This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books for nine seasons of the city of New York with an extreme intimacy—or, rather, with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew the Managing Editors as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with Washingtonians of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to Washington, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of a Washingtonian heart. I had known the shallows.
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can nonbelievers pray?”, will take place on the evening of July 20. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In UnHerd, Sam Leith on the grotesqueries of children’s literature:
As has always been the case, for instance, the most fervently didactic children’s literature captivates its audience with exactly the things that it ostensibly encourages them to disapprove of. The fate of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (1964) may be a caution against the sin of gluttony: but a fat kid getting sucked through a chocolate pipe to an unknown fate is fun to contemplate. It’s the punishment, rather than the moral, which the reader enjoys. Think, too, of the glee in Struwwelpeter (1845) and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) (Roald Dahl claimed to have the latter memorized as a child); or the macabre and surreal works of Edward Gorey—not written for children but riffing on the conventions of children’s stories, and an acknowledged influence on Handler.
[This is what the Oompa Loompa songs are about. —Steve]
- on Katherine Rundell:
Rundell’s academic appreciation of the radicalism in E. Nesbit often tips over into this sort of authorial calling out to her readers—look, here is something vitally important about life you must urgently know, now. Children enjoy being spoken to like adults, but they enjoy more the careering of unicorns unexpectedly out of bushes and the vomiting of griffins over unsuspecting children.
- on Katherine Rundell:
In Tablet, David Mikics on Delmore Schwartz:
Everything you do matters too much: That was Delmore’s curse and, for a while, the blessing of his art. Overestimating his own gifts, he relished the feeling of omnipotence, then was shattered by the knowledge that he was not up to the world-historical writerly task he had set for himself. Often he gravitated to authors who, he seemed to hope, might provide the antidote to his own disabling self-consciousness. He immersed himself in Heinrich Heine, and signed a contract to edit the “Portable Heine,” one of the many book contracts he never fulfilled. But Schwartz utterly lacked the poise and crispness that distinguished the great German Jewish poet. His work was often maudlin, while Heine’s was heartfelt and agile.
[We featured a poem by Schwartz in WRB—Aug. 5, 2023.] [I will say that Simpson’s memoir Poets in Their Youth (1982) made it hard not to develop a soft spot for Schwartz, his uneven body of work aside. To me that book is just proof that twenty-something poets have been all neurotic over the exact same questions for decades. —Julia]
Two in Liberties: first, Rosanna Warren on the hundredth anniversary of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium:
“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” comes early in the volume. Already the French title deranges English sense, and in its phonetic play it veers into a kind of nonsense in French as “Monocle” becomes “Mon Oncle” by the addition of one letter. This evasive and ambitious poem of twelve blank verse stanzas of eleven lines each punishes its own Keatsian eloquence (“This luscious and impeccable fruit”) as it mourns and savages an ideal of romantic love (lower case “r”). One can sense here, if one wishes to read biographically, something of Stevens’ disappointment in his marriage to Elsie, who may or may not have prompted the Eve addressed here: “When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet . . . ” But it would diminish the poem cruelly to shrink it to personal anecdote: Stevens takes pains not to allow that. Yes, the lovers are seen as aged beyond romance: “Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. / Two golden gourds distended on our vines, / We hang like warty squashes . . . ” But intrinsic to erotic loss is a rebellion against the language of romance, the “fops of fancy” as this self-proclaimed “yeoman” rudely puts it. The whole poem bursts with disappointment, and by mocking the old hymns—“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds”—in their own “magnificent measure,” it discovers a new way to use that measure.
[Warren writes “In Harmonium, coming in September 1923 right on the heels of The Waste Land, he plotted an entirely independent mode of being ‘modern’” and says that Eliot and Pound were “more threatened” by the Victorians than by Keats. Cf. the notes in WRB—July 10, 2024 on the controversy between the admirers of Stevens and the admirers of Pound. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall: Julia on Archibald MacLeish’s theory of poetry, Steve on making it new, Julia and Steve on the danger of poetic solipsism, Renata Adler, Napoleon, Seamus Heaney, the Doors, Elena Ferrante, Mary Gaitskill, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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