Posts Tagged ‘Edwin Frank’

Stanford’s Another Look book club has often showcased New York Review Books’ excellent offerings, so as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Stanford book event series, we’re pleased that our fall event on October 5 will feature Glenway Wescott‘s too-little-known 1940 novella, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story. New York Review Books founder Edwin Frank (and, incidentally, he’s also a former Stanford Stegner Fellow), agreed to answer a few questions about the book, one of he first NYRB Classics published in 2001. (The Book Haven also ran an interview, “Great literature is literature that remains news,” between Edwin Frank and another Stanford alum, Daniel Medin, at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, 2016, here.)

Another Look was launched in November 2012, with William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow. Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look, talked about his choice in a short video here. Our tenth anniversary event for Wescott’s novel will take place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 5, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, on the Stanford campus. The event will also be livestreamed. Come celebrate our tenth with us! It’s not to late to register here, for the virtual and live event. Walk-ins are always welcome, too.

The panelists will include a special guest, Steve Wasserman, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review and editor at large for the Yale University Press, and now publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley. Other panelists will include: Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books; Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Author Cynthia L. Haven, a National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar, will round out the panel.

The interview with Edwin Frank …

CYNTHIA HAVEN: Wescott’s prose is meticulous, keenly observed, epigrammatic, profound – and often very funny. Do we have any idea how he wrote? How he crafted this perfect novel? His papers and manuscripts are at Yale, do they give us any idea?

EDWIN FRANK: I don’t know how Wescott worked and haven’t seen the papers. Nor am I conversant with the details of his life, except in the vaguest way, and I hadn’t even realized that Yvor Winters was his mentor. Interesting! As to his neglect as a writer, in America, or perhaps anywhere, not writing a lot, and essentially giving up writing novels, as Wescott did, is not a great recipe for a career as a writer. Why he wrote so little is another question—I don’t know the answer—though both Pilgrim Hawk (with its ambisexual Alex) and Apartment in Athens can be read as tales of the closet, suggesting that Wescott found himself more and more caught out by not being able to write frankly as a gay man.

HAVEN: Pilgrim Hawk features a lot of complicated relationships: painful love, unhappy love, unrequited love, non-existent love—often suggested in glances, or a quip, or in silence. How much do you think this evasiveness reflects Wescott’s own ambiguities, as a gay man at a time when it was far less acceptable than it is today?

FRANK: The Pilgrim Hawk is clearly enough about frustration, in love and as a writer. Counting the triangles it traces is an interesting exercise: there’s Madeleine, Larry, and Lucy; Jean, Eva, and Rickert; Tower, Alex, and Tower’s brother (and one might treat these three triangles as constituting a higher order triangle in their own right of different—or are they all alike at some level?—kinds of marriage); and perhaps most importantly, Tower, Alex (and all the rest of them for that matter), and The Pilgrim Hawk, the story of a day (and his life) that Tower finally can be deemed to have put down  (though the narrator of a book is never quite its writer, close as they may be), fulfilling himself as observer, even as central to his observation is his own inability to love. The narrator is left as one of “The lovers [who are] to be pitied…are those who have no one to hate, whose rough shooting can take place only in the imagination, and never ends” (page 34). 

The rough shooting was about to hit a different order of magnitude in 1940…

FRANK:“Rough shooting” reminds me that the book also has World War II in the background, and here another triangle can be discerned, between the late 20s, when the action takes place—the past—1940, the date of narration and of publication, when the war had begun but the U.S. had yet to enter it—the present—and the future, undetermined apart from the war going on (perhaps parallel to the narrator’s loveless future). In that light the book can be read as a very subtle allegory of the feckless fashionable interwar years that the Cullens, and Alex’s showy but “not splendid” house with its big glass modern windows, epitomizes, as the senile French politician in the chateau next door does the corruption of the Belle Epoque. Implicit is the question of what future is there for the world at war (so ostentatiously charted in the first paragraph) and what kind of world was it that led to that war. (You could read the book alongside Civilization and Its Discontents.) But this question is very much implicit, and maybe I am making too much of it, though the central presence of the hawk inevitably puts questions of entrapment and predation in the air (or on a bloodstained gloved hand). The narrator’s predatory gaze is also emphasized increasingly throughout. 

