July 22, 2020 Arts & Culture The Flatterer and the Chatterer By Marjorie Garber Detail from lithograph by Matthias Rudolph Toma depicting Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “character heads,” 1839. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The “Theophrastan character” is not often mentioned today, perhaps because it is so little known as a genre. Yet for centuries this was what “character” meant in literature. A list of familiar social types compiled in the fourth century B.C. that chronicled human traits and foibles—from bore to boaster, cynic to coward—influenced the development of later fiction and drama, and remains sharply pertinent in psychology, journalism, cartoon art, and popular culture. Theophrastan character sketches deliberately describe a recognizable model of behavior rather than a mocked or skewered individual. Dickens’s ever-hopeful Mr. Micawber, clinging to the thought that “something will turn up,” is a descendant of the Theophrastan character, as are Molière’s miser and hypochondriac. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have created character types on what could be called the Theophrastan model, like the obsessive-compulsive, the hysteric, the impulsive man, and the paranoid (whom Theophrastus, lacking the resources of the DSM, might have called “The Suspicious Man”). The “white working-class voter” is a Theophrastan type, as is the equally hypothetical “soccer mom,” not to mention generational “types” like the baby boomer and the millennial. By the twenty-first century, the “character sketch” (or “character portrait”) had become the frequent province of editorial journalism, both print and electronic, as well as of social media and stand-up comedy. “Any kid with a passionate interest in science was a wonk, a square, a dweeb, a doofus, or a geek,” wrote the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a self-confessed geek. (Within a year or two, however, this “depreciative” term—“an overly diligent, unsociable student,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—would morph into the glamorous style called “geek chic.”) Why has this ancient mode survived so long? “The Characters suggested an adaptable form and a set of basic techniques, according to which human types of any century or country could be depicted,” observes J. W. Smeed. “The book seemed to offer an invitation to later writers to borrow the method and use it to describe their own contemporaries.” He adds, “I cannot think of a smaller book with a greater influence.” Read More
July 22, 2020 Sky Gazing What Does the Sky Feel Like? By Nina MacLaughlin Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. Albert Aublet, Selene, 1880 Objects we use to flirt with the sky: Kites Fountains. Hammocks. Ice skates. Balloons. Weather vanes. Parachutes. In November, the last time I was on an airplane, it was a rainy day in the Northeast. As the plane picked up speed along the runway, we were pressed against the seats in a sensation I always associate with sex. I inhaled and held my good-luck rock. The moment when the whole heft of the airplane leaves the surface of the earth is a moment of enormous erotic charge. The rise and press and all-at-once feeling of elsewhere, a temporary reprieve from the regular pull. In liftoff, in the erotic moment, we are freed of something. What are we freed of? Gravity’s tug, time’s nonstop forward surge. Time surrounds us, spreading forever in all directions. And gravity still applies, but we are entered into a changed awareness of weight. There is more and less of it at once. We are both relieved of it (I’m flying! I’m dissolving!) and under a stronger spell of its power (shoulders pressed against a cushioned place; gut in hips). Read More
July 21, 2020 Redux Redux: Marks of Feathers 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. Chinua Achebe. This week at The Paris Review, we’re scribbling, scratching, and reading about manuscripts and notes. Read on for Chinua Achebe’s Art of Fiction interview, Umberto Eco’s short story “The Bible,” and selections from Elizabeth Bishop’s notebooks. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139 Issue no. 133 (Winter 1994) INTERVIEWER I once heard your English publisher, Alan Hill, talk about how you sent the manuscript of Things Fall Apart to him. ACHEBE That was a long story. The first part of it was how the manuscript was nearly lost. In 1957 I was given a scholarship to go to London and study for some months at the BBC. I had a draft of Things Fall Apart with me, so I took it along to finish it. When I got to the BBC, one of my friends—there were two of us from Nigeria—said, Why don’t you show this to Mr. Phelps? Gilbert Phelps, one of the instructors of the BBC school, was a novelist. I said, What? No! This went on for some time. Eventually I was pushed to do it and I took the manuscript and handed it to Mr. Phelps. He said, Well . . . all right, the way I would today if anyone brought me a manuscript. He was not really enthusiastic. Why should he be? He took it anyway, very politely. He was the first person, outside of myself, to say, I think this is interesting. In fact, he felt so strongly that one Saturday he was compelled to look for me and tell me. I had traveled out of London; he found out where I was, phoned the hotel, and asked me to call him back. When I was given this message, I was completely floored. Read More
July 21, 2020 First Person Time Decides By Justin Taylor Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), ca. 1809, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 67 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m living in Indianapolis for the semester on a teaching fellowship. It’s the end of January 2017. I flew into Nashville a few days ago and picked up a Volkswagen Passat that belongs to my mom’s friend’s kid, who is studying abroad for a year. I feel incredibly lucky that this came through for me, because the four or five grand it would have cost to rent a car for the semester is pretty much what I hope to have left over after taxes, living expenses, and my half of the rent on the apartment back in Portland. If not for the gift of this free car, this “writer in residence” position would be, essentially, a break-even deal. I call Dad to check up. “How’s it going?” I ask. “I was sitting by the edge of the bed, something about sitting there, it’s one of the only places—relief, a little relief, this was a week ago, and I’ve been afraid since then, afraid to sit there. One of the few things that was working and I lost it. I’m afraid now. