ISSUES | winter 2007

Featuring reviews of: The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi; Epileptic, by David B.; Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; and Cancer Vixen, by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.

Laurence Olivier never wanted to be a matinee idol or a leading man who played only romantic heroes. Yet after back-to-back performances in Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Pride and Prejudice in 1939-1940, he was sought after by producers and directors, celebrity magazines and ardent fans. His early roles were classic literary characters. A New York Times reviewer called his portrayal of Heathcliff a case of “a player physically and emotionally ordained for a role.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for both Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Hollywood was sending a rare message: “We want more.”

March 2006. I’m sitting in a hot tub at Well of Mercy Catholic Retreat Center in Hamptonville, North Carolina, under a full moon. I got in on this chilly night hoping to drift further away from the anxieties that prompted me to retreat: the regular stack of ungraded papers, a botched repair job in my kitchen, a spat with a friend. I’m a person who received pancreas and kidney transplants six years ago, and I’m easily fatigued. My mother is elderly, our country is at war — there’s enough to be concerned about. But what I’m thinking of at the moment is my hair.

In 1988, at the age of eleven and a half, I spent the first of what would be several summers in Sicily. My parents had separated the previous year, and my mother had migrated from Montreal to Catania, a city tucked between the great Mount Etna and the placid Ionian Sea. There, a leisurely walk from a rocky coast that had once boiled and spilled from the earth and into the waves, she lived with a man she’d met on an Adriatic beach some sixteen years earlier.

I have a suspicion that goodness, like cleverness, like being good at writing — is a talent, which can and must then be educated and trained…. If, despite my experience of the Holocaust and having to leave my family at ten, my assumption is that this is not a basically violent world, it might not have something to do with having been treated kindly and with respect and with affection by the first people around me in my childhood.

The full text of this poem is not currently available online.

Featuring the poems: 1. Uz, 5. Song of Songs [featured as Poem of the Week], 9. Promises, 15. Idolatry, 17. Eternal Return, 18. Dust and Ashes

Featuring the poems: White Power [featured as a Poem of the Week], Vigil of the Door, Elephants of the Good Ship Memory, Mortal Aphasia, The Amazing Tomkins — Readings by Touch — No Appointment Necessary

In one of his many helpful letters of advice sent to young actors — published for the first time in this issue — Laurence Olivier describes the essence of a Shakespearean tragic character as a “perfect statue of a man,” made vulnerable by a significant flaw that finally will destroy him. Olivier’s remark calls to mind a quality of literature and indeed of all the arts: they relate to the core of an individual, the human, not the “statue,” and they articulate danger. The masks of literature, like those of primitive art and ritual, suggest “the other” that lies below the social being — the primal conflicts, the animal, and the sometimes scary forces within us.

L.E. Miller has published short fiction in Calyx and Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1999, edited by Sherman Alexie. She lives on Plum Island, on the North Shore of Massachusettes, with her husband and son. She is completing a collection of stories. [2007]

Old Foley was the first to discover the thing, followed by your man Terrence Lafferty. Foley brought it into Cleery’s public house to show it off one evening, a year or two gone by now. He was a farmer, Foley was, a poor excuse for a farmer, a man who couldn’t afford the price of a belt so he kept his trousers up with a piece of rope.

Mom told me about the diagnosis when we were sitting on a beach in North Carolina. My wife, Helen, had just left to take the puppy for one last run, and I realized that her convenient departure had been prearranged by the way she glanced back at us, biting her lower lip that way she does when she’s worried.