The Washington Review of Books cancels all engagements.
Links:
In Liberties, Michael Kimmage on F. Scott Fitzgerald, folly, and wisdom:
Keats died in 1821, more than sixty years before Fitzgerald was born. Bits and pieces of the Romantic era entered into the Fitzgerald myth—Fitzgerald as the Byronic hero whose heart was tortured by love and who died before he should have; but in his prose style Fitzgerald was not a throwback. Rather than reviving Romanticism, he immersed himself in modernism. Though he never wore the mantle of an avant-garde experimentalist, he nonetheless extracted his stylistic tools from modernism: the evocation of a surreal world shaped and shadowed by the human psyche, and the eagerness to convey all that is discordant in the modern city and in the modern person. The tension and the energy of Fitzgerald’s prose style arise from his aesthetic of juxtaposition. Strange as it is for Gatsby to be trivial and great at the same time, a prose style attuned to the irreconcilable can express contradictions with clarity, and it can make them real. A modernist style freed from rationality brought Fitzgerald to the heart of the (not especially rational) interaction between folly and wisdom.
[Cf. the link on modernist novelists and Romantic poetry, as well as my notes on it, in WRB—July 31, 2024. (The one-sentence version is that unlike the modernist poets, who could hardly find new poetry in the Romantic poets, the modernist novelists found a new approach to the novel in them.) For expressing contradictions with clarity we can turn to Keats again:
several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.
If Coleridge was incapable of remaining content with half knowledge Fitzgerald was incapable of gaining the half knowledge in the first place—and yet. Gatsby ends with Nick Carraway giving his take on what it all meant, his attempt at knowledge, but the rough draft of Gatsby that is “Winter Dreams” is even more revealing. Several years after the main events, Dexter learns from someone he meets for business that the girl he once dreamed about is in a bad marriage and no longer beautiful. Fitzgerald then provides several paragraphs of prose shaped by romantic poetry describing his inner state. But the story ends with this:
“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”
“Something,” “that thing”—we can say vaguely what it is, but Dexter has no interest in trying to articulate it. It just is. He knows something has changed, but instead of working out what exactly he remains with his “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” —Steve]
Reviews:
In the local Post,
reviews a collection of Henry James’ criticism (On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays, edited by Michael Gorra, April)But at root, almost all the pieces here are about personality. Even when James was nominally assessing a particular work, he was in fact taking stock of its author’s more general bearing. In his determinedly novelistic hands, criticism becomes a human drama. His reviews are nothing so much as delightful character sketches. Of dutiful, plodding Trollope, James wrote: “He sat down to his theme in a serious, business-like way, with his elbows on the table and his eye occasionally wandering to the clock.” Of muscular, vital Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It must have been a kind of luxury to be—that is to feel—so homogenous, and it helps to account for his serenity, his power of acceptance, and that absence of personal passion which makes his private correspondence read like a series of beautiful circulars.” Artistic success, in these portraits, is bound up with success as a human being. On George Eliot, for instance: “The constant presence of thought, of generalizing instinct, of brain, in a word, behind her observation, gives the latter its great value and her whole manner its high superiority.”
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 15, 2025. In her short book on James Rebecca West points out that, when editing Roderick Hudson for a later edition, James changed one character’s assertion that the events he has just experienced are “like something in a novel” to “like something in a bad novel.” West reads this as James dismissing Roderick Hudson as early and inferior work, which is no doubt part of the point. But the change also speaks to a deeper feeling on James’ part. The sort of novel in which things “like something in a novel” happen is ipso facto a bad novel because it provides no indication of the artist’s morality or sensibility. Whatever sensibility there is is the sensibility of novelistic tropes, unthinkingly repeated. Even when James seems to permit the novelist to work with whatever materials he likes, as in “The Art of Fiction,” where he says “we must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it,” he later clarifies:
I mention this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest.
