WRB—Feb. 12, 2025

“Lovingreading”

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[Three years in you’d think we’d have used up all the really low-hanging fruit for opening jokes, but apparently not. —Steve]

N.B.:

The WRB’s third birthday sale is still ongoing; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the month. That works out to $4/month or $40/year. [You figure we send out around ten newsletters a month—that’s under fifty cents a newsletter. You can’t get anything that cheap these days. —Steve]

Links:

• In The New Statesman, John Mullan on the death of the British Catholic novel:

  The other leading British Catholic novelist of the twentieth century (and another convert) was Muriel Spark. In the year that Lodge finished his thesis, 1959, she published her third novel, Memento Mori, a formally audacious (and hilarious) book in which the author does divine justice to the human capacity for self-delusion and evil. Each one of the novel’s elderly main characters receives telephone calls from someone who says, “Remember you must die,” and each responds differently. The police fail to identify the caller (who is, of course, Death). Spark’s Catholic convictions, transfused into her fiction, allows her narrative tricks that a non-Catholic would surely never have contemplated.

  Spark’s Catholic characters are not necessarily sympathetic (her novels feature some notably unchristian nuns); the influence of her Catholicism is instead in her narrative method. Lodge, who would eventually become a huge admirer of Spark’s fiction, observed: “The Catholic God is intensely concerned with the fate of each individual soul, and Catholic novelists have adopted the ‘God’s eye’ viewpoint in order to control or comment on the destinies of their characters.”

  [Regular readers will know of my loathing for “the Catholic imagination”—if the novel has to die, at least it will take the Catholic novel with it.

  I can never escape the feeling that what I think of as the Waugh/Greene model of the Catholic novel—a few hundred pages all leading up to a conversion, seemingly sudden but actually carefully prepared by the whole novel, at the end—is missing the point a little. It works for deathbed conversions, I’ll give it that; the problem with Brideshead Revisited (a novel I like) is not Lord Marchmain’s conversion. But for any other life it places the end at the wrong point, especially if the goal is to depict “the Catholic experience of the world.” The people who saw God part the Red Sea are also the people made to wander in the wilderness for forty years.

  Much better there is something like Diary of a Country Priest, which puts its own moment of conversion at the center of the novel but in the life of someone who is not its focus. There it’s just one moment in the life of the priest, part of a life spent in drudgery on the same small things over and over despite knowing that they will be met with indifference, trusting in God even when God seems absent, doing the work because it’s important and because someone has to do it. As the Curé de Torcy tells the priest:

  They read stacks of books, but never have the nouse to understand what is meant when we say the Church is the Bride of Christ. What’s a wife, lad—a real woman as a man’d hope to get if he’s fool enough not to follow the advice of Saint Paul? Don't answer—you’d only talk rubbish. I’ll tell you: it’s a sturdy wench who’s not afraid of work, but who knows the way of things, that everything has to be done over and over again, until the end.

  (But enough about the Washington Review of Books.)

  And this experience is not somehow uniquely understood by Catholics. The best Catholic movie of recent years, Hail, Caesar! (2016), was written and directed by two Jewish atheists, the Coen brothers. In many ways it is a retelling of Diary of a Country Priest if the priest were instead a Hollywood fixer; he is overworked and overlooked, and no matter how many problems he solves today he will have just as many tomorrow, and the exact same people will cause some of them. And yet he goes on because his flock needs him, and because he has the sense that this is what Christ is calling him to do. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Peter Szendy’s upcoming book (Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks, translated by Olivia Custer, March 11):

  This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’ speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:

  1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).

  2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).

  For Phaedrus, loving()reading is, above all, loving and reading, in a single verb, someone. Loving and reading are intertwined in this reader who loves the voice to which he listens in the text to which he lends his own body. And it is thus under the sign of this hyphen (trait d’union), the hyphenated loving-reading, that Plato’s Phaedrus opens. It is as though this feature, the line contracting the space between the two verbs, some sort of silent bond where a contractual relationship between them takes place, has brought them together or joined them together in order to express the union of love and reading in the act of uniting with the one who speaks in the text.

  [I suppose this is the WRB’s Valentine’s Edition. We’re not bringing the classifieds back (despite imitators), but why not get your significant other a gift subscription? Flowers fade, and chocolates get eaten, but the WRB will go on appearing in their inbox long after the 14th, and they’ll think of how cultured and caring you are every time it appears.

  And if you’re single, what would make you more eligible than subscribing yourself? Imagine all the witty things you’ll be able to say at parties, all the books and articles you’ll be able to pretend you’ve read, all the easy charm you’ll pick up from subscribing to America’s leading flâneur newsletter, all the cultural cachet you’ll have in a few years when you can tell people you subscribed to the WRB “before it was cool.” (The WRB is the Velvet Underground of newsletters; become one of those 30,000 people who bought their debut album and started a band.) I am reliably informed that all the most eligible single people already subscribe—why not join them? —Steve]

• In minor literature[s], Golan Haji (translated by Robin Moger) on the names of love:

  True life is in the encounter. Nothing is dearer to God than that He be loved. In this account, Moses never asked His name, as he does in the Book of Exodus when he hears God’s response issuing from the fire in the bush, the divine name taking the form of a nominal sentence that in English becomes verbal: “I am who I am” (or in the German of Buber and Rosenzweig, Ich bin da, “I am here”). The expectation was that the sight of the face might lift the name’s veil from the named; language would cease its chatter, silence bringing an end to its inescapable ambiguity.

  The beloved is borne within the word they speak, and when they are absent, this word becomes their face.

  [I don’t have a face beyond the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• The new epistolary novel

• A detour into numismatics

• Grace on a Poem by Robinson Jeffers and poetic monuments

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]