, also founded a gallery for contemporary art, Gallery One, where the Modernists often convened a literary salon, the so-called jeudis de Shiʿr, which hosted Stephen Spender and Yves Bonnefoy among other European luminaries.

In some respects, Shiʿr was a typical product of its time and place. Beirut’s Modernist moment (circa 1955–75) coincided with the rise of the Lebanese capital as the center of Arabic intellectual life, usurping the place hitherto held by Cairo. Lebanon’s liberal censorship laws attracted writers and editors from across the region. Many of these immigrants were Palestinians fleeing north in the wake of the 1948 Nakba; subsequent waves were composed of Egyptians or Syrians escaping the increasingly monolithic regimes of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baʿath. As Franck Mermier writes in his study of Lebanon’s print culture, “At the end of the 1950s, Lebanese publishing had managed to transform itself into the crossroads of Arabic intellectual production. Unlike its competitors elsewhere in the Arab world, Lebanese publishing enjoyed a striking degree of autonomy from the State and was held almost entirely in private hands.” In Fouad Ajami’s more skeptical view, “The city’s large number of newspapers reflected the worldviews of their patrons, the rival embassies and foreign governments that paid and sustained them. But the press still played with ideas, pointed fingers, debated the issues of the region, and now and then appalled the conservative custodians of proper and improper things.” In many histories, Lebanon in these two decades before the civil war was an oasis in the midst of an authoritarian wasteland, “a laboratory of numerous and conflicting tendencies,” in the words of Adonis, a Syrian Lebanese poet who was among West Beirut’s immigrants and the preeminent figure of the Modernist movement. Read More
December 17, 2018
Literary Cities

The Legibility of Fausto Reinaga

By Mark Goodale

Fausto Reinaga spreading his ideas and his books in Plaza Murillo, in the 90s. File by Hilda Reinaga Fuente

In 1957, in a strange twist of political and historical fate, in front of Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, Fausto Reinaga, the future modern prophet of Indian revolution, reaffirmed his destiny. Reinaga officially had traveled to the old German Democratic Republic from Bolivia in order to participate in an international meeting of trade union confederations. Unofficially, however, Reinaga had left Bolivia at a time in which his books and essays had made him a target of the leaders of the 1952 National Revolution. Unluckily for Reinaga, his second book, published in 1949, had been a scathing and deeply personal attack on Víctor Paz Estenssoro, just on the cusp of a celebrated political career, who soon after would be swept into power at the head of the new revolutionary government. Before leaving for Leipzig, Reinaga had been arrested by state security forces and forced to sign a declaration renouncing his 1949 book as an error-filled distortion.

Born to Quechua-speaking peasants in 1906, Reinaga did not learn to read or write in Spanish until he was sixteen. Nevertheless, Reinaga had been marked from the beginning for a world-historical life. According to legend, Reinaga’s mother was a direct descendent of the eighteenth century Indian rebel Tomás Katari, who had been executed by the Spanish in 1781 for organizing Indian resistance to Spanish colonial tributary demands. As Reinaga later explained, when he had finally been sent to public schools by local leaders, it was on the understanding that he would have to learn the intellectual traditions of the West in order to eventually lead Bolivia’s Indians in a final revolution against the oppressive neocolonial order.

Reinaga spent his early adulthood as a political activist and writer. His first book, Mitayos y Yanaconas (1941), was a Marxist reinterpretation of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire. During the early 1940s, he had supported the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR)—co-founded by Víctor Paz Estenssoro —and had participated in the MNR’s alliance with the military reformist government of Gualberto Villarroel, until Villarroel was deposed in 1946 by a peculiar coalition of mining oligarchs and urban trade unionists, who stormed the presidential palace in La Paz, killed Villarroel, threw his corpse off the balcony into Plaza Murillo, and then hung it from a lamppost, where it was desecrated, Mussolini-style, by the surging throng.

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July 30, 2018
Literary Cities

Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito

By Dick Cluster

Cotopaxi, in Quito.

Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city ninety-three hundred feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than thirteen thousand feet.

Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city—the tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped, conical volcanoes in the distance.

Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981 and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So, too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H. G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.” Read More
May 30, 2018
Literary Cities

Thomas Bernhard, Karl Kraus, and Other Vienna-Hating Viennese

By Matt Levin

Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902.

Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze.

I found it all beautiful. And yet, as I sat and sipped and sighed like a sentimental character in a nineteenth-century novel, the twentieth-century novel I was reading, Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, in which a narrator attends a dinner party with old artistic friends he despises, was heaping scorn on this very city: “This dreadful city of Vienna,” “Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna.” Adolf Loos, the architect and designer of the very Café Museum I sat in, I later learned, had derisively called Vienna a “Potemkin city.” I left the Café Museum and walked to the Inner City as dusk clasped around the metropolis, in a trance, blessing all the facades.

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