The Washington Review of Books is the tribute the Managing Editor must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.
N.B.:
[A note on scheduling: I need a break, so this will be the last WRB of 2024. The WRB will return to your inboxes on Saturday, January 4, 2025.
Thank you to all of our readers, you wonderful people out there in the dark. A special thank you to those of you generous enough to pay for the WRB; you help keep this thing going, and your support means a lot to me. Another special thank you to those of you I met for the first time this year, and the same to those of you, whenever I met you, who are the victims of my love of thinking “out loud”—through conversation you have helped shape both my ideas and the WRB. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and happy new year. —Steve]
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:
In Harper’s, Cynthia Ozick on the various kinds of letters:
The most insidious betrayer of letter writing comes subtly, prettily, artfully, as an impostor pretending to be the letter’s harmless twin: it comes in the mail as a look-alike, with handwritten signature, postage, envelope personally addressed. And everything that the unforgotten letter did best, the greeting card excels at. It is a model of decorum and proportion when suitable. It can be antic and witty, off-color enough for an innocent good laugh, tenderly sympathetic, touchingly romantic, decorative and painterly, exuberant or grave. It knows how to choose the apt phrase for every conceivable circumstance of human life, from first day of school to funeral. It ameliorates hurt, heals past offense, and exorcises loneliness. It is, always and always, Thinking of You. Whether inexpensive or costly, it is reliably time-saving, and relieves the sender of hard-won mulling over the right word. It is as ingenious as ventriloquism, made possible by some humble hireling rhymester drudging away at a keyboard in a faraway office.
But what the greeting card cannot do is what the letter never failed to deliver: the news. News of births, of deaths, of jobs, moves from one neighborhood to another, or from city to city; news of reactions to the news, local, presidential, international; news of rumors and scandals, news of movies seen, books read, meals cooked, restaurants visited; news of trips to the dentist, the zoo, the beach, the aquarium, the planetarium, the art museum, the circus; news of the knees, the stomach, the heart, the lungs.
[My problem is that most of the people with whom I’ve exchanged letters I’ve also texted much more frequently. And so my letters, free from the need to carry news, become unhinged exercises in rhetoric. (Even more than my usual writing. Don’t email me.) —Steve]
In Lit Hub, Katherine J. Chen on love and Henry James:
There is a moment in Roderick Hudson when after Rowland Mallet has performed an eloquent monologue on what he would like to do with his life, his cousin Cecilia exclaims, “What an immense number of words to say you want to fall in love!” This is, in essence, James. We need the walls of text that James writes to understand love, to leave us, like the wave that crashes over our heads and which initially buries us under its overwhelming weight, to make us fully comprehend what love is, what it demands, and what it can brave. The performance of what some readers may deem to be verbosity, of taking too roundabout a way to get to the point, ironically compels us to realize that love has been sitting, like the golden bowl, center-stage all along. A profusion of language makes what is not said only more keenly felt, and we arrive at the complete and perfect distillation of those three simple though sacred words: “I love you.”
In The New Criterion, Richard Tillinghast on Andrew Nelson Lytle:
But if we see Lytle purely as a chronicler of the Old South and an adherent of traditional values, we see only part of the man. If his material was traditional, his technique was modernist. He took Flaubert as his model for technique in fiction, often citing “Un coeur simple” as his favorite work. And in his approach to point of view, he followed Henry James. Who else would ask the question, as he does in the foreword to a collection of his stories, “Which is the great American novel, Moby-Dick or The Ambassadors?” In his youth, after graduating from Vanderbilt, Lytle earned his MFA in the theater program at Yale. There was always something of the actor about him. While at Yale he became familiar with the avant-garde theater and dance scene in New York. When a classmate and I made a trip there, Lytle gave us an introduction to Martha Graham, who let us attend rehearsals. And who else but this mischievous man would title a collection of literary criticism The Hero with the Private Parts? He reveled in being described in a newspaper article, at the age of seventy-five, as “barrel-chested and sexy.” He would get us to read this aloud and then he would crow delightedly.
In Van, Hannah Schmidt interviews Olivier Latry, titular organist at Notre-Dame de Paris, about its reopening and his work:
Schmidt: How do you differentiate between [the organists’] styles? Can you describe them?
Latry: It’s hard, because the differences are often really slight. At the end of the day we all belong to the French school. Thirty years ago, there was a situation with Philippe Lefebvre: As part of a sound check, the technicians played a recorded improvisation. We were standing in the tower next to the organ and discussing which one of us had played it. Me, or someone else? We couldn’t say. And I remember a concert with a guest organist from Austria. He played a Franck chorale, and it was beautiful, really. I was there with a colleague of mine and we looked at each other and said, “This is really beautiful, but it’s not French.”
