The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning.
Sam Shepard
Aldous Huxley was born on this day in 1894. Read his Art of Fiction interview here.
If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard.
William Faulkner
Consider it the best of times.
Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film
In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.” …
From our editor, Lorin Stein:
In the last six or seven months, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the importance of the arts. Maybe you have, too. In certain circles, it’s become a sort of refrain: we need the arts more than ever.
In my experience, this has not been—in any obvious or immediate way—the case. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of news. My taste for fiction has narrowed. I’m more impatient. A certain kind of story went stale for me last November. When I read a contemporary writer, I want to be spoken to honestly and intelligently about the times we live in.
I realize this is not a new complaint. As luck had it, my colleagues and I spent the election deep in the Paris Review archive. We were revamping our website, and it meant rereading and sorting through all our back issues, hundreds of stories and interviews, thousands of poems, many written in times of upheaval. The more I read, the more I saw them reflect the politics of their time.
Like my colleagues, I knew the manifesto written by William Styron for our first issue, in 1953, where he proclaimed that the Review would not be a magazine for factions, for drumbeaters, for propaganda; that it would honor writing for its own sake, that it would never become a political magazine.
I also knew that the men and women who started the Review were by no means “apolitical” people. Peter Matthiessen, who worked for the CIA as a young man, later became a leader of the environmental movement. Rose Styron helped found Amnesty International. Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books, where his journalistic engagement altered the course of two wars and touched on every intellectual debate of the past half century. George Plimpton, when he was editor of the Review, took time off to campaign for Robert Kennedy. He was there in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot. He took the gun from the killer’s hand.
And yet the only time George (or any other editor) waded into political discussions in the pages of the Review, it was to deplore a lack of government funding for the arts or to protest a stricture on free speech. When the NEA instituted rules against obscenity, George turned down their money, because he believed in the freedom of this space: the aesthetic space.
I’d understood this balance, between politics and art, since I took the job of editor seven years ago. At least, I thought I had.
But what I learned last November, during those nights in the archive, is that this aestheticism, this refusal to engage in arguments over the news of the day, left The Paris Review open to political and cultural crises for which the country did not yet have a name. To the queerness of the Beats, the New York School, and the Factory. To the early feminist writings of Denise Levertov, Alice Notley, and Adrienne Rich. To the fire of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, to the dazzling absurdities of Harry Mathews, and, many decades later, to the deep satire of David Foster Wallace. To the political unconscious at its most fertile.
I hope the same is true in our new issue.
