They are only very beautiful young men about whom there is very little to say, once one has admired them. Doubtless one can get from them only pleasant and magnificent actions, which will be enough for the Muses and will satisfy the Goddess. They are here to be the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books, and then, to die: intelligence is not needed for these great things.
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.
Links:
- on early Updike:
This is another, larger sense in which Poorhouse Fair (1959) fails, I think. It’s a novel about America (that’s fair enough, of course). But the way it tropes that country is as a decrepitude: a nation declining into the vale of years, with nothing but dusty-souled materialists and socialists to inherit its promise. This is, I’d say, just wrong. I mean, wrong as a way of characterising the 1950s U.S.A., aesthetically as much as anything. Nabokov’s Lolita (published four years earlier in Paris, although not in the States until 1967) tropes America as a luscious nymphet, but that's an outsider’s, a European’s perspective. Updike in Rabbit, Run (1960) lights on something cleverer: America is not a 90-something godfearing old geezer, but neither is it an alluring teenager. It’s an adult, but one who hasn’t properly grown-up. America is, in other words, a superannuated adolescent, inhabiting a big and powerful body, and with considerable charm and sex appeal, but lacking self-discipline and commitment to duty. America is religious, but its religion is window-dressing for a libidinal fixation, a facile eroticization of the sublime. America has energy and passion but no capacity for endurance or self-sacrifice. America, when push meets shove, will do a runner.
[Lolita comes at the question through the title character but also through Clare Quilty; Humbert’s feelings about him are the European feeling “Why is this unsophisticated boor, this idiot clown the United States of America in charge of the world, and not us?” translated to the situation.
The ending of The Great Gatsby has something of both: the Dutch sailors see “a fresh, green breast of the new world” when they first get there, but Gatsby “did not know that [his dream] was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” This is not merely about place but also about time, and there will always be something a little childish about wanting to live in the past.
Further evidence of America as overgrown adolescent can be found in the phrase “Founding Fathers,” which underlines both generation and authority. They cannot be displaced; they are always there, somehow preventing their descendants from becoming like them, let alone surpassing them. Frequently this gets Oedipal. As Daniel Webster said in his first Bunker Hill Monument oration, given in 1825:
We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us a great duty of defense and preservation.
Seething resentment, barely concealed. What achievement could possibly compare to founding the United States of America? We’re all overgrown boys because we can’t escape Dad’s shadow.—Steve]
In The Point, Kaya Genç on Oğuz Atay:
Atay, who was born in 1934, had a short writing life. Only five years passed between the publication date of his debut, The Disconnected, in 1971 and 1972, and his death in 1977. He published three other novels: one of them, Science of Action, was left unfinished and published posthumously. A play of his was rejected by theater companies at the time. His only story collection, Waiting for the Fear, was published in 1975. In all these works, fear is the ground note. Waiting for the Fear is a set of Kafkaesque short stories that Atay began writing in 1972. And there is Atay’s Diary, whose posthumous publication in 1987 shocked Turkey’s intellectuals, his frequent targets. “The original sin” of Turkish citizens, he wrote, is the “fear of living” implanted by the Turkish state and its extension, the Turkish nuclear family. In an entry dated January 5, 1975, Atay complained of “a small semi-intellectual gang that has monopolized all kinds of progressive and reactionary movements, who has not felt the need to renew itself for years, and today, in order not to lose its place, is trying to survive.” Those people, he warned, “are not aware of the human being, the real human being. They truly remain ‘in a cowardly darkness.’ They’re afraid of living and having fun. They’re afraid of getting to know people, especially women.” Atay asked writers to “expose them everywhere” and embark on this confrontation in their novels, stories, and poems. “Of course, we have nothing to say to those afraid of themselves.”
