The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
N.B.:
April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”
And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.
Links:
Two on teaching Gatsby:
In ,
on teaching it for three years in a row:Is it possible that Nick loveees Gatsby (many students wonder about this)? Regardless of the nature of his love, here we get a justification for Nick’s presence. He is the only one left who has continuously returned to Gatsby, both literally (to his home, his aid, his funeral), and narratively—the story is told retrospectively. The layered understanding of his grandeur and his emptiness comes from the many obsessive years we imagine Nick spends mulling Gatsby over. This is the love Gatsby cannot give Daisy because he’s too busy extracting and imposing; it’s the love of being seen. This is close reading at its best. On a surface read we can get the obsession Gatsby has with Daisy, but we will never understand—or at least be able to explain—the curiosity of Nick’s presence and the depth of his desire to believe in something bigger, more “romantic” than himself, a belief that compels him to return to this man’s story over and over again. Gatsby itself becomes a text about returning: Gatsby to Daisy, Nick to Gatsby, us (at least those shaped by the American high school system) to the novel.
Many critics of close reading pride themselves on reading more books because they privilege the narrative, without pausing to analyze or over-read; they return to books because they love the character or the plot or the vibe. But close reading is just applying the obsession we have with plot and character to language itself, and returning to the words—the building blocks of the other parts—with the same attention as the first time. It’s treating the language itself like a room worth returning to, or a person who we love but can’t quite figure out.
[There is, of course, the quote from Lady Bird (2017): “Don’t you think they are maybe the same thing, love and attention?”
There is also the joke about sonneteers: “if a man writes a woman one sonnet, he loves her; if he writes her three hundred sonnets, he loves sonnets.” Writing over and over again becomes a way of close reading the situation, going over it repeatedly to see what those repeated readings can turn up, and at a certain point it becomes indistinguishable from reading past readings. Gatsby is not just Nick’s record of Gatsby and what happened to him, but his record of him processing it, going over that portion of his life over and over again until he could turn it into the text. And the polish of that text indicates that Fitzgerald had also gone over it many times. —Steve]
In Public Books, Andrew Newman on what students find in Gatsby’s vision of America:
“There’s something so beautifully perfect about that little novel,” [Tanya Baker, the Executive Director of the National Writing Project] said. “I think many young people growing up in the United States, in the particular culture that we live in, yearn for things that they don’t understand the costs of, and for a kind of life that they see represented around them. But they don’t understand why some people have it and some people don’t, and why. What would it take to access it, or if it’s even possible to access it. And in The Great Gatsby is sort of the perfect characterization of that desire that we’ve been fed, and it’s so poignant.” Her words made me reconsider my own ambivalence about the novel, as well as its curricular uses.
“I just think it stunned me when I was 17,” she continued. “And I taught it for 10 years when I was a high school teacher—it stunned other kids. You know it stunned kids. And it’s so little, and there’s so much. You know, people will talk about the purple prose, but it’s like . . . so American, actually, this idea that we can build something extraordinary—”
“And then have it come crashing down,” I interjected.
“And then have it come crashing down,” she agreed, “without ever really recognizing what it costs.”
[Gatsby’s whole plan is the sort of thing that makes sense to a teenager in love; the process of reading is not merely the process of disillusionment but also comes with an understanding that such plans exist in a world that can maybe be influenced but not controlled. (Romeo and Juliet is also in part about this.) —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Ronjaunee Chatterjee interviews Nathan Brown about his new translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil: The Definitive English Language Edition, January):
Here, Baudelaire’s diction is rendered in English; the word is, after all, a cognate. We also have “The absent palms of splendid Africa,” which directly renders the sense of the third line and conveys the combination of social realism and idealizing exoticism this stanza involves. This doubling of registers is essential to the poem, which allegorizes its historically situated depiction of Paris during Haussmannization by identifying it with the fall of Troy. The famous opening clause of the poem—Andromaque, je pense à vous!—is doubled by the phrase Je pense à la négresse: Andromache was taken as a slave after the death of her husband, Hector, and the fall of her city. The complex allegorical operation of Baudelaire’s stanza has to be situated in the context of transatlantic slavery, which continued in some French colonies until the mid-nineteenth century. Africans sold into slavery, and their descendants, arrived in the metropole through circuitous paths: as refugees, as “servants,” as concubines, sometimes as freed men and women. Baudelaire’s lover, Jeanne Duval, was Haitian. He was intensely cathected, on many levels, to the exoticist imaginary of French colonialism, not least insofar as he was in love with a Haitian woman of mixed race, whom he also deployed as a token of exotic fascination in his poems.
