Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
N.B.:
[What was in the hearts of Chris and Nic when they started the Washington Review of Books three years ago today I cannot tell you. But I can tell you what they wrote:
Our goal is fundamentally to deliver a bulletin that is a quick and enjoyable way for you to hear about good and interesting writing and good and interesting books.
It’s no longer quite as quick as it was in the old days, and I suppose “enjoyable” was then and still is a matter of taste, but as the Managing Editor I am proud to have continued the work of highlighting good and interesting writing and good and interesting books. (Also, “bulletin”? ’Sletter, please.) Theatrical complaining about it aside, this is work I am happy to do, and I am honored that Chris has handed to me the task of managing—barely—to edit the WRB. And on that note I am thankful for him, who created the WRB and makes its social events happen, for the great work done in the Poem section twice a week by Julia and Hannah and Grace and K. T., and for the lovely Children’s Literature Supplement put together every month by Sarah and Grace. But most of all, I am thankful for you, our readers. I still can’t believe that this reaches thousands of you twice a week, and it’s an honor to have so many wonderful readers. I knew some of you as friends before I started doing this, and I became friends with some of you because I started doing this, but really, I feel like you are all my friends. (That or I have to reflect on the large chunks of my personality I’ve revealed to total strangers.) The WRB is for me a work of friendship, a work of learning and exploring together, and I’m happy that you’ve chosen to come along with us for the ride.
In celebration of the WRB’s third birthday, we’re having a sale; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of February. That works out to $4/month or $40/year, which I dare say makes the WRB both some of the cheapest and some of the finest entertainment available in this great land. So that you can see what that subscription gets you, today’s WRB is free for all—I hope you enjoy the additional Links, the quick hits of N.B., a Poem (today by Aphra Behn and with excellent commentary on it by Hannah), some Upcoming books, the ability to see (and hear about) What we’re reading, and the notes on criticism (and other subjects) in Critical notes, all of which you can see every Wednesday and Saturday in your inbox. As always, I greatly appreciate those of you who have been generous enough to pay for a subscription. It means the world, and you help make all of this possible.
And, finally, I figure that turning three is a good time for me to start learning how to read. —Steve]
Links:
In Aeon, Faith Lawrence on poetry and listening:
The idea that listening might be a gateway to a kind of transcendence is echoed in a “sound” reverie that Rilke presents alongside his school story. At one time, he says, he spent “many hours of the night” in the company of a skull borrowed from an anatomy class, imagining what he might hear if only he were able to pass a phonograph needle over the grooves in its coronal suture. This auditory fantasy kept coming back (“a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places”), and it made Rilke consider the visual bias of the European poet: “sight overladen with the world—seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing,” a critique that might have been self-reflection. Rilke had been influenced by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, while working for him in Paris as his secretary: “[H]e wants to know only what he sees,” wrote Rilke. “But he sees everything.” At one time, Rilke even lauded a poetic process he called “in-seeing” that entailed gazing intently until he had reached the very center of an animal, before (figuratively) popping out of it again on the other side.
[Being bad at listening because you like talking too much is hardly a problem unique to poets; besides, being so attentive to the sound of poetry diminishes the attention paid to other sounds.
And there is always the dream of poetry beyond sound:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
(More about Keats in What we’re reading below.) —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Andrew Wilton on J. M. W. Turner and technology for reproducing paintings:
Like many successful artists, J. M. W. Turner was alive to the importance of commercial reproductions in promoting his work. Only a few people would visit exhibitions, or see private collections in which original paintings and watercolours could be seen: many more benefited from published images in books, magazines or sets of prints. In the late eighteenth century and throughout his lifetime, London was full of shops selling images, and was home to many printmakers and print publishers, as well as a large potential market in the crowds that thronged the streets of the capital. Turner, born in London in 1775, already at the age of 16 perceived all this and took steps to take advantage of the opportunities outside his door.
