Tag Archives: Antioch Review

The Story Behind the Story–Excellence at a Reasonable Price by Wilhemina Austin

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in Fiction, The Story Behind the Story, Uncategorized

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Excellence at a Reasonable Price

By Wilhemina Austin

Wilhemina Austin

“Excellence at a Reasonable Price” was published the Summer 2012 issue of The Antioch Review. It’s characters, members of an aging country club, consider the authenticity of a Maxfield Parrish painting that hangs above the fireplace in the library room where they meet to discuss wine.

We need an answer to what it is,” Franklin said. “The real thing, or not.

What an honor to be asked about a past story! I never want to re-read a past story. In this case, when I did, I writhed in my chair like a first-grader in school with his teacher’s eye upon him for need-of-bathroom-status. I still like the story’s setting – a country club, once a home, built in the early 1900s with a library, solid and gloomy with paneling. The club’s financial status: rickety. I still like the idea of a few people meeting in the library regularly to open and share a bottle of wine, with comments.

Meeting these folks again in the story, I find them surprisingly acidic, like my wine choices that have never met, will never meet, my goal of excellence at a reasonable price. In life I tried to accomplish this goal for two family events a few years apart: my son’s rehearsal dinner and my daughter’s wedding, with the advice of an acquaintance, a gentleman skilled in judging wine. This experience kicked the story into life for me, as did the idea of a dying country club, a place of supposed repose approaching the real thing. What would happen to the painting over the library fireplace – also the real thing, with its sky a Parrish-blue over a landscape rolling in Parrish trademarks? No one had ever paid much attention to it. A club member of book-keeping practicality might take another look.

To this end, the wine advisor in life became the unsentimental asset-gauger in the story with the painting being at stake. Was it an authentic Maxfield Parrish? The club was in northern Delaware set high in hills that are always said to roll, not unlike those in a mural Parrish had done for another family. There were his background mountains—their look between out-of-this-world and out-west. The blue-on-fire sky. The paper lanterns, lit, their unseen candles somehow not sending the lanterns and everything else up in flames. The curtains of roses. Domestic creatures that shouldn’t have been anywhere near the forest opening that hosted them.

There was more to be had from the hope that the painting was real, says the story, than finding out that it wasn’t – unlike, in life, the wines I chose and tried out by myself, a widow at my kitchen table, one glass doing the trick, two swallows often definitive, with the rest a hope against hope. The remainder of each bottle I let glug down the sink drain. You’re kidding, the wine advisor said, shocked. But what would come of polishing a bottle off? Was he kidding? I didn’t ask. My imaginary Parrish blue burned a little hotter in my mind through the few glasses that seemed to strike the right land-of-make-believe note all the way through.

***

Wilhemina Austin is from Delaware but has lived in southeastern Pennsylvania on a farm for years with her family and her goats. She has been published in Cimarron Review, Thema, and The Antioch Review.

© 2015 The Antioch Review

 

Revisiting Kipling, the Brontës, Denver, and Martha’s Vineyard

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Editorials, Uncategorized

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From the Summer 2015 issue of The Antioch Review.

Revisiting Kipling, the Brontës, Denver, and Martha’s Vineyard

By Robert S. Fogarty, editor

It is a sound literary practice to revisit writers who have fallen from notice because of shifting political, social, or literary currents. Some years ago I taught a course titled “Studies in American Literature: Second-Rate Literature” wherein I chose some works that I was sure students had probably never heard of (and some classics) with an eye toward examining texts like The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic that Edmund Wilson wrote admiringly about in The New Yorker. Frederic was a New York journalist turned novelist, a member of the bohemian “Savage Club” in London who became a cause celebre on his death because his mistress, a Christian Scientist, tended to him in his illness as a lay practitioner and was charged with manslaughter.

The title of the course was, of course, tongue in cheek, but with a serious purpose namely to probe that perennial question: What is first rate and why should we read it?  In the syllabus I wrote that the course was specifically designed for: a) students who sign up for courses with jazzy but irrelevant titles; b) students who think that Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn is first-rate; c) students who enjoy reading and are willing to work at what they read; d) second-rate students.

This is by way of introducing the essays in this issue beginning with the lead piece “The Unsentimental Education of Rudyard Kipling” by Mukund Belliappa about an author who is little read these days except by parents to their children despite the fact his short stories are, in particular, various in their choice of subject, theme, approach and it is no wonder that for many twentieth-century writers he a prose stylist of the first order. The list of his admirers is long (Henry James, Jawaharlal Nehru) and the contemporary view of him is either cautious or dismissive.  One of the best introductions to his work can be found in a 1987 volume A Choice of Kipling’s Prose edited by Craig Raine, the former poetry editor at Faber & Faber and Oxford don who carefully grappled with the many sides of Kipling’s prose. We follow on with an essay on the Brontë sisters who are still read, but in Kenneth King’s view need to be reread in the light of their obsessions, their interest in spiritualism and other sublime matters.

Maureen McCoy revisits Denver, Colorado in the 1970s when Larimer Street was still a place for the down and out and the dispossessed and the city sat on the edge of the Front Range with real country between it and Boulder rather than large congeries of suburban homes clustered around interstate highways. She sketches her job in the city and the characters that constituted a world akin to the one found in Nathaniel West’s Hollywood.

