I presume that there is no reader in America that has not heard of the Washington Review of Books, of the District of Columbia, than which a more famous review of books is not to be found in the university libraries; and though, as a man of the world, I have learned to despise heartily the claims of some PRETENDERS to reviewing books who have no more skill in criticism than the lackey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the boasting of many of my fellow Managing Editors, who are all for their own reviews of books, and talk of a review no better than would wrap a fish as if it were Lionel Trilling; yet truth compels me to assert that the Washington Review of Books is the noblest of the country, and, perhaps, of the universal world.
Links:
In The Paris Review, Joshua Cohen interviews Vladimir Sorokin (translated by Max Lawton):
Cohen: Which brings me to questions of paranoia and conspiracy. I feel that novelists, especially in the so-called West, when faced with suspicions or dread, used to ask themselves, Is this true? Now, in a time when anything, when everything, “can be true,” the new thing to ask is, Can we live with it? How has fiction changed as the culture has become more and more explicitly self-fictionalizing?
Sorokin: “Is that really true?” is an eternal question in our world, where fakes multiply with each passing minute. But I rely on my intuition, as I did before. My life experience and my inner feeling are all I have when assessing a phenomenon, person, or event. It seems to me that we have nothing else. To take something on faith is a dangerous act in our time.
[“The so-called West” is beautiful, reminiscent of that apocryphal Gandhi quote: “What do you think of Western civilization?” “I think it would be a good idea.” (I would also encourage writers to carefully consider when to use “so-called” and when “soi-disant.”)
However, as an old man still clinging to the law of non-contradiction, I want to insist that “anything can be true” and “everything can be true” should not be conflated. The former is merely a less enduring formulation of “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”; the latter is just giving up. And, whatever my feelings about autofiction, it seems a bit much to give it a role in epistemic collapse. Would that novelists were that important! —Steve]
In The American Scholar, Mark Phillips on getting lost in the woods:
It is difficult for art to evoke the contiguous supernal beauty and infernal horror of the natural world. And yet—the sentimentalism of some visual artists aside—painters and photographers, unencumbered by limits of language, tend to be better than writers at capturing the actuality of nature. On a wall of my cabin bunkroom, and in counterpoint to the single dimension in the rest of my cabin décor, hangs a print of a Winslow Homer watercolor. Titled An October Day, it depicts a white-tailed deer swimming across a wild pond glowing with autumn, a scene so alluring that at first a viewer might fail to notice the deer hunter and his hound in the background across the water, seekers of nourishment, harbingers of death. A print of another Homer painting, Old Friends, hangs in my home, some 250 miles from my cabin. In it, an elderly man, Adirondack guide Rufus Wallace, is gazing up along the thick trunk of a dead tree, his raised right hand on it, perhaps caressing it, a life and death linked to another life and death in an uncaring, unforgiving and yet cherished wilderness—perceived in paradox and oxymoron that a lesser artist would distill into clichés.
[People will tell you that “Young Goodman Brown” is about Puritanism, or Calvinism, or the Salem witch trials, or man’s connection to society, or whatever. They are all wrong. “Young Goodman Brown” is about going into the woods at night. —Steve]
In Lit Hub, Ed Simon on writers who write a lot:
Because prolific writers so often are methodical writers, like Philip Roth (thirty novels) who told Tina Brown at The Daily Beast that “I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365” or John Updike (23 novels, 18 short story collections, 12 nonfiction books, 12 books of poetry) who rented an office above an Ipswich, Massachusetts restaurant where he kept regular working hours, there can be a sense that the magic has been wrung out of the process. After all, William Pritchard said of Updike, “He must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn’t tell it.”
Often there is a valorization of the tortured writer, all those sad, young literary men at the bar (only very occasionally and in-between sighs) scribbling in moleskins while they smoke American Spirits, whereas someone renting an office might as well be an accountant. Then there is the suspicion that at its most extreme, prolificness isn’t even an issue of work, but of mania—more stunt than literature. What if, however, without disparaging either those who write a lot or those who write a little, we consider that for the former the approach to the craft which is grubby can also be glowing? That there is, in fact, a mysticism engrained within the stolid, that the compulsion to produce isn’t inconsistent with inspiration, but an extension of it?
[It all depends on how you count, doesn’t it? And on what you count as “prolific,” a term that gets applied to anyone who writes a couple dozen books. Roth’s archives testify that he reworked or discarded the vast majority of what he wrote; that one page a day is just what he kept. And at that pace, with that approach to the work, you can write Roth’s 30 novels, but you cannot write Georges Simenon’s 400. Mania, as conventionally talked about in this context, can get a lot of text on the page, but what about editing it?
And much of the barely disguised envy of the productive writer comes from writers who have to make their living some other way. Roth spent basically all day every day writing (or reading, which he viewed as part of his process); plenty of people can’t. —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 my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
I plead for a Browning revival
Thinking in place
Hannah on a Poem by Robert Lowell and Maine fishing villages
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 very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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