When old Cato was asked what was the most profitable feature of an estate, he replied: “Raising cattle successfully.” What next to that? “Raising cattle with fair success.” And next? “Raising cattle with but slight success.” And fourth? “Raising crops.” And when his questioner said, “How about a books-and-culture email newsletter?” Cato replied: “How about murder?”
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:
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Claire Messud on Lolita at 70:
As a character comments in Nabokov’s early novel Bend Sinister (1947), “curiosity [ . . . ] is insubordination in its purest form.” Such insubordination is, and perhaps not only in a Nabokovian universe, the beginning of hope: it’s a refusal to accept the limitations of the known; it’s an openness to the real, to whatever that may be and however uncomfortable we may find it. When we read Lolita with our eyes open, we experience perforce multiple emotions, often simultaneously. We can’t help but recognize this known world, our familiar fallen humanity—terrible, hilarious, beautiful, absurd, monstrous and tragic. Who doesn’t wish to shape the world according to our fantasy? And yet, Nabokov suggests, each of us must learn the evil consequences of such desire. Humbert, at 70, remains unspeakable but as meaningfully speaking as ever. His story and Lolita’s fate resonate beyond topical trash, beyond the hollow problematic, in an overdetermined ecstasis (in its original Greek sense: standing outside oneself). Painfully, paradoxically, in this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass.
[Messud mentions Alice Munro; we linked to a piece in WRB—Dec. 11, 2024 by Giles Harvey about Munro that mentions Lolita:
Nabokov said he felt the “initial shiver” of Lolita after reading a newspaper story about an ape “who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” It appears that this was Munro’s subject, too.
Cf. also Dana Dragunoiu on Nabokov, morality, and freedom (as linked to in WRB—Mar. 6, 2024). —Steve]
In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Peter Brooks’ upcoming book about Henry James (Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, April 15):
Henry’s rejection of William’s strictures on his novel becomes a not entirely covert critique of William’s provincialism, his incapacity to see beyond the values of Cambridge, Harvard, and New Hampshire. Which is perhaps fair enough: for all the range and perceptiveness of his writings, and his wide reading of German and French psychologists and philosophers, William’s style, as a writer and a person, seems very much rooted in Cambridge soil, which from early on seemed to Henry unsuited to his longings.
Henry winds up by saying: “It shows how far apart & to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally & properly!) our respective intellectual lives! And yet I can read you with rapture . . . Philosophically, in short, I am ‘with’ you almost completely.” It can be argued—and has been—that Henry’s books offer a demonstration of pragmatic thinking and pragmatic ethics in action; the moral dramas of his novels tend to turn on how one treats other people. That William was unable to appreciate how close his brother’s worldview may have been to his own cannot be attributed to stupidity—there’s none of that in either of them. It seems rather to be generated by a kind of psychological blindness that no doubt derives from family dynamics as well as from William’s rejection of his brother’s lack of “manliness.”
[We linked to a review in WRB—Apr. 2, 2025. Cf. , as linked to in WRB—Oct. 14, 2023:
James himself confessed that such American men as these are a mystery to him, as he could never truly understand their lack of any complexly layered interiority. But this incomprehension itself yields up the most vibrant, comical and fascinating characters in James’s entire body of work. For James, “What would it be like to be a proud American industrialist?” is a philosophical question, almost like wondering what it would be like to be a bat, and we sense his puzzlement and fascination every time one of these men enters the scene.
“What would it be like to be another member of my family?” is not quite a philosophical question in the same way, but the psychological blindness makes it more difficult to answer. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson; first, an essay adapted from Merve Emre’s introduction to a new edition of I Am Charlotte Simmons (by Tom Wolfe, 2004, May 13):
The image of one person looking through two pairs of eyes recalls a line from Wolfe’s 1972 article “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism,’” which provided instructions to readers for how to write nonfiction with “personality, energy, drive, bravura”: “Shift as quickly as possible into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story.” The echo of it in I Am Charlotte Simmons reminds us that free indirect style is, and always has been, the vast open plain on which realism meets the New Journalism. If this has been difficult to appreciate, or even to note, it is because Wolfe worked hard to obscure it, loudly championing the naturalism of Balzac or Zola as “realistic” (whatever that meant), and because nothing could have been further from the restrained irony of Flaubert’s style than Wolfe’s extravagance. What James Wood decried as the “enormous excitability” of Wolfe’s prose—his crowded sentences, his noisy passion for italics, exclamation marks, ellipses, and capital letters—threatened to drown out the distinctive thoughts of his characters. By accident, this style proved better suited to representing college students than any of Wolfe’s other subjects. It captured their unflagging energy, the energy of youth. It ventriloquized their thoughts and speech in an idiom that was at once charming and inventive, stupid and cruel. Its homogeneity was appropriate. No matter how many kinds of people, of how many races and creeds, gained admission to the grove, Wolfe believed that the elite university remained a fundamentally closed system, an echo chamber of knowing references to movies and television shows, of sarcasm and slang, curses and song lyrics. It was as if, in the figure of the drunk, arrogant boy marveling at his own reflection, Wolfe had finally found the emblem of his style. “Where was the writer who would immortalize that feeling?” Hoyt asks of his double vision. “C’est moi,” the author answers from behind him.
[About the decline in Wolfe’s popularity cf. pieces linked to in WRB—Jan. 3, 2024 and WRB—Jan. 6, 2024.
To me Ovid had already immortalized the feeling of arrogant boys marveling at their own reflection:
All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)
Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.
He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede,
And where he lykes another thing, he lykes himselfe in deede.
He is the partie whome he wooes, and suter that doth wooe,
He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe.
. . . .
The thing thou seekest is not there. And if aside thou go,
The thing thou lovest straight is gone. It is none other matter
That thou doest see, than of thy selfe the shadow in the water.
The thing is nothing of it selfe: with thee it doth abide,
With thee it would departe if thou withdrew thy selfe aside.
(Golding’s translation.) All the linguistic pyrotechnics, the careful arrangements of Narcissus’ desiring being set up in direct opposition to his being the thing desired, do not obscure, and are in service of, depicting his solipsism. The two lines starting with “He is the partie” present two circles from which there is no escape because there is nothing besides himself in them. Maybe it needs more exclamation points. (Do young people use exclamation points now? I’m an eighteenth-century crank in the body of a 26-year-old and wouldn’t know.) —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:
I complain about daffodils again
The ambiguities of Wordsworth’s poetry mentioning Milton
K. T. on a Poem by Diane Seuss and words with slightly different meanings as nouns than as verbs
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]
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