The Washington Review of Books may provide an ordinary editor the desired opportunity to elucidate in detail that it is not a comedy, tragedy, novel, short story, epic, or epigram. He will also find it inexcusable that one tries in vain to say 1, 2, 3. He will also find it difficult to understand the movement in the newsletter, for it is inverse; nor will the aim of the WRB appeal to him, either, for as a rule editors explain existence in such a way that both the universal and the particular are annihilated. Above all, it is asking too much of an ordinary editor to be interested in the dialectical battle in which the exception arises in the midst of the universal, the protracted and very complicated procedure in which the exception battles his way through and affirms himself as justified, for the unjustified exception is recognized precisely by his wanting to bypass the Managing Editors.
N.B.:
The regular salon discussions organized by the WRB and Liberties Journal will have a session in Manhattan this evening. The topic for discussion will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” This conversation will be graciously hosted by
. Space is limited; if you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.Back on the home front: the monthly D.C. Salon, on the same topic, will take place next weekend, on the evening of July 20. Again, if you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In Image, Katie Ford on the experience of reading and rereading:
When I teach the craft of repetition, I tell my students that what’s repeated is only exact repetition on the literal plane. A repeated syllable, sound, line, or stanza bears the imprint of what has occurred between its first and second use. Repetition is sameness transformed, which might mean there is no such thing as literal repetition, at least not at these depths. Rituals—whether religious or not—are repetitions, of course, and repetition prepares our neurology for the arrival of something meaningful. My return to books is a ritual, then, and these books occupy a particular shelf in my home, where even to gaze upon them is a form of friendship.
In The Paris Review, Daisy Rockwell gives “five mixed metaphors for translation”:
The British Empire spread the English monocrop initially, but the American Empire is the greatest expert on the export of the processed and the packaged, the canned and the bottled, the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-real. On the island of the monocrop, we grow up surrounded by nothing but our own language. Flat, rippling fields of English, as far as the eye can see. Yes, there are small farms scattered about the landscape, along the coasts, primarily, that grow and nourish non-Englishes. But those are other. English crowds in on those crops and stifles them wherever possible. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me. For all of us. New metaphor: a padded cell of monolingualism. Mixed metaphor: a cell padded by french fries, sealed shut by nondairy corn-and-soy-based butter substitutes. There are voices outside the cell (beyond the field?) but we can’t hear them. They don’t matter to us. Other languages are decorations for our speech. A word here, a phrase there. They are the sriracha on our french fries; the matcha powder in our soy milk. Is that what it means to translate into English? Are we mixing matcha lattes?
[It makes no sense to refer to “the original quote” when no one ever actually said it, but the original specifies that the English in question is the King’s English. And it’s true; only the King James Version is good enough for Jesus Christ. Other English versions are, well, I-can-believe-it’s-not-real. —Steve]
In the MIT Press Reader, an excerpt from Robert F. Barsky’s biography of Noam Chomsky (Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997):
Unlike the many members of the left who captivated him as a young man—such as Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell—Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there. At a tender age, he had begun his search for information on contemporary left-libertarian movements, and did not abandon it. Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political writings, and when one reads Orwell’s works, the reasons for his attraction to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist perspective become clear.
In Prospect, Robert Chandler on Andrey Platonov:
In part, “The Return” is about the fear of exclusion. Each character in turn feels excluded. First, we are told that Ivanov felt “orphaned” without the army. On entering his home, Ivanov embraces Lyuba for too long, frightening his five-year-old daughter. Then he again feels excluded himself: Lyuba—he thinks—may have been unfaithful to him, and 11-year-old Petya has usurped his role around the house. During the night, Petya overhears his parents quarreling; he criticizes them, feels rejected—and then he too breaks down. This string of rejections and exclusions culminates in Ivanov’s setting off to the railway station.