His chosen subject was topography: views of places having historical or antiquarian interest, scenes or buildings that people wanted images of. He quickly embarked on a regular schedule of tours that took him to such places, and devoted much time to making drawings in his sketchbooks that he could take home and work up into saleable or exhibitable pictures. This was a habit that he maintained all his life. In a sketchbook he was using on a tour to Bristol and Bath in 1798, he began to select views that might become a series of subjects he could reproduce as etchings under the title “Twelve Views on the River Avon.” He wrote the titles on his first sketches in neat copper-plate, and elsewhere made notes about the process of etching. Nothing came of these plans, though equally interestingly one of the selected subjects ended up as his first exhibited oil painting, which shows him thinking about topography in a far from conventional way. All these schemes show his brain as a ferment of ideas about exploiting his talent.
[Cf. Benjamin:
Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception.
Wilton mentions Turner’s openness to any means of reproducing his paintings that would bring them to a wider audience so he could sell more of them—the artist is attentive to the possibility of a mass reception brought about by technology then in its infancy. —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication across the pond, Toril Moi reviews a new translation of a novel by Vigdis Hjorth (If Only, translated by Charlotte Barslund, 2024):
The novel is mostly written in the third person, from Ida’s point of view, but it begins and ends with a brief passage in the first person, with the older Ida looking back at the unhappy young woman she once was. “A long, long time ago when I was nineteen, I was at a railway station in another country. I felt so alone, so wretched. I remember asking myself: What’s going to happen to me? What am I going to do, where will I be twenty years from now?” The older self sees a girl wracked by shame. Now, she tells us, things are different: “I am not ashamed, I take it seriously, now that I know the secret of that unhappy girl.” Right at the start, then, If Only announces one of its major themes: that our heroine has not been able to examine, let alone trust, her own experience. “Back then I felt ashamed . . . I collapsed under the weight of my own pain. Poor, poor girl. Why wasn’t I with you back then? Why couldn’t I go to you, sit down next to you, hug you and console you? I, your realization, was many years away.” The term I have translated as “your realization” is Kierkegaard’s virkeliggjørelse, the process of becoming free by choosing one’s own life. (Barslund opts for “your mature self.”) By insisting on the existential dimensions of If Only, I don’t mean to imply that it reads like a philosophical essay. I mean, rather, that Hjorth has read Kierkegaard so closely and for so long that her worldview has naturally merged with his. (Two of her novels have Kierkegaardian titles: “Long live the Post Horn!” is a line from Kierkegaard’s Repetition of 1843, and Repetition is the title of Hjorth’s as yet untranslated novel of 2023.)
[Chris had some notes related to Repetition in WRB—Feb. 3, 2024.]
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews Ali Smith’s new novel (Gliff, February 4):
The problem of naming—I’m suddenly reminded of the chapter on names and their perils in Tristram Shandy (1759)—is in Gliff partly an anxiety about nature, its destruction as much by language as by whatever forces have laid waste to the world. Alongside Gliff, the novel contains a parable about a girl born with the head of a horse, and the miraculous powers she exhibits before she too is rendered unverifiable. After nameless officials take her away, her family and others rise up. “Not just the people. All the creatures did too and the rocks, the stones, the grass, the seas, the rivers, the weeds, were angry at the way they’d been treated, and the weather was furious . . . ” Joining the revolution of the natural world is the detritus it has been misused to produce: plastics and computers and phones and poisonous batteries—all of it forms a landslide and slides “to a stop only to stop up every door of every place where anyone thought they were in charge of the world.”
[Anyone interested in rectifying the names? —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Chris Power reviews a new translation of W. G. Sebald’s essays studying Austrian writers (Silent Catastrophes, translated by Jo Catling, March 25):
Sebald’s preferred term for his literary writing was the open-ended “prose work.” My copy of Vertigo lists three genres on its front flap: fiction, travel and history. (Angier notes that the book’s publisher, Christopher MacLehose, wanted a fourth but wasn’t allowed.) J. M. Coetzee has pointed out that by the time Sebald began publishing his literary works, the German reading public was already accustomed to “the crossing and indeed trampling of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.” He is referring to a spate of documentary-like novels that appeared in the 1970s, which Sebald referred to as “an important literary invention, but . . . an artless form.” Gabriele Annan identified a considerably more elevated source, invoking the mix of Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”) that Goethe used as both title and method for his autobiography, and James Wood contorted himself adjudging the levels of these constituent parts, writing that, “Sebald so mixes established fact with unstable invention that the two categories copulate and produce a kind of truth which lies just beyond verification: that is, fictional truth.” But the best and pithiest definition was minted by Sebald’s friend, the poet Michael Hamburger, who also became, in The Rings of Saturn, one of his characters, and so knew the Sebaldian effect from both inside and out. In a letter sent after reading the section in which he appears, he complimented Sebald for finding “a most satisfactory form of essayistic semi-fiction.”
