February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Epic, Neglected Vision of Joan Murray By Farnoosh Fathi The following is adapted from the editor’s introduction to a new collection of Joan Murray’s poems, published last week. Joan Murray. Photo courtesy of Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. “What truth, what mystical awareness can be lived,” Joan Murray wrote in a letter to her mother. Like the young Rimbaud, Murray intended to make herself a seer—what she calls, among other figures, the “Unemployed or universal Architect.” She became this architect-seer not, as Rimbaud proposed, by a total derangement of the senses but by building “the firm reality of a consciousness, consciousness in the never-ending, the great wideness that one must blend withal.” Like Emily Dickinson and Laura Riding before her, Murray belongs to a radical arc of American metaphysical women poets, most of whom still remain unsung. Her untimely death from a congenital heart condition in 1942, at age twenty-four, marked the loss of an extraordinary poet; yet Murray’s poems recalibrate the notion of a life’s work. The tragic facts only underscore the epic achievement of her vision. Five years after her death, out of the blue woodwork of 1947, her first book of poetry was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition with the title Poems by Joan Murray: 1917–1942. W. H. Auden, who had been dissatisfied with the manuscripts he had received as a first-year judge, had reached out to Murray’s mother to inquire about the possibility of publishing her daughter’s work posthumously for the prize. Murray had been a student in Auden’s Poetry and Culture course at the New School in 1940, and her mother countered Auden’s invitation with the accusation that he had killed her daughter by inspiring her “poetry fever.” But she was devoted to her daughter’s work and eager to see it published, so agreed to the Yale edition with the condition that her friend Grant Code—a poet, Harvard lecturer, and dance and theater critic—edit the collection. Read More
February 14, 2018 In Memoriam Watching Screwball Comedies with Harry Mathews By Ann Beattie Harry Mathews. Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of his own devising. From 1989 until 2003, Harry served as our Paris editor. In 2007, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, interviewed Harry for our Art of Fiction series. As she wrote in her introduction, “After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language.” Harry died last year just as our Spring issue, with an excerpt from his final novel, was going to press. —The Paris Review Harry Mathews, who died a year ago, on January 25, was born on Valentine’s Day. This is the first time his friends (including those in Key West, who, during the winter, often got to see Harry and his beloved wife, Marie) have had to be without him. About the time he turned eighty, maybe a bit earlier, he had to stop bicycling. He did this grudgingly, berating some of us for our concern (expressed as he was about to cycle off after certain … let’s just say wine-centric dinners). His good friend James Merrill was the person who’d urged the Mathewses to leave wintry New York and come enjoy the sun in Key West. (Merrill, on his own bicycle, was always a delightful sight as he sped toward you wearing his shirt, shorts, argyle socks, and sandals.) Not that Harry needed to imitate Merrill or his other close friend John Ashbery at all: his sense of style was singular, as was Harry. But how did I become dear friends with a person who had specially sewn compartments in his shirt pockets for his cigars? How did my husband and I appear, year after year, on New Year’s Eve to be poured as much champagne as we wished (forget that “wishing upon a star” nonsense; this was excellent champagne) and to watch a screwball comedy that would be midway through at midnight? He shushed us if we so much as whispered to the person sitting next to us. In the background, we’d hear fireworks, the screams, the ubiquitous unmuffled motorcycles, more piercing screams, and soon, very soon, the sirens, as the TV volume was adjusted upward to a near-deafening level. In Key West, certain individuals get the idea that they might, say, blow up a pier to celebrate the New Year. (Or, at the very least, set their neighbor’s garbage can on fire.) Read More
February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois By Ibram X. Kendi W. E. B. Du Bois The dispute lasted for more than a year between itinerant black farmer Sam Hose and his wealthy white employer, Alfred Cranford. Hose requesting his wages. Cranford refusing to pay up. The dispute grew like the crops on Cranford’s farm outside of Atlanta, in Coweta County. On April 12, 1899, Cranford aimed murderous threats and his loaded gun at Hose. Hose grabbed a nearby ax, threw it at Cranford, and ran into the Georgia wilderness. Newspapers got wind of the incident and started blaring sensational details of the murderous Hose who raped Cranford’s wife as Cranford lay dying. Read More
February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Advice on Love from Nietzsche and Sartre By Skye C. Cleary A couple in front of the love locks in Paris. Locking lips and interlocking fingers are harmless enough, but locking into love is seductively dangerous—both figuratively and literally. Twenty-first-century lovers have become so captivated by the metaphor that, in 2015, the pont des arts in Paris had to be released from the crushing weight of forty-five tons of padlocks that lovers had secured to it. Keys, tossed over the rails, litter the Seine. While the Parisian love locks were auctioned to raise money for charities, padlocks still smother memorials around the world—from other bridges in Paris, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to fences in Hawaii and Australia. Urban planners have now become accidental heroes in the crusade against the obsession, although the phenomenon persists despite their best efforts to thwart it. On a Valentine’s Day that comes hot on the heels of #MeToo, it’s worth reflecting on some of our rituals and symbols of love. For example, while I hope chastity belts are a relic of the past, ironmongery such as wedding bands are still among our ultimate signifiers of commitment—perhaps even more so than the marriage certificate that binds us legally. In some ways, this makes sense. Steely icons are strong, stable, and durable. Metallic tokens outlive us to such an extent that they remind us of the possibility of everlasting love. Most of us want love, and we want it to stay, so no wonder we’re tempted to fetter it in chains. However, these exalted symbols are deeply troubling in other ways. Not only are they cold and hard and inflexible, but they’re also relics of a long tradition of possessiveness: wedding rings are a vestige of dowry traditions and signify being owned. Read More
February 13, 2018 Redux Redux: Pevear and Volokhonsky, Evan S. Connell, William Leo Coakley 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. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Happy Valentine’s Day! This week, we bring you our 2015 Art of Translation interview with the husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Evan S. Connell’s famous story “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge,” and William Leo Coakley’s poem “The Marriage of Dionysus and Apollo.” A subscription to The Paris Review makes a great gift for that special someone. They’ll receive full access to our sixty-four-year archive and four issues of new interviews, poetry, and fiction. Read More
February 13, 2018 Hue's Hue Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe By Katy Kelleher Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds, 1963, still from a color film, 119 minutes. In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like for many of his fellow Frenchmen, the Orient, as it was often called, was a source of endless fascination, but visiting wouldn’t be easy on his wallet or his waistline. It was an arduous journey: from mail coach to riverboat to railway then finally to a room aboard an ungainly and fragile boat named Le Nil, which was equipped with a sail, a tall funnel, and a pair of paddle wheels. “The ugly little ship staggered the length of the Mediterranean like a drunkard,” writes Geoffery Wall, author of Flaubert: A Life. After eleven days on board Le Nil, Flaubert arrived in Alexandria, where he found himself overwhelmed by the noise of the animals, the scents of the food, and, above all, the colors. “I gobbled up a bellyful of color, like a donkey filling himself with oats,” he writes. In another letter, dated 1850, he compares the country to being alive in “the middle of one of Beethoven’s symphonies … For the first few days, may the devil take me, it’s an astounding hubbub of color, and your poor old imagination, as if it were at a fireworks display, is perpetually dazzled.” Read More