The writer of a recent monograph declares that “many a modern publication would do well to emulate the Washington Review of Books, not only in its taste for the Beautiful in Art but also for the Intellectual in Conversation.”
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on the evening of June 15th. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Propaganda: do you know it when you see it?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
In The Paris Review,
on Persuasion and what it means that Anne Elliot is twenty-seven:The eight years Anne and Wentworth have spent apart are a real and irrevocable loss, one the novel makes sure we keenly feel. But had they stayed together, they would have had much to forgive one another for anyway. Like in the old screwball comedies where people divorce so they can remarry, what reveals their love to be sturdy and unbreakable is that once they broke it. Anne’s constancy is revealed by her betrayal, Wentworth’s devotion by his coldness. They both had to fall from their trees and grow so they could meet again—not as different people, but as precisely who they always were.
[Somewhere in Wentworth is that desire Stanwyck expresses after Fonda jilts her in The Lady Eve (1941): “I need him like the ax needs the turkey.” —Steve]
In UnHerd, Mary Gaitskill on Pale Fire and the experience of reading it:
But. When I first read the book I was an ignorant 24-year-old with a barely adequate undergraduate education. Because I had not majored in English (I was concerned about what kind of job I might get after graduating and an English degree did not look promising), I had not taken many literature courses. I had read very little poetry and almost no Shakespeare. I recognised the names of the poets mentioned in Pale Fire but I could not possibly register the more subtle meanings evoked by the adjacent language because I didn’t know their work in any depth or really at all. That didn’t matter. I loved Pale Fire. I could feel its intellectual power in the intense perceptual contrasts of its characters, in the descriptions of faces and objects and, for example, the swift evocation of an alternate world in John Shade’s image of himself reflected in the window glass, “above the grass” with his furniture and an apple on a plate. I could feel it in the patterning I saw and sensed, viscerally, as if I was not only seeing a griffin landing before me but feeling the vibration of its wings come up through the ground into the soles of my feet.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Richard Bratby on musical responses to World War I [Great title on this one. —Steve]:
Meanwhile, the responses of individual composers to world events were as unpredictable and varied as the artists themselves—startlingly so, if one adopts the post-1960s assumption that art automatically aligns itself with the progressive and the anti-patriotic. In France, Maurice Ravel was disappointed to be rejected for military service in 1914 (he was nearly 40, and only five foot three inches tall). Frustrated, he made musical plans instead, which included “a French suite—no, it isn’t what you think: ‘La Marseillaise’ will not be in it, but it will have a forlane and a gigue.”
Ravel finally talked his way into an auxiliary unit in March 1915, and in March 1916 he was posted to the front at Verdun. He drove a lorry (he christened it Adélaïde) under mortar fire; at one point hiding out in the forest for ten days after shrapnel disabled the engine. By the time his “French suite” was performed in Paris in April 1919, six months after the Armistice, it had become Le Tombeau de Couperin: simultaneously a musical book of remembrance dedicated to friends lost in the War, and an exquisite tribute to the French baroque without a gloomy note in it.
[I think there are some gloomy notes in the menuet. —Steve]
Poetry:
On the Library of America website, an interview with Jay Parini about his new book on Robert Frost (Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, March):
I think Frost was afraid of his dark side. He waited a long time for the acclaim that came in abundance in his later years. He was a wisecracking, avuncular figure on the platform, and he gave endless readings to large crowds. They didn’t want to be frightened by poetry. As a result, he never read aloud certain amazing poems, such as “The Subverted Flower.” He tended to read more cozy poems, such as “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken” or “Birches.”
But it’s hard to go very far into Frost without seeing the dark side, as in “Acquainted with the Night,” “Provide, Provide,” or “Design,” which contains the line: “What but design of darkness to appall?” His best work is chilling. There’s not much comfort in Frost, although nature does speak to him, and to us, through him. And there is some assurance there.
- Moul on Denise Levertov and Adrian Schoell, both connected to Essex:
Once things settled down for Schoell, his continued output of regular Latin verse offers a remarkable glimpse of domestic and parish life in the 1560s and 1570s, with poems on pupils and fellow teachers, royal visits, national events, and local scandals, but also on unexpected snow in April in 1570 and on being surprised by a dormouse in the henhouse. The Levertovs were a clergy family as well. Denise’s father, a Russian Jewish emigré who had converted to Christianity, was, like Schoell, an Anglican clergyman. Levertov’s late poetry (which I don’t have in Paris with me) became increasingly religious, but we sense the influence of a clergy family background throughout her career. The poem above refers to the Anglican service of Evensong, which ends with the nunc dimittis, the prayer of Simeon in the Temple on encountering the infant Christ. My favorite of her glimpses of this world, though, is the poem “A Cure of Souls” from the 1964 collection O Taste and See. (The “cure” (care) of souls is a traditional expression for the primary duty of a parish priest.)