Reviews:
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Timothy Aubry reviews a book about close reading (On Close Reading, by John Guillory, with an annotated bibliography by Scott Newstok, January 8, 2025):
Close reading, Guillory contends, developed in response to “the massification of literacy” and the proliferation of different kinds of texts and media in the early part of the twentieth century. If literacy alone was no longer a mark of distinction, close reading enabled its practitioners to elevate themselves above other less-educated readers. At the same time, as a method for demonstrating what made certain texts rich and rewarding, it served as the basis for aesthetic judgment, thus privileging a select number of works out of the vast heaps of writing suddenly being published. Later, this function was partially responsible for the backlash against close reading, with politically oriented critics casting it as a reactionary means of policing the literary canon (and keeping it white and male). Moreover, these critics claimed, close reading served to sequester the text from its social and political context, thus supporting myopic assumptions about literature’s autonomy. But Guillory’s parsimonious definition describes a technique disentangled from any such conservative agendas. Employed even by the left and progressive methodologies that rejected New Criticism, close reading, as he understands it, has in fact consistently demonstrated its usefulness to historicist analysis. Noting its utility among competing schools of criticism, Guillory concludes that “close reading as a technique has no ideological or political implications whatsoever.”
[Cf. Jonathan Kramnick in WRB—Aug. 10, 2024, where he claims that “As the term circulates in the profession, close reading is in this way a practice of writing more than it is one of reading.” The elevation Aubry mentions is done through writing about the thing read, and the aesthetic judgment is also communicated through writing. —Steve]
In The Atlantic, Rhian Sasseen reviews the first two volumes of Solvej Balle’s septology (On the Calculation of Volume, Book I and II, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, November):
On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup. Both of these volumes move swiftly; their briefness (each is less than 200 pages) is at odds with the feeling of unendingness that attends Tara’s predicament. Balle’s work disrupts one of the foundational laws of the universe: that time moves forward. Only the act of writing allows Tara to feel some control over her time again. “That is why I began to write,” Tara notes near the beginning of the first novel. “Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” But without other people experiencing the same events beside her, do any of her actions matter? Without time, life becomes static, a repetitive series of journal entries all marked with the same date.
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Dec. 7, 2024.]
- reviews a short story by Jane Gardam (“The Sidwell Letters,” 1980):
No, what obsessed me about this story was the pivot and the realization that in Annie we have a narrator determined to give away as little as possible and only at the last moment. To whatever extent such a thing is possible Annie tries to be the neutral pane of glass through which the light falls. The fullest image we get of her is that glimpse of what she imagines she must seem to her cousin. She is a narrator determined to preserve her own privacy and thus we never discover what one would consider important facts about her—what her novels are like, what her life is like. She remains stubborn and elusive. Thus Austen’s deliberately blanked-out life is recapitulated in Annie’s own deceptive transparency.
[Austen is strong evidence for “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” The closest she ever comes to letting it slip is “her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for,” and even that is only a slight lift of the mask. (More about “Tradition and the Individual Talent” below.) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
[Britishisms? In my American English? It’s more likely than you’d think! —Steve]
There are Guinness shortages in the United Kingdom.
Dance in ancient Rome. [I’ve always found the Carmen Saliare and the Carmen Arvale evocative. —Steve]
New issues:
Berlin Review No. 8 | Jan. 2025
New Left Review 150 | Nov/Dec 2024
Local:
Poem:
“Never May the Fruit Be Picked” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold,
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot.
[One of my favorite things about Millay is how unapologetically cyclical she is throughout her oeuvre. She tracks her rising and falling moods as she tracks the weather, the seasons, and her surroundings—with intensity, attention, and precision that is sometimes joyous and sometimes wry, but always honest. In Renascence the poem “Afternoon on a Hill,” which opens with the exuberant lines “I will be the gladdest thing / Under the sun!”, is immediately followed by “Sorrow,”which opens with the blankly depressive “Sorrow like a ceaseless rain / Beats upon my heart . . . ” Even when she pokes fun at herself a bit (as when in “Departure,” after several verses of grimly desolate lament, she adds an italicized punchline in the form of a brief and mundane domestic exchange that underlines the heightened emotions that preceded it) she refuses to trivialize the feelings that sweep over her life—each one is given voice. She draws illustration for her verse as often from lively personal anecdotes as from solitary moments in nature—whether sketching a brief exchange between strangers or watching the inexorable beating of the sea against the shore, she finds glimpses of recognition of the myriad workings of the human heart everywhere.
