WRB—July 8, 2026
“remains of antiquity”
is the life of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books life? at best it is but the life of a mill-horse, who sees no end to his circle but in death. to such a life that of a cabbage is paradise.
Links:
In the Financial Times, Yiyun Li on Moby-Dick’s America:
In re-reading Moby-Dick, a thought often occurred to me: there are more Captain Ahabs in the world than there is that singular Moby Dick. Some of the Ahabs must have gone through their seafaring careers without encountering and without being destroyed by the white whale, and thus without bringing destruction to the crews around them. But that thought, I now believe, was too optimistic. During my latest re-reading, along with a group of brilliant young people, I’ve realized that one true Americanness of the novel is this. Everyone can be a Captain Ahab, and every Ahab has a Moby Dick to chase and to conquer. Be it power or wealth or status or pleasure or leisure, be it religious or political or aesthetic or athletic prowess, what drives America to go upward and downward is this tireless and restless pursuit of something out there in the sea, beyond imagination.
Someone may argue that Moby Dick and Ahab are universal archetypes—more than purely American—and that is a good point. However, anyone without a white whale to chase in America is bound to be labeled as passive.
[Wonderful work here by the Brits at the FT—I would have thought that America as a nation of Captain Ahabs would be an idea you could only get out of the highest Tory alive, and yet. (If Milton had been an American, imagine the takes we’d get about Satan.) Dr. Johnson would have said it in Taxation No Tyranny if not for the chronological issue:
The heroes of Boston [the great actor of patriotism] tells us, if the stamp act had not been repealed, would have left their town, their port, and their trade, have resigned the splendour of opulence, and quitted the delights of neighbourhood, to disperse themselves over the country, where they would till the ground, and fish in the rivers, and range the mountains, AND BE FREE.
These surely are brave words. If the mere sound of freedom can operate thus powerfully, let no man hereafter doubt the story of the Pied Piper.
Or on a whale ship in the Pacific, as the case may be. Perhaps the idea is that a ship crewed by 330 million monomanics could never fall into following one man’s mania because the other 329,999,999 would resist him too strongly? The mind reels. In any case, I have read Moby-Dick, and I know how it ends, and so if this is a nation of Ahabs I’d really like to get off the boat. —Steve]
In Bloomberg [Great day for the financial press here. —Steve], Daniel Mendelsohn on “Iliad people” and “Odyssey people”:
To be sure, the Iliad, because of its grim confrontation with death, has always appealed to those who like to think of themselves as serious people. For many members of the so-called Greatest Generation, schooled first by the Great Depression and then by World War II, the Iliad speaks with particular force. Fifteen years ago, my father, then aged 81, decided to sit in on an Odyssey seminar I was teaching for first-year undergrads; by the end of it, I still hadn’t managed to convince him of the Odyssey’s charms. “I grew up during the war,” he growled. “The Iliad is what makes sense to me.” My great friend and mentor, the editor Robert Gottlieb, who was two years younger than my dad, meticulously went through my translation of the Odyssey before I submitted it to my publisher. When he finished, he shook his head dismissively. “Why does he go on like that? I just don’t understand why he doesn’t just get home already!”
[I have for a while had a theory that “Odyssey people” are also “Genesis people” and “Iliad people” are “the rest of the Pentateuch people.” And a fun way to waste a bunch of time—I know because I wasted a bunch of time while I was trying to finish this up—is by assigning other works to the categories of “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” (The Managing Editor, despite his affection for all those modernists rewriting the Odyssey, is an Iliad person.) —Steve]
Two in Portico:
Nic Rowan on visiting Rome:
Such occurrences are not limited to fiction. Nancy Mitford, on her honeymoon in 1933, was at first charmed by Rome. “Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?” she wrote in a letter home. “I am adoring mine.” Then, a week later, after she had seen a little more of the city, she sent another note, this time to a friend, scribbled on the back of a photograph featuring the monstrously tasteless Victor Emmanuel II monument. “This of course is much the prettiest thing in Rome. I go and look at it every day,” she wrote mockingly. “I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats’ cheese.” Decades later, she would get her revenge in a derisive essay, where she characterized Rome as “a capital city only in name; in fact and at heart it is a village, with its single post office, single railway station and life centred round the vicarage.”
