{"id":132794,"date":"2019-01-22T11:00:03","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T16:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132794"},"modified":"2019-01-22T11:06:10","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T16:06:10","slug":"to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/","title":{"rendered":"To All the Introductions I\u2019ve Loved Before"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Konrad Kachelofen\u2019s printing of Eclogue of Theodulus<\/i>, 1492. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI never read introductions,\u201d says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn\u2019t quite ring true. She amends it: \u201cWell, I\u2019ve read two<\/em>,\u201d she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac\u2019s introduction to Robert Frank\u2019s The Americans<\/em>, required reading for a photography class: \u201cBut it was fine because I like his style.\u201d The other is Sherman Alexie\u2019s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven<\/em> (a favorite book, and author, of Rose\u2019s), because \u201cit felt like it would be rude not to.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect that my daughter\u2019s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword<\/em> (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface<\/em> (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don\u2019t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget.<\/p>\n

You will not find me among either group; in the second instance out of hard experience but in the first out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheever\u2019s all-too-brief preface to his Stories<\/em>, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/em>: \u201cThese stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certain forewords\u2014Susan Sontag\u2019s to A Barthes Reader<\/em>, Walter Benjamin\u2019s to Fables of Leskov<\/em>\u2014and prefaces\u2014Raymond Chandler\u2019s to The Simple Art of Murder<\/em>, Robert Towne\u2019s to the published script of Chinatown<\/em>, Elmore Leonard\u2019s to his Complete Western Stories<\/em>\u2014have become beloved, even crucial texts for me, to be regularly reread, as are Nabokov\u2019s afterword to Lolita<\/em> and Leigh Brackett\u2019s to her Best of<\/em> collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some forewords are transitive<\/em>: acts of seduction that are at the same time documents of earlier seductions. I already had a serious literary crush on Susan Sontag when I saw her name on the cover of A Barthes Reader<\/em> and plunged into her foreword, at which point I discovered that Sontag, in turn, had a serious literary crush on this droll-looking Frenchman in his ubiquitous cardigan; I emerged from her foreword with a crush of my own on the late M. Barthes. Other forewords are parasitical<\/em>; like cuckoos\u2019 eggs laid in crows\u2019 nests they hatch and flourish at the expense of their hosts. The fables of Nikolai Leskov are fine, if you like that sort of thing, but I can\u2019t imagine life without \u201cThe Storyteller,\u201d Benjamin\u2019s preface to a German translation of that Russian classic. Benjamin\u2019s diamantine, epigrammatic style is on dazzling display throughout the piece but in no other writing of his does it do the work of heartbreak so powerfully as toward the end of the first section of \u201cThe Storyteller,\u201d where Benjamin collapses all the industrialized brutality and disruption of World War I into some fifty words: \u201cA generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Benjamin\u2019s cuckoo\u2019s egg also had a lasting personal effect on me, far more acute than anything I got from the Fables<\/em> it nominally served to introduce. I used to worry, sometimes\u2014in particular after I read Frank O\u2019Connor\u2019s seminal meditation on the short story, The Lonely Voice<\/em>\u2014that unlike James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, A.\u2009E. Coppard, and the other writers Frank O\u2019Connor lionized in The Lonely Voice<\/em>, I was not really from<\/em> anywhere. My family had been on the move for three generations or more, on both sides, and by the age of twenty-five I had lived in more than a dozen different places. The distinction Benjamin draws, in his foreword to Leskov, between storytellers who stay put and accumulate stockpiles of local lore and those who travel the world collecting the material of the tales they bring home, went a long way in reassuring me that my rootlessness was not only a legitimate condition for writing but, potentially, a theme worth exploring in my work.<\/p>\n

As for prefaces (and afterwords), these may be explanatory, apologetic, triumphal, tendentious, rueful, score-settling, spiteful, bibliographic, theoretical (as is the case with Chandler\u2019s), or gently\u00a0embarrassed (as is the case with Cheever\u2019s) but the best of them\u2014like Cheever\u2019s\u2014are also what I would call restorative<\/em>. They unstopper the vial that contains, like some volatile oil, the fragrance of the time in which the prefaced work was engendered, conceived, or written, summoning for writer and reader alike a sensuous jolt of things past: Cheever\u2019s Goodman-haunted stationery stores; the motels and dusty mountainsides of Nabokov\u2019s midcentury transcontinental butterfly hunt; Towne\u2019s ache for the smell of orange groves and all the lost Los Angeles that it encodes; and the Malibu, desolate and wild as Barsoom, of Leigh Brackett\u2019s girlhood.<\/p>\n

There are many reasons a writer might agree to provide an introduction to her own or another writer\u2019s book: affection, gratitude, regret, revenge, enthusiasm, a desire to evangelize or set the record straight. I\u2019ve done it for some of those reasons, and more. But the primary motivation for writing introductions has been the same as for everything I write: a hope of bringing pleasure to the reader\u2014to some reader, somewhere. In this hope my sole assurance has been the pleasure I\u2019ve taken as a reader, over the years, in the prefaces, forewords, and afterwords\u2014the intros and outros\u2014written by others. I\u2019m aware that this assurance may be far from sufficient for many readers, however, and I would encourage skippers of introductions to put this book down and seek pleasure elsewhere\u2014but what would be the point?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning author of fifteen books. This piece is excerpted from his latest collection, <\/em>Bookends<\/a>, a special release benefiting the MacDowell Colony<\/a>. The book comes out on January 22.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Chabon on the front matter, back matter, intros, outros, forewords, afterwords, and prefaces he treasures most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[47379,47374,4738,23557,47386,9651,47382,2598,47376,15154,47375,30288,47377,47373,20492,947,1810,47381,504,966,313,5126,47385,47372,4769,30584,4935,11122,501,47384,47380,47383,47378,967,1725,7740],"class_list":["post-132794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-e-coppard","tag-afterword","tag-anton-chekhov","tag-benny-goodman","tag-bookends","tag-chinatown","tag-complete-western-stories","tag-elmore-leonard","tag-end-matter","tag-fables","tag-foreword","tag-frank-oconnor","tag-front-matter","tag-intro","tag-introduction","tag-james-joyce","tag-john-cheever","tag-leigh-brackett","tag-literature","tag-lolita","tag-michael-chabon","tag-nikolai-leskov","tag-outro","tag-preface","tag-raymond-chandler","tag-robert-towne","tag-roland-barthes","tag-sherman-alexie","tag-susan-sontag","tag-the-barthes-reader","tag-the-lonely-voice","tag-the-simple-art-of-murder","tag-the-storyteller","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-walter-benjamin","tag-world-war-i"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTo All the Introductions I\u2019ve Loved Before by Michael Chabon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Chabon on the front matter, back matter, intros, outros, forewords, afterwords, and prefaces he treasures most.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"To All the Introductions I\u2019ve Loved Before by Michael Chabon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 22, 2019 \u2013 Michael Chabon on the front matter, back matter, intros, outros, forewords, afterwords, and prefaces he treasures most.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-01-22T16:00:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-01-22T16:06:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/1200px-kachelofen.inc_.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"872\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Michael Chabon\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Michael Chabon\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Michael Chabon\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/e974ec7d5caddcad3a384e025d4399a0\"},\"headline\":\"To All the Introductions I\u2019ve Loved Before\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-01-22T16:00:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-01-22T16:06:10+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/\"},\"wordCount\":1119,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/to-all-the-introductions-ive-loved-before\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/1200px-kachelofen.inc_-1024x744.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"A. 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