WRB—June 22, 2024
He had been happiest as leader of the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys, the Washington Review of Books, and he took with him the clichés and behavior of a Managing Editor.
N.B.:
The D.C. Salon | June 2024
You can now listen to the recording of the last session of the discussion series formerly known as WRB x Liberties, The D.C. Salon. “Propaganda: do you know it when you see it?” is now available wherever podcasts are served [Celeste and I decided this was going to be a lot less annoying to say, type, refer to formally, et cetera going forward. —Chris]:
The next discussion will take place on the evening of July 20 on the topic “Can nonbelievers pray?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.
Links:
Two in The Paris Review:
Margaret Ross interviews Elaine Scarry:
In the midst of reading poems and novels, I noticed that writers kept constructing certain images in the same ways. The fact that, to get us to make an image of solid walls, for instance, Proust does exactly the same thing in creating the Balbec and Combray rooms as Flaubert does in creating the Bovary kitchen and Charlotte Brontë does in creating the red-room—they describe a weightless image like a roving light or a shadow moving over a wall, which coaxes the wall into sturdiness by comparison with the light or the shadow. It’s just amazing to me. And it’s not because they’re reading one another. They watch their own minds and just intuitively get it done.
And I was watching my own mind, too. This is the common practice of introspection, which is what philosophers from Descartes onward have done. The assumption is that readers can see whether it’s true for themselves, which is why, in the book, I keep saying things like, “Try and see if it isn’t the case that you can make the face more vivid by having an apple blossom shadow fall across it.”
[I wanted to pull about half of this for the quote. Don’t miss Scarry declaring works by Sade (the marquis, not the singer) and the like “very confused about the somewhat ridiculous claims they’re making.” —Steve]
Excerpts from Saskia Vogel’s forthcoming translation of a text by Peter Cornell, presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript now lost (The Ways of Paradise, 1989, January 14, 2025):
It hardly needs to be pointed out that a center may just as well be located at the periphery, like a humble fragment. Marcel Proust asserted that Vermeer’s View of Delft was the most beautiful of all paintings, and when the painting was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in 1921, not even his infirmity could prevent him from seeing it again. A photograph from this visit has been preserved, taken the year before his death. Proust has just stepped out into the bright sunlight and is standing stiff and tall, as if gripped by a grand, solemn ceremony. What has he seen? Proust incorporated the episode into his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). There the aged and sickly author Bergotte takes great pains to make his way to an exhibition to see the same painting by Vermeer, which he also loves. But this time, the whole doesn’t interest him as much as an apparently inconsiderable detail: a little patch of yellow wall. At once the patch illuminates Bergotte’s consciousness, ecstatic and merciless. “His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall. ‘That is how I ought to have written,’ he said.” Bergotte realizes that his writing has become ever more desiccated and lifeless, and he would gladly trade it for this exquisitely painted patch of yellow.
Two in our sister publication in the City of Angels: first, Grace Byron on being a fan of Salinger in her youth:
Yet Franny and Zooey still feels like a knife. Salinger inspired me to write awful, puny satire, eventually propelling me to more serious literature. Before MeToo, he gave me a lesson on not meeting your heroes. The talismans in his novels did not lead me to a Zen-like epiphany, but they did give me a lot of new source material to track down. Rereading his work does not bring the same rapture I remembered. I can see why a high schooler would want the kind of life Franny or Buddy leads in New York, but I am less convinced now. There is an uneasy boundary between adults and children in Salinger’s work. The young are old; the old are hapless. Maybe we all grow into such naivete. We can lose ourselves in mysticism and decide to see ourselves as Christ instead of looking outward. We need to size up our relationship to positions of innocence and power. Doing so requires constant renewal. If we try to have a beginner’s mind, we may just grow up.
