The Paris Review's Blog, page 746

The Leaves’ Leavetaking

Photo: Horia Varlan, via Flickr

Howard Moss, the late poet, was born today in 1922. Moss’s Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 1972; he served as The New Yorker’s poetry editor for nearly forty years, from 1948 until his death in 1987. The Paris Review published his poem “A Balcony with Birds” in our fourth issue, circa the winter of 1953; an excerpt follows.

The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves
   The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.
The actual is real and not imagined,—still,
   The eye, so learned in disenchantment, sees
Two trees at once, this one of summer’s will,
   And winter’s one, when no bird will assail
The skyline’s hyaline transparencies,
   Emptying its architecture by degrees.

Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun
   Feverish with light, goes down, and on
Come ambitious stars—the stars that were
   But this morning dimmed. Somewhere a slow
Piano scales the summits of the air
   And disappears, and dark descends, and though
The birds turn off their songs now light is gone,
   The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.

 

A Mountain of Sable Plumes

Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s Gothic revivalist manor, in Twickenham.

Earlier this week, to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, Flavorpill found ten Gothic short stories for our delectation, and I must say, they’re really hitting the spot. January is especially well suited to the tint of the Gothic mindset—nothing helps you settle into the winter doldrums like an unceasing parade of bloodied knives, thousand-yard stares, disemboweled corpses, creaking doors, and shrieking virgins. It’s enough to make you want to sunder a frilled shirt and drink rancid port from a tarnished silver chalice, muttering all the while about the gloaming, the gloaming, the gloaming…

And let’s not forget the funereal knell of church bells. You’ll want those, too.

If you really want to whip yourself into a Gothic froth, I recommend The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, widely regarded as the forebear of the Gothic proper. It’s not “good,” per se—you won’t find independent booksellers foisting it on you as a forgotten classic—but it packs a lot of senseless murk into a slim volume, and it features one of my favorite opening scenes in all of literature: a homely young man is crushed to death by a giant helmet, which seems to have fallen from the sky. His father, Prince Manfred, comes upon the disaster:

The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes was a group of his servants endeavoring to raise something that appeared to him a mountain of sable plumes. He gazed without believing his sight.

“What are ye doing?” cried Manfred, wrathfully; “where is my son?”

A volley of voices replied, “Oh! my Lord! the Prince! the Prince! the helmet! the helmet!”

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily,—but what a sight for a father’s eyes!—he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

The horror of the spectacle, the ignorance of all around how this misfortune had happened, and above all, the tremendous phenomenon before him, took away the Prince’s speech. Yet his silence lasted longer than even grief could occasion. He fixed his eyes on what he wished in vain to believe a vision; and seemed less attentive to his loss, than buried in meditation on the stupendous object that had occasioned it. He touched, he examined the fatal casque; nor could even the bleeding mangled remains of the young Prince divert the eyes of Manfred from the portent before him.

And so on. It’s a turn that seems straight out of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, but without the fart sounds. You can read all of Otranto here; it goes on to include ghosts, brazen trumpets, and walking portraits, among other oddities. If you’re not engrossed, you may be, at least, instructively perplexed. And when, after a few hours in the hysteria and gloom, you raise your heavy eyes, the winter will be that much closer to its end.

 

Like the Cat That Got the Cream

Photo: catsdrivingthings.tumblr.com

The girl and the boy stood in the doorway of the crosstown bus as we crossed the park. She was dressed all in black, her lank hair streaked with crimson, eyes circled with heavy kohl, wrists crisscrossed with black rubber bracelets. Her backpack bore an “Emily the Strange” badge.

Her companion, plump and pale, in an oversized trench coat, turned toward her with a coy tilt of his head.

“Mee-ow,” he purred, extending and then curling his fingers one by one in what was clearly intended to be a cat-like manner.

His companion did not respond.

“Mee-ow,” he said more loudly.

“I’m so fucked on this test. Let’s get some pizza,” she said impatiently, pulling the stop bell.

