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The Daily

July 12, 2021
Arts & Culture

Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text

By Vanessa Zoltan

Frederick Walker, A.R.A., Rochester and Jane Eyre, 1899. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The summer that I did my chaplaincy internship was a wildly full twelve weeks. I was thirty-two years old and living in the haze of the end of an engagement as I walked the hospital corridors carrying around my Bible and visiting patients. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m from the spiritual care department. How are you today?”

It was a surreal summer full of new experiences hitting like a tsunami: you saw them coming but that didn’t mean you could outrun them. But the thing that never felt weird was that the Bible I carried around with me as I went to visit patient after patient, that I turned to in the guest room at David and Suzanne’s or on my parents’ couch to sustain me, was a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel. The Bible I carried around that busy summer was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Read More
July 9, 2021
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Traps, Tall Tales, and Table Saws

By The Paris Review

César Aira. Photo: Nina Subin. Courtesy of New Directions.

César Aira’s latest book to appear in English, The Divorce (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), brings to mind an older approach to fiction—that of pure fabular storytelling, unencumbered by character development or realism. The plot is essentially nonexistent: a freshly divorced academic travels from Providence, Rhode Island, to Buenos Aires in order to distract himself from his emotions, and spends a day sitting outside a café around the corner from his guesthouse. While sitting there and chatting with a video artist named Leticia, he encounters Enrique, the guesthouse owner, who is holding a bicycle and appears to be freshly soaked from a large amount of water that has just been splashed upon him. Multiple stories quickly emerge: a surreal childhood encounter between Enrique and Leticia, the impoverished background of an acquaintance of Enrique’s named Jusepe, the strange life of Enrique’s mother (including the time she narrowly survived a mob killing), and the mysterious origins of the love of Enrique’s life, who is connected to the water with which the narrator finds Enrique soaked. These are tall tales in the most pleasurable sense of the term, looping and linking around one another as though to echo the strange circularities and synchronicities that so often repeat themselves in the course of a human life. “And with one hand,” writes Aira of Enrique, “he went on holding the delicate machine at his side: that ‘little steel fairy,’ the bicycle, from whose spinning stories are born.” —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 9, 2021
From the Archive

Game, Set, Match: Tennis in the Archive

By Christopher Notarnicola

Gentlemen’s Doubles tennis final at the 1897 Wimbledon Championships. Photo: J. Parmley Paret. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned a lot while fact-checking the Summer 2021 issue, and I owe a ton of that knowledge to Joy Katz for her essay “Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof.” Now, whenever the subject of tennis comes up, I find myself bursting with trivia. Did you know that the first Wimbledon championship was held in 1877, or that the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club employs a Harris’s hawk named Rufus to keep pigeons from interfering with matches, or that Hawk-Eye is the name of the technology used to verify a challenged umpire call? There’s a story in there somewhere. Tennis is well known for drawing the attention of the literary set—Martin Amis, Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, and John Jeremiah Sullivan come to mind—and the archive of The Paris Review boasts a wealth of writing on the subject, the sport often taking the role of the Hawk-Eye—a keen lens through which life’s quick volleys may be slowed, reviewed, and challenged in turn.

In Ross Kenneth Urken’s “1, Love,” a tennis stroke becomes the embodiment of a young boy’s “neurotic, racquet-throwing heart,” with nods to Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth along the way:

At its best, my slice backhand follows the flamboyant path of a violin virtuoso’s bow striking the climactic note of a concerto—from above my right shoulder plucked diagonally down to my left shoestring. The ball’s tone is a hollow pok on hard courts and a chalky chh-chh on clay that dies on the second bounce. All these dramatics—mere vestiges of a time when I wanted to impress Angela, my middle school crush.

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July 9, 2021
Look

Eileen in Wonderland

By The Paris Review

In an undated note bequeathed to the Tate Archive in 1992, Eileen Agar (1899–1991) writes of her admiration for the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Lewis Carroll is a mysterious master of time and imagination, the Herald of Sur-Realism and freedom, a prophet of the Future and an uprooter of the Past, with a literary and visual sense of the Present.” The same could be said of Agar, whose long career as an artist spanned most of the twentieth century and intersected with some of the prevailing movements of the time, including Cubism and surrealism. Her timeless work—including the oil painting Alice with Lewis Carroll—will be on view through August 29 at the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,” the largest exhibition yet of the sui generis artist’s oeuvre. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper, 10 x 12″. Private collection. Estate of Eileen Agar/Bridgeman Images. Photograph courtesy Pallant House Gallery, Chichester © Doug Atfield.

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July 8, 2021
At Work

In the Gaps: An Interview with Keith Ridgway

By Christopher Notarnicola

Keith Ridgway. Photo courtesy of New Directions.

The central chapter of Keith Ridgway’s latest novel, A Shock, takes place in The Arms—a South London pub that serves as a gathering place for many of the book’s characters. “The Story,” as the chapter is titled, is about local patrons regaling one another with anecdotes, all of which speak either directly or obliquely to the stories in the surrounding chapters or to the novel at large. In one tale, a bird flies as high as a mountaintop, where its heart gives out, and it drops, only to take another flight to those same mountainous heights—“Stuck in a loop. Doing the same thing again and again.” So, too, does this novel deal in loops, reinventing itself with every chapter while following familiar characters and themes, collapsing at its center only to unfurl again, opening with “The Party” and closing with “The Song,” which takes place at the titular celebration of the first chapter.