[Cf. Brian Dillon’s review of a collection of Sebald’s photographs (as linked to in WRB—June 1, 2024):
Images of characters, landscapes, architecture, and historical disaster may or may not match the “real” thing. So many ways of saying: They are not illustrations, you know.
Easier to say what it’s not than what it is. —Steve]
In The Atlantic, Kristen Martin reviews Sarah Chihaya’s memoir of reading and not reading (Bibliophobia, February 4):
Early in Bibliophobia, Chihaya identifies the two competing “imaginary texts” that long undergirded how she saw herself and the world around her, offering “the comforting illusion of form in a formless life.” The first was the book she was sure she would someday find if she read enough, which would reveal everything about the world and her place in it. The second was the book of her own life, one she was certain would be short and tragic. Governed by these two narratives, Chihaya read “with vicious desperation” in search of the book that would save her.
[Reading with vicious desperation—we’ve all been there. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
What happens when your kid finds your tell-all book? [I always wonder how this never occurs to the authors of such books until it’s too late. —Steve]
New issue: Parapraxis Issue 05: Economies
William E. Leuchtenburg died on Tuesday, January 28. R.I.P.
Marianne Faithfull died on Thursday, January 30. R.I.P. [“Broken English” has to be the best representative of one of my favorite microgenres: songs that use the sterility of late ’70s, early ’80s pop music to set off lyrics that are in theory about international politics or Cold War paranoia but are actually about failing relationships. (ABBA has two such songs on their last album, made when the band consisted of two divorced couples and no one was having any fun; basically every song on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces (1979), the essential album of our time, also qualifies.) Few singers with voices as distinctive as hers have understood as well how to use it to such good effect. —Steve]
Poem:
“Love’s Witness” by Aphra Behn
Slight unpremeditated Words are borne
By every common Wind into the Air;
Carelessly utter’d, die as soon as born,
And in one instant give both Hope and Fear:
Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind
According to the Caprice of the Mind.But Billetdoux are constant Witnesses,
Substantial Records to Eternity;
Just Evidences, who the Truth confess,
On which the Lover safely may rely;
They’re serious Thoughts, digested and resolv’d;
And last, when Words are into Clouds devolv’d.
[I stumbled across this poem while browsing an anthology of women poets and was bemused by it because as I read it I began contrasting it with the Internet age. Benn lived from 1640 to 1689, and I wonder how she’d versify text messages or—worse—DMs. I imagine it would be with the same wry sarcasm with which she goes about ascribing “Eternity,” “Evidences,” “Truth,” and “serious Thoughts” to a billet doux, which is hardly a “Substantial record” however “digested and resolv’d” its words may be. The impermanence of words renders them capricious even when their effect is all too real, but the possibility of impermanence in a lover can turn the hard proof of an amorous letter into something as capricious and even more painful. Though “Carelessly utter’d” words can “give both Hope and Fear,” leaving the hearer with nothing but memory “when Words are into Clouds devolv’d,” the lover who relies too much on the “Record” of the written word is at risk of being left with something worse—a memento. Perhaps it’s just as well that the love letter is passé and we’re all left with the transience of text messages instead—you can read them back again and again, you can even take a screenshot, but there is no true physical connection lingering between them and the sender. They’ll all fade back into the digital abyss eventually. Unlike a real billet doux, you can never truly hold them any more than you can hold a spoken word. —Hannah]
[Catullus 70 tells us that what a woman says to her lover should be written on the wind and running water (and Benn’s “borne / By every common Wind into the Air” echoes it), but he neglected to tell us what to do with love letters there.
