WRB—July 27, 2024
Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books who personify an idea should not, cannot, fall below a certain level for generations; if they do, the idea suffers too.
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The New Statesman, Helen Macdonald on English heaths:
Heaths had long been seen as waste ground, aesthetically unpleasing, economically unproductive. In the past they were considered the home of those on the margins of society, places of disorder, rebellion and crime. Walking on the reserve, I thought of Daniel Defoe crossing Bagshot Heath in a carriage in the 1720s. He complained that it was a vast tract of land “given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on.”
Well, I thought, looking down at a patch of tiny tormentil flowers, it’s impossible to see the beauty of a place like this, even in summer, from a moving carriage. Like tundra landscapes, lowland heaths look featureless from a distance, failing to conform to the conventions of a beautiful landscape, but up close they are rich with small glories. The sharp angles of grass seedheads, the scramble of tiny veronica plants, masses of parasitic dodder strewn over heather like pink silly string, the tiny, jewel-like beads on the leaves of sundews in the wetter places. To see a heath, you must focus on what is at your feet.
[I have not been to the tundra, but I have been to the top of Ktaadn, and that’s close enough—it has the same rocks and the same plants growing close to the ground that you have to get down to really see. The point, like the man says, is “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” —Steve]
In Lit Hub, an excerpt from
’s contribution to Best of the Rust Belt (edited by , July 2) [The Upcoming book in WRB—June 29, 2024.]:When I think of what the Midwest gave to my imagination, I think first of the way this landscape suddenly shifted in those moments, the way I suddenly felt that I didn’t know it. It’s not only the flatness that writers like Michael Martone and Marilynne Robinson have described so well—how it makes the world into a kind of showcase or theater of the glory of God or of humankind or of the inexplicable—but a duality. You’re looking at a flat field, a thing that just lies there, that has nothing to do but be patently itself, and you suddenly realize that this flat square is also more things than you can possibly fully see at once. By laying itself out for you, it also exhausts your seeing and forces you to confront that exhaustion. It reminds you how little you see of what you see. And this estrangement doubles back on oneself. You know the truth of Willa Cather’s famous sentence, “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” What even are you, anyway?
In Granta, Mary Gaitskill on her experience of a kind of physical therapy:
I saw Linda once more before she returned to the West Coast. When she was in New York later that year, I saw her another few times. I can’t remember much about the physical parts of these experiences; it was more of the same, but deeper, as if each session reinforced the previous one. However, I remember the talking aspect. Talking wasn’t supposed to be a big part of Pneuma; Linda actively discouraged talking or interpretation. But given all the change I was feeling in my body, Pneuma-induced and otherwise, it was impossible for me to be completely silent, nor did total silence seem desirable to me. I don’t remember exactly what I said, just that I spoke frankly about my emotions, especially regarding loss. I also talked about images that popped into my head during the treatment. Linda was sympathetic with the former, but impatient with the latter. She said that I was too much in my mind; she said, “You need to cut your head off.” She said this emphatically; she said it as if it were a wonderful suggestion. On another occasion she said it was a good thing I’d never had children because I would’ve been a “terrible mother.” I opened my eyes and said, “Wow, that’s really hurtful.” And she said, in a tone of apparent surprise, “Really? That hurts you?” I may’ve replied, “I think that would hurt almost anyone.” But I’m not sure.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Katherine Harvey on Gerald of Wales:
For Gerald, things were complicated by his mixed loyalties, especially in relation to Wales. Both his Irish and Welsh works include sections on how conquest could be achieved, and how the conquered peoples should be governed. But the Description of Wales also suggested how the Welsh could resist conquest—an inclusion which he justified because “I am myself descended from both peoples.” He also wrote positively about the Welsh princes, who ruled with “equity, prudence and princely moderation,” though lacking the polish and sophistication of their English counterparts. Even on the other side of the Irish Sea, where he was undoubtedly one of the invaders, he was not entirely without sympathy for the native rulers, blaming John’s failure in Ireland on his youthful inexperience, but also on his foolish mistreatment of those Irish lords who had been well-disposed to the English. Rather than give them the respect they craved, he treated them “with contempt and derision,” and even allowed his followers to pull their long, flowing beards.
[Winston Churchill, writing about Magna Carta: “When the long tally is added up, Britain and the English-speaking world owe more to the vices of King John than to the labors of more virtuous sovereigns; for it was through the union of many forces against him that the most famous milestone of our rights and freedom was in fact set up.” From this we can also learn that, if you disrespect men with beards, the chroniclers will make sure people 800 years later know about your malice and incompetence.—Steve]
Reviews:
In , Mark Clemens reviews a recent reissue of a Guy Davenport essay collection (The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays, 1997, January):
But while Davenport is not above snobbery, he does not preen. He is sure of himself, yes, and incredibly free with his knowledge—those are grounds enough for an uncharitable reader to accuse him of pretentiousness—but importantly, he is not a showoff. He can’t pose for us because he is simply moving too fast. The velocity of his thought, its firehose quality, is another core feature of his style. He moves fast because he can’t wait to get where he is going, and he tows us along in the wake of his passion, tossing out ideas a more tedious writer might wring for a whole book. His pure love for his material and his loose, discursive way with it evoke the character of two of his heroes, Ruskin and Thoreau, who might have recognized the vibrant power of his sincerity—that deep and knowing earnestness, uncompromised by naïveté.
