March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture On Finally Reading Joseph McElroy’s Lost Magnum Opus By Adam Dalva Obsession had brought me to Joseph McElroy’s apartment building. I was vibrating from too much caffeine. I had been up late with his 1,200-page novel, Women and Men, suffering the long-forgotten nervousness of cramming for a difficult final. The elevator opened directly into his apartment—a surprise. I hadn’t prepared my facial expression. McElroy, in a purple checked shirt tucked neatly into neutral pants, greeted me cautiously. As he led me through a maze of books, I noted the strength of his voice and the way, at eighty-seven, he walked with only the faintest hint of caution. I sat in his study beneath a large printed photo of McElroy himself staring angrily down at me. For the past decade, every time I’d entered a used bookstore, it was with the hope of finally finding a copy of Women and Men. Now I was interviewing its author, something that I’d had no desire to do. My interest in the novel began with Jonathan Franzen’s “Mr. Difficult,” a takedown of William Gaddis. I wasn’t yet aware of the phenomenon of big-game hunting, the youngish critic making a case for their own fiction by taking down a writer who is either too lofty or too dead (ideally both) to punch back. Franzen’s argument relied on a binary: there was the “Status model” of evaluating novels—artistic greatness regardless of the novel’s popular success—and the “Contract model”—a friendly egalitarian compact between writer and reader. While Franzen allows that certain novels like House of Mirth can be appreciated in both modes, the categories diverge over challenging works. For a contract reader, difficulty is an impediment. I took note when he identified a status canon of “intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers … Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Barth, Barthelme, Hannah, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin.” I had never heard of Joseph McElroy, whose 1987 book regularly sells for more than three hundred dollars on eBay. The one volume in the New York Public Library system is impossible to secure, there is no e-book, and I grew fascinated with the elusiveness of Women and Men. I wasn’t alone. Most online discussions of the book are tips on finding it. The novel was notorious, eleven years of labor that quickly vanished from cultural consciousness. Many books go out of print because they are unremarkable, but few acquire the cult status of Women and Men. We who hadn’t read it all had the same questions: Why was it so long? And was it good? And why, despite its failure, did it still fascinate so many? Read More
March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Duncan Hannah’s Seventies New York By M. H. Miller Duncan Hannah in his studio and apartment in Brooklyn. Photo by David Coggins. In the last decade, a cottage industry has sprung up around wistful recollections of New York in the seventies, from memoirs authored by people who lived through it, like Richard Hell (2013’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp) and Patti Smith (Just Kids, which won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction), to novels by people too young to have been there (Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire) to television series that gleefully depict the city when it was near bankruptcy and had a harder edge (The Get Down, about the burgeoning hip-hop scene, and The Deuce, about the golden age of pornographic theaters in Times Square). Some of these works are endearing pieces of art, but all of them inevitably look back with a glimmer of sentimentality—and perhaps envy—at a time when it was still possible to live comfortably as an artist in New York without a trust fund. Twentieth-Century Boy, by the painter Duncan Hannah, a collection of the artist’s notebooks from the seventies, has none of the retroactive fondness afforded by distance. Beginning at age seventeen, Hannah meticulously documented his conservative upbringing in Minnesota (against which he rebelled with a combination of alcohol, LSD, and a part-time job as an usher at the Guthrie Theatre, where he got to live out his hero-worship of figures like Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin) through his art education at Bard College in Upstate New York and his move, in 1973, to the city to attend Parsons and try to make it as an artist. Read More
March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture UFO Drawings from the National Archives By David Clarke The National Archives AIR 2/18961. Painting of a UFO spotted on 18 January 1975, near Birmingham. Later identified as satellites Zond 4 and Cosmos 460. With its origins in the aftermath of World War II, belief in extraterrestrial visitations has grown into one of the most widespread and persistent of modern mysteries. As one measure of its impact on British society, a 1998 opinion survey for the Daily Mail found that one third of the UK’s population believed that “extraterrestrial life has already visited Earth.” Of these, 2 percent (1.26 million people) claim to have seen a UFO or had direct experience of alien visitation. In conspiracy culture, stories circulate telling of UFO crashes, government cover-ups, and secret agreements between the U.S. military and alien intelligences. In the UK some believe the Ministry of Defense (MoD) operate a “secret army against the aliens” and employ special agents—the legendary Men in Black or MIB—to silence witnesses and remove hard evidence of UFO visitations. But in 2007, after decades of stonewalling questions about its UFO investigations, the MoD announced that it had decided to proactively release all its surviving files. This was, it said, to counter “the maze of rumor and frequently ill-informed speculation” that surrounded their role in this subject. In recognition of the fact that there was public interest in the content of their archives, thousands of pages of formerly secret documents were scanned and uploaded to the Internet. Only a small amount of information was “redacted” to remove names and addresses of people who had reported sightings and, occasionally, secret information that might harm national security if released. These are some examples of what was contained in those files, sent in by citizens to report their sightings. Read More
