KR Newsletter—October 2006

Joining such literary lights as E.L. Doctorow and Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan will accept the 2006 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement this November.

The award, which was created in 2002, has recognized the remarkable careers of Doctorow, Heaney, Joyce Carol Oates, Roger Angell, and Umberto Eco.

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement will be presented to McEwan at a gala dinner on Thursday, November 9, at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Members of the literary community and other luminaries are expected to be on hand, including past winners of the award.

The evening's events will be further highlighted with a special tribute to Matthew Winkler, long-time Kenyon Review trustee and outgoing board chair. Winkler, founder and editor in chief of Bloomberg News, will be recognized for his many years of leadership both to KR and the national journalistic media.

McEwan will be recognized for his outstanding contributions to literature. His stories and novels have won many awards, including the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998, for Amsterdam, and has been shortlisted three times. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). A film version of Atonement is currently in production. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.

“Ian McEwan’s fiction is notable for its fierce ethical engagements and its exceptional artistry,” said David H. Lynn, editor of KR. “More than any other recent author, McEwan explores the unanticipated and often brutal collisions between the ordinary and the extraordinary."

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was first presented in 2002 to novelist E.L. Doctorow, a 1952 graduate of Kenyon, who is known for such works as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake and more recently for The March. In 2003 the recipient was novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wonderland, Do With Me What You Will, and We Were the Mulvaneys, among many other titles. In 2005, Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, received the award. Last year KR honored Roger Angell, the renowned baseball writer who has also been fiction editor of the New Yorker, and Umberto Eco, the Italian author of such best-selling novels as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum

Proceeds from the dinner, and from the live and silent auctions that accompany it, benefit KR’s endowment fund, ensuring the legacy of one of America’s most revered literary journals. It also supports scholarships and fellowships to KR's summer writing programs, the Writers Workshop for adults and the Young Writers program for high-school students. The magazine’s literary outreach programs include the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, established in 2003, which attracts thousand of entries from across the globe.

For more information about the 2006 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, please email KR.

FROM
THE
ARCHIVES

In 1965, the National Book Award went to Saul Bellow for Herzog (fiction) and Theodore Roethke for The Far Field (poetry). Ralph Nadar wrote his groundbreaking consumer advocacy book Unsafe at Any Speed. During the State of the Union address in January 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson proposed his Great Society program, including a "war on poverty," that greatly expanded the government's role in domestic policy. In February 1965, during a small demonstration in Marion, Alabama, a skirmish broke out and one of the protestors, Jimmy Lee Jackson, was shot by an Alabama State trooper. The hospital in which Jackson worked refused to treat him because he was black. He died a few days later. The subsequent landmark march from Selma to Montgomery was planned in tribute to his memory. Also in 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. The first combat troops entered Vietnam. The prevalence of cigarette smoking was double what it is today—52% of men and 34% of women smoked. The cost of a stamp was five cents.

The Winter 1965 issue of KR featured a "lost" interview with T. S. Eliot—as Dr. Leslie Paul explains below, the interview was actually conducted in 1958. It is doubtful the editors could anticipate the timeliness of this publication—Eliot died in January 1965, likely just as the magazine was hitting mailboxes.

a conversation with t. s. eliot
LESLIE PAUL

I have always been interested in the great and lively sweep of T.S. Eliot’s ideas and interests, and usually take the opportunity to discuss them with him on the too-rare occasions when we meet. His political ideas, for instance—aristocratic and theocratic in a time barren of political ideas—and I think fascinating and seminal and too little pursued. In 1958, I arranged with the European Service of the BBC, a discussion with Eliot that would cover many of his ideas and activities. I hoped to draw out the whole politico-literary, and Christian, man. We talked in our shirt-sleeves in the board room of Faber and Faber on the hottest London day I can remember. The first part of our conversation, mostly about Dr. Erich Kahler’s The Tower and the Abyss, is lost forever because the technicians were so interested that they omitted to switch on the tape, and we were wise enough not to attempt to repeat a spontaneous discussion. Fortunately, the omission was soon discovered, but it accounts for the seeming abruptness of my first question. For reasons that are now obscure to both Eliot and myself, the conversation was not published at the time. —L.P.

LESLIE PAUL: The first question I want to ask you is really a political one. In The Idea of a Christian Society, which you wrote almost twenty years ago, you said, I think, that the choice before us was between the formation of a new Christian culture and the acceptance of a pagan one. Do you still feel that this is the choice before us?

T.S. ELIOT: Well, I don’t know whether or not I’d use those exact words. I think I should prefer now to say a new or renewed Christian society rather than “culture,” but I never remember exactly quotations from my own works—neither can I identify them. However, in any case, I no longer feel that the most likely alternative is a pagan culture. I shouldn’t use that phrase any longer. You see, we’ve had since I wrote—or it was going on then—the attempt in Hitler’s reign to foster a Germanic culture, and that, if it wasn’t altogether an attempt to suppress Christian culture, was at least an attempt to bypass it.

Paul: A deliberately pagan one.

Eliot: Yes. A conscious attempt to be pagan. Well, the doctrines of this non-Christian pan-Germanism appear to us ridiculous, I think, if we read their pronouncements nowadays. They’re merely ludicrous. There’s still going on today, of course, the attempt of Communism to foster a kind of religion of humanity…

Paul: That's not pagan?

Eliot: I think the real paganism is something which arises naturally, like the culture among primitive peoples. And, of course, the religion of humanity turns out often to be a religion of inhumanity. But it is an attempt to replace the religious emotions by a kind of deification of an abstract humanity. We need a new word other than "pagan," but even so what I'm attempting to get at is this: that what we notice about the emotions aroused by either Nazism or Communism, emotions which attempt to replace religious emotion, is that they can only be kept alive—kept hot—by presenting always the image of an enemy; an enemy and an earthly god, I think. Well, the earthly god is inseparable somehow from the enemy. He only remains in the position of a good so long as there is an enemy.

More >>

KR Joins Kenyon College to Present Pre-College Workshops for Freshmen

2007 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers Begins in November

Think of this section as a bulletin from KR in which we brag about the accomplishments of the extended KR family and leave out the gall-bladder surgeries.

Current Issue | Order | Workshops | Interviews | Blog | Info for Writers

Ian McEwan to Receive Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement