Letters & Essays of the Day

Perfection

Issue 233, Summer 2020

For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume.

My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when I went over to play. There were three trees in the yard, but if you know where to stand, you can get lost in a forest of three trees. She could do it. She had to. Her mother died when we were nine.

The Year in French Literature

By C. Chesnaie

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, there is a lot of talk about publishers; in France as a whole, much less. In Saint-Germain people like to speculate about whether the winner of the Prix Goncourt will be published by Gallimard or Julliard; in France people look for and buy novels which they think they will enjoy. The war of the literary prizes is of interest primarily to publishers, and it would be a mistake to think that it influences opinion or affects the history and the future of the French novel. Here, at any rate, are some of the prize-winners:—

A Review of Italian Writing

By Giacomo Antonini

Since the end of the war, Italian literature has been arousing marked interest in almost all the countries of Europe, and particularly France and England. A great many people, however, seem to imagine that the termination of hostilities and the overthrow of the Fascists started a new era in Italian prose and poetry. Not at all: although even in Italy people expected a radical change just after the liberation, nothing came of it.

Paris Commentary

By John Train

The golden age of the expatriate literary life is already well past, there seems no getting around it, although like most golden ages it may never have existed and be simply a useful myth, a theme of conversation and art. Certainly the sympathetic enthusiasts of Mürger and du Marnier, and even of Imagism and Dada, seem as distant now as the shepherd-folk of the pastoral convention.

Letter to an Editor

By William Styron

Dear—:

The preface which you all wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and re-worded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn’t be mine.