Here in Maine, winter is throwing a series of fickle fits and starts as we’ve alternated between fresh, chill snowfall and unseasonably warm downpours. While the woods were still blanketed with white, I took a long walk alone and eventually fell to musing on the things that life seems to leave to waste on frozen boughs. When I discovered this poem shortly afterwards, I found an echo of my own feelings, but also a reminder that there is a softer and truer beauty to be seen here—Millay concludes with what’s left behind, true, but not without her bittersweet paean to what is, in even a single moment. Love, she reminds us, is not a feeling to be worried over and hoarded away. It is action, experience—satisfaction to be reached for and picked, even if it cannot always be retained within our grasp forever. And, after all, even in “the winter of love” and its “empty bins” there is, as in all of Millay’s work, the promise of new seasons and new loves to come. Morning and evening, springtime and harvest, each in its time and season, and each with both grand feelings and quiet moments to extol. After all, hunger and fullness are both, in their way, gifts. —Hannah]
Upcoming book:
Goldsmiths Press | December 24
Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary
edited by Torsten Andreasen, Emma Sofie Brogaard, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Nicholas Alan Huber and Frederik Tygstrup
From the publisher: What does finance capital look like? How do the push and pull of debt and credit shape our feelings and relations? Across fifty-five unforgettable entries, Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary offers an unorthodox appraisal of our bizarre, distorted contemporary condition.
What we’re reading:
Steve started reading The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry (translated by Denise Folliot). [In the introduction Eliot spends a fair bit of time trying to obscure how aligned he is with Valéry on a number of questions—“We do not turn to Valéry’s art poétique in the hope of learning how to write poetry or how to read it.” The most egregious example comes in complaining that when Valéry says
With every question, before making any deep examination of the content, I take a look at the language; I generally proceed like a surgeon who sterilizes his hands and prepares the area to be operated on. This is what I call cleaning up the verbal situation.
he has been carried away by his ideas of poet as scientist, and so Eliot finds it “very obscure” “eyewash.” (What about the other half of the situation here, the patient etherized upon a table?) But in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” we read “It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.” And the poet achieves this depersonalization through developing a historical sense, which
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
This is only possible with a deep knowledge of the literature of Europe from Homer. And to know it this intimately means that it simply comes to mind when at work on other problems. To be fair to Eliot, “The Fire Sermon” does not end how it does because he sat down to consider the literature about corruption in port cities and the vanity of desire. That happens automatically. But he could hardly consider the content without considering the language, if for no other reason than that the language we have read shapes how we think. And any artist who is any good will consider what has been done before and what language has been used. If not, the art will be only a bad imitation of the past.
This talking past each other makes one point of agreement all the stronger:
The insistence, in Valéry’s poetics, upon the small part played, in the elaboration of a poem, by what he calls le rêve—what is ordinarily called the “inspiration”—and upon the subsequent process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labor, is a most wholesome reminder to the young poet.
Since Eliot is not counting “cleaning up the verbal situation” as work, he further emphasizes the importance of revision. As Valéry says, sometimes you get a first line for free, but then you have to come up with the second line by yourself and, if you’re good, no one will be able to tell which was which. As Thomas Edison did not say, “Poetry is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” And a lot of that perspiration is about knowing what to do with inspiration. For Valéry experiencing a poetic state individually is easy, but being able to put something down in words that will induce a poetic state in others is not. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Mallarmé (quoted by Valéry): “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.” [So far I like Valéry as a writer, but the punchiest line was a quote from somebody else. —Steve]
- on getting people interested in reading:
When it comes to getting people invested in literature, I tend to believe that the right approach is not to beat people over the head with lectures about how literature is really important; it cultivates moral and ethical qualities in a person; if they don’t read books, or they’re reading the wrong books, they’re dumb and cringe and uncool.
