November 28, 2017 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls By Linda Simon Photo courtesy Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs division). In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls. Read More
November 27, 2017 Document Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter By Rainer Maria Rilke Balthus, The Cat of La Méditerranée, 1949. Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter is a surprising companion to his earlier and far more famous Letters to a Young Poet. In eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke encourages the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Written toward the end of Rilke’s life, between 1920 and 1926, these letters paint a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, looked back on his life, and continued to embrace his openness toward other creative individuals. We have excerpted one of the letters below. Château Muzot-sur-Sierre, Valais (Switzerland) February 23, 1923 Dear Balthus, In a few days you will once again celebrate the outward absence of your rare and discreet birthday. Many happy returns, my friend: let this year of your life about to commence be a happy and prosperous one—despite everything, I have to add, since it seems we have fallen back into the worst of the political turmoil that has already ruined so many years and that little by little deprives those of my generation of any reasonable future. It’s different for you, you will see the dawn to come after this night engulfing our world; you need to see it and call it and prepare for it with all your strength. Read More
November 27, 2017 Conversation Starter Eileen Myles and Jeremy Sigler Go to an Exhibition By The Paris Review Jeremy Sigler and Eileen Myles at “(Re)Appropriations,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Photo: Andrew Arnot Not long ago, I found myself reading Jeremy Sigler’s 2009 interview with Eileen Myles in The Brooklyn Rail. The occasion was a new book by Myles, but the conversation opens with banter about clothing—“I’m pretty critical of the J. Crew catalogue, which I have to confess I love looking through”—as though the pair had met for a drink instead of an interview. And then, toward the end of their time together, Sigler mentions Larry Rivers’s famous nude portrait of Frank O’Hara: “I think this is my idealization of the poet,” he says; Myles calls it “collaborated outrageousness.” Earlier this fall, Tibor de Nagy Gallery opened a small survey of Rivers’s work, including the O’Hara painting—an opportunity, in other words, for Myles and Sigler to continue their conversation, wherever it may lead. (With gratitude to Andrew Arnot, owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery.) —Nicole Rudick MYLES: I guess we maybe want to start with the famous one. SIGLER: Yeah. I’ve never seen this painting in person, actually. Have you? MYLES: I feel like I have, but that may or may not be true. SIGLER: I’ve seen the drawing that was on the cover of one of O’Hara’s books. MYLES: Right. SIGLER: Which Andrew said is missing—the drawing is actually gone, he said. MYLES: Who said? SIGLER: Andrew. MYLES: Really? SIGLER: Yeah. MYLES: Gone from where it was? Where was it? SIGLER: A collector who owned it said it was stolen. MYLES: From where? From their house? SIGLER: Yeah, something like that. But this is … this is really something else. MYLES: Yeah. I think it’s kind of a good painting. SIGLER: Yeah. I mean, look at that cinder block. MYLES: I know, I had the same feeling. The hair on his chest, too. And, of course, Frank’s dick. Read More
November 27, 2017 Arts & Culture The Original Single Lady By Joanna Scutts On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment, preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first book. The following day, the New York Times would sound a note that would soon become familiar, calling it “amusing, sensible, worldly wise and very practical”—not gushing words, perhaps, but perfectly suited to both the book and its author, a plain, good-humored magazine editor in her midforties, who would soon be America’s most famous “bachelor girl.” But this description won’t quite do, still less the sour-sounding “spinster.” The best word for who and what she was is the one she coined herself: “Live-Aloner.” It explains her by the choices she made, not the husband she happened to lack. It was a status that depended on equal parts knowledge, pluck, willpower, and self-indulgence—all of which she would share with readers in her book: the bluntly titled, wildly popular self-help manual Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. For a celebratory occasion like this Saturday night, a single lady needed rituals. First came a long soak in the bathtub, and with it the habitual prayer of thanks that she wasn’t at that moment being jostled onto a train at Grand Central Station by commuters bound for the suburbs. After the bath came whatever lotions and perfumes she most loved, whether they were gifts from admirers or treats she’d bought herself. Then, wrapped in a summer-weight negligee (single women ought to own at least two, to be changed with the seasons), she might pour a glass of sherry or shake up a cocktail from the small stash of liquor she kept on a pantry shelf—something her teetotal parents would never have done, but which was now not only acceptable but a marker of a single woman’s sophistication. With glass in hand, she could apply her makeup—another formerly scandalous practice, now perfectly commonplace—and choose what to wear for her evening out. Read More
November 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Black Friday, the Poem By Sadie Stein In honor of Black Friday, we bring you a poem and also deals. Everything in our store (except subscriptions and prints) is ten percent off with the code “NOVEMBER.” Who do you know who might like a Paris Review T-Shirt (or a baby-sized onesie) for Christmas? “The New York Gold Room on ‘Black Friday,’ September 24, 1869.” —E. Benjamin Andrews 1895 While most of us know Black Friday as the nightmarish commerce-fest following Thanksgiving—a term coined in Philadelphia in 1961—in fact the nom de guerre dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1869, the robber barons Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, resulting in financial crisis and scandal. E. C. Stedman, a poet and broker(!), wrote the following: One Hundred and Sixty! Can’t be true! What will the bears-at-forty do? How will the merchants pay their dues? How will the country stand the news? What’ll the banks—but listen! hold! In screwing up the price of gold To that dangerous, last, particular peg, They had killed their Goose with the Golden Egg! Read More >>
November 23, 2017 First Person Black History By Asali Solomon The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! From the cover of Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel. Back in the early 1980s, no one at the mostly white elite prep school I attended had heard of Kwanzaa, which I’d grown up celebrating instead of Christmas. This was a yearly hassle of explaining: yes, presents; no, Santa Claus. But absolutely no one had heard of Umoja Karamu, “a ritual for the black family” that we observed at Thanksgiving. This one I never volunteered to explain. Black families who celebrated Umoja Karamu (Kiswahili for “unity feast”)—and we were the only one I knew of—were to trade in the ritual of senselessly stuffing ourselves for one in which we used food and words to reflect on the grim, glorious trajectory of black people in America, to recall the crimes of the “greedy one-eyed giant” white man, and to keep the “Black Nation” energized and focused, struggling toward liberation from racism. During Umoja Karamu, which lived in a 1971 booklet (a mere two years older than I was) published by a fellow Philadelphian named Edward Sims, we sat at our special holiday table and took turns reading solemnly aloud from a pithy narrative of African American history that moved from the ancient kingdom of Mali to the Watts riots. Between readings, we ate a symbolic sequence of aggressively non-Thanksgiving foods, including black-eyed peas, rice, corn bread, and leafy greens, all served unseasoned, perhaps to make us more thoughtful. Blessedly, my mother always insisted on a normal holiday meal after Umoja Karamu. But Edward Sims was certainly about his business. Each Thanksgiving, as I waited to get to the stuffing and gravy, I did indeed taste the suffering we read about. I experienced the “bland and tasteless condition under which Black Folk lived during the slavery period” in the form of unsalted white rice and chalky black-eyed peas. But happily, enduring Umoja Karamu, unlike the suffering of the Black Nation, was a private shame, one about which my school friends knew nothing. That is, until I received a fifth-grade assignment to write an essay about family Thanksgiving traditions and to read it aloud. Read More >>