May 31, 2019 Summer Solstice The Start of Summer By Nina MacLaughlin In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Summer in Nidden. 1919-1920 It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half: On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night. Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric map-makers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are. Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins tomorrow, June 1. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth’s tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, this year on June 21, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and light lasts longer than any day of the year. Read More
May 31, 2019 Arts & Culture What Really Killed Walt Whitman? By Caleb Johnson “Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.” – “Section 46” of Song of Myself, Walt Whitman At the start of every semester I ask my creative writings students what food they would choose to eat for their last meal. What they say reveals elements of their pasts, values, hopes, regrets. Students have answered crème brûlée, Papa John’s pizza, Ritz Crackers washed down with grape juice. My go-to is whole fried chicken, served cold, alongside champagne. Beginning in a roundup of notable ailing figures titled “The Sick Among Us,” the New York Times chronicled the decline of Walt Whitman, whose two-hundredth birthday would have been today. In the article published December 18, 1891, he was said to have been “taken with a chill” and “quite feeble to-night, though not considered dangerously ill.” The poet was seventy-two years old, a celebrity the country over—his health warranted front-page news. Over the next few months, the Times continued with minute coverage of what turned out to be Whitman’s final days and diet. Among the liquids and solids mentioned, one in particular caught my eye—milk punch. Milk punch dates back to the seventeenth century. The cocktail writer David Wondrich credits the drink to Aphra Behn, an English actress and writer noted for being one of the first women to make a living by publishing her work. Typically milk punch contains milk, sugar, a sprinkle of nutmeg, and bourbon, brandy, or rum—sometimes more than one. There are two main varieties: the creamy kind served in a glass right after mixing, and the clarified kind, bottled in advance. For the latter, milk gets curdled then strained, which creates a smoother flavor. Whitman’s health problems had begun decades prior. In the summer of 1858, he experienced a small cerebral hemorrhage. While he continued to brag about his rosy complexion, his thick beard, and how he tipped the scales at more than two hundred pounds, the hemorrhage was the first of several strokes that would partially paralyze the poet on one side of his body. According to Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds, Whitman received a number of confusing diagnoses throughout his life, which seeded a mistrust of doctors and medicine. In September 1869, one medical professional told Whitman the dizziness and sweating he was experiencing resulted from “hospital malaria, hospital poison absorbed in the system.” Vague diagnoses like this were common before germ theory. Read More
May 30, 2019 Pinakothek Masked and Anonymous By Lucy Sante In her biweekly column, Pinakothek, Lucy Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. The press photographer’s task is to obtain a likeness of the person who is at the center of the news. This proves difficult when the subject, who is either accused of crimes or tied, however flimsily, to someone who is, wants to avoid being photographed at all costs. Hounded at every step, unable to escape, even in shackles, the subject resorts to makeshift concealments—hat, sleeve, lapel, handkerchief, newspaper—in order to prevent facial capture. The photographer can only pursue, shadow, perhaps verbally goad the subject, waiting for a slip or a stumble that will cause the mask to drop. When that fails to happen, the photographer’s sole option is to photograph the mask. The public, inflamed by press coverage of the case, wants a face it can charge with blame (and, often enough, spread the blame to faces that bear it a superficial resemblance), but is instead offered a metonym: hat, handkerchief, newspaper. The photographer, in quest of a portrait, has delivered in its place an event: the defeat of portraiture by the subject. Read More
May 30, 2019 Bulletin Welcoming Our New Digital Director, Craig Morgan Teicher By The Paris Review Criag Morgan Teicher. Photo: Spencer Quong. Attentive readers of the magazine may recognize a new name on our masthead: on May 28, Craig Morgan Teicher joined the staff as our digital director. Craig has been a regular contributor to The Paris Review, with that rare trifecta of bylines in poetry, fiction, and essays, spanning from 2004 to last fall. Meanwhile, he’s had a daytime career at Publisher’s Weekly. Over the last dozen years at that magazine, he’s worn many hats, including director of digital operations and, most recently, director of special editorial projects. We were impressed by his pragmatic and broad set of technical skills, his track record of bolstering digital platforms at organizations much like our own, and his literary acumen. He arrives with a sensibility that manifests as a robust understanding of TPR as a magazine, web presence, and resource, which will be central to any new initiatives we undertake on the site. We wear a lot of hats here, too. We’re eager for Craig to flex his multifaceted muscles and help guide a great many projects on the web. Stay tuned to this space to see improved site navigation, new features to enhance our sixty-six-year archive, even better newsletters, and a more user-friendly way to get your TPR swag. And the podcast! We’re heading back into the studio—season 2 will be coming this fall. We asked Craig for a favorite piece from the archive (all of which is digitized and available here), and he replied with a piece from issue no. 215. He writes, “I carry Henri Cole’s books with me everywhere I go, literally—I have all the e-books downloaded on my phone. I feel like he speaks for and out of the dark in my heart, and reaches toward a narrow kind of joy, a pinprick of light, that I’m also drawn to. So I picked this poem, ‘At the Grave of Robert Lowell,’ because, in it, Cole is looking back at another poet who is desperately important to me, complicated for me, as he is for so many others.” Welcome, Craig!
