What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books fitted to destruction:
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place tonight. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The American Scholar, Robert Zaretsky on Stendhal’s love of music and his biography of Rossini:
The musicologist Herbert Weinstock dismissed Beyle’s book as little more than a “psychological self-portrait of its author, a parade of enthusiasms and detestations.” But this is the very reason why Beyle’s book fascinates: it is less about the Italian composer than the French writer. By the time of the book’s publication, Beyle was associated with the dilettanti, a group that, depending on one’s perspective, was either respected or ridiculed for its behavior at musical performances. As Beyle makes clear in the book, a member of the dilettanti was immediately recognizable: “Lost in his private and ecstatic universe of contemplation, anger and impatience are the only reactions that he is likely to manifest towards the importunate intrusions of other people—towards anyone who is rash enough to come between him and the rapture of his soul.”
This state of rapture was a thing to behold. “His mouth,” Beyle writes, “will gape half-open, and every feature will bear traces of intolerable enthusiasm—or, rather, will seem utterly drained of the last thin drop of vitality; his eyes alone may give some insight into the fiery recesses of his soul, and even then, should anybody chance to advise him of the fact, he will bury his head in his hands, so desperate is his contempt for other people.”
[This is how I look while working on the WRB. —Steve]
In Liberties,
on sisters in Austen:As it happens, Elizabeth never finds herself able to reply to Mary under any circumstance; she does not speak to Mary once in the entirety of Pride and Prejudice. She is occasionally sorry for Mary, sometimes “in agonies” over her behavior in public, and often mortified by her badly-timed aphorisms, but whenever Mary tries to address Elizabeth in particular, Elizabeth falls pointedly silent. In this Elizabeth is characteristic of Austen heroines: she’s profoundly ashamed of her relatives and (mostly) unwilling to say so. Mary’s unique brand of vanity and ignorance demands silence. Elizabeth is never witty at her expense, which suggests a carefully constructed shield of protective silence, since she so often deploys witty remarks in order to bear bad or foolish behavior. Jane she adores, Lydia and Kitty she will happily criticize to her father if the situation calls for it, but with Mary she can only observe the principle that “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
[I must say that the experience of being a sibling (especially at the age of Austen’s heroines) Lavery describes was not mine; the discussion in the WRB Slack has convinced me that this is due to some combination of not being raised by Regency landed gentry, not having a sister, and general strangeness on my part. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Marisa Anne Bass on Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin:
In other words, van Eyck painted the earthly world so beautifully to direct our eye beyond it, to the time of the Last Judgment. The lilies in the garden of the Rolin Madonna could only be a reference to the Garden of Paradise, the river a reference to heavenly Jerusalem. Even the smallest detail in van Eyck was part of a “preconceived symbolical program.” Part of the appeal of Panofsky’s approach came from the lack of contemporary written sources on Netherlandish paintings, compared to those by fifteenth-century Italian writers. The possibility that Netherlandish paintings might themselves be read became a way to show that the art of the Northern Renaissance was as sophisticated as that of Renaissance Italy.
But it is hard to fix the meaning of every detail in a picture. Take the peacocks on the left side of the garden in the Rolin Madonna. Are they just rare, beautiful birds, or are they also moralizing symbols of pride? Can they be both? Is the waterway in the distant landscape the Meuse River that runs through the Netherlands, or does it represent the crystalline waters of salvation? At the root of such questions is another: What did van Eyck intend a painting like the Rolin Madonna to do?
[Any river can be the Jordan if you like it enough. (Or if the quality of what’s on each side is stark enough, as is the case with the Piscataqua.) —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Armand D’Angour on the sound of ancient Athens:
At the port of Piraeus itself huge ship-sheds have been recently excavated, in which Athens’ warships, its vaunted fleet of triremes, were built and launched. In an extravagant metaphor, Aristophanes talks of how a poet “rounds out his forms, refines them on the lathe, welds them together, and hammers out sentences and phrases”; the din of these kinds of activities might better apply to wood being sawn, hewn, and lathed, the creaking of timbers, ropes and sails, and the screeching and rattling of completed ships sliding down the slipways into the sea. There, three banks of rowers on the triremes would wield their oars in time to the penetrating sound of the double-pipe (aulos), a sound whose power and sinuous beauty can be heard from the playing of pipes reconstructed from archaeological remains.
Reviews:
In The Atlantic, Phyllis Rose reviews a book about Robert Louis Stevenson’s marriage (A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, by Camille Peri, August 13):
For Louis, an overprotected man who resented his upbringing and expected all women to be delicate tyrants like his mother, Fanny’s glamor was immense. He had never encountered an American woman outside of books, and she was an unusually unconventional specimen (as Henry James, that connoisseur of rule-bending womanhood, later testified). They lived together in Paris and also saw each other in London, but Fanny did not imagine a future for them as a couple. Louis’ closest friends did not welcome her; they considered her uncouth and damaging to his growing reputation as a belletristic essayist and critic. His family was unhappy. Her family and Sam’s were fiercely opposed to a divorce: The scandal would affect their social standing along with hers. Finally, Fanny returned to Oakland and to Sam in 1878.
