WRB—August 5, 2023

Belgium is a monster.

The Washington Review of Books is a rare coup that successfully triples as memoir, criticism and history.

[The WRB is a flâneur publication. Aware of this fact, I went back to Baudelaire to find ideas and was reminded of his beef with Belgium: “Hatred of poetry. No literature. No metaphysics. No art. Sculpture, nada.” The WRB is considering imitating him in this under the assumption that what people really want out of a literary publication is insane and inscrutable beefs. (I once again exhort our audience to watch college football.) We await a response from Brussels.

Charlotte Brontë also fanatically hated Belgium. That’s a sign. —Steve] [The list of inscrutable beeves is in the Google Docs folder, do you not have access to that? —Chris]

In today’s edition:

(working backwards from the bottom):

Delmore Schwartz…SFF…Pepys…The Brothers Karamazov…the Wife of Bath…windowless buildings…Steve attempts to embody the spirit of Baudelaire…

Links:

• In Plough, Roberta Green Ahmanson on church architecture in late antiquity and the Middle Ages:

  Church buildings became embassies of the New Jerusalem. Believers could gather in them to be refreshed by singing the songs of Zion, eating holy food . . . the Eucharist . . . hearing the word of God, learning the principles of the New Jerusalem to apply in their daily lives as restorers of the brokenness around them, as witnesses to the transformative power of the gospel and the promise of the day when all things would indeed be made new. In his book Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, David Mayernik says that, for Augustine, “only . . . the vision of this celestial City,” our ultimate citizenship, “can sustain our collective souls. . . . Since the Heavenly City existed outside of time or contingency, one could live simultaneously in the Earthly and Heavenly Cities, the former being a physical necessity, the latter a spiritual goal. While never meaning to be an architectural theorist, Augustine still gave Western society an idea of heaven in the form of a city that partly redeemed an urban culture in crisis.”

• Also in Plough, an excerpt from Gary Saul Morson’s new book (Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, May):

  The greatest Russian writers do not tell us what life’s meaning is, but they show us what the discovery of it looks and feels like. That is because meaning is not a proposition we could learn, as we master the binomial theorem. If there were such a proposition, we would all already know it. It would be the first thing we had been taught. In Brothers Karamazov Madame Khokhlakov implores Father Zossima to prove that something beyond “the menacing phenomena of nature”—something truly meaningful—actually exists. “There’s no proving it,” Zossima replies, “but you can be convinced of it.” The distinction is crucial: some things cannot be adequately addressed from a third- person perspective. Physicalism and materialist philosophy notwithstanding, the world as described “from nowhere” is incomplete.

• In an article for the Window Research Institute [Really? —Chris], Takahiko Kanemaki on windowless buildings:

  The word “claustrophobia” in the articleʼs title has a footnote explaining that the condition is related to other phobias such as acrophobia and agoraphobia. Architectural historian and critic Anthony Vidler notes that such spatial phobias, particularly agoraphobia (the fear of being in open spaces) and its opposite, claustrophobia, were “discovered” in the late nineteenth century in connection with the formation of the modern metropolis. That is, in psychology at that time, these anxiety disorders were believed to stem from the sense of alienation that people experienced in the new urban environments which differed greatly from those of traditional communities. This observation brings up a paradox: the windowless building was proposed as a solution to the various problems caused by overcrowding in metropolises—no differently from the modernistsʼ architecture of “all windows”—and yet, it was the one that wound up being associated with a spatial phobia considered to be a malady of the metropolis.

Reviews:

• Two in the Journal:

  • Danny Heitman reviews Paula Marantz Cohen’s book on conversation (Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation, March):

    The obstacles to good conversation can be as simple as the spaces in which we’d like to linger and chat. Ms. Cohen sighs at the popular fashion in industrial décor at restaurants, where steel tables and backless chairs don’t exactly invite warm exchanges. More broadly, she finds that talk “of a staged and highly predictable sort” is all around us, “on talk shows, TV panels, interviews, YouTube clips and podcasts,” ersatz conversation that replaces the unpredictable, real thing with an often scripted substitute. One surprising figure she calls out for a negative effect on conversation is Ronald Reagan. His disciplined PR strategy, still a popular model, “flies in the face of the serendipity and spontaneity that characterize real conversation,” she writes. “It may well be that Reagan’s example, through its extraordinary success and superficial appeal, debased political conversation—and beyond that, all conversation—more thoroughly than any other figure in history.”