There was a brief silence. Then,

“Purrrr-fect,” said the boy.

She ignored him.

They got off at the next stop, after a very slow old lady.

 

W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y

“75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Cynthia Ozick reflects on W. H. Auden, whose readings she remembers attending as a Poetry Center subscriber in the fifties.

There must be sorrow if there can be love.
—From “Canzone”

Ah, the fabled sixties and seventies! Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs! The glorious advent of Howling! Of Getting Stoned! The proliferation of Ginsbergian Exclamation Points!

To secure the status of their literary subversion, these revolutionary decades were obliged, like the cadres of every insurrection, to denigrate and despise, and sometimes to blow up, their immediate predecessor, the fifties—the middling middle, the very navel, of the twentieth century. The fifties, after all, were the Eisenhower years, stiff and small like Mamie’s bangs (and just as dated), dully mediocre, constrained, consumerist, car-finned, conformist, forgettable, and stale as modernism itself. Randall Jarrell, one of its leading poets and critics, named this midcentury epoch “The Age of Criticism”—and what, however he intended it, could suggest prosiness more? And what is prosiness if not the negation of the lively, the living, the lasting, the daring, the true and the new?

The reality was sublimely opposite. It was, in fact, the Age of Poetry, a pinnacle and an exaltation; there has not been another since. Its poets were more than luminaries—they were colossi, their very names were talismans, and they rose before us under a halo of brilliant lights like figures in a shrine. It was a kind of shrine: the grand oaken hall, the distant stage and its hallowed lectern, the enchanted voices with their variegated intonations, the rapt listeners scarcely breathing, the storied walls themselves in trance—this was the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in the heart of the twentieth century.

And bliss was it to be young and enraptured in the dusk of that cavernous arena, at twenty dollars per season ticket! It was the Age of Poetry precisely because it was still the age of form, when form, even when abandoned, was there to be abandoned. (Wild-hearted Allen Ginsberg knew and revered his progenitors, even as he tossed them to the winds.) And form, in those disparaged fifties, meant difficulty in the doing; meant the hard practice of virtuosity; meant the the plumbing of language for all its metamorphoses and undiscovered metrics; meant the heritage of knowledge; meant, in order to aspire to limitlessness, the pressure of limits—rhyme, even rhyme, a thing of wit and brio, never an archaism. Poetry then had not yet fallen into its present slough of trivia and loss of encompassment, the herding of random images of minuscule perspective leading to a pipsqueak epiphany, a delirium of incoherence delivered, monotone upon monotone, in the cacophony of a slam.

Instead, a procession of giants. Their names are lasting, their lines permanent, and their voices (fortunately) recorded—voices idiosyncratic, distinct, and so luxuriant in their unlikeness that it is an astonishment to see so many so large all alive at once. They have nothing in common but their dazzling mastery. And behold, on this selfsame platform, T. S. Eliot—a sacerdotal figure, the era’s reigning literary pope, fake-Brit sonorities reverberating like a cathedral organ, grim and tragic, and as funereal as a marble tomb. And then W. H. Auden, capaciously contrapuntal, though they lived in consonance, Eliot born in 1888, Auden in 1907, Eliot an American who chose England, Auden an Englishman turned American. They died eight years apart and knew the same world, the same political dooms, and the same return to the metaphysics of Christianity. On that broad stage, Auden seemed at the time a lesser god: only Eliot could fill, as he once did, a football stadium. The public Eliot was a venerated monument that loomed unforgivingly, while Auden, even in public, had an air of plainness. Auden’s reading was spoken; it had almost a kind of casualness, a flatness, a matter-of-factness. He read poetry as if he were reading prose. He refused the vatic and the flamboyant. “I must try to eliminate from my own poetry false emotion, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities,” he once wrote. And in an interview: “Poetry is not self-expression.” Eliot’s thundering fame has since shrunk to a period datum, or, as in The Four Quartets, a mystical haze. But Auden, the most copious poet in English of the last century, unequaled for variety and scope—drama, lyric, ballad, sonnet, libretto, villanelle, and more—is the touchstone for all serious poets writing now.