May 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Escaping Samuel Johnson By Peter Martin Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used,” wrote Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man. One of the most persuasive spokesmen for American independence, he championed the clearing away of British “cobwebs, poison and dust” from American society. American independence, he argued, could never be complete without that. Many Americans thought the same way: that apart from economic stability and success, what they needed almost more than anything else after political independence was intellectual and cultural independence, free from the stifling influence of British arts, letters, and manners. They resented their cultural subservience, which had not disappeared with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet for more than a century after the Revolution, the majority of literate and cultured Americans did not want to turn their backs on British culture, “their ancient heritage”—especially its literature and the historical traditions of its language. About seventy long years after Paine’s statement, the popular English novelist Anthony Trollope elegantly expressed this powerful, persistent, and apparently inescapable linkage: “An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Molière. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.” Janus-like, and often in a less fully conscious way, Americans knew that their “mental culture,” whether they liked it or not, was linked to Britain’s, and they had little taste for parting with it. * America’s lingering literary and linguistic attachment to England is nowhere so evident as in the nation’s pervasive ambivalence toward Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary, published in 1755, which many call the first major dictionary of the language. He was the great sage of English literature, and a brilliant essayist, moralist, poet, lexicographer, and biographer, the “Colossus of Literature” and “Literary Dictator” of the second half of eighteenth century England, a figure thoroughly synonymous with Englishness. Throughout his career as an author, Johnson advertised his multilayered and complicated dislike of America and Americans. In 1756, the year after he published his famous dictionary, he coined the term “American dialect” to mean “a tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.” He had in mind an undisciplined and barbarous uncouthness of speech. With typical hyperbole on the subject of Americans, he once remarked, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American … rascals—robbers—pirates.” Read More
May 30, 2019 At Work Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction: An Interview with Julie Orringer By Andrew Sean Greer Left, Varian Fry. Right, Julie Orringer [photo: Brigitte Lacombe] From the fall of 2008 until the spring of 2009, I was colleagues with Julie Orringer at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. We both had the extraordinary fortune to receive fellowships to do research for our novels. I was researching New York City at various moments in the twentieth century, along with the history of AIDS in the city. Julie was researching the historical figure Varian Fry. Neither of us knew what we were about to make, nor could we make any sense of the pile of books the other had stashed in their office. Ten years have passed, and now we know: I wrote a novel called The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Julie has just published her novel The Flight Portfolio. It is an honor to watch a writer in the beginning stages of work, fiddling with their magician’s equipment, and an astonishment to see what flies, at last, out of their sleeve. In her case: a breathtaking work of wonder, set in occupied France. I waited for the world to take notice. Then I saw The Flight Portfolio featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, reviewed by fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick, who is now ninety-one. The words on the cover are glorious praise, but buried deep in the second page, I found an unsettling critique: Ozick was perturbed that Julie’s fictional Varian Fry is portrayed as gay. Ozick stated: “there is no evidence of homosexuality.” She even abstractly alluded to the dangers of keeping the record straight when writing about the Holocaust. And I did something I had never done; I wrote a letter. The New York Times Book Review printed it, along with letters from Fry’s biographer, and, of all things, from his son. Fry’s son clearly refutes Ozick: his father was gay. I wrote my letter about the invisibility of gay people in history, the lack of evidence, and the worth of the novel to use empathy and invention to imagine the lives of others. I have great respect for Ozick, as I know Julie does. But since I had seen the beginnings of The Flight Portfolio and the vast amounts of research, I wanted to ask her about the process of using history, biography, and imagination to create a novel—and, of course, about this strange misapprehension that occurred in the newspaper of record. What nerve did Julie strike here? And, looking at myself, what nerve did Ozick strike? These questions have been on my mind since I read that review. So I asked Julie. INTERVIEWER Historical research can be overwhelming. How did you decide where to begin your story, and where to end? ORRINGER The story of Varian Fry’s lifesaving mission in France has a seemingly obvious beginning and end—he arrived in Marseille in September of 1940 with a list of two hundred writers and artists he hoped to save. He left thirteen months later having rescued, against all odds, nearly ten times that many, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andre Breton, and Hannah Arendt, among others. But time in fiction doesn’t function along a strict continuum, or doesn’t have to. It can bend and loop, as we often experience it in real life. From the beginning, The Flight Portfolio explores how the past extrudes into the present, and how the prospect of our future—and of how our future selves might judge us—exerts pressure on our present moment. The more I learned about Fry’s personal history—his clinically depressed mother and work-preoccupied father, his decision to drop out of Hotchkiss in protest against its hazing rituals, his conflicts with the dean of Harvard when he was a student there, his relationship with future New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein—the more I knew this stuff had to be present in the novel, and had to press upon Fry during his time in Marseille. That meant, of course, that my research had to push beyond its initial boundaries, a daunting prospect when the available materials already included twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s papers at Columbia. But it was necessary to go further for the sake of full emotional accuracy. It also meant I had to exercise restraint, or the book might have been a thousand pages. Read More