By again associating “the idea” and “the subject” James leaves no room for the novel in which things happen for the sake of having things happen or the novel in which plot substitutes for sensibility (or is the only sensibility the author can muster). Rothfeld quotes him on Far from the Madding Crowd, a novel for which Thomas Hardy is fairly suspected of devising a wild plot so that each installment of its serialization would have something interesting: it “has a fatal lack of magic.” This is too far (I like Far from the Madding Crowd), but it again indicates James’ desire to understand the author through the work, and work that slavishly imitates novelistic convention affords no opportunity to do so—except, perhaps, that the novelist is the sort of person who slavishly imitates novelistic convention. —Steve]
In the TLS, Emma Greensmith reviews some books about Homer (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography by Alberto Manguel, 2007, revised and expanded 2024; Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World, by Edith Hall, March; and Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It, by Emily Hauser, June):
That’s a lot of ground to cover in 300 pages, and Manguel shares with his poetic subject a remarkable talent for unified storytelling, combining sweeping panoramas with selective concentration. The style is both dazzling and extremely dense. The focus is mainly on grand male heroes, the glitterati of the literary world, but non-elite figures and alternative perspectives sometimes sneak in to steal the show—while our guiding narrator stays tantalizingly distant, his subjectivity always implied, never asserted. Many big-name events are covered (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Reformation, the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns), but it is in the less familiar corners and smaller touches that the most memorable material is found. For example, the story of how Homer came to Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age shows that the epics’ trajectory was often spectacularly non-linear: the poems emerge there not through the grand work of the city’s translation center, but thanks to an exasperated student who got chucked out of a lecture hall and returned two years later with word-perfect knowledge of Homeric verse. And the wonderful anecdote about Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey reveals how one-sided and exclusive even the most “open-ended” receptions can be. Butler’s grand claim was that a woman had composed the Odyssey. But when William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter Anne Thackeray Ritchie suggested a similar theory of female authorship, that the sonnets of Shakespeare could have been written by Anne Hathaway, Butler walked away muttering “poor lady, that was a silly thing to say,” the irony apparently lost on him.
[We linked to an earlier review of Penelope’s Bones in WRB—June 14, 2025, and I had some earlier notes on the most beautiful woman in the world in WRB—Jan. 18, 2025. You feel bad for Helen—everyone else in Homer gets to be who they are except her. The ambient ideas we pick up about Achilles and Odysseus and everyone else hardly define them after we’ve read the poems, but “the most beautiful woman in the world”—everyone already has an idea of that, and nothing Homer does can change it. (I suspect I am not alone in associating that phrase with the actress I was obsessed with when I was thirteen.) I don’t think archeology can change it either.
Also, where did this student go to find and memorize Homer? Talk about a gap year. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Thames, Colin Burrow reviews a book about satire (State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature, by Dan Sperrin, July 1) [The Upcoming book in WRB—June 25, 2025.]:
The disappointment with satire that emerges from this book is in part a product of its method. The alluringly simple-seeming question “What is this text trying to do?” is a much less good one to ask of satire than it might sound. It immediately excludes the possibility that a satirist might be a confused mess of self-censorship mixed with odd lunges for freedom, in which a desire to make a mark on the world as an individual intersects riskily with a desire to make people change their behavior. The question “What is this satire trying to do?” also implies that authorial intentions are clear, and that so long as you know enough about the day-to-day politics of the Walpole administration you can pin those intentions down and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists—Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell—had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question “What are you trying to do?” with something like “I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too.” Furthermore, asking the same question of satire that one might ask of a political pamphlet aimed at redressing an immediate political wrong radically restricts the parameters within which satire can operate. It makes satire a mode that addresses a particular moment rather than a mode which might have an afterlife, or even change how people see the world in the longer term. You might say that’s not just a recipe for disappointment with satire, but for missing the point.
[This also misses that part of the afterlife of satire is its preservation of the things being attacked. To take one of the more obvious examples, the Dunciad is both a thrilling attack on bad artists and also the only reason I know the names of various bad artists in Hanoverian England. —Steve]
N.B.:
A professor at Boston University, with the help of students, has created a digital database of all 795 poems in The Tale of Genji, featuring five different English translations of each poem alongside the original Japanese texts and additional commentary.
“These Restaurants, Salons and Workouts Are Free for Hot People—if They Post About Them” [The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books has not been offered any of this. What’s up with that? —Steve]
Scribal errors in Chaucer.
The world of fans of supermarkets.
New issues:
Harper’s August 2025
Liberties Volume 5—Number 4 | Summer 2025 [As linked to above.]
Connie Francis died on Wednesday, July 16. R.I.P.
Poem:
“One acquires an especially lush gender” by Toby Altman
In these interactions of heat and electricity
a geometry emerges, a fraction.A romance, the stranger and his roommate
naked in the lake.Arrival of thunderheads after a long delay.
That’s when I begin to say.
Architecture, which is an encounter.
In all its aspects sexual, the practice
of geometry.Yet I took no pleasure in the spring,
having been insufficiently punished.This love of beauty, which begins in the senses
and travels through them.It requires discipline, flowering of the whip.
The hands of a stranger, rubbing
slush against my brow.And without such formalities, would we be
unable to desire at all.
[I enjoyed the slide into slant rhyme, then perfect rhyme, in the lines“[a] romance, the stranger and his roommate / naked in the lake. // Arrival of thunderheads after a long delay. // That’s when I begin to say” which resolved itself with the delightful return: “[a]rchitecture, which is an encounter. // In all its aspects sexual, the practice / of geometry.”
