Advertisement

Letters & Essays: P-R

Letters & Essays of the Day

Women Sweeping

By Ishion Hutchinson

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.

The Paris Review Sketchbook

By George Plimpton

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

An Autobiographical Outline

By Ezra Pound

Entered U.P. Penn at 15 with intention of studying comparative values in literature (poetry) and began doing so unbeknown to the faculty. 1902 enrolled as special student to avoid irrelevant subjects. 1903—5 continued process at Hamilton College under W.P. Shepard, “Schnitz” Brandt and J.D. Ibbotson. 1905—7 P.G. at U. of Penn. Chiefly impressed by lack of correlation between different depts, and lack either of general survey of literature or any coherent interest in literature as such (as distinct for example from philology). 

Canto 72, Confession

By Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was obsessed with language. Quotations from seventeen languages, from hieroglyphics to the dialect of the Na-Khi tribe of China are scattered through the Cantos. Two cantos were written completely in Italian: numbers 72 and 73. It is not perfect Italian, though Pound had lived in Italy, off and on, for thirty years when he wrote the poems in Rapallo in 1944 toward the end of the war. There are minute errors of syntax and a few slight slips in verbal tone. But Pound’s ear was so keen, the finest of his generation according to Yeats, it was nearly impossible for him to write a line that was not melodic.

“Yr Letters Are Life Preservers”: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway

By Ezra Pound

1923 

Chamby Sur Montreaux

Suisse

23 Janvier

 

Dear Ezra—:

We have the intention of joining you.2 How is it? What do you pay? What is the hotel? Can I, like Northcliffe3 on the Rhine, preserve my incognito among your fascist pals? or are they liable to give Hadley castor oil?4 Mussolini told me at Lausanne, you know, that I couldn’t ever live in Italy again. How the hell are you any way? e sua moglia? How long are you going to stay? Answer any of these that seem important.