And I keep all the letters sent to me, love or not. I’m with Tom Townsend on this one: “It just seems to me that it’s a kind of trust. If someone takes the trouble to write you a substantial letter, you don’t throw it out.” —Steve]
Upcoming books:
New Directions | February 4
No One Knows
by Osamu Dazai, translated by Ralph McCarthy
From the publisher: Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed—in an addictive, easy style—the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,” a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,” a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: Is this what I really want? Or am I a proxy for their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,” a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeois sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash. No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons . . . They write nothing but lies.”
This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of “soliloquies by female narrators,” as Dazai described them. No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirl” and shows the fiction of this twentieth-century genius in a fresh light.
Also out Tuesday:
Ecco: Shattered: A Memoir by Hanif Kureishi [We linked to a review in WRB—Jan. 29, 2025.]
Knopf: A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025 edited by Deborah Treisman
A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925–2025 edited by Kevin Young
Pantheon: Gliff by Ali Smith [We linked to a review above.]
Random House: Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya [We linked to a review above.]
Slant: The Flight from Meaning by Stephen Haven
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks (2003). [When Ricks gets the idea that Dylan is (whether consciously or not) working off some other poem, he drops whatever he’s doing to spend ten pages proving it. The most interesting example is his treatment of “Not Dark Yet,” which he goes through line by line to identify matches in words and patterns with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Ricks connects Dylan’s “I was born here and I’ll die here against my will” with Keats’ “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”—the words line up, the persistence of the nightingale emphasizes the shortness of human life, and Dylan makes explicit the dissatisfaction under Keats’ reverie about dying. (Ricks: “‘Half in love with easeful Death’: but only half.”)
But Ricks’ specificity about the phrasing reminded me of a passage of poetry that comes even closer, from Housman’s translation of Horace’s Odes 4.7, “Diffugere nives”:
The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.
“Thou wast not born for”—death in one case, eternal life in the other. It’s almost a complete inversion of Keats’ line. Instead of the poet telling a piece of the natural world that it was not born to die, a piece of the natural world tells the poet that he was, in fact, born to die. And both these reflections are prompted by the rebirth of the natural world in spring—Housman’s translation opens with “The snows are fled away,” and spring is when the nightingales are singing.
And if Dylan is working with Keats, he is also working with Horace. (Dylan’s familiarity with the classics, especially the poetry, is under-remarked upon; as I noted in WRB—Nov. 11, 2023, the man once wrote a very clever and very self-aware paraklausithyron.) “Not Dark Yet” ends in the same place “Diffugere nives” does. Dylan:
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
And Horace (again, Housman’s translation):
Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.
Dylan’s waiting for death is almost identical to Horace’s underworld. Everything is “vacant and numb”—even love, as Horace says, is useless here. (And Horace doesn’t mention Lethe, but Dylan’s inability to remember echoes that part of the Greco-Roman underworld.) There are no prayers. What would be the point? Everyone is stuck here, so why bother—they won’t be answered. Horace would have you feast before death comes, but feasting is still only something to do while waiting for death, and waiting for death is quite close to the real thing. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Arnold Bennett (quoted by Patrick Kurp):
At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. . . . This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste.
[Reading the WRB is an elegant accomplishment, though. —Steve]
- on Michael Longley (R.I.P.) and Roman elegy:
I wouldn’t want to suggest that Longley, over the course of his long life in letters, became the poet he thinks Propertius could have been had he survived to write more; still, Longley’s work is both rich and controlled and not uninfluenced by the love elegists he read so well in his youth. An excellent version of Tibullus 1.10, which Longley titles “Peace,” in commenting obliquely on the Troubles from the midst of them, operates similarly to “Cease-fire.” A sonnet called “Sulpicia” borrows motifs from her elegy / epigram. And in the following poem, “Detour,” Longley draws, quite clearly in my opinion, on Propertius’ penchant, illustrated in both poems above, for stage-managing his own obsequies. Longley also does what all true poets do, in assimilating his influences to his own context and concerns, in this case, for the homely objects and humble inhabitants of an Irish village. As for his funeral, I hope it went as he wished. Peace to him.