April 5, 2021 Arts & Culture The Making of Billy Wilder By Noah Isenberg Portrait of young “Billie” Wilder, ca. 1926. Courtesy of the Film Archiv Austria. Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known—and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna—as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. “Billie was her American boy,” insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer and director. Wilder spent the first years of his life in Kraków, where his father, the Galician-born Max (né Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billie’s birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafés along the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. When this gambit lost steam, Max opened a hotel and restaurant known as Hotel City in the heart of Kraków, not far from the Wawel Castle. A hyperactive child, known for flitting about with bursts of speed and energy, Billie was prone to troublemaking: he developed an early habit of swiping tips left on the tables at his father’s hotel restaurant and for snookering unsuspecting guests at the pool table. After all, he was the rightful bearer of a last name that conjures up, in both German and English, a devilish assortment of idiomatic expressions suggestive of a feral beast, a wild man, even a lunatic. “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder,” his second wife, Audrey, once remarked, “he behaved like Billy Wilder.” Read More
April 2, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bars, Balzac, and Buses By The Paris Review Vanessa Springora. Photo courtesy of HarperVia. “For many years I paced around my cage, my dreams filled with murder and revenge,” writes Vanessa Springora toward the beginning of her book Consent (translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer), which details the abusive relationship she endured at the age of fourteen with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, then fifty. “Until the day when the solution finally presented itself to me, like something that was completely obvious: Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” Consent is that elegantly laid trap, a memoir that asks sharp questions about desire, literature, and a culture that fetishizes female youth and inexperience over female art. Springora is merciless in her portrayal of how easily Matzneff—referred to in the book only as “G.M.”—was able to prey upon her and other young girls and boys in plain sight, how he used her letters and likeness in his work without her consent and wrote celebrated paeans to sex tourism with children in the Philippines and affairs with barely teenage girls in Paris. It’s immensely upsetting to read about how seemingly every adult in Springora’s life turned a blind eye to all of this (at one point, a doctor snips Springora’s hymen to allow Maztneff to penetrate her; the philosopher Emil Cioran tells a crying Springora that it is an “honor” to have been chosen by Matzneff), but there are also moments of real catharsis as she grows older and begins to analyze what happened. In the end, Consent is as much an indictment of how writing and literature—from fairy tales to love letters to classic works like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet—can betray girls and women as it is a cool-eyed deconstruction of a particular moment in time. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 2, 2021 On Poetry A Continuous Musical Delight By Vijay Seshadri Published earlier this week, Poets at Work is the latest release from Paris Review Editions, the book imprint of The Paris Review. The anthology gathers thirteen Art of Poetry interviews from the magazine’s nearly seven decades of history. In the book’s preface, which appears below, The Paris Review’s poetry editor, Vijay Seshadri, explains the process by which he selected this baker’s dozen, as well as the particular pleasures of the magazine’s Writers at Work interview series. The Paris Review’s first Art of Poetry interview was with T. S. Eliot, and was published in issue no. 21, Spring–Summer 1959. As the magazine had been publishing interviews since its inception, in 1953, transforming in the process a commonplace American journalistic feature into something like an art form, it isn’t unreasonable to ask why it took so long to get around to a poet. (Robert Penn Warren had been interviewed, but about his fiction, and an early attempt to corral Robert Frost had failed.) Poets sensitive about the prerogatives of their art should be reassured, though, just by the nature of the Paris Review interview itself—a natural-seeming object that is actually delicate and labor intensive and involves the intersection of many serendipitous elements, not the least of which is the rare sympathy between interviewer and subject that brings a conversation to life. Also, along with the usual chances and mischances of publishing, when it came to a magazine that saw itself as canonical (in an era when there was such a thing as the canonical) and at the same time improvisational, secular, hip, casual, and cosmopolitan, editorial choices must have been made under multiplying, contradictory pressures. Whatever the reasons, once the interviews of poets got going, they sprinted along, energized perhaps by the editors’ coming to recognize that poets are very good at talking about themselves. The resulting hundred-plus conversations from which this selection was made are rich and various, and so satisfying across the board that choosing just a baker’s dozen was an excruciating job. Even limiting the set to poets born before the historical watershed of World War II left over sixty to choose from—interviews with fathers of civilizations (Frost, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, W. H. Auden), poets unfairly neglected or forgotten (Conrad Aiken, Charles Tomlinson, May Sarton, Amy Clampitt, John Hall Wheelock, Karl Shapiro), masters outside the anglophone tradition (George Seferis, Yevgeny Yevtushenko), and several of the most celebrated poets of the Silent Generation (Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright). Read More
