Three Vistas
A democratic vista is prose that is pliant to poetry. When prose is pliant to poetry, it means that prose bends to the authority of poetry without giving up its own self-concept…
7 May (1948): May Sarton to Juliette Huxley
Now words have so little meaning—and so much. I walk round and round them, searching for the exact truth. All the horizons are pushed very far out for me…
6 May (1941): Katherine Anne Porter to Donald Elder
There are a great number of things wrong in this country, and it is the fault of all of us: if we don’t…fight the things we know are damning this place, then we are really in guilty complicity with them….
Review: On Adam Begley’s “Updike”
The secret to John Updike’s long tenure as America’s preeminent man of letters can be found in the essays from Self-Consciousness, his 1989 memoir-of-sorts. The book is fairly representative: it’s an unabashed hymn to Updikehood, a finely recorded bout of nostalgia, a cheerful philosophical riff, and a masterwork of English prose…
5 May (1958): Henry Miller to James Laughlin
I feel loath to make any compromise whatever, and certainly not a compromise which would make it look as though, towards the end of my life, I had grown weary of the struggle and for the sake of a few shekels had decided to give in…
Life Sentences: The Unbearable Ironies of Alanis Morissette
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in writing this Alanis has a much deeper, more radical, and philosophical concept of irony. It seems to me that Ms. Morissette is remarkably well versed in the theories of irony from Erasmus to Paul de Man.
2 May (1946): Martha Gellhorn to Eleanor Roosevelt
But Max Perkins, of Scribner’s, who seems to have a sort of literary divining rod, tells me I better do it, that it’s okay, and as the highest compliment ‘I wouldn’t have thought a woman had written it.’ Now why that should please a female writer, I don’t know: in a way, it shocks me that I am pleased, for it’s so unrealistic…
1 May (1912): Virginia Stephen Woolf to Leonard Woolf
There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me…
30 April (1891): Arthur Rimbaud to Marie Catherine Vitalie Cuif
Don’t be upset by all of this, regardless. Better days are coming. But it is a sad return on so much work, deprivation, and suffering! Alas, life is miserable!…
29 April (1950): Jessica Mitford to Lady Redesdale
I have been convinced since the beginning that it’s a frame-up (oh dear you don’t know what a frame-up means)…