Sponsored by Knight First Amendment Institute Geoffrey O’Brien is one of those writers who can write about anything: opera, British postwar film, crime fiction, the Third Reich, Grant Wood, Patti Smith, Duke Ellington, Seinfeld. Yet these subjects are often united by a kind of nostalgia—or more precisely, the kind of nostalgia that can be mediated through the televisual form. His essay from our August 20, 2026, issue, “A Gust from Another World,” is about the Bridey Murphy craze of the 1950s, which was sparked by the account of a young Colorado woman who discovered, under hypnosis, that she was possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Irishwoman. The dubious story (first documented in a book by her hypnotist, then adapted into a movie) helped give rise to a fascination with the unconscious, hypnotists, the afterlife, and mind control. For O’Brien, who remembers the craze from his childhood, it was “a blast from the country of the dead” that cut through a midcentury world “grounded in practicalities, reassured by material things that functioned: fuse boxes, automobile engines, lawn mowers, power drills, reel-to-reel tape recorders.” 
Geoffrey O’Brien O’Brien has written nine books of poetry, a novel, and ten books of nonfiction. He is the editor of the Library of America book series and a longtime contributor to The New York Review. His criticism has also appeared in, among many other publications, Artforum, The New York Times, and The New Republic, and he has written dozens of essays to accompany Criterion Collection editions of movies, including Young Mr. Lincoln, High and Low, The Lady Vanishes, and Moonrise Kingdom. Over a few days in August, we emailed and spoke on the phone about getting into opera, film archives, and Jane Austen. 
Advertisement Lauren Kane: Let’s start at the beginning. Your writing life began with poetry? Geoffrey O’Brien: I had the good luck to be born into what amounted to a well-stocked library. My parents were largely self-educated after high school, and both were passionate readers. They had a special interest in theater, so the house was full of plays of all eras and countries, and also much else: classic writers in affordable editions (Dumas, Dickens, Keats, Voltaire, Conrad, et al.), books on art, and loads of the detective fiction they loved. I came upon poetry by poking around in these volumes, Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Poe’s poems, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and whatever caught my attention in various old poetry anthologies, for instance The Riverside Book of Verse and Conrad Aiken’s Modern American Poets. I still have many of those old books and go back to them often. Because theater was such a consuming topic in the house, I associated poetry first of all with speech and performance. Later on free verse forms attracted me by way of the Psalms (King James), Whitman, and translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry, which eventually led to Pound, Williams, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and others—at which point (in my late teens) I started making my own attempts. I felt I could write a book about that early process of being a reader before being a writer, and published a small volume called Where Did Poetry Come From a few years ago. It does seem you are never done with beginning. You began writing about opera in the pages of The New York Review. How did that happen? Without Robert Silvers I probably would never have written a word about opera. He asked me one day if I was interested in reviewing a production of The Rake’s Progress at the Met; I told him I didn’t know the opera, in fact didn’t know much about opera at all, and what little I did know I mostly learned through recordings rather than live performances. He replied simply that in that case I should go out and see some operas. I followed the advice for several years, something made easier by the fact that the more affordable City Opera was still functioning then, and when he came back with another suggestion I felt ready to at least take a stab. When I was growing up I did hear a great deal about opera from my oldest brother, a precocious musician who never missed a Saturday afternoon Met broadcast and was already studying Wagner orchestrations as a child. (I enjoyed leafing through his copies of Opera News to read the plot summaries and look at the costumes.) He felt I should see an opera at the old Met before it closed, and took me along with him when I was thirteen—the opera in question was Parsifal, maybe not the best starting point. (A few years later Carmen proved more approachable.) Not being a musician, at first I approached opera as drama enhanced to the maximum degree, with language expanded by music and music framed by visible patterns, structures, colors, and fabrics, analogous in its way to bunraku or kabuki. I still feel like a novice. There is always a moment, watching an opera, when it feels like an unknown labyrinth is opening. 