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I put my foot down. It came down wrong on the floor and it twisted. I rolled the ankle, I slipped. I fell. I fell between the edge of the bed and the desk. You know the room, you can picture where. I fell and hurt my ankle but I was also stuck at this angle, I lifted my arms to try to grab the edge of the desk, I couldn’t reach it, then I did but I couldn’t hold on, then I did hold on but my arms locked. I had no strength to lift myself up but now I could not let go, I was stuck that way, my muscles were exhausted, the pain I can’t even tell you, the pain and shaking still this whole time, my body, so the back of my head, my neck, banging the leg of the desk, it’s still bruised back there, my head my leg, I was drooling, crying, an hour and forty minutes, the feeling came back and I could move some, I got out of there but I haven’t sat at the edge of the bed again, I’m afraid, but why afraid, I don’t know, I mean I know but what I mean is when I was stuck there, that whole hour forty minutes all I thought about was starving to death, how I could starve to death there, and all I kept thinking was I wouldn’t mind, I’m sorry I’m telling you this, if it only didn’t take so long, if it could happen and be done already I really think I would say okay, fine.” “This was a week ago? Have you been to the doctor? Did Ronni or Fran come over?” “I didn’t call them. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m only telling you now because you asked how things are going. Well, that’s how.” Read More
July 21, 2020 At Work Stalin’s Bodyguard: An Interview with Alex Halberstadt By John Jeremiah Sullivan Alex Halberstadt is a writer who was born in Russia and lived there until he was nine, when his family (or part of it) immigrated to the United States. He did the rest of his growing up in Long Island City. Educated at Oberlin and Columbia, he has written all sorts of things, books and reportage and profiles. His previous book, the excellent Lonely Avenue, is a biography of the songwriter Doc Pomus, who cowrote “Save the Last Dance For Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and a list of other lasting hits. The New York Times called the book “taut and affecting.” His newest is titled Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. Unexpectedly, given the title, it is a deeply personal book, an engaging and subtle piece of nonfiction that’s full of history and Alex’s own wit, which can flick back and forth from dry to wet in a very effective way. This new book has had the misfortune to be published during the pandemic-related downturn, a moment when many good writers feel like their new books are vanishing into wells. Halberstadt himself caught COVID-19 a couple of months ago and has been suffering some in isolation. I am glad for a chance to call attention to Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. For this interview, conducted in May, we communicated electronically between Brooklyn, where Halberstadt has lived for the past twenty-six years, and Wilmington, North Carolina. INTERVIEWER I remember sitting in a bar with you maybe fifteen years ago, and I told you some story about my grandfather that I thought was interesting. When I was done, you sort of waited a beat and said, “My grandfather was Stalin’s bodyguard.” Which is an unfair trump card to be carrying around in your pocket all your life. Then you told me you’d never met him. I said something like, “Why don’t you go find him and write about it!” Any physically conscious person would have said the same thing. What’s remarkable here is that you actually did it. You went to Ukraine and found him. How is it that you had never met your own grandfather? HALBERSTADT My father stopped speaking to his father, my grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, when I was born. There were many sound reasons for him to do this, but mainly he did it because he wanted nothing to do with what his father stood for, which was Stalinism and the power of the Soviet state. My grandfather had been an officer in the secret police for most of his life, and for thirteen years one of Stalin’s personal bodyguards. He was an absent and sometimes brutal father. He was also a gifted photographer, and a really great-looking man obsessed with clothes. When my mother and I left Moscow, when I was nine, we took with us one photo of Vassily and my grandmother Tamara. They are sitting near a lake; he’s wearing a fedora. For years, that was all the proof I had that my grandfather existed. I assumed that he had died sometime shortly after I was born. Then in 2004 my father got a call from a distant cousin who said that Vassily was alive and mentally still with it. That’s when I told you about him at that bar—I had just found out he was alive. Read More
July 20, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 18 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Record collectors love to spend long hours trawling through boxes and bins in pursuit of the rarity, the one-off, the perfect B side, but I think this same obsession with the archival can apply to literature lovers as well. There’s a triumphant thrill to be found in this hunt for the unknown, and as someone who spends a lot of time sifting through the Paris Review archive as part of my job, I’ve been lucky enough to feel it often. Wait a minute, I realize, we have an Art of that?! Those writers took part in a roundtable in the eighties, the transcript of which was published in a back issue? Colleagues who’ve received many a multi-exclamation-mark’d message from me can attest—there are some buried treasures to be unearthed on theparisreview.org! In that spirit, this week’s Art of Distance lifts the paywall on a series of one-offs, rarities, and uncategorizable pieces from the Paris Review archive. If you find yourself looking for something a little different to read, perhaps one of the following will be a welcome discovery.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Truman Capote. Photo: Andy Warhol. Although The Paris Review is known for its Writers at Work interviews, if you read enough back issues you’ll find that the magazine has also published a number of interviews that don’t necessarily fit within the usual “Art of … ” rubric. There’s the one and only Art of the Musical, with Stephen Sondheim, from the Spring 1997 issue, for instance, or this “composite interview” with Pablo Picasso from Summer–Fall 1964. Or this Winter 2016 interview with the critic Albert Murray (a close friend of Ralph Ellison’s), who discusses the history of the Black American literary tradition. Or 1993’s “A Humorist at Work,” with Fran Lebowitz; I dare you to read it without laughing out loud. Read More