The WRB’s maddening distractions recall the frustrations of Kafka’s fiction; you can sense a Managing Editor nightmarishly unable to find a quiet space to work.
Links:
In The Paris Review,
on Northanger Abbey:Where another writer might pretend that such a mismatch between proxy and reality does not exist, or moralize her readers by admonishing them not to judge, in Northanger Abbey, Austen does neither. She examines a flaw in human perception and judgment but offers no solutions. We do judge others through proxies that are often useless and wrong, but we also have to judge by something. The alternative would be to remain naively open to everybody, incapable of drawing conclusions, which is neither possible nor really desirable. This position is, in fact, the one Catherine occupies at the beginning of the book—she doesn’t have enough experience to judge good friends from bad and assumes good intentions from others even on the thinnest of evidence. When she does try to listen to her gut, as with General Tilney, she doesn’t have enough life experience to know that what would be the answer in a Radcliffe novel is unlikely to be the answer anywhere else. And yet, perhaps there is another kind of novel—a novel like Northanger Abbey—that can provide insight into human choices. Austen’s narrator boldly declares that a novel is “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
[Past Northanger Abbey commentary (both from me and in the links) can be found in WRB—Feb. 5, 2025, WRB—May 14, 2025, and WRB—June 4, 2025. Northanger Abbey also offers no solutions to the problem of judging novels. Austen’s narrator does not intend to apply that glowing description to every novel, after all. And Catherine doesn’t really learn how to judge them; simply to reflect that she does not live in a Gothic novel is not judgment. Nor does it imply any standards by which novels might be evaluated wisely—to think that good novels feature events that might happen in your life, while bad ones do not, would be an error as great as any Catherine makes. (I think it rather unlikely that I will find myself on a whaling ship captained by a man intent on revenge against a whale that took his leg off, among other things.) If, like Catherine, you lack insight into human choices, you might just have to trust the novels you’ve read and hope they give you some. One solution for us, of course, is to read Austen; pity her poor characters, who lack that option.
(Also, I like to imagine that Henry Tilney, whom I find annoying, is playing the long game; having convinced his wife that such things don’t happen, he’s going to imprison her in a secret chamber or something like that, and she’ll have no idea it’s coming.) —Steve]
In The Yale Review, Elena Gosalvez Blanco on working for Patricia Highsmith at the end of her life:
She sat down in a chair across from me and asked, “Do you like Hemingway?”
She looked me in the eyes for the first time. I drank some of my tepid tap water. I knew the question was important. But I did not know anything about Pat or her life history. I did not know her tastes, or her relationship with other twentieth-century North American writers. I did not even know she had lived in New York and Paris. I had read only that one book by her, just before on the train. I set my glass on the table, knowing I was running out of time, like in a game show, and I decided it was a heads-or-tails choice. I could not guess the right answer, I reasoned, so I might as well tell the truth. “No,” I answered, as if putting my last chip down on the roulette table.
“I HATE Hemingway!” she screamed.
She stood up and walked to the door to show me out. Is that the entire interview? I wondered, following her. I had a thousand questions about the job, the daily tasks, the car, the salary, the conditions. But I didn’t dare open my mouth. She thanked me again for coming and told me she would call Dani as soon as possible to convey her decision. She shook my hand, then quickly slammed the door behind me.
In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Susan Gubar’s book about female artists (Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists, June 10):
[Marianne] Moore did not revise her earlier poems so much as she slashed them, much to the distress of quite a few friends and later scholars. Her self-critical editing generated a great deal of confusion. A text in Collected Poems (1951) could look quite different from earlier versions. The question about what might have motivated Moore’s editorial excisions in Collected Poems is worth considering, because she later rigorously expunged work in the misnamed Complete Poems (1967), which appeared on her eightieth birthday. Since, as she famously stated in the epigraph to that volume, “omissions are not accidents,” one can search for clues about her motivation in the essays Moore composed.
In “Feeling and Precision,” Moore argued that the deepest feelings tend “to be inarticulate” or they will “seem overcondensed.” Because we associate intensity with minimalized language, “expanded explanation tends to spoil the lion’s leap.” In “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” she admits, “I myself . . . would rather be told too little than too much.” In another essay, she repeats “a master axiom” from Confucius: “When you have done justice to the meaning, stop.” The discipline of restraint remains an ideal: “It is a commonplace that we are the most eloquent by reason of the not said.” The titles of two essays—“Compactness Compacted” and “Reticent Candor”—express her admiration of “the not said.”
[This vision of editing as removal strikes me as particularly modern, Moore’s reference to Confucius aside. There are ancient references to editing that worry about both adding and removing; the Shiji reports this about Lü Buwei, who lived in the Warring States period:
He considered [the text] to encompass from antiquity to the present the affairs of the myriad kinds of things between Heaven and Earth and called it The Springs and Autumns of Mr. Lü. He posted it on the city gate of Xianyang and suspended cash of one thousand jin above it. He invited the traveling persuaders, guests, and retainers of the many lords and offered the thousand jin to anyone who could add or subtract a single character.
And near its end the Book of Revelation contains these threats:
If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
The works are perfect because nothing can be added or removed. In contrast, the modernists take it for granted that you could add, but why would you? It’s all (as Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” argues) there anyway. In The Pound Era Hugh Kenner identifies these omissions as key to the technique of Eliot and Pound:
Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand, but behind Eliot’s resonances there is frequently nothing to restore (how centrifugal are the Notes to The Waste Land!).
And Pound’s work editing that poem was mostly making cuts. This is the era, and the approach, that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captured with “perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
The importance of janitorial work
Bill Belichick’s book (as always, this is a football newsletter)
A Poem by William Carlos Williams and flowers
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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