But the undisputed king of having a rotten time in Rome is Tobias Smollett. The Scottish novelist came to the city in 1765 with two aims: “to view the remains of antiquity by which this metropolis is distinguished; and to contemplate the originals of many pictures and statues, which I had admired in prints and descriptions.” How sorely he was disappointed! He saw the ruins, certainly, and wrote about them with windbaggy reverence. But the rest of the place drove him to a purple rage.
[I like that the Non-Catholic Cemetery sells Dover thrift editions of Keats and Shelley. Let me edit that: I like that the Non-Catholic Cemetery sells Dover thrift editions of Keats. I really do admire the self-aggrandizing of getting “here lies one whose name was writ in water” writ in stone. As long as your name is writ in something slightly more lasting than water it works out well for you. —Steve]
Matthew Buckley Smith on staging Macbeth:
The second major challenge for any production of Macbeth is the play’s tone. The script is among Shakespeare’s shortest, and the scope and complexity of the story give the audience little chance to digest all of the plot developments. The abruptness with which characters shift from unshakeable loyalty to blackhearted villainy or from cynical realism to hallucinatory ecstasy can risk producing a comic effect in the midst of what might otherwise be a scene of terrible gravity. And when the characters display ambivalence about their choices, the wobbliness of their commitments can seem less tortured than incompetent. When Macbeth returns from Duncan’s murder to confess the crime to his wife, Lady Macbeth is appalled to find her absent-minded husband still in possession of the bloody daggers. The many references to drinking that appear between Duncan’s arrival at Inverness and the discovery of his body invite suspicion that the Macbeths might even have been drunk when they committed the murder. Much has been made of the Porter’s comic soliloquy, coming as it does in the midst of one of the play’s darkest moments, but that darkness has already been confused by a series of mishaps and half-measures on the part of the murderers. The script itself does not specify the proper tone with which to present such moments to the audience.
[While reading this the idea came to me for a production of Macbeth that maintains the tone throughout of The Death of Stalin (2017), which understands that the maneuvering of those attempting to stay on top and stay alive in such a system is, on account of the absurdities of the system itself, hilarious as long as you avoid thinking about the atrocities. For too long Richard III has received all the totalitarian adaptations; Macbeth is a much better fit. When Solzhenitsyn said that “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. . . . The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,” he must have forgotten this from Ross:
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.
This is not a description of Macbeth having a couple recalcitrant aristocrats who refused to go along with the new regime killed. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Mark Ford on Rosemary Tonks:
The romance here is even more wobbly and unlikely than in its successors but, no doubt remembering how Colette achieved success with her Claudine novels, Tonks tracks the semi-flirtatious disputes of her characters as if a declaration of “Reader, I married him” might be the novel’s ultimate goal. Page after page is taken up by their spirited verbal sparring. While Houda propounds decadent dogma about seeking vision through pain, the Emir takes the role of cynical littérateur, deftly puncturing her pretensions. Wildean epigrams and bons mots spice their every encounter: “History is a bed on which you change the sheets when you think they look dirty”; “A poet must be one of civilization’s failures”; “I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.” The plot melts away into a series of almost theatrical encounters between Houda and the Emir, all lit up with verbal pyrotechnics of that kind.
Two in Literary Review; first, Tom Cook on typesetting:
Editors used to work closely with in-house typesetters, or even directly with out-of-house printers. All parties were fluent in the language of the craft: leading, swash, ems, points, picas, ligatures. Those printers, in turn, were proud of their own standards: questions of copy-editing not caught by editors would routinely be flagged at the galley (rough-proof) stage. Moreover, owing to the mechanical nature of setting the type—by hand at one time, via the keyboard of a Monotype machine in the twentieth century—printers engaged closely with the text itself. Today, text hurtles by, imported from a Word document then rapidly checked by someone on abysmal freelance pay, whose sole commission is to eradicate typos. Unless a proof is printed out and checked page by page—unless it is given that physical existence and a considerable amount of time and care—it will swim in the inexact, rapid world of the screen. Its visual inelegances (and howlers) will become clear only when it’s too late: when the physical book has come back from the automated printers and is stacked in warehouses all over the country.
