WRB—Dec. 11, 2024

“banished from his discourse”

Washington Review of Books: Eternal topic of conversation. Universal cause of illness. Always complain about it.

N.B.:

The final D.C. Salon of the year, cohosted by the Washington Review of Books and Liberties Journal, in celebration of a full year of our monthly salon discussions, will take place in a joyous mode on New Year’s Eve, at Chris’ home, as we gather to discuss a timely question: “Can people change?” Email Chris for details.

There will be no WRB Presents in December, but WRB readers and reading enthusiasts will be interested in attending the first D.C. Translation Night this Friday, December 13 at 7 p.m., which the Managing Editors are informed will be “not a writers’ workshop or a formal reading series but a convivial gathering of people interested in translation.” For more information, join the Google group.

Links:

• In the Times, Giles Harvey on Alice Munro:

  You wonder what Fremlin made of “Runaway” and of the other stories about trapped women that Munro produced in her final years of creativity. Were her efforts to portray him as a kind of savior figure in the interviews she gave around this time a form of compensation for the less flattering picture she was painting in her fiction? Or was this double bookkeeping an expression of the same denial that the character Carla—a portrait of the artist as a desperate mythomaniac—embraces at the end of the story? Whatever the answer, Munro’s relationship with Fremlin enabled her to do her greatest work—indeed, some of the greatest work ever done in the short story form. That so much of that work now reads like an indictment of the relationship is a bitter paradox. 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.

• In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Orlando Reade’s book on Paradise Lost about teaching it in prison (What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, December 10) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 4, 2024; we linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 9, 2024.]:

  One of the students—I will call him Roger—was a tall, bald man with thick glasses, probably around seventy years old. He worked as a classroom assistant, so I would often see him before the other students arrived, clearing up the classroom, and we would always exchange a few warm words. It was almost certainly Roger who had offered to help me on the first day as I was scrabbling to begin my class. He used language in a way that I found difficult to understand—I don’t know how to describe it—but he was unfailingly enthusiastic. One day, in class, he started talking about Newark in the 1960s, the riots of 1967, the Black Panthers, slave religion, and African languages.

  In his final paper, Roger wrote what I quickly recognized as a critique of my class. Drawing on Mark’s insight into Paradise Lost, and the idea that poetry could be bound by laws, he argued that poetry should instead be dedicated to freedom. The essay ended with an unattributed quotation: “Nothing vast enters the life / Of mortals without a curse.” I was struck by these words. They summed up what the students had been trying to tell me about literature and its relationship to the world. They also feel true of Milton’s vast poem: not as an apology for its shortcomings, but as a description of the world in which it has had a long and complex afterlife.

  [There’s a moment in here that revolves around whether “disobedience” in the first line of Paradise Lost has three or four syllables. I once asked a friend of mine who studied linguistics if there was a word for words like this, whose number of syllables can change according to the dictates of meter, and I was told that there wasn’t. I think there should be. I remember running into this absence a few years ago while trying to communicate that, in “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” the rushing of “chariot” and “hurrying” into two syllables is essential to the speed of the line and, therefore, a sense of the speed of what it describes. If you know of a word for this, or have a suggestion, please let me know. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Louis Klee interviews Gerald Murnane:

  Klee: Would you say that getting lost is a feeling you try to evoke when writing—when carefully constructing a very long sentence, say?

  Murnane: The final section of Tamarisk Row, which results from the putting-together of five gigantic sentences, would be a perfect example. A part of the first sentence proceeds, then stops, and then the first part of the second sentence follows, followed by the first part of the third sentence, and so on. Once the first part of each sentence has been put on the page, we go back to do the second part of each sentence . . . Now, this might sound a bit of artificial trickery on my part, but it was meant to somehow suggest the confused understanding that a boy could have while listening to the broadcast of a horse race from outside the house, in a backyard. My first knowledge of horse racing came to me as I was playing in the backyard at the age of four or five. I’d hear scattered bits of sound coming to me through the window, so I’d just get these little sequences of the broadcast of a horse race. Once again, part of the pleasure was in knowing that I was listening to a perceptible, rationally founded entity, but at the same time, I was lost.

  [Gerald Murnane spends lots of time putzing around on Google Maps—he’s just like me. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve encourages women to read Jane Austen, discusses your favorite Beatle, and finishes Bouvard and Pécuchet, Grace on Anne Bradstreet, as well as the surrealists, writing biographies, Valéry, Fredric Jameson, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? We get the WRB out just for you. Your support helps keep us going, and we greatly appreciate it.]