And more: he is the necessary antithesis of Eliot. How clearly, two or three generations on, we can feel this! When the Twin Towers were felled by jihadist terror, and the world of American self-confidence ended not with a whimper but with a civilization-shattering bang, it was not The Wasteland that was invoked to toll the bell of mourning. Not “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down … shantih shantih shantih,” that melancholic jigsaw of allusions, but the hard mundane despairing concrete presentness of Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.

Here there are no symbols, no arcane “objective correlative.” Invasion and war, violence and dread, horizon and olfactory nerve, place and time—the kernel of the hour, its history and politics—are intimately knotted in these plainspoken lines, open and direct and quick with fury. And never portentous in the way of a shrouded haruspex.

Elsewhere, Auden’s dry satiric voice can seize boisterously and shamelessly on the vernacular, capsizing the lyrical with a trickster’s parodic quip:

Goddess of bossy underlings, Normality!
What murders are committed in thy name!
Totalitarian is thy state Reality,
Reeking of antiseptics and the shame
Of faces that all look and feel the same.
Thy Muse is one unknown to classic histories,
The topping figure of the hockey mistress.
—From “Letter to Lord Byron”

Though it may require a British staccato to rhyme mistress with histories, the syncopated excitement of such a melange of constructs, balanced by modulating couplets and quatrains, is Auden’s signature; or call it the audaciously conflicting cadences of his breathing. His politics is metaphysics, his metaphysics is history, his history is humanity adrift in a labyrinth of its own making. In his heroic abundance he will catch hold of any form—or invent a new one—to assess, judge, condemn, praise, ruminate, fulminate, love; and once, in the name of literature, forgive:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
—From “On the Death of Yeats”

No thought or feeling or concept eludes Auden: death, dream, doubt, loss, beauty, sex, love, fear, appetite, flight, wrath, hope, yearning, refuge, bliss, catastrophe, homage, savagery, pity, heritage, exile, nightmare—every motion, motive, and emotion of the range and plethora of human endurance. In one of his most impassioned elegies, addressed in supplication to the spirit of Henry James—“O stern consul of intractable provinces, / O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist”—he contemplates the flooding in of all that the world contains or intimates, its “hinted significant forms”:

As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks,
And aspirin presupposes,
On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down, and any who will
Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus
Of the master and the rose.

Our theatre, scaffold,and erotic city
And all the infirm species and partners in the act
Of encroachment bodies crave
Though solitude in death is de rigueur for their flesh
And the self-denying hermit flies as it approaches
Like the carnivore to a cave,

That its plural numbers may unite in meaning,
Its vulgar tongues unravel the knotted mass
Of the improperly conjunct,
Open my eyes to all its hinted significant forms
Sharpen my ears to detect amid its brilliant uproar
The low thud of the defunct.

              . . .

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living and dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the variety of our calling; make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

These are verses that can be understood, beyond the literary invocation that is their conceit, as philosophical advocacy, or even as a kind of crooked incantation, forsaking easy eloquence. They decline to chant or sing, and never has rhyme been so inconspicuous, while at the same time insinuating its sly and stealthy beat. Auden is a poet—no, the poet—of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. His successors and inheritors can be named in an uncommonly short list—contemporary poets for whom the lyrical ear and the all-seeing eye and the mind in fever are entwined with the breath and breadth of the world; and to whom history, that multitudinous ghost, is no stranger.

Perhaps there is no extant recording of Auden reading “At the Grave of Henry James” on the august stage of the 92nd Street Y half a century ago. Or perhaps there is. Still, whatever it was that we anointed listeners were once blessed to hear, the timbre and the rasp, and the Hurrah and the Alas, of the poet’s voice can be found again in these plain lines:

… Only the past
Is present, no one about but the dead as,
Equipped with a few inherited odds and ends,
     One after another we are
Fired into life to seek the unseen target where all
Our equivocal judgments are judged and resolved in
     One whole Alas or Hurrah.