In Poetry, Ilya Kaminsky on Tomaž Šalamun:
After Šalamun died, many essays remembering him were published, one after another, all of them focusing on the over-the-top tonalities of his work. Let’s try and not confuse the man with the speaker of his poems. The speaker in his lyrics enjoys extremities of tone, yes. But the man I remember was once asked at a party what was the most important thing human beings tend to ignore.
There was a brief pause in the conversation. Then Šalamun chuckled.
“Modesty,” he said.
[We featured a Kaminsky poem last Wednesday. Brian Henry, the translator and editor of Šalamun’s English Selected (May), was recently interviewed in Blackbird on Šalamun and poetic translation (by David Wojahn, featured in today’s poetry column). Some new Šalamun translations by Henry were also published in that issue. —Julia]
In The Point, Brandon Kreitler on Jorie Graham’s late style:
Yet by the cruel contingency of history, she’s a cleric who can’t in good conscience offer a redemptive or consoling program. And so there exists a cleavage between her ostensible psychic supposition (more dire means more true) and our response to it. Listen to the interviews—on stage, on podcasts or YouTube—and you’ll hear one interlocutor after another enlivened, thick with awe, almost agape. Even as she takes the pessimistic line and asks that we not shrink from imagining its terminus, she returns us to the mystery, to our inner scope. She undoes our habitual and defensive narrowing. This is her program’s curious double identity: she’s an evangelical bearing the charism of tongues, here to waken us to the good news—only she knows none. We seem to receive it all the same.
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Catherine Nicholson reviews two books about reading in the Renaissance (A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe, by Lina Bolzoni, translated by Sylvia Greenup, 2023; Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England, by J. K. Barret, 2016):
In A Marvelous Solitude, her new book on Renaissance humanists’ romance with reading, the Italian scholar Lina Bolzoni channels the allure, for Petrarch and those who came after him, of a life in books, its pleasures “more intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods.” But such intimacy came at a cost: “A sense of being unsuited to one’s times, a feeling, almost, of extraneousness and alienation.”
There is often a whiff of misanthropy about Petrarch’s passion for books. In the fourteenth century, before the invention of movable type, books were artisanal objects, and even the simplest were inscribed and bound by hand. But once acquired, Petrarch observes, they asked little of their possessors; with books, unlike houseguests, “there is no tedium, no expense, no complaints, no murmurs, no envy, no deceit. . . . They are satisfied with the smallest room in your house and a modest robe, they require no drink or food.”
[The Washington Review of Books is satisfied with the smallest amount of your email inbox storage. —Steve]
In e-flux, Brian Dillon reviews a collection of W. G. Sebald’s photography (Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials, edited by Clive Scott and Nick Warr, 2023):
Until recently, the German author’s photographic habits and motivations have mostly been gleaned from interviews—he died in 2001—and from the books themselves, in which images of characters, landscapes, architecture, and historical disaster may or may not match the “real” thing. So many ways of saying: They are not illustrations, you know. What, then? There is no simple answer in Shadows of Reality, a lavish volume that collects as far as possible (with restrictions from his estate) the photographs Sebald made, happened upon, or sought out for his novels—if that is what they are. “The writer’s curse,” Sebald once said, “is that he doesn’t work with tangible matter of any kind, and this is a little device that helps.” He liked to pretend that the often small or grainy images on the page were products of his amateur fiddling at the photocopier. But Shadows of Reality reveals more convoluted, collaborative practices, and a laconic visual style in his own photographs.
In the local Post,
reviews a collection of essays on reading by Elisa Gabbert (Any Person Is the Only Self, June 11):Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments. In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet’s perfected phrases and startling observations. “Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically,” she writes in an essay about fictional depictions of parties. She describes the photos in a book by Rachael Ray documenting home-cooked meals—one of the volumes on the recently returned shelf—as “poignantly mediocre.” Remarking on a listicle of “Books to Read by Living Women (Instead of These 10 by Dead Men),” Gabbert wonders, “Since when is it poor form to die?”
N.B. (cont.):
A profile of Garry Wills at 90. [The headline is that he recently decided he’s no longer Catholic; I will have to decide how this affects the place of his Why I Am A Catholic (2002) on the list of books to get to. —Steve]
Elle has announced a project to open branded residences. [The WRB will get in on this one of these days. —Steve]
“Are editors still tastemakers?” [Only Managing Editors. —Steve] [I get no credit around here. —Julia]
- on a recent acquisition:
is singularly responsible for this acquisition, and it is only because he took the time to read an unheralded (in the traditional sense) book, write about it smartly, and interview the author. That took a lot of work on his part. Of writers we have plenty; it’s the readers (and those who truly understand and share their reading) we should be looking towards.
