May 30, 2019 Bulletin Welcoming Our New Digital Director, Craig Morgan Teicher By The Paris Review Criag Morgan Teicher. Photo: Spencer Quong. Attentive readers of the magazine may recognize a new name on our masthead: on May 28, Craig Morgan Teicher joined the staff as our digital director. Craig has been a regular contributor to The Paris Review, with that rare trifecta of bylines in poetry, fiction, and essays, spanning from 2004 to last fall. Meanwhile, he’s had a daytime career at Publisher’s Weekly. Over the last dozen years at that magazine, he’s worn many hats, including director of digital operations and, most recently, director of special editorial projects. We were impressed by his pragmatic and broad set of technical skills, his track record of bolstering digital platforms at organizations much like our own, and his literary acumen. He arrives with a sensibility that manifests as a robust understanding of TPR as a magazine, web presence, and resource, which will be central to any new initiatives we undertake on the site. We wear a lot of hats here, too. We’re eager for Craig to flex his multifaceted muscles and help guide a great many projects on the web. Stay tuned to this space to see improved site navigation, new features to enhance our sixty-six-year archive, even better newsletters, and a more user-friendly way to get your TPR swag. And the podcast! We’re heading back into the studio—season 2 will be coming this fall. We asked Craig for a favorite piece from the archive (all of which is digitized and available here), and he replied with a piece from issue no. 215. He writes, “I carry Henri Cole’s books with me everywhere I go, literally—I have all the e-books downloaded on my phone. I feel like he speaks for and out of the dark in my heart, and reaches toward a narrow kind of joy, a pinprick of light, that I’m also drawn to. So I picked this poem, ‘At the Grave of Robert Lowell,’ because, in it, Cole is looking back at another poet who is desperately important to me, complicated for me, as he is for so many others.” Welcome, Craig!
May 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Escaping Samuel Johnson By Peter Martin Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used,” wrote Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man. One of the most persuasive spokesmen for American independence, he championed the clearing away of British “cobwebs, poison and dust” from American society. American independence, he argued, could never be complete without that. Many Americans thought the same way: that apart from economic stability and success, what they needed almost more than anything else after political independence was intellectual and cultural independence, free from the stifling influence of British arts, letters, and manners. They resented their cultural subservience, which had not disappeared with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet for more than a century after the Revolution, the majority of literate and cultured Americans did not want to turn their backs on British culture, “their ancient heritage”—especially its literature and the historical traditions of its language. About seventy long years after Paine’s statement, the popular English novelist Anthony Trollope elegantly expressed this powerful, persistent, and apparently inescapable linkage: “An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Molière. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.” Janus-like, and often in a less fully conscious way, Americans knew that their “mental culture,” whether they liked it or not, was linked to Britain’s, and they had little taste for parting with it. * America’s lingering literary and linguistic attachment to England is nowhere so evident as in the nation’s pervasive ambivalence toward Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary, published in 1755, which many call the first major dictionary of the language. He was the great sage of English literature, and a brilliant essayist, moralist, poet, lexicographer, and biographer, the “Colossus of Literature” and “Literary Dictator” of the second half of eighteenth century England, a figure thoroughly synonymous with Englishness. Throughout his career as an author, Johnson advertised his multilayered and complicated dislike of America and Americans. In 1756, the year after he published his famous dictionary, he coined the term “American dialect” to mean “a tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.” He had in mind an undisciplined and barbarous uncouthness of speech. With typical hyperbole on the subject of Americans, he once remarked, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American … rascals—robbers—pirates.” Read More
May 30, 2019 At Work Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction: An Interview with Julie Orringer By Andrew Sean Greer Left, Varian Fry. Right, Julie Orringer [photo: Brigitte Lacombe] From the fall of 2008 until the spring of 2009, I was colleagues with Julie Orringer at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. We both had the extraordinary fortune to receive fellowships to do research for our novels. I was researching New York City at various moments in the twentieth century, along with the history of AIDS in the city. Julie was researching the historical figure Varian Fry. Neither of us knew what we were about to make, nor could we make any sense of the pile of books the other had stashed in their office. Ten years have passed, and now we know: I wrote a novel called The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Julie has just published her novel The Flight Portfolio. It is an honor to watch a writer in the beginning stages of work, fiddling with their magician’s equipment, and an astonishment to see what flies, at last, out of their sleeve. In her case: a breathtaking work of wonder, set in occupied France. I waited for the world to take notice. Then I saw The Flight Portfolio featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, reviewed by fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick, who is now ninety-one. The words on the cover are glorious praise, but buried deep in the second page, I found an unsettling critique: Ozick was perturbed that Julie’s fictional Varian Fry is portrayed as gay. Ozick stated: “there is no evidence of homosexuality.” She even abstractly alluded to the dangers of keeping the record straight when writing about the Holocaust. And I did something I had never done; I wrote a letter. The New York Times Book Review printed it, along with letters from Fry’s biographer, and, of all things, from his son. Fry’s son clearly refutes Ozick: his father was gay. I wrote my letter about the invisibility of gay people in history, the lack of evidence, and the worth of the novel to use empathy and invention to imagine the lives of others. I have great respect for Ozick, as I know Julie does. But since I had seen the beginnings of The Flight Portfolio and the vast amounts of research, I wanted to ask her about the process of using history, biography, and imagination to create a novel—and, of course, about this strange misapprehension that occurred in the newspaper of record. What nerve did Julie strike here? And, looking at myself, what nerve did Ozick strike? These questions have been on my mind since I read that review. So I asked Julie. INTERVIEWER Historical