WRB—Dec. 16, 2023

Happy people

The Washington Review of Books analyzes and overanalyzes, talking Charlie Brown through his depressions and existential confusion.

N.B.:

[The Saturday editions of the WRB, starting with this one, will now be unpaywalled and accessible in their entirety to all readers. These are our wares, and we hope you enjoy them. The Wednesday editions, which are identical to the Saturday editions in form, will continue to be paywalled. We’d like to thank all of you for your readership and support, which make everything we do possible. —Steve]

Links:

• Sometimes happy people read books. [I spent a bit of time talking about Madame Bovary last night. Do you want to stay happy? Don’t read books. They’ll ruin your life. —Steve] [I don’t know if we decided that books will make your life better, but they will, at the very least, make it different. If you’re unhappy enough, that’s something itself. —Chris] And sometimes the books themselves are happy. Sophie Haigney recounts her year through the books she read in The Paris Review:

  This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?

  [Grace Paley: “What she meant by happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything.” —Chris]

• In the Times, James Poniewozik on the Jewishness of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) [TV specials, no matter how perfect, don’t go in the Film Supplement. —Steve]:

  He analyzes and overanalyzes, talking Charlie Brown through his depressions and existential confusion. He nurses his anxieties and neuroses, carrying his security blanket like an emblem of strength (capable of whipping a snowball like David’s slingshot). Every Halloween, he forgoes the celebration of the larger community around him and awaits a messiah.

  If not a Jewish surrogate, Linus at least carries himself like your brainy, philosemitic Christian friend who knows the scriptures better than you do. This is the same kid who, in a 1970 comic, wished a department store Santa Happy Hanukkah and discussed Judas Maccabaeus with him.

  [A fine piece, but aren’t we wandering pretty close to “Charlie Brown had hoes”? —Chris] [The Coen brothers, like Charles Schulz, are from the Twin Cities area, which naturally suggests Charlie Brown as the hero of A Serious Man (2009). —Steve]

Reviews:

• In 4Columns, Geeta Dayal reviews a history of eyeliner (Eyeliner: A Cultural History, by Zahra Hankir, November)

  Eyeliner is believed to have been invented in ancient Egypt, where Hankir starts her story. The word “kohl,” as she explains, is derived from the Arabic “kuhl,” denoting a dark powder meant to be applied to the eyelids. It was thought to guard against the “evil eye,” which it is still used for in some cultures, and it had practical uses, too, like shielding the wearer from the harsh sunlight and possibly even offering protection against infections. (Though the eye makeup was often crafted from substances we now know to be toxic, such as lead and antimony, these compounds may also have an antibacterial effect.)

• In our sister publication in the Big Apple, Nathaniel Rich reviews a book arguing for the importance of literature written during the Second World War in understanding the experience of it (Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, by James A. W. Heffernan, 2022):

  What truth does the novelist Gellhorn record that the journalist Gellhorn cannot? She renders the lives of her subjects in far richer detail, though this may say more about the editorial conventions of Collier’s than narrative journalism as a form. In her fiction, Gellhorn writes about the novelists and journalists who came to Prague to exploit the situation for their careers, offering a behind-the-scenes perspective that Collier’s editors might have considered unseemly. And through her surrogate, a reporter named Mary Douglas, Gellhorn writes about herself—her own vulnerabilities and cynicism and bystander guilt. When a young Czech Communist in hiding begs Douglas to condemn the Nazis for her American audience, she dutifully obliges, but without conviction: “After they had public opinion all properly shaped, what good did it do? It was immensely easy to make people hate but it was almost impossible to make them help.” Ultimately Douglas decides to engage, intervening in the lives of several people she meets through her reporting. She brings one injured man to a hospital and smuggles out documents for another—a haphazard, largely ineffectual response to her feelings of impotency, but the only one available to her.

  [A friend recently reminded me of a quip, which I’ll recycle here: No one can compete with NYRB in the “novels in which the League of Nations figure more than you’d expect” game. —Chris]

• In

  Book Post
  , a review of a translation of the poetry of Surdas by John Stratton Hawley (Sur's Ocean: Classic Hindi Poetry in Translation, February):

  Hawley explains that among the poets who achieved pre-eminence in the major strands of classical Hindi—Brajbhasha, Tulsidas, Kabir—many were remembered for their devotion or their exploits, but “when the subject was poetry itself, Surdas had no peer.” Surdas, to whom a body of work came to be attributed that was so large and various it was called “an ocean”—“Sur Sagar,” an ocean of songs, eight thousand of which perhaps are still sung—has been understood for many generations to have been blind. To his blindness, Hawley continues. was attributed the clarity of his spiritual insight. In one version of his story, Sur was granted a vision of Krishna and then requested the deity to remove his faculty of sight so that whatever he might see subsequently would not dilute the splendor of what he had witnessed. In another, Sur is blind from birth.