    One wouldn’t even have to be a particular fan of Reagan to find Ms. Cohen’s assertion a strange piece of hyperbole. (Later in Talking Cure, she points to more obvious enemies of conversation, dictators such as Hitler and Stalin.)

  • Sam Sacks reviews the new translation by Michael R. Katz of The Brothers Karamazov (July 25):

    Here’s a data point that may be useful in the tricky task of choosing between excellent translations of a Russian classic: In Constance Garnett’s canonical 1912 version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the word “ecstasy” and its variations (“ecstatic,” “ecstatically”) appear 34 times. In Michael R. Katz’s new translation, published in a solid brick of a hardcover, the words show up 78 times, more than double the frequency. There’s a lesson in the numbers. Garnett’s brilliance was bound up in the fluency of her prose, and she was prone to taking Dostoyevsky in hand when he became too crazed or inscrutable, fixing repetitions, cutting apparent non sequiturs and breaking up massive paragraphs into shorter, more readable portions. Mr. Katz has accepted ungainliness in return for greater intensity. His translation sharpens the sensation unique to Dostoyevsky, that of a man clutching your forearm and shouting something into your face. It feels truly manic—though the better word surely is “ecstatic.”

  • Also reviewed in The New Yorker by Jennifer Wilson a week or two ago: “The novel has a spoken quality that is meant to communicate the unreliability of memory and the fact that people tend to misunderstand one another far more often than they do the opposite. Katz is particularly attentive to this feature of Dostoyevsky’s prose.”

• Speaking of The New Yorker [As we frequently do. —Steve], Katy Waldman reviews Ann Prachett’s new novel (Tom Lake, August 1) there:

  Tom Lake collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in Our Town. Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen.” Lara herself “would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh.”

  • And Jill Witty reviews it in The Millions:

    As author, Patchett writes and directs the production, choosing the order of the narrative, who comes on stage, when to open and close the curtains on certain scenes. Lara—as narrator, a proxy for Patchett—acknowledges the power she holds: “I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.” You can almost hear Patchett chuckling, knowing she, too, will withhold some of the best parts for later.

• In the local Post,

  becca rothfeld
  reviews Clare Carlisle’s book on George Eliot and George Henry Lewes (The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life, August 15):

  Murdoch cautioned that anyone who pries into a marriage will be punished by “an avenging deity.” Perhaps the avenger in this case is the chaotically and cacophonously hybrid genre that is increasingly prevalent in the catalogues of major publishers. The Marriage Question is not quite biography: There are several comprehensive biographies of Eliot already. But it is not quite criticism, either: When Carlisle does touch on particular works, she often produces clichés (Eliot’s books “open our eyes and stretch our souls”). Of course, there are some anomalously good books in this daringly dissonant mode—Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings is a rare coup that successfully triples as memoir, criticism and history—but casualties of its wide-ranging demands are far more common. The Marriage Question tries to do too much and ends up doing little. It is full of airy rhetorical queries: “Why are we so intensely curious about other people’s relationships?” “How could marriage be a site for philosophy, even a path towards knowledge?”

  [Read Parallel Lives (1983), and you will regret it; don’t read it, you will also regret it; read or don’t read, you will regret it either way. —Chris]

• Three in the LRB:

  • Irina Dumitrescu
    reviews three books interpreting the Wife of Bath, one a history of the character (The Wife of Bath: A Biography, by Marion Turner, January) and two contemporary adaptations of her story (The Wife of Willesden, by Zadie Smith, 2021; and The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks, 2022):

    At one point Alysoun looks back on her youth, both rueing her lost beauty and revelling in the erotic pleasures she once enjoyed: “I have had my world, as in my time.” Despite no longer being as attractive as she was, she is determined to do what she can with the body she has, and to be “right merry.” This sense of time passing helps make her a person: she speaks as if she has a past, present and future, rather than being in the text merely to represent an idea or further the plot. While recounting the story of her life she digresses, circles back to traumatic memories, and occasionally contradicts herself. This creates “the feeling that we are seeing a mind unfolding

    • Dumitrescu also appears on the LRB podcast to discuss Chaucer's relationship to Ovid.