It took at least a week and usually more to cross the Atlantic by steamer, then another week to cross the United States by rail. A lovelorn year later, Louis came after her, and in doing so made a kind of existential leap, proving to himself as much as Fanny, by the epic nature of the journey, that he was not an effete young man of letters who had to negotiate his desires with his parents. He seems to have been one of those men for whom marrying an unsuitable woman is a defining act, a rejection of the life that others expect him to live.
[If this works, you’re Robert Louis Stevenson; if it doesn’t, you’re T. S. Eliot. (Although in both these cases the marriage was essential to the production of art.) —Steve]
In The Baffler, Sanders Isaac Bernstein reviews Elias Canetti’s collected notes against death (The Book Against Death, translated by Peter Filkins, October 8) [The Upcoming book in WRB—May 8, 2024; we linked to an earlier review, an essay adapted from Joshua Cohen’s introduction, and an excerpt from the text itself in WRB—Apr. 27, 2024, and we linked to another review in WRB—Aug. 3, 2024.]:
Even knowledge of death elicits his skepticism. As he mused between 1929 and 1942, before beginning The Book Against Death in earnest: “The knowledge of death appears to be the most consequential experience of human history. It turned into the acceptance of death. Deliberate killing among us is only possible once we know that the deceased is to a certain degree dead.”
For Canetti, who still believed in the Dichter as a real romantic title, Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”—or in his own phrasing, “the guardians of metamorphosis”—it was the role of the poet to work against the implementation of such fatal power, or at least to feel the responsibility to do so. At the outbreak of World War II, he had written, “Wäre ich wirklich ein Dichter, ich müßte den Krieg verhindern können,” a sentence he would return to years later in “The Profession of the Poet”: “Were I really a poet, I would have to be able to prevent the war.” By taking all of life into himself, the poet, he insisted in this essay, gains “the strength to stand against death.”
[Poetry is descended from music, and music is descended from magic. Cf. Orpheus, the notes about chanting in WRB—Sept. 20, 2023, the line in As You Like It about the Irish doing rat control with rhyming (as the Managing Editor resident in New York I say we should look into this one), the Twelve Tables declaring bad poetry to be a capital crime, and so on. —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Irene Katz Connelly reviews Jo Hamya’s new novel (The Hypocrite, August 13) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 7, 2024; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 14, 2024.]:
The least realized character among The Hypocrite’s spare cast, Round Glasses reads less like an actual leftist than like a robot programmed to arouse baby boomer ire. But while her pronouncements about whose work deserves to be staged are easy to dismiss, Hamya uses Round Glasses to expose a different weakness in Sophia’s play: perfect narrators are rare, and narrators who stay perfect in the eyes of successive generations are even rarer. Sophia is neither, and her play’s success depends on the audience perceiving her to be right and her father wrong. Art that derives its authority from morally unimpeachable characters, Round Glasses argues inadvertently, is especially vulnerable to critique when future generations realize that those characters aren’t so unimpeachable after all—all the more so in a moment when many are (rightly!) becoming newly cognizant of their own biases and striving toward more enlightened values. Sophia’s father enjoyed decades of acclaim before becoming unfashionable; his daughter, this encounter implies, may have a much shorter period in the sun before facing similar scrutiny.
In the TLS, Fiona Green reviews a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters (The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, April):
Dickinson was conventional too in her concern, for those who really had made the permanent move to another world, that theirs had been a good death. She wrote in 1854 to the minister who had been with Benjamin Franklin Newton in his final hours. (Newton had been her father’s student, and became for Dickinson “a gentle, yet grave Preceptor.”) She wanted to know from Reverend Hale, “if his last hours were cheerful, and if he was willing to die.” Hale’s reply does not survive, but Dickinson was evidently reassured by it that her friend was safe: “It is sweet when friends are absent, to know that they are home”, she said, and you can hear her stepping into the metered prose—as Miller and Mitchell term it—that was her own most familiar rhythmic ground. Wordsworth’s conviction that poetic meter offers the co-presence of something regular to those in an unusual or irregular state of mind was never more evident than in the case of Dickinson’s prose. Sometimes meter’s “intertexture of ordinary feeling”, in Wordsworth’s phrase, imposes proper bounds on grief, as when Dickinson writes, “Home itself is far from Home since my Father died”; sometimes the reminiscence of ballad form renders peculiar thought as commonplace (“November always seemed to me the Norway of the Year”); and sometimes it tautens the rhetorical spring of her syntax: “I work to drive the awe away, yet awe impels the work.” Millicent Todd Bingham recalls the trap this set for editorial work on the letters: “Emily’s habit of lapsing into poetry in the middle of a letter [was] another pitfall for the editor who thus might fail to detect a poem.”
