Frederick Seidel, whose first book of poetry, Final Solutions, caused a controversy in 1962, was interviewed for the Fall 2009 issue of The Paris Review.

(As I’ve explained before, I have a lifetime subscription to that magazine, instigated by my wife as a present way back in 1979. The gift that keeps on giving!)

One of the questions dealt with the poetic influence of and his friendship with Poet Laureate Robert Lowell.

An unexpected name popped up in Seidel’s answer:

“He was my mentor and a friend and certainly an influence. I went to interview him for The Paris Review in 1959. It took two days, maybe four or five hours a day—an enormous amount of effort and time. At a certain moment late in the first day, my friend Whitney Ellsworth, who was manning the tape recorder, said, I’m afraid we’ve got to start over. It turned out he hadn’t had the machine on. That’s when I got to know Lowell! We hit it off, and he became a good friend.”

Unless there’s some other Whitney Ellsworth I don’t know about, this means that the comic-book editor of Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Batman, Detective Comics and Superman in the ’40s and mid-’50s, who later became the producer and story editor on the television series The Adventures of Superman, was also hanging around with the poetry circle of the period. Is this something that was commonly known?

On the other hand, he might not have had an interest in poetry at all. Maybe it’s just that Ellsworth had been a classmate of Seidel’s, and was also one of those early adopters of the ’50s who fooled around with reel-to-reel tape recorders, and so was called into service because of that.

Does anyone out there have further information on Ellsworth’s non-comics background? I’ve been unable to turn anything up online.

In any case, it’s an interesting case of six degrees of separation, and a piece of comics history I knew nothing about.

In an interview with Annie Proulx in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review, the author of “Brokeback Mountain” and The Shipping News is asked to name her influences.

Here’s how she responds:

I can’t answer that question. I have been an omnivorous reader since early childhood and I suppose the work of all the writers I’ve read has flowed through my brain, and that some of it stuck. S.J. Perelman, Nordhoff and Hall, Kinnan Rawlings, Jack London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dante, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, lots of science fiction, Vardis Fisher, Graham Greene, Jaroslav Hasek … why go on? Almost every book I’ve read has left its mark. And I think it silly to look for influences.

As much as I admire Proulx, I have to say this ticked me off.

Non-SF authors get named, but any SF writers she might have read get lumped together as “lots of science fiction”? Yeah, that sci-fi stuff is indistinguishable. Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein? Can’t tell them apart!

I’d like to have learned the names of the specific writers. But no.

Sigh …

Am I overreacting yet again? I think not, but then, that’s what you’re all here to let me know.

The Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review includes a series of collages by famed poet John Ashbery. Evidently, he became fascinated by the collage concept during his years as a student at Harvard in the 1940s, and returned to the form in 2008. The magazine prints a dozen recent examples of these, 11 inside, and one on the issue’s cover.

Dan Chiasson, who wrote a brief introductory blurb to explain what we’re about to see, delves into the symbolism of these collages. He says:

“The background elements often depict possible pasts: people on go-carts, a scene in Rotterdam of men in bowlers, and the teetering, top-heavy trucks of the twenties. The foreground elements seem to express elation or relief at having escaped those pasts to make the art he has made and keeps making.”

Symbolism is all well and good, but if you look at the color component of the collage above, you’ll note that Ashbery didn’t just use any foreground element. That man with his hands over his ears was taken from one of the most famous pieces of comic-book art ever published.

Do you recognize him? I may be the only regular reader of The Paris Review who could identify him immediately, but I’m sure that in this venue, I’m not the only one.

You’d think the source would be worth mentioning in any interpretation of the meaning of this collage. I chalk this up to another case of those concerned with supposed “high culture” failing to be aware of supposed “low culture.” Because the origin of that image matters, whether or not The Paris Review or Ashbery scholars acknowledge it.

I could say more about why that particular man is so important, but I don’t want to spoil it for those of you for whom that image doesn’t cause an immediate “I know that face!”

So—a show of hands please. Who out there can recognize that famous face? Many of you, I hope, or else I’ll be severely disappointed.

A simple yes or no will do to start, so you don’t spoil it too quickly for the puzzled.

The Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review features “The Lover,” a melancholy story by Damon Galgut about a young man traveling across the African continent. You can read the first few pages of the piece here.

I’d never read anything by Galgut before, even though he’s a critically acclaimed writer who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. Accidental finds like these are one of the best reasons for reading magazines—I get exposed to writers whom I might never have made the effort to track down on my own.

“The Lover” was an interesting story of accidental meetings and missed opportunities. What moved me the most was its penultimate paragraph:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them know who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Whether it touched me more now than it might have at some other time due to recent events in my life I can’t say. I only know that this aside on the ephemeral nature of our passage through the world spoke to me now.

The Fall 2008 issue of The Paris Review includes an excerpt from the oral biography of George Plimpton, who edited the magazine for its first half century.