Cynthia Ozick is the author of novels, essays, and short stories. Her most recent novel is Foreign Bodies.

Listen to audio of onstage conversations with writers—many of which became the foundation of The Paris Review’s Writers-at-Work interviews—as part of our copresentation with the 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.

 

“The Era of the Word,” and Other News

A Golden Age for journalism. (Journalism not pictured.) Illustration by Brahma Kumaris.

“A strangely democratic and egalitarian Era of the Word has emerged.” Why we may be living in an idyllic age for journalism.
“People love stories. The more you see your story as part of a broader narrative, the better.” The six things that make stories go viral will amaze, and maybe infuriate, you. Kudos to The New Yorker for aping Upworthy’s headline style.
And since we’re doing sixes: six pieces of advice from successful writers. (Though they’re a touch cliché, right down to the “avoid clichés” apothegm.)
It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision. The medium is obsolete; the verdict is not. It’s the basis of a lot of our ideas about copyright, consumer rights, and fair use.
#ReadWomen2014: A hashtag becomes a movement.

 

Welcome to Wellcome

Thomas Burke after Philipp Reinagle, Cupid inspiring plants with Love, in a tropical landscape, 1805, via Wellcome Images.

Enjoy viscera? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: as of yesterday, London’s Wellcome Library, whose specialty is medical history, has opened up more than 100,000 images in its capacious digital archive for free download. Whether your tastes run to the macabre or the beautiful—not to say, of course, that such things are mutually exclusive—the Wellcome galleries have something for you. Conjoined twins wearing swimsuits? They’re here. A man being hit on the head by a falling flowerpot in Rome, circa 1890? Coming right up. Or perhaps—the keystone of any collection—a surgeon letting blood from Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Durham, but leaving his patient in order to attend to a sick horse. And it’s not all grisly; above, for instance, you’ll see Cupid, slinging arrows so that the flora of the tropics will be inclined to reproduce. (You know, sexually.)

Click in good health.

 

Curious Punishments

A still from Quick Draw McGraw.

The other day, my brother called and asked if I would look and see if he had accidentally left his good trousers at my apartment while he was crashing with me; he needed to attend a funeral. I said he had, and that I would press them for him.

“I wish he could afford some better clothes,” I said regretfully to my friend. “But it’s not like anyone will be looking. And the lights probably won’t be be very bright.” (While this may seem a trivial concern, anyone who has worn black polyester to a funeral will know what I’m talking about.) 

“It will be fine,” said my friend. “It’s not as though he’ll be in rags. Or a barrel and suspenders.”

This got us thinking about barrels and suspenders—the familiar image of an individual in visibly reduced circumstances. I imagined it had originated in old political cartoons or similar. And then of course we had to look it up.

Wikipedia informed us that, indeed, a cartoonist called Will B. Johnstone was known for having created a New York World-Telegram cartoon character known as the Tax Payer, who—presumably having been taxed so exorbitantly that he could no longer afford clothing—was portrayed sporting only a barrel held up by suspenders.

But the origin of the trope was most likely the Drunkard’s Cloak, or Newcastle Cloak, a form of pillory in seventeenth-century Germany and England in which the publicly inebriated were placed in a barrel colorfully illustrated with scenes of drunken antics. As one helpful Web site explains, “There were two kinds—the enclosed barrel which forced the victim to kneel in his or her own filth, or the open barrel which allowed the victim to roam about town, open to ridicule and scorn.” A Sophie’s choice, really. Especially as both barrels were likely employed for communal use and, presumably, never cleaned.

As late as 1865, an American newspaper, according to Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, describes how a “wretched delinquent was gratuitously framed in oak, his head being thrust through a hole cut in one end of a barrel, the other end of which had been removed, and the poor fellow loafed about in the most disconsolate manner, looking for all the world like a half-hatched chicken.”

