WRB—July 6, 2024
The Title I have chosen for this Treatise, is a Reproach universally thrown on this City by Foreigners, and all our Neighbours in New York, by whom Nervous Distempers, Spleen, Vapours, and Lowness of Spirits, are, in Derision, call’d the WASHINGTON MALADY. And I wish there were not so good grounds for this Reflection. The Moisture of our Air, the Variableness of our Weather, (from our Situation amidst the Swamp) the Rankness and Fertility of our Soil, the Richness and Heaviness of our Food, the Wealth and Abundance of the Inhabitants (from their universal Trade), the Inactivity and sedentary Occupations of the better Sort (among whom this Evil mostly rages) and the Humour of living in great, populous, and consequently unhealthy Towns, have brought forth a Class and Set of Distempers, with atrocious and frightful Symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors, and never rising to such fatal Heights, nor afflicting such Numbers in any other known City. These nervous Disorders being computed to make almost one third of the Complaints of the Managing Editors.
[For the record: half of the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books live in New York City. Divide the modern world between them, is no third, whatever you like. —Steve] [“A poetic fiction, unsteadily maintained, is that the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books lives in the District of Columbia. In many cases, of course, he does.” —Chris]
N.B.:
Speaking of New York City: the regular salon discussions organized by the WRB and Liberties Journal will have a session in Manhattan this month, on the evening of July 13. The topic for discussion will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” This conversation will be graciously hosted by
. Space is limited; if you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.Back on the home front: the next monthly D.C. Salon, on the same topic, will take place the following weekend, on the evening of July 20. Again, if you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
Two in Literary Matters:
Brian Brodeur interviews A. E. Stallings:
Rhyme is a rhetorical device also, because it is persuasive, because rhyme is reason. Many a conclusion owes its chime to a rhyme. Rhyme can also combine surprise with the inevitable. Rhyme is often essential both to a poem “clicking shut” like a box, and to one that takes off the top of your head.
To be honest, I think you really start to feel rhyme as a serious limitation or constraint only if you are rhyming more than two things. Strict tercets raise the level of difficulty by an order of magnitude. You might have to really reach and only get a slant rhyme, or simply rethink your original choice and start from scratch.
Constraints are freeing in themselves, though, as formal poets and avant garde poets tend to agree. They free you from feeling that you are entirely in control. They give up some control to language itself, or the subconscious, or, if you like, the Muse.
[Stallings’ “And I have a theory that where there is a technical glitch—meter or rhyme—that is simply the visible or audible sign of some deeper conceptual issue” is a nice companion to some advice of Pound’s on editing in a letter to Iris Barry:
The thing I notice in your emendations is that you stick very tight to the form or arrangement of words you have already used. Better get the trick of throwing the whole back into the melting-pot and recasting all in one piece. It is better than patching.
A new line or a new word may demand the rewriting of half a poem to make it all of a piece.
—Steve]
Michael Rutherglen on Emily Dickinson’s use of the subjunctive:
There is certainly something essential and ahistorical about “The General Rose,” but it has been purchased at the expense of actuality. And where there is no actual flower, there is nothing to decay, save imaginarily. English allows this thought to be formulated in the indicative (“The General Rose decays”), but the subjunctive here insists on the ideality of the ideal blossom. The poem begins to contrast it with the durable essential oil that might be wrung from an instance of it, but the oil too remains partially in suspension. If we also read “Make” as subjunctive, then we are left with an attar whose scent is equally imaginary, and the contrast apparently collapses. There is, however, both a simple, local reason for reading it as a subjunctive and a more global justification, which together preserve the difference. Locally, the “when” generates contingency enough for the subjunctive, present in both “make” and “lie.” Though her death is inevitable, the lady has not yet died. She has not yet entered the past perfect realm of rosemary, a flower with strong memorial associations. Thus the endurance of the attar’s effect remains a supposition in the strict sense. It remains to be seen whether the scent will outlast the decease, since neither has happened yet.
