WRB—Feb. 8, 2025

“a well-fertilized sheaf of wheat”

The “madness” of the Managing Editor lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of the Managing Editor, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the Managing Editor it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.

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 Yorker, Alex Ross on Alma Mahler-Werfel:

  Rehabilitation can go only so far. Casting Mahler-Werfel purely as a victim minimizes the power she wielded, particularly in her relations with Jews. At various points in her life, she was both oppressed and oppressor. We are confronted by a personality of maddening complexity—no less complex than that of any of the august men around her. At the age of eighteen, she wrote of her desire to accomplish a “great deed,” in the form of a “really good opera, which no woman has yet done.” Although that goal eluded her, she found another kind of greatness, by overseeing, from the fortress of her taste, a cultural empire. She was, her friend Friedrich Torberg wrote, a “catalyst of unbelievable intensity.” Once, in conversation with the Austrian journalist Bertha Zuckerkandl, Mahler-Werfel spoke of having to handle the moods of a genius like Mahler. Zuckerkandl quoted the adage about no man being a hero to his butler, adding, “Is there a genius for us genius women?”

  [Because some of you will ask: Tom Lehrer comes in for condemnation for his “sniggering ballad,” which contributed to “what might be called the slut-shaming of Mahler-Werfel.” Do ducks always envy the swans? —Steve]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Muriel Zagha on songs written in French:

  But what about non-French lovers of French chanson? Why do people the world over enjoy listening to songs sung in French? Salar’s character in Dark Hearts in one such person. In the context of Dark Hearts there is the intimation that French is one of the languages spoken by many in the Middle East and which creates a bond between those who speak it, wherever they are from. Beyond this, and even when a song’s lyrics remain unintelligible or are only understood in part, through French chanson a certain idea of France is shared, projected and experienced. Hearing “Les Feuilles mortes” performed by Juliette Gréco, for example, would in the early 1950s have allowed anyone, wherever they were in the world, to close their eyes and imagine themselves transported to Paris, perhaps sitting in a café in Saint-Germain des Prés, or striding down the Champs-Elysées. The song still operates in this way today. Even when you don’t know French you might know that this is a French song, and that is an invitation to share in a common fund of imaginary references.

  [I, a person who does not speak French, had a big Jacques Brel phase several years ago. I found him through Scott Walker’s covers on his first few solo albums, and I think what drew me to him was the sense that he was going to wring everything out of his songs he could, no matter how it looked. (I don’t really think it was my understanding of the lyrics; the translations Walker used aren’t great.) Especially in some of the faster numbers it seems like he’s going to push it until it all falls apart; he and the other players are going to get louder and louder until they can’t sustain it any longer. But somehow they do, and somehow Brel’s belief that he can hold it all together no matter what happens is always true.

  The idea that a song could just be one long crescendo hadn’t occurred to me. I knew Ravel’s Boléro, but that’s a joke, and I knew some examples from the world of rock—Television’s “Marquee Moon,” King Crimson’s “Talking Drum” into “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part II”—but those aren’t the whole song. (Writing this now it came to me that Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” which I knew, is very indebted to Brel.) Brel, though, committed to it, and so he showed me something new you could do with a song.

  Or maybe it was the accordion. Maybe that’s also why I like the Band so much. It’s all coming together.

  “Autumn Leaves,” though, I’ve never heard in French. Only in saxophone or trumpet or piano. —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication on the Hudson: first, an essay adapted from Michael Hofmann’s introduction to his upcoming translation of Markus Werner’s The Frog in the Throat (1985, March 4):

  Werner’s books dramatize figures on the outs with life. There is a loose thread, which may be something distinctly trivial, often something written or said, a word or a phrase in a postcard or a newspaper or a telephone call, and the Werner figure (and these exist, just as the Bernhard figure exists, or the Kafka figure exists) tugs at it. Perhaps it’s a communication cord on a train, or a bell rope or a fuse. He—it’s usually a “he”—pulls at it idly or experimentally, in a spirit of irritation or retaliation, vengeance or self-defense, and then, like the translator above, won’t willingly stop. He becomes a verbal and attitudinal terrorist. A table setting sets him off not because it’s wrong or he’s fussy (though he is) but merely by being there the night before and presuming on a tomorrow with breakfast.

  He goes on picking and pulling. Existence very rapidly—in the space of a few score pages—loses its texture, its weft or its warp; shreds of it hang down looking unappealing and distinctly unlivable. Whole worlds, or what had been worlds, devolve to piles of lint: first, or most grievously, the innermost circle of the Intimsphäre, one’s minimal domestic existence in what Randall Jarrell once called the “group of two,” the home life or private life or emotional life that in Werner is always overpriced and overprivileged, the only “soft” or “premium” part of life, the desert island of feeling in a sea of verbiage and uncouthness and money. And then rapidly also one’s professional life, one’s wider setting and prospects, and finally the possibility of a continued conventional existence within language and society.

[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:

• Trading old ladies for various poems, as Faulkner suggests

• Ford Madox Ford’s current popularity, or lack thereof

• K. T. on a Poem by A. E. Stallings

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]