WRB—Dec. 6, 2025
“passed from hand to hand”
That one may smile and smile and be a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
Links:
In The New Statesman, Nicholas Lezard on recommending Philip Roth to his mother:
Over the din of the TV, my mother’s piercing voice asked: “WHAT WAS THAT NOISE YOU MADE?” As it happened, this was my “I have just read something interesting in this book” noise. But I could not say, “I have just read something interesting in this book,” because she would then ask what the book was and what was interesting in it. And the reason I could not answer her was because the book was about Philip Roth, and if I said that a whole cascade of unpleasant associations would begin.
It’s not only what Philip Roth had to say about mothers. That’s bad enough. (In a nutshell: “Get out while you can.”) But it’s also that shortly after it came out, I bought her Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), for her birthday. My reasoning: she reads good books (or did then); she spent her childhood in New Jersey, like Roth, and, well, Roth’s a good writer. What I had not done was read the book. It would have been wise to have done so. The next time I saw her, her face was a mask of horror. “That book you gave me,” was all she said. By this time, I knew what was in the book, and I could see her reasoning: this is not the kind of book to give your saintly silver-haired mother on her birthday, even if she is from New Jersey. I will spare you the details if you have not read it. If you have, you will know what I mean. It doesn’t exactly make Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) look like Ant and Bee, but it’s getting there. So I said, “Oh, nothing,” and retired to my boudoir upstairs.
[I once found a first edition of Portnoy’s Complaint in a bookstore, bought it along with a few other books, and then joked on my Instagram story about having to buy the other books so the woman at the checkout didn’t take me for the sort of person on the hunt for first editions of Portnoy’s Complaint. The next time I talked to my mother on the phone she asked why I was buying pornography. (I don’t think my mother has any opinions about Philip Roth, although she also grew up in New Jersey; if I had to guess it came down to a combination of the joke and reading “Portnoy’s” quickly.) —Steve]
In The Creative Independent, Theadora Walsh interviews Terrence Arjoon:
Walsh: I had a pen pal when I was younger and he was very smart, and he told me that you can write something and it can just be for yourself, but then you edit it to make it for other people. And that feels like something poetry’s kind of uniquely good at—being for other people—because it can sometimes approach the objectivity of a painting or a sculpture. A poem you love, you can feel like nobody wrote it.
Arjoon: Yeah, I was going to say that I think it is a durational thing where you’re inside the novel, and I think you can admire or observe a poem outside of time, and it becomes durational during performance.
[You can write anything for yourself, but if you want other people to make something of it you have to think about how they’ll receive it.
And it can feel like nobody wrote a poem just like some songs feel like nobody wrote them because they must have always existed. A world without them is unimaginable. Some poetry so perfectly encompasses a feeling that it must always have been there; how could people have ever understood what they were feeling without the poem? The champions of this category are A. E. Housman and the early Yeats—simplicity has a lot to do with this specific magic. —Steve]
In UnHerd, Terry Eagleton on Tom Stoppard:
Stoppard’s work is celebrated for its wit—a form of humor which it seems you don’t have to work at, and which is, therefore, more appropriate to the English gentleman than the honest bourgeoise. It can be a form of frivolity, but one that redeems itself from the merely vacuous by its agility of mind. It can be funny and coruscatingly intelligent; it can convert the serious into the sportive, but it can also be stinging, rapier-like, combining style and poise with a devious form of aggression. The gag, by contrast, is more impersonal, more capable of being passed from hand to hand and less expressive of a unique individual. We relish witticisms partly because they jolt us into thought, but also because they seem apposite, spot-on, hitting off a truth at a single casual stroke. Wit is the enemy of sentiment and empathy, laced with a hard-boiled quality which puts it a long way from the tear and the twinkle. Gags or jokes are sporadic events—but the wit or dandy is never off-duty. Their permanent mild amusement is possessed by those remote from the grind and rigor of this world, an everyday form of art admired for its well-crafted form as well as for its scintillating insight.
[You can, and people have, said a lot about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but my first thought about it is always how funny it is. (Hamlet is also funny, and part of Stoppard’s achievement is matching that aspect of the play.) It’s a sustained exercise in turning “the serious into the sportive,” to use Eagleton’s phrase. —Steve]
N.B.:
Various documents from applications to the Royal Literary Fund.
Retail store employees are saying “welcome in” to customers. [The lady doth protest too much, methinks. I’m with the guy who wonders why we need to invent new phrases instead of saying “good morning” and the like. Are we too good for “good morning” now? What won’t refinement culture kill? —Steve]
There is a shortage of massive Christmas lawn ornaments at Home Depot. [This is my personal How the Other Half Lives. —Steve]
Steve Cropper died on Wednesday, December 3. R.I.P.
