June 27, 2018 Correspondence An Editorial Exchange: Donald Hall and George Plimpton By Donald Hall George Plimpton and Donald Hall. Donald Hall served as The Paris Review’s first poetry editor from 1953 to 1961. His vast knowledge of contemporary poetry and demand for excellence helped set the Review’s poetry standards high from the beginning. In this undated letter, which is an ars poetica of sorts, he argues with our founding editor George Plimpton about several Beat poets, what makes a poem good or “fake,” and the importance of poetic history. The Paris Review 2 Columbus Circle New York 19, N. Y. Circle 7-2278 8 Rue Garancière Paris 6, France DANton-04-50 Dear George, You are quite unlike anything else on the planet. Open up Vogue, and there is George among the yachts at Newport. Open up my Paris Review envelope, and there is George among Corso, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Dear Podhoretz would probably say that it follows, but I am not so sure. I believe in the sincerity of most of these people. I happen to agree with what most of them feel about America, and I expect that when the war comes Ginsberg and I will be in the same concentration camp. (Forgive me, but I don’t think you’ll be there; it gives me, true or not, some feeling of authority.) But sincerity is easy; it means that you’ll say something and stick to it, even to the point of suffering for it; art isn’t easy, and sincerity never helped anybody to be a great artist. Wait; maybe it helped, but let me say this: the ratio of sincere people to even merely good poems is about a hundred million to one. A sincere person can write a fake poem because he lacks the skill or intelligence or the intense self-knowledge which is necessary; because he is not an artist. Read More
June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Spooning By Lawrence Weschler I was paying a visit to the studio of Jessica Anne Schwartz, a promising young San Francisco artist recently transplanted to New York, and over in the corner, on the floor, off to the side—she hadn’t particularly been intending to show them to me—she had ranged a series of small painted studies on board from several months back. She’d pulled them out earlier for the first time since she’d made them, across the last several months of 2017, and was trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with them. All images of a single spoon, from a wide range of vantages—“I’d first found the spoon abandoned out in a garbage pile on the street,” she explained—and in a tumbling array of alignments. She and I gazed upon the assembled panels for a while, she leaning over, assaying a few other arrangements, sighing. “Single Serving” was the name she’d assigned the entire set. Back then, she explained, she’d only just recently broken off from a long-term relationship, really only the second serious relationship in her life. Fresh out of high school, she’d married. The marriage had lasted eighteen years, and then she’d almost immediately taken up with this second guy, and that had lasted another eight. This new period, in the middle of 2017, had really been the first time in her life she’d found herself living alone. She’d gone into fierce mourning, this business of being all alone being all she could think about—that and, of course, how she was no longer with the boyfriend. Read More
June 27, 2018 First Person On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers By A. M. Homes John Templeton Lucas, The Letter Writer, 1877. As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens. My inability to leave home, my separation anxiety, was all-encompassing. It wasn’t just about leaving my mother, though that would have been enough. It was about house and home—family—in the largest most literal sense. If I left the house, something might happen. It might not be there when I got back. This soul-crushing sense of impending doom was crippling. It started in nursery school, when my mother would drop me off at the little house at the top of the hill. They’d have to hold me back while my mother drove away, never looking in her rearview mirror at her sobbing child. I didn’t write to strangers because they were famous. I didn’t want an autographed eight-by-ten. I wanted to tell them about my life, my day at school. I wanted to drive a wedge between my childhood and the larger world that I hoped I might join one day. I wanted a way out. Read More
June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Girl, Interrupted, Twenty-Five Years Later By Tara Wanda Merrigan Susanna Kaysen. Photo by Michael Lionstar. When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like “an anthropologist in the loony bin.” She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands—“a standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and who didn’t and what were the feuds,” Kaysen told me. Her husband’s study made her realize that “McLean was sort of like a village but somewhat larger. Our ward was a tiny little village with our doctors and nurses and aides.” Kaysen hired a lawyer and got ahold of her medical records and began writing. She pared down details about herself and her struggle with mental illness so that the resulting memoir, Girl, Interrupted, reads today like a comedic travelogue of an extended stay at a young women’s ward. Lines like this one, about restrictions on sharp flatware, are typical: “We ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital.” And yet the readers of twenty-five years ago—Girl, Interrupted was published in June 1993—were not quite ready to recognize the book’s detached perspective. Instead, Kaysen said, many took Girl, Interrupted as some sort of stigma-defying big-t Truth about life with mental illness. During the book tour, readers would line up to tell Kaysen how her book had spoken to them. The author recalls hearing things like “nobody else has ever said these things” and “I feel like I’m not alone.” Or: “You wrote this book for me.” “I would say to myself, I didn’t. I don’t know you. I wasn’t try to reach you,” Kaysen said. “What had spurred me to write was rage and a desire to dissect this world. And that didn’t seem to register for a lot of these people.” Read More
June 26, 2018 Redux Redux: In Dire Straits By The Paris Review This week, we bring you three pieces about immigration from our archive. Read Dany Laferrière’s 2017 Writers at Work interview, in which he bemoans complacency in the face of suffering; meet the narrator from a war-torn country in Gretchen Herbkersman’s short story “Thor”; and travel to impoverished Detroit, the city in which the American immigrant dream once lay, in Philip Levine’s poem “A Walk with Tom Jefferson.” Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237 Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017) To watch someone see you, when you are begging or homeless, and the person isn’t scandalized. He’s not happy about it, but he is thinking if someone has to be homeless, it might as well be you. If you saw that someone you went to school with had become homeless, you would be scandalized. You’d say to yourself, It can’t possibly be! But for all the others who are homeless, it can’t possibly be either! But it’s like that when you don’t know the person—you are categorized by race, or as a part of society that we accept seeing in a miserable situation. Native Americans drinking on a street corner or blacks in dire circumstances—these are things society thinks are normal. I’m not saying they accept it, but it’s something they’ve always seen. Well, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve been seen that way—He’s an immigrant and not white, and he’s in dire straits, that’s normal. There is nothing more extraordinary than seeing compassion in someone’s eyes, but not the slightest surprise at your situation. That is what it is to be a desert island, with no one to protect you—which could plunge some people into despair, bordering on insanity. But for a writer, it can be interesting. Because you can observe society, since you are completely invisible. No one sees you. People will say and do anything in front of you. Read More
June 26, 2018 Arts & Culture A Life of Reading Is Never Lonely By Edmund White Photo by Nadja Spiegelman. Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear. No wonder Victorian parents used to read out loud to the whole family (a chapter of Dickens a night by the precious light of the single candle); there’s nothing lonely about laughing or crying together—or shrinking back in horror. Even if solitary, the reader’s inner dialogue with the writer—questioning, concurring, wondering, objecting, pitying—fills the empty room under the lamplight with silent discourse and the expression of emotion. Who are the most companionable novelists? Marcel Proust and George Eliot; certainly they’re the most intelligent, able to see the widest implications of the simplest act, to play a straightforward theme on the mighty organs of their minds: soft/loud, quick/slow, complex/chaste, reedy/orchestral. But we also cherish Leo Tolstoy’s uncanny empathy for diverse people and even animals, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism, Colette’s worldly wisdom, James Merrill’s wit, Walt Whitman’s biblical if agnostic inclusiveness, Annie Dillard’s sublime nature descriptions. When I was a youngster, I loved novels about the lost Dauphin or the Scarlet Pimpernel or the three musketeers—adventure books enacted in the clear, shadowless light of good and evil. Read More