March 19, 2019 One Word One Word: Avuncular By Myriam Gurba In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. Man with beer, artist unknown, c. 1920 My uncle Henry has killed a lot of people. In spite of his dark past, and because of it, he’s my favorite American uncle. Since I cherish bilingually, in English and in Spanish, I cherish my uncles and my tíos separately. The border separates us, cleaving family from familia. My favorite tío was Alvaro. Unlike Henry, he wasn’t a genius. He never killed anybody, though he was known to get rough with English. His favorite T-shirt was a little too tight and its stenciled letters declared LIFE’S A BEACH! To visit Alvaro, I travel thousands of miles, to a cemetery in Guadalajara. To see Henry, I need only walk a mile from my apartment to a skilled nursing facility beside a hipster barbershop and an Irish pub. Henry no longer speaks about the people he killed as an artillery officer, but decades ago, he often rambled about them to my father, his little brother. He shared specifics. He described GIs slicing free enemy ears, threading them together, crafting leis of shriveled lobes. He told about exploded water buffalo dripping from trees, pink rain. He talked about calling in an air strike and obliterating everyone and everything in a village, all life wiped out except for a single baby. When Henry returned to California from Vietnam, the baby followed him. He continued to hear it crying. He looked for that baby everywhere, including underneath his mother’s house. He couldn’t find it. Read More
March 19, 2019 At Work These Are Not the Margins: An Interview with Bryan Washington By Nikki Shaner-Bradford Bryan Washington describes himself as a writer from Houston, but it might be more accurate to say he’s a writer of Houston. His work not only observes the city, it seems to create it anew. The words rustle through the trees and stomp new cracks in the sidewalk. Washington’s fiction and essays range from food, film, and the arts to sexuality, gentrification, and blackness in America. No matter the topic, his work is steeped in Houston, conjuring the city with equal parts empathy and pride to create a distinct feeling of home. In his debut short-story collection, Lot, an unlabeled map serves as a frontispiece, and the stories, each named after a different area in Houston, fill in the space. Washington’s characters share the same streets, roaming their city and singing a collective history. In the story “Alief,” a neighborhood relishes in the drama of an extramarital affair; “Shepherd” follows a boy sorting through shame and sexuality with a visiting cousin; and a young man finds job security with a veteran drug dealer in “South Congress.” Throughout these stories lives a recurring narrator, a young man growing up in a rapidly transforming city, sorting through his scattered family, his queerness, and his black Latino identity. Houston is a constant, but as the force of gentrification builds in the wake of Harvey, the narrator is forced to choose between leaving and staying. His transition into adulthood is haunted by the ghosts of people who have left, restaurants that have closed, and muddied baseball fields. In the final story, “Elgin,” Washington writes, “Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete.” Lot has been enthusiastically anticipated, and stories from the collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and Electric Literature. Although these stories stand alone, reading through Washington’s book from start to finish feels significant, like bearing witness to Houston’s erosion. For every thrown fist and quickly whipped comeback, there is a quiet moment cleaning dishes, sitting in the Whataburger parking lot, or sneaking out on a lover in the night. Just as every city is created by its inhabitants, Lot belongs foremost to its characters, who ask to be remembered, even long after their pages have turned. Read More
March 18, 2019 In Memoriam Two Memories of W. S. Merwin By The Paris Review W. S. Merwin, one of the greatest poets of a fading generation, died last week at the age of ninety-one. Merwin was a frequent contributor to The Paris Review, and over the years we have published thirty-six of his poems, a short story, an essay, selections from a travel journal, and an Art of Poetry interview. Below, two short memories of his dedication, both to his work and to the earth he carefully tended, from those who knew and loved him. Photo: Tom Sewell Lament for the Maker The sun was setting in Hawaii on a spring day in 1995, when W. S. Merwin invited me into his study to hear him recite a new poem, and since he did not care to turn on the lights I listened to the last stanzas of his “Lament for the Makers” in near darkness. His study had a sacred aspect—its door was to remain locked whenever I house-sat for him and his wife, Paula, during their travels to the mainland and then to their place in the Dordogne. This atmosphere was heightened by his melodic voice, which in my mind bore traces of