In Poetry,
on Wolfgang Hilbig:Hilbig’s narrators search for truths concealed in their surroundings, and, to their horror, often find them, in a sort of proletarian gothicism that continually pushes against but never quite violates the principles of a naturalistic universe. Factories shelter a menagerie of creatures, constructs, and specters. Mirrors serve a dual purpose, ensnaring the narrators in phantasmagoria but also reflecting harsh light on their diminished circumstances. In “The Etiquette of Windows” an expatriate writer is disturbed by the images, perhaps more than the reflections, he sees in his dirty apartment windows: “The daemons sit within the windowpanes . . . and darkness, where only a desk lamp burns. The doubled panes—blue sometimes from their substance, blue sometimes from their semblance, which should be beautiful—both show their jaundiced physiognomies, which turn and face me every time I look over.” These fantastical passages are not escapist flight from maturity, but Hilbig’s attempt to work out his own method for facing life as he experienced it, both grim and strange, where other techniques of literature had failed or were simply unavailable.
Reviews:
In our sister publication Down Under, Sophie Gee reviews the first novel by Kate Briggs (The Long Form, 2023):
But the most revealing sentence in Dr. Johnson’s essay is his concern that the events of novels will “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will.” This is a big claim—that fiction is powerful enough to suspend the will and take possession of the mind, even a mind as great as Dr. Johnson’s. Briggs, likewise, is interested in this question of what happens to our minds and attention when we encounter fiction. She’s fascinated by the idea that the novel, just like the foundling baby in Tom Jones, can seize our attention with “no advance warning.” This capacity novels have to grab our interest can be disconcerting. Like Fielding’s middle-aged Mr. Allworthy, who is unexpectedly moved when he finds a baby in his bed, readers’ feelings can be hijacked by novels. Fiction can “interfere with (divide, multiply and disconnect), shift or expand the purview of [our] concerns,” as Briggs puts it. Pace Johnson, she believes that while novels can take minds by surprise, leaving us “feeling unexpectedly addressed . . . and wanting to go on,” there’s no violence. The beauty of reading novels is that even as they grab our attention we can “put a novel down (face-down) on the carpet” and “make it wait.”
In The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz reviews a new biography of Norman Maclean (Norman MacLean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, by Rebecca McCarthy, May):
The “tough guy” part came naturally to Maclean. Like his father before him, he was a formidable and unsparing critic, and anyone who fell short of his high standards—a student who turned in subpar work, a colleague whose career foundered, a friend whose marriage fell apart—could expect to face his undisguised disgust. “Sometimes the split was irreparable and he cast them out of the tribe forever,” McCarthy writes. “The Calvinist in him hated failure.” As a result, many people who knew Maclean feared him. Yet he was also widely beloved—especially by his female students, whose intellects he took seriously—and those who got his praise knew they had earned it.
But, if Maclean poured energy into teaching, he withheld it from scholarship: in his entire career, he published just two academic articles. “He ended the ‘publish or perish’ debate for himself with a rhetorical question,” his son wrote in a memoir. “‘Does the world need another article on lyric poetry?’” Deciding that it did not—and recognizing some very different need in himself—Maclean left campus every summer for a cabin on Seeley Lake, an hour northeast of Missoula. It was his Innisfree: “The only place in the world,” he once wrote to his wife, “where my troubled soul feels at peace.”
In Public Books, Henry Clements reviews a book about the uses and meaning of Arabic in the colonial and post-colonial Muslim world (Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures, by Annette Damayanti Lienau, January):
Lienau’s exposition forcefully illustrates that the Orientalist position of Islam’s antagonism toward diversity and Quranic Arabic’s essential untranslatability are rooted not in historical fact but racist fantasy. Yet what appears at risk of escaping critique in Lienau’s book is the normative judgment forwarded by the colonial critique of Arabic itself. Lienau, that is, despite her explicitly anticolonial agenda, cannot untether her analysis from the Western idea that the worth of a religion, language, or culture can only be evaluated by the extent to which it is open to foreign influence, by the degree to which it can release its claim to unique access to “ontological truth,” and by its capacity to see itself as one among many, a singular historical formation in a world populated by myriad forms of irreducible human difference. Where does this leave those for whom the worth of Islam and its Arabic message has less to do with some humanist vision than with the divine relation it inculcates? Where does this leave those Muslims who do in fact consider the Quran to be, in some respect, singularly hallowed and untranslatable?
