May 23, 2018 In Memoriam Philip Roth, 1933–2018 By The Paris Review Philip Roth, a towering figure of twentieth-century literature, has died at the age of eighty-five. He had a long history with the The Paris Review. His story “The Conversion of the Jews” was pulled from our slush pile when Roth was just twenty-five years old, and published in issue no. 18 (Spring 1958). Roth then made his first visit to New York, where he met the magazine’s young editors and writers. The connection was immediate. As he described in his speech at our 2010 Spring Revel, “This time I sent my story not to The Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top.” His next story, “Epstein,” was published in issue no. 19 (Summer 1958), and “Goodbye, Columbus” was published in issue no. 20 (Autumn–Winter 1958–1959). In the early eighties, the writer Hermione Lee interviewed Roth for our Art of Fiction series. In her words, Roth “listens carefully to everything, makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused. Just underneath this benign appearance there is a ferocious concentration and mental rapacity; everything is grist for his mill, no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily, and nothing that might be useful is let slip.” In 2010, The Paris Review presented Roth with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. In the interest of letting nothing useful slip, here is a quick roundup of our various and varied Philip Roth pieces from over the years. Read More
May 23, 2018 At Work The Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt By Michael Meyer There’s a good chance Georges Borchardt was responsible for shepherding at least one of your favorite writers to publication. After immigrating to New York from war-torn France at age nineteen in 1947, Borchardt found work as an assistant at a literary agency. One of the first sales he completed on his own was a play by an Irishman titled Waiting for Godot. Over the next seven decades, Borchardt introduced American readers to works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eugene Ionesco, and found a home for Elie Wiesel’s oft-rejected Night. He has represented John Gardner, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin, and John Ashbery. Today his clients include Ian McEwan, T. C. Boyle, and Susan Minot as well as the nonfiction writers Tracy Kidder, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild, and—somehow—me. Wry and self-deprecating, Borchardt’s French-accented answers are often punctuated with a laugh that sounds like a mixture of joy and disbelief. This isn’t surprising when you consider the path his extraordinary life has taken—from hiding in plain sight in Nazi-occupied France to representing five Nobel laureates and eight Pulitzer winners. For his contributions to literature, in 2010 he became the first literary agent to be awarded France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour. Borchardt and his wife, Anne, have run their own agency together since 1967. We spoke over sandwiches in his office on East Fifty-Seventh Street and Lexington. INTERVIEWER When you began in 1947, were agents as entrenched in publishing as they are today? BORCHARDT When I started working as an agent, I didn’t even know what an agent was. I had never heard of the profession. And there was no such profession in France. The job I had, it didn’t even say “agent” on the letterhead. It said “Authors and Publishers Representative.” It took me at least six months to figure out what we were really doing. Agents were not held in great esteem. For a long time, publishers felt that agents were like parasites. When they were polite, they called them “middlemen”—not realizing that they themselves were middlemen and that the only important ones were the authors and the readers. INTERVIEWER How did you get that first job? BORCHARDT After I arrived in New York, I went to a number of employment agencies, and they always said, What’s your American experience? Well, I had none. But then again, I didn’t have any experience. I was nineteen. The son of a man who had worked for my father in Paris—a high school kid—helped me write a classified ad for the New York Times. I put two ads in the Times, and two letters came in response–both from the same person, Marion Saunders. She owned an agency that specialized in foreign writers—they had recently sold Albert Camus’s The Stranger for $350 to Knopf. In addition to getting coffee and bookkeeping, I was supposed to read French books. I thought that was amazing—I could get paid to read, and I could get free books. I mean, during the war, there were no books in France. There was no paper, there was very little being printed, and all of my books and the family’s books had disappeared. At the office in New York, I would see things that were interesting and think, I may not be able to sell this, but I may as well read it. It was a way to build my library. Did I know I was an agent? Of course not. I really didn’t know what that was. One thing the war had taught me was a dislike for owning things. Because everything I liked as a child had disappeared—my stamp collection, my books. I mean, in those days, when you gave a book to a child, it was not an insult. If I didn’t ask for a book for Christmas, I asked to have one of my favorite books bound. They came uncut, with paper covers. I would go to a place and select the end papers and the leather for the binding, and then I would have this beautiful object to take home. Well, all these things were gone. INTERVIEWER What did you read as a kid? BORCHARDT In the lycée at the time, the world more or less stopped at the end of the nineteenth century. I wasn’t taught Proust or Gide. You didn’t learn anything about foreign literature. If you wanted to read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky—that’s not what was being taught. But I was fond of translations—Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper. I collected a whole series of “tales” books—Tales of the Aztecs, Tales of the Greeks, Tales of the Bible, and so on. In school, I was always first in récitation, memorizing scenes by Racine or Molière. I always got the main roles. I thought I might become an actor. Read More
