April 4, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Etty Hillesum By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Etty Hillesum (Photo courtesy of the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, Middelburg, the Netherlands) In 1942, the year before she died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine, the Dutch diarist and mystic Etty Hillesum wrote: “I have the feeling that my life is not yet finished, that it is not yet a rounded whole. A book, and what a book, in which I have got stuck halfway. I would so much like to read on.” She was in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and had decided to stay, voluntarily, at the Dutch transit camp Westerbork as a “social welfare” representative of the Jewish Council—Joodse Raad—that had been set up to mediate between Jewish citizens and the Germans. Unlike some, Hillesum didn’t expect her association with the council to save her, and she harbored no illusions about the tragedy engulfing Europe. What the Nazis wanted, she realized, was “our total destruction.” Still, she had hopes of coming through the war alive. She longed to channel her prodigious literary talent into writing Dostoyevskian novels, as well as documenting the history she witnessed. “I shall wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer,” she declared, “and my words will have to be so many hammer strokes with which to beat the story of our fate.” Read More
April 3, 2019 Arts & Culture Limericks from beyond the Rings of Saturn By Anthony Madrid Illustration by Edward Lear I must write about Waterman. I must try to do justice to Waterman. Inclination, affection, and duty combine: I must speak and write about Waterman. 23 September 2017, I was in Chicago. I was in a bookstore I seldom visit: Open Books. Open Books does not often “speak to my concerns,” but that day was an exception. I had found, for six dollars, a hardcover of Kierkegaard’s Letters and Documents, volume 25: Princeton edition, jacket intact. I did not yet know that the book is neither rare nor valuable. Nor did I know that, in a year and a half of owning the book, I would not open it once. No, I was exultant: I thought it was probably worth forty-five dollars, and that I would start reading it in the airport on the way back to Texas. That day I found something else special. I found Paul Waterman. In particular, I found his 1965 book, Five Lines to Limerick. It has fifty-six numbered pages. It was warmly inscribed (“Best to Virginia Rick”) in ballpoint pen on 22 April 1966, in Worcester, New York. The book was published by Candor Press in Dexter, Missouri. Here is the cover: Read More
April 3, 2019 Arts & Culture In Search of William Gass By Zachary Fine William Gass teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine. In some late month of 1995, William H. Gass attempted a flight from New York to Saint Louis but was stalled by fog at the flight boards. He repaired to a small table at an airport bar, his socks pulped and moaning, and spent the night with a galley of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Gass ordered a glass of rosé, began reading, and observed the ways that the characters in the novel seemed to come and go like people in an airport bar. Time passes, and eventually civil servants and industrialists of 1913 Vienna wander into the bar itself, right alongside the airport castaways—or so Gass tells us in the essay he went on to write about Musil. After my plane lurched off the runway in New York, I took a folded copy of Gass’s essay out of my pocket and started reading. In September, I’d begun working on a review of The William H. Gass Reader, steeping myself in the life’s work, and now it was October, and I was uncertain about the direction of the piece. I declined the free snack mix and kept reading. I again tried to make sense of the beginning: there is a grounded flight in New York that occasions an essay in which an airport bar bleeds into an Austrian novel, and fiction into nonfiction, and then all sense of genre melts away as the review progressively constructs a lyrical world with its own logic and law. It struck me now that this was an uncanny echo of the most oft-repeated anecdote of Gass’s literary life. In October 1978, Gass was at a fiction festival in Cincinnati with the novelist John Gardner, and Gardner observed about their respective prose styles, “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” Gass responded: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there, solid as a rock, and have everybody think it is flying.” Asked decades later whether he would amend his words, Gass said, “I might put it differently, but the point would be the same. I would like my plane to be too beautiful to risk.” Read More
April 3, 2019 Happily The Evil Stepmother By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905 The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job. I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail. When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry. On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth. I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you. Read More
April 2, 2019 Redux Redux: Revelry 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. Deborah Eisenberg. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the three writers we’ll be celebrating at our annual Spring Revel, with Hadada Award recipient Deborah Eisenberg’s 2013 Art of Fiction interview; Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor,” winner of the 2019 Plimpton Prize for Fiction; and Benjamin Nugent’s short story “Safe Spaces,” winner of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize for Humor. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218 Issue no. 204 (Spring 2013) The real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. Read More
April 2, 2019 Arts & Culture Athena, Goddess of Copyediting By Mary Norris Ancient pottery depicting Athena and Enceladus fighting. Louvre Museum. Public domain. My first exposure to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill. Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and apparitions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt. Read More