Since Plimpton is no longer around to be interviewed the way Peter Matthiessen and others were, he’s represented with quotes from his diary, such as this passage in which he wrote about the search for a title during the magazine’s founding 55 years ago:

I know The Paris Review is a sensible and safe title. It might not sell a million copies but it’s safe. It has snob appeal. Paris—God what that connotes everywhere, and its life and its literature, and its eccentricities. But not quite enough for them. Merde, Phusct, Venture, MS, Manuscript, Counterpoint, Baccarat, all these evocative names which symbolize countless magazines with similar names which have failed in one respect for that every reason—zero, Blast, Transition (although that a fine one), Wake, etc. I said I’d never read a literary magazine of any sort with a one name supposedly striking title which hadn’t folded within a year or so. “Time, Life, Fortune?” asked du Bois. Well, he may be right but we shall see. The title can certainly ruin it. We’re all thinking about it. I hope if there’s a better one and a safer one than The Paris Review I can open my mind to it.

Considering some of those alternatives, I’m glad that his mind didn’t get that open.

Umberto Eco, scholar of medieval studies and bestselling author of such books as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, was interviewed in the Summer 2008 issue of The Paris Review. (My wife gave me a lifetime subscription more than three decades ago, and it’s truly been the gift that’s kept on giving—something that George Plimpton wasn’t too happy about!)

He had fascinating things to say about memory, the creative process, communication, and more, but it was his thoughts on the future of reading which stood out for me the most.

As you’ll see, he’s full of hope for the future, even as others are running around in fear.

What do you make of those who proclaim the death of the novel, the death of books, the death of reading?

To believe in the end of something is a typical cultural posture. Since the Greeks and the Latins we have persisted in believing that our ancestors were better than us. I am always amused and interested by this kind of sport, which the mass media practice with increasing ferocity. Every season there is an article on the end of the novel, the end of literature, the end of literacy in America. People don’t read any longer! Teenagers only play video games! The fact of the matter is that all over the world there are thousands of stores full of books and full of young people. Never in the history of mankind have there been so many books, so many places selling books, so many young people visiting these places and buying books.

What would you say to the fearmongers?

Culture is continuously adapting to new situations. There will probably be different culture, but there will be a culture. After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were centuries of profound transformation—linguistic, political, religious, cultural. These types of changes happen ten times as quickly now. But thrilling new forms will continue to emerge and literature will survive.

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who feels that though the bottles into which we decant words may change, the wine of literature will always remain.

As I’ve shared here before, Paul Di Filippo has for years been sending me envelopes decorated with collages culled from old magazines, newspapers, and comic books. Here’s yet another example of his envelope art, which sends a Lady in Red searching for me through a casino.

If only I could manage to look that debonair in reality!

But thanks to the Spring 2008 issue of The Paris Review, the secret of Paul Di Filippo’s inspiration has been revealed at last! (more…)

The Spring 2008 issue of The Paris Review includes an interview with Leonard Michaels conducted back in 1986. Michaels died in 2003, and this marks the interview’s first publication.

Michaels was the author of (among other things) the short story collection I Would Have Saved Them If I Could and the novel The Men’s Club.

He had this to share about his reaction to feedback on an early novel:

Was it at Michigan that you wrote a novel in a month?

I wrote the novel in New York. One editor read it and took me to dinner at the Yale Club. I was dying to hear what he thought of my novel He said that from his office window he could see into another office, across the avenue, where every night a man laid his secretary on his desk. Then he said, Your novel should be published, but not by me. I dropped all the copies into the incinerator chute of my parent’s apartment building.

I’ve often told my wife that if I should die while working on a new story and I haven’t completed at least two or three drafts that she should cremate us both.

My first few drafts bear little resemblance to the story which will eventually exist, with sentences reordered, scenes added and deleted, subtext altered, points of view changed, characters added and deleted, tone tinkered with, tenses switched, endings trashed, and the whole often so transformed that sometimes I wonder whether readers would actually be able to tell that the first and final drafts related to the same story. Sometimes, in the midst of revisions, I even realize that I want the story to say the opposite of what it started out to say.

So until I get to the end of that second or third draft (better make that the third draft at minimum) I wouldn’t want the story to have any kind of independent life. By then, maybe it can clumsily hint at my point, but until then, it’s not yet anywhere near truly mine. (more…)

I just finished the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review, a magazine I’ve been reading since high school, and which I’ve been receiving ever since 1979 as part of a lifetime subscription my wife bought me that year for our anniversary. (We’ve now been married thirty-one years. Thank you for asking.)

Irene paid $100 at the time, doing so just a month before the publisher raised the price of lifetime subscriptions tenfold to $1,000. Considering that the individual issue cover price is currently $12, I’d say we came out ahead on the deal, even accounting for inflation. So much so, in fact, that George Plimpton wrote me about twenty years into the sub, asking whether I felt embarrassed about having gotten such a good bargain, and suggesting that I make an additional donation to help support the magazine.

We declined. After all, isn’t that what a lifetime subscription is all about, taking a gamble? And most of the time, the house wins. I’m sure if I’d died a year or two into the sub, I wouldn’t have gotten a refund.

I’ve always enjoyed the Paris Review interviews most of all. There are usually at least two per issue, beginning with E. M. Forster back in 1953. The Fall issue includes an interview with novelist David Grossman. I’ll profess my ignorance here by admitting that I’ve never read him before, so the fascinating things he had to say were completely new to me. (more…)