Schmidt: What was missing? What made it not French?
Latry: The rubato was different, for example, or the way the colors were mixed: A lot of little things. But he wasn’t a French organist, and it wasn’t meant as criticism. We were really happy to hear an organist who was taking our music in a different direction. But maybe it’s an organ thing, and is different for other instruments.
[I hope that Latry’s opening improvisation brings French organ improvisation to a wider audience. —Steve]
In Comment, Mark Clemens interviews John William Trotter about his production of Handel’s Messiah:
Trotter: A large number of traditionalists loved it. You know, people who really know the piece well, who keep going, who find themselves wanting to go less and less. That’s the funny thing, right? Like, you keep going because . . . why? A little bit of your hope dies each time. You feel like there’s something not happening that could happen.
Clemens: You go because once upon a time you had an encounter, compared to which every subsequent time is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. But you’re hoping to get a glimpse of that first thrill again. I don’t know Messiah as well as a lot of people, but I had that experience too: I sat there feeling that that thing you feel when you’re in the presence of a great work and it tells you, like Rilke’s torso of Apollo, You must change your life. You’re like, oh right, that’s why I read these books that nobody cares about and listen to all this old stuff. Because sometimes this happens.
Trotter: For fifteen years now I have articulated the belief that, though music does lots of things, the thing it’s for is transformation. It can help you pass the time and it can, you know, manipulate you during political ads. But I think it’s for transformation, which I distinguish from a period of time out of your reality. Transformation means you are different at the end than you were at the beginning, and possibly you will continue to be different.
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Thames, Clare Bucknell reviews a book about the Earl of Rochester (Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure, by Larry D. Carver, June):
An attitude that looked poised and assured reveals itself to be compensatory, mechanical. Libertinism, here, is less a choice than a “hedonistic repetition-compulsion,” in Christopher Tilmouth’s words: “each kind Night returnes” and with it the speaker and his roll-call of mistresses, until, one day, they don’t. No one, especially not the libertine, is getting out alive. The double use of the verb “change” reveals who is really in charge. Subject becomes object: the speaker may “change” his mistress, but eventually it is he who will be “change[d],” and irrevocably. If you are this devoted to your fleshly pleasures, the thought that the worms will come at last must be terrifying.
Libertinism, by parading its heterodoxy, its independence of the rules, risks being just a parade: a firework display that fizzles into nothing. In Rochester’s mock-heroic poems, his speakers make claims that read as both chest-thumpingly exaggerated and somehow a bit limp.
[Following this is a discussion of “The Disabled Debauchee.” I would have liked a move from “somehow a bit limp” into “days of impotence.” I think Rochester would have appreciated it. —Steve]
In the local Post,
reviews a collection of E. B. White’s writing about New York (New York Sketches, December 3):His simultaneous intimacy and distance yield jewels of observation that glint on every page of Sketches. The sound of trains in Grand Central Terminal is “the noise of destinations”; a dog darting down the street is “a sturdy black animal with an idiot love of life.” White had a genius for approaching language at a slight, surprising angle. When he wrote about a waitress who spilled buttermilk on him, he did not note that he was covered in the stuff but rather, “I was all buttermilk.” Later, “I rose from my chair, a smear.”
This is vintage White: These sentences boast remarkable economy (“I was all buttermilk” is four impossibly vivid words), but they are neither astringent nor ascetic. White displays none of the mannered understatement of a Hemingway, none of the icy detachment of a Didion. His brand of irony is amused and affectionate, and if he condenses and compresses, it is because he relishes the weight of each word. He cannot stand to see any language squandered.
N.B. (cont.):
Charles Dickens’ other Christmas ghost stories.
Various versions of the lyrics to “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” [The only argument I will hear that the revised lyrics are better than the original depressing ones is that Bob Dylan used them. —Steve]
Martha Stewart’s book about making wreaths.
A history of tiki bars.
“What is sprezzatura?”
Mencken (h/t Patrick Kurp):
The same old books are bought and given year after year. Go into the bookstores and you will see huge pyramids of the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald’s Omar (in a score of gaudy and painful bindings), the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious romances, the essays of Emerson, cheap reprints of Kipling’s earlier and uncopyrighted stories, Shakespeare in trashy near-leather, Wilkie Collins, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, Dumas Pere, Sienkiewicz and Charles Garvice—stupid and silly “gift” books innumerable.
[Why not give the gift of the WRB instead? —Steve]
New issues:
The Drift Issue Fourteen
Harper’s January 2025 [As linked to above.]
Literary Review of Canada January | February 2025
The New Criterion Volume 43, Number 5 / January 2025 [As linked to above.]