In the Journal, John J. Miller reviews a book about the legacy of Charles Fort, who wrote about various bizarre happenings (Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers, by Joshua Blu Buhs, July 3):
As Joshua Blu Buhs puts it in Think to New Worlds, his account of Fort’s influence on popular culture, “Forteanism expanded the imaginative possibilities.” It went on to feed the legends of the Abominable Snowman, the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness monster and more.
“Who in the name of frenzy is Charles Fort?” asked Booth Tarkington in 1920. The novelist supplied an affectionate answer: Fort, he wrote, was “a magnificent nut.” Admirers viewed Fort as a diligent investigator whose strange stories about fantastic events, compiled in The Book of the Damned and later volumes, fostered a useful skepticism in the face of scientific orthodoxy. Critics saw him as a kook. H.G. Wells condemned Fort as “one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers.” Mr. Buhs takes Fort seriously but also recognizes that his detractors had a case: “Fort teetered on the edge of pure crankery.”
N.B. (cont.):
A careful dissection of the various kinds of Pulitzer Bait titles.
People are paying coaches to help them get their exes back. [I recommend anyone trying to do so subscribe to the Washington Review of Books and then apply themselves to diligent study of its contents. —Steve] [I mean. Olivia Rodrigo. She’s got some great songs on this theme. —Chris] [One of these days we’ll get into the pop song business and really conquer the world. —Steve]
On “map-splaining.” [This term describes navigational apps thinking their users are incompetent and not men trying to explain to women that clicking around on Google Maps is actually a rewarding pastime. —Steve] [I’ve been up and down the coast for various things a whole lot the past few weeks, and while traveling I’ve had quite a number of little navigation errors trip me up. Are maps getting worse? —Chris] [I just assume everything is. —Steve]
“In a famous 1959 lecture, Philip Johnson told his Yale audience, ‘We cannot not know history.’ Yet with a few exceptions, today’s classical architects have been highly selective in choosing exactly which history to know.” Witold Rybczynski in The American Scholar on building buildings.
The topic of January’s D.C. Salon was “Is forgiveness possible?” We read in Psychology Today:
Crucially, in very many cases, an apology is the only way to “cleanse and heal social rifts.” If we insult, mistreat, or lie to another person, excuses and justifications are not going to cut it.
Perhaps the offended reluctantly accedes to such an account. But while the whole episode may get pushed into the background, the social rift will not be cleansed through forgiveness or healed through reconciliation. Regret and sorrow, the heart of a genuine apology, cannot be forced. Without apologies, social harmony is undermined.
New issues:
Bookforum Summer 2024
The Brooklyn Rail July/Aug 2024
Literary Matters Issue 16.3 | Spring/Summer 2024 [As linked to above.]
Ryan Wilson, the editor-in-chief, has announced that this will be the last issue with new material and that he himself is moving on: “I sincerely hope that Literary Matters will be able to continue after my departure, but its future is, at present, uncertain. For now, all submissions are closed indefinitely.” [There’s really never cause for optimism in situations like this, but I would hate to speak of the living, however tenuously, as dead. It’s a great magazine. —Steve]
New Left Review 147 | May/June 2024
Local:
The National Gallery of Art is showing Contempt (1963) tomorrow, July 7, at 2 p.m. [If we ever made a list of “Essential WRB Texts” Contempt would be on it. Chris and I discussed it in January’s Film Supplement. —Steve]
Ann Shumard, the National Portrait Gallery’s Senior Curator of Photographs, will tour the exhibit of photographs from the Golden Age of Hollywood tomorrow, July 7, at 3 p.m.
Poem:
“First Fire of the Season” by Deborah Digges
Blessed is the word igniting now
under the green spitting wood alive with insects.
Blessed the the names, dissembled, falling,
Blessed their miraculous erasures.
How quickly a nest would burn this evening, the shell-embedded down, the underweavings.
How quickly become a fist of fire opening
mid-air, plummeting.
When I was a child a falling star meant someone’s dying—
the terrible luck of knowingseedling the dark, growing like prophesy,
as if some distant farmhouse light had gone out
for good in the imagination, some bird
jumped in its sleep, feeling
the dead pull of the imagination.
