January 1, 1970
Rough Beast Slouching: A Note on Horror Movies
“What will you do if the people you knew Were the plastic that melted and the chromium, too?” —Frank Zappa One of the minor developments of taste of the last […]
January 1, 1969
Camus at His Sources
Albert Camus has always had a special appeal for American readers. The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel have been sowing moral and intellectual provocation […]
January 1, 1969
Literary Exile in Residence
In January 1968, Delacorte published Gil Orlovitz’s first novel, Milkbottle H, and it didn’t do well at all. American reviewers at best regarded it with grudging and tentative praise and […]
January 1, 1969
The Year That Couldn’t Happen
About midway through the dance season just concluded, a dancer asked me in worried tones whether I didn’t think there might be too much dance in New York. As performing […]
January 1, 1969
The Saint
Tim Traynor was the curate in the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, Dublin. I had met him first through Sean O’Faolain when Tim was curate in Adam and […]
January 1, 1969
Saint-Simon, Chronicler of Versailles
“Of the two dukes who have gained immortality by letters, one depicted the follies of mankind in almost the lengthiest of human masterpieces, the other in almost the briefest.” So […]
January 1, 1968
Conversion and After
My father’s favorite joke symbolized our family’s attitude toward religion. A little boy told his Sunday School teacher that another little boy had said there wasn’t a God. When the […]
January 1, 1968
Apotheosis of a Prodigal Son
On April 26, 1968, in Chicago, I had a chance to see a performance of LeRoi Jones’s The Dutchman at Circle Campus, and, on the following night, a performance of […]
January 1, 1968
Notes toward the Destitution of Culture
Absolute honesty is, I suppose, the great obligation which a pseudonym puts upon one who elects to use such a device. After all, to assume a fake name and then […]
January 1, 1968
A Five-Sense Psyche
When I was twelve, I spent a lot of Saturdays at the museum, staring at the Corots. Until recently, in the reflective paternalism of memory, I had gauged those half-dull, […]
January 1, 1968
A Postscript on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The occasion of this brief piece requires a little introduction. A new edition of my book of essays, The World’s Body, will shortly appear from the Louisiana State University Press; […]
January 1, 1968
Yorkshire and the Novelist
In the Autumn of 1938 it was suggested by two young Yorkshire writers then living in Leeds, Lettice Cooper and Barbara Cooper, that a dinner should be held for Yorkshire […]