“The agent at the talent firm describes a ‘one strike and you’re out’ mentality, with some authors getting dropped by their agents if their debut doesn’t sell well.”
- argues that there are about as many authors of books making a living from it as there are self-made billionaires.
New issue: The Brooklyn Rail June 2024
Available for pre-order: the new issue of the Cleveland Review of Books.
Local:
Poem:
“Excavation Photo” by David Wojahn
After making love she’d found it, asking me to touch the place
as well:
her left breast, I remember that precisely, & just below the nipple
I can also still recall,half-dollar sized, a dusky pink that grew erect so often in
my mouth and hands.
But the year, the details of the room, all blown apart in memory,
broken vessels, potsherdsgleaming in the excavation photo’s sepia, sunlight & long shadows;
& if only my hand remains,
circling, pushing, probing, it’s a lump I’m sure of it & if
I could tell you what would happennext, which sound from her throat, which sound from mine, the days
& weeks to follow
& the bitter eschatologies of touch, what profit would
such knowledge give you?Would you hear our bedside clock? Cars outside in the rain? —
& where is she now? Could you tell me
that much? Sand & gravel sift & the sought thing rises,
stroked & circles with a tinyhorsehair brush. Bead, shard, incised bone, it does not flare
in the toothless worker’s
whorled palm; & my hand keeps moving even now, the fine
transparent hairserect as they waken from gooseflesh-speckled aureole, my circles
tights, concentric. Do you
feel it now? The push & probe & spiral & the sudden
yes I can feel it too.
[This is from Wojahn’s 1997 The Falling Hour, his fifth collection.
There’s an interesting interaction, in this poem, between the musicality of meter—moments like After making love she’d found it, asking me to touch the place / as well and the bitter eschatologies of touch—and the fragmentation of the list-like syntax in lines like Sand & gravel & the sought thing rises. It matches the poem’s content in a lovely way: the musicality of intimate memory entwined with the way memory fragments as it fails.
There’s such a vivid image in the line & if only my hand remains, and it begins a section that invokes loss and fear so sharply: a sound from her throat, a sound from mine, the unpunctuated words it’s a lump I’m sure of it. At the same time, it reckons with both the unpredictable nature of the future and our inability to fully communicate our losses with others: if / I could tell you what would happen, the speaker says, and the weight of that word, if, is emphasized by how the enjambment separates it from the rest of the sentence. There’s a kind of gentle confrontation with the reader, too: even if the poet could share the details of this moment, what profit would / such knowledge give you? And then the confrontation with the reader is pushed further: where is she now? Could you tell me / that much? It isn’t only confrontation that comes through in those questions, though; it’s also the desperation of heartbreak.
I love how the scene of the speaker and his wife in their bedroom is woven together with the scene of the excavation worker carefully brushing away dirt to reveal Bead, shard, incised bone: But the year, the details of the room, all blown apart in memory, / broken vessels, potsherds // gleaming in the excavation photo’s sepia, sunlight & long shadows. The linking of the two scenes fades in and out throughout the poem; Wojahn is able to wander away from the linkage without ever leaving it far behind. And every time they’re paired together, it’s startling how quickly we move from one to the other: it does not flare / in the toothless worker’s / whorled palm; & my hand keeps moving even now. Part of what I love about the ending is how it doesn’t land where I’d expect it to, on another one of these recurring excavation scenes used to create an objective correlative that mirrors the distress or worry of the speaker and his lover as they feel for this lump in her breast. Instead, we land so definitely in the present moment in that bedroom, in the physicality of his hand movement and the plainness of their words to one another. We’re just right there with them, as much as it’s possible to be across the space of a poem. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
June 4 | Tin House
Fire Exit
by Morgan Talty
From the Lit Hub preview: A river divides Charles Lamosway from the life he might have had. On the other side of the river that runs in front of his house, Charles has watched his community in the Penobscot Reservation change, watched time pass, and watched a young family raise their daughter. The whole time, he’s been keeping a secret. The couple’s daughter is actually his. As his home and family life begin to crumble around him, Charles is forced to deal with the many burdens he’s spent his life carrying. Talty’s debut novel Fire Exit is tender, sparse, and thoughtful.