the hymns he had composed as a child for his Presbyterian minister father in Scranton, Pennsylvania. A palm frond crashed into the ravine beyond the lanai, on which a pair of sleeping chow chows did not stir. William recalled his departed poet-friends: “One by one they have all gone / out of the time and language we / had in common which have brought me”—and here his voice began to crack: “to this season after them.” “Beware the ides of March,” a soothsayer warns Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s drama, and when news arrived today that William had died in his sleep, at the age of ninety-one, I remembered him telling me that for years he always traveled with a paperback edition of the Bard—which tuned his ear to deeper sources of the English language. But it was the jagged music of the Scottish poet William Dunbar that inspired “Lament for the Makers”: fifty-two rhyming quatrains, one for each week of the year, mourning the passing of his mentors and friends—Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir and Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, and on and on, including his teacher at Princeton, John Berryman, all of whom heard the clear note that “never promised anything / but the true sound of brevity / that will go on after me.” Read More
March 18, 2019 In Memoriam Poem for Merwin By Matthew Zapruder Merwin’s Garden (Photo: Matthew Zapruder) There is no poet whose work has meant more to me than W. S. Merwin. Last December, I went to Hawaii for a series of conversations with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift. The trip was organized by the Merwin Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the ongoing preservation of the poet’s writing, ideals, and now legacy. They also work on maintaining and preserving the palm garden in Maui that he built, along with his late wife, Paula. When you go there, it feels more like a forest, filled with palms of so many different varieties, many of them rare. It’s an unexpected, completely singular place. I hope it will survive and continue to thrive now that he is gone. I got to see Merwin, and sit and talk with him and his editor, Michael Wiegers, and Lewis, on the lanai overlooking the garden. Toward the end of his life, Merwin lost his sight, though he was completely aware of what was going on around him. This is a note I wrote in my journal right after: At one point there was a bird in a tree and I knew if I described it carefully enough he’d be able to tell us what it was, so I looked for a while and then said, what is that bird with the grey feathers and orange beak and a little bit of red in its tail and a crown, and he said, that’s a female cardinal, and I think she is about to have babies, so if we put a blueberry on the railing of the lanai her mate, the red cardinal, will come and get it. Merwin put two blueberries on the railing and the red cardinal came. Long before the trip, I had begun a poem for him, but couldn’t seem to finish it. It was only after visiting the garden, and then sitting with him, that I was able to. Indeed, I finished it that same day, right after we sat together on the lanai. In the garden is Paula’s gravestone, where Merwin will also be buried. On it is the inscription “Here We Were Happy,” which, along with many other thoughts and things said during this trip, made its way into the poem. Poem for Merwin for a long time you planted one every day and now the garden is a clock on forest time Read More
March 18, 2019 Arts & Culture The Genius of Terry Southern By David L. Ulin On April 2, The Paris Review and its supporters will meet at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Spring Revel, an annual celebration of the magazine and the enduring power of literature. That evening, Elif Batuman will present the Terry Southern Prize for Humor to Benjamin Nugent for his story “Safe Spaces.” Terry Southern, the namesake of the award, was the novelist and screenwriter behind the success of, among other things, Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. He acted as a crucial influence in the early years of The Paris Review; “The Accident”—an excerpt from Southern’s debut novel, Flash and Filigree—appeared in the first issue. This week, Grove Atlantic will reissue Flash and Filigree with a new introduction by David L. Ulin. This introduction appears below. Terry Southern. Terry Southern hit me like a drug. He wasn’t the first—before him, there was Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Joseph Heller—but he was certainly the weirdest, or maybe just the most intent on subverting the dominant narrative. He seemed to want to take the piss out of everything, writing novels that were fiercely and deliriously ironic, disdainful of material obsessions and the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. I first discovered him through the copy of Candy my father kept stashed in his bureau, as if Southern were a rumor or a ghost. But it was only after I made my way to college that I began to