Foucault in Warsaw

An excerpt from his nonfiction debut, Foucault in Warsaw, Remigiusz Ryziński recounts the secret police's interest in the French philosopher's during his stay in the 1950s.

Probably in the summer of 1959, I learned my friend had made the acquaintance of a Frenchman by the name of Foucault. Because I knew a little French, it was decided I should meet him, which I proceeded to do. At a time when Foucault was to return by plane from Paris, Stefan O., Jurek R., and I went to the airport to welcome the foreigner. (I stress they both already knew Foucault.) Upon greeting him, we all went to his home on Rutkowski Street. In the apartment I also found Henryk R., whom I had known for some time and to whom I was close despite our difference in age. I returned to Foucault’s apartment a number of days in a row. Each day, I found the company I mentioned above, though with small changes, because, as I realized, this foreigner was a homosexual who enjoyed changing his ‘bed boys’ fairly frequently. Despite our acquaintance, nothing intimate transpired between me and Foucault in the course of those days, because of Stefan, who was my friend and in front of whom it was unsuitable to do anything.

Read more at Words without Borders

What was difficult was not being gay but being working-class

Kim Willsher writes on the French writer Didier Eribon's newest memoir Returning to Reims at The Guardian. 

The book opens with Eribon’s return to Reims three decades later following the death of his father, a man he admits he despised: “I didn’t love him. I never had. We were basically strangers. There was nothing between us, nothing that held us together… at least that is what I believed, or struggled to believe; it had been my idea that one could live one’s life separate from one’s family, reinventing oneself and turning one’s back on the past and the people in it.”

However, going back, and slowly rekindling a relationship with his widowed mother as they reminisce over family photos leads him to think again about the world he had left: “I asked myself why I detested my father, why I hadn’t tried to see him before he died. And why I had never tried to understand him and his life, which was not easy.”

Read more at The Guardian

The Man Who Loved Proust

Sudip Bose recounts the little known relationship between Reynaldo Hahn and the famous French writer at The American Scholar.

Throughout his life, many famous people were drawn to Hahn. When he met Proust, however, at the home of the artist Madeleine Lemaire in 1894, the writer was a fledgling artist of little renown. Proust was three years Hahn’s senior, and the two had deep mutual interests in music, painting, and literature. During the two years that their romance bloomed, they saw each other nearly every day, embarking on vacations in Venice and Brittany. Even after the affair ended, they remained good friends. It seems clear that Hahn was conflicted about his sexuality: he remained in the closet, had relationships with women, and was scathing about homosexuality in his correspondence. Still, the letters to and from Proust, those on auction today, reveal a touching, if veiled affection. In a letter dated March 1896, Proust writes: “I want you to be here all the time but as a god in disguise, whom no mortal would recognize.” “Mon petit Reynaldo” is how Proust addresses his friend, upon whom the protagonist of his sprawling, autobiographical, unfinished novel Jean Santeuil is based.

Read more at The American Scholar

Write Something Inappropriate

Amy Wright interviews the writer Dorothy Allison on finding the courage to write at Guernica Magazine

Name the works of genius by American artists and you’ll find that working-class artists created them because they had nothing to lose. The choice is life and death: you will either be murdered outside the Greyhound bus station in your hometown, or you will go to New York to become a dancer or a singer or a poet or writer of fiction. And you find that over and over again. When you find a great artist and you query them you find out that they came from a small town, and they’re estranged from their family. You know why. Even if they weren’t queer they’re queer in that broader context of being unacceptable.

Read More at Guernica

What Makes a Good Essay?

Michele Filgate interviews Leslie Jaminson and Roxanne Gay on their two recent essay collections. Both agree that a good essay needs to look both inward and outward, combining personal experience and larger cultural ideas, all grounded upon a creativity and intellectual rigor.

Well, going along with what both of you said, I wanted to ask what each of you think makes a good essay. You kind of hit on it already a little bit but … I feel like the essay can be so different, much like a novel. There are different kinds of novels, and there are different kinds of essays. But for both of you, when you’re writing them and when you’re reading them, what do you want to see in an essay?

Gay: I definitely want to see writing that looks both inward and outward. I love the exposure, the way in which people reveal themselves, but I also want an essayist to connect to something beyond themselves, something bigger … that kind of inquiry that’s both personal and beyond personal is what makes a really good essay. I also love attention to the sentence. I love a really well-crafted sentence, and a well-crafted essay. Someone who is putting as much time into the writing as they are into the revelation.

Jamison: Yeah, I would definitely echo both of those. I think that when I write, and when I read, I like that whole gaze inward and outward, I also love to be surprised, and I love to be surprised on the level of the sentence certainly, the level of cadences and rhythms and how those can kind of lull me into a certain trance, a certain set of expectations and then jolt me out of it again, that sensation is pleasurable to me. But I also love surprise, I love the kind of surprise that testifies to ways that the writer was surprised in the act of writing the essay … I love coming back to the essay as an attempt or as an inquiry, and that certainly resonates in my experience as a writer. Like, almost every essay that I’ve written that I feel is successful is partially successful because it surprised me at some point because it ended up being about something very different than what I thought it was going to be about when I started writing it. And I love as a reader when I’m granted some version of that experience in an essay as well. It thwarts where I thought it was headed, or another kind of floor opens up beneath the floor I thought I was standing on.

Read more at Salon