Also out Tuesday:
Crown: Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon
Vintage: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
What we’re reading:
Steve read more Max Beerbohm essays. [Ryan Ruby proposes that “the most reliable way to have ‘intimacy without commitment’ is to own a lot of books.” (Cf. the comment on Petrarch’s attitude towards books linked to earlier in this newsletter.) This led Hannah to suggest on the basis of my Wednesday comments that The Cut (or some other masters of the clickbait title) should run a piece titled “My Girlfriend(s) Left Me for a Long-Dead Essayist.” Happens to the best of us. —Steve]
Julia read more of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
Critical notes:
Cinque Henderson remembers Helen Vendler:
“I found the key to understanding her,” she said. She pointed to an ars poetica in poem 1097, “Ashes denote that Fire was,” which explained why Dickinson adhered so obsessively to the miniature form. It seemed remarkable to me that Helen, late in life, could go from casual distaste, even irritation, over a poet’s work to championing them as an “unforgettable” master of language and writing the definitive book on their poems. It was a testament to how intellectually and emotionally alive she remained throughout her career, how contrary to her reputation for stodginess or intellectual rigidity. She, like the poets she loved, was constantly revising, constantly updating, in response to the world around her and to the lyric as it enacted the mind of an original poet. It is no surprise that so many giants of poetry across the generations—Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Graham—felt such deep kinship with her.
[We linked to previous remembrances of Vendler in WRB—May 1, 2024.]
Christopher Sandford on The Castle:
“Everything now seems over with,” Kafka wrote in his diary that same month. He found it impossible to sleep, and equally “impossible to endure life,” seemingly tortured by an “inner clock [that] runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace” while “the outer one limps along at its usual speed.” In the late 1980s, a photograph came to light that purports to show Kafka arriving in Spindelmühle. He is seen posing at the side of the horse-drawn sleigh that has brought several travelers on the last leg of their journey from Prague. The figure who may or may not be Kafka stands a little apart from his fellow passengers, his features blurred by snow, but a faint smile playing on his thin lips. It is dusk, and there’s something that suggests an isolating, or at least not wholly welcoming, scene imbued with latent menace, the same ingredients present in the opening paragraphs of the novel he began by gaslight in his small upstairs room at the hotel later that night.
- on “the way of contemplation and the way of desire” [The phrasing reminds me of The Tree of Life (2011): “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” —Steve]:
In Proust’s world, we are moving targets, constellations of ineffable longings and desires that bear a tenuous and opaque connection to the actual things beyond our heads. We are bewitched by we know not what: the scent of a flowering tree, a fairy-tale read in childhood, a milk-maid seen from a train window whose face seems to promise eternal beatitude. By some mysterious alchemy, our secret dreams of beauty take on the forms of things that seem susceptible of possession—a town that might be visited, a person that might be married. But what is it that we really desire? If it happens that (miracle of miracles) the object of our desire comes into our possession, we are revealed as the fool. The beloved is not what we thought; the illusion is dissipating; the dream of beauty is already fleeing to set up camp elsewhere, teasing us from the distant horizon.
[The twin brutalities at the end of Sentimental Education—Frédéric’s rejection of Madame Arnoux and Frédéric and Deslauriers deciding that they were never happier than when they conducted an abortive visit to a brothel as teenagers—point to the problem of possession really being one of knowledge. (“Familiarity breeds contempt” is one of the wiser sayings.) That Madame Arnoux has white hair undoes Frédéric because ideals do not age and so do not have white hair. And Frédéric and Deslauriers were happier thinking about the brothel than experiencing what was inside because they had no experience to tell them what was inside; they were never happier than as adolescents because all their longings were untainted by knowledge of the world, a knowledge which the titular education gives them. This is all bleak and sounds inescapable, but knowledge is also always knowledge of ignorance; the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. (At least, for anything worth knowing about.) But maintaining that attitude is hard for human beings. —Steve]
Beerbohm:
It is only (this is a platitude) the things one has not done, the faces or places one has not seen, or seen but darkly, that have charm. It is only mystery—such mystery as besets the eyes of children—that makes things superb. I thought of the voluptuaries I had known—they seemed so sad, so ascetic almost, like poor pilgrims, raising their eyes never or ever gazing at the moon of tarnished endeavor. I thought of the round, insouciant faces of the monks at whose monastery I once broke bread, and how their eyes sparkled when they asked me of the France that lay around their walls. I thought, pardie, of the lurid verses written by young men who, in real life, know no haunt more lurid than a literary public-house.
Also Beerbohm:
“All men kill the thing they love” was the keynote of a fine ballad which every one has read. And, indeed, it does seem that in all love, be it love for animate or inanimate things, there is an ogre-ish element; humanity, in its egoism, being unable to appreciate anything unless it have also power to destroy it.
The hidden story of “Eveline” is the story of Frank, a bounder with a glib line, who tried to pick himself up a piece of skirt. She will spend her life regretting the great refusal. But what she refused was just what her father would have said it was, the patter of an experienced seducer.