WRB—Dec. 13, 2025

“only a hayseed”

All roads lead to the Washington Review of Books.

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert on Jane Austen:

  Some writers are victims of their own success, of their complete assimilation by the culture. Freud is one: people who preach confidently about how psychoanalysis is for quacks will quite happily talk about others’ unconscious desires, or denial, or repression, forgetting where these terms originate. Jane Austen, the 250th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated this month, is another. When the big day comes, there will be plenty of festivities in a kitschily traditionalist vein: a “quilting workshop” at Chawton where she lived, a “regency ball” at Winchester Cathedral where she is buried. But there will be surprisingly little concerned with what she did for the form of the novel—and for language in general. This is a pity. Because like all radical new literary forms, Jane Austen’s new method for slipping into the consciousnesses of others did not just change the way we write; it changed the way we think.

  [Free indirect discourse is a record of thinking, and its need to be recordable it forces the thinking it depicts to have some structure to it. A series of inchoate impressions can be transmitted in literature, but free indirect discourse requires there to be a concrete and verbalized discourse. When Austen’s characters think they are, much of the time, wrong—deceiving themselves, being deceived—but in spite of themselves there is a precision to their thinking. Or at least it seems like there is. That’s how she gets you. —Steve]

• Two in the TLS; first, Ronald K. Fried on writers who appeared on The Dick Cavett Show:

  The first writer I worked with was Saul Bellow. I’d never felt so closely observed—or sized up—as when he looked me over in my khakis, tweed jacket and rep tie. He quickly announced that he had just come from the dentist and could somebody fetch him a bit of gin. On the phone, he had asked to keep the conversation light; on the air he treated the Nobel prize as “just a prize”: “Only a hayseed would be overborne by this great honor.” Asked if he’d ever been in psychoanalysis, Bellow said: “Psychoanalytic theory implies that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but the psychiatrist does . . . I think that’s yielding too much power.” Hoping to get Bellow to sit for a third half-hour in front of the cameras, our executive producer walked onto the set and leant in close to make the request. The great man, who was then married to the fourth of his five wives, assented: “It’s not the first time I’ve been flummoxed by a beautiful woman.”

  That final session was the most revealing. “I don’t care what people say about me,” Bellow said. “I know the worst about myself, and they don’t.” Asked whether he was sad that life was short, he replied: “Life takes care to tucker you out before the end. So you’re not altogether unhappy to go.” Afterwards, he pulled on a long down coat over his bespoke suit, laughed, and said: “Let’s stay strangers.”

  [“Yielding too much power” is an interesting phrase; framing it in terms of power and not truth allows Bellow to evade saying which half of the implication is untrue. Do you know what the hell you’re talking about? Or does the psychiatrist also have no idea? —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Nicola Shulman reviews John Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, October) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025.]:

  There are no letters to Joyce in the other category of personal letters, which is love and other letters to the important women in his life. Updike’s sexual incontinence and self-appointed role, as he put it in his autobiography, as “a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife does,” are well known, as is his achievement as a master of the writing of desire, “sitting looking for the mot juste as the sun pours into my eyes.” Almost any passage from Couples (1968), prefaced with “I can’t stop thinking about your . . . ”, would do well in a love letter; and, recalling how Martin Amis, himself celebrated as a writer of love letters (women were said to get with him just to receive one), once remarked that it was always his habit to think: “How would Updike put it?”, I approached these with alerted expectations. As it turns out, Updike puts it like this, marking the end of his liaison with Joan Cudhea, an Ipswich neighbour: “It was just terribly nice and precious [ . . . ] while I had always been very oral in making love, it was you who gave enough to enroll orality, for me, in the general scale of bodily acceptance.” Nice? Precious? Enroll orality? Joan should get her petrol money back.

  [The things I was born too late for. Love letters lose something when they’re no longer a part of life, a thing people do—if you want to write a letter now you have to reckon with how affected it is. (And at that point you might as well write a love poem.) As the only letter-writer left in the United States of America, I recommend embracing the affectation; much better than trying to ignore it.

  So here I am, reading about John Updike enrolling orality. (We hear so much about killing metaphorical fathers and so little about castrating them.) Did the people who made talking like this the thing to do for about ten years of human history have any idea how badly it would hold up? Is it even possible to imagine those words coming out of the mouth of a human being and not a character in some turgid and self-important ’70s drama? —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:

• A return to the classic WRB subject of women and deer in poetry

• I reveal which century has the best English poetry

• K. T. on a Poem by José Olivarez and the smell of flowers

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]