Frank Gehry died on Friday, December 5. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Haptographic Interface” by Maureen N. McLane
I’m a Keats bot
so are you
our living hands
held toward each other
on the internet
solution sweet
I stood on a peak
in Darien, googled
my error
I am so colonial
I am tubercular
my alveoli a-swell
my actual blood
your actual blood
we made love
I planted basil
I planted your head
in my basil pit
I cut it off
in my head
and in my head
planted your head
in a basil pot
We call this
imagination
or fancy
debate which
You want a draught
of vintage blushful
but the fountain’s dry
the spring the well’s gone dry
the inkwell this AI
can’t use but knows
algorithmically
This living hand
that lives
and lo! the death mask
of publication a scholar
says at a conference
in Germany.
Dusseldorf
or Biarritz
I clearly made the wrong
choice I went to Rome
and died. You lived on
and married someone
else you whore Fanny.
That’s what I say
gravely. I’m John Keats.
Men do whatever they can
over and over and over
and we try to restrain them
by which I mean us
or redirect them
but. Today’s retronym
is human writer.
I had a miraculous year.
[This poem amused me, both its premise and certain lines within: “I clearly made the wrong / choice I went to Rome / and died. You lived on / and married someone / else you whore Fanny.” It also scorches: “Today’s retronym / is human writer.” I think fiction and technology —particularly internet-based technology—are uneasy interlocutors, but this poem is an unmistakable success. You can read more about the inspiration, haptographics, and McLane’s process in the Paris Review. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
University of Chicago Press | December 11
The Complete Notebooks
by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom
From the publisher: Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivaled glimpse into the writer at his most personal and reflective. These notebooks contain his thoughts on politics, solitude, personal failings and regrets, his travels, and his relationships with friends and rivals. They also provide insight into his process as a thinker—his frustrations, his ideas for novels and plays (some pursued and others abandoned), his routines, his aspirations, and his self-recriminations.
For Camus devotees, there is no more intimate experience than reading these notebooks. On the one hand, his fallibility is on full display: He is irritated by mediocrity, frustrated with his health, plagued by insomnia, and miserable about life’s petty necessities. Yet, he is also intensely curious and observant, sometimes moved to rapture by landscapes and people. Readers will experience the bounty of Camus’s philosophical imagination and witness firsthand how his ideas take shape. The notebooks contain drafts of letters to friends and recorded reflections on the compromises that being in the world demands.
This publication marks the first time Camus’s complete notebooks have been published in one comprehensive volume. Expertly and movingly translated by Ryan Bloom with extensive footnotes contextualizing the entries, The Complete Notebooks will remain a literary treasure for years to come.
[We linked to a review of Bloom’s translations of Camus’ notebooks from the late 1940s in WRB—Nov. 4, 2023.]
What we’re reading:
Steve is still reading The Recognitions.
Critical notes:
Patrick Kurp on memory and the muses:
Some of my sentences come automatically, and I sense they’re drawn from a higher brain function. Call it rationalism, not unlike solving a differential equation. But others, often the more interesting ones (to me, if not the reader) are mysterious. They seem to appear ab nihilo, from nowhere, like a magician pulling a coin from my ear.
[Housman says of the last poem in A Shropshire Lad in “The Name and Nature of Poetry”:
Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.
The first two stanzas come out of nowhere, but the third comes once the mind has something to work on, even if unconsciously. No doubt the first two stanzas are also the result of the mind working on problems, but the difference is that we are not aware of these problems; we are not even aware that they are problems. And while Housman certainly knew he needed a poem to wrap up A Shropshire Lad, nothing intrinsic to that problem suggests that it should be about a man sowing seed for flowers that are currently unfashionable. That idea comes from memory. As Kurp quotes Clara Clairborne Park saying:
In our heads or, better, in another part of the body, there where we “learn by heart”—there in the unconscious, where the Muses sing to us darkling, and all the richness of what we know and value can come together in unexpected, unheard-of combinations.
Knowing things lets you call them up on demand, but it also stores them somewhere where you can unexpectedly present them to yourself. —Steve]
- Cooper on Alexander Pope’s contempt:
Pope noticeably neglects to imitate Horace’s closing remark that “men more quickly learn and more gladly remember what they disdain than what they approve and admire” (discit enim citius meminitque libentius illudquod quis deridet, quam quod probat et veneratur). Instead, he regrets that “a fate attends on all I write, / That when I aim at praise, they say I bite.” A colloquial summary of this final stanza might read: “my haters are my motivators.”
Horace’s remark couldn’t be better applied than to Pope. In life, he was a reputed hater; Dr. Johnson remarked that “Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”
Pope was at his best criticizing others; by comparison with his satires, An Essay on Man leaves us wanting. Some might think this is a shame—are even the best poets constrained by the fact that it is easier to tear things down than to build them up? The sublime is Icarus’ sun; approaching it would scorch anyone’s wings. But Pope, in tearing others down, employed such an exquisite poetic diction and so perfected the heroic couplet that there’s no need to worry. Enjoy his contempt.