Some notes on Christmas movies:
- on Eyes Wide Shut (2000):
Prompted by his wife’s startling confession of desire for another man, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) embarks on a long sexual misadventure in New York that isn’t so dissimilar from those taken by Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol or George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—two works, we should note, that have never have been in dispute as holiday classics. Christmas is a time when people are expected to appreciate their loved ones and cherish the lives they’ve built for themselves, but Harford, like Scrooge and Bailey, is restless and unmoored, and in need of outside intervention. While he may not be visited by supernatural interlocutors, the New York of Eyes Wide Shut seems a little like the one in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), a nocturnal force that’s exacting a punishment on him that he doesn’t think he deserves. Conspiracies abound in the film involving the city’s most powerful people, but there also seems to be a quieter one underneath, like a collective effort to teach the reeling doctor a few lessons he can bring back to a healthier marriage.
Cruise’s decent and bourgeois Bill, who is perhaps a little complacent in his love for his wife, resembles the decent and bourgeois Gabriel Conroy of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” who is also perhaps a little complacent in his love for his wife. The difference is that Alice’s revelation is entirely sexual, whereas Gretta Conroy’s is entirely romantic.
[Last Christmas I was at my parents’ house, woke up long before everyone else on Christmas Day, and considered watching Eyes Wide Shut on the TV in the family room and hoping no one else woke up before it finished. But in the end I declined to play The Most Dangerous Game. —Steve]
On rationing Christmas movies. [I have no idea how you would run out of solid Christmas movies by the 25th. But then not mentioned in this piece are (in chronological order; this is not a ranking): Remember the Night (1940), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) (!!!), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), White Christmas (1954), My Night at Maud’s (1969), A Christmas Story (1983), Metropolitan (1990), the above-mentioned Eyes Wide Shut, and so on. It does mention A Christmas Carol (singular, doesn’t say which) and also calls it “bad,” so add two of the Alastair Sim one (1951), the George C. Scott one (1984), and the Muppet one (1992) to that list. —Steve]
Poem:
“To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris” by Helen Maria Williams
What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
Ah say, what strange enchantment dwells
Enclosed within its odorous cells?
Is there no small magician bound
Encrusted in its snowy round?
For magic surely lurks in this,
A cake that tells of vanished bliss;
A cake that conjures up to view
The early scenes, when life was new;
When memory knew no sorrows past,
And hope believed in joys that last!—
Mysterious cake, whose folds contain
Life’s calendar of bliss and pain;
That speaks of friends for ever fled,
And wakes the tears I love to shed.
Oft shall I breathe her cherished name
From whose fair hand the offering came:
For she recalls the artless smile
Of nymphs that deck my native isle;
Of beauty that we love to trace,
Allied with tender, modest grace;
Of those who, while abroad they roam,
Retain each charm that gladdens home,
And whose dear friendships can impart
A Christmas banquet for the heart!
[We are having a largely DIY Christmas because that is the kind of Christmas I prefer, and I tend to get what I want. It started with painting my own wrapping paper with the kids; now there are only a few things that are purchased rather than made or decorated at home under the tree. I love the flurry of activity, the spreading out of craft supplies all over the house, collecting little bits of ribbon and scraps of yarn. My husband might like this part less, especially when I inevitably wander around the house looking for an important tool that I left on the coffee table where the baby could reach it. (This is true. —Jude)
Occasionally, I have doubts that this is the best way to manage Christmas. Do I get more enjoyment from the making and the giving than the recipient has in receiving? Everyone is too polite to say so, if that’s true. Williams, however, heartens me. An English plum cake sent to Paris is not only a lovely treat but a reminder of home. She has her cake, and she’ll eat it, too. Simply holding and smelling the (probably liquor-soaked) confection brings a flood of lovely memories. The sweetness of her childhood, the pang of friends long since passed, and the love of the friend who sent the cake all fill her heart to bursting.
I hope this is how all my little gifts are received, too. It’s not just a pretty little trinket or tasty treat, but a whole history of the love in our shared lives. —Grace]
Upcoming book:
Dey Street Books | January 7
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)
by Colette Shade
From the publisher: The early 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.
In Y2K, one of our most brilliant young critics Colette Shade offers a darkly funny meditation on everything from the pop culture to the political economy of the period. By close reading Y2K artifacts like the Hummer H2, Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” body glitter, AOL chatrooms, Total Request Live, and early internet porn, Shade produces an affectionate yet searing critique of a decade that started with a boom and ended with a crash.
In one essay Colette unpacks how hearing Ludacris’ hit song “What’s Your Fantasy” shaped a generation’s sexual awakening; in another she interrogates how her eating disorder developed as rail-thin models from the collapsed USSR flooded the pages of Vogue; in another she reveals how the McMansion became an ominous symbol of the housing collapse.
