WRB—June 24, 2026
“real problem”
For a quarter of a century, I have read the Washington Review of Books, and I cannot remember a single valuable remark made by the Managing Editor, nor even a solitary good piece of advice.
Links:
Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames. First, Ruby Hamilton on screwball comedies:
Screwball actors work with and against our impressions of them. The Lady Eve (1941) may be the slyest of these films because it’s about the ways in which conforming to type condemns you. Henry Fonda appears as a naive herpetologist who has no chance against Stanwyck’s slippery con artist. The expected scenes of humiliation—like Grant in his negligee in Bringing Up Baby (1938), or Cooper going “goofy, bim-buggy” in Ball of Fire (1941), or Spencer Tracy losing his head in court in Adam’s Rib (1949)—are funnier because there’s a quality in Fonda (a softness? A credulity?) that makes him what Grant, Cooper and Tracy never are: embarrassable. His pratfalling over sofas and Stanwyck’s leg is a joke about his character’s apparent uprightness, but also the preternatural decency signified by “Henry Fonda.” He hasn’t done much to deserve this embarrassment, but that’s the screwball logic. He’s embarrassed precisely because he’s the type of innocent who can be embarrassed.
There’s a tautology here: it’s what Cavell is getting at when he says that, in these films, “only those can genuinely marry who are already married.” Screwball has a back-to-frontness about it. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which a Warsaw theatre troupe stages a play about the Nazis, impersonations come before the people who are being impersonated. In Bringing Up Baby the leopard doesn’t arrive until after Hepburn has said there’s a leopard; when it pootles into frame, the joke is that she isn’t lying—and yet we’re also left with the suggestion that the world bends to her word. It comes back to fast-talking and the idea behind it: that if you’re quick enough, you can out-talk the truth.
[We had a bunch of Cavell discussion here a couple years ago. (Re-reading it I discover that I felt the best way to understand Cavell was through Milton’s divorce tracts and Samson Agonistes. Things don’t really change around here.)
One animating idea behind all the best screwball is the power of speech, which creates love and is a sign of love. Everyone in these movies is getting talked into love because that’s what “talk” and “love” mean; if they loved each other less, they would shut up. (Here is where the divorce tracts come in: “a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of mariage.”) The problem identified in Cavell’s tautology, then, can be rephrased as something like “only those can genuinely start a conversation who are already having a conversation.” The general setup of a comedy of remarriage ensures that a conversation is ongoing. Those similar films in which the couple is not divorced or on the verge of it at the start frequently have the couple refer to a shared past, whether real or imagined—in some sense, the conversation must have always been going on.
The Drama (2026), the best new movie I’ve seen this year (although I haven’t seen too many), gets at this perfectly; its final scene is a couple play-acting a first date. Its approach to humiliating its characters, though, is not the genteel mockery of the classic screwballs. Instead, it goes for the mortification of cringe comedy. There’s life in this genre yet. —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Adam Thirlwell reviews a new translation of Gorky’s memoirs (Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk, 2025):
One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s “The Darling” in front of Chekhov. “On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: ‘There are misprints in it . . . ’” Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious.
But the theory was always fragile. This is why criticism since the nineteenth century has always veered between genres, the august impersonal critical essay and the memoir, the diary and the letter (one problem with Flaubert’s theory was his own correspondence, published a few years after he died, which was as exciting, as novelistic, as his novels), and why perhaps the greatest novelist in history is recorded by Gorky in this way: “It always struck me that Tolstoy did not much care to discuss literature—and in this I do not believe I am mistaken—although he was vitally interested in the personality of the author. I was frequently asked the question: ‘Did you know him?’ ‘What was he like?’ ‘Where was he born?’”
[Best sentence Thirlwell quotes (this about Tolstoy): “Like a French novelist, he talks of women willingly and at great length.” —Steve]
Two in Harper’s:
First, Rosanna Warren reviews Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, 2025) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 9, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 4, 2026 and a piece by McCrae on Berryman in WRB̦—Sept. 10, 2025.]:
The archival poems tend to lack that precision; on the whole, they sound like disjecta membra from a more accomplished work. They’re full of gossip, complaints, literary rivalries, barroom blather, and drunkenly slurred speech (“Aw gone,” “Highlone, highlone”). At times, they read more like entries in a diary or a Rolodex than carefully crafted lyrics. One sees why Giroux and Meredith—and Berryman himself, in more sober moments—excluded them from the architecture of The Dream Songs.
Yet Berryman’s gift to the English language and to American poetry is so monumental that it’s worth having these poetic trials and errors, which do include some successes, so we can think more comprehensively about this outrageous spirit who visited our language for a while and startled it awake. Any poet’s files will be stuffed with unpublished drafts; Berryman’s drafts are interesting because Berryman is interesting. With Only Sing, we’re invited into the poet’s disorderly study to try to understand how the grand, mysterious songs were made.
[Imagine how lacking in precision a poem had to be to get rejected from something as inconsistent as the published Dream Songs. (The Berryman I like, the Berryman who is one of my favorite poets of the twentieth century—as discussed in WRB—Jan. 28, 2026—is the Berryman who imposes limits on himself, who works in a tradition besides that of ventriloquized blackface.) The strangeness of Berryman’s syntax, too, reads differently when subtly invoking the likes of Thomas Wyatt than when a stylistic tic. Warren quotes Dream Song 29:
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
Wyatt never, so far as I know, mixed tenses like this, but the tangled syntax as reflection of confused feelings towards a woman who is both there and not there has its parallels, as in “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”:
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
(The title could be a Berryman line, as could “Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise / Twenty times better.”) “Unstable dream, according to the place” has similar moments:
Unstable dream, according to the place,
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.
By tasted sweetness make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case
Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew
But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,
My body in tempest her succour to embrace.
The identity of Henry’s woman (“her body . . . the pieces . . . they”) is unstable; so is Wyatt’s addressee. Is it, as the tropes of the first lines suggest, a woman (“Unstable dream . . . be steadfast once”), or is it Wyatt’s dream of the woman (“Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew”)? —Steve]
Second, Clare Bucