WRB—Feb. 22, 2025

“explicitly subversive epic productions”

When thou seest a Managing Editor, thou seest a portion of Genius, lift up thy head!

N.B.:

The most recent D.C. Salon and its New York City cousin, both dedicated to the question “Can we change how we love?”, are now available for listening wherever you get your podcasts.

This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.

March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”

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. [For the cost of a beer at the bar, you can instead get eight or nine fine metaphorical breakfasts with the Managing Editor each month. —Steve]

Links:

• In Harper’s, an essay adapted from Rachel Cusk’s introduction to a reissue of Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989):

  Amis’ father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, was one of the twentieth century’s great chroniclers of his fellow countrymen. Kingsley Amis was gloriously witty, drunken, bigoted, anti-intellectual, and profoundly lacking in empathy and self-awareness: he was something of an embodiment of the national character. Among the many things Kingsley Amis despised was the notion that a writer might regard himself as an artist. So Martin Amis arrived on the literary scene preternaturally aware of who he was and where he stood. Amis the younger had to shout to be heard. His discovery of the “other,” of that which was not himself and his literary heritage, was therefore especially charged, and the habits of caricature and satire—along with a high degree of authorial self-consciousness—that flowed from this discovery came to define his writing. Martin Amis both suffered from the curse of Englishness and became its archest commentator.

  • Kingsley Amis, “Against Romanticism”:

    Better, of course, if images were plain,

    Warnings clearly said, shapes put down quite still

    Within the fingers’ reach, or else nowhere;

    But complexities crowd the simplest thing,

    And flaw the surface they cannot break.

    [I would never have thought to attack negative capability on the grounds “if you were good you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into that situation.” —Steve]

• Two in Literary Matters:

  • Paul Devlin on Saul Bellow’s preface to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995):

    Somewhere in Bellow’s mind when he accepted the 1995 assignment could have been John W. Aldridge’s rather wound-up 1964 essay “The Price of Being Taken Seriously,” the subhead of which is “the critics may make him a novelist but they cannot make him write”—a very obvious, ungenerous, lengthy, and mean-spirited attack on Ellison—in all but name—in the New York Times. Aldridge, then a professor at the University of Michigan, was big mad, as the kids say, that someone wasn’t doing what he wanted them to do. Yet his question had an audience. Why did Ellison only publish one novel? And the question circulated and resurfaced for years.

    When Ellison gave an interview to the Washington Post in 1982, he was defensive about the issue when asked about it, stating “It would be easy enough to write other fiction, to put out several books. You don’t—I don’t—write to satisfy other people. You do certain things and then you do other things, and you don’t always publish what you write.” Interviewer Lynn Darling notes that this answer was given with “some irritation.” By 1994, Bellow had apparently had enough of the question that had plagued his friend, and he had the determination—and the credibility—to kill it.

    [“Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” Getting mad at a novelist for not writing enough novels is an expression mostly of disappointment; the novelist has something valuable to say and yet refuses to say it. (More on a related phenomenon in Critical notes.) I haven’t done the research here but I do get the impression that we give our artists much more time in between each piece of art than was common when Aldridge wrote his essay—maybe novelists are different, but no one expects an album a year from musical artists now, and Hollywood is no longer an assembly line in the way it once was. (Forget the auteurs; what happened to my beautiful studio hacks?) —Steve]

  • Chard deNiord interviews Robert Hass about a new translation of poetry by Czesław Miłosz that he worked on (Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953, translated by Robert Hass and David Frick, February 4) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 29, 2025.]:

    deNiord: What do you think Miłosz himself thought of the poems in  Poet in the New World?

    Hass: Well, I don’t know. Except that they troubled him. I think he was philosophically unsettled. That generation was saturated in Hegel. They thought—he thought or sometimes thought—that there was some providential purpose being worked out in history and it was on that basis that, as a person of the left, he could join the new Polish government. Another part of him thought that history, as an inexorable force, was monstrous. As a kid he had loved the natural world, imagined being some kind of naturalist, but his was also the generation that had to absorb Darwin and an inexorable will in nature to reproduce that was ravenous and directionless. He worked with, I wouldn’t say worked out this issue, after this book, in his “Treatise on Poetry.” In this period he was just trying to figure out where to stand in his relation to the violence he’d just witnessed and the narrative about it that the Soviets were imposing in Poland. In “Treatise on Morals,” he anticipates what he’d have to say in The Captive Mind about ideology and mental reservation. Also, what ethical stances the postwar was developing—it is from this distance amusing that the three subjects he addresses are existentialism, phenomenology, and vodka.

[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:

• My feeling when doing negative criticism

• Wisdom and encountering the Muse

• K. T. on a Poem by Elizabeth Bishop about morning

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]