May 23, 2018 Arts & Culture “Once Upon a Time” and Other Formulaic Folktale Flourishes By Anthony Madrid Walter Crane, Beauty and the Beast, 1875. We take the phrase “once upon a time” for granted, but if you think about it, it’s quite oddball English. Upon a time—? That’s just a strange construction. It would be pleasant to know its history: When, more or less, does it get up on its legs? Around when does it become standard procedure? My researches into this question, however, have yielded nothing conclusive. Forget “upon a time.” Look at the “once.” That part really is standard from the beginning, and not only in English. Just this past weekend, I paged through fifteen volumes of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, and I’m here to tell you: The word once is in the first sentence of almost every single folktale every recorded, from China to Peru. There is some law of physics involved. Folktales get right down to business, no fooling around. Once there was an old king who had two sons. Once there was a poor lace merchant who decided to make a trip. And if it doesn’t say “once,” it will say “a long time ago.” A long time ago, the fox and the hen were good friends. A long time ago, there was a man who had a shaving brush for a nose and who had two daughters, et cetera. Why should it always be a long time ago. That’s easy. If you said, “When I was a girl, there was an old man in this village … ” you’d be opening yourself up for interruptions. Where is that old man now? Where are his two sons? But if the story took place a long, long time ago, or simply in undefined and undefinable history (“once”), interruptions will be … fewer. I want to mention that not one story in Grimms’ Fairytales actually begins “once upon a time.” German doesn’t have that expression. They just say “once.” (The term is einmal. Es war einmal ein Mann und eine Frau … ). Italian, pretty much same thing. C’era una volta … (literally, “One time, there was … ”). All this counts as formulaic. Carlo Collodi plays with this in the famous beginning of Pinocchio: Read More
May 22, 2018 Redux Redux: Tom Wolfe, Barbara Grossman, and Gwyneth Lewis By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011 Tom Wolfe died last week, at eighty-eight. So today, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview. We also bring you Barbara Grossman’s tale about a young man and his house plants, “My Vegetable Love,” and Gwyneth Lewis’s poem about Florida titled “Pentecost.” Read More
May 22, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Carmen Maria Machado By Carmen Maria Machado In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. What remains: dilly beans, which remain my greatest pleasure, pickled garlic cloves and capers and olives and artichokes and hearts of palm and roasted red peppers, Bloody Mary mix and assorted gourmet shrubs I bought in a book-induced panic, grapefruits for my grandma-style breakfast, asparagus and raspberries and jalapeños and bell peppers and arugula that’s going bad, Worcestershire sauce, champagne for the summer’s spritzers, hummus, beer, eggs, premixed margaritas, simple syrup, tonic, stock bouillon, half-and-half, butter, assorted Tupperware with half a lime, half a lemon, and half a can of chickpeas. Read More
May 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Speaks Freely?: Art, Race, and Protest By Aruna D'Souza One year after protests and counterprotests erupted around the exhibition of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial, Aruna D’Souza investigates the fraught history of artists, curators, and institutions invoking free-speech discourse in the interest of entrenching whiteness. Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018, mixed media on paper, 19 in. x 24 in. Courtesy the artist. To say that I watched the protests around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket with interest would be an understatement. The decision by the curators of the 2017 Whitney Biennial to include a painting by a white artist depicting the brutally beaten body of the young Emmett Till in his coffin set off debates on social media and in real life, and I watched my Facebook feed fill with both angry condemnations and passionate defenses of Schutz, as well as thoughtful analysis, hilarious and problematic memes, and knee-jerk “get off my lawn you whippersnappers”–style screeds. It was messy, loud, and at times hugely illuminating. What to many seemed a cut-and-dried argument over artistic freedom and free speech was anything but; in fact, if anything, the controversy revealed quite starkly that such values, far from universal, are doled out unequally and provisionally. Especially when the free speech in question comes in the form of protest. For many of the (largely, but not exclusively) young African American artists, writers, and art historians who first raised the alarm around the painting, the issue was whether it was appropriate for a white artist who had never before grappled with issues of racism in her work to suddenly take up an image that loomed so large in black American experience, and which was also a signal event in the civil rights struggle. What did it mean for Schutz to paint Emmett Till and for the curators to include her work in one of the most-watched exhibitions in the U.S.—especially at a moment when black people are still subject to extrajudicial violence, meted out not only by vigilante mobs operating with the tacit approval of law enforcement, as they did in Till’s day, but also and increasingly by law enforcement itself? Read More