[We linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Apr. 13, 2024 and WRB—May 18, 2024.]
In The Nation, Julia Case-Levine reviews Lydia Millet’s new book (We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, April):
Millet often describes nonhuman life as if she were an alien plopped on Earth, writing a letter home. “Some are covered in lustrous feathers, silver scales, or elaborate segments of armored plates,” she writes of animals. “Some look like translucent bells, floating in water and trailing a mass of curling ribbons.” Animals are so fabulous, Millet observes, that children often think “they might have been invented purely for our delight.” Her arresting and odd descriptions remind us of that feeling.
Millet asks if we might apply a similar sense of wonder to our daily routines. Just as we’ve become anesthetized to the magical strangeness of animals, we tend to take for granted the technology, beliefs, and customs that guide how we move through the world. To this end, she makes a series of unusual connections designed to kindle surprise. In one chapter, Millet leaps between a number of subjects: the invention of the Walkman; how personal soundtracks encourage us to narrate our own stories; her many beautiful ex-boyfriends; romance as the pursuit of self-flattery; the use of pools as early mirrors; ancient ground sloths; frames and social media; the challenge that octopuses face in passing down generational knowledge. These sections are all loosely collected around our obsession with individuality and the failure to commune and connect outside of the self.
[Hard to say the children are wrong:
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
—Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Notes on completionism and its practitioners.
An interview with Joy Williams.
Stereotyping in book covers.
The Institute for Progress is hiring an assistant editor.
The Library of America is having a sale.
The Onion is reviving its print edition.
New issue: Overland No. 254 Autumn 2024
Local:
The 51st, a worker-led nonprofit newsroom of DCist alumni, hit their fundraising goals for launch.
The Eric Williams Quintet will perform at the Kreeger Museum on Saturday, August 31.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington’s 50th anniversary exhibit closes on Sunday, September 8.
Lost City Books is having its summer sale (20% off everything) today, August 17, and tomorrow, August 18.
Poem:
“Sonnet with Mailbox and Machine” by Robert Thomas
after César Vallejo and Donald Justice
I will die in spring with camellia blooms
strewn on the bluestone path as if they knew . . .
To say it is to make it so. Justice
and Vallejo understood. Petals sprawled
on gravel like Miami sunbathers,
lying shameless on their dove-gray towels,
not gone but going, as they say, to seed.
The main truck will stop at the box beyond
the gate, not seeing me in the cool dirt,
the shade of the cedar. Don’t believe them
when they tell you about the blood machines,
the drip. To say it is to make it so.
There will be camellias, and meteors
will be falling, unseen in all the light.
[This is from Blackbird’s latest (all-poetry!) issue, Flight v22n3. Thomas is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent being Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff (2023). —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | August 20
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
From the Lit Hub preview: In addition to being one of our great living poets, Gumbs is perhaps our most knowledgeable expert on Audre Lorde’s life and work. This brilliant new biography of Lorde should help provide a deeper understanding of Lorde’s writing and life for those who’ve only encountered the most superficial of her quotes and ideas—particularly around Lorde’s incredible ecological activism and her powerful, driving sense that humanity and the Earth are inextricably entwined.
Also out Tuesday:
Ballantine: Wild Failure by Zoe Whittall
Knopf: There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
What we’re reading:
Steve read more essays on the English Civil War. He also read Nabokov’s lecture on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. [He’s a big fan, which I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed, but it makes sense. He describes the basic artistic problem Stevenson faces as follows; Utterson and Enfield need to be boring and stolid to ground the story, but such men do not make good storytellers because they are boring. This could be gotten around by having them reveal many details about Hyde, but they are not observant enough for this, and in any case it would dispel the sense of mystery around Hyde. The solution Nabokov identifies is that “the shock of Hyde’s presence brings out the hidden artist in Enfield and the hidden artist in Utterson.” Yes, and I would add that Stevenson can do nothing with a workaday lawyer, and the shock of Hyde’s presence allows the artistic talent of the author to be imbued into his character. —Steve]
Julia forgot to bring Gravity’s Rainbow with her on a trip and as a result did not read anything all week.
Critical notes:
Roger Kimball, “What the Right Gets Wrong About Art”:
On second thought, though, I realized that I could give an abbreviated answer to the question implicit in my title in just three words: indifference, capitulation, kitsch.
Let’s start with the indifference. Conservatives in the West long ago ceded culture to the Left. Culture, they felt, was not really serious. You cannot eat a Rembrandt, nor the Ninth Symphony, nor Paradise Lost. You cannot make the payroll writing poetry, or studying Botticelli or Herodotus. True, in 1780, John Adams wrote that “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy . . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” That sounds noble, but who still believes it? Not paid-up members of establishment conservatism. Quote that passage to them. Then watch them smile.