Platonov writes with such sensitivity that it is equally possible for a reader to identify with any of the three main characters. One colleague took it for granted that the central figure was Lyuba; she was impressed by Platonov’s understanding of “what it’s like for a woman to have to deal with an uncomprehending husband.” Many readers see Ivanov as the central figure and admire Platonov for his ability to evoke the difficulties faced by millions of soldiers in 1945 and 1946 as they struggled to find their bearings in a by-then unfamiliar world. And I know of a Jewish reader who, without hesitation, saw Petya as the main character. As a boy, this reader had survived the war in Poland, hiding in the forest; for him, the story was “about a boy who, like me, was forced into premature adulthood.”
- on Osamu Dazai:
By the end of [The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935)], we learn that Yozo intends to stick to the “facts,” whatever they are. But this accommodation to the powers that be only sharpens the narrator’s motive for “revenge.” By blurting out everything, then taking it back with further disclosures, he shows that he isn’t to be trusted.
Yet, again, these confessions are strange: They are all but totally directed away from what Yozo meant or did and toward his anxieties about his art. The questions that really worry him are: Is this boring? Was what I just wrote clever or merely trite? The morality of writing—it must be interesting, it must hold nothing back—takes the place of social morality. Everything, for the reader of Dazai, will depend on how much one is charmed or repelled by this brand of principle.
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Celeste Marcus on Chaim Soutine:
In the late 1920s Soutine focused on a series of animal still lifes—most notably fish, fowl, and beef carcasses—before turning to portraiture. He made several paintings of men in uniform. In Le Petit Pâtissier (circa 1921), a pastry chef’s cheeks are flush with patches of red, and indigo glimmers on the edges of his white suit and hat. A parallel theme occupied Soutine in the next decade: female domestics. In The Chambermaid (1930), the figure’s white apron and pink blouse is informal. Strokes of red at her ankle ground the portrait. She stands with her feet together and her hands clasped at her waist, neatly centering the composition. The mood is one of dull restraint. As the art historian Maurice Tuchman has written, in Soutine’s late portraits “timidity and passiveness replace the more animated or anguished expressions of earlier subjects. . . . Rarely do the later figures confront us directly. For the most part they do not gesticulate but stand or lie inertly, their hands at their side or supporting their head. They are tired; their eyes are veiled or downcast.”
In The New Statesman, Phil Hebblethwaite on Modest Mussorgsky:
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov got off lightest in the letter, mostly because Tchaikovsky believed he’d rid himself of the group’s “contempt for schooling, for classical music” by becoming a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The group’s leader, Mily Balakirev, a withdrawn figure by 1878, was called “a saintly prig.” Alexander Borodin’s technique was “so weak he cannot write a line without outside help.” César Cui was accused of being unable to compose other “than by improvising and picking out on the piano little themelets supplied with little chords.”
Modest Mussorgsky, the most radical composer in the Five, was cast off as “a spent force,” although Tchaikovsky did add: “In terms of talent he is, perhaps, higher than all of the preceding ones, but his is a narrow nature, devoid of any need for self-perfection, with a blind faith in the absurd theories of his circle and in his own genius. He has a low character, which relishes coarseness, uncouthness, and roughness . . . Yet, for all his ugliness, Mussorgsky does speak to us in a new language. It may not be beautiful, but it is fresh.”
[It was Mussorgsky’s misfortune that the most famous “tinkerings” (to use Hebblethwaite’s word) with his music were done by Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel. Their genius as orchestrators, regardless of their fidelity to his intent, would have given the impression not that he was after something different but that he was amateurish by comparison. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Nora Goldschmidt reviews a book about Maecenas and his legacy (Rome’s Patron: The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas, by Emily Gowers, February):
Horace’s Odes represent a different act in the drama of patronage. In the dedication to Maecenas that opens the first book, Horace refers to his patron’s ‘royal ancestors’ and appears to flatter him further by saying that he needs only Maecenas’ high estimation of his poetry for his head to “strike the stars” (sublimi feriam sidera vertice). In Book 3, he invites Maecenas to drink with him to celebrate a close call with a falling tree and lay down the concerns of state. It’s a compliment to Maecenas as statesman and right-hand man of the victorious Augustus. But as in other odes addressed to Maecenas, the suggestion of real friendship between patron and poet comes through as strongly as the flattery. Was this how Maecenas wished to be seen, not as a lofty commissioner but a friend and confidant of writers? Or is it just part of the “Maecenas trail” which Horace lays in his poems, allowing him to produce the kind of verse he wants to write?