[There’s a joke about an old woman who saw Hamlet, not knowing the play, and when asked for her thoughts she said “it was interesting to hear all those famous quotes in one place, but I did not understand why they were arranged in that order.” I feel something like that about the Essay on Man (and even, to a much lesser degree, about the Essay on Criticism, which is wonderful).
The real question with some of the best poets, though, is not so much whether it is easier to tear down than to build up (it is) but to which they find themselves more inclined. Dante could write the Inferno and also the Paradiso; those who set out to respond to him or imitate him tended not to be completely successful with the second part. As Andrew J. Kappel asks of Rock-Drill and Thrones, which Ezra Pound intended to be the paradise section of the Cantos, “Why are [the books Pound used as sources], the supposed means to the end, so large a part of the end, a once but no longer detachable scaffolding inextricably bound into the finished work?” And Blake is correct that Milton wrote in fetters of angels and God and at liberty of devils and hell; one involves building up, the other tearing down, and Milton’s temperament was much more inclined to the latter. (One defining trait that links many of Milton’s heroic figures—the Lady in Comus, Abdiel in Paradise Lost, the Son in Paradise Regained—is not that they do anything, which would necessitate a vision of positive action, but that they say no to their tempters. And Samson in Samson Agonistes does have his way and tear the building down.) Those failures (PL and the Cantos being, on some level, political poems) seem inextricable from the failure of Milton’s and Pound’s political visions, speaking purely psychologically; they were too shattered there to inhabit paradise to the necessary extent. It makes Dante’s achievement all the more impressive by comparison.
Pope’s specific problem is similar, but has more to do with a cast of mind than with a specific political situation (I’m not going to say anything about the extent to which Pope was or was not a Jacobite here). His whole life and career were defined by his existence in opposition—to the Church of England, to the Hanoverians, to hack writers, and so on—and the mental attitudes reinforced by that experience are not conducive to writing a defense of optimism. —Steve]
- Moul on poetry featuring William Harvey’s discoveries about the circulation of blood:
Harvey’s work met initially with a markedly hostile reception, and his discovery was not generally accepted for some time. But Dryden was far from the only poet to make use of the image in the 1660s, when it seems to have had a particular poetic vogue. It features prominently in two of the most ambitious—and most forgotten—poems of the 1660s, by Abraham Cowley and Maurice Ewens, both engaging examples of how poets of this period felt that poetry was for—and could cover—whatever you needed or wanted to do with it. A fully connected circulation with the heart at its center makes for stirring political allegory, of course—but the poets of this period were confident that the structure and existence of the cardiac septum or the vena cava were also poetic subjects in their own right.
[As Dryden, translating Virgil, says:
Happy the Man, who, studying Nature’s Laws,
Thro’ known Effects can trace the secret Cause.
—Steve]
In ,
interviews :But we do also need someone who can translate Greek and understands the archeological basis of our knowledge of Greek theaters, or who knows how to navigate the Medici financial records or the Venetian state papers, or who has a good idea of how early modern London periodicals circulated! How does that happen purely online? By the way, I’m not talking about my own work here: I’ve just been in this environment long enough to have an admiration verging on awe for the truly great, truly methodical scholars who enable so much else.
That said, there are also things you can’t do in academia. The most pressing questions need collective answers. What’s the meaning of literary writing and reading in a world where literature has lost any plausible claim to cultural centrality? What is a truly peripheral intellectual sphere actually for? What are we actually doing with these vestiges of an almost lost culture? Those questions are structurally impossible to answer within the university, where our roles are predicated on a model that places intellectual life at the center of society.
[To me these questions are not so different. We want people who can navigate the Medici financial records for the same reason we want people doing literary writing and reading even if such things exist on the periphery of culture: first, they are good in themselves, and second, they may prove useful to someone someday. I admit that the promise of usefulness is more obvious with literary culture generally than specific researches into the Medici financial records, but marvelous discoveries and new lines of thought have come from stranger sources. And, since the supply of eccentric aristocrats devoting themselves to studying specific hobbyhorses seems to have dried up, the university—for all its flaws—is the only model we have left for that.
And, if I may be so bold as to reinterpret “What is a truly peripheral intellectual sphere actually for?” as “Why do you put this newsletter together?”, I put it together for the people who read it. We, as human beings, live in a time and a place and a culture; we have an obligation to think about those things, and from that thought emerge art, criticism, and research. Are there better ways of doing so? This is the only one I know. Is it marginal? Well, I’m a guy with a BA from a Midwestern football school who puts together a twice-a-week books-and-culture newsletter in his spare time. You tell me.
I understand that I am addressing none of the deeper questions about the decline of literary culture or the possible obsolescence of the university, an institution that developed in a very different world, in the year 2025. But the case to be made for these things, if there is one, will not come from self-conscious defenses made to an uninterested world. (“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”) The case will have to be made by doing the work, and doing it well. I am not—as any reader of the WRB will know—much inclined to optimism, but I think we have to believe, maybe not in ourselves, and maybe not in the world, but in the work. It’s all we have. That’s why we do it. —Steve]
 | A guest post by
|