Advertisement You’ve written recently for us about certain periods in film: Fifties Hollywood, postwar British cinema, the singular work of Buster Keaton. How do you conduct research when writing on film history? If you do archival research, what kinds of things do you hope to discover? The poet Jack Spicer wrote that poems cannot live alone any more than people can. The same goes for movies. The collective process involved in the making of even one film is extended by the electric impact of films placed in juxtaposition. I’m indebted to the film archivists and programmers who make possible those experiences of immersion, whether in a single body of work or a given time and place. In the Sixties, certain directorial retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Theater (Hitchcock, Dreyer, Lubitsch, Sternberg, Keaton), as well as Lawrence Alloway’s curated examination of violence in American films at MOMA, or the New Yorker’s genre by genre explorations of Thirties and Forties Hollywood (featuring many films that were then hard to see): all these made a permanent impression. The effect of bringing a host of films together in this way is never predictable; even familiar elements don’t look the same. You cohabit with them, and it’s very much like slipping into a time warp and making direct contact with what is no longer there. The challenge is to stay open and not make hasty judgments. You write in the Review’s Summer Issue that long after the Bridey Murphy furor had subsided, she remained a postwar “beacon for a culture awash in the uncanny.” What do you think she, and her story, represented to Americans of the time? How does the uncanny persist in our culture today, if at all? As Alison Winter suggested in her book Memory (2012), the Bridey Murphy story didn’t so much introduce something new as bring into view currents that had long been there. Many people who read Morey Bernstein’s book came forward with accounts of their own paranormal experiences, and in the following decades these moved from the margins ever closer to the center, incorporated into memoirs, fictions, professional practices (channeling, past life therapy, and much more), or evolving belief systems, whether religious or political or an amalgam of both. When I worked for an occult bookselling firm in the 1970s I was overwhelmed by the range of traditions and trends within their compass, but even then could not have foreseen the scope and variety of what has followed. Bridey Murphy was very much a harbinger of what has emerged and continues to emerge, perhaps not as flamboyantly visible as it was in the Sixties and Seventies, but only as far away as a click or two on a laptop. What books or recent reading projects have been particularly meaningful experiences to you? You mentioned in an earlier conversation reading through Jane Austen—did you arrive at any new insights about her? Aside from renewed amazement at each of the novels, I discovered in Austen’s so-called juvenilia a treasury of brilliant comic writing, wickedly observant and demonstrating from the start a genius for parody. If Austen had not survived to adulthood, I think these would be recognized as unique achievements. They are as hilarious as anything I have read by more mature writers. By contrast the remarkable fragment The Watsons—a novel she abandoned—describes a social world akin to that of the finished novels, but seen in a much harsher light by a young woman (another Emma) who has been estranged by long absence from her own family and milieu, and is mortified on her return by “unequal Society, and family Discord…. Hard-hearted prosperity, low-minded Conceit, and wrong-headed folly, engrafted on an untoward Disposition,” until, in solitude, “the dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.” 
Advertisement More by Geoffrey O’Brien at nybooks.com
A Gust from Another WorldThe Search for Bridey Murphy caused a sensation in 1950s America, and while its tale of reincarnation was soon discredited, it revealed a deep cultural fascination with the supernatural. 
They Knew Too MuchSteven Spielberg’s new film is a discordant, ambiguous errand into the maze of ufology. 
Sein of the Times“The mutual kvetching of Jerry and George—of which we’re given just enough to know how unbearable continuous exposure would be—serves as the ground bass over which Kramer, Elaine, and the expanding circle of subsidiary characters weave endless comic variations. The relationship of Jerry and George is much like that of talk show host and sidekick, marked by constant obligatory banter indistinguishable from nagging. In short, a comfortable level of hostility and mistrust is maintained, upheld by everyone’s fundamental desire not to get too closely involved with other people.” 
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sábado, 22 de agosto de 2026
Braving the Labyrinth
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