But I chose this poem for the phrase, “the flowering of the whip,” which I liked immediately, though I suspect it is the kind of phrase that may also irritate. I felt that its extravagance was earned, because though the unfurling of a flower fails to resemble a whip’s blistering snap, it is that very juxtaposition that interests me. Something brutal, disarmed by loveliness. It is, after all, the love of beauty that requires the discipline of the whip. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Penguin Press | July 22
Pan: A Novel
by Michael Clune
From the publisher: Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out (2013)—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
[We linked to a review in WRB—July 16, 2025.]
Also out Tuesday:
University of Texas Press: Ṭarab: Music, Ecstasy, Emotion, and Performance edited by Michael Frishkopf, Scott Marcus and Dwight Reynolds
What we’re reading:
Steve read Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. [A little while ago I was having a conversation with a friend about her Zuleika Dobson-like ability to have a certain type of man fall in love with her without her doing anything; it made me think I should revisit the novel. I discovered that, while I remembered the basic outlines of the plot, I had forgotten everything else. It’s barely a novel, more a collection of Beerbohm bits and jokes with some connection to the story. Frequently the narration takes on the exact same voice as his essays (although I doubt even he could have done much more with these subjects):
One has never known a good man to whom dogs were not dear; but many of the best women have no such fondness. You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes—possibly dangerous, certainly soulless.
(As a man to whom dogs are not dear I don’t believe the first phrase, and I don’t believe the rest either, but the joy of Beerbohm is not in always agreeing with him.)
Why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance?
(Finally, someone brave enough to say it.)
Any man is glad to be seen escorting a very pretty woman. He thinks it adds to his prestige. Whereas, in point of fact, his fellow-men are saying merely “Who’s that appalling fellow with her?” or “Why does she go about with that ass So-and-So?”
(Tell me about it.)
He makes fun of himself too; when Zuleika is told that her speech has “a literary flavor,” she blames it on “a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere.” And as part of making fun of himself he makes fun of his current enterprise:
“Was she pale?”
“Very pale,” answered the one.
“A healthy pallor,” qualified the other, who was a constant reader of novels.
And in a similar spirit the novel is full of other bits that I suspect Beerbohm had been sitting on for a while and waiting to use. They include an account of how Clio got bored with history and came to prefer novels, several ghosts from the past (for instance, an eighteenth-century lothario) unable to influence the present action and very mad about it, a history of “Judas College” at Oxford, and a Socratic dialogue about whether killing yourself would make you happier than thinking about killing yourself. None of this has any necessary connection to anything else, or to the plot, but all of it is extremely funny, and what else is a novel by Max Beerbohm for? —Steve]
Critical notes:
- on Robert Graves and the First World War:
“We were all intensely excited at the noise and flashes of the guns” is entirely told, and in no respect shown. The tone here is the blandly dialed-down underexcitement appropriate to Graves’ class and generation. Most of Goodbye to All That is like this.
The really interesting thing, so far as I’m concerned, is that by 1929 Graves had already gone most of the way along the path that reconfigured his whole aesthetic: from whimsical offhandedness, juvenile black humor and a protective shield made out of blocks of unremarkable prose, and to a mythic ingenuousness, to poetry, and to a sometimes frankly embarrassing open-heartedness: his new mythos and ethos. The remarkable thing about The White Goddess is how assertively feminine it is: an (invented) myth of matriarchal prehistoric Europe being conquered by a patriarchal culture, but keeping the religious adoration of the triple goddess (maiden/mother/crone) alive in subterranean ways, for instance through poetry. It completely inverts both the medium and (male) subject of Goodbye.
In Bloomberg, Adrian Woolridge wants more novels about business:
Tom Wolfe provided one explanation for this neglect in his 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He argued that novelists were abandoning the greatest story of their time—capitalist civilization in all its buzzing confusion—and retreating into literary game-playing. He tried to change the direction of literature by writing a succession of state-of-the-nation novels, two of which, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998), focused on businesspeople, a Wall Street trader and an Atlanta property developer respectively. Wolfe’s books sold in their millions, but his prophecy nevertheless remained true: Novelists left the great business stories of the era to be told by journalists such as Michael Lewis or to be fictionalized in TV series such as Succession and Billions.
C. P. Snow provided another explanation with his notion of “two cultures.” Snow, a novel-writing scientist, worried that mid-century Britain was divided between two cultures which knew little of each other—a literary Britain and a scientific Britain. Today the West is equally divided between two equally alien cultures—a literary culture and a business culture.
[The Managing Editor would have you know that he is a devoted listener of Odd Lots.
J R (1975), which I still cannot stop thinking about a couple weeks after finishing it, is the essential novel about capitalist civilization in all its buzzing confusion in part because it’s about failed artists who find themselves at its mercy. On the other side, business is represented by—is?—the titular twelve-year-old who starts with a bunch of junk mail, turns it into the J R Family of Companies without really understanding what he’s doing, and then yells “how come everybody’s always getting mad at me!” as it all collapses. (J R is also an essential novel of the internet.) —Steve]
Patrick Kurp on first books and last books:
Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude.
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