December 6, 2012 Correspondence William Styron in Letters, Part 4 By William Styron To George Plimpton September 18, 1953 Ravello, Italy Dear George: Last night I did something which I only do once or twice in a generation: I stayed up all night with a bottle of Schenley’s and watched the dawn. That sort of thing is a perverse, masochistic business and at around 9 A.M. I was entertaining the idea of writing two or three novels before I went to bed, but oblivion closed in an hour later, and I just woke up. It is now almost sunset. This is mainly by way of saying that if this letter doesn’t have a Chesterfieldian elegance + grace you will at least have been apprised of the reason. My main reason for writing this letter is one-fold, I have been forced down certain channels of contemplation by a recent communiqué from John (“The Second Happiest Day”) Phillips, to use current journalese. Primarily, I was interested in his remarks about a Hemingway issue of PR; and I think at this point and without further ado I can shoulder my burden as advisory editor of the snappiest little mag on the Rive Gauche and say that I think it’s a great idea. Peter and THG apparently (according to Marquand) are not so enthusiastic about the proposition; as for me I think that if you really have enough interesting, fresh material in the offing (it must be interesting, fresh, original, and there must be quite a bit of it) then it might be one of the literary coups of all time. As Marquand said, print the word Hemingway in neon all over each page and both covers. Anything goes. Read More
December 6, 2012 On the Shelf Scary Children Reading, and Other News By Sadie Stein Even terrifying people love books. “A bedbug had crawled out of a copy of True Blood while she was reading it.” When library books get bedbugs. “It is awful to think I’ll probably be regarded as some sort of authority on Brazil the rest of my life.” Benjamin Moser on Elizabeth Bishop and her adopted homeland. Might selling used books become illegal? “Al and the TAs are like reality-show TV contestants: regular people who suddenly have a huge audience.” Elliott Holt takes an online literature course.
December 5, 2012 Bulletin The Paris Review Mug: Now for Sale! By The Paris Review When we announced our special mug offer, cries were heard across the land: We already subscribe! We want to give the mug as a gift! We want two, three, four! Rest easy: the special-edition Paris Review diner mug is now available to everyone, for all your coffee-drinking and gift-giving needs. One side features our logo in black; the other, praise for the magazine from Newsweek in 1953: “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time.” We at the TPR offices can vouch for it. Supplies are limited. Buy it now!
December 5, 2012 On Language Vispo By Nicole Rudick Amanda Earl, Sun. The Paris Review’s interviews have long featured single manuscript pages from among the subjects’ writings. They are meant to show the author at work, his or her method of self-editing, of revision—an illustrative supplement to the process described at length in the conversations. To me, though, they always exist first as instances of visual artistry. The particularities of each writer’s markings are immediately perceptible: the way Margaret Atwood’s handwritten lines appear impatient and vital in contrast with the prim logos of the SAS Hotel stationery on which she penned a poem; the way Yves Bonnefoy’s long, spidery insertion lines give physicality to the pallid rows of words; the way David McCullough’s xed-out typewritten phrases become so many tiny, busy intersections. In the same way, I’ve always found the looping inscriptions of Cy Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings, in particular Cold Stream, to be a kind of magic—the secret scribblings, writ large, of a mind at work. (It’s no coincidence that Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the army.) I’m struck by the frequency, in Paris Review interviews, with which authors describe writing as being a visual activity. John Edgar Wideman imagines his drafts as “palimpsests.” Don DeLillo finds that “the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality … They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.” Read More
December 5, 2012 Bulletin We Have a … Winner? (NSFW-ish) By Sadie Stein The votes are in, the people have spoken, and the winner of the 2012 Bad Sex in Fiction Award is Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, for her novel Infrared. Here is the publisher’s description: Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations. After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects. Read More
December 5, 2012 Correspondence William Styron in Letters, Part 3 By William Styron William and Rose Styron. To Norman Mailer June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Norman: I note that you began your last letter: “I’ve been kind of depressed lately,” and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I’ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me—elated at having just married a most admirable girl (perhaps you’ve gotten an announcement) and depressed because for roughly your own sort of reasons—an inability to get going again at this writing game. To complicate the situation, a few days ago, barreling down the Autostrada in an effort to catch up with Irwin Shaw’s Ford convertible (we had been on a two-car picnic at Angio) I smacked into a motorscooter going full tilt and glued an Italian all over the front end of my car. The guy was made of brick and will survive with nothing more than lacerations, and fortunately for the legal end of the thing it was his own fault (he was a moron, for one thing, and for another had been driving with a glass eye) but such incidents always leave me spookily aware of just how vulnerable we all are. Perhaps they’re valuable as such from an ah-tistic point of view, but I doubt it. Read More