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WORK TITLE: Evolution of Desire
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http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/
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CAREER
Literary and cultural journalist. Stanford University, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, visiting scholar.
AWARDS:Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Quarterly Conversation, Civilization, Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Georgia Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Literary and cultural writer Cynthia L. Haven has written for numerous literary journals. She is a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Haven was also a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and a Voegelin Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
In 2011, Haven edited An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. The collection of thirty-two remembrances of Polish poet Milosz (1911-2004) by his colleagues, students, scholars, and fellow writers and poets reveals him to be fascinating, complex, and rooted in twentieth-century eastern European history. “Bringing to life the poet as a man of blood and sinew—an Everyman,” the collection shows Milosz as both jovial and somber, concerned about his poetic legacy, according to D. Hutchins in Choice.
Milosz was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1961 to 1998, and was the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The book’s essays are arranged chronologically by the date the authors met Milosz, from the 1930s to near the time of his death in 2004. Contributors include Elizabeth Kridl Valkeneir, Daniel Halpern, George Gomori, and Marek Skwarnicki. The essays focus on his academic work, champion of Polish literature, and his religious beliefs. “Along with the power of Milosz’s own words, we have this collection, and these fragments of memory create a captivating and human portrait of the poet and his life,” noted Sarmatian Review contributor Lisa D. Chavez.
“This is an honest tribute that puts an affectionate stamp of ownership on Milosz during the centennial year of his birth,” said Alice-Catherine Carls in World Literature Today. Carls added: “As An Invisible Rope shows us, despite his fervent efforts to transform the devenir of experience into être, he never stopped becoming.” The book includes an interview with former poet laureate and Milosz translator Robert Hass and a selected bibliography of Milosz’s works.
Haven next published a biography of French theorist René Girard (1923-2015), Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, part of the “Studies in Violence, Mimesis, Culture” series. Born in 1923 in Avignon, Girard studied at the Ecole des Chartes in the 1940s during the German occupation of Paris. In the United States, he taught at Indiana University and Duke University when he began publishing essays on race, literary criticisms, and his views on how our desires and violence often mimic others. In 1961, Girard published his philosophical book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. “Haven was a close friend of Girard’s, and that privileged perch allows her to consider his life both personally and intellectually. Many aspects of his history would be hard to adequately comprehend without this dual perspective,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, September 2011, D. Hutchins, review of An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, p. 117.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard.
Sarmatian Review, September 2012, Lisa D. Chavez, review of An Invisible Rope, p. 1694.
World Literature Today, July-August 2011, Alice-Catherine Carls, review of An Invisible Rope, p. 76.
Cynthia L. Haven has written for "The Times Literary Supplement," "The New York Times Book Review," "The Nation," "The Virginia Quarterly Review," "The Washington Post," "The Los Angeles Times," "The San Francisco Chronicle," "World Literature Today," and other publications. Her work has also appeared in "Le Monde," "La Repubblica," "The Kenyon Review," "Quarterly Conversation," "The Georgia Review," "Civilization," and others.
She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and a Voegelin Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
"Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven" was published in London, 2005. Her "Czesław Miłosz: Conversations" was published in 2006; "Joseph Brodsky: Conversations" in 2003; "An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz" was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. "Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard" will be published in Spring 2018 with Michigan State University Press.
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Visiting Researcher
French and Italian
Cynthia L. Haven
Visiting Writer in French & Italian, 2012-15
Cynthia Haven is a literary and cultural journalist who has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Quarterly Conversation, and the Poetry Foundation. Her work has also appeared in Words Without Borders, The Cortland Review, Civilization, and other publications. Her An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz was published in 2011 by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations in 2006, and Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. She was a 2008 Milena Jesenská Fellow in Kraków with Vienna's Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.
She is currently under contract to write a book about the life and work of René Girard.
She blogs at The Book Haven (http://bookhaven.stanford.edu).
