The Paris Review's Blog, page 795

Short Story

Check out those shorts second from the right. Your eyes do not deceive you: that is indeed the very same 1953 William Pène du Bois cityscape that graces the inside cover of your issue of The Paris Review. It’s one of four designs, taken from our archive, to be found on these limited-edition swim trunks (which could also, of course, just be worn as shorts). Produced in collaboration with Barneys New York and Orlebar Brown to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of The Paris Review, they can be found in our shop. With each purchase, you will receive a one-year subscription. (L-R: Kim MacConnel, Summer 1980; Donald Sultan, Summer 1996; William Pène du Bois, Spring 1953; Leanne Shapton, Spring 2011.)

 

Sex on the Beach

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

On August 5, 1953, the film version of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity opened at the Capitol Theater in New York City. A heat wave suffocated Manhattan. The theater was not air-conditioned. Nobody cared. Lines formed around the block beginning on that torrid Wednesday night. Quickly, it was decided to add a one A.M. screening to accommodate the overflow crowds. It was a smash hit throughout the world, and the film’s beach scene became instantly iconic. 

Did the film version of From Here to Eternity so enthrall the masses merely because of that famous beach scene (in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, playing adulterous lovers, passionately kiss as the waves wash over them)? Or because it was tailored to the ex-G.I. generation, thriving amid America’s victorious postwar abundance? Winning eight Academy Awards didn’t hurt.

But there’s more to it than that. By the time the film debuted, James Jones’s debut novel had won for itself not just the 1952 National Book Award for Fiction, but also a vast international readership. It would sell a half million copies in hardcover and then three million in paperback. Timing was key. From Here to Eternity was published between the release of the controversial first Kinsey Report (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” in 1948) and its scandalously received sequel, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” which induced a critical firestorm when it appeared in 1953. Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s methodologies and conclusions still inspire debate. But there’s no disputing the public’s reaction then to the two statistically top-heavy books that he and his colleagues issued. Shock, dismay, denial, and disgust were in the air, as the Kinsey Reports’ charts about extramarital sex, masturbation, homosexual and bisexual orientations, and other data contradicted American society’s self-image. Read More »

August

“Do what we can, summer will have its flies.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Sketches from the Trial of Bradley Manning

On Tuesday, I sat in a Fort Meade courtroom, waiting to hear if Bradley Manning would be found guilty of treason. Bradley Manning’s trial (like those of hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, or Anonymous-affiliated journalist Barrett Brown) is a trial of modernity. It shows the old world lashing out against an increasingly uncontrollable future.

I was there because I know which side I’m on.

A tight community of supporters has grown around Manning. From veterans and NASA scientists to teenagers and retirees, they stand in the hot sun while drivers from Fort Meade scream insults at them. They wear black T-shirts, printed with the word truth. Many have been coming for years. They speak of Manning as a friend—or, sometimes, their child. They care for him as much as for they do for the truth his leaks represented. They take care of each other. Read More »

Jane Austen Unmentionables, and Other News

Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award–winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been pulled from the PS 114 sixth-grade reading list based on the following: “And if God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs. So I thank God for my thumbs.”
Speaking of the National Book Awards: the gotcha! stunt is as old as time. In the 1970s, a disgruntled writer submitted the manuscript of Jerzy Kosiński’s award-winning Steps (sans famous author name) to publishers and, yep, it was rejected.
Did Shakespeare really invent the concept of zero?
“Nestling in the middle of my Jane Austen goody bag is a black lace thong.” A visit to the JASNA convention, the Comic Con of Janeites. 
And a list of well-read TV characters begins with the dog Wishbone, from Wishbone. Happy Monday!

 

Museum Hours

The city is our best shot at escaping the city. Within the big, frantic city, we find places to breathe. Twice in the last month, dozens of times in the past year, I have taken refuge in the National Gallery of Art. Washington has beer joints. Washington has baseball. But when money is tight and the stress intolerable, there are few luxuries like strolling along a wall of Modiglianis for free.

Often the museum has been a family retreat. My wife goes for Whistler’s Symphony in White, a rather suggestive portrait of the artist’s redheaded mistress perched at the end of a corridor that has the feel of a wedding aisle. Beckett, our three-year-old, digs the dragon figurines in the gift shop. Of the galleries, the eighteenth century British, flush with gundogs and lapdogs, are the ones he hates least. Beckett wants a dog, preferably a beagle, for Christmas. A dog or a razor scooter, of which there are no paintings on view.

