language in which faith intertwines with desire

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Francine du Plessix Gray, in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer’s Chapbook—

We must all struggle against all that is curious, already-seen, fatigued, shopworn. I battle against what my admirable colleague William Gass calls "pissless prose," prose that lacks the muscle, the physicality, the gait of a good horse, for pissless prose is bodiless and has no soul. Of course this holds equally true for fiction as for essays, reporting, a letter to a friend, a book review, a decent contribution to art criticism—in sum I search for language in which faith intertwines with desire, faith that we can recapture, with erotic accuracy, that treasured memory or vision which is the object of our desire. I'm keen on the word "voluptuous," a word too seldom heard in this society founded on puritanical principles. I think back to a phrase of Julia Kristeva's, the most interesting feminist thinker of our time, who speaks of "the voluptuousness of family life." I would apply the same phrase to the prose I most admire, prose I can caress and nuture and linger on, diction which is nourished by the deep intimacy of familiar detail, and yet is constantly renewed by the force of the writer's love and fidelity to language.

Bill Styron | ah'm goin' home to grow pee-nuts

Peter Matthiessen in Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr, ed., George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life. New York: Random House, 2008, p. 89—

[In 1952 American novelist] Bill Styron showed up on the dingy fourth-floor landing of our apartment [in Paris] at 14, rue Perceval, with no French and a thick Tidewater accent…Patsy and I gave him a drink, and then took him to…a little Breton café…[During dinner] We were all…sloshing up a good deal of rough vin de table, and at a certain point, overcome by dire homesickness, he fell face forward into his platter and lay lachrymose amongst the oysters, uttering the immortal Styronian words: "Ah ain' got no mo ree-sistance to change than a snow-flake." But by this time, we were were already fond of this well-read, humorous, and very intelligent man. We became fast friends on that first evening and from that time on.

Roy R. Behrens, rice bowl collage (detail), c1992

Like emptying a cormorant every few fish

John Train, in Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr, ed., George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life. New York: Random House, 2008, p. 121—

[When The Paris Review was founded, the most effective distributors] were the hawkers we employed to peddle the magazine in the streets. In French, such people are called camelots. Our best camelot was named Abrami. He was a poet, and he would walk in front of the Deux Magots and the Flore handing out to the drinkers on the sidewalk copies open to some interesting illustration, preferably off-color; then he’d come back, retrieve them, or collect payment, if possible. He was particularly effective. You had to catch up with him at frequent intervals, because if he collected too much money from customers, you risked having him go into hiding and on to a spending spree. So you had to keep up with him. It was like emptying a cormorant every few fish… 

Roy R. Behrens, beetle montage (detail), 2004

Letters to Guy Davenport | Roy R. Behrens

Blog post from Paris Review (2016)

We were recently delighted to learn that my twenty-plus years of  letters to American scholar, essayist and fiction writer Guy Davenport have been added to the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They are part of Davenport's papers, acquired in 2005. They will soon be supplemented by my own gift of 231 letters from Guy Davenport to me. A post on the Ransom Center's blog featured one of my letters (with, as I often did back then, an illustrated envelope). It was also featured in a post on the blog of the Paris Review.

Blog post Harry Ransom Center (2016)