Reviews:
Second, Graham Elliott reviews a book about punctuation (On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, by Florence Hazrat, August 11):
Drama, communal storytelling and printing presses had their say in the contrivance of the dash. Both Jonson and Shakespeare (or rather, Shakespeare’s printers—we do not have his original manuscripts) could play fast and loose with the dash. Jonson’s Poetaster (1602) sees multiple hyphens used to form dashes in the rebarbative scene involving Crispinus and Tibullus. Compositors and printers, spotting this tendency—and presumably eager to save time—fashioned a longer line. In the 1608 and 1619 editions of King Lear (1605), long dashes appear when familial and political disintegration is the subject matter.
On the Mark has many origin stories like these. The ampersand, for example, is a ligature of lower-case letters “E” and “T”; its early forms date back at least as far as Pompeii. Sometimes still seen in the format &c (short for et cetera), it is an abbreviation within an abbreviation. Its name, the author writes, is “shrouded in mystery” but one possible origin is a portmanteau of “and per se and.”
[I use &c in texting. I have no idea where I picked it up. Having never bothered practicing how to write ampersands, in my handwriting I use +c. —Steve]
N.B.:
4Columns has shut down:
While the news may come as a surprise to some, the truth is that 4Columns was never meant to last. A project of a private foundation, the magazine was established with a budget to cover ten years. While our editorial team has explored myriad ways to see if we could extend the magazine’s lifespan—through grants, fundraising endeavors, subscriptions, etc.—we found no way to do so without compromising our foundational principles: to provide free issues, uncluttered by ads, to our readers; to compensate our writers fairly; and to run the magazine with absolutely no outside editorial interference or pressure.
“People Keep Sneaking Into an Empty IBM Campus. This Town Has Had Enough.”
New issues:
Literary Review July 2026 [As linked to above.]
New Left Review 159•May/June 2026
Portico Issue 2 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
Odes 4.7 (“Diffugere nives”) by Horace, translated from the Latin by A. E. Housman
The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o’er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.
[Apropos of last week’s discussion of the classics’ influence on Philip Larkin. Larkin once described himself in a letter to Barbara Pym as “A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship or the soft job or the curious private life,” so I suspect much of the classical influence on Larkin was filtered through Housman—if not at the level of specific allusion then as a state of mind. And yet it’s hard to say what exactly that influence was. Much of this poem has a vaguely Larkininan flavor, but pinning down why eludes me. Hardly a phrase in it sounds like Larkin. The beginning is reminiscent of “The Trees,” and the ending of “Aubade,” but in Larkin those are two very different poems, and no journey would connect them (fun as it is to imagine a poem opening with “The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said” and eventually getting to “Death is no different whined at than withstood”). “Aubade” lets you know what sort of poem it is immediately—“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. / Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare”—and in that way has more in common with Housman’s original poetry than his take on Horace. What distinguishes Larkin from most poets influenced by the classics is his complete lack of interest in intellectualizing it. Gilbert Highet once described the other kind of poet like this:
A poet like Eliot or Propertius, who is deeply read, and who lives as much in the world of the imagination as in reality, cannot record his own emotions without at the same time recalling the mythical parallels which intensify his experience.
To which Larkin: “Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap.” —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Bloomsbury Academic | July 9
A Grecian Lad: A. E. Housman and the Classics
by Jennifer Ingleheart
From the publisher: The first book to bring together A. E. Housman’s poetry and classical scholarship, revealing the deep connections between the two. It offers the first full-length study of his Latin elegy for Moses Jackson, including a new translation and commentary on this homoerotic poem’s links to his wider verse. The book also provides an original version and close reading of Praefanda, Housman’s little-read yet notorious scholarly article on sexual themes, written in Latin. Further, it examines how Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love grapples with the tensions in Housman’s dual careers as poet and professor.
Housman has long been seen as a man divided-the emotional poet of A Shropshire Lad on one hand, and the austere Latinist on the other. While he publicly downplayed the classical influences on his poetry, this book interrogates the subtle but intricate classicism woven throughout his work. By reading his verse alongside his scholarship, it uncovers a more integrated and complex figure, shedding new light on both his poetry and academic writings.