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Haven, Cynthia L.: EVOLUTION OF DESIRE
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Haven, Cynthia L. EVOLUTION OF DESIRE Michigan State University Press (Indie Nonfiction) $None 4, 1 ISBN: 978-1-61186-283-6
A biography provides a portrait of French theorist Rene Girard. In her book, Haven (An Invisible Rope, 2011, etc.) recounts the rich details of Girard's life. He was born on Christmas night in 1923 in Avignon, the second of five siblings. His mother was among the first women in the region to receive a baccalaureate, and his father was an anti-clerical archivist who served in World War I. Girard was a mischievous prankster and inconstant student but still showed precocious signs of his sensitive devotion to literature. Around age 10, the two books that influenced him the most were Cervantes' Don Quixote and Kipling's The Jungle Book. Due to his sickliness, he was later ineligible for military service. He studied at the Ecole des Chartes in Paris in the 1940s while the city was under German occupation. Girard jumped at an opportunity to teach at Indiana University, where he met his wife, Martha McCullough. He was denied tenure, neglecting to take seriously the counsel that publishing was crucial to advancement: "It is under this principle that I started to write, around 1950, after two or three years devoted essentially to female students and cars." Girard was forced to take a position at Duke University in 1952, well before it was a heralded institution, which furnished plenty of fodder for his thinking on race. In 1961 he published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a philosophically sprawling work that covered the likes of Flaubert, Stendhal, and Dostoyevsky. And in 1966 he helped organize the legendary conference "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which introduced the United States to an established Jacques Lacan as well as Jacques Derrida, a rising star. Girard's illustrious career was crowned in 2005 with an election to the Academie Francaise; he died in 2015. Haven was a close friend of Girard's, and that privileged perch allows her to consider his life both personally and intellectually. Many aspects of his history would be hard to adequately comprehend without this dual perspective. For example, she offers an impressively incisive account of his conversion from atheism to Christianity in 1958 ("It was something no one could have anticipated, least of all himself. 'Conversion is a form of intelligence, of understanding,' he said; it's also a process...and as such would absorb him for the rest of his days"). In addition, her rendering is as panoramic as his thought--she considers a vertiginous array of diverse subjects insightfully, including Girard's trenchant criticisms of Camus' The Stranger, the ways in which the French and Americans view each other, and desire's metaphysical aspects. Furthermore, Haven ably, even elegantly, synopsizes the central tenets of Girard's beliefs, in particular his pioneering views on mimesis--a kind of updated version of Rousseau's amour propre--the notion that the desires and violent conflicts that often spring from people have their root cause in the gregarious mimicking of others. In this intimate but philosophically searching book, the author's writing is marvelously clear. She expertly unpacks Girard's ideas, making them unusually accessible, even to readers with limited familiarity. A penetrating account of an important thinker--and as agile, profound, and affecting as its subject.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Haven, Cynthia L.: EVOLUTION OF DESIRE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536570966/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cebe374c. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536570966
An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz
Lisa D. Chavez
Sarmatian Review. 32.3 (Sept. 2012): p1694.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Polish Institute of Houston, Inc.
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/
Full Text:
An Invisible Rope Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz Edited by Cynthia L. Haven. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press (www.ohioswallow.com), 2011. 280 pages. ISBN 978-0-8040-1155-4. Paper.
When Czeslaw Milosz died in 2004, the world lost one of our great poets. What remains are his words and, in this engaging collection of essays, we have the words of those who knew Milosz. The authors include friends, colleagues, students, and translators, and the book follows a roughly chronological order, beginning with those who knew Milosz earliest, such as Elizabeth Kridl Valkeneir--her essay begins with the line "I first knew Czeslaw Milosz when I was a child before World War II" in Wilno (10), and progressing toward the final interview with Robert Hass. These thirty-two essays, collected and edited by Cynthia L. Haven, range from the very short which function almost as summaries of his life ("The Exile Who Rejected Pathos"), to anecdotes, to memoirs. There is also an interview conducted by the editor with former U. S. Poet Laureate Hass about his encounters with Milosz.
One of the strengths of this collection is that the book is honest--it is not a tribute to Czeslaw Milosz the Nobel Laureate with writers gushing over the poet in glowing terms, but more a collection of portraits that capture the true man: brilliant, difficult, warm, complex. Daniel Halpern says in his very brief anecdote "Milosz at Chez Panisse" that Milosz was "awesome and scary, at times sweet and uncle-ish, affable, and ... irritable, a man ready to negate the patch of earth you stood on" (164).