[We linked to its introduction and an earlier review in WRB—Jan. 13, 2024. Clemens refers to Davenport, because of his “bias for the granular,” as a member of the “fantastic facts” school. (Great phrase.) He then names some others in a footnote; the first two are Hugh Kenner, like Davenport a Poundian, and Eliot Weinberger, who has done the requisite thinking about Pound that comes with writing about Chinese poetry translated into English. I suspect they got it in part from Pound; The Cantos, in their own way, are fantastic facts, carefully selected, arranged, and versified to point beyond themselves. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Thames:
A. W. Moore reviews three new translations of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by Michael Beaney, 2023; translated by Alexander Booth, 2023; translated by Damion Searls, February)
First, this book is not just a work of philosophy, it is a work of art. (In a notebook from the early 1930s Wittgenstein wrote: “Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry.”) All three translators are sensitive to this. Booth writes in his preface: “We are in the realm of craft, shape and, now and then, possibly even song.” And Jan Zwicky, in her introduction to Booth’s translation, details the way the stress and play of vowel sounds in the final proposition of the book give it a certain musicality (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”). But, by the same token, the Tractatus is not just a work of art, it is a work of philosophy. There is a risk that translators will try so hard to preserve its aesthetic merits that they fail to remain faithful to Wittgenstein’s philosophical intentions. I am not so confident that all three translators are sensitive to this. Certainly Zwicky, in her introduction, and Marjorie Perloff, in her foreword to Searls’ translation, seem to betray their own insensitivity to it when they write, respectively, “compositions that we intuitively recognise as lyric . . . are enactive: how they communicate is what they mean,” and “the ideal translator for the Tractatus is perhaps not a professional philosopher at all, but what we call a creative writer. From a literary perspective, what is said is never as important as how it is said in the translating language.” Whatever truth there may be in these claims, it is of considerably less significance, as far as translating the Tractatus is concerned, than the error in them.
[We linked to an excerpt from Searls’ introduction in WRB—Feb. 17, 2024.]
Michael Kulikowski reviews a history of Byzantium (The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, by Anthony Kaldellis, 2023):
Up to this point, Kaldellis has succeeded at doing what he set out to do. The reader will not just be convinced of this history’s importance, but surprised that it should have been so widely neglected. His strategy of taking Christian theological disputes seriously but not literally works: one understands why they were central to political developments without having to worry about the minutiae of hypostases or ousia. His determinedly imperial and Constantinopolitan perspective rarely strays into polemic. His baddies are the Normans, towards whom (and anyone else using the “old Norman playbook”) he displays an animus almost unseemly in a dispassionate historian. And though it is unfair of Kaldellis to accuse modern historians of recycling anti-Greek calumnies from the ninth-century papal ambassador Anastasius Bibliothecarius, he is quite right that too many accounts of the Fourth Crusade go out of their way to excuse or explain away the cynicism and brutality of the venture. The eight pages he devotes to it are a masterly refutation of such apologetics.
[Surely in the Anglophone world we are familiar with making the Normans the baddies to make other points that have little to do with the Normans themselves. The real purpose of talking about “the Norman yoke” was never to prove that William the Conqueror was bad. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Christopher Benfey reviews four books about Melville (Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, 2023; Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, by Aaron Sachs, 2022; Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things, by Cody Marrs, 2023; Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, by Jennifer L. Fleissner, 2022) and a new edition of Moby-Dick (1851, edited by Jeffrey Insko, 2023):
My mounting impatience with therapeutic readings of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab is the disease and various remedies (love, beauty, environmentalism, community, democracy) are proposed for treatment, made me particularly receptive to the densely argued chapter on Melville in Jennifer L. Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will. An English professor at Indiana University Bloomington, Fleissner notes, with some impatience, the overwhelming critical tendency—conspicuous in Sachs and Marrs—to view Ahab “as a sort of demon within that the book must manage and finally exorcize.” Sometimes the demon is identified psychologically, as in Marrs’ “little Ahab inside of us.” A long tradition of critics has ventured a political reading instead, with “Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of . . . Ishmael.” Fleissner notes, drily, that “very few [readers] have seen fit to align themselves with Ahab.”
