WRB—Apr. 23, 2025

“commercial buccaneers”

“Why not be a managing editor of the Washington Review of Books? You’d be a fine managing editor. Perhaps, a great one.”
“And if I was who would know it?”
“You, your readers, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that . . . Oh, and a quiet life.”

N.B.:

The N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”

May’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Carlo Massimo, ​Molly McCloskey,​ Kelly Sather, and ​Ena Selimović, will take place on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Sudhouse DC. Readings begin at 7.

Links:

• In The American Scholar, Matthew Zipf on commas:

  Punctuation controls two things: logical separation and breath. In Adler’s words, “part of it is meaning, and part of it is cadence.” Writers weigh each role differently. Didion wrote that grammar was a piano she learned to play by ear, and she seems to have given priority to breath. Adler learned grammar in school, where she diagrammed sentences, and then at The New Yorker, which gave far more weight to logic. The magazine, where she began working at age 24, was alternately beloved and deplored for its commas. If a phrase was not essential to the sentence, the editors wanted it enveloped: thus “on the phone,” a wrapped-up appositive. (“May I offer you a comma?” the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, used to say to Adler in editing sessions.) Punctuation grew into a dogmatic inheritance, a passion, and a trademark of the magazine. E. B. White wrote that “commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

  [“Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon.” (Or “Comma, comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon”?) I personally am on the side of breath, probably because I swear by reading all my writing to myself sotto voce as part of the editing process. And so my rule is, more or less: if I don’t pause at a comma, it gets removed, and if I pause where there isn’t a comma, it gets inserted. And so I can’t help but read a sentence of Adler’s like the one Zipf quotes at the end—“But I believe, you know, I actually, naturally think, in long, sad, singing lines”—with a pause at each comma. It becomes almost Jamesian at that point in a way; the pauses and reconsiderations enforced there with clause after clause are produced here with comma after comma. —Steve]

• In Commonweal,

  Santiago Ramos
  on Mario Vargas Llosa:

  Vargas Llosa’s eurocentrism, especially his francophilia, were common among the Latin American bourgeoisie of his time. (You can still encounter traces of it—my mother, for example, still refers to a nightclub as a boîte.) Spain may have been the imperial motherland, but it was France that represented the pinnacle of art and culture. There’s even a word in Spanish for francophiles like Vargas Llosa: afrancesado, one who becomes French by choice. But for him, as for the rest of the Boom, the ambition to associate oneself with the universality that France symbolized was not in tension with the desire to tell the story of Latin America. On the contrary, it was a point of pride that Latin America should take its rightful place in la cultural universal, as they called it.

  The Boom writers were able to reconcile this plainly elitist cultural attitude with left-wing politics. Garcia Marquez was honored throughout Europe while he lived in Castro’s Cuba. Julio Cortazar complained that “Boom” was an English word—the language of yanqui imperialists—and he donated the rights of one of his books to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But he was also an aesthete who attacked telurismo, the regionalist and indigenist tendencies in Latin American literature, which he dismissed as provincial and proto-nationalistic. No one, Cortazar wrote, “will get very far with these regional hangups,” just as the Boom writers “would [not] be worth much if they renounced their condition as Latin Americans and joined, more or less parasitically, any European literature.” As late as 2021, Vargas Llosa defended Cortazar’s polemic against telurismo.

Reviews:

• In The New Republic, Scott Bradfield reviews Peter Brooks’ new book on Henry James’ return to the States (Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, April 15) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 9, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 2, 2025 and an excerpt in WRB—Apr. 5, 2025.]:

  In “The Jolly Corner,” James’ final short story and his last completed fictional effort to describe the psycho-emotional journey from America to Europe and back again, his central protagonist, Spencer Brydon, returns to New York City after several decades abroad to catch up with two of his old properties, which are situated on opposing corners of a downtown intersection—one corner is filled with quite “jolly” memories of childhood, while the other is darkly implicated in a financial world that has been providing Brydon the money he needed to leave that world behind. He hates being back in New York and can only make his days purposeful in ways that most James characters do—by relentless observation. So he sets out: “to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.”

  Brydon’s expedition into his former American properties leads him to discover, or intuit, the ghost of the man he might have been had he never escaped to Europe—an alternate self that has been transformed into an “awful beast” with a mutilated hand and a “rage of personality” powerful enough to sustain him in the jungle of American commerce. In other words, the sort of man who could no longer appreciate Europe’s rich, alternative possibilities, and who lived only for his “million a year.”

  • BDM
    on Katy Perry:

    And for this reason, she’s kind of a nobody. A wealthy nobody. Whatever societal ills this space jaunt represents, she’s not really their cause, or even their primary symptom. She’s just . . . irrelevant. Irrelevant to pop culture, to space, to politics. That’s probably the worst thing to be, from her perspective, but from mine . . . well, it would way be worse to be relevant to this mess, frankly.

  • T. S. Eliot:

    Somehow I have not felt since last March that I ever wanted to see America again. Certainly at the present time I think I should feel like an adult among children. Probably I shall get over this dread in time.

  • Also Eliot (and in “In Memory of Henry James,” no less):

    [Americans] like to be told that they are a race of commercial buccaneers. It gives them something easily escaped from, moreover, when they wish to reject America.

  • David Bowie:

    I’m afraid of Americans

    I’m afraid of the world

    I’m afraid I can’t help it

    I’m afraid I can’t

[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:

• Virgilian groves

• The poetry of spring

• Hannah on a Poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and the rain

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]