Most of the essays are personal memories of Milosz, and some of the most delightful are from those who knew him longest. I found these earlier essays the most compelling: in them, we glimpse the poet in his early years. In the essay "An Epistolary Friendship," George Gomori writes that the great poet's Berkeley lectures were "very entertaining, especially when he discussed contemporaries, people whom he had known personally" (24). There is something of that quality in this book which is akin to eavesdropping on social gathering of Czeslaw Milosz and his friends reminiscing over good food and drink. Some of the details in the essays are intriguing, such as Marek Skwarnicki's story about receiving a lost package sent by Milosz in1964. The gift, which included poems and sketches, did not reach Skwarnicki until 2002 when Milosz handed it over in person in Krakow. This essay in particular, titled "Half a Century with Milosz," is a beautiful testament to a long friendship and was one of my favorites in the book. "Love at Last Sight" by Richard Lourie, a translator of Milosz's work, is another tale of a long friendship, beginning rather inauspiciously with Lourie as a student whose work is singled out in class, and not positively. The essay ends years later in Krakow, just two years before the poet's death. It is a lovely essay, full of warmth and humor.
Many of these early essays seem more substantial than some of the middle ones, but perhaps that is just this reader's taste. Some of the shorter essays, gossipy and full of the intrigues of academia and publishing, seemed to be more about the authors of the essays than about Milosz, and I found these less compelling. A memorable later piece is Judith Tannenbaum's "Milosz at San Quentin," a memoir about the Nobel Laureate's visit to her creative writing class in the prison. This essay is more than an anecdote, it is a beautifully written memoir that includes Milosz and ponders the big questions the poet himself was also concerned with as he talks to the inmates about the nature of good and evil.
Overall, An Invisible Rope is a very strong collection, and what it gives a reader is a sense of the man, more than of his work, though a few writers, like Seamus Heaney and Joanna Zach, do focus beautifully on poetry. Still, this is not meant to be a collection about Milosz's poetry per se; this is a collection of remembrances about the man himself, and, it is an eminently readable book. While it would be useful for students of poetry, I could see the collection appealing to anyone with an interest in the nature of art and genius. In his essay "In Gratitude for All the Gifts," Seamus Heaney notes that "with Milosz gone, the world has lost a credible witness to this immemorial belief in the saving power of poetry." But along with the power of Milosz's own words, we have this collection, and these fragments of memory create a captivating and human portrait of the poet and his life.
Chavez, Lisa D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chavez, Lisa D. "An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz." Sarmatian Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, p. 1694. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303450065/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=13cba18c. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A303450065
An Invisible rope: portraits of Czeslaw Milosz
D. Hutchins
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 49.1 (Sept. 2011): p117.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
49-0160
PG7158
2010-37732 CIP
An Invisible rope: portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, ed. by Cynthia L. Haven. Ohio University, 2011. 280p bibl index afp ISBN 9780804011327, $59.95; ISBN 9780804011334 pbk, $26.95
An "invisible rope" connects these 31 very personal reminiscences of Czesiaw Milosz (1911-2004). Written by scholars and Milosz's colleagues, fellow poets, and former students, these narratives (several of which are available online) of encounters with the Polish Lithuanian 1980 Nobelist are presented without editorial corrections and serve as "in memoriam." Bringing to life the poet as a man of blood and sinew--an Everyman--the collection shows Milosz's jovial and somber moments and reveals his overriding concern about his poetic legacy and poetry's task of "witnessing to mankind's history." Some of the commentaries are self-aggrandizing, but particularly noteworthy are Clare Cavanagh's reverent "Job and Forrest Gump"; Zygmunt Malinowski's "Poet versus Camera" remarks on his photographs of Mitoszz (included here); George Gomori's musings on poetic translation in "An Epistolary Friendship"; and tributes by luminary poets Robert Pinsky, Tomas Venclova, Adam Zagajewski, and Seamus Heaney. Augmented by a helpful detailed chronology of the poet's oeuvre, the apocryphal essays serve both to place the man within his epoch and to fill in the gaps for those who knew him. The umbilicus of recollections delivers the poet to posterity. This collection is a must for everyone aspiring to know Mitosz and his work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** All readers.--D. Hutchins, Buena Vista University
Hutchins, D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hutchins, D. "An Invisible rope: portraits of Czeslaw Milosz." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Sept. 2011, p. 117. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A266345338/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85a157f1. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A266345338
An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz
Alice-Catherine Carls
World Literature Today. 85.4 (July-August 2011): p76+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Cynthia L. Haven, ed. Athens, Ohio. Swallow / Ohio University Press. 2011. xxi + 280 pages. $59.95 ($26.65 paper). ISBN 978-0-8040-1132-7 (1133-4 paper)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) grew up in Lithuania, studied law at the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, and became a leading avant-garde poet. After World War II, he served in the Polish diplomatic corps. In early 1951, he sought political asylum in Paris, immediately starting a lifelong collaboration with the émigré institution founded by Jerzy Giedroyc, Instytut Literacki (Kultura), who was the sole publisher of his works in Polish until 1989. In 1960 Milosz began teaching at the University of Berkeley. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He resettled in Kraków in 2000. With essays ranging from the luminous vignette to the longer philosophical musing, the thirty-two contributors to An Invisible Rope chronicle the North American half of Milosz's life and deal tactfully with its controversial aspects. This is an honest tribute that puts an affectionate stamp of ownership on Milosz during the centennial year of his birth.