  • Daniel Soar reviews a collection of stories by Yuri Herrera (Ten Planets, trans. Lisa Dillman, March):

    Here’s the start of one story in Ten Planets: “&°°° couldn’t be happier. @°°° couldn’t be happier. The twins, *~ and #~, couldn’t be happier.” You soon come to understand that in this happy family &°°° is the mother, @°°° is the father and *~ and #~ are their children. The names are a nice joke: these are literal characters, in the sense of being assemblages of arbitrary symbols on the keyboard, representing people through a kind of algebra. (Sometimes a text gains rather than loses in translation: the character/character double meaning is less obvious in Spanish, where a letter on a keyboard is a carácter but Anna Karenina is generally a personaje.) All told, there are six characters in the story, but only the family dog, Roanoke, has anything resembling a human name. Roanoke, of course, was the site of the first English colony in North America, where in 1590, five years after their arrival, all the settlers were found to have disappeared. Everything about Herrera’s story suggests that people are perfectly capable of being expunged.

  • Seamus Perry reviews reissues of some of Waugh’s novels:

    A reader coming across such a sentence in 1945 might have been forgiven for not identifying its author as Evelyn Waugh. The same is true of many passages in Brideshead: the debutante Julia, for instance, is said to bring to those she meets “a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled water.” Waugh toned down such purple patches in subsequent editions, but your main reaction is still: oh puh-lease. And especially since, as Rose Macaulay pointed out, this is just the kind of romanticism that the younger Waugh “pilloried in bland ridicule”: in Scoop, especially, which has much fun at the expense of William Boot’s fine writing in his “Lush Places” column (“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole”). Still, once you’re attuned, you discover such lush passages elsewhere: “those wistful, half-romantic, half-aesthetic, peculiarly British longings which, in the past, used to find expression in so many slim lambskin volumes.” Take Tony’s unicorns, for example, or the “soft English weather” of his estate, “mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills.” The apogee of this Wavian pastoral comes in the dying speech of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead: he approaches his maker with thoughts of the chapel, “the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl,” and of the good old days, “the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough.” This is splendid schmaltz, like the Albert Memorial or The Dream of Gerontius: you can see why a puzzled Edmund Wilson thought the passage “an absurdity which would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not—painful to say—meant quite seriously.”

N.B.:

• Reminder that Bookforum is back this month; you can subscribe here.

• The Samuel Pepys Twitter bot may be done, but you can get your fix elsewhere.  “Pepysheads dissect early modern linguistic oddities, the condition of our man Sam’s finances, the geography of London, and the like.”

• ken whyte
  against Goodreads. [I don’t use Goodreads. I’ve never read a book. I watch movies. I use Letterboxd, which is good. —Steve] [I was saying to someone this week that one of the primary things Letterboxd does for me is remind me just how terrible Goodreads is in comparison. —Chris]

• David Burt
  on strategic paths for the local Post. [The first time I saw “Democracy Dies in Darkness” I thought it was a joke at the Post’s expense. You don’t see the Times doing that! —Steve]

Local:

• Metrobus is hoping to speed up its service. [I love taking the bus, but about once a week I’ll be waiting for a ride and the bus driver will look at me and keep driving. I plan to make this the centerpiece of the worst piece of autofiction you’ve ever read—stay tuned. —Chris]

Upcoming book:

August 15 | Verso

Only a Voice: Essays
by George Scialabba

From the publisher: In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity’s promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. In Scialabba’s hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists, and philosophers—including Edward Said, D. H. Lawrence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ellen Willis, and Noam Chomsky—Scialabba tours western intellectual history to find that no matter the stakes, critical thought remains a necessary precondition for politics.

Every writer, Scialabba writes, faces the choice of whether “to tilt at the state and capital or ignore them”—and the world now is too dire not to choose the former.

Poem:

“In the Slight Ripple, the Mind Perceives the Heart” by Delmore Schwartz

In the slight ripple, the fishes dart
Like fingers, centrifugal, like wishes
Wanton. And pleasures rise

as the eyes fall

Through the lucid water. The small pebble,
The clear clay bottom, the white shell
Are apparent, though superficial.
Who could ask more of the August afternoon?
Who would dig mines and follow shadows?
“I would,” answers bored Heart, “Lounger, rise”
(Underlip trembling, face white with stony anger),
“The old error, the thought of sitting still,
“The senses drinking, by the summer river,
“On the tended lawn, below the traffic,
“As if time would pause,

and afternoons stay.

“No, night comes soon,
“With its cold mountains, with desolation,

unless Love builds its city.”

[This is from Schwartz’s 1959 Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, the collection that made him the youngest poet to ever win the Bollingen prize. It’s a great late-summer poem. —Julia]