WRB—Jan. 11, 2025

“threatened much, Virginia Woolf?”

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake Washingtonian standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cocktail parties.

N.B.:

This month’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, January 24 to discuss the topic “Can we learn to be alone?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In Air Mail, Amanda Vaill on the influence of Hemingway’s first marriage on A Farewell to Arms:

  Hemingway would spend a career taking people and incidents from his own life and transmuting them into fiction, not just for the purposes of art but to enact some alchemy that would transform his personal experience into a truth he preferred, or needed. Perhaps, then, he used A Farewell to Arms to figuratively (if not necessarily consciously) put his former wife, and the life they had shared, behind him in the most decisive way possible, acting out what the critic Malcolm Cowley would describe as a “farewell to a period, an attitude, and perhaps to a method also” as he sought to deliver the novel that he and his critics were expecting—a book whose surface brilliance was secondary to its heart.

  He more than succeeded in doing so: when A Farewell to Arms was published, in September 1929, it was greeted by critics as a kind of coronation. “It fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway,” said The Atlantic, to which The New Republic added that “A Farewell to Arms is worthy of their hopes and of its author’s promise.” It sold 36,000 copies in the first month after publication and became Hemingway’s first best-seller, something that gave its author enormous pride. (He always cared deeply about his sales figures.)

  [We linked to a review of the LOA edition of Hemingway containing A Farewell to Arms in WRB—Oct. 26, 2024.

  Do people not read Hemingway anymore? I remember, while reading all the reviews of Intermezzo (which, to be fair, I have not yet read), thinking that the situation in which two characters are in love, one of them is physically unable to have sex, and so the other has sex with other people is basically what drives The Sun Also Rises, another book about aimless young people. I do not consider The Sun Also Rises to be an obscure book, nor Hemingway an obscure author, and yet none of the reviews mentioned this. (Maybe they were under the impression that it was forbidden to compare Rooney to non-Irish authors?)

  But Hemingway’s cultural star has been falling for a while—fallen so far, in fact, that many of the contributions to “why aren’t men reading?” discourse don’t even mention him as an example of the kind of writer that appeals to men. The last place I remember him being important was Midnight in Paris (2011), which is a movie that came out 14 years ago and was written and directed by a man born in 1935. —Steve]

• Two in the TLS; first,

  Irina Dumitrescu
  on satirical takes on the novelist:

  Peter Tarslaw, the hero of Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist (2009), wants nothing more than to be a hack. Working at an essay mill in the Boston area and subsisting on a diet of takeaways and beer, he finds out that the girl who broke his heart in college is getting married. A television interview with a rural novelist inspires him: “If you could write a book and act like you meant it,” he thinks, “the reward was country estates and supple college girls.” Nothing simpler, then, than to write a bestselling novel and make the ex see what she has lost.

  Tarslaw decides to ignore all the well-meaning advice about writing what’s true, and to break down what makes a book popular. It should have a murder, a character who leaves a boring job, scenes set in American towns with lots of avid readers, but also some exotic locations and the names of their plants, all of it in lyrical prose. Most important, readers should see versions of themselves in the book, but made more glamorous: “Awesome heroes stuck in mediocre lives are compelling, because they suggest that having a mediocre life may not be your fault.”

  [He forgot to mention that the book should be timely, urgent, vital, and, most importantly, luminous. This will ensure that your ex regrets leaving you, especially if your ex is a hack book reviewer. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Oonagh Devitt Tremblay reviews a collection of Samuel Richardson’s correspondence (Correspondence Primarily on Pamela and Clarissa (1732–1749), edited by Louise Curran, George Justice and Sören Hammerschmidt, 2024):

  Above all, this volume allows us to enjoy the sense of urgency that Richardson’s contemporaries would have felt in reading these unprecedented works of fiction. Of Clarissa, John Channing, an apothecary and Arabist, confessed to the author in September 1748, “I sat up with your Heroine till near one o’clock this morning.” Before “binge-watching,” there was binge-reading; Richardson’s fans may well have been among the first to partake in this kind of literary consumption. And this was a fundamentally sociable pursuit. As they came off the press, sometimes separated by several months at a time, his volumes would be dispersed and shared; letters would ensue and rumors about the plot would spread before Richardson had even released the next volume. Someone going by the name Philaretes wrote in 1748, “since I have heard that you design the End shall be unhappy, I am determined to read no more: The Idea of Clarissa’s Misery or Death would haunt and torment me through the Whole.” Readers also wrote to Richardson to complain about the length of his books: “there are many excellent Observations, which will not be attended to, for want of the Patience necessary to separate them from the Heap of Matter by which they are surrounded.”

  [Maybe 2025 is the Year of Clarissa after all. (There was also a piece in Engelsberg Ideas a couple days ago hanging the importance of reading on the author’s experience of Clarissa; more evidence for it.) I also think it would be nice if readers of the WRB saw it as a fundamentally sociable pursuit. Tell your friends. —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 the desks of the WRB:

• I resolve the great irony/sincerity debate through the imitation of Christ

• My read on the epigrammatic tendencies of the internet

• Grace on mid-January, in conjunction with a Poem by Robert Frost

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, as always, thank you. —Steve]