[This is from Digges’ Late in the Millenium (1989), her second of five collections, which I’m still returning to. I think it’s my favorite of her books—or it’s at least tied with her third collection, Rough Music (1995). —Julia]
Upcoming books:
July 9 | W. W. Norton
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation
by Emily Van Duyne
From the publisher: Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination—the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne—a superfan and scholar—radically reimagines the last years of Plath’s life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy. Drawing from decades of study on Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, the chief architect of Plath’s mythology; the life and tragic suicide of Assia Wevill, Hughes’ mistress; newly available archival materials; and a deep understanding of intimate partner violence, Van Duyne seeks to undo the silencing of Sylvia Plath and resuscitate her as the hardworking, brilliant writer she was.
[If I used Twitter for anything these days other than whining about the weather and making observations about my commute, this would be a great moment to say something like, “Huge news for the most annoying girl you know.” I don’t have the heart anymore—alas. —Chris] [My munificence extends even to the Plath girls, although for the sake of my sanity we should consider handing out copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay in schools to prevent the development of any more. —Steve]
Also out Tuesday:
Doubleday: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
What we’re reading:
Steve finished John Ganz’s new book. He then read the first volume of the three-volume biography of Ezra Pound he has sitting around (Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920, by A. David Moody, 2007), and, in conjunction, a lot of Pound’s poetry from that era. [The things I can get done with days off from work.
I might quibble with some aspects of Moody’s approach. As you would expect with a three-volume biography, it includes every possible fact; this works fine for Pound, who is always present, but it tends to provide unsatisfactory impressions of other people in his life, who fail to make any definitive impression as people beyond their piles of facts. The introductions to people are sometimes wonky as well. Frequently, brief biographical descriptions appear in footnotes. Eliot first gets mentioned off-handedly in a summary of a letter of Pound’s before we learn anything about how he entered Pound’s life; I checked the index, sure I must have missed an earlier reference, and no, that was in fact the first mention of him.
But too much of this sort of critique is ungenerous, and these flaws are more than adequately compensated for by Moody’s sensitivity as a reader of Pound’s work, especially in his attention to the ways it reflects Pound’s reading and thinking at the time of writing. Two moments stand out here. The first, near the end of the volume, deals with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Moody sets it up much earlier by showing that the very young Pound—and even the Pound of “Make it new!”—had not yet excised from himself his inclination to dead pre-Raphaelitism. (This was, no doubt, an occupational hazard of being interested in the troubadours and Dante at the time.) And from this Moody concludes that in Mauberley Pound is finally and explicitly killing off this early version of himself, what he might have been if he had not developed, as he prepares to set out on a project in which it would have no place. Yes, Pound’s broader London milieu and the rest of the world also come in for a beating, and he is kissing them off, but the main subject of the poem is still Mauberley, and “I am no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock” is an exemplary specimen of the non-denial denial.
Even more interesting, and new to me, is Moody reading Cathay as a response to the First World War:
He is intent, moreover, on implicating the condition of the empire in the condition of this individual poet [Rihaku (Li Po)]. There may be then a further relation between Rihaku’s China and the British Empire in 1914. In both there were barbarians to be fought off, by soldiers having a hard time at the front; in both there was a lack of enlightened direction from the ruling class at home; and in both the arts, including the art of government, were in their usual decadent state. Pound’s situation as a poet was after all quite like Rihaku’s, but with the essential difference that while he wanted to put things in order, Rihaku, a Taoist, had been content to drift with the flow.
When read this way Cathay becomes subtler than the Homage to Sextus Propertius and its far more explicit link of the British Empire to Augustan Rome, and through this subtlety it avoids the need for such silliness as “Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities / And expound the distentions of Empire.” (Moody wants to give the Homage more notice than it generally receives. It is probably true that the Homage has been neglected compared to Mauberley or other poems Pound wrote in the second half of the 1910s. It is certainly true that it has some of Pound’s best work, finer than anything in Mauberley. The problem for any attempt to make it Mauberley’s equal is that it also has some of Pound’s worst work. Despite Pound’s attitude towards Christianity, he tends to be on firmer ground with love poetry in the Christian tradition, which has somewhere in the background that it might also describe the soul’s search for the divine light and union with God, than with his pagan and more earthy sources. He could never quite write the stuff himself.) It also becomes more incisive than Mauberley’s critique, which after describing the dead satisfies itself with “came home, home to a lie” and expansions thereof, along with the striking if general “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.” Cathay pulls together the situation at the front, the situation in the arts, and the situation in government more clearly, and as Moody points out the organization of the poems also underlines the connection. The greater distance from the specifics of the British Empire and First World War give it a timelessness that adds to its power, as does Cathay’s greater devotion to depicting “the way things should be.” The Homage and Mauberley wallow in the muck, but the glimpses of paradise Cathay provides are all the more damning of the world as it exists. The sad parts of “Exile’s Letter” are all the more sad because of the vision in that poem of another way of life. I was listening to Le tombeau de Couperin on Thursday and it struck me, in connection with this, how much more successful it is as a response to the First World War than La valse, also by Ravel. Destroying the waltz, like destroying Mauberley, is easier than calling up the dead (which is also where The Cantos literally start) and finding in and through them a melancholy joy. —Steve]
Julia read more of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), and also read a bit from Helen Vendler’s The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (1988).
