Letters & Essays of the Day
Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof
By Joy Katz
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark.
That year, we were going to France in June—small, out-of-the-way places in Guyenne and the Dordogne—and so I decided to brush up my college French (se remettre le Français que jai apprit à I’université), even though I realize it’s a losing game. As everyone knows, the French are delighted to encounter one’s college French — they either ignore it and ask in plain English, “What language are you trying to speak.
The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century.
Archibald MacLeish died just two-and-a-half weeks before May 7, 1982, when he would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday. He had accomplished what Robert Frost once said it was his hope to accomplish: he had written a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.
He wrote other letters that day to Wes Joyce, proprietor of the Lion’s Head where he drank, and to Joe Flaherty the writer who lived in the same house as himself. The letters were all postmarked at three in the afternoon. That evening he went to the Lion’s Head, drank quietly, said little, and studied the faces of Joyce and Flaherty who were also at the bar and would receive his letters in the morning.
What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.
I used to be interested in mountains.
They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up.
It was like that all my life.
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.
You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.
Sue was not overly fond of bullfights. I believe they wearied and distressed her, although she did enjoy the music, the colors, and the pageantry. She went to bullfights with me in Spain—long ago, twenty-three years ago—when we were first together.