WRB—Apr. 2, 2025

“notoriously unfashionable”

RESIST THE MANAGING EDITOR OF THE WASHINGTON REVIEW OF BOOKS, AND SAVE YOURSELVES FROM THE BURDEN OF £6000 OF ADDITIONAL TAXATION

N.B.:

April’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Diana Brown, Owen Paul Edwards, Celeste Marcus, ​Will Snider, and Kelly Xio, will take place on Wednesday, April 9 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.

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:

Reviews:

• Two in Literary Review:

  • Peter Rose reviews a book about Henry James (Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, by Peter Brooks, April 15) and a collection of his essays (On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays, edited by Michael Gorra, April 15):

    James had many names for his mobile persona—“the restless analyst,” “the lone visionary,” “the visionary tourist,” “the palpitating pilgrim.” But what was he to make of the country he had fled in 1875, deeming it insufficiently rich and textured to fire his imagination? Brooks sees James as an anthropologist and likens him to Alexis de Tocqueville. With the assumptive omniscience of the biographer, Brooks writes that James recognized “the ineradicable depth of his American roots. In returning to the United States he was obeying some almost primal drive.”

    James was shocked by the squalor in the South. He lamented the ostentatious wealth and was cutting about America’s new “hotel-civilization.” America was not dedicated to equality but to what he called “eligibility” through accumulated wealth. Adrift in the “unservanted state,” with its shrill accents and breezy manners, James missed the European class distinctions and observances. He complained that women had been left in charge of culture and the arts while men were solely interested in making money.

    [Americans are always recognizing the ineradicable depth of their American roots. As that Missourah boy over in England put it:

    I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

    Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,

    Anglo-Catholic in religion, classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and opening his poem with a paraphrase of “Ol’ Man River”—“There’s a brown god called the Mississippi / That’s the brown god that I’d like to be.” —Steve]

  • Seamus Perry reviews a book about Blake and those he inspired (William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World, by Philip Hoare, May 6):

    The last items on that list are of particular significance, for among Hoare’s other books is a memorable account of the lives of whales. Those noble creatures play an unexpectedly large role in this work too. He gathers several sightings in Blake’s poetry (“a whale, I lash / The raging, fathomless abyss”). They are certainly creatures suited to Blake’s sense of the delightfully monstrous. Hoare has also tracked down numerous documented sightings of whales in Blake’s London, and finds other things too. Lambeth, where Blake lived for a time, was, it turns out, “home to two manufactories busily refining spermaceti oil brought back by British whale ships sent to the South Seas with their harping irons.” The Blakes’ flat in South Molton Street was over a shop selling corsets “stiff with whalebone, as worn by the Prince of Whales.” As that pun indicates, Hoare writes about all this with exuberance (“Personally I believe sea serpents existed”), while cheerfully acknowledging his waywardness: “But I digress. Whales do that to you.”

    [The last sentence here is what Moby-Dick is about. Great job by the editor who titled this review, by the way. —Steve]

• In the local and free Beacon,

  Micah Mattix
  reviews a biography of Poe (Edgar A. Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley, March) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 15, 2025.]:

  George Rex Graham, the owner of Graham’s Magazine, remembered Poe as a “polished gentleman,” always “the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar, the devoted husband, frugal in his personal expenses, punctual and unwearied in his industry, and the soul of honor in all his transactions.” Another editor at a magazine where Poe worked remembered him as “a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times every one liked him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have met.”

  Poe’s sometimes acidic criticism could cause problems for his employers, but it also led to increased circulation. He disliked the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the moralistic Transcendentalists. “Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Poe wrote in one issue of Graham’s, “belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatsoever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake.” In a review of Henry Cockton’s now-forgotten novel Stanley Thorn, Poe wrote, “It not only demands no reflection, but repels it, or dissipates it—much as a silver rattle the wrath of a child.”

  [Tired of magazines being named stuff like The New Review or, alternatively, Shimmer. Bring back magazines named Graham’s Magazine. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• An additional jab at T. S. Eliot

• Paradise Regained revisited

• Hannah on a Poem by Emily Brontë (with cameos by William Blake and Matthew Prior), and me in defense of Wuthering Heights

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.

—Steve]