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And Tremble

As a child, I had a morbid fear of the Shelley sonnet “Ozymandias.” (In the pantheon of night terrors, it ranked only behind the cover of the Sweeney Todd LP, which lived in our living room, and the ghost of Ty Cobb, who lived in my closet.) I guess it was in the children’s poetry anthology my mother would sometimes read from. I interpreted the poem extremely literally: any messages about the way of all flesh and the death of empires was lost on me, and I envisioned, instead, merely a series of monstrous limbs, and a sneering head, coming to life Bedknobs-and-Broomsticks-style, and chasing me around. (Later, in high school, I took to secretly calling this one really arrogant nerd with excellent posture Ozymandias, because I was cool like that, but really that’s a story for another day.)

I would have been absolutely terrified of this Breaking Bad promo, in which Bryan Cranston reads the poem to the accompaniment of an ominous drumbeat. In fact, I still sort of am.

 

What We’re Loving: Pulp Fiction, Struggles, Kuwait

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, an anthology of “domestic suspense” fiction written by women between the forties and the seventies, makes for perfect subway reading: not only are the stories magazine-short, but the book’s terrific, pulpy cover is a real conversation starter. In her introduction, editor Sarah Weinman makes a compelling case for the genre’s subversive impact, both on society and the modern psychological thriller. But influence aside, the stories are just plain fun: whether it’s Patricia Highsmith’s highly-strung nanny, Shirley Jackson’s paranoid runaway, or a noirish housewife with a sinister secret, the cast of characters will haunt you long after you’ve reached your stop. —Sadie Stein

My first read through Geoffrey O’Brien’s new collection, People on Sunday, induced a kind of dazzled bafflement. The language is precise but the turns are hard to follow: “It’s the opposite / of dreaming,” he explains in one poem, “except that objects / are alive and episodic, connected / by comforting blurs.” I especially liked a poem set in New Mexico (“This land was always postnuclear, / Out of time while in it”), and another about riding the F train (“it’s embarrassing / still to be riding this system, antiquated / As reading a newspaper or choosing / The semicolon”). After a second and third reading, I find that O’Brien’s most urgent theme is the difficulty of writing public-spirited poetry at a time when “the poem / Is now believed to be the most distant / Object ever seen.” You might think this would make for a poetry of despair or irony, but oftentimes it’s just the opposite: “We decided to rebuild our home again / In the intermittent sun, strangers with arms / Linked to protect the thing behind them.” —Robyn Creswell Read More »

The Strange Saga of the Jane Austen Ring, and Other News

Thwarted in her quest to bring Jane Austen’s One Ring to the U.S., singer Kelly Clarkson has been forced to commission a replica.
The Amazon powers that be have ensured that Vonnegut fan fic is now legal, and one can buy it via Amazon. “Bill Pilgrim, unstuck in time, is going to quickly become a Kindle Worlds favorite,” says a member of the Vonnegut trust, ominously.
“I stay away from applied fields—it is my only ethical standard as a ghostwriter. I will not help a nurse to qualify on false pretenses: who knows, it might be my parents who find themselves in their care.” Confessions of an essay-mill writer.
Presented without comment: “A Massachusetts resident pleaded guilty to stealing over $600,000 worth of books, audiobooks, and Legos.”

 

Hollywood Indian

Image from D. W. Griffith’s film The Squaw’s Love, 1911

At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a young Abanaki Native American woman named Margaret “Soaring Dove” “Dark Eyes” Tahamont moved from her home in the Adirondacks across the country to Los Angeles to play in the moving pictures. She was born in Indian Lake, New York, where her extended family—a mixed group of Abanaki, Oneida, and Anglo ancestry—had been well established since the town’s founding, owning substantial land, running an inn for visitors to the region from New York City, and employing many town residents as laborers.

Margaret, born Camp, judging from all photographs of her Indian Lake family, was raised in the costume of any white northerner. Her cousin Emma, near Margaret’s age, can be seen wearing a high loose bun, plush woven hats, and carefully tailored dresses covering from the high neck to the wrist, puffed at the sleeves, pintucked across the bodice, and lightly trimmed with lace.

But Margaret moved to Los Angeles to perform as an Indian in plays, Indian hobby societies, and early silent films. She now wore long braids, leather, beaded headbands, moccasins, and performed under the name Dove Eye. Her husband Elijah Tahamont, or Dark Cloud (also Abanaki, from Quebec), had been acting in silent films made in the Adirondack region—what would later be known as the “eastern Westerns”—including at least a few with soon-to-be famed director D. W. Griffith, and when eastern production companies began to move west to join nascent Hollywood corporations, the Tahamonts went along. Elijah, as Dark Cloud, played in over thirty titles; Margaret in at least five silent shorts, and likely more—the idea of preserving film and film records still lying a bit ahead on the horizon. Read More »