WRB—July 26, 2023

Hysterical WRBism

Suppose that, every Wednesday and Saturday morning, when we opened our email inbox with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say the Washington Review of Books? And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years, we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between “criticism” and “publicity.”

In today’s edition:

Fathers and children—poetry, alive and dead—book clubs and manifestos—the creation of a voice—the names of sports teams—late style.

[We’re experimenting with leading with something like this. We will be iterating. This isn’t over. —Chris]

N.B.:

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Links:

• In the Cleveland Review of Books, Sean Alan Cleary on American perceptions of British English:

  In my British Literature class for high school sophomores, we start each year with a survey of accents. I cannily ask my students: what’s your impression of a British accent? I’m doing a sort of ongoing experiment, year after year, to see how they respond. Do these students from the American suburbs have some idea of what it might mean to speak “British” specifically? We go around the room and everyone has to read the first line of Heaney’s Beowulf in their best go at an accent. 

  Most approximate the Queen’s English, sometimes as filtered through Harry Potter. To someone more familiar with contemporary British languages, it sounds like a southern inflected RP that’s as foreign to Beowulf as my students’ own modern American English is. But what’s surprised me in the time since I started this course four years ago is the slow creep of other English languages from Great Britain into their impressions of British English. 

• In Lapham’s Quarterly, Leopold Froehlich on the twin sisters behind dueling advice columns:

  Three months after Lederer began at the Sun-Times, something caused a schism between the sisters. Phillips had helped her sister write responses, and Lederer’s editor put a stop to the practice, prohibiting her from farming out the work. Phillips left and set up shop at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she wrote under the byline of Abigail Van Buren. (“I took the Abigail from the Old Testament, for Abigail was a prophetess in the Book of Samuel,” she wrote in 1981. “I chose Van Buren from our eighth president, Martin Van Buren, because I liked the aristocratic, old-family ring.”)

  When Lederer found out her sister had been writing and syndicating Dear Abby, she felt betrayed. In return, Phillips was said to have offered her Dear Abby column to their hometown paper, the Sioux City Journal, at a reduced rate if the Journal promised not to print columns written by Lederer. (It does not appear that the Journal took her up on the offer.)

• Justin Smith-Ruiu on William Gaddis’ J R and postmodernism:

  The kid’s soul is simply unreachable—he only wills one thing. But there’s purity in that, as Kierkegaard understood, and one finds oneself in a queer state of suspension throughout the novel, never quite willing to throw it all in for the art-and-beauty team, and always feeling, uneasily, that J R himself, and plausibly J R itself, is among the greatest artistic creations one could imagine, and that any system as soul-crushing as the one that produced him/it does not so much kill the soul as channel it into deliriously perverse pursuits, of which both J R and J R, both American capitalism and great American art of the late twentieth century, are the strange perverted fruits.

• In The Guardian, an excerpt from Emmett Stinson’s upcoming book on Gerald Murnane (Murnane, August 1) [Today’s Upcoming book! —Chris]:

  The artist he most reminds me of is Joseph Cornell, the New York artist famous for creating his detailed boxed assemblages out of found materials sourced from secondhand stores and opportunity shops. Cornell’s assemblages, like Murnane’s writings, are simultaneously homemade and deeply personal—yet also somehow wholly self-sufficient and autonomous creations that make the viewer feel as if they are peering into a new and unknown world. Murnane’s fiction produces a similar effect: the specificity of his narrator’s perspective and the often-overwhelming detail of experience makes the window of his vision narrow, but its horizonal depth feels endless. For all of its strangeness, Murnane’s work is still invested in recognisable and traditional literary notions of the beautiful and the sublime—and he repeatedly suggests that reading and writing are privileged ways for accessing these transcendent moments.

• Online for The Lamp, Matthew Walther clarifies the views on poetry he expressed a few months ago in the Times:

  Eliot was of course a distinguished critic as well as a poet. While his verdicts were often far-fetched, with more than a hint of piss-taking bravura (at the age of thirty-one, he famously pronounced Hamlet “an artistic failure”), he was perhaps the most insightful writer of the twentieth century on the complicated question of how society-wide changes in perception circumscribe creative activity. In an essay originally published in 1936, he blamed Milton for the stilted Latinate diction and cardboard imagery of much eighteenth-century verse, arguing that whatever its merits, Paradise Lost had stunted the growth of poetry at worst possible moment, when English men and women were experiencing a collective breakdown in their ability to think and feel in unison. One could say that Eliot himself was just as guilty of the sin of which he accused Milton.