Finally we have Kenneth McClane who revisits a dock ferry at Martha’s Vineyards Island where he encountered “Thomas,” who became a pivotal figure in his life despite the fact that “Thomas” was “reprehensible” and “incoherent” and McClane a middle class, black college student at a summer job. Our fiction has some returning veterans including Paul Christiansen, Kent Nelson, and Glen Pourciau and some fresh new writers to our pages like Pia DeJong. They, like the poets are revisiting people, places and memories. Our “From the Archives” takes us back to 1996 when Warren Bennis was at the high point of his distinguished career as a business analyst and trend maker who was always looking ahead. His crystal balling about what questions organizations should ask themselves are as valid today as they were twenty years ago.

So dear reader as St. Augustine proclaimed at the moment of his conversion: “Take up, read! Take up read! “

***

 

Antioch Review editor, Robert Fogarty

Antioch Review editor, Robert Fogarty

Robert Fogarty has been editor of The Antioch Review since 1977. Author and editor of eight books, with articles, and essays in the Nation, TLS, Missouri Review, Manoa, and Boulevard, among others. Recipient of the PEN/American Center Nora Magid lifetime achievement award for magazine editing 2003, Fulbright Distinguished Roving Lectureship in Korea; Visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; New York University Institute for the Humanities; Newberry Library; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recent publications include: Duty and Desire at Oneida (2000); “Literary Energy” in Editors on Fiction (1995); Special Love/Special Sex (1994).

© 2015 The Antioch Review

Writing on the Train by John Taylor  

05 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in On Poetry, Poetry

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John Taylor is a leading authority on European poetry. He has contributed translations and articles on the subject to the Times Literary Supplement and to the Antioch Review since 1997. His most recent book, A Little Tour through European Poetry, is available from Transaction Publishers. Taylor also writes poetry in addition to writing about it. Here he talks of his creative process.

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John Taylor1

The essays, book reviews, the Antioch Review “Poetry Today” column—all these pieces are written at home, in my little French house in Anjou, in my study lined with books some of which go back to my teenage years in Des Moines; and the translations are done there as well, with a bilingual dictionary just to my right on my desk, or sometimes on another table, or even on the floor when I am revising. But the personal writing?

For years now, I’ve written my poems and short prose texts almost exclusively while riding on trains. Between here (Angers) and Paris, and especially between here and Nantes, a trip I take regularly because of a regional literary association in which I participate.

Why write on trains? Because I am no longer surrounded by those well-thumbed dictionaries and uncorrected galleys, because I can isolate myself in the train car, especially if I shrewdly analyze the train schedule and select a time slot in which the regional train is rarely crowded; then I slip into a window seat on the less picturesque side of the train, put my bag on the aisle seat, and extend my legs along the floor to discourage anyone from sitting across from me—I am not really misanthropic, there are plenty of available seats. Soon the majestic Loire River will be flowing parallel to the rails, kindly not soliciting my attention.

I pull out my notebook, my blue pen. Although I type my book reviews and translations directly into the computer, the personal writing is produced first in the notebook. And I correct those first drafts in the notebook as well, before transferring them into the computer for further revision. Maybe if I could write the poems and short prose texts in my study at home, I would type them into the computer from the onset. But I cannot. I write them out by hand on trains.

Recently, fortunately (I must say), the number of meetings in Nantes has increased. Moreover, I have been working on some collaborative literary-artistic projects with an artist-friend, Caroline François-Rubino.

She has produced three series of paintings that have solicited poetic responses from me. I receive her work by pdf, print it out, slip it into a folder. Then I tuck that folder, along with one full of administrative documents for the regional literary association, under my arm before taking bus No. 4 to the train station.

hyblots-05

Caroline François-Rubino – from “Portholes” series – 2012, ink and watercolor on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm

Today, entrenched in my window seat in the regional train, which is actually more comfortable than the internationally touted TGV, I’m looking at a photocopy of one of Caroline’s paintings from her series called “Portholes.” The series immediately reminds me of my boat trip from Piraeus to the island of Samos in August 1976. That was no ordinary boat trip, no vacation whatsoever. During that boat trip, I decided to stay in Europe, after a year spent studying at the University of Hamburg, and not to return to the United States. I was twenty four years old.

The ticket collector has just asked me for my ticket. I show it to him, along with my senior citizens’ reduction card (for nearly four decades have gone by since that decision made on the boat to Samos). He says “Merci, Monsieur” and goes down the aisle to the next passenger. Now I’m truly alone and will remain so for 58 more minutes. (My uncrowded train is also the slowest one between Angers and Nantes.) I’m already studying the photocopy of Caroline’s painting, open my notebook, and jot down:

                                               you knew
                                        new night would
                                                encircle
                                           day breaking
                                            
                                             ever less lit

***

John Taylor is the author of Paths to Contemporary French Literature (volumes 1–3) and Into the Heart of European Poetry. He has written several books of fiction, short prose, and poetry, most recently The Apocalypse Tapestries and If Night is Falling. He writes for the Times Literary Supplement and authors the “Poetry Today” column in the Antioch Review.

 

 

 

 

© 2015, The Antioch Review