What we’re reading:
Steve read A Christmas Carol and started reading A Lover’s Discourse.
Critical notes:
- Moul on Ben Jonson’s Christmas His Masque:
Politically, Jonson’s entertainment contributes to a contemporary debate about the appropriateness and legitimacy of the folk traditions around Christmas, disapproved of by Puritans who argued that they preserved pagan traditions and trivialized the season. Jonson’s gathering of a large number of folk traditions all in a single short entertainment, and having them burst in on the court before the royal family to high comic effect, is an argument in defense of Christmas as a season of high spirits and a degree of controlled chaos. This political-religious aspect of the piece is the one that has generally been remarked on by scholars. It’s obvious, too, that the way Jonson handles the classical element of the entertainment—Venus as a fishwife’s daughter, her son Cupid an apprentice of dubious parentage, both of them completely out of place at court—sends up the contemporary fashion for elegant classicism: think, for instance, of the masque of Iris, Ceres and Juno in Act 4 of The Tempest, first performed in 1611.
- advocates for “new experiments in the national fantastic and a quest for the Great American Fantasy story”:
Last—and this might be the assignment I’d give myself if I were suddenly graced with extra time and extra talent—you could try to write more as Baum did and create an All-American children’s fantasy (not a “Y.A.” fantasy, perish the thought).
The models, along with Oz and J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, would be Narnia, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain and Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising novels; some influential American antecedents would include Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time quintet and Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window and its sequels.
And the goal would be straightforward: Dethrone that precious Harry Potter and all his twee tea-sipping chums, free American kids from the tyranny of the British boarding school system (did we lose a war?) and give them a magical country that matches the scope and scale and impossibly wide horizons of their own.
[In the spirit of anti-decadence I propose we aim not for an American Harry Potter or an American Lord of the Rings but for an American Paradise Lost, an American Aeneid. (If we have the stomach for fantasy series and not epic poetry that’s its own problem.)
That said—and as all who are not too sinful to see it know—the Aeneid was actually written by a native of Michigan, one P. Virgil Morrow (1832-1878). His formal study of the classics ended after one year of college; the need to support his elderly mother and his younger siblings after his father’s death forced him to leave school. He then failed in a number of enterprises, including potato farming, wagon making, and the production and sale of Dr. Morrow’s Medicinal Tonic, which refuted its advertising by proving ineffective at relieving intestinal disorders, let alone helping balding men regrow their hair. He would not have known what to do next if not for the Civil War; seeing no other options, and facing accusations of quackery at home, he enlisted in the Union army and salvaged his reputation with brave fighting in several battles in northern Virginia. These he regarded mostly as unpleasant interruptions from reading Tacitus. Upon his return to Michigan, his failures in business and his year of college led him to seek and find employment as a schoolteacher. He became dissatisfied teaching the standard Latin authors because his students found them all boring, and he, a man inclined to being shy and retiring, was not the sort to insist on their doing the reading anyway. To rectify this situation, he took it upon himself to compose a Latin poem about the first Thanksgiving. He chose that subject because he felt, rather naively perhaps, that a lack of knowledge and appreciation of the event was a cause of the Civil War. His students, however, were even less interested in reading this piece of neo-Latin than they were in the real stuff from the grandeur that was Rome. He then hit upon the idea, first, to expand his treatment of the subject into an epic, and, second, to hide his real subject under Roman myths of their founding and so pass it off as an ancient work. And so the Pilgrims became the Trojans, and the Wampanoag the Italians. (The finer transformations I leave for the alert reader to discover.) This, finally, Morrow’s students accepted. His epic would have remained in a pleasant obscurity had one of his students not gone on to a career in politics; he advanced very quickly through the ranks of the Michigan Republican Party and was eventually elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Granted an audience with President Garfield, of whom it was said that he could write in Latin with one hand and in Greek with the other at the same time, he thought to impress him with several references to the Aeneid. Upon seeing Garfield’s bafflement, he was finally moved to ask if the president was familiar with that work; Garfield said he was not and was persuaded to seek it out. The president recognized the merits of the poem and sent off many letters to the leading scholars and literary men of the time recommending it to them. These had the intended effect, aided by the identity of the man sending them, and the Aeneid swept first America and then the world. Morrow, however, would not live to see it happen; he drowned in 1878 when a train of the Kalamazoo and Ypsilanti Rail Road, on which he was a passenger, derailed while on a bridge and plummeted into the river below. Eventually the poem came even to Italy. During the Second World War, American soldiers thought it very funny to graffiti ancient Roman ruins with its first line.
And that, my friends, is the story of the Aeneid, America’s first epic poem. If we are to have a second, I think it should recount the life and work of P. Virgil Morrow. —Steve]