research can be overwhelming. How did you decide where to begin your story, and where to end? ORRINGER The story of Varian Fry’s lifesaving mission in France has a seemingly obvious beginning and end—he arrived in Marseille in September of 1940 with a list of two hundred writers and artists he hoped to save. He left thirteen months later having rescued, against all odds, nearly ten times that many, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andre Breton, and Hannah Arendt, among others. But time in fiction doesn’t function along a strict continuum, or doesn’t have to. It can bend and loop, as we often experience it in real life. From the beginning, The Flight Portfolio explores how the past extrudes into the present, and how the prospect of our future—and of how our future selves might judge us—exerts pressure on our present moment. The more I learned about Fry’s personal history—his clinically depressed mother and work-preoccupied father, his decision to drop out of Hotchkiss in protest against its hazing rituals, his conflicts with the dean of Harvard when he was a student there, his relationship with future New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein—the more I knew this stuff had to be present in the novel, and had to press upon Fry during his time in Marseille. That meant, of course, that my research had to push beyond its initial boundaries, a daunting prospect when the available materials already included twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s papers at Columbia. But it was necessary to go further for the sake of full emotional accuracy. It also meant I had to exercise restraint, or the book might have been a thousand pages. Read More
May 29, 2019 Look Eggs and Horses and Dreams By The Paris Review Leonora Carrington’s work unfurls like a dream, both familiar and not. As in her sui generis short stories, mysterious human-animal hybrids populate the fantastical landscapes of her paintings, speaking in riddles, partaking in oblique ceremonies, eating sumptuous feasts. Blending iconography from mystical and religious traditions the world over, Carrington’s work hints at a hidden all-encompassing language of symbols, one that represents the inseparability of the universe and fertility (eggs crop up repeatedly in her work, as do horses—talking and otherwise). After spending years in the shadows of her fellow surrealists, Carrington has finally received her due as one of the twentieth century’s most singular artists: a museum in Mexico devoted to her life and work, reissues of her deliciously odd books, and now “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg,” the first solo exhibition of her work to appear in New York in twenty-two years. The show, an off-site presentation by Gallery Wendi Norris, is on view through June 29 at 926 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, where the gallery will also host a symposium on her work and a reading of Carrington’s unpublished play Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg. A selection of paintings from the exhibition—as well as two masks that Carrington designed for the play—appears below. Leonora Carrington, Green Tea, 1942, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″. © 2019 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris. Read More
May 29, 2019 Arts & Culture Beauty or Brains? A Simple Equation By Julia Phillips The main character of the musical The Light in the Piazza is named Clara. She’s blonde. The show is set in the fifties, and she wears gorgeous fit-and-flare dresses. The waists are belted tight and the wide skirts swirl. She’s beautiful. Her tastes are simple—she likes sunlight, hugs, the thought of having a baby one day. Her story goes like this: she and her mother are visiting Italy from North Carolina when they meet a handsome young man named Fabrizio. He and Clara fall in love at first sight. The initial obstacle to their romance is that they don’t speak the same language; the later, and more serious, is that in Clara’s mother’s eyes, Clara is not ready to enter any relationship, as Clara was kicked in the head by a horse at her twelfth birthday party and has remained childlike ever since. But neither of those things matters in the end. Clara’s beauty reflects her essence—her face reveals, at a glance, her pure heart and innocent spirit. What unites the American girl and Italian boy isn’t a shared culture or IQ, but the quality they sing out in their love duet: “You are good, you are good, you are good …” I watched them sing to each other in a Manhattan theater when I was seventeen years old. I’d taken the bus in from New Jersey to see the show. Four rows from the stage, I sat alone, dressed in black, my head shaved, and cried. Clara and Fabrizio wrapped their arms around each other. It was so romantic—it felt unattainable. My seat wasn’t farther than twenty feet from Clara’s T-strap shoes, yet we seemed to exist in different worlds. There, I thought, is the woman I will never be. Read More
May 29, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: The 10,000-Year Clock By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. This is her final dispatch. Somewhere in the desert of western Texas, in an underground chamber beneath a remote mountain range, a clock is being built that will last for ten thousand years. The clock is five hundred feet tall, and its pendulum is as large as a man. Its Geneva gears sprawl eight feet in diameter. The clock will be functional, perhaps more functional than any clock ever made, but it will not measure minutes or hours. Where the second hand should be, there will be a marker that advances once every century. The cuckoo will emerge at the dawn of each millennium. Each time the clock is wound, its bells will ring out in a different permutation of its algorithmically programmed sequences—no melody will be played twice. Reaching the clock will require something of a pilgrimage. The nearest airport is several hours by car, and to find the clock, visitors must travel through the desert, hike a rugged trail that rises up the mountain, then descend a spiral staircase that tunnels down into the earth. The 10,000-year clock, or the Clock of the Long Now, sprang from the imagination of Danny Hillis, a supercomputer designer who proposed its creation in a 1995 article for Wired magazine. It was a response to a problem that Hillis called “the shrinking future,” or the inability to think beyond one’s own lifetime. The most ambitious and enduring projects of former civilizations, he argued—the Egyptian pyramids, the medieval cathedrals—were constructed across several generations and required a kind of long-term thinking that had become lost to us. “I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me,” he wrote. The problem was that he couldn’t visualize this story. The clock was to become a symbol of this expansive outlook, one that would by its very nature encourage people to begin thinking again about the prospect of the distant future. Over the years, he built several prototypes. The clock garnered fans among a certain type of male celebrity who regards himself as forward-thinking—Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Peter Gabriel—all of whom contributed funding and creative input. But for two decades, the clock was simply an idea in Hillis’s mind: a symbol without a referent. Read More