Chris read the Book of Sirach. He is going on a vacation, for most of which he is probably going to be working anyway.
Critical notes:
Michael Kimmage reviews a book on the New York Intellectuals (Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, by Ronnie Grinberg, March):
The greatest legacy of the New York intellectuals did not reside any particular style, but in their contributions to the tradition of the American essay. They did not tend to excel at writing books. (Irving Howe’s study of Jewish-American history, World of Our Fathers (1976), was an exception.) They did not excel at writing fiction or poetry. They excelled at writing essays, in which they dramatized ideas or investigated the workings of art and culture. They brought novel vernacular and audibly Jewish tonalities into the American essay, whether it was Lionel Trilling writing about Wordsworth and the rabbis or Susan Sontag in her slyly wisecracking notes on camp. Some of this prose was chest-thumpingly assertive; much of it was not. The larger argument of Write Like a Man and some of the book’s individual chapters can give the false impression that the “combative” paradigm was all there was.
[We linked to previous reviews in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024 and WRB—Apr. 13, 2024.]
Adam Roberts on Charles Taylor’s new book (Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, May):
Sometimes Taylor is offhand in his readings. Of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et Camées he breezily says “Gautier explores new dimensions of feeling about the world, love, and so on.” That’s all we get. And so on. Taylor starts his analysis of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus with the no-shit-Sherlock observation: “they [the poems] call on Orpheus, the singer-god. Hence Sonnets to Orpheus.” Then he gives over three pages to lengthy quotation from the texts, and finally sums-up by saying “the sonnets extend [Rilke’s poetic vision] in a host of new directions and offer their own original views on our present condition,” without specifying what the direction is, or what views on our present condition are articulated. Instead he says: “—but I can’t take things further now.” Which makes one wonder why the poems are in the book at all. A long account of Mallarmé ends in a confession of even franker failure: Mallarmé “seems very difficult,” Taylor says, adding musingly “why do we (including me) strive so hard to unravel the mystery [of] Mallarmé’s mature poetry?”
[We linked to earlier reviews in WRB—May 29, 2024 and WRB—June 19, 2024 and an excerpt in WRB—June 29, 2024.]
- on Jordan Castro’s novel (The Novelist, 2022):
The best thing about the literary trend of so-called “autofiction,” which The Novelist exemplifies, is that, in crafting stories about semi-fictional versions of themselves, autofiction authors are participating in a much older literary genre: the confession. The confession is a story that interprets itself along the way, part exposé and part self-evaluation. One can write a confession for the same reason that one goes to confession. To let go of a burden, to become free.
- on “the modern discourse novel”:
So much of Conversations with Friends (2017) was about deconstructing modern life that the characters had a private joke: “What is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?” In Rooney, though, deconstruction isn’t enough. Her characters mature past their obsession with discourse. While Rooney’s characters talk discourse, they don’t read like they are trapped in the literary modes of the internet. In Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), Rooney’s description of Felix working in an Amazon warehouse owes a lot to “Amazon discourse”, but she doesn’t spend pages detailing all the elements of what makes Amazon objectionable, whereas Oyler gives so much space to the deconstructing the images and signs and language of the Trump rally (analyzing the discourse of the rally, of modern leftism, of feminism) that Fake Accounts (2021) becomes a personal-political essay. Ditto Lockwood, whose documenting of the pseudo-ironic pose of her online life lacks enough distance and becomes a replication of the internet, rather than a response to it.