understand. One evening, in the row house I rented with six friends in West Philadelphia, I caught the 1969 film adaptation of his novel The Magic Christian (Southern had cowritten the screenplay) on after-hours TV. There was an image of a ten-pound note, so large it filled the screen, and then the voice of Peter Sellers, who played the billionaire Guy Grand, announcing in a clipped Oxbridge accent: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is commonly known as money. It comes in all sizes, colors, and denominations, like people. We’ll be using quite a bit of it in the next two hours. Luckily, I have enough for all of us.” Southern was a genius, can we just say that? He was a vivid mimic, a writer of outlandish set pieces; just think of the demonically twisted “Mrs. Joyboy” scene he wrote for the film The Loved One. He liked to start simply, in something close to believable reality. Then he would push the boundaries, until the whole world seemed to explode. Take his first novel, Flash and Filigree, published in 1958. Influenced by his great hero Henry Green, the book opens as a young man, Felix Treevly, visits the “world’s foremost dermatologist,” Dr. Frederick Eichner, at his clinic on Wilshire Boulevard. Treevly is pretentious, arrogant; “a small boil,” he sniffs, referring to his ailment, “actually a cystic mass—or wen if you like, extremely small, no larger than the common variety of facial pustule.” He is, in other words, an almost perfect Southern target, so full of himself he is aware of little else. “Yes, of course,” the doctor murmurs, then slams a padded paperweight into the top of the patient’s skull. The act appears to have erupted out of nowhere, as if the poles of the narrative have been reversed. Protagonist? Antagonist? What’s the difference? In Southern’s universe, how would we know? This is the point, a world without, in any real sense, heroes, in which the disrupters (Treevly, Guy Grand in The Magic Christian, Blue Movie’s Boris Adrian) and the disrupted are equally complicit. Read More
March 18, 2019 Arts & Culture Isaac Bashevis Singer from Beyond the Grave By Matt Levin VIDEO STILL OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, BY TETSUO KOGAWA, 1977. The Isaac Bashevis Singer of public consumption—the elderly, distinguished, Yiddish, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer—projected an air of oblique, quizzical humility, as if he were bemused by the grandiose esteem in which he was held. He endearingly told The Paris Review in his 1977 Art of Fiction Interview, the year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, that “a story is still a story where the reader listens and wants to know what happens,” and that he knew so few American writers “because here in America I find there is no place to meet them.” The younger brother of a celebrated Yiddish author, Israel Joshua Singer, he relished slotting himself beneath Israel’s long-dead shadow. According to that Paris Review interview, he listed himself publicly in the Manhattan phone directory, and “would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee.” He enjoyed “feeding pigeons from a brown paper bag.” The interviewer, Harold Flender, writes: “The first impression Singer gives is that he is a fragile, weak man who would find it an effort to walk a block.” That public persona—inviting, avuncular, warm, and unpretentious—was played with such confidence that the private Singer was able to stand just beside it, unhidden but unnoticed. Despite his appearance of overwhelming physical frailty, Flender tells us, Singer actually “walks fifty to sixty blocks a day.” In nearly every promotional photo of Singer, he seems to have been caught slightly unprepared, standing in the middle of the street, hands clasped awkwardly, like a maladroit foreign uncle. In portraits, he appears caught in the midst of composing himself, midsigh, midgrimace, midsmirk, his face, when in motion, a garden of widening, branching lines: deep-riven forehead wrinkles when the eyebrows arch, cheeks bunched up in a smile, overhanging like mountain crags, casting thick shadows. Yet in these photos his eyes belie the rest—they are steady and very still. They are the eyes of a seer. The joke he is smiling at is also quite serious, his eyes say, that joke is the molten core of his being. Running beneath his genial exterior, feeding it, is a soaring religious notion, unflinchingly held, as if he had seen it with as little ceremony as a cloud or a car. It bursts into the open near the end of his Nobel Prize lecture, when he addresses Yiddish, his native tongue: “There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way … Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.” Singer has reverted to prophecy. He was not an orthodox Jewish believer, but in the end he, like his rabbinical forefathers, did not believe in death. The universe and time were too vast, too wide, too kaleidoscopic, for finality. That is the extent of his prophecy. It is an extension of his humility. Read More