Selections from the First Two Issues of the New York Review of Books

by Robert B. Silvers, Barbara Epstein

Used book in good condition.

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 1988

About the author

Robert Silvers was an American editor who served as editor of The New York Review of Books from 1963 to 2017.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a little freebie sent to subscribers. A few excerpts I found interesting:

Dwight McDonald, in a review of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Politics of Hope: "Schlesinger made his reputation with The Age of Jackson, which I thought at the time turgidly written and structurally confused. But the time was 1946 and the liberals - having just lost Roosevelt and gotten Truman - were understandably worried. The Age of Jackson reassured them. It gave a rosy picture of Jacksonian democracy (myself, I see it as the first big turning-point downward away from our political golden age - the Jefferson-Madison period) and, more important, implied a parallel with the New Deal. The results were a Pulitzer Prize and Schlesinger's emergence as the scholarly (Professor of History at Harvard) spokesman for what he was later to call, flatteringly, the Vital Center..."

Norman Mailer, in a review of That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan: "Like many an American writer to come after him, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald was one of those men who do not give up early on the search to acquire more manhood for themselves. His method was to admire men who were strong. In this sense he was a salesman."

John Berryman quoting a lecture W.H. Auden gave at Oxford in 1956: "Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?" The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: "What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?"

Alfred Chester on City of Night by John Rechy: "Like all false poets, Rechy listens to other poets and not to life, and like all false poets, he tries to make poetry out of mood rather than music."

The best review might be Robert Lowell on Robert Frost.

The last and longest piece is a conversation Edmund Wilson has with himself (it is titled "Every Man His Own Eckermann" - Eckermann being the author who had conversations with Goethe and published them as Conversations with Goethe). Wilson discusses what he does and doesn't like in art and music. If we're to take him at face value, his taste is stodgy and retrograde. At the end the conversation is revealed to be a dream, as he is awakened by his maid vacuuming. But not before he explains, "I'm told that in the schools of music, the Schoenberg technique is now so much the thing that the students have to withstand a strong pressure, and even to risk something like ostracism, if they don't want to become twelve-toners. A friend of mine who has seen a good deal of these students tells me that it is almost like the pressure of a homosexual group - though he didn't mean to imply that there was any connection between homosexuality and serial music. Except, of course, that they're both culs de sac. It strikes me that - in America, at least - the composers are the most ingrown group of any in the major arts."