But as Michael Cunningham nicely says in the introduction the poor hawk is doomed from the get-go to be a symbol and yet triumphs for all that, becoming, in the telling, wonderfully, electrically, real and distinct. Those burning claws! And there is a lot of edgy, self-aware humor, too: “Still, I felt rather as if I had a great thought of death concentrated and embodied and perched on me” (page 47). Rather!

A book of concrete observations and endless reflections and lapidary sentences: “She said this in a great sad false way” (page 88); “airy murderess like an angel; young predatory sanguinary deluxe hen” (page 94).

HAVEN :The falcon’s name Lucy is usually linked with Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor. But it also has associations with Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Its final act is one of the most frenzied in all opera. Certainly Westcott’s fierce and ominous Lucia has a good deal of madness about her. Can you channel Westcott for a moment and connect the Lucys—Wescott’s Lucy with Scott’s and Donizetti’s?

FRANK: There is nothing subtle about Donizetti’s Lucia, but there is nothing but subtlety in Wescott’s book, subtlety and ferocity, despair, and some genuine camp. That mix, so unusual, may explain why its audience has always been a little select. 

REGISTER HERE FOR THE EVENT!

Go HERE to read more about it!

We’ve written about editor extraordinaire Daniel Medin of the American University of Paris, who is an editor for Music & Literature, The Cahiers Series, and The White Review. We’ve also mentioned Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books (and, incidentally, a Stanford alum), from time to time, since Stanford’s Another Look book club so often features NYRB’s books.

So we’re pleased the two of them got together for an interview last fall at Shakespeare & Company in Paris.

A few excerpts from the comprehensive Quarterly Conversation Q&A:

Daniel Medin: Could you tell us about the origins of NYRB Classics?

Edwin Frank: NYRB came into existence crab-wise, almost accidentally. I was in my mid-30s and had never had anything to do with publishing when I got a freelance job with a business associate of the New York Review called The Readers’ Catalog, a sort of a giant Sears Catalog of books. The idea was to sell the 40,000 best books in print. Independent stores were closing across the United States, so you could get The Readers’ Catalog and order the books you couldn’t find. And I got this job that basically consisted of reading through sections and saying “this shouldn’t be here” or “why isn’t this here?” The most prominent example that has stuck in my mind is that [Alberto] Moravia was pretty much completely out of print everywhere, this would have been around ’96. And lots of other things were out of print that I just thought by definition would be in print. I didn’t know why they weren’t in print, and since I didn’t work in publishing it took me a while to figure out that they weren’t in print because they wouldn’t sell. So I made a list and at some point made a proposal to the publisher of the New York Review, Rea Hederman, that effectively said, “maybe we should have a publishing project.” It took a few years to come together, but in 1999 we did come out with about 14 books, in a different design than we have now, a sort of disastrous design, but we survived that. And the books did better than anybody would have expected; I think we sort of went into it on tiptoes, but the response was more excited than I think anyone anticipated.

DM: I wonder about the vision of the project. You mentioned that the initial idea was to do reprints, so maybe you can talk about how it has developed since 1999.

EF: The fact is, I really, really didn’t want to call the series “classics.” Who knows what a classic is? It’s difficult to explain to people in the States, and also to foreign publishers, where “classics” has a much more defined meaning. So it was difficult for a while to get people to understand that we weren’t doing new editions of Thucydides. But it’s just as well, or else we would have been arguing about the name of the series to this day. Anyway, from the beginning our goal was always to mix things up. Great literature is literature that remains news, and there’s a way to publish things that can cast a new light on things we take for granted in our own time. The metaphors I tend to think of are somewhere between the vinyl bin, where you can flip through and there’s a whole range of music and so on, or the repertory film theater that can move from Japan to B movies and so on. So that was always the idea, but at the beginning it was very much about reprints, and that was true for two or three years. Partly because the series was doing well there was a moment where it seemed right to begin acquiring books and doing new translations of books.

***

DM: I’m curious as to how you’ve curated the lists from languages you cannot read. Hungarian literature, for instance. I happen to specialize in writing from that region—and your Hungarian list is remarkable. Anybody in this audience can go online and look at NYRB’s offerings, and if you pick a title and mention it to an author or cultivated reader from Hungary, they will acknowledge its importance. And Hungarian’s only one example among many in your catalog. What’s been the approach?