But the best description comes from a fascinating site called TVTropes.org, which explains,

To show that a character is in such dire financial straits that he’s literally “lost his shirt” (though there are times where a character has to wear a barrel because he or she lost her clothes, not because he or she is poor) the otherwise naked character will resort to wearing a large barrel held up with suspenders. Primarily seen in cartoons.

A Sub-Trope of Stock Costume Traits.

After that, obviously, we had no choice but to descend into the rabbit hole of Stock Costume Traits, which taught us the distinction between Mystical High Collars and the High Collar of Doom; and then we talked about Halloween costumes for a while, and I said this year I was going to do Sexy Struwwelpeter, goddammit (here is a video of Heidi Klum with Struwwelpeter-inspired hair), or maybe Sexy Bella Abzug, and no one could stop me.

We arrived, somehow, at the question of Gilligan’s Island, and I said, There must be a minor indie band called the Professor and Mary Ann. I looked it up. And I still literally cannot believe there isn’t.

Somewhere along the way, I completely forgot about my brother’s pants. When he came to get them, they were still here, his good trousers, still wrinkled. I feel terrible about it, but the fact is, it is snowing so hard here, chances are everyone will get snow-caked on their way to the funeral home. Of course I know that is not the point.

 

What We’re Doing: Talkin’ Translation

Tonight at seven, brave the snow, the cold, and any other inclemencies the sky may belch on us and come to Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, where our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is discussing translation with Eliot Weinberger (acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bei Dao), Idra Novey (translator of Clarice Lispector), Daniella Gitlin (translator of Rodolfo Walsh), and Jeffrey Yang (poet, editor, and translator of Liu Xiaobo). It’s all to celebrate the third anniversary of Asymptote, the international literary journal.

 

That’s Material: An Interview with Daniel Menaker

Daniel Menaker doesn’t waste time in signaling his penchant for self-deprecation. The title of his wise, playful, deeply felt new memoir is My Mistake. And the memoirist, no mere tease, is happy to detail the errors he’s made during his life and his celebrated career as fiction editor of The New Yorker, publisher at Random House, and author of novels, stories, and essays.

Most of the blunders recounted by Menaker aren’t too dire, but he remains haunted by the inadvertent role he played in his only sibling’s untimely death. During a game of touch football in 1967, he challenged his older brother, Mike, to play backfield despite Mike’s bad knees, and from there everything went horribly amiss: Mike, then twenty-nine, sustained an injury that led to knee surgery, and this surgery led to a fatal blood infection called septicemia.

For all of Menaker’s mistakes, great and small, readers of My Mistake will likely feel that he got a lot more right than wrong. His memoir takes us from a red-diaper childhood in Greenwich Village through teenage summers on a colorful uncle’s Berkshires guest camp and an education at Swarthmore in the early sixties; it recounts his professional mentoring by the legendary William Maxwell and William Shawn, his office politics with Tina Brown and Harry Evans, and the editing of some of the great authors of our age. Menaker, who, at seventy-two, has written five other books, is an expert at turning those proverbial life-lemons into lemonades; his description of his protracted recent struggle with lung cancer, for example, winds up being one of the memoir’s most inspiring and invigorating sections.

Since finishing My Mistake, Menaker has been working on a series of thematically linked stories, and during an early December break in his current “self-financed” book tour, he answered each question I catapulted at him by telephone.

In My Mistake you say that writing a memoir was a means for you to take stock of your life while facing possible death, pondering what you call “the Great Temporariness.”

The book came about through a really weird route. The proposal for it was vastly different from the finished product. Fourteen people rejected it. I posted the rejections on the Huffington Post, and got in terrible trouble for that with my agent. I didn’t care—I’m too old to care about that shit. I just thought it was funny. And then somebody made an offer, but he was let go from the publishing house, or left, shortly after he acquired my book. I like to think there was no causal connection!

