August 9, 2017 Correspondence Life’s Dull: A Letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis By Philip Larkin From left: Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Hilary Amis. From a 1979 letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis. Larkin, who was born on this day in 1922, and Amis enjoyed a long friendship. In their respective Writers at Work interviews, both Larkin and Amis spoke about their working relationship; the two shared unpublished writing with each other. In Amis’s case, Larkin provided “very constructive suggestions” on the “feeble” first draft of his novel Lucky Jim. Dear Kingsley, I write at 4:30 on a Sunday—well, this one, to be precise—what you might call the arse-hole of the week. Lunchtime drink dead, not time for six o’clock gin. Tea? Don’t make me cross. Sorry you are feeling lowdown; I sympathise. I don’t know that I ever expected much of life, but it terrifies me to think it’s nearly over. I mean there can’t possible now be any good bits like going to Corfu with some busty ex-Roedean girl WHOSE FATHER GIVES HER LOTS OF MONEY and who loves being pocked (‘it’s better every time, oh darling’), or being a novelist. I don’t want any of that swearing. I mean, you’ve become what I dreamed of becoming, and I don’t suppose you ever dreamed of being a librarian. If I’m so good why don’t they pay me enough money to go to some southern beach and lie on my belly (or someone else’s)? Eh? Now there can only be don’t normally take on anyone over 55, like to do a few tests if you don’t mind, am returning it because it isn’t really up to your own high standard, afraid I must stop coming Mr Larkin hope you find another cleaning lady to AAARRRRGHGHGHGH TV seems awful these days. I got one last December, and it was all right for a bit, but now the novelty’s worn off I suppose and there seems nothing but chat shows and non-comedy and B-films and NEWS—God how I hate news—I can’t watch it—to see these awful shit marching or picketing or saying the ma’er wi’ noo be referred back to thu Na’ional Exe’u’ive is too much for me. Why don’t they show NAKED WOMEN, or PROS AND CONS OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN GIRLS’ SCHOOL oh for God’s sake Phil can’t you NO I CAN’T For God’s sake keep writing dear man, for life’s unexciting. Penelope Fitzgerald’s prize-winning bum, Philip
August 8, 2017 From the Archive Purfect Prose: An Appreciation of Kitty Litterature By Jeffery Gleaves From the cover of issue no. 136 (Fall 1995) of The Paris Review. It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats. Hilary Mantel included a photo of her cat in her Art of Fiction interview. So did Ali Smith. Hemingway’s home is famous for its clowder of six-toed cats; Capote, Chandler, and Kerouac all kept the five-toed variety. Read More
August 8, 2017 At Work Great Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo By Patrik Henry Bass Photo: Pixels Digital Stay with Me, the debut novel by Nigerian Ayobami Adebayo, explores a contemporary marriage in a Yoruba community stubbornly tied to tradition. Despite suspicious in-laws, scheming second wives, and secretive spouses, Yejide and Akin try to break from their obstinate middle-class neighbors’ outdated views on matrimony. Akin, an accountant and the eldest son in an influential family, initially rejects the notion of polygamy; Yejide takes pride in her successful beauty salon and her forward-thinking views on life and motherhood. Yejide’s inability to get pregnant, however, tests the couple’s values, and their future. In her last review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described Stay with Me as being “at once, a gothic parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary—and deeply moving—portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” In a nearly hour-long telephone conversation from Brooklyn to Nigeria (with a three-second delay and an interviewer just discovering voice recording via cell phone), Adebayo reflected on the characters she had a difficult time getting to know and whom she subsequently couldn’t let go. INTERVIEWER Yejide will join a pantheon of unforgettable literary heroines. How did you find her? ADEBAYO I got to know her over five to seven years. I started thinking about the book two years before writing it. What was peculiar about her—and even her husband—was they felt very real. I created them, but I felt like there were things I discovered that, throughout the process, felt very real. When I didn’t understand what was going on or I didn’t know what would happen next, I felt that I needed to just wait and listen to Yejide and understand things about her. One of the ways I got to know her better and to start writing her was that sometimes I would sit down in my room and have all these conversations, which is weird now that I think about it. I basically talked to myself and talked to this person and asked her about things. A lot of it didn’t make it into the book, but … it’s bizarre, but she felt fully formed. Read More
