Key West Literary Seminar

Photo by Diane Gorodnitzki

Lanford Wilson died this week. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was 73.

Wilson participated in the Seminar twice, first in 1986 for an event dedicated to the work of Tennessee Williams; and again in 1990, for “New Directions in American Theater.” He served as an adviser to our board for the latter, and in this capacity wrote the letter reproduced here to then-director Monica Haskell. The “very private comments” it contains consist of frank, snapshot assessments of Wilson’s peers—among them Don DeLillo, Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, JoAnne Aikalitis, Terrance McNally, and August Wilson. Click the image below to read the letter in its entirety.

Click to view in full size.

Alongside Key West’s tradition of acclaimed writers-in-residence like Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens lies the output of obscure authors whose work met the world through small press and self-publishing ventures. We found this autographed copy of Hildegard Ott Russell’s 1964 Spanish Limes an’ I got ‘em Sweet at Bargain Books on Truman Avenue about two years ago, during one of that once-venerable bookseller’s restructurings of inventory that consistently result in a steeper pornography-to-poetry ratio.

The collection of 100 poems appears to have brought together more than 30 years of Russell’s previously published and new work. It includes a foreword by Florida Poet Laureate Vivian Yeiser Laramore Rader and six silhouette cuttings by Phoebe Hazelwood Morse. No press name is given and it is likely that Russell, a former teacher of creative writing at Key West High School, paid for the printing herself, expertly done by the Artman family at Florida Keys Star. Beneath its dust jacket, the sewn book is hardbound in green cloth, illustrated with the same Morse cutting. It is unknown how many were printed.

Russell’s title poem refers to the practice, still common today, of young boys selling bunches of Spanish limes which they’ve cut from trees around town. Known as ganip or canip in much of the Caribbean, the Spanish lime (Melicoccus bijugatus, seen on Ashe Street below), bears bunches of ripe fruit nearly the size of a ping-pong ball from July through September. The rigid green skin is typically cracked with the teeth to reveal the delicious sweet-sour pulp surrounding a single large pit. The trees, with silvery bark and thick, light green foliage, are among the largest in Key West.

    Spanish Limes
    Hildegard Ott Russell

    Black boys are calling their limes,
    ”Got ‘em sweet as honey of bees!”
    While St. Paul marks the hour with chimes.
    Black boys are calling their limes,
    Where men roll their accents in rhymes
    Under almond and flaming trees.
    Black boys are calling their limes,
    ”Got ‘em sweet as honey of bees!”

Click the image below for a full-size reproduction of the letter John Malcolm Brinnin wrote to Octavio Paz on October 13, 1991. Brinnin recalls the first time he and Paz met, in 1972 in Elizabeth Bishop’s Cambridge apartment, and invites Paz to be the keynote speaker of the 1993 Key West Literary Seminar.

Tony Hillerman. Photographer unknown.

Tony Hillerman, bestselling author of detective novels set set among the Navajos of the Southwest, died last Sunday at 83. You can read his obituary in The New York Times here. It was written by Marilyn Stasio, who also wrote this piece for PaperCuts about meeting Hillerman at the 1988 Key West Literary Seminar, where they discussed Hemingway while leaning against the pink stuccoed wall of the La Concha.

Below is a reproduction of a letter Hillerman wrote on personal stationary to Les Standiford, the coordinator for our 1988 Seminar, Whodunit?, dedicated to the art and tradition of mystery literature.

Click to enlarge.

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We are proud to issue John Malcolm Brinnin’s onClick="return popup(this, 'notes')">Travel And The Sense Of Wonder as the second in our series of digital reproductions of obscure, hard-to-find, or just plain interesting books which have particular relevance to Key West letters (Harry Mathews’s Epithalamium was the first). The text of this 24-page staple-bound pamphlet, originally published in 1992 by the Library of Congress as part of the Center For The Book’s Viewpoint Series, reproduces Brinnin’s keynote address from our 1991 Seminar, Literature of Travel: A Sense of Place, and includes an introduction by KWLS founding member William Robertson. Brinnin’s essay is a deceptively simple discussion of the role of "the sense of wonder" in the impulse to travel, and "the spirit of investigation" required for said sense to "get off its aspirations and go to work." With characteristic good humor and disarming eloquence, Brinnin recounts his late-career transformation from a poet and literary critic ("one of those charity cases") into a chronicler of ocean liners and social change, revealing along the way a remarkable sensitivity toward the wondrous capacities of language.