I’m not a big fan of the present tense, but it functions well in My Mistake.

Memoir is such a vexed form and category, for any number of reasons. I can’t even count how many reasons there are for not writing a memoir. People are not in it, or they are in it, they’re pissed off, your memory is wrong—there are all sorts of land mines. With a book that doesn’t have anything truly remarkable in it—I wasn’t captured and sexually violated for ten years, I wasn’t a jihadist, I didn’t go into outer space—I had to figure out how I could make this more immediate. It’s a kind of gadget to use the present tense, but it felt right. And it helped me to put myself—or pretend to myself that I was putting myself—back in the moment. It was a sort of a shoehorn back into the past.

Had you read other memoirs that impressed you?

Wrinkles, by Charles Simmons, a memoir-like novel, may have had an effect on me. It’s epigrammatic, practically. Another influence was Dorothy Gallagher, a writer whom I edited and published. She wrote two fabulous books of personal essays: How I Came into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House. What happens is that retroactively you see the little rivulets of influence that go into what you do.

I have to ask about the novel Primary Colors, which you edited. You really weren’t aware of the secret identity of its author while you were working on it? Did you know Joe Klein, the bashful “Anonymous,” at the time?

I had met Joe, but I had no idea it was him. Not until the day before the announcement. I edited it through his agent. And I didn’t think it was important. I loved the idea that people didn’t know who Anonymous was. It reinforced the education I got at Swarthmore, which was very much explicative. You didn’t care who wrote a poem, you just read it. Of course, now—historically and biographically—I care who wrote what, but at the time it seemed to me a kind of ideal approach to text, shorn of ego—here’s the object. I’m not sure that Primary Colors is a great work of art. I do know that it’s an awfully good novel, and it was a pleasure to have all the author complications cut away. So that was a sort of purist, graduate-school approach to something that was a commercial publication, but it was great fun.

You describe a phenomenon in your memoir that you call “writer-editor transference.” Was this a common occurrence for you? Did you have a lot of instances of “transference” with writers?

I never didn’t have an instance of it. And as a writer, try as I might to be aware of this impulse of regressive parental transference, I have never successfully avoided a certain amount of that childlike need for attention. It might be impossible to avoid it.

Were there ever cases in which the transference was flipped the other way, in which the editor wanted the writer’s approval, or where a writer tried to “run you” as the editor?

Nope. I think it’s truly structural. It doesn’t have to do with me or with the writer—once the book is acquired or once the short story is bought, the editor becomes like a teacher, but with only one student. The editor becomes the locus of the writer’s preliminary concerns and anxieties.

Certainly your feelings about your brother’s death have stayed with you and remain charged. You’ve written about this tragedy in your short fiction twice before. How different was it to render it now, decades later, in a memoir?

It mirrors, without my having realized it until recently, what William Maxwell did with the death of his mother, which he revisited two or three times in his fiction. Trauma, and its lasting effects on a person psychologically and then later literarily—they’re material. Like a comic looks at his problems and thinks, That’s material. There’s a kind of iciness about it—a sense of, I can use this. That’s why writers are always a little weird. If they’re not actively thinking in a divided way, then they may be storing observations for later. When I worked with Alice Munro, I had this sense about her, though she’s the most delightful person in the whole world. She was observing things, and had probably observed things her whole life. And used them.

But with all your writing about it, clearly you’ve gained a lot.

It has reaffirmed my belief that the past is the definition of inevitability. I had no choice but to do what I did with my brother during the touch football game, which was to goad him slightly. He had no choice but to take up the goad and to do what he did. And so I’m kind of at peace with it. It led to a lot of trouble, sadness, real emotional problems. But you work on them. I’m a worker. I work on stuff with myself, and sometimes I get the job done and sometimes I don’t.