There are further complications. In Book 2 of the Odes Horace writes that he cannot live beyond Maecenas, who is not only his “pillar of prosperity” but “part of my soul.” Yet a few odes later he claims that he, Horace, being a poet, won’t taste death. Is Maecenas assured immortality, too, as the poet’s patron? Will Horace carry (feram) his patron’s name to the stars like other protégés, or is it the poet himself whose head will bump into them (feriam)?
[Turning to the other Book of Odes (translation by James Legge):
Ye, brilliant and accomplished princess,
Have conferred on me this happiness.
Your favors to me are without limit,
And my descendants will preserve [the fruits of] them.
Be not mercenary nor extravagant in your States,
And the king will honor you.
Thinking of this great service,
He will enlarge the dignity of your successors.
What is most powerful is the being the man;—
Its influence will be felt throughout your States.
What is most distinguished is being virtuous;—
It will secure the imitation of all the princes.
Ah! the former kings are not forgotten!
You give literary types money two thousand years ago and they’ll still be talking about you now. Giving literary types money covers a multitude of sins. —Steve]
Colin Kidd reviews a reappreciation of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability, by Robin Douglass, May):
Mandeville also skewers the motives of non-virtue-signallers, however, unmasking the feelings of secret superiority that accompany such reticence. We merely deceive ourselves into thinking we might not be showing off. The seeming contrast between sanctimonious exhibitionists and the quietly smug is no contrast at all. Both groups are equally motivated by pride; the only difference lies in the subtlety of execution. According to Robin Douglass, Mandeville understood that “secretly concealing the outward display of our pride from others” is pride’s “most sophisticated manifestation.” He knew that people felt the “pleasure of being esteemed by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be.” In his reading, every one of us is a sleekit—and self-deceiving—attention-seeker: we brim over with self-admiration and spin our vainglory as altruistic and other-serving. Centuries before Facebook, he perceived the way that as social beings we constantly curate the profiles we disclose to the wider world and to ourselves.
In The Point, Linden K. Smith reviews Marilynne Robinson’s study of Genesis (Reading Genesis, March 12) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 6, 2024; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Feb. 28, 2024 and a review in WRB—Feb. 17, 2024.]:
Despite the beauty of Robinson’s interpretation, the biblical narratives of providence can sometimes seem a little thin beside her fiction. Compare poor forsaken Esau with Robinson’s depiction of Jack Boughton in Home (2008). We get to hear Jack reflect on his own felt disfavor by God. We see everything from his anguish over his sins to his quirks. By the end of the novel, I felt that I knew Jack, at least in some small way. So Jack’s estrangement from God is palpable, I can feel it for myself and consider how similar it is to my own. I can understand Jack Boughton, but I will never be able to understand Esau—not without imagining details that scripture does not give me. Perhaps in certain ways, then, poetic enlargements of biblical stories (Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Kierkegaard’s portraits of Abraham in Fear and Trembling) are more theologically productive than straightforward commentary. Insofar as theological problems are personal problems, we need to understand them through people, not exegesis.
[True in the sense that Genesis is not a novel explicitly focused on the interiority of its characters, but then most of literature throughout human history isn’t. The storytelling masterpiece of the Bible, by the way, is the story of David. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Esquire inquires:
Whether America still cares about authors. [“The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep” —Steve]
Where sadboy literature went. [My first thought here was Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), so I wasn’t surprised when he came up halfway through the article. Also, I’ll say it: Pynchon is for the girls (and also the boys, and anyone who likes fun and beautiful prose). I’m standing by this. —Julia] [The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is absolutely for the girls, depicting as it does that men, when given the choice between helping a woman and indulging in their own arcane and useless hobbies and obsessions, will always choose the latter. —Steve]
Why sports novels are making a comeback. [Just read A Fan’s Notes (1968). —Steve]
The local Post predicts what will be on Barack Obama’s summer reading list.
