Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence

"Here is a relationship the height of whose intimacy was in the letters. You feel that when you read them. I was moved to tears reading some of those letters. There’s an honesty about how difficult it all is. These are incredibly powerful admissions of real closeness. Their styles are very different, and yet, from the day they meet at this literary party in 1947, they complement each other completely in spite of . . . on the one hand, his rather muscular and locomotive style and her much more self-effacing approach to poetry. But it almost makes them the ideal mutual critics for each other’s work. Lowell was in many ways the kind of quintessential male writer of that time. He was good-looking, well-educated, dashing, with a command of Greek and Latin, and came from a good family, too. Bishop, by contrast, decided to live most of her life off the beaten track. She spent her latter years with her Brazilian lover, who committed suicide late in their relationship. Both poets had their streak of tragedy, with Lowell’s recurring depression. In addition to finding a kind of critical sounding board, they clearly found solace in one another, as well. There must have been some part of each of them that really valued the other’s attentions, because they were so different. So, if you’re that retiring, off-the-beaten-path poet, there’s something thrilling about this completely opposite type being drawn to your work and drawn to you as a person. Meanwhile, if you’re the kind of grandstanding, quite forceful, out-there male poet, there’s something probably quite comforting that this grounded person that you deeply respect is there for you, even as you wonder yourself whether you might be a phoney. Literary life unfolds in such privacy, in such intimacy and closeness, that to be a public figure like Lowell must have brought with it feelings of inauthenticity. These would have been assuaged by someone like Bishop, whose attentions suggested to the contrary that Lowell had real depth, the kind of depth as a poet that touches people not just on the surface but deep down. You might say there was this literary co-dependence there, too. Looking at those four collections–Alice James and Kafka on the one hand, and Bishop/Lowell and Heidegger/Arendt on the other—the interesting thing about the Rilke’s letters are the way they combine elements of both the monologue and the true exchange. His letters have the intimacy of these pairs, Bishop and Lowell and Heidegger and Arendt, but also at times the one-sidedness of what we see in Alice James and Kafka. Ultimately, there might still be this sense that it is about Rilke giving the advice and not about an exchange. Rilke probably liked the idea of being the advice-giver, while in the case of both Bishop and Lowell, and Heidegger and Arendt, there’s a real listening happening. Handwritten letters are clearly a sort of relic, but maybe email is, too! It’s funny to talk about email as an old-fashioned medium, but with all these other messaging systems like Twitter, WhatsApp, Slack, and other professional tools that allow people to communicate at work . . . Exactly! Email ends up being very close to the handwritten letter for still having a salutation, body paragraphs and a final closing. So, interestingly, I have a sense that people are still conducting serious exchanges. Only these are happening via email. I cannot wait to look at some of the great writers writing today and their emails. In my own case, I love the email correspondence I’ve had with writers that I respect, people like Joshua Cohen, or even the exchanges I’ve had with Harold Bloom, who was my teacher at Yale. So, it’s not happening the same way, but I think it’s very much still happening. With our recent distribution deal with Simon & Schuster, we can really publish anything. I would love for David Zwirner Books to publish a novel. Either a reprint of a novel out of circulation, or something new, something that is out of our typical comfort zone but which chimes with our artistic vision. We’ll see how that unfolds, but Five Books readers, please take note! I am actively looking for that, and people should feel ready to reach out. I envision us becoming a sort of publisher that is releasing titles at the high end of all sorts of different disciplines, whether they’re visual, reprint and historical, nonfiction, or fiction. And of course, I have a soft spot for literary letters . . ."