Some of my favorite parts of your memoir are your hard-won bits of wisdom about writing. As you write at one point about actors—“When you ‘indicate’ while delivering lines, you show you are aware that you’re acting and the audience will register the effect, the artificiality of what you’re doing. A lot of prose writers similarly indicate. They don’t trust the facts and their objective observations to carry the weight of their attitudes and judgments. But they do carry that weight …”

This, I think, is at the heart of writing, and of editing. It is essentially not much more than the old show-don’t-tell cliché. In fiction and nonfiction, a lot of writers fail to understand that feeling automatically infuses description, narration, and dialogue. They make the mistake of explicitly indicating—almost instructing—what the reader should feel. Of course, doing so lessens the chance that the reader will indeed feel it.

My Mistake has been very disciplined by other readers. What they did—what a good editor does—is make your text the way you really would have wanted it to be if you had been doing it on your most disciplined, best day. It’s like Michelangelo looking at a piece of marble. There’s a shape inside it. And one of the ways to get that shape out in a text is to have editors who try to put themselves in your shoes and figure out what you’re trying to do, where you may have succeeded—and where you may not have.

Do you edit short stories the same way you do novels?

A short story is more like a single space than a number of spaces—a full-blown narrative with plots and subplots and so on. So when you edit a story, it’s better to regard it as a space that the reader will experience all at once, like a big painting, rather than something that will develop over time. Of course, it takes time to read a story, but it’s a much, much shorter time than with a novel or a nonfiction book. So in a way, it’s more spatial than linear. A practical editing result of this philosophy—just to give one example—is that the editor and writer must cast a pretty cold or at least strict eye on lengthy digressions. In novels, lengthy digressions, if they’re good and if they ultimately play well into the whole work’s themes, are not only fun but can be crucial.

I’m curious about a remark you make in My Mistake about bigotry’s malignant influence: “It will take me years to purge most of the racism and homophobia that I inhale in the fifties at Nyack High School … Honestly? These hateful reflexes remain in me to this day, like a splinter or buckshot under the skin which never works its way out.”

Right. There’s no rational counterpart to it—it doesn’t have to do with thinking. It’s kneejerk. This is a problem that plagues society, so why not admit it? I think I’ve come as far as I can go, and much further than most people, in purging it. It’s like a scar—it may heal, but it’s still palpable. It’s still visible. Let’s say you have a mean, abusive father. You don’t get rid of that. You may master it, you may come to terms with it, you may even forgive him and may even lead a wonderful life—but he can’t be gone from your life. He’s in there. Remember the TV ad for Ragu spaghetti sauce? A father says, in this Italian accent, “To make-a the good sauce, you gotta have the right spices!” And his son says, “It’s in there.” “And you’ve gotta put some love in the sauce, too!” And the son says, “It’s in there, Pop!” So we’re all like a big sauce. Everything’s in there. Nothing goes away.

 

Being a Tough Guy, and Other News

A lobby card for The Tough Guy, 1926. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

What’s it like to share a name with a Tom Clancy hero and teach at the Naval Academy? “I would be lying if I didn’t say that when I walk out Gate Three of the Academy from time to time—which is the gate that Jack Ryan walks out of during Patriot Games and gets shot—that there’s a sense of surrealness to it.”
Speaking of which, masculinity in art is undergoing a transformation. We’re “questioning yesterday’s tough guys.” Condolences, tough guys!
In honor of MLK Day, The New Yorker has lifted the pay wall on Renata Adler’s 1965 classic “Letter from Selma.”
What New York’s editors want in a good book: “Are you writing a dinosaur erotica novel, or the book that all dinosaur erotica novels will be measured by?”
The poet Mamoun Eltlib on writing and reading in Sudan: “You don’t feel it’s a living language; you just feel it’s like a dead language, a bloody language.”
Now accepting applications for admission: the Yale Writers’ Conference, a summer program with a formidable faculty including Nathaniel Rich, Je Banach, Teddy Wayne, Trey Ellis, Marian Thurm, Colum McCann, Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman, and others.