[We linked to a review of a French edition of Baudelaire’s collected works in WRB—Sept. 7, 2024. It’s worth comparing Baudelaire’s complex setup here with the significantly less complex setup of the first stanza of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” —Steve]
In Words Without Borders, Saudamini Deo on the reception of translations of works from India:
Already, critical responses to and reviews of non-Western translated texts are rare, and wherever we do find them (whether in anglophone publications or in publications from “native” countries like India), the criticism seems to grapple only with the authenticity question and how fluid and mellifluous the text is in English, how easy it might be for the average English reader to comprehend. The average English reader test is one that all non-Western translations must pass, even though no such test exists for other translations. In India Today’s review of Gillian Wright’s translation of Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla (1968, 2012), the anonymous critic writes that “One misses the robust Awadhi dialect. Whereas the Khari Boli dialogues read well in English, the attempt to translate Awadhi in archaic English sticks out [ . . . ] Fortunately there are few such attempts. Wright seems to be in two minds when translating proverbs. Some are literal like “he beat all my ribs and bones to chaff”: others English substitutes.” Some may agree or disagree with the review, but the complete absence of the translator’s viewpoint and consideration of her approach is jarring. Arunava Sinha, a celebrated and prolific translator from the Bangla, talks about critics and criticism in one of his interviews: “What I have found is that very often the criticism of translation comes from this notion that, ‘This is such a good book in Bangla (or any other language) that it could never be translated. Therefore, the translation must be bad.’ This is the kind of response I’ve faced from people who haven’t even read the translation. They’re criticizing on principle.” He goes on to add, “There is a big lack of discourse.”
In Liberties, Alfred Brendel on Haydn:
The means of expression that Haydn applies in order to achieve comic results have been thoroughly scrutinized. For my part, I would mention: seeming absentmindedness, sudden interruptions, repetitions of motifs, marking time, sudden manifestations of power, feigned naivete next to the genuine kind, musical twinkle, the idea to start a piece with its end, unfounded insistences, the relish of the unforeseen. And of course the surprises of instrumentation. Not all that is unexpected is necessarily comical: in the magnificent Military Symphony No. 100, we may prefer to experience the incursion of pandemonium as a frightening memento mori. And not every finale is a big joke: the whispered fugues in some of his early quartets convey a different, partly cryptic, partly intellectual message.
Among the surprises that Haydn springs on us is his string quartet Op. 42. It stands all on its own, a wallflower between those larger quartets in series of six or three. It is terse and avoids virtuosity, a work of touching modesty, a starting point for a new mode of expression that Haydn decided not to pursue. On the interaction between Haydn and Mozart, Tovey writes that Haydn’s effect on Mozart resulted in an increased concentration of symmetry, while Mozart aided Haydn in liberating himself, making it possible to be no less capricious in his larger pieces than in his minuets and anti-minuets. In his quartet Op. 42, it seems the reverse: Haydn simplifies. Only the finale makes use of counterpoint.
[Brendel complains that not enough attention is paid to Haydn’s humor. If anything, I think I’ve encountered the reverse—too much attention is paid to it and it ends up belittling him, as if he had to do jokes because he was somehow deficient at writing “serious” music. Sometimes great art is funny. Horace is funny. Jane Austen is funny. Buster Keaton is funny. And Haydn is funny. Doesn’t make any of them less great. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, an essay adapted from Eimear McBride’s introduction to a new edition of The Unnamable (by Samuel Beckett, 1953, translated by Beckett into English, 1958, March)
Assertion, followed by denial, sometimes followed by reassertion, forms what central thesis The Unnamable recognizably contains. For, while our man may be caused to suffer from “little attacks of hope from time to time”, he is most often preoccupied by questions of whether he does or does not, has or will ever, exist at all. And if he is, or is not, currently in the process of dying or of being born. However, even if either were to be the case—and he’s not saying they are—he doubts such ephemeral activities could imply greater existential meaning anyway. Because who am I? No one. What’s happening? Nothing. What’s the point of all this? There isn’t one . . . probably. What he really wants is for it all to stop. The talking. The being. The having to go on. But, whenever it does, it just starts again. This is a novel that’s less “life finds a way” than “unfortunately, life finds a way.”
Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
N.B. (cont.):
Photographing Abraham Lincoln and his beard.
A Facebook group where cops answer questions from crime writers like “How long could someone survive if they were locked in a bank vault over a long weekend? And would there automatically be an autopsy if they died?”
New issue: Liberties Volume 5 - Number 3 | Spring 2025 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“How Many Demands . . . ” by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer
How many demands the beloved can make!
The woman discarded, none.
How glad I am that today the water
Under the colorless ice is motionless.And I stand—Christ help me!—
On this shroud that is brittle and bright,
But save my letters
So that our descendants can decide,So that you, courageous and wise,
Will be seen by them with greater clarity.
Perhaps we may leave some gaps
In your glorious biography?Too sweet is earthly drink,
Too tight the nets of love.
Sometime let the children read
My name in their lesson book,
And on learning the sad story,
Let them smile shyly . . .
Since you’ve given me neither love nor peace
Grant me bitter glory.