The trouble with writing Trump novels. [The trouble is that, in his own way, he’s a superb prose stylist. —Steve]
The history of footnotes.
The pie from Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at a Milledgeville restaurant.
New issues:
The Believer Issue One Hundred Forty-Six | Summer 2024
Cleveland Review of Books Vol. 2.1 (available for pre-order)
Image Issue 121 | Summer 2024 [As linked to above.]
Stanley Moss died on Friday, July 5. R.I.P.
Local:
The Folger Shakespeare Library’s pop-up book fair is tomorrow, July 14, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Poem:
“Bend” by Jim Peterson
I found you walking beside a horse
without halter or lead. It shadowed you,
sometimes resting its enormous head
on your shoulder. I’d been alone
for a long time. I feared you were the end
of all that. Sometimes at night
we laid a blanket down in the pasture,
the dark, ground-hugging clouds of horses
grazing around us. I talked a lot
but you didn’t care. You were already
who you were. Whenever a horse saw you
its ears pricked forward. Its eyes
followed you. When the horse stumbled
and fell, it was you who stumbled and fell.
When it flew over the fences and creeks
it was you flying. When its body curved
from nose to tail, when it shortened
or stretched out its gait, it was you.
I said teach me. You showed me my hands
that didn’t know they were feeling
the horse in the reins. You showed me
my legs and feet that didn’t know
they were shaping the stream of that body.
I couldn’t fathom that my thoughts
fell into the river of the horse and altered
its course, its bearing. As I learned, I felt
the current of my body bend
toward the current of yours. Their confluence—
woman, man, and horse walking together.
[This poem is from the Spring 2024 issue of the Good Life Review. Peterson has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being The Horse Who Bears Me Away (2020).
I was reading TGLR earlier this week and was so struck by the poems of Peterson’s in their most recent issue, especially this one. I love the way the voice in this poem, with its straightforward syntax and line breaks, conveys a steadiness that’s present in both the relationship and in the you of the poem. You were already / who you were. And yet for all the poem’s straightforwardness, we get such telling, but understated, moments like I’d been alone / for a long time. I feared you were the end / of all that. I love how it’s not just “the end of that,” but of all that—it’s such an effective characterization of the speaker, that subtle introduction of complexity. There’s the lovely strangeness, too, of the way the lover is linked to the horse, which is told to us so plainly by the speaker: When it flew over the fences and creeks / it was you flying. It’s a linkage that the speaker asks her to teach him, and so gets initiated into—into union, and away from the independence and isolation of his past life, his prior all that. And as the speaker changes in the end of the poem, so too does the syntax, albeit subtly: the poem’s final sentence is the most drastic shift away from a simple subject-verb construction in the whole poem. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Random House | July 16
Banal Nightmare
by Halle Butler
From the Lit Hub preview: I think we all know something about banal nightmares by now. But Butler’s book, in which a millennial New Yorker winds up back in her Midwestern hometown after a breakup, is unlikely to be banal, though it may be nightmarish—after all, Butler is low-key the voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation. I’ll have to read it at arm’s length lest it cut too close to the bone.
What we’re reading:
Steve finished the last volume of the Ezra Pound biography (Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume III: The Tragic Years 1939–1972, by A. David Moody, 2015). [Moody emphasizes that the lyric voice is minimal in Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones, written while Pound was at St. Elizabeths. It comes back in the final cantos the completely broken Pound wrote after his release. I suspect that this attitude towards the lyric voice—useful for some things, not for others; The Cantos are both personal and impersonal moment by moment—is part of the background to the dispute I discussed on Wednesday.
To anyone interested in the final years of Pound’s life I recommend Donald Hall’s account of meeting him in Old Poets (reissued and updated under a couple different titles during Hall’s life); the section on Pound is the best part of the book. (I’ve mentioned it before in this newsletter to recommend the Dylan Thomas section.) —Steve]
He also read “A Note on the Milton Criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot” by Todd H. Sammons (1988). [I’m turning over in my head a theory that a lot of Pound’s hatred of Milton is motivated by—for a lack of a better term—the narcissism of small differences, not in their verse but in their stature, their lives, their personalities, and their projects, both political and poetic, and both Milton and Pound would have said that the two were inseparable. —Steve]
Julia is still reading Gravity’s Rainbow.