Milosz used charisma, talent, elective affinities, circumstance, and patronage to braid a life rope that helped him fuse his bifurcated life. The Polish language provided the core of a growing elite group of colleagues, students, academics, diplomats, poets, translators, writers, émigrés, editors, and personal assistants, with whom he engaged in passionate and often conflicted friendships. Another important strand in the rope was his fight against oblivion. Indeed, Milosz felt a sense of urgency that only those who have experienced utter destruction can understand, and that was particularly poignant in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was still struggling to find an audience.
If the rich composite portrait of the poet is one of the main delights of the book, two other important views emerge: namely, the portrait of his literary entourage, and the biography of his books. Milosz contributed to a multitude of projects and generously encouraged his fellow poets. He was a formidable ambassador of Polish literature in the United States and of Anglo-American poetry in Poland. He shaped Polish studies curricula in North American universities by training an entire generation of academics, translators, poets, and writers who re-create here not only the cultural context of Milosz's life but also the story of the exacting and complex birthing, maturation, and reception of his works. The precision and care with which the thirty-two contributors wrote their remarks is a tribute to Milosz's formative impact, and it makes An Invisible Rope indispensable reading for future biographers, bibliographers, and translators.
The book spends a fair amount of time discussing the poet's religious beliefs. This was an important issue for Milosz, who was not totally reconciled with Roman Catholicism. He was troubled by evil and revolted by violence. True to Polish tradition, he endowed his poetry with humanizing, ethical, historical, and salvationist values, his own life a triumph over war, exile, and oblivion through an endurance "that comes from enduring." Milosz was a literary giant, a continent in himself. As Gombrowicz noted, with one stroke of the pen, Milosz shifted the moral center of European literature one thousand miles east. He was one of the few Nobel laureates who wrote good literature until the end. As An Invisible Rope shows us, despite his fervent efforts to transform the devenir of experience into être, he never stopped becoming.
Alice-Catherine Carls
University of Tennessee at Martin
Carls, Alice-Catherine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carls, Alice-Catherine. "An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz." World Literature Today, vol. 85, no. 4, 2011, p. 76+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A260062878/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1feb884d. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A260062878
An invisible rope; portraits of Czeslaw Milosz
Reference & Research Book News. 26.3 (June 2011):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780804011334
An invisible rope; portraits of Czeslaw Milosz.
Ed. by Cynthia L. Haven.
Ohio University Press
2011
280 pages
$26.65
Paperback
PG7158
Haven, contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, presents a collection of reminiscences by those who knew the great poet and Nobel laureate, including his students, and other poets. The essays are organized chronologically by the date the authors met Milosz, ranging from the 1930s to near the time of his death. Among the authors are Adam Zagajewski, Tomas Venclova, Robert Pinsky, Leonard Nathan, Daniel Halpern, and Zygmunt Malinowski. Haven concludes the volume with an interview with former poet laureate and Milosz translator Robert Hass and a selected bibliography of Milosz's works.
([c]2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An invisible rope; portraits of Czeslaw Milosz." Reference & Research Book News, June 2011. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A257995616/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2a06ea6. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A257995616