[Say what you will about the Tories in England, it took the day of danger to wring from them the confession that they were enthusiastic only about ground rent. The American right, with the exception of a couple magazines (to Kimball’s credit The New Criterion is one of them), will tell you that for free. —Steve]
- Moul on Calvin quoting Virgil:
By his extremely careful choice of words in the first half of this apparent “aside,” Calvin very neatly summarizes one traditional approach to the Christian interpretation of Virgil—that reading the works of Virgil as a whole can lead us from noticing (en!), to nurturing (ad gignendam fovendamque), to naming true pietas. This attitude to Virgil was a common one: in Calvin’s own time, Marcus Antonius Maioragio, professor of eloquence at Milan, asked “For where better will you discover what virtue and wisdom is possible, than in this divine work of Virgil?” But all the way to valeat we have not yet encountered the subject of the sentence. When we finally reach it (speculatio), we discover that this subtle and beguiling summary of the experience of reading Virgil’s poetry is after all a false lead: all he really offers is “starveling speculation” (ieiuna illa speculatio).
[Has anyone proposed that Jerome got yelled at so harshly in his vision specifically because he was a follower of Cicero and not of Christ? If it had been Virgil I think he would have gotten off easier. —Steve]
Ishiguro’s novels are built on tension between the characters’ lagging awareness of themselves and the reader’s quicker understanding, and at the cathartic moment, the characters seize on the realization the reader has craved for them all along. (Of course, this usually comes too late for them to save themselves.) His stories are like Jenga towers that tumble down at precisely the right moment, which overcomes any possible annoyance I could feel at the repetition in his novels. I’m not even enthralled by his writing on a sentence level—though I know many are—but his management and timing of plot and character development are unceasingly fascinating.
What are words? Are they truly carriers of consciousness? Or of “fake” consciousness? Mediated. Media-ated. But you make those type of word plays in 1973. No matter. In some lecture notes at Dublin college, Hopkins wrote, “We may think of words as heavy bodies, as indoor or out of door objects of nature or man’s art.” Is this true in 2024? Heavy bodies? It’s certainly an image dappled or really sprawled with pixels. Words and images have both cheapened. And what words do still have a power are the most shrill or the most weaponizingly deployed ones. And as I reach to my relative’s bookshelf for George Steiner’s On Difficulty (1978), I imagine this bespectacled author grimacing at the charade ensconcing the globe—he didn’t stand for this and fewer and fewer people will stand for his arch brand of aestheticism. Since the new kingmakers are not too interested in the locomotion of sentences, of language—they are kings and queens, and indeed, the argot still traffics heartily in the use and abuse of words of royalty—those “heavy bodies,” those psychical words (Coleridge: Words are LIVING POWERS), are ignored, the gimmick of the author’s life or plot points are the tinfoil tiaras to being branded as “important.”
Looked at in a certain light, ideas around the infrastructural humanities mirror the omnipresence of turns in critical theory (not to mention the en vogue prefixing of the humanities more generally). Whether it is the environmental, material, affective, digital, or . . . fill in the blank, there has been a proliferation of ostensible novel frameworks for reading in the past few years. In this sense, it’s hard to shake the feeling that literary studies of infrastructure are just another front in the so-called method wars, where competing practitioners make the case for the primacy of their approach to interpretation.
- with more on Knausgaard:
Fiction is not the novel, then, but the incessant urge to interpret and narrativize experience, instead of simply presenting things as they are: the truth. Of course, when one thinks they are seeing the truth they may be simply telling a different story, and they may have blind spots; but still, one can try, one can write against interpretation. This is what Peter Handke, one of Knausgaard’s favorite authors, does in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970). He’ll write a sentence that goes something like, “The house seemed unoccupied because the door was open,” and then he’ll follow that sentence with, “The house seemed unoccupied even though the door was open.” Which one is it? What is the connection between an open door and the presence of someone in a house? We connect events through language, create patterns of cause and effect, and in this way, create meaning. But what if the meaning is a lie? What if, instead, we simply described things empirically and refused to draw conclusions? “The door was open. He wondered whether someone was inside.” Moment by moment narration, while hypnotic, can also be tedious, however. An entire novel constrained by the limits of personal experience, with no attempt at interpretation or analysis, may lack the momentum to sustain a reader’s interest. This is where memory comes into play. “The door was open. He wondered whether someone was inside. In childhood, when he would visit his grandparents during summer, the screen door had always been left open.” Now, maybe, just maybe, we have something. A story always comes through eventually, but to create a true one, a true fiction, it may be necessary to resist the story for as long as possible.
[Has anyone tried mixing memory and desire? —Steve]