August 9, 2017 Our Correspondents H.D. Notebook, Part 2 By Anthony Madrid Headnote: Part 1 of this piece appeared here (on The Paris Review Daily), on Wednesday, May 3, 2017. Mr. Madrid originally intended to publish part 2 in June, but lost track of time. You needn’t read part 1 to understand part 2. There is no part 3. H.D. ❧ 1 Poetry readers who spend a lot of time in used bookstores will have seen some of H.D.’s novels from time to time. They stand out because their titles are unfamiliar, and because they are recently printed books. One does not find old-looking hardcovers. Asphodel. What is that. HERmione. What is that. Majic Ring. The White Rose and the Red. Friends of modernism say: “Why have I never heard of these?” Before my H.D. project, my assumption was that these books must have been previously judged unfit for publication on the grounds of their containing explicit scenes of girl love. Wrong. None of them have explicit scenes of any kind of love. The only hot-sex bit in any of the H.D. prose I’ve read actually was printed in her lifetime. Privately printed, but printed. It’s in her novella Nights, and it’s woefully hetero. (It’s her and that musician guy, father of her only kid.) My next wrong thought was that she had written all those books “for the drawer,” just her way of working out her feelings, et cetera. This would have made her a very unusual case: a writer whose prose was private but whose poetry was invariably intended for the public. Most people are just the opposite, but that doesn’t matter, ’cuz she did intend to publish these novels and memoirs—the ones she finished anyway, with maybe like one exception. She sent ’em around or allowed Norman Pearson to send ’em around for her. They just never found takers. This—or rather the equivalent of this—would not happen today. Or I doubt it. Semi-unintelligible melodramas, thoroughly interesting and impossible to care about, where the point of view is suppressed to the threshold of nonexistence—there are many, many small presses who would be happy to put these works into circulation in 2017. Their mission statements literally say this. Read More
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