SUMMER 2008
Ruth Behar's conversation with Sandra Cisneros is titled "Talking in Our Pajamas: About Finding Your Voice as a Writer, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World."The occasion for the freewheeling conversation was indeed a pajama party, with a roomful of students eagerly eavesdropping on the fast-moving and witty exchange of anecdotes, speculations, and gossip about the writer’s life. It’s a delightful summertime sequence of insights into two prominent authors of our time.
Charles Johnson has taught creative writing courses for thirty-two years at the University of Washington and elsewhere, and over the years his students have migrated into positions of influence in the literary world. Of late, however, he has found his classes "disappointing, and at times even depressing." Short story after short story “steeped in violence, drugs, cynicism and...a profound dislike for other human beings. "Who are these students reading as models? What has happened to literary decorum, or even taste, in their reading habits? Mainly, it seems, "highly promoted authors published after 1960 and...no nonwhite writers except Louise Erdrich." This fact led Johnson to a meditation in this Hopwood Lecture that takes him in surprising directions, and not entirely negative ones, as he considers the advice of John Gardner and texts going back to the Vedas and the New Testament. In this well-argued essay, Johnson, author of I, among other outstanding works of fiction, provides us with a corrective aesthetics for readers as well as writers.
Death of a Salesman remains the central theatrical text for the historical period from 1945 to the present, not just in America but all over the world. It has been written and argued about for more than five decades, but one theme has received surprisingly little attention, the theme of the lost father--not just Willy Loman as lost father but Willy’s own lost father. Charlene Fix, better known as a poet, undertakes a critical essay analyzing the way the play taps into a mythic archetype and historicizes it, making Willy even more of an archetype of an existential condition than readers and spectators fully appreciated. The role of Willy’s brother, Ben, in the play becomes clearer in this exposition, and the anguished questions Willy directs at him ("Where is Dad? Didn’t you follow him?") as the salesman strives to pierce straight through to the heart of the American Dream.
When the late Steven R. Centola sat down with Arthur Miller on a very warm August day in 2001 to discuss Miller's recent work, the subject of Death of a Salesman nevertheless intervened. Miller speaks in this interview about how it represented "the turning point of my career," and how recent productions have pleased him, though he complains that the substitution of jazz music for flute music--the signature sound of Willy's father, and more generally "the pastoral agrarian dream"of America, in one production was problematic for him. Mainly he wishes to describe his intentions in the play Mr. Peters' Connections, which Peter Falk had brought to Broadway not long before. Before the interview is abruptly terminated on account of sultry weather, the two discussants have illuminated Miller's craft in satisfying ways.
"Soon his heart would become hard and cold like a lump of ice. Even this tiny splinter had the power to make him see as evil everything that was good, and it had its effect immediately." Glass splinters from the magic mirror do terrible damage to the young man in Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Snow Queen, a favorite story of Lisa Lieberman, author of the landmark book Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide. It helped her to understand her mother's problems and also her own. In the memoir in this issue she records the process by which she coped with unhappiness. "The Snow Queen taught me a valuable lesson: don't trust anyone unless you are desperate, least of all well-intentioned adults." The uncanny coincidences that linked together her life and her unfolding understanding of this popular fairy tale have lessons for all readers about the power of childhood innocence, a condition which, the author asserts, "is tragically overrated."
Fiction: John Allman and Jane Gillette present two studies of the emotionally wrenching condition of absence: in one short story the absence of a beloved wife and in the other the absence of a beloved child.
Poetry: New writing by Diana Fox, Bob Hicok, Deborah Landau, Iman Mersal (translations from the Arabic of this prominent Egyptian poet by Khaled Mattawa), and Gary Soto.
Reviews: Roger Gilbert on John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich; Joseph Stanton on new studies of Edward Hopper.
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