Out Tuesday:
Bloomsbury Continuum: Homer Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet
Coffee House Press: Ada: A Novel by Mark Haber
New Directions: Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated from French by Kate Briggs
Penguin Classics: The Poems of Catullus: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text, translated from the Latin by Stephanie McCarter
What we’re reading:
Steve read The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (1973). He also celebrated the Fourth by reading the correspondence of John (and Abigail) Adams with Thomas Jefferson. [Funniest letter I forgot about features Adams telling this story:
In 1775 Franklin made a morning Visit, at Mrs Yards to Sam. Adams and John. He was unusually loquacious. “Man, a rational Creature”! Said Franklin. “Come; Let Us Suppose a rational Man. Strip him of all his Appetites, especially of his hunger and thirst. He is in his Chamber, engaged in making Experiments, or in pursuing Some Problem. He is highly entertained. At this moment a Servant knocks, “Sir dinner is on table.”. “Dinner”! Pox! Pough! But what have you for dinner?” Ham and Chickens. “Ham”! “And must I break the chain of my thoughts, to go down and knaw a morsel of a damn’d Hogs Arse”? “Put aside Your Ham.” “I will dine tomorrow.”
Right before this Adams does a little sex talk:
Torrey a Poet, an Enthusiast, a Superstitious Bigot, once very gravely asked my Brother Cranch, “whether it would not be better for Mankind, if Children were always begotten from religious motives only.”? Would not religion, in this Sad case, have as little Efficacy in encouraging procreation, As it has now in discouraging it?—I Should apprehend a decrease of population even in our Country where it increases So rapidly.
Between that and some references to lines of Theognis about breeding, Adams puts at the end of the letter
As I have no Amanuenses but females, and there is So much about generation in this letter that I dare not ask any one of them to copy it, and I cannot copy it my Self I must beg of you to return it to me.
Second-funniest part I forgot about was Jefferson complaining about receiving too many letters:
I happened to turn to my letter-list some time ago, and a curiosity was excited to count those recieved in a single year. it was the year before the last. I found the number to be 1267. many of them requiring answers of elaborate research, and all to be answered with due attention and consideration. take an average of this number for a week or a day, and I will repeat the question suggested by other considerations in mine of the 1st. is this life? at best it is but the life of a mill-horse, who sees no end to his circle but in death. to such a life that of a cabbage is paradise.
(Very like Jefferson to count them in order to complain about it.) Earlier in the correspondence, Adams had offered some advice on this situation:
Necessity has compelled me to resort to two expedients to avoid or escape excessive importunity. One has been, by totally neglecting to answer Letter, after Letter. But this Method has cost me very dear in the loss of many Correspondences that had been and would have been instructive and profitable to me, as well as honourable and entertaining. The other has been by giving gruff, Short, unintelligible misterious, enigmatical, or pedantical answers. This resource is out of your power, because it is not in your nature to avail yourself of it.
As it happens, Adams (at least in the “elder statesmen renewing their correspondence with one eye on posterity” phase and not the “American diplomats in Europe dealing with various practical problems” phase) writes more letters to Jefferson than he receives, although Jefferson’s are more polished and tend to be longer. Adams—in a trait gratifying to me—is just having ideas and sending them off. In one case, he is so excited to ask Jefferson whether he knows anything about a history of the Jesuits “in four volumes” that he’s reading that he forgets to mention any other identifying details (Jefferson writes back “Your history of the Jesuits, by what name of the Author, or other description is it to be enquired for?”). That’s the feeling of most of this correspondence—even the subjects that were central controversies of their time as political adversaries, like the French Revolution and Adams’ thoughts about aristocracy, produce very little heat. (Jefferson concedes that Adams was right about the French Revolution in an exchange that feels like Adams reminiscing “remember how wrong you were about that?” and Jefferson also asks Adams to write more about aristocracy, which is sincere interest made funny by Adams’ writing about aristocracy supplying the material for every attack ad avant la lettre against him.) The content is interesting but not really notable in itself, since both Adams and Jefferson expressed themselves more fully elsewhere, and in any case Jefferson won the debate about what America is and means. The charm and the value is in the two looking back and living the life of the mind. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Patrick Kurp on “cromulent”: “The word sounds authentic, a little old-fashioned and stuffy, perhaps Johnsonian. That’s the key to lastingly successful coinage.”