[I have questions about the timeline implied by claiming Salinger was “feeding on the genre of YA as a source for so-called serious literary fiction,” since the genre as we think of it did not exist in the ’50s. And “we all love The Catcher in the Rye, and we all hate it”—we don’t. And, if we do, it’s because we last read it in a high school English class, which tend not to be conducive to the appreciation of literature, and we committed the elementary mistake of confusing our thoughts about Holden Caulfield, a character in the novel, with our thoughts about the novel itself. (Is not having strong feelings about The Catcher in the Rye growing up?) —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Alina Ştefănescu reviews Patrick Nathan’s new novel (The Future Was Color, June 4):
As György’s world expands, so does his relationship to medium. When he and Paul go camping for a weekend, György learns how to use a camera, and the photographic lens teaches him “how to watch, which is a way of being kind to the lives of others.” Monarch butterflies, “their wings like Tiffany lamps,” haven’t lost their rich hues; “the baby-blue finches” create color as they leave the nest and fly to new branches. “[T]he most peaceful blue in the world” is “a nest of robin’s eggs,” he says, vowing to “remember it, these colors, the way some fool [ . . . ] vows to remember a smell.” Yet these bright colors cannot be captured by the camera; they fade in the developing process. Here, Nathan seems to be questioning the representational function of art in these failures of realistic modes—a questioning that recurs throughout the novel.
In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Dustin Illingworth reviews a new translation of a novel by Yoko Tawada (Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, 2020, translated by Susan Bernofsky, July 9):
Yet this is first and foremost a novel about loving a poet. Patrik is always coming back to Celan’s works—an elliptical return like that of migratory birds or weather patterns. He yearns to be absorbed in individual poems, permanently frustrated at anything—errands, obligations, relationships—that stands between him and his quarry. All sensation, all thought, all activity leads back to Celan. When he is ailing: “I’ll stop trying to read my partial physical pain. Instead, I’ll read Celan.” When entertaining fantasies of purpose and meaning: “One day Patrik would give a lecture in which he revealed the significance of every single letter Celan used in his poetry.” When facing social commitments: “I wished for nothing more than to become invisible so as to be able to read. To read Celan.” Devoted readers will recognize such bewitchment—the beautiful, baffling, embarrassing ambit of literary enthusiasm for which prosaic reality is no match.
[This is what working on the WRB is like. —Steve]
In Compact, Valerie Stivers reviews Rachel Cusk’s latest (Parade, June 18) [The Upcoming book in WRB—June 12, 2024; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—June 15, 2024; cf. the discussion of Emily Gould’s use of Cusk quoted in WRB—May 11, 2024.]:
It’s worth considering how Cusk’s abandonment of “character” affects the conclusions of the work. It’s easy to erase archetypes, less so to erase specific people, who might complicate the morality play with their own side of the story. And to rely on archetypes allows the people doing the erasing to hold themselves to no account. The woman oppressed by the metaphorical violence of the female role can steal her children or abandon them, she can dip out on spousal support, she can blame her ex for everything, she can even be complicit in her own oppression—all without troubling her conscience. She can suggest that men cease to exist if it gets her what she wants. When I read Aftermath (2012) as a mother of young children—surprised and horrified by my new life and contemplating a divorce, as well—I saw myself in Cusk’s work. But I don’t anymore. Too much is missing.
In The New Statesman, Andrew Motion reviews a biography of Christopher Isherwood (Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, August 27):
The hostility that [Auden and Isherwood] suffered for their decision is largely explicable by reference to the war: their critics thought they were cowardly for deserting the ship of state in its hour of need. In fact, of course, both men had lived outside the country for much of the previous decade, so their departure was consistent with a pattern of living that they’d already chosen. Indeed, their principal reason for leaving had nothing to do with the war: their celebrity at home, and the habit of gossipy denigration that characterizes English cultural life, had left them feeling suffocated. “We had forgotten our real vocation,” Auden said, at once modestly and proudly. He felt that in America, “We would be artists again, with our own values, our own integrity, and not amateur socialist agitators, parlor reds.”
[I applaud whoever wrote the subhead for figuring out a way to get the word “autofiction” in there. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Rhian Sasseen reviews a new translation of a novel by Marosia Castaldi (The Hunger of Women, translated by Jamie Richards, 2023):
This is an experience of time that functions exclusively for women, as the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva observed in her 1981 essay, “Women’s Time”: “when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming or history.” Castaldi, too, writes of time as a thing that at once shapes and yet is at odds with the lived experiences of women, who are dependent on the relationships shared between women as mothers and daughters, friends, and lovers. When her daughter leaves for university, Rosa, alone in her kitchen, finds herself mentally returning to the past: “I was satisfied with the madness of the age-old knowledge of food and cooking contained within my hands The madness of food revived the deafening roar of the God of time that lived in revelry and the clocks’ tick-tock We’ll all of us die from the madness of clocks.” Clock time, with its rote progression, extinguishes, destroying its watchers’ sanity, while this other form of time—Rosa’s time—revives.
