WRB—Dec. 10, 2025

“feed luxuriously”

I cannot at all convey an adequate notion or even image of the Managing Editor’s extraordinary and very peculiar powers.

Links:

• Two in The Paris Review:

  • Eliot Weinberger on Thomas Manning:

    Lamb wrote that Manning was “A Man of great Power—an enchanter almost. Far beyond Coleridge or any man in power of impressing— . . . I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.” Thomas Allsop, a disciple of Coleridge and later a close friend of Karl Marx, said, “I cannot at all convey an adequate notion or even image of his extraordinary and very peculiar powers.”

    Manning left no trace of these powers. He wrote a few unmemorable poems and an academic article on Chinese jokes, translating some forty of them in a deadpan manner. His letters to Lamb are largely puns and sophomoric wit, often about drinking. His one piece of extensive writing is the journal he kept on the trek to Tibet and back, which was published decades after his death as, according to its editor from the Geographic Society, a curious “relic.”

    The journal is notable in that it makes almost no observations about the things he was the first Westerner to see. The splendor of the Himalayas goes unmentioned. He was uninterested in Tibet, which he considered merely as a back door he could take into China, then forbidden to foreigners. In the months that he was there, he only once begrudgingly visited a temple. He enjoyed going to the Potala to play games with the Dalai Lama–who died at age ten a few years later–and otherwise amused himself by writing homophonic translations of squibs of Latin. In the journal, he is almost comically oblivious to his surroundings, preoccupied with his clothes, his comfort, his health, his food, his sleep, the inferior qualities of the local liquors, his disputes with his servant, and the maintenance of his beard. On the historic day when he finally reaches Lhasa, his journal entry begins: “Our first care was to provide ourselves with proper hats.”

    [So now you can’t fill your letters to your friends with sophomoric wit? What’s the point of writing letters? And what’s the point of going about if you have to go about in an improper hat?

    It is funny to read about people like this. I think of some people I know who, even if they are not the first Englishman to enter Lhasa, are to me figures of “great Power,” and yet if asked to substantiate that claim the best evidence I would have to offer is—text conversations full of puns and sophomoric wit. (I don’t know if the people I have in mind are writing any poetry.) Same as it ever was. —Steve]

  • Alice McCrum interviews Hélène Cixous (translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz):

    McCrum: Would you say that your criticism is autobiographical, too?

    Cixous: When I teach my seminar, I don’t talk about myself. I talk only about others. But does criticism exist? It’s not a word that interests me. I never thought that I did criticism. I mean, on the one hand, it’s a genre that belongs to the arena of commerce. And on the other, I think of how Woolf reads a few sentences of Defoe, or how Proust very succinctly reads a page of Chateaubriand, or of Dostoyevsky. Proust does not set out to explain the entire book⁠—not at all. Instead, suddenly, rather precisely, we see the art. Criticism is one artist discerning the secrets of another artist, who understood that something was decided perhaps by the passage of a bird, or a color. What Proust perceives in Chateaubriand is what belongs to his⁠—Proust’s⁠—own world. It’s Chateaubriand, but the Chateaubriand that’s already Proust. Or the Proust that’s Chateaubriand. We have a case in French⁠—Baudelaire reading Poe. Poe and Baudelaire become one. You don’t know who you are reading anymore. In my experience, when I read Kleist, for example, I live it completely. I have the impression that it’s me. I am not saying “It’s me” like when Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” No, I am not saying that I am the character. I am saying that it’s as if I am a musician interpreting a piece of music.

    [Cixous, earlier in the interview:

    I loved to read in an organized way, because one of the aspects of literature that is very important for me is that literature itself has read. It doesn’t just arrive like that. It has read. I have read this, this, and this, it says, and it passes itself on.

    Criticism can discern the secrets of an artist because criticism, like literature, has read. What Proust perceives in Chateaubriand belongs to Proust’s world, but part of that world is that he has read Chateaubriand and he has read things by people who have read Chateaubriand. All these impressions and sensations float around, waiting for the critic to combine them and make something solid out of them. In the case of a canonical artist we can say not just that they influenced such-and-such artistic movement and that these writers reacted against them, and so on; we can also say that it’s in the water, as it were. Criticism of canonical works and authors is hard enough—the critic has an obligation to match or exceed the thing being criticized—even before dealing with all these reflections which are both source and object of criticism. We receive everything as it is passed down, and what we find in ourselves is in part what we have received and what we have read. —Steve]

• In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Susannah Fullerton’s book about authors and their cats (Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them, December 9):

  Colette soon welcomed her kitten and named her La Chatte. This seems a rather unoriginal name to be chosen by a woman whose talent lay with words. Soon author and cat were devoted companions. Time spent with cats was never wasted time in Colette’s opinion. She had loved cats since she was a girl; for her, no cat was ever ordinary. Her childhood home had always been a place for animals—in fact Colette’s forceful mother Sidonie had “boasted of her ability to housebreak pets and children.” Once Colette was in her teens, her feline companion was Kiki-la-Doucette (Kiki-the-demure), a grey Maltese, and she liked to take him for walks on a leash around the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy.

  In 1893 she married her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villars (always known as Willy) and they moved to Paris. But the move did not mean abandoning Kiki. Indeed it was her cat, her resolution to travel and see the French capital city, and her passion for solitude which were the invaluable things Colette took with her as “personal belongings.” Kiki travelled with her to Paris, though struggled to adjust to an apartment lifestyle after the freedom of the countryside. The distressed animal “roamed around depositing his wastes everywhere except in the designated receptacle.” Her nickname for her new husband was also Kiki-la-Doucette, which must surely have caused confusion in the Willy household, but Willy took it as a sign of love, and felt honored that she’d bestowed her cat’s name upon him.

  [If naming a cat Cat is good enough for Holly Golightly, it’s good enough for Collette. And perhaps all cats would be happier as Cat. They’re proud animals; no doubt they would rather be addressed by their title than by their name. No doubt how boring stereotypical cat names tend to be—Felix? Tom? All the ones that are merely describing the cat’s coat?—is evidence of this. Besides, as the poet says, cats have secret names:

  And that is the name that you never will guess;

  The name that no human research can discover—

  But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

  And good for them.

  The only naming of cats that struck me as anything extraordinary was done by someone with two cats, whom he named Tybalt and Mercutio. —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:

• The nostalgia in newer Christmas songs isn’t as good as the nostalgia we used to have

• Words for eating

• A Christmas Poem by Robert Southwell

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. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]