EF: Well, it varies. The Hungarian case is an interesting one because the language is so isolated that basically the Hungarian state commissioned a program of translating Hungarian literature into English. And the translators they employed were actually quite brilliant. (The Soviets also had that kind of program, but the translations were a lot iffier.) … one of my favorite books in the whole series is [Gyula] Krúdy’s Sunflower—a totally bizarre book, I’d never read anything like it. I mean it’s a book that . . . I used to compare it to a strange cross between Bruno Schulz and PG Wodehouse, with gypsy music kind of thrown in, funny and sexy and just odd. Like nothing I’d ever read. It’s not often you read a book that’s like nothing else you ever read. I sometime think if I read a book like that I should publish it, but sometimes that’s a mistake. Anyway, so for the most part [the Hungarian translations] haven’t been commissioned, and to get back to the larger question, you are dependent to an extent to the translators or the literary criticism.

Read the whole thing here. Or check out the video and podcast of the event at the bookstore’s website here. 

J.R. Ackerley led an outwardly quiet life between his flat in suburban Putney and his London office at The Listener, the BBC’s weekly magazine, where he worked from 1935 to 1959.  Though he was the leading literary editor of his generation, he was in no hurry to publish his own work – hence, his controversial memoir appeared posthumously.

Now his following is growing.  It’s likely to expand further when Stanford’s “Another Look” book club takes on My Father and Myself, exploring Ackerley’s life as a gay man and his determined outing of long-held family secrets. A book discussion will be held Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m. in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Levinthal Hall.  The event is free and open to the public.

The evening will be moderated by Terry Castle, professor of English and author of  The Professor and Other Writings. She will be joined by Adrian Daub, an associate professor of German studies, and Jeffrey Fraenkel, founder of San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery for photography.  The event launches the second year of “Another Look,” founded by the English/Creative Writing Department.

It’s not the first time Stanford has had a role in beating the drums for My Father and Myself.  When Edwin Frank, a former Stegner Fellow in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, founded the New York Review Books Classics in 1999, none of Ackerley’s books were in print.  Frank republished all four – they were among the first titles of the eminent series that rediscovers out-of-the-way classics.

Given current critical esteem, their former obscurity is surprising, but Frank cites several reasons why this was so. “He published one book early on, and it was a success.  Then he didn’t write anything for years on end. If you do that, you will have a more vulnerable career as a writer,” he explained. “My Dog Tulip was published privately.  My Father and Myself was posthumous.  We Think the World of You was published in 1963 – it was a relatively open picture of a gay relationship between two none-too-appealing people.

“Each of the books is odd,” said Frank.  “They don’t match anybody’s expectations. Ackerley’s books are not good in the way people expect them to be good.”

Read the rest here.

There’s more.  At the “Another Look” website here, you can read:

“The Many Loves of J.R. Ackerley”

J.R. Ackerley was sitting on a park bench with Forrest Reid in Hyde Park, when the older writer asked him, “Do you really care about anyone?”

In My Father and Myself, Ackerley says he pondered the remark long afterwards. “To this searching question I do not know the answer, it goes too deep; since people and events vanish so easily from my memory it may be no.”  Not everyone shares his assessment. “It is characteristic of him to report against himself – he fears he is an uncaring person,” said Edwin Frank, founder of the New York Review Books Classics.

When accused of hating the human race, however, Ackerley was quite startled: “I am not a misanthropist,” he insisted. “I like people and get on well with them; I am only a numerical misanthropist.” To stem the rising population tide, he recommended homosexuality. No one could be entirely sure how serious he was.

Read the rest here.

“Sometimes Love Really is a Bitch” 

My Father and Myself is dedicated simply “To Tulip.”

Tulip’s identity is no enigma. Although the real name of J.R. Ackerley’s dedicatee was “Queenie,” his editors worried the name had racy connotations, even for a dog, and hence the title of his earlier book had been My Dog Tulip. It is perhaps the only story of a man and his dog in which the two are treated as equals.

Read the rest here.