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
March 15, 2019 In Memoriam W. S. Merwin, 1927–2019 By The Paris Review W. S. Merwin. We’re sad to report that W. S. Merwin, one of America’s finest poets, has died at age ninety-one. The recipient of nearly every literary award imaginable, Merwin was incredibly prolific over the course of his long career, and this shows in the amount of work he contributed to The Paris Review: thirty-six poems, a short story, an essay, selections from a travel journal, and an Art of Poetry interview. “The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about,” Merwin tells Edward Hirsch in his interview. “It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again.” Read More
March 15, 2019 In Memoriam Crashing W. S. Merwin’s Wedding By Edward Hirsch Photo: Jill Greenberg/Courtesy of Copper Canyon Press William Merwin had a deep knowledge of the world. He was an autodidact, a poet who prided himself on making his way outside of the academy. He had gone to Princeton, but didn’t think much of the university, though he revered his teachers, John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur, who encouraged him to go his own way. He took their advice. When he was young, he looked up to Ezra Pound and Robert Graves, who took an interest in him, and, like them, he decided to figure things out for himself. He wasn’t a teacher, at least in any formal sense. He had the crankiness of people who learn everything on their own. He was a poet, a prose writer, and a translator. He was completely sure about his vocation. He was the most international of American poets, and the most down to earth, literally: he knew more about the natural world than anyone else I’ve ever known. He had a kind of homespun wisdom, though he was so handsome that it sometimes seemed as if Orpheus had walked into the room. I loved being with him. Read More
March 15, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Passion, Portals, and Premature Presents By The Paris Review T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” I’ve spent a lot of time guddling around the Daily archive of late. There are many joys attendant to this, not least the expansion of that tragic category, Literature I Should Already Be Familiar With. This rapid multiplying of “known unknowns” is the reason I’m reading a Christmas poem, T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” in March. Casey N. Cep’s Daily article does a perfect job of describing the history behind Faber’s Ariel Poems series, to which Eliot’s piece belongs, so I’ll direct you there instead of rehearsing it here. Perhaps after reading, you’ll do as I did and buy yourself a springtime Christmas present: one of the slim original pamphlets from 1954. They’re beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I can’t really justify holding on to it—I know my Christmas-loving mother would appreciate it far more than I do. Reluctantly, next December, I’ll give it away. Thank heavens it’s not yet April. —Robin Jones Read More
March 15, 2019 At Work Ennio Morricone Plays Chess By Alessandro De Rosa Collage with modified images. Ennio Morricone photo: Gonzalo Tello. Chess photo: David Lapetina (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Ennio Morricone is responsible for some of the most recognizable soundtracks in cinema. He’s been the go-to composer for Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Brian De Palma, and many others. He’s especially renowned for his spaghetti western themes, which helped establish the mood of the genre. In 2007, Morricone received an Academy Honorary Award, and in 2016, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score, for The Hateful Eight. Here, he discusses one of his other great passions: chess. ENNIO MORRICONE How about playing a round? INTERVIEWER Rather than playing a game, you’ll have to teach me how to play the game. [We pull out a very elegant chessboard, which Morricone keeps on a table in the living room of his home, where we are seated.] INTERVIEWER What’s your first move? MORRICONE I usually open with the queen, so I’ll probably start with her, although once the great chess player Stefano Tatai advised me to open on E4, which reminds me a lot of the figured bass. INTERVIEWER Have we already started talking about music? MORRICONE In a certain sense … In time, I’ve discovered that strong links exist between chess and the musical notation system, set up as it is in durations and pitches. In chess, the two dimensions remain spatial, and time is what players have at their disposal in order to make the right move. In addition there are horizontal and vertical combinations, different graphic patterns, just like musical notes in harmony. Even still, one can pair patterns and plays as if they were instrumental parts in an orchestra. The player who doesn’t start—who has been assigned black chess pieces—has ten moves to choose from, before it is again the opponent’s turn—white chess pieces. The number of possible moves then grows exponentially with the following plays. This makes me think about counterpoint. There are analogies between the two disciplines—if one is interested in looking for them—and progress in one field oftentimes is linked to progress in the other. It is not by chance that mathematicians and musicians are generally among the best chess players. Take Mark Taimanov—an exceptional pianist and chess player—Jean-Philippe Rameau, Sergei Prokofiev, John Cage, my friends Aldo Clementi and Egisto Macchi. Chess is related to mathematics and mathematics is related to music, as Pythagoras claimed. And this is all the more true for the kind of music Clementi composed, a music substantively based on tone rows, numbers, and combinations … the same key elements as in chess. Ultimately, music, chess, and mathematics are all creative activities. They rely on graphical and logical procedures that also involve probability and the unexpected. Read More
March 15, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Colette By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Any writer who has recently been the subject of a film starring Keira Knightley can be said to be having a moment, and this is especially true of Colette (1873–1954), a star of the belle epoque Parisian literary scene whose life lends itself well to the themes of our own time. Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was a gender nonconformist more than a hundred years ago who adopted her surname as a one-word moniker. She was born to prosperous parents in the French village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, and at twenty years old, with a “little pointed face,” a “well-made body,” and braids that touched her calves like “whips” or “reins,” she made an improbable love marriage to “Willy” (Henry Gauthier-Villars), a wealthy thirty-four-year-old Parisian aristocrat and publishing impresario. Willy was the ultimate networker, a critic, society hound, and a provocateur who ran a workshop where impecunious young writers pumped out popular novels under his name. He brought his countrified young bride to Paris and was disowned for the ensuing scandal. Colette quickly went to work for him, and the series of semierotic autobiographical novels she wrote as “Willy,” which begins with Claudine at School, was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest” success stories in French literature, according to a contemporary. Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman even credits her with having invented the teenage girl. Later Claudine books reveal the queer and genderqueer ferment in Parisian society at the time (Proust was a contemporary); Colette’s affairs with women, including Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, a woman who dressed as a man and went by “Missy”; and Colette and Willy’s open marriage, which could be considered an early attempt at polyamory. The approach of the Keira Knightley movie is to portray Colette’s struggles to leave Willy, regain the rights to her work, and begin writing under her own name as a feminist parable. As a person allergic to orthodoxies, I never want to like the writer who is having a moment, especially when the reasons are ideological (even when the ideologies are ones I mostly share). I’d been resisting Colette until cracking a spine and discovering, like most of Paris did once before me, that she’s irresistible. Read More