August 21, 2024 Letters Hearing from Helen Vendler By Christopher Bollas Helen Vendler in her home in Cambridge. Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell. Earlier this year, the visionary poetry critic Helen Vendler died at the age of ninety. After her death, the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas—author of The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among many others—collected a correspondence between himself and Vendler that unfolded over email during the last two years of her life, which began as Vendler was clearing out her office at Harvard in 2022. These emails, which have been selected and edited by the Review (with spelling and punctuation left unchanged), touch on the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry; the experience of aging in all its forms; and the growth of a friendship, and understanding, between Bollas and Vendler. January 22, 2022 Dear Christopher Bollas, A friend of a friend quoted, in an email, your generous notion that what I do as a critic of poetry has a resemblance to the work of analysis. I take that as an amazing compliment. I don’t know where you said that, but I did see that one of the steps in your career was a PhD in English at an exciting time at the U. of Buffalo, and that you’ve written a series of books with intriguing titles, which (“now that I am old and ill”—Yeats) I may not get to immediately, but hope to see a couple of them once I finish the interminable task of clearing my office (now that we once again have access after the Covid ban). Yours truly, Helen Vendler Read More
August 20, 2024 First Person Self-Portrait in the Studio By Giorgio Agamben All images courtesy of the author. A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio. Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio? *** In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible. *** How does one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality; one can only inhabit it. Read More
August 16, 2024 The Review’s Review On Asturias’s Men of Maize By Héctor Tobar Asturias, ca. 1925. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history. In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came. Read More
August 15, 2024 At Work Siding with Joy: A Conversation with Anne Serre By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Francesca Mantovani. Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. “That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly authoress whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind. This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said. INTERVIEWER Are you in Auvergne right now? ANNE SERRE Yes, I am. As I’ve been doing every summer for a long time now, I’m spending two months of vacation here, in this region of mountains and small lakes, in the house I have inherited. Now that my whole family has passed away, the house belongs to me. I don’t write here. I spend my vacation the same way I did when I was a child. I walk in the lanes and meadows, look at the scenery, swim in the lakes, and at night I read in bed. There are a huge number of books in the house—three generations’ worth. Basically, I do pretty much the same things I did when I was twelve or fourteen. Read More
August 13, 2024 Dinner Parties Inner Light By Jack Hanson Frans Snyders, Still Life with a Wine Cooler (1610–1620). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on. Read More
August 12, 2024 Letters Five Letters from Seamus Heaney By Seamus Heaney Tom Sleigh, Seamus Heaney, and Sven Birkerts. Courtesy of the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979. To Ted Hughes March 14, 1995 Dear Ted, Matthew’s letter jolted me. And not because of its frank address to money matters and its real interest in moving things along on the Schoolbag front. It made me wince that I had not long ago written to you, to thank you for—among other things—the new Selected and the paperback Pollen. When I saw “Chaucer” in The New Yorker a few weeks ago I reeled for joy. The emerald and the laundry. They were like the streamers of spring, of the Shelleyan spark scattered, new life from huge sorrow. The poem began and ended with immense promise. And in between all was exalted. And then I opened the “uncollected” section of the new book and found myself like canvas in a big wind. Which I could not rebuff. The poem about the vision of your mother and her sister and you mistaken for her brother—well, I suppose that [is] what the poem is about all right, but what it is is sheer poetry. And it is wonderfully placed as a prelude to what follows. I was deeply moved to find “The Earthenware Head” again, a poem which had stayed in me from the moment I read it years ago. But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of “Black Coat” and “The God”—like a “Prelude” turned inside out. The total engagement of those poems is exhausting and beautiful because of the total candor and the unleashed, justified anger. Intelligence rampant, as it were. So head-on, and not just with the “you” of the poems; as much, more, with the ring of “them” at bay around the poem-hearth. It is all really quite heartbreaking to contemplate. The positive truth in it all is that your book is as lightning-packed for me in the final pages, in the nineties, as it is/was for the me who read the early poems in the sixties. Those Sylvia poems and “Opus 131” and “Lines about Elias” set the guy-ropes thrumming. Groundswell and emptiness. Your courage and endurance and fecundity and brave solitude count for everything. When I read the poems, I just want to dwell in the daunting feel of them, but even if blurting out impressions is a kind of misrepresentation of the reality of the experience of reading them, I still want to let you know how gratefully shaken I was when I went through them. And there’s all the rest of the book as well. Gaudens gaudeo. (And I was proud of T. Paulin the other night on The Late Show. I’m sure somebody must have told you that he said—rightly but so strangely in the context of that rabid gossip arena—that you were to be revered. As poet and as example of good behavior. The verb was both unexpected and elevating.) Read More