My earliest memories revolve around a handsome white house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, built by a sea captain toward the middle of the nineteenth century. It rests midway down a low-lying rise called Money Hill. Perhaps money had once been buried there; in any event its illustrious owner, EW, never had enough of it-due to financially irresponsible habits that included not paying income taxes, the lavish use of taxis (he never learned to drive) and the long-distance telephone.

“It was an escape route, something entirely private,” Max Sebald mutters as he rummages through a thick folder of old photographs. A boy in a white gown and caftan; a graveyard with tilted headstones; a turn-of-the-century spa: they’re the kind of photographs you’d come across in a junk shop, leafing idly through a box of postcards. Which is more or less where Sebald found them. 

After forty-five years, as W.S. Merwin says, "the sentence continues." Here are a sheaf of poems from some of the original contributors to The Paris Review, which may serve--though many more of the original contributors are still writing poems--to inscribe upon the tablets of memory a certain continuity, a certain faith. 

Two of the most distinguished American literary artists of their generation—their names as frequently invoked by critics and historians as they are seldom linked—appear here in a conversation that is mostly about being in Pans after the Second World War. The occasion giving rise to this conversation was a late September, 1996, University of Pennsylvania weekend observation of my retirement from the English faculty there. When friends Norman Malier and Richard Wilbur accepted invitations to attend, I suggested talking about this experience that both had often said was personally important, that neither had ever overtly visited in his works, and that happened to have a particular relevance to the Penn audience in that season.

Kenneth Noland’s name is synonymous with a particular kind of American abstraction—one based on the potency of color, rooted in the belief that relationships of hues, like music, can directly and wordlessly stir our deepest emotional and intellectual reserves. Noland’s name stands, too, for pictures with lucid, near-geometric formats—images that ring changes on frontal, symmetrical, deceptively simple compositions, brought to life by seductive color. Probably the best known of these are the Circle paintings—unabashedly beautiful concentric rings of disembodied hues—with which he first announced himself as a painter to be reckoned with, four decades ago.

I was so used to seeing his name in print that at first the obituaries did not faze me—the only odd feature was that new tag line, “dies at 83.” He had always seemed to me most fully alive, most present, in print. In person, especially in the last years of his life, he was often heartbreakingly unreachable. 

In 1960 the French novelist, poet and encyclopedist Raymond Queneau, together with his friend Franqois Le Lionnais, a mathematical historian and chess expert, founded a research group, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature.

In 1980, the year before Elias Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Susan Sontag wrote that the notebook was the perfect form for a writer like him—a man who was a student of everything rather than of anything in particular—for “it allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness.” Canetti's published works are as various in their shapes as the entries in his notebooks. He originally intended his 1936 Auto-da-Fé to be the first in a series of eight novels, each examining a monomaniac whose madness typified a facet of the modern era.