John Malcolm Brinnin was a poet, biographer, critic, anthologist, and teacher. The director of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center (the 92nd Street Y) in New York City from 1949-1956, he became friends with many prominent 20th century poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz, Richard Wilbur, and Dylan Thomas. His Dylan Thomas in America recounts Brinnin’s friendship with the Welsh poet and the reading tour which ended with Thomas’s death. Brinnin also wrote several collections of poetry, biographies of Gertrude Stein (The Third Rose, 1959) and Truman Capote (Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy, 1986), a critical work on William Carlos Williams, and The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (1971). His behind-the-scenes influence on a number of writers was significant, if insufficiently recognized by the broader public. As a resident of Key West in the 1980s and 1990s, he was a crucial influence on the nascent Seminar, and was particularly responsible for the success of our tribute to Elizabeth Bishop in 1993, as he called on a lifetime of friendships to gather together the writers and friends who knew Bishop and her work best. He died in Key West in 1998.

We thank the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brinnin’s copyright-holder, for their permission to reproduce this work; the University of Delaware Library’s Special Collections Department, whose John Malcom Brinnin Papers are a resource for Brinnin scholars; and David Wolkowsky.

Click the image above to view the book as a series of images in a popup window. Click onClick="javascript:
pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/TravelAndTheSenseOfWonder_JohnMalcolmBrinnin.pdf'); ">here to download a .pdf (12.4 MB).

This small broadside was designed and printed by John Hersey in 1969, and reprinted in 1993 by the Fellows of Pierson College at the John Hersey Printing Office.

Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose Hiroshima chronicles the destruction of that Japanese city in the wake of an American atomic bomb, lived in Key West with his wife Barbara for many years. Each was a good and longtime friend who did much good for the Seminar, and we honor John each year with our keynote spech, the John Hersey Memorial Address.

As master of Yale University’s Pierson College, Hersey operated the college’s printing press. Our investigation reveals a storied history of letterpress printing at Yale, fears for its extinction with the advent of desktop publishing, and a heroic revival by turn-of-the-century book-arts devotees. But there seems to be nothing on the web about the Yale Presses, or the John Hersey Printing Office, since 2002. Does anyone out there know anything more? Here’s what we found about the Pierson Press; and about Yale’s letterpress tradition. Click the image to enlarge.

Photo by Lee Nye

Letter from James Crumley to Les Standiford, 1987. (click for full-size image)

The New York Times is reporting the death of critically acclaimed crime novelist James Crumley. He was 68.

We had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Crumley in 1988, for Whodunit?, our Seminar devoted to the art and tradition of mystery literature. In a correspondence between Crumley and Les Standiford, our program chair that year, Crumley explained his preference for detectives who are "more rebel than hero:"
    They should put their hearts and minds on the line to find whatever limited justice can be found in an injust world, should oppose greed, the sorriest of evils, and ignorance, and should prefer forgiveness over revenge. We don’t need heroes stalking mean streets, but human beings, imperfect as they might be, seeking a justice beyond law."

The letter reproduced here, typed on Hellgate Productions stationery, shows a lighthearted, funny, and gracious Jim Crumley. He will be missed.

During our 27th annual Seminar this January, we’ll consider the various ways in which historians like David Levering Lewis and novelists like William Kennedy reveal essential truths about our shared history. As we prepare for this unique opportunity, we are also uncovering our own history– as an organization, as an event, and as a group of individuals joined in lettered island life. We’ve advanced in this endeavor by expanding our Past Seminars page, which now lists the theme and scheduled panelists for each and every year of our history, with links to images of our promotional posters from the pre-website era. onClick="return popup(this, 'notes')">Click here to see a slideshow of these low-tech handsome posters.

Photo by Arthur W. Wang

The New York Times is reporting today on the death of Robert Giroux, editor and publisher of some of the 20th century’s greatest writers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Derek Walcott, and many more. He was 94.

We had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Giroux in 1993, for our Seminar devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bishop. At the time, he was editing the definitive collection of Bishop’s letters now known as One Art. Reproduced below is a letter Giroux wrote to John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend and correspondent of Bishop’s, and the organizer of that year’s Seminar. (Click to enlarge.)

A letter from Robert Giroux to John Malcolm Brinnin, 1991. (click for full-size image)