Tonight we begin our work with Invisible Man- it is certainly, in light of the riots, an auspicious time to be discussing issues of race and identity. Tomorrow afternoon another Salon on A Portrait of the Artist starts at a participant’s home near Trocadero. There is one space left in each Salon- please contact me asap if you are interested.
Upcoming Events and Hazel Rowley’s new book. Tete a Tete
* Hazel Rowley’s Tête-à -Tête, a literary biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre is now available at the Red Wheelbarrow & the Village Voice. I had the privilege of meeting her last summer and greatly enjoyed her previous literary biography on Richard Wright. She will be reading in Paris later in the winter- I will announce her visit when I have the details. Check out the review below…
* An established writing circle in Paris is looking for 1 – 2 new participants. They meet once a month, share writing (fiction, poetry) and offer suggestions to each other. Interested persons should email isacooney@yahoo.com (and send a short writing sample).
* Photographer Isabel Gogibu presents her work from 17 October through 17 December at Chez Terrasse a Cie- 74 rue Lamarck (Paris 18 eme, metro Lamarck)
Hazel Rowley’s webpage:
http://www.hazelrowley.com/tete.htm
Tête-à -Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
They are one of the world’s legendary couples. We can’t think of one without thinking of the other. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre-those passionate, free-thinking Existentialist philosopher-writers-had a committed but notoriously open union that generated no end of controversy. With Tête-à -Tête, distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two colossal figures and their intense, often embattled relationship. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Rowley portrays them up close, in their most intimate moments.
We witness Beauvoir and Sartre with their circle, holding court in Paris cafés. We learn the details of their infamous romantic entanglements with the young Olga Kosakiewicz and others; of their efforts to protest the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; and of Beauvoir’s tempestuous love affair with Nelson Algren. We follow them on their many travels and to meetings with dignitaries such as Roosevelt, Khrushchev, and Castro. We hear the anguished discussions that would lead to Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize and listen in on the couple as they comment on each other’s works.
The impact of their writings on modern thought can hardly be overestimated, and yet Beauvoir and Sartre are remembered just as much for the lives they led. They were brilliant, courageous, profoundly innovative individuals, and Tête-à -Tête great story is precisely what Beauvoir and Sartre most wanted their lives to be.
Critical Praise
“Fascinating . . . A neatly assembled record of people behaving badly in the name of literature, philosophy and amour.”
-Kirkus Reviews
“TETE-A-TETE has just about everything… Hard as I tried, I could not put it down.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich
“Enormously rich and utterly absorbing… a short, concise, penetrating look into the famous couple who changed their century.”
-Brenda Maddox
“A lively and fulfilling portrait… [A] wonderfully crafted narrative … Thoroughly researched and well-written.”
-Library Journal
“[Rowley] draws from vast stores of published and unpublished writings, correspondence and interviews.”
-Publishers Weekly
New York Times review, October 5, 2005, by William Grimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/books/05grim.html?pagewanted=all
Alesian Literary Salon Newsletter
October 15, 2005
1. November Salons Announced
2. Upcoming Events: writing group, photography exhibit and Hazel Rowley’s new book. Tete a Tete
Strictly business for this letter- next time, a poem…
1. November Salons Announced & text descriptions
Monday Night: Invisible Man 8-10 PM first meeting November 7th
Tuesday Afternoons: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1:30- 3:30 PM first meeting November 8th
To sign up: You can either email me directly (literarysalon@wanadoo.fr) or use the website: http://literarysalon.free.fr
If this is your first Salon, a deposit of 25 euro is required to reserve your place. If you have done a Salon before, your written commitment is sufficient. Please email me if you have any questions.
* Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Please check out the description under ‘What might we read…’
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Once one lets go of the need for linear narrative and a traditional plot, the imagistic world that Joyce evokes is utterly emotionally resonant. His descriptions of young Stephen Dedalus away at school for the first time, alone and reduced, reach out of the precise context of turn of the century Jesuit private school to connect with each of us in that moment of pushing out from the parental shores, then finding ourselves adrift in the unsympathetic world. His description of the highly charged holiday dinner shimmers in front of us- recalling our own long meals of relatives misbehaving and the world as it was presented to a child’s sharp emotional comprehension.
Chester Anderson, in the Editor’s Preface in the Viking Critical Edition, describes the experience of resonance this way:
“The pages of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are, as Stephen Dedalus says of those in his second-hand copy of Horace, “human pages.†They tell the story of the growth of a human soul from early childhood to young manhood- his revolt against his “nice mother†and the mother Church; his attempts to distance through comic formulation his improvident father; his real and phantasmal movements of love toward immaculate virgins and prostitutes; his encounter with sin, injustice and cruelty and hypocrisy and a million other faces of the “reality of experience,†as he goes forth from the Eden of his childhood.
But it is also the story of the growth of the artist trying to “see’ his life as “that thing which it is and no other thingâ€; trying to find the words, the individuating rhythms, the shapes of sentences, the mythic paradigms to give that flowering growth the “wholeness, harmony, and radiance†which writer and then reader rejoice to see and to understand.â€
-Chester G. Anderson, Preface, Viking Critical ed. of Portrait
Joyce seeks to use language in a way not seen before- bending it to his purposes (some might say breaking it) to contain all the exquisite and awkward emotions of living. Portrait documents his treading new ground- his tentative experimentation before he lets loose completely in Ulysses. Both texts, I submit, can only be truly enjoyed read in good company. This is what the Salon proposes to do.