In TNR, Alice Robb reviews Lucy Grealy’s memoir (Autobiography of a Face, 1994) and Ann Patchett’s account of her friendship with Grealy (Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, 2005):
Patchett’s generosity is not always reciprocated. Grealy comes across as needy and often possessive—demanding that Patchett reassure her, in front of her other friends, that Grealy is her favorite; draping herself across Patchett’s lap at a literary prize ceremony. When Patchett falls in love with a poet, Grealy sulks. “Do you like his poetry better than mine?” she asks. “Do you love me more?” In an instance I find hard to imagine just moving on from, Grealy bans Patchett from working with an editor she likes, because Lucy had worked with her first.
Grealy’s memoir is a testament to the ego-muddling effects of having a face that’s perpetually in flux. Patchett draws a link between Grealy’s ever-shifting appearance and her inability to forge a stable identity. “In the course of most lifetimes, few people are capable of the kind of enormous changes that Lucy seemed to manage every year,” she writes. Patchett watched Lucy reinvent herself over and over: “shy and cool” at Sarah Lawrence; “scrappy and James Dean tough” at Iowa; “decked out in high heels and tiny black cocktail dresses” in New York. She saw her reveling in her short-lived literary fame; crushed by writer’s block (“I spend my entire life feeling guilty that I’m not writing”); and, finally, isolated and dependent on drugs.
N.B. (cont.):
“Silent Book Clubs Are Here and Introvert-Friendly” [Surely we don’t need this. —Chris] [A spoonful of silence helps the medicine go down. —Steve] [I think this is OK. —Julia]
Our cultural overlords at the NYRB are having their sitewide summer sale.
New issues:
The Miami Native Issue Two
The Paris Review No. 248 | Summer 2024 [As linked to above.]
Local:
NOAA has identified the hottest and coolest neighborhoods in D.C. (The ones with lots of trees are cool; the ones with lots of asphalt are hot.)
The results of the local Post’s survey about the best dive bars are in.
Robert Winnett will not be joining the local Post as editor after all.
The Folger Shakespeare Library reopened yesterday.
Poem:
“I Remember Stopping on a Little Bridge in 1972” by James Richardson
It is so late
it is early, and there, once again,
is that thrilling and disturbing bird
of dawn, its four notes,
one two THREE, four climbing
a little way up into the future
and back down, and once again
Everything that’s mine is in a rental truck
or in the future.I should tell this boy
who has pulled over by a little river
just so he can breathe (this boy
wishing so hard that this would all be over
that he has someone called me here)
that it’s going to be OK. I should tell him
to relax, that he’ll get there by sunset,
sit among boxes with a six-pack,
letting the TV run on and on.I won’t tell him about the breakdown, only a day,
I won’t tell him about the worse things
that will break in a week, a month, a year,
the ones he would think he could not get over
and still be himself, the ones
he would hate me for getting over.
I tell him, however it is we’re speaking,that it’s just fine here in the future,
so that in a few minutes he can go on,
as he did. I think him into the truck,
which hesitates but starts
this time. Now on the waters fast enough to hear,
the reflected moon
lets go, sweeps downriver.
[This poem is from Richard’s ninth collection, For Now (2020), but I found it in Issue No. 9 of the Common. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
June 25 | Catapult
The Liquid Eye of a Moon
by Uchenna Awoke
From the Lit Hub preview: This might be billed as a kind of Nigerian Catcher in the Rye, but Dimkpa, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Awoke’s debut novel, is nothing like the cosmopolitan elite he observes from up close as a house boy in Lagos, after making the long journey from his village in rural Nigeria. Deeply committed to class and the clash of tradition with modernity, The Liquid Eye of a Moon is a typically messy but also stoic coming of age story without any of Holden Caulfield’s phony fussing.