And yet, as Fleissner notes, the novel won’t sustain such anti-Ahab readings. For if readers hesitate to align themselves with Ahab, the crew of the Pequod displays no such reluctance. Even Starbuck, “the properly bourgeois first mate . . . who is most disturbed by Ahab’s bizarre divergence from their stated economic aim,” comes around. The entire crew is on board with Ahab, “the collective’s representative rather than merely its antagonist.”
[It is funny that Ahab, who is in the tradition of Milton’s Satan as well as of various Shakespearean characters, inspires these unsophisticated moralizing readings that no one has made of Paradise Lost in so blunt a form for—centuries? “Satan is evil” is true, but it also does not constitute analysis of Paradise Lost on its own. (And Mammon is also properly bourgeois. Satan is after something else.) —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Sarah Moorhouse reviews a biography of 50 women pianists (Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, by Susan Tomes, April):
Indeed, the sheer array of stories that Tomes fits into her book—from Zhu’s to Philippa Schuyler, who was subjected by her parents to a grueling practice regimen and punishing diet that involved eating raw meat—rubs up uneasily against its central premise: that there is something, first and foremost, gendered, and thereby homogeneous, about these individuals’ piano playing. In her final chapter, Tomes argues that the modern piano competition creates a “gladiatorial arena,” rewarding a style of “masterful” (read: masculine) playing to which female pianists “sometimes try to conform [ . . . ] even though it may not suit them.” She likens this to “end-of-year exams,” which “play to the strengths of boys.”
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Leah Abrams reviews Gabriel Smith’s new novel (Brat, June):
This is a fine choice for a novelist to make, but it gives the final product a shifty, ephemeral finish. Style is sexy, but without its earthly trappings—the meaty, earthy details that give texture and life to a novel—it floats away as soon as the book is shut. It was like going on a fun trip to a haunted house but not remembering what, exactly, made you scared, because you were too focused on impressing your crush the whole time. The reveal? Underneath Gabriel’s peeling skin is just more skin; we never find his beating heart.
This is compounded by the fact that Smith’s focus is not singularly fixed on style, but also on making a capital-P Point about autofiction. He pokes fun at the genre by manipulating its tropes (writing about a writer named Gabriel Smith, closing on Gabriel writing the first lines of the very same novel). If you’re not in on the joke, these read as strange deviations, seemingly pulled from thin air—and if you are, they read as Smith drunk on his own cleverness.
N.B. (cont.):
The Romance Writers of America, which the Times describes as “a group that called itself ‘the voice’ of romance writers,” is collapsing.
In praise of memorizing poetry. [Right now, all I have memorized is several psalms and also Larry Levis’ “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” which is really all I need. I’ve been trying to memorize some of Deborah Digges’ poems, though. —Julia] [The two I’ll recite if you ask me for a poem are “Full fathom five” (maybe set to the melody I composed for it in high school, if you ask nicely) and “Who Goes With Fergus?” —Steve]
The office birthday party is in decline. [Good. —Steve]
Lewis H. Lapham died on the night of July 23-24. R.I.P.
- remembers him in the local Post:
He knew the life of a writer was one of frustration, failure and humiliation, relieved only by a sense of constant dedication and occasional delight. That’s why on reading an early published work of one of my colleagues and detecting in it the beginnings of a real writer, all he said was: “I’m sorry.” Then he published it.
- remembers him in the local Post:
Local:
The National Gallery of Art is showing On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002) today at 2 p.m.
Poem:
“The Body” by Patrick Phillips
The house is dark
but the body glows.
It’s not the way it seems:how what he was
is him again
each time the red clock blinks.Soon the undertaker’s sons
will come and lift this
strangest of all strange things:a palimpsest
of what we loved,
a nest in the brittle leaves.It’s late, I know,
and the whole world waits
there, where you stopped to read,and found us here,
and stared respectfully
out the windows at the trees.
[This is from Phillips’ Elegy For a Broken Machine (2015), his third and most recent collection.
This week, a friend recommended this book to me when we found it at a bookstore, and I’m glad he did; it’s an incredible collection that enters into the grief of losing a father and, at the same time, pays witness to moments of life with depth, gratitude, force, and impressive poetic skill. There’s such an acuity in Phillips’ short lines, and I love the way he subtly uses near-rhyme throughout the collection—look here at how seems, leaves, read, and trees all link, and so do blinks and things. It adds a lovely music to the poems.
I love this poem in particular for how it reckons with grief’s resistance and the experience of distance-as-mercy. It’s not the way it seems, the speaker says, how what he was / is him again / each time the red clock blinks. In this moment, in that gap between the speaker’s father’s passing and the removal of his body, the speaker can’t help but see, or search for, the echo of life in the father’s body, to look for what was there for so long, And yet he recognizes it’s only a hope, or an illusion—it’s not the way it seems—that really, the father’s body is as empty as a nest in the brittle leaves.
