When was it that I stopped writing confidential and intimate letters? That I had to force myself to write letters at all? I no longer knew. When had the period of the “as if” letters begun—when I had decided to write as if no one was intercepting my mail; as if I was writing freely. . . . Could I still feel disappointment at this? Horror? Hadn’t I come to accept it? They’re succeeding, I thought. And how.
T. S. Eliot in Cambridge, MA, 1956. Volume 1 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, which takes us from the poet’s childhood in St. Louis through The Waste Land, appeared in 1988, the year of Eliot’s centenary; the revised edition, meticulously edited by the poet’s widow, Valerie Eliot, this time with the help of […]
On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive biography,
In literary annals, 2009 may well go down as the year that saw the publication of not this or that novel, set of poems, or “important” theory book, but, quirkily enough, the first of four promised volumes of the letters of Samuel Beckett. As Joseph O’Neill put it in the cover story for the New York Times Book Review of April 5, “an elating cultural moment is upon us.” That sentiment has been echoed by many other reviews: In the March 11 TLS, Gabriel Josipovici takes Beckett’s letters to be, along with those of Keats and Kafka, among “the ten
“The feuilleton,” Joseph Roth once declared to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung, “is just as important to the paper as its politics. . . . I don’t write ‘witty glosses.’ I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper.” Michael Hofmann, who has, over the past two decades, translated most of Roth’s major fiction, including his great novel The Radetzky March (1932), concurs with this boast. “Roth’s masterpieces,” he writes, “were not his novels but his feuilletons.”