August 8, 2017 Letter from Our London Editor Against Argument By Adam Thirlwell Teju Cole, Zürich, 2014, from the exhibition “Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper,” on view at Steven Kasher Gallery from June 15–August 11. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. 1 When I was a kid, I always wanted to inhabit the Wild West. It was the most exotic place. And now, I guess, I do. 2 I never had a definition of my country, or my identity. Everything has been a series of oxymorons. I grew up in Britain: savage and polite, a European island. Within that, I grew up in London: the British capital, and the pure international. But we also lived in the north London suburbs, neither countryside nor city, and I went to a private high school that was basically Jewish and Hindu, with perhaps the occasional Muslim or Sikh or very rare stray goy. We were rich but not exorbitantly rich: we were rich but intellectual. Moreover, if I was definitively Jewish, I was also definitively half Jewish. For me, this series of oxymorons represented a kind of ideal state: placelessness was my idea of a utopia. Read More
August 7, 2017 Inside the Issue Growing Up with the Odyssey By Emily Wilson Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey appears in our Summer issue. Here, she remembers performing in a child’s production of the Odyssey as a girl in Oxford, England. From the Odyssey, adapted by Gillian Cross and illustrated by Neil Packer, published by Walker Books in 2013. When I was a shy, awkward eight-year-old living in Oxford, England, I was moved to a new school. The transition was hard at first. I left behind a beloved best friend and traveled to a world where many things had to be learned all over again, starting with the daily routines (here we had to sit cross-legged on the rug for attendance, not upright on plastic chairs) and handwriting (my scratchy, illegible scrawl was no longer acceptable). I felt lost, as if in a foreign island or out at sea in a storm—although in fact, the school was only three blocks from my house. But there were good things in this strange new world. It was a Church of England school, and the teachers made us sing cheerful songs about “sharing and caring.” We learned to make pot holders, quiche Lorraine, and lumpy ashtrays out of clay—talents that are still more or less the pinnacle of my domestic abilities. I made a new friend, a girl with an adorable freckly smile. By far the most exciting thing that happened that year was the school play: an ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children. I had some dark moments when my younger sister, she of the gorgeous blonde ringlets, was cast as Helen of Troy. But I had no good reason to be jealous. Helen was a nonspeaking role, and my beautiful sister spent her single brief dramatic appearance being tugged across the stage by the sweaty little boy playing Paris. I was Athena, the most kick-ass goddess of them all. Though Odysseus is the hero (acted by our class troublemaker, a clever, rowdy British Pakistani boy on whom I had a secret crush), I was vastly more powerful, and I got to tell him exactly what to do. Read More
August 7, 2017 On Music Suzanne Ciani and the Subliminal Property of Being Human By Dave Tompkins Suzanne Ciani. I’m being sold the memory of a weed-eater dream at the speed of August. The motor’s vortical hiss, slowed into an alligator groan. A commercial for the Black and Decker Cutter appears on a split screen, now a quadrant, continuously subdividing, each cell occupied with its own product activity, vying for attention and competing with human physiology, the maxed bladders and empty guts that threaten to spirit us away from our sponsor. A GE dishwasher offers to pamper the china. The Merrill Lynch bull walks into a popular idiom, a commercial space that is shiny but not as clean as ITT’s “Clean Room,” which, as claimed, is quantified a thousand times cleaner than an ER: “hyperclean.” It all seems to be happening at once. (I am suddenly compelled to trim the patio near the statue of a headless saint by the garden where I once interred my pajama bottoms beneath a geode.) To the ear, the weed-eater spot could be selling the Buchla 200 synthesizer, if not the work of Suzanne Ciani herself, an electronic-music composer who mastered Don Buchla’s switchboard of patch bays and oscillators. She’s a classically trained pianist who abandoned the keyboard interface (and its muscle memory) to revolutionize music, sometimes anonymously, right under your TV tray. The grid of old TV ads flashed on the screen in A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and career directed by Brett Whitcomb. Now available, it screened at Moogfest at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, last May. An original plug tuner, Ciani created identities for logos and products in the seventies and eighties as a way to support her own music projects and studio. Brands and their sonic referents may have been owned by the client, but the sounds themselves belonged to a woman whose work was singular in a field that was then undefined: routing signals and ideas into tiny spaces and “microcosmic time slots,” all while creating her own signature in the male-dominated world of advertising. Electronic music was largely mysterious then, a time when a modular synth for “Planetary Peace” would cause a bomb scare at the San Francisco airport. The media was no less baffled, but especially so with a woman behind the controls. “This is an album,” said one awkward TV interviewer, doing his best Perd Hapley. That’s about as far as he got. Cut to a commercial. Read More