And yet in the midst of the speaker’s struggle, we get this incredible turn and tonal shift in the last two stanzas. Suddenly, the speaker moves into a direct address to the reader, and it’s a moment of gentleness, and generosity, when the speaker says It’s late, I know. I love what echoes unspoken there: you should be resting. The next clause, the whole world waits / there, with its sudden zoom out of scale, has its own gentle echo, too: there’s so much you could be doing instead of holding this book. But all that gentleness is framed as a response to the gentleness born in the final image, in which the reader turns away from the grieving family and stares out the window at the trees in order to give them some privacy. There’s another poem in the collection, “Once,” which details how after the father / of my son’s friend / watched his father die, the speaker, who can identify himself as only a guy he knew, / or kind of knew, can’t help but covertly watch the grieving man:
at the there-
but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I of him . . . .
the truth about love, about all of us,
so plain in him
there was nothing leftbut to pretend
I was not watching
out of the corner of my eye . . . .
Those moments, where the greatest mercy we can afford the other is to turn away from their pain, to pretend we don’t see it, are so striking, even on the level of image alone: we put distance between ourselves and the grieving party because we actually aren’t distant from their experience at all; we know how it feels to want a moment of privacy, or at least the illusion of it. As much as that grief is a singular experience, we actually aren’t other from them at all. We know it’s more than we can fix. We turn away our faces for a moment. It’s the best we can do. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Flatiron Books | July 30
The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982
by Chris Nashawaty
From the publisher: In the summer of 1982, eight science fiction films were released within six weeks of one another. E.T., Tron, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior changed the careers of some of Hollywood's now biggest names—altering the art of movie-making to this day.
In The Future Was Now, Chris Nashawaty recounts the riotous genesis of these films, featuring an all-star cast of Hollywood luminaries and gadflies alike: Steven Spielberg, at the height of his powers, conceives E.T. as an unlikely family tale, and quietly takes over the troubled production of Poltergeist, a horror film he had been nurturing for years. Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Alien, tries his hand at an odd Philip K. Dick story that becomes Blade Runner—a box office failure turned cult classic. Similar stories arise for films like Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and The Thing. Taken as a whole, these films show a precarious turning-point in Hollywood history, when baffled film executives finally began to understand the potential of high-concept films with a rabid fanbase, merchandising potential, and endless possible sequels.
What we’re reading:
Steve read The Leopard (by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1960). [I was watching Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), which is deeply indebted to Visconti’s adaptation of this novel (1963), on Wednesday and decided that, since these are two of my favorite movies, I should finally get around to reading the novels they were adapted from. The book is funnier, if for no other reason than its ability to bring you the dry irony inside the Prince’s head at all times, but I have to say I like the movie more—excellent as the scenes at the ball are in the novel, very little can compare to the last hour of the film. I missed watching Burt Lancaster, conscious of his own obsolescence, move through the large palace and the liveliness of the ball like a ghost. And Visconti was correct to cut the epilogue chapters. After you’ve seen the ball, what else needs to be said? —Steve]
Julia started Linda Gregg’s All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (2008) [Two of my favorite poems I’ve read (and columned) in the past year were Gregg poems, so I figured it was time to read more of her work. —Julia], reread some of Deborah Digges’ Late in the Millenium (1989), and started Eliane Dundy’s Dud Avocado (1958). She also read some of Richard Fariña’s poems and short stories published in his posthumous Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone (1969) [The poems aren’t anything noteworthy, but some of the short stories/essays are interesting. —Julia] and, of course, more of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Critical notes:
Joel Sandelson on “realism” in music:
Eighteenth-century pieces dramatize this potential for longer-range harmonic motion. A movement of a Vivaldi concerto or Haydn sonata stages a harmonic journey away from a tonic key to a closely related one, through more distant regions, before a satisfying homecoming. Each of these modulations requires an imaginary sort of “effort,” typically by the suggestion of a delicately weighted sequence of fifths above each new key. We have seen how large-scale repetition can suggest something like temporal depth. Could the tension we hear in a tonal piece between these two related “angles”—the key we are in at a given moment and the overall tonic—produce something like a spatial equivalent?
Another way of looking at this is to say that harmonic structure becomes fundamentally relational, not absolute. Critics have detected just the same quality in the realist prose that flowered in the next century. Commenting on Flaubert’s description of a living room, Roland Barthes suggests that the piano might indicate the bourgeois standing of its owner and the boxes and crates a sign of messiness or decline of the household—but the barometer is just there, “neither incongruous nor significant.” Realist narrative relies on an accretion of insignificant details like this. These details are not symbolic or allegorical, alive with meaningful resonances; their only purpose is to evoke the texture of reality.
[A lot of this is made possible by thinking in terms of chords instead of counterpoint; here’s a fun little video about the Neapolitan chord that shows how that shift in perspective expanded the chord’s uses. —Steve]