May 10, 2011 At Work Emily Fragos on Emily Dickinson’s Letters By David O'Neill Last month, Everyman’s Library published a pocket-size volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, edited by poet and professor Emily Fragos. Dickinson’s missives are the only prose she ever wrote, and they make an intriguing complement to her veiled, often mysterious verse. I recently corresponded with Fragos about the portrait of Dickinson that emerges from this collection of her lifelong, ardent epistles. Most discussions of Dickinson begin with her April 1862 letter to Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in which she famously asks, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” By this point, she was already thirty-two and an accomplished, if private, poet. What were her earlier letters like? You find a vivacious, brilliant, very witty young woman who had a multitude of friends, both men and women, whom she adored. She traveled, entertained, played music, and was a star at school. Everyone she wrote to already knew she was a gifted and unique individual. So the reclusive-spinster stereotype is not accurate, at least not when she was young. Right, we don’t see a recluse wearing all white, living apart from others, and penning mysterious poetry. We meet a loving, studying, working, tired, joyful, sometimes upset person who takes part in the running of a busy household and who is the caregiver, without respite, for her bedridden mother. We glimpse the personality traits that will deepen with the years, especially the intensity of her feelings. But the gift of the early letters are the details that demystify Dickinson, reminding us that she was a real person living in a real place at a real time in history. The poems have such an eternal and modern feel to them that it’s easy to forget that Dickinson lived in the nineteenth century, in the middle of the Civil War. In the letters, we read how it’s hotter than hell in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. People dropped like flies, and there were always tons of flies, literally, stuck to the walls in the heat. There were needy soldiers who sometimes came knocking on the door of the Dickinson homestead. When she writes so ecstatically about the oncoming spring and the flowers in bloom—which she calls the “beautiful children of Spring”—it is partly because she has survived another New England winter. Read More
May 9, 2011 On Poetry David Orr: Lost in the Archives, December 1985 By David Orr Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin was the first poet I understood. He wasn’t the first poet I could write a reasonably coherent college essay about (that was probably George Herbert), nor was he the first poet whose poems I memorized (Vachel Lindsay, although in fairness, I was twelve). But Larkin was the first poet whose sensibility I felt I grasped in most of its dimensions: he appeared not as a blueprint, but as an actual structure. And a very peculiar structure at that. When I think of Larkin, I imagine a cathedral filled with cheap gray metal desks, or possibly a strip mall with a belfry. Indeed, Larkin combines so many opposed elements of lyric tradition and modern consciousness that he comes close to being the writerly equivalent of a folly—and he has a folly’s ability to seem simultaneously monumental and embarrassingly personal. Yet people still often describe this complicated figure in one of two fairly straightforward ways. The first is to claim that Larkin is a wry poet of good-natured grumbling and resolute sanity, a portrait that has the virtue of being so inaccurate as to form a likeness in negative. The second way, which became more prevalent after Andrew Motion’s dirt-dishing biography was published, is to claim that Larkin was a nasty man whose poems are filled with secret nastiness that reveals the fundamental nastiness of … well, something really nasty. Great Britain, maybe. (I’ve written about some of these issues before; you can read further here, if you’re curious.) Maybe it’s enough to say that Larkin—like Stevie Smith, like Bishop—is the kind of poet we seem bent on reducing, in part because he often seems desperately eager to contain something about himself. One of the more interesting perspectives on Larkin appears in an essay by Donald Justice from 1995. Justice’s nominal subject is Larkin’s short yet masterful poem “Coming,” but the real topic is exactly this kind of restraint: It has been claimed for Larkin that he was never sentimental, never brutal. But the truth is that I find him both sentimental and brutal, though in different poems, or in different parts of the same poem … Irony, diffidence, skepticism, wit: not all of these together are enough to keep out a certain unreasonableness of feeling—the sentiment, the sentimentality—that keeps rising up out of Larkin’s poems. Actually, it is what saves them. Doesn’t everybody really know this? Everybody doesn’t know it, actually. Even now. Read More
May 6, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Geoff Dyer, Lydia Davis’s Cows By The Paris Review Thanks to a three-day flu I read Rebecca Wolff’s witchy coming-of-age novel The Beginners, then stayed up late reading the rest of Jennifer Egan’s juggernaut A Visit From the Goon Squad (it lives up to the New Yorker excerpts), then started rereading Geoff Dyer’s deeply charming book on photography, The Ongoing Moment, plus a bunch of his old magazine pieces, now newly collected in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition … all worth a good deal of coughing and sneezing. —Lorin Stein I picked up Lydia Davis’s The Cows, a chapbook about, well, the cows that live across from her. “She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.” —Thessaly La Force Amid the impeccably constructed drama of the last of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, Rabbit at Rest, sits an unforgettable line about how popular culture produces and reproduces itself, one generation after another: “They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of glop.” —Rosalind Parry Thanks to associate editor Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, my summer reading list has unmistakably flipped its wig. Friedersdorf has compiled May 6, 2011 Fiction Contact By Adam Gilders I remember thinking, after the second or third unreturned phone call, maybe this is how it begins with stalkers. A few unreturned phone calls, three or four, but it’s the absence of a good reason that really sets you off. I mean, why isn’t he returning those calls? There’s no good reason. You want to address the problem, to set things straight. So there’s a few more calls, like, why aren’t you answering my calls? It’s not that it’s a big deal to me, it’s not that I don’t have anything else to do, or that my life lacks meaning, but there’s no good reason to be avoiding me. We used to be pretty good friends, and it’s not like we had a big falling out. I mean, it just came into my mind to give you a call, since we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, and I thought maybe you’d want to know that things hadn’t worked out with my marriage. The point is, I suddenly had an insight about how stalkers are born: mounting frustration, burning resolution, determination to make contact. So you’re thinking the stalker gives birth to himself, but the stalker, and I use the word loosely, very loosely, isn’t necessarily responsible for the birth; there’s at least two parents, I mean. There was never any threat to your person. With the restraining order you reported that you had reason to believe that you were in danger. The only one who was in danger: me. I’m the first to admit that I went too far with some of my … When I cut off the tip of my finger and sent it in a package. Sent the tip of my thumb, with the note: What would it take Dale? (What does it?) How did that add up to a threat to you Dale? It added up to a lot of pain for me, but not a threat. If he stopped thinking about himself for five minutes and thought about … Sent him my finger. Do you know what that’s like, in terms of pain? Friend is: Dale This story first appeared in Another Ventriloquist. See also: “Adam Gilders and Another Ventriloquist.”