April 1, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Cheswayo Mphanza Reads Gerald Stern By Cheswayo Mphanza National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Leaving Another Kingdom” by Gerald Stern Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983) I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs before I get too sad. I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower, and the blue squill go, and the primroses. Levine will be here by then, waving fountain pens, carrying rolled-up posters of Ike Williams and King Levinsky. He will be reaching into his breast pocket for maps of grim Toledo showing the downtown grilles and the bus stations. He and I together will get on our hands and knees on the warm ground in the muddy roses under the thorn tree. We will walk the mile to my graveyard without one word of regret, two rich poets going over the past a little, changing a thing or two, making a few connections, doing it all with balance, stopping along the way to pet a wolf, slowing down at the locks, giving each other lectures on early technology, mentioning eels and snakes, touching a little on our two cities, cursing our Henrys a little, his Ford, my Frick, being almost human about it, almost decent, sliding over the stones to reach the island. throwing spears on the way, staring for twenty minutes at two robins starting a life together in rural Pennsylvania, kicking a heavy tire, square and monstrous, huge and soggy, maybe a 49 Hudson, maybe a 40 Packard, maybe a Buick with mohair seats and silken cords and tiny panes of glass—both of us seeing the same car, each of us driving our own brick road, both of us whistling the same idiotic songs, the tops of trees flying, houses sailing along, the way they did then, both of us walking down to the end of the island so we could put our feet in the water, so I could show him where the current starts, so we could look for bottles and worn-out rubbers, Trojans full of holes, the guarantee run out— love gone slack and love gone flat— a few feet away from New Jersey near the stones that look like large white turtles guarding the entrance to the dangerous channel where those lovers—Tristan and his Isolt, Troilus and you know who, came roaring by on inner tubes, their faces wet with happiness, the shrieks and sighs left up the river somewhere, now their fingers trailing through the wake, now their arms out to keep themselves from falling, now in the slow part past the turtles and into the bend, we sitting there putting on our shoes, he with Nikes, me with Georgia loggers, standing up and smelling the river, walking single file until we reach the pebbles, singing in French all the way back, losing the robins forever, losing the Buick, walking into the water, leaving another island, leaving another retreat, leaving another kingdom. Cheswayo Mphanza’s debut poetry collection is The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press). His poems “Frame Six” and “At David Livingstone’s Statue” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.
March 31, 2021 At Work What Is There to Celebrate? An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib By Langa Chinyoka Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard. Hanif Abdurraqib spent the winter shoveling. In Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, he often found himself spending hours clearing the snow from his driveway, only for it to start back up again as soon as he was done. Sometimes, his neighbor would be out there, too, and as they braced themselves for the cold and the work ahead of them, they’d exchange a smirk, a raised eyebrow, and a nod, as if to say, Ain’t this some shit. Abdurraqib laughs as he offers this anecdote, not just because it’s funny but because of the simple, effervescent joy that bubbles up from beneath interactions like this—when you’re with your people, and things do not have to be explained, or even spoken, to be understood. But how do you put these moments into language? In part, this is the project of A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib’s new collection of essays on the history of Black performance in the U.S. It’s Whitney and Michael, minstrelsy and blackface, school dances and sports games, Soul Train and a spades table, and so many other cultural artifacts held beneath a loving microscope for Abdurraqib’s careful examination. A practiced author, poet, and critic with books such as Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us (2017) under his belt, Abdurraqib is in complete control here, balancing the personal and the public as he explores the legacy, the nuance, and sometimes, yes, the shame of Black performance while surrendering even himself to scrutiny—the limits of his past self, the limits of all this loving. When we spoke on the phone earlier this year, we discussed optimism, gratitude, and grace, I was reminded of the Lucille Clifton poem that goes, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” I thought of it again as I reread the book’s final essay, in which Abdurraqib writes, “Isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t?” Although Abdurraqib admits to feeling cynical sometimes, A Little Devil in America is a testament to still being here, still finding moments to celebrate despite everything else. If you were to transform a head nod into something that could be held within the pages of a book, it would look like this. If you were to tell someone you loved them, you missed them, and you were happy to know them, you would hope it sounded like this. There is no exaggerated sentimentality, but there is—even in the middle of mourning—music, and even dancing. INTERVIEWER In A Little Devil in America, you celebrate the joy of Black performance, but you don’t shy away from its difficult history. Can you talk a little about that? ABDURRAQIB When I was first writing the book, I spent a lot of time in the midst of minstrelsy and blackface. Much of that is still in the finished book, but the original drafts were anchored by it. I don’t want to disparage my past books, obviously, but I do think it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn. Which doesn’t mean that I’m, like, coming out in favor of minstrel shows, but it was important to recontextualize, to think about what it was like to be a person who had been enslaved, or had a relative who had been enslaved, and possessed very few resources to perform in a way that provided power to the people. Read More
March 30, 2021 Redux Redux: Her Perfume, Hermit-Wild By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco. This week at The Paris Review, we’re using our olfactory senses. Read on for Ha Jin’s Art of Fiction interview, Fleur Jaeggy’s story “Agnes,” and May Swenson’s poem “Daffodildo.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202 Issue no. 191 (Winter 2009) INTERVIEWER What do you remember most about your arrival in the United States? JIN There was a chemical smell here. It was very alien, very overwhelming. Also a lot of people wore perfume. I know a woman who came here from China and said she couldn’t stop vomiting. Read More