A Shock is an artful exercise in nervous revelry. There is an exciting, almost voyeuristic quality to the reading experience, a bit like wandering slowly through the very house party Ridgway depicts. The novel features an exquisitely arranged guest list of characters. A woman spies on her neighbors through a hole in the wall. Another habitually invents elaborate personal histories. A man obsesses over what might have happened to the former tenants of his apartment. And Ridgway makes a wonderful master of ceremonies, introducing each character in turn and nodding to the many connections between. His language is realistic yet defamiliarized, balancing a fealty to the many flaws inherent in natural modes of expression and the writerly necessities of successful storytelling, rendering confusion with narrative clarity and imprecision with the utmost intention, so that dialogue may drift in and out of earshot, perspectives may shift, details may gain or lose focus as faces emerge or fade from the crowd, but always in service of honest conversation and never at the expense of a good time.

Ridgway is from Dublin. In addition to A Shock, he is the author of the novels Hawthorn & Child, Animals, The Parts, and The Long Falling, which was adapted as the 2011 film Où va la nuit. His writing has earned him the Prix Femina Étranger, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the O. Henry Award. He lives in London. As much as I would have loved to attend an actual party at the Ridgway place, this interview was conducted over the phone, over the static of the Atlantic, over one evening this past April.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to start with the idea of the middle. Your latest novel, A Shock, finds characters trapped in an attic, introduced in medias res, and literally squeezed through a gap between walls. What brings you to write toward these liminal spaces?

RIDGWAY

Well, that’s where we live. In the gaps. In this book there are characters who are trapped or stuck or separated in various ways. Sometimes, as you say, literally. Stuck in a building or in part of a building. But also, there are characters trapped in looped thinking, or in poor housing, terrible work, and the political gap that allows those things. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in the spaces themselves, but I am interested in the people. And among them are others who seem less trapped. Who seem somehow to have more freedom of imaginative movement, based on something in themselves, a sort of ability to walk through things. I was interested in all these people. Read More
July 7, 2021
Correspondence

Shirley Jackson’s Love Letters

By Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson, Photograph. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, emigrated from England at age twelve with his mother and two sisters and became a successful self-made business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, is a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and can trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War.

Shirley grows up primarily in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she is sixteen, Leslie is promoted and transferred, and the family moves—luxuriously, by ship, through the Panama Canal—to Rochester, in upstate New York. The Jacksons quickly join the Rochester Country Club and become well-established in the city’s active society world. The move is very hard on Shirley, who misses California and her friends there, especially her best friend, Dorothy Ayling. She finishes high school in Rochester (where one of her classes is once interrupted for a few minutes so that Shirley can marvel at snow falling outside the window), then attends the University of Rochester for one difficult year, before deciding to spend the next year writing alone in her room at home, with the lofty goal of producing a thousand words a day. Little of what Shirley writes during that period is believed to have survived.

She then enrolls at Syracuse University, where she enjoys literature classes, and where the university’s journal, The Threshold, publishes her story “Janice,” a one-page conversation with a young woman who brags that she has that day attempted suicide. Another literature student, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Brooklyn, New York, the brash, intellectual son of a Jewish second-generation wholesale paper merchant, reads her story and vows on the spot to find and marry its author.

Shirley and Stanley meet on March 3, 1938, in the library listening room, and an intellectual connection quickly develops into a romantic one. These letters begin just three months after they’ve met, when both Shirley and Stanley are on summer break, she at home in Rochester and he at first at home in Brooklyn and then rooming with his friend Walter Bernstein at Dartmouth, then working at a paper mill in Erving, Massachusetts.

This is the earliest known surviving letter of Shirley’s. She is twenty-one, and Stanley is about to turn nineteen.

*

[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

tuesday [June 7, 1938]

portrait of the artist at work. seems i brought a collection of miscellaneous belongings home from school, among them a c and c hat which bewilders goddamnthatword my little brother. he says if it’s a hat why doesn’t it have signatures all over it. mother seems to think i’m insane, and closes her eyes in a pained fashion when i call her chum. she also tells me that love or no love i have to eat and when i say eatschmeat she says what did you say and for a minute icy winds are blowing. there has been hell breaking loose ever since mother woke me this morning by telling me that that was a letter from dartmouth that the dog was eating. when she came in an hour later and found me reading the letter for the fifth time she began to be curious and asked me all sorts of questions about you. yes, she got it all. consequently there was a rather nice scene, me coming off decidedly the worse, since mother quite unfairly enlisted alta’s assistance and alta went and made a cake and i like cake. mother says, in effect: go on and be a damn fool but don’t tell your father. i had to cry rather loudly though. which means that you are going to meet a good deal more opposition than i had counted on. i think mother was mad because she took your long distance call the other day and the big shot was expecting an important business call and he was quite excited when the operator said that the party at the other end of the line wasn’t going to pay. yes, and mother says to tell you that any more letters arriving with postage due and she will either steam the letters open since they belong to her since she practically bought them or she will start taking the postage out of my allowance. Read More