It’s more useful and rhetorically effective to simply model what it means to care about literature, and how engaging with it can shape one’s life. If you seem like someone interesting and even admirable, then the people who encounter you will see a preoccupation with literature as interesting and admirable as well.
[A long time ago Chris wrote up the WRB statement of purpose, which hits similar points. I just do the newsletter. I am the Bill Belichick of twice-a-week books-and-culture newsletters. “Do your job.” (As always this is a college football newsletter.) —Steve]
- on Martin Amis:
The subject of The War Against Cliche is nothing less than the divine, Platonic pleasure of observation. “[Philip] Roth’s sentences are dapper and sonorous, always eventful, never congested.” Why, that’s exactly right! “I reviewed Crash when it came out in 1973; and, as I remember, the critical community greeted Ballard’s novel with a flurry of nervous dismay. But of course reviewers do not admit to nervous dismay. Nervous dismay is a response that never announces itself as such, and comes to the ball tricked out as Aesthetic Fastidiousness or Moral Outrage.” Of course it does. Sometimes the pleasure of good criticism is seeing a great mind rigorously systematize. But sometimes the pleasure is that of seeing a beautiful silver key slide soundlessly into a silver lock and turn with a satisfying click.
Pope:
True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
- on Dylan’s gospel period:
Back to why everyone quit Dylan: it’s possible it wasn’t the religion alone. Some of the songs are prayers, and quite moving ones. In their articulations of faith and of doubt, “Pressing On” and “Every Grain of Sand” rank with the most powerful songs he ever wrote. But elsewhere on the albums are songs attacking a lack of faith, and warning of the hellfire coming if one does not repent: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Slow Train,” especially “When You Gonna Wake Up,” it’s there in the titles. Of course no one should have been surprised to find Dylan singing songs of accusation. These same fans cheered the finger-pointing in “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Idiot Wind.” The problem now, maybe, was they couldn’t identify with the singer—leaving them forced, uncomfortably, to identify with the target.
John:
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
. . .
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
You know something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
Zoë Hitzig interviews Ryan Ruby about his new book (Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, November) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024; we linked to a review and an earlier interview with Ruby in WRB—Nov. 20, 2024, and I discussed it in WRB—Nov. 23, 2024. —Steve]:
As for the economic aspect, do you know Mark McGurl, the literary sociologist? I love his most recent book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021). He examines the “genre turn” in literature by looking at huge amounts of self-published genre fiction—often very demotic, “subliterary” forms, with strange genre mutations. He shows how creativity in genre fiction isn’t at the sentence level but at the level of genre variation. A romance novel turned into a vampire romance set in corporate America where everyone wears diapers during sex. That’s the kind of creativity at play, not a novel way of writing a sentence.
But what McGurl points out—and it’s a fascinating and troubling point—is that, because of the sheer volume of production of this subliterary prose, the result is a realization of a great modernist dream of the purely uncommodifiable word, of language freed from capital. This astronomical supply of language means demand can’t keep up, so the “price” of language drops to nothing. The vast majority of genre writers—and increasingly other kinds of writers too, especially poets—do not get paid for their work. The modernist dream of decommodifying language has come true, oddly enough, in the form of hundreds of thousands of people reading, say, “adult diaper baby romance,” formally the least modernist kind of writing you could possibly imagine.
Why is this? Few are inspired to such love for other writers, even great ones like Swift and Landor. The answer, I suspect, is not entirely flattering to Johnson’s readers. Johnson was like us, only more so. He could be ferocious. His fear of death was overpowering. He was ungainly, as inelegant in manner as his prose was elegant in its gravitas. Johnson was sick, guilt-ridden and depressed, but equally hard-working (though sorely tempted by idleness), gifted and compassionate. He recognized his weaknesses and wrestled with them daily. His life was laborious, not easeful. This accounts for Johnson’s enduring attractiveness to us as man and writer. With his wracked sense of humility, he never claimed to transcend the human lot. His weakness was ours. He was like us, but brilliantly, articulately so.
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