May 6, 2011 Fiction Contact By Adam Gilders I remember thinking, after the second or third unreturned phone call, maybe this is how it begins with stalkers. A few unreturned phone calls, three or four, but it’s the absence of a good reason that really sets you off. I mean, why isn’t he returning those calls? There’s no good reason. You want to address the problem, to set things straight. So there’s a few more calls, like, why aren’t you answering my calls? It’s not that it’s a big deal to me, it’s not that I don’t have anything else to do, or that my life lacks meaning, but there’s no good reason to be avoiding me. We used to be pretty good friends, and it’s not like we had a big falling out. I mean, it just came into my mind to give you a call, since we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, and I thought maybe you’d want to know that things hadn’t worked out with my marriage. The point is, I suddenly had an insight about how stalkers are born: mounting frustration, burning resolution, determination to make contact. So you’re thinking the stalker gives birth to himself, but the stalker, and I use the word loosely, very loosely, isn’t necessarily responsible for the birth; there’s at least two parents, I mean. There was never any threat to your person. With the restraining order you reported that you had reason to believe that you were in danger. The only one who was in danger: me. I’m the first to admit that I went too far with some of my … When I cut off the tip of my finger and sent it in a package. Sent the tip of my thumb, with the note: What would it take Dale? (What does it?) How did that add up to a threat to you Dale? It added up to a lot of pain for me, but not a threat. If he stopped thinking about himself for five minutes and thought about … Sent him my finger. Do you know what that’s like, in terms of pain? Friend is: Dale This story first appeared in Another Ventriloquist. See also: “Adam Gilders and Another Ventriloquist.”
May 6, 2011 At Work Adam Gilders and ‘Another Ventriloquist’ By Craig Taylor and Deirdre Dolan Adam Gilders. In 1998, Adam Gilders, a Canadian writer, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Before his death in 2007 at the age of thirty-six, he wrote close to two hundred stories. Though Gilders’s fiction has been featured in The Paris Review and The Walrus, two of his friends, Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton, decided to publish a more comprehensive book of Gilders’s writing under their independent imprint, J&L Books. Together, with Geoffrey Bainbridge, Miranda Purves, John Zilcosky, and Adam’s mother, Carla Gilders, they edited Another Ventriloquist, which debuts this Saturday, May 7, at the J&L FUNdraiser. We spoke to Jason and Leanne about the book. Another Ventriloquist is an unnervingly good read. Can you talk about the status of the book when Adam died of a brain tumor in 2007? Had any of his friends discussed with him the possibility of gathering his writing into a book? He never talked about publishing a collection of his stories. That was all our idea. When he died, he had around two hundred unpublished pieces on his computer. One of the first conversations we had with his mother and friends after the funeral was about needing to get his stories collected and published. We never even knew he wrote so much. He was very critical of his own work and most of it he would have never brought forward for publication, especially not the older pieces or funny stuff like “Michael Douglas.” This is the one silver lining we can see to the situation—we get to read all these stories. Read More
May 6, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Strong and Wise Mothers; No Children, Please By Lorin Stein Dear Lorin: This Mother’s Day, I’d like to give my mom a thoughtful gift as a gesture of my deep love and respect for her. I’d like to give her a book with a strong, wise female character whom she might resemble. Do you have any suggestions? Laurel Yes, I made that mistake once: I gave my mother To the Lighthouse—and told her that Mrs. Ramsay reminded me of her. She didn’t much like the comparison. Mrs. Ramsay is certainly strong and wise, and we want our mothers to be strong and wise, but so often our mothers have ideas of their own. I suggest Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories, which contains not only tributes to strong and wise mothers (including Mrs. D) but also funny and sympathetic stories about mothers under pressure. My mother has an etiquette question: is it impolite to say when being seated in a restaurant “Away from children please,” given that she has four children (but they are adults and she didn’t take them to restaurants until they had manners). —A friend This one I checked with my own mother, who managed a restaurant when my sister and I were children, and has pronounced views on restaurant etiquette. Her view: away from children, by all means! I feel the same. It is always depressing to see adult conversation sacrificed to the whims of some little psycho in a high chair, playing fort-da with its knife and fork. I think our mothers were absolutely right to leave us at home (even if, in my case, this has left me with an unslakable and expensive weakness for eating in restaurants, and for eating late, and generally for the company of grownups … ) Happy Mother’s Day to all! Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.