[We will pass over the description of The Catcher in the Rye here. I said enough about it above. —Steve]
Also out Tuesday:
Penguin: Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley
Random House: Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
What we’re reading:
Steve started reading
’s new book (When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, June 18). [A little while ago I bought a biography of David Duke I intended to read before this as preparation, but I never got around to it. Jumping in blind. —Steve]Julia started Gravity’s Rainbow. She also started Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (1972) even though she said she wouldn’t. [In true Bly fashion, the poetic criticism is excellent, really interesting, and at times just completely woo-woo. Here he is in the introduction, talking about the decline of associative movement in Western poetry:
Sometime in the thirteenth century poetry in Europe began to show a distinct decline in the ability to associate powerfully. There are individual exceptions, but the circle of worlds pulled into the poem by association dwindles after Chaucer and Langland; their work is already a decline from the Beowolf-poet. By the eighteenth century, the dwindling had become a psychic disaster . . . . There are very few images of the Snake, the Dragon, or the Great Mother . . . . The loss of associative freedom showed itself in form as well as in content. In content the poet’s thought plodded through the poem, line after line, like a man being escorted through a prison. The “form” was a corridor, full of opening and closing doors. The rhymed lines opened at just the right moment, and closed again behind the visitors.
By the eighteenth century the European intellectual was no longer interested in imagination really. He was trying to develop the “masculine” mental powers he sensed Socrates stood for—a de-mythologized intelligence, that moves in a straight line made of tiny bright links, an intelligence dominated by linked facts rather than “irrational” feelings. The European intellectual succeeded in developing that rationalist intelligence and it was to prove useful. Industry needed it to guide a locomotive through a huge freight yard, or guide a spaceship back from the moon through the “re-entry corridor.”
Bly’s interest in associative movement, both as a poet and a translator, is easily his biggest legacy within American poetry, and this book is a wonderful little anthology of poems that he thought showcased good associative movement—it’s heavy on Vallejo and García Lorca. It’s also, it goes without saying, enormously funny (“Great Mother”?). —Julia] [Catullus 63 is the story of a man who, driven mad in the service of the Great Mother (poetic criticism), castrates himself (Snake? Dragon? I’m going with Snake; the book from The Lady Eve (1941) is Are Snakes Necessary?, after all) and then says a bunch of stuff about music (read: poetic criticism). Then it turns out that this devotion to the Great Mother and the madness that comes with it (once again: poetic criticism) ruins your life. Let’s see you associate that one, Bobby! —Steve]
Chris got a copy of Ganz’s book but forgot it at home when he left for Philadelphia this week. He’s been reading Kierkegaard on his phone (“Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,” 1846).
Critical notes:
- Moul on uses of Horace Odes 1.3 in the poetry of the English Civil War:
In the epigram, this reassuring sprig comes not from a tree, however, but caelo, from heaven, sent directly by God. It is surely very likely that olivae is specified here to suggest Oliver [Cromwell], as this play upon his name was very common in the period. This too links back to Odes 1.2, since the second half of that poem asks the question “which god will Jupiter send to save us?”—settling finally, after considering various possibilities, on Mercury in the form of Octavian. Our anonymous Latin epigram suggests that the contemporary answer to this question might be Cromwell.
Beginning an early modern Latin poem iam satis is conventional almost to the point of being hackneyed, and there are plenty of examples—especially examples of fairly routine panegyric—where the allusion adds little, or even seems tactless. But this little epigram is a good example of how the best known poems, the most familiar “classics,” can spring into new life under the pressure of events.
[This sent me first to Milton’s translation of Odes 1.5. (It’s not really the one you’d expect him to have translated, although there is something of Milton’s Eden in “plain in thy neatness,” something absent from the sophisticated and worldly irony of Horace’s oxymoronic simplex munditiis, “simple with elegances” (note the plural). And that is the difference between the two.) Then it sent me to JSTOR, where I found a nice article from 1937 on Horace’s influence on Milton, especially in the sonnets:
Beyond any English poet Milton was suited by his education, character, and the circumstances of his life to embody the poetic ideals of the ancients. If he had had leisure in the ten years following his return from Italy to write his Arthuriad, it can hardly be doubted that the poem would have been a national epic after the pattern of the Aeneid. As it was, his self-appointed duties permitted him only the sonnets, and he carried into these the ideals which would have animated a larger work. To say, then, that his purposes were similar to Horace’s is incontestably true in the broad sense that both poets felt it their place to estimate and reward the private or public virtues of their contemporaries from the independent, almost priestly, vantage-point of poetry.
It is to this priesthood that the Managing Editors of the WRB are called. —Steve]