WRB—Jan. 8, 2025

“mania for dice”

It may be possible to do without the Washington Review of Books entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without opening an email newsletter of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of opening an issue have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

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 Liberties, Robert Alter on the poet who wrote the book of Job:

  Job’s wish never to have been born joins with a panorama of human life, and it is a bleak panorama. Kings “build ruins for themselves,” imposing structures that inevitably crumble to dust (one thinks of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”) and princes store up gold and silver, futilely, for they will part from it in death. Verse 18 shows the poet’s firm sense of integrated structure, of which we will see a more spectacular instance in the Voice from the Whirlwind, for “babes who never saw light” takes us back to the early lines expressing the wish to be a stillborn and blot out the light. Everyone, in this despairing vision, finds repose only in death, the great equalizer. And what has life been for humankind? The wicked have troubled others, all are weary, there are prisoners and slaves and taskmasters. Existence is so universally miserable that everyone longs for death. In this way, Job invites us to see his wretchedness not as a special case but merely as a particular instance of the fate of misery shared by all. The large resonance of Job’s inveighing against God as he proceeds in his poetic argument derives from his seeing unwarranted suffering not as his alone but as the common plight of humankind.

• In The New Yorker, Louise Glück’s contribution to Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of Their Craft:

  The things I wrote down so urgently were not fixed thoughts projected from my brain onto the page. What I considered thought was a kind of seeking, a mission. But it was very difficult. This was not writing as rhetoric or catharsis. This was writing as transformation (or this is what I wanted it to be). I wanted to turn experience, often disappointment or hurt, into an externalized form that, in its accuracy and beauty, would both separate me from the experience and redeem it. The need to write in this way was constant, but the ability to write at all came and went; often in my life it was gone for years. This was not something I could do anything about.

  I had, in regard to making poems, no feeling of agency at all. Words and phrases came from nowhere; I rarely had any sense of what they meant or to what context they belonged. Nor could I access the source of these fragments. Whatever their source, I was either its victim (if I was hearing nothing) or its beneficiary. I felt, in childhood, like Joan of Arc in the story my father told my sister and me at bedtime, with the burning omitted. Joan, who heard voices and saved France. I heard voices, too. I heard pieces of phrases. But I did not have any idea what they were telling me.

  • Matthew Arnold:

    And the criticism of life will be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound or half-sound, true rather than untrue on half-true.

  • Paul Valéry (translated by Denise Folliot):

    However, a dream makes us see by a common and frequent experience how our consciousness can be invaded, filled, made up by an assembly of productions remarkably different from the mind’s ordinary reactions and perceptions. It gives us the familiar example of a closed world where all real things can be represented, but where everything appears and is modified solely by the fluctuations of our deepest sensibility. In very much the same way the poetic state begins, develops, and dissolves within us. That is, it is wholly irregular, inconstant, involuntary, fragile, and we lose it, as we acquire it, by accident. There are times in our life when this emotion and these precious formulations do not appear. We do not even think them possible. Chance gives them and chance takes them away.

    [I excerpted and reflected on another passage of Valéry, this one about poetry as a means of preserving and passing on “poetic life,” in WRB—Dec. 18, 2024. —Steve]

• In Lit Hub, Lauren Groff’s introduction to a new reissue of A Room of One’s Own (January 7):

  On the one hand, she did believe she was giving young women a firm and loving push, writing to her close friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson after he read and enjoyed the book, “I’m so glad you thought it good tempered . . . my blood is apt to boil on this one subject as yours does about natives, or war; and I didn’t want it to. I wanted to encourage the young women—they seem to get fearfully depressed—and also to induce discussion.”

  At the same time, she sneered a little at the young women of Girton who made up her audience for the lecture there by saying they were not, perhaps, the geniuses that she was tilting at but rather, “starved but valiant young women. . . . Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals.”

  Woolf’s snobbery is not her finest point; like all snobbery, it arose from fear. She knew herself to be exceptional and did not want to be lumped in with ordinary women, who were considered even lesser than ordinary men.

  [We linked to a piece on Woolf’s diaries, which provide more evidence of this snobbery and fear, in WRB—Aug. 12, 2023.]

[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 an Upcoming book, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today the desks of the WRB have for you:

• why I would like artists to stop fighting the battle of the sexes in their work

• my unsatisfying exploration of Silver Age Latin poetry

• Hannah’s commentary on a poem by Yeats

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]