March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Tennessee Williams in Four Objects By Margaret Bradham Thornton Left: Tennessee Williams, Self-portrait, undated, oil on canvas. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Right: Autograph manuscript notebook, 1943 March 12 to September 26 and undated entry dated “Late Tuesday Night” [24 March 1943]. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University. Tennessee Williams papers, 1932–1983, Ms Thr 397 (1355). In the decade I spent editing and annotating the notebooks of Tennessee Williams, I learned that one cannot find nor, as my editor Jonathan Brent noted, tell the story of anyone’s life in a linear way, certainly not Williams’s. As I endeavored to track down individuals with only their first names as guide and find and identify unpublished manuscripts referred to only in the most generic ways, my efforts, at times, took more the form of a scavenger hunt, even a flea-market trawl. Along the way, I unearthed several lost notebooks and unknown manuscripts, including a one-act play. Encouraged by the British Museum’s ability to tell the history of the world across a span of two million years with one hundred objects, I have chosen, from Williams’s archives, four objects from four categories—an unpublished poem, a passage from a journal, an unknown one-act play, and a letter—to give insight into his ambition, his psyche, his creative process, and, finally, his sense of humanity. Read More
March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Listening to Harold Bloom’s Laugh and DeLillo’s Bronx Accent By Matt Levin On listening to the archival audio of the Writers at Work interviews in the Morgan Library. The Morgan Library. Every week for the past four months, I have made the multistage journey to the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the Morgan Library, the home of the archives of The Paris Review, in the aim of gathering audio for The Paris Review Podcast. I approach the library obliquely, around the corner from the main entrance, through the glass staff doors. I can see the guards, wave to them even, but each time, I must state my business through a small intercom at about the height of my belly button. When I am let in and signed in, I pass through a glass door that leads immediately to another glass door, which can only be opened by another security guard. Often, I am stranded for a few minutes in this transparent, soundproof vestibule, trying to get the attention of the guard. I can see perfectly into the open, mellow, well-lit blond-wood cube lobby of the library, which looks like something out of a Scandinavian modern Lego set. Then the door opens, and sound pours in—spoons tinkling on porcelain saucers, voices faintly echoing under the high ceiling, the tonic buzz of the HVAC system. The space changes. The sounds of footfalls or a cough or a machine whirr, I realize each time, constitute a room as much as the shape of a window, the sunlight slanting in, the style of a vase. I trail behind the security guard to the elevators (all glass), a special key is inserted, and I rise to the third floor, where another glass-ended anteroom awaits. I can see through a glass door into the reading room itself, can see the employees moving in a shuffle that is itself a whisper, can see the researchers in their blue latex gloves gripping the corners of translucent manuscript pages with the delicacy used to pick up a strand of hair. I stuff everything I have except for my laptop, a notebook, and a number-two pencil (no ink allowed) in a locker and wash my hands, per regulation. Then the heavy glass door with a scratchy brass latch bolt clicks open, and I’m finally inside, and the room becomes the scent of aging books—stale glue, starchy paper, faint notes of smoked cigarettes and palms and rainwater—mingling with bright lemon cleaning products. In the reading room, I sit and listen to archival audio of The Paris Review Writers at Work interviews, which I have read and know the words to but only imagine I’ve heard, have been guessing at from across the transparency of the page. Read More
March 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman By The Paris Review John Berger When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. Now he’s dead, but his final book is forthcoming. In May, Notting Hill Editions will publish Smoke, Berger’s illustrated elegy to cigarettes. If “collaborative consumption”— a lifestyle whose transactions include co-working, co-living, and ride sharing—is a poorly disguised marketing campaign designed to sell old habits of communal living to millennials with new income, Smoke imagines a reciprocity that’s for real. In fable-like prose, Berger describes a community of men, women, and children who pass around cigarettes, lights, and worldviews. When their habits are declared deadly, and they themselves are declared murderers, they retreat into the shadows. Though their love is illicit, they meander toward old haunts, where they are “happy,” in Berger’s words, “to encounter one another as outlaws.” —Maya Binyam On the site of a newly discovered temple deep in the jungle of Honduras, two groups of Americans enter a standoff that lasts nearly two decades. The first group, arriving from Hollywood to shoot a film, finds the second, sent by a Rockefeller-like tycoon character to dismantle the temple and bring it stateside piece by piece, camped out by the half-deconstructed ruin. Both groups have hired the same locals to help them. The characters in Ned Beauman’s Madness Is Better Than Defeat are, to the reader’s delight, haplessly out of place, and, it would seem, doomed. Take Jervis Welt, a film-theory teacher from Southern California who’s been sent on this mission by an enigmatic, Howard Hughes–like, Hollywood mogul (he has never directed a movie before). Before long, both groups become entangled with black-hat CIA operatives out to use them for their own geopolitical purposes and an ex–Nazi officer on the run. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Beauman’s layered treatment of familiar archetypes surges at you like a Pynchonesque detective novel with the slow-building surreality of Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now. Madness is a thrilling, dark, comedic romp through the jungle. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More