Critical notes:
Yasmin Nair on the state of book reviewing at the Times:
Reading the Book Review is a joyless task because it is mostly so massively, stiflingly dull. There is a sameness and a flatness to the reviews, held as they are to some invisible set of Times “standards,” the most obvious one of which seems to be, “Never be interesting.” A recent review of Anthony Fauci’s memoir, On Call (June), describes it as “a well-pressed gray flannel suit of a book with a white coat buttoned over it,” as if its dullness is the best thing about it. Other than a mild comment about the overuse of “bureaucratese” (phrases like “proof of the pudding” and “pushing the envelope,” which are simply clichés), the entire “review” by Alexandra Jacobs reads like a dutifully written eighth-grade summary. I have read reviews there by some of the wittiest writers whose prose sparkles elsewhere but who, when transplanted to the hallowed and hollow grounds of the Times, quietly shrivel and hush. To enter the world of the Book Review is to stumble into a boring tea party: everyone has nothing but niceties to murmur to each other, everyone is dropping quotes from Joan Didion and some dead white guys, and everyone’s tea is secretly laced with gin just to keep them going.
[To me the archetypal bad Times review is the one I got worked up about in WRB—Dec. 20, 2023, which opens by resenting that Anthony Hecht is making the work of appearing to be well-read more difficult through such stratagems as “using obscure words” and “expecting his readers to have read the Bible and Shakespeare.” If Anthony Hecht tires you, what will the modernists do?
Or, to quote someone who made the medicine go down by setting it to music:
But nobody has any respect
Anyway they already expect you
To just give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations
—Steve]
- on “the girlboss era in literature”:
But curiously juxtaposed to the girl-boss persona of the Rooney/Cline/Moshfegh trio is what they are saying in their fiction. And what they are saying, at least in what I’ve read (I haven’t read everything), is to extol the joys of submission. . . .
If I am right that the literature of a given era is a distillation of the society’s underlying psychic turbulence, then this is fundamentally what the society is dealing with—how to align female empowerment with female sexuality. There is no other competing narrative.
[Cf. the links and notes about Jane Eyre in WRB—Jan. 20, 2024.]
One strand of recent criticism implies we have reached the saturation point in our consumption of the ever more scandalous, ever more revealing life writing epitomized by the early internet’s premier literary genre, the personal essay. This critical agitation responded to a glut: many of the critiques originated as epitaphs for a form that had fizzled after all the secrets had been told. It’s not so wild to imagine we might soon tire of autofiction’s kicks, which draw on the same repertoire of shocking self-exposure and radical transparency. But as a brief glance at the long view of literary history shows, we can’t escape the volatile relationship between life writing and fiction. All we can do is think about what could be next.
[Speaking of Jane Eyre, one of the most unintentionally revealing novels ever written: I am sure part of the appeal of autofiction and the like for its writers is that it’s impossible to reveal anything unintentionally if you reveal all of it intentionally. —Steve]
- on calling things autofiction (and the Brontës):
I’m an avid reader of biography, incidentally, and I would like to write biography some future day, and I don’t think biographical readings (or biographically informed readings) of texts are stupid. But the above goes far beyond an interest in the life–work interaction to assuming that Charlotte and Emily were essentially stenographers of experience and not artists. In the case of Emily specifically, it’s more attractive perhaps to see Wuthering Heights as a book completely cut off from any other book, its sole source wild inspiration, rather than the work of somebody writing in a particular artistic tradition.
In some ways, the instinct to stress its originality comes from a need to make sure she’s not dismissed for merely mimicking other writers—but you end up saying that Wuthering Heights was a freak accident produced by a freak accident, which is probably worse.
[People make this mistake with Emily, I think, because Charlotte’s and Anne’s novels pretty obviously mine a lot of their ideas from the lives of their authors, and people love refusing to see the Brontës as, you know, different people. —Steve]
- on calling things autofiction (and the Brontës):