[Here in Maine, we’re still caught in the tantalizing embrace of a fickle false spring. There are no green buds or daffodils yet—perhaps a few crocuses, and some robins when the sun is high. But, too, there are still stubborn piles of snow in shadowed stretches of the woods and each morning you still have to ask, before choosing a coat, “is it supposed to snow today?” And so, the setting of this poem, which opens overlooking standing water glazed with ice, drew me to it. I am fond of poems where the poet in love is carried along by the sensual suggestions of nature, seeing echoes of their passion in every movement and sensation they meet. But, in the aftermath of a breakup, these same suggestions can turn bitter. Here Akhmatova expresses gratitude that there is stillness in her surroundings instead of anything more lifelike. The water is motionless, and the crust of the earth is like a shroud for a past love. Here is an echo of passion—but a dead one.
And yet, even as she stares into the blank page of unfeeling ice, she keeps her love letters (“my letters,” she pointedly says, not “ours”). “How many demands the beloved can make! The woman discarded, none.” And yet, she makes one.
If the chill setting is what drew me to this poem, these lines were what really plunged me under its surface to the cold fire at its heart, and made it my choice for today: “Too sweet is earthly drink, / Too tight the nets of love.”
How many songs and poems describe the experience of drowning a breakup in a bottle? Akhmatova will have none of them. Such shallow peace is not for her—a sickly imitation of a deeper peace she didn’t find in passion. Love itself is a cast-off net, far too restrictive for the expanse of the anger left in its stead. Acrid irony drips from her faux-solicitude for the future reputation of her erstwhile lover. No, there will be no gaps left for posterity to guess at. In her letters and in her verse, she keeps a record of the truth. Standing in a wasteland of bright, brittle silence, the discarded woman, once beloved, stands with pen in hand and makes one demand after all: “Since you've given me neither love nor peace / Grant me bitter glory.” —Hannah]
[“You’re Still On My Mind” and “The Bottle Let Me Down” are great songs, though. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 15
Fugitive Tilts: Essays
by Ishion Hutchinson
From the publisher: In Fugitive Tilts, the poet Ishion Hutchinson turns to prose to create an incomplete biography of love: love of poetry, discovered in childhood; love of home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works and artists—from Treasure Island, to John Coltrane, to the Jamaican music of his youth—that look over him with an angel’s aura.
Drawing inspiration from Derek Walcott’s notion that “the sea is history,” Fugitive Tilts is suffused with the sea, present whether Hutchinson is recalling a trip to Senegal or memorializing his grandmother in a meditation on a painting by Édouard Vuillard. With this fresh, archipelagic sensibility Hutchinson confronts the fraught questions of inheritances and influences, “acknowledging,” in his words, “something outside our view.” These essays, varied in their forms and ranging across time and place, allow Hutchinson to build a space from which the suffering of the past and the present can be reckoned with and survived.
Also out Tuesday:
Algonquin Books: In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf by Heather Christle [We linked to a review in WRB—Mar. 1, 2025.]
Archipelago Books: stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken
Sarabande Books: My Heresies: Poems by Alina Stefanescu
Verso: Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Education of Henry Adams. [One thing the praise of this book would not tell you is the frequency with which Adams delivers hilariously dry sentences with an aphoristic quality. Some examples:
Even the Washington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had singular charm, and used it.
The Managing Editor has not lived in Washington for the better part of a decade and demurs.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
If you enjoy the WRB why not subscribe, and why not encourage your friends and lovers and associates and acquaintances and rivals and enemies to do the same?
The newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and thinking in another.
I invite readers to supply their own jokes about Straussianism here. I myself don’t even have one personality, let alone two.
At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go nowhere else.
As Gertrude Stein may or may not have said, “You are all a dead generation.”
And in the sort of thing I appreciate, Adams complains that at no point in his education was his attention drawn to the opening lines of Lucretius, and he then attempts what seems to me a rather audacious connection with Dante. He quotes a line from the opening of De rerum natura: Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas—“since you alone govern the nature of things” (Adams’ emphasis, my translation) and compares it to a stanza in the hymn to the Blessed Virgin in Canto 33 of the Paradiso:
Donna, sei tanto grande e tanto vali,
che qual vuol grazia ed a te non ricorre,
sua disianza vuol volar senz’ali.Lady, thou art so great, and so prevailing,
That he who wishes grace, nor runs to thee,
His aspirations without wings would fly.
(Longfellow’s translation.) “The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools,” Adams claims—but I would not take Lucretius’ invocation of Venus straight. I do appreciate the subtle perversity (in a book full of it) of claiming that the opening lines of De rerum natura are “perhaps the finest in all Latin literature.” I’m sure whoever taught Henry Adams Latin was very owned. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Hazlitt (h/t Patrick Kurp):
I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance, writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage:—another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not quite come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.
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