  • Odyssey 8 (translated by Alexander Pope):

    The herald now arrives, and guides along
    The sacred master of celestial song;
    Dear to the Muse! who gave his days to flow
    With mighty blessings, mix'd with mighty woe;
    With clouds of darkness quench'd his visual ray,
    But gave him skill to raise the lofty lay.

  • John Milton, “When I consider how my light is spent”

  • Jason Wermers:

    [Blind Willie] McTell was born William Samuel McTier in 1903 near Thomson and grew up in Statesboro. It’s not known whether he was blind at birth or if he might have had a few years before totally losing his vision. Yet he never treated his blindness as a handicap. In fact, his hearing was the stuff of—for lack of a better term—legends.

    Those who knew him best said he could feel a suit in the closet and tell what color it was. He could hear certain cars pass by on the street and accurately describe the make and model, even the year they were made. And this superior sense of hearing made its way into his music.

• In Slate, Rebecca Onion reviews Blake Butler’s memoir of his wife’s suicide (Molly, December 5):

  Well, I have now read Molly. I get why postmortem publication of these kinds of secrets might give some people pause, but the book is so vital, so full of force, it’s a memorial most people would be happy to leave behind—the “bad” parts included. Molly guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness—“She was troubled”—right down its belly, showing exactly how that trouble presented, its sound and smell and taste, how it grew and receded and grew, how it left Molly profoundly isolated from her family, her friends, her husband, everything she loved. (“She seemed more alone than anyone I had ever met,” Butler writes.) It doesn’t pretend to know anything definitive about Molly at all—not-knowing is, in fact, part of its point. Butler is shattered at how he never really knew her. But he nonetheless describes her mind, and her ways of being, with such devoted attention that the book feels almost worshipful.

  • The Paris Review ran an excerpt a few months ago:

    I wasn’t allowed to leave the scene. Instead, I was asked to tell and retell my story of what happened over and over, first to one detective, then another, then another, like hellish Matryoshka dolls with badges and guns. I could feel their eyes searching my eyes, reading me as I told the story as best I could. They asked if I’d had any sense that this could happen, which made me feel embarrassed to say yes, trying to explain in so many feeble words Molly’s persona, her personal history, her cryptic poetry. “I like poetry too,” one detective interrupted with a grin, somewhere between considerate and dense, like we weren’t really talking about what we were talking about. I had to hand over Molly’s letter, which I’d been clutching this whole time, messy with mud and crumpled up, now considered evidence. This letter was my last link to her mind, I felt, therefore to any frame that might be found to explicate her reasoning, and now I had to hand it over, following procedure like some suspect on TV. I begged them to be sure to return to me, to not let it end up missing, aware at the same time in my periphery of the handling of the body of my wife, the hunt for facts, none of which could ever change what had just happened, much less whatever might come next.

    [This excerpt has stood out in my mind since I read it the first time for the forcefulness with which it conveys an unbearable pain. There are paragraphs in it significantly harder to read than this one. —Steve] [I went to hear Butler talk on Tuesday evening; the story is wrenching and I cried in the bookstore a little. I don’t know what it could mean to mourn under those circumstances, mourning something the history of which is shifting under your feet. —Chris]

N.B. (cont.):

• The Fence Magazine
  has rounded up the year's funniest things.

  • A weekly roundup of funny things.

• On regional Christmas music. [I’ve always had a soft spot for Tom Lehrer’s sendup of this sort of thing, “(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica.” —Steve]

• “So much can go wrong at a holiday party.” [The Apartment (1960) is about this. —Steve] [I hope something goes wrong at my holiday party this evening. —Chris]

• New issues:

  • NLR 144•NOV/DEC 2023

  • The Brooklyn Rail DEC 23-JAN 24

Poem:

“Ownership” by Gabrielle Bates
in Memory of J

Yes, I have trouble dwelling in what’s mine.
No, I did not suspect his pain.

My mind is the one that’s still here,
that received the news, then saw the bone,

its rows of flat, herbivore’s teeth
absorbing green from the moss.

Bent close, I described it until it was strange,
then familiar, then stranger—a character

transplaced from Ovid, saved or punished,
storied deer but concocted around the hymn of him

I’d known, if shallowly. A boy. I’d touched
his shoulders; I’d watched him dance in the fat

intersection of College and Magnolia, red lights
glossing his open mouth and limbs.

His being now: a chrysalis of flesh and hide amassing
then dissolving away

as the winds pick up, rhythmic but ruptured
on the bluff, a statue that could never be of stone.

His bed was elevated on crates and concrete blocks.
That I have always loved a storm

that can’t touch me is no secret.
What if I touched it. All of it. Description

drifting all over the dashboard, a running
boy’s essence poured into a deer’s mouth,

displacing the deer’s essence, running on and stumbling
uphill heaven-haunted toward the sound.

[This is from Bates’s debut collection Judas Goat (January), which I just finished yesterday. It’s an excellent book. 

My favorite poem from the collection was “Mothers” (which was a bit too long to feature here in full, but is well worth taking the time to read). As I re-read “Ownership”, I was reminded of a line from that one: The poem must be mess because we love each other. While I’d hardly call this poem a mess—there is a great deal of control in how Bates moves through all the small lyric detours of this poem—the speaker generates a kind of intentional confusion between the elegized boy, J, and the deer carcass she’s looking at. She received the news, then saw the bone, she tells us, linking the two so closely that it’s briefly ambiguous whether she’s looking at J’s body or not, until she gives us further details: flat, herbivore’s teeth / absorbing green from the moss. By the end of the poem, it’s clear that she experiences the two as linked in some real, mystical way, but I love how she progressively brings that into sharper focus as we move through the poem as we move between these vivid images of the deer and of the boy. His being now: a chrysalis of flesh and hide, she says, but then shifts back into a more objective recollection with the details about what his bed was like. There’s something so kaleidoscopic about this poem, and it is in that aspect that Bates tries to make room for love. Language and narrative so often fall short of being able to represent the other, the beloved, in their full goodness, and so the poem must be a mess, as Bates says, so that its messiness, its kaleidoscope, its strangeness and cracks, can show through to that ever-distant other. Because we love each other. —Julia] [I’ve been thinking a lot this week: if the facts of love are how they fall before us, is it possible to write or say anything true at all? —Chris]

Upcoming book:

January 9 | And Other Stories

Inland
by Gerald Murnane

From the publisher: Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination—from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. “No thing in the world is one thing,” he declares; “some places are many more than one place.” These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs—fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green—and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.

[The Upcoming book in WRB—July 26, 2023 was a study of Murnane, and we also linked to an excerpt from it there. —Steve]

What we’re reading:

Julia is reading Jesse Nathan’s poetry collection Eggtooth (September).

Chris was going to reread the Phaedrus but didn’t get around to it. He read Psalm 51 while he was loitering in the Liberties office yesterday afternoon. One day, he’s going to finish a novel again.

Steve read some more of Thomas Hardy’s poetry. [Sometimes you want to read “life sucks then you die.” This is probably a pathology common to classics majors. —Steve] [Happy for you bud. —Chris]

Critical notes:

• Llewelyn Morgan:

  In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce talks of the “human pages” of Stephen Dedalus’s “timeworn Horace” that “never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold”. Many other readers have discovered in Horace’s poetry an intimate friend in the shape of a book. David Hume couldn’t look this friend in the eye when he was failing so abjectly to follow his advice.

  [The Poem in WRB—Nov. 22, 2023, by Walter Savage Landor, was followed by a discussion of its Horatian aspects. There really is something friendly about that gentle irony. —Steve] [Horatian satire was the subject, the better part of a decade ago, of one of the first arguments Nic and I ever had. —Chris]

• Sarah Manavis:

  Are Swift’s feelings really the point? While we know celebrities typically only do traditional media when they have a guarantee it will be positive, Time’s Person of the Year holds some gravitas—meaning the interviewer is in a unique position to pose tougher questions. What is the purpose of celebrity journalism that only provides obedient affirmations of the subject’s flattering version of events?

  [At least past attempts by stars to get this flattering treatment gave us the truly stunning headline “I was Russell Crowe’s stooge” and a piece which lives up to it. I think about it at least once a week. —Steve]