April 11, 2018 Bulletin Photos from Our 2018 Spring Revel By Julia Berick Nicole Zajdman, Josh Zajdman, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Dana Spiotta (Photo: Matteo Mobilio) April isn’t all cruelty and taxes. Every year, during the first week of the month, we celebrate The Paris Review at the Spring Revel. This year, we gathered friends, fans, and family to honor Joy Williams and sixty-five years of the magazine. John Waters, the legendary mustachioed auteur, was the self-described “monster of ceremonies,” escorting guests through an evening that recognized the emerging and established writers who have found a home at The Paris Review. The stars at Cipriani rivaled those across the street on Grand Central’s ceiling, as Don DeLillo, Radhika Jones, John Waters, David Sedaris, Patricia Marx, Tina Brown, Sir Harry Evans, Michael Cunningham, Lesley Stahl, Morgan Entrekin, Lewis Lapham, Hailey Gates, Ellie Goulding, Amor Towles, Dana Spiotta, Joanna Coles, Henry Finder, Emma Cline, and Kwame Anthony Appiah toasted with Review readers old and new. Guests hushed to the sound of George Plimpton interviewing Eudora Welty, a snippet from the first season of our podcast. As the crickets of Jackson, Mississippi, faded away, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, toasted Paris Review comrades who had died this year, including Drue Heinz, Bokara Legendre, and John Ashbery. The first award of the evening bridged the Review’s past and present. Named for our founding editor George Plimpton, the Plimpton Prize is presented each year to a new voice in fiction. The novelist David Gates presented Isabella Hammad the prize for “Mr. Can’aan,” from our Fall 2017 issue. Her story, which begins on the banks of the Jordan River a week after the Six-Day War, immerses the reader in the inheritance of loss passed through generations of Palestinians. In her speech, Hammad noted that the prize had brought her more than one kind of encouragement: Over the last few years since I’ve been living in New York, the conversations in this country surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and lives have definitely been changing … This should not distract us from the reality that the situation there has not improved. In fact, it has become palpably worse. Nevertheless, at a time when it is often difficult to feel hopeful about the future, that a story about Palestinians should win a prize like this does help me to feel a bit of hope. David Sedaris, known for spinning his own sadness into impossibly funny yarns, was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor by the incomparable Patricia Marx, who threatened to upstage her honoree on the microphone as she explained her love for his work: There are plenty of writers whose work I like, but with those writers—let’s just say I didn’t read Crime and Punishment and wish I could visit the prison in Siberia and sleep on the bed of nails with Dostoyevsky. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—depressed. It’s different with David Sedaris. You read a story about his family or his boyfriend, Hugh, or even a line of his like, “As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character,” and you know you need to meet this writer immediately. As Cipriani’s legion of waiters noiselessly disappeared dinner, John Waters praised Joy Williams for her lifetime of characteristically uncompromising writing: Ms. Williams is a desert rat, and I mean that as a compliment. She calls wild animal trophy hunters psychopaths, and I agree with her. And wishes Earth First would rise again, though she realizes they were branded terrorists and anarchists by the FBI. You could say the same for her writing. It confuses our values and destroys moral superiority. “She’s probably not for everybody,” the New York Times once warned. But who are these “everybody” she’s not for? The literary deplorables, that’s who. If you can’t appreciate Joy Williams’s writing, you have no business being a reader. Get outta here, go to a movie or something! For all the hard edges and vacant horizons in her work, Williams warmly accepted the award and turned her appreciation to the magazine, extolling, The Paris Review appears to me a strong, glittering chain of continuity, a continuity of artistic excellence and discovery and verve, bridging the years, harboring all manner of marvels and singularities. I’m so happy to be honored here at this literary revel of revels, on the list, a very special list. I will tell you, I feel a churchy exultation and joy right now. Hadada, hadada, hadada. Our interim editor, Nicole Rudick, brought the evening to a close and the guests close to tears as she expressed her pride in the magazine’s potential and encouraged the audience to imagine that every Revel could be the best one yet. May April always bring renewed Review merriment—next year with you! Take a look at the photos below, by the photographer Matteo Mobilio, plus more from Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine—and we hope to see you next year! Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Illicit Love Letters: Albert Camus and Maria Casares By Stephanie LaCava Maria Casares and Albert Camus. For the past few weeks, I’ve fixated on a collection of primary source material that reads like a tidy work of epistolary fiction. It’s a big book, nearly 1,300 pages, transcribed from original letters, postcards, and telegrams sent between the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus and the Spanish French actress Maria Casares between 1944 and 1959. It’s too heavy a book to bring on the subway, so I downloaded the electronic version on my phone. My camera roll is now nearly a hundred screenshots of exchanges in French between the two lovers. The book was published in France by Gallimard and has not yet been translated into English. The romance of Camus and Casares is richer, if not sadder, when considered alongside the narratives of each of their work. There is an eerie doubling of life and art. Absurdity is the only certainty, and this is confirmed over and over again by coincidence and chance. The two first met on June 6, 1944, the storied day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. Both were involved in the production of Camus’s play The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu), which was being staged in Paris at the Théâtre de Mathurins. Preproduction, Camus brought Casares to an evening hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (The latter remarked on the young actress’s beauty and confidence.) It is said that that evening, the two began their love affair—Casares twenty-one, Camus nine years her senior. Their fling ended abruptly when Camus’s wife, the mathematician and pianist Francine Faure, returned to Paris from Algeria after the Occupation. Read More
April 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden By Anthony Madrid W. H. Auden backstage at the 92nd street Y in 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr Dorynek I don’t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor: What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can’t explain is how Auden can possibly have thought anything good was gonna come out of this assignment. He was a glutton for punishment, I’ve heard. But you’d have to have a screw loose to hand out the above as an assignment. It’s not that the students wouldn’t do it; they’d try. But then you’d have to read the results. Take a sec and imagine the anger. Read More
April 10, 2018 Redux Redux: A Poem Is a Suitcase 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. It’s National Poetry Month, so this week, we bring you … poetry: our 2008 Art of Poetry interview with Kay Ryan; Simon Worrall’s feature on literary forgery, “Emily Dickinson Goes to Las Vegas”; and Caroline Knox’s poem “Sleepers Wake.” Read More
April 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Not a Nice Girl: On Berenice Abbott By Julia Van Haaften Berenice Abbott, Self Portrait with Distortion, 1945. Photography is the most modern of the arts … It is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other … Photography born of this age of steel seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers. —Alvin Langdon Coburn I like this picture so well because it re-creates for me some of the feeling I got from the original scene—and that is the real test of any picture. —Berenice Abbott, 1953 It’s twilight in late December 1932. Thousands of streetlights and office windows blaze in electrified concert for a scant half hour between the winter-solstice sunset and the lights-out, five o’clock end of the office workers’ day. Just weeks earlier, after three crushing years of the Great Depression, fear-defying FDR had won the presidency by a landslide. Optimism was in the air. High up in the northwest corner of the new Empire State Building, thirty-four-year-old Berenice Abbott aims her bulky wooden view camera at the exuberance below—the glittering, boundless cityscape of Midtown Manhattan, diffused just slightly by a sheltering glass window. She opens the shutter and begins a fifteen-minute exposure. Her triumphant photograph, Nightview, New York, will forever signal “modern metropolis”—as futuristic to us in the twenty-first century as it was to Berenice’s Depression-weary contemporaries. Read More
April 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Monsieur Bébé: The Brief, Strange Life of Raymond Radiguet By Emma Garman Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau. In the spring of 1923, the young married artists Jean and Valentine Hugo began inviting people to séances at their Paris apartment. A new mood of occultism, influenced by Freud and the early Surrealists, was in the air. And raising the dead was in Jean’s blood: while his great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, was in exile in the 1850s, he presided over frequent “table-rapping” sessions on the Channel Islands. As Victor Hugo recorded in four red notebooks, his “talking table” conducted conversations with such eager spirits as Jesus, Moses, Dante, and Shakespeare—the last of whom, obligingly, concurred with Hugo’s assessment of himself as the greatest writer of all time. Jean and Valentine’s gatherings, however, elicited messages so chilling that the group, spooked, abandoned the practice after only a few tries. It wasn’t an overreaction; before the year’s end, the omens they’d received in their séances were borne out. In a pink velvet-lined anteroom, the Hugos and their friends, including the artistic polymath Jean Cocteau and the avant-garde composer Georges Auric, encircled a wooden pedestal with a tripod base and tilting round top, a type of table reputed to encourage spiritual communion. Placing their hands on its surface, which was lacquered black and painted with flowers, they asked questions. The table tapped out answers on the floor (one tap meaning the letter a, and so on), which Jean Hugo wrote down. Over the course of these sittings, the clearest messages were intended for the youngest guest: the nineteen-year-old Raymond Radiguet, Cocteau’s protégé and lover, who had just published his scandalous debut novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh). “Uneasiness will grow with genius,” claimed the “spirit.” Radiguet, the spirit said, “should love me for he loves nothing.” It warned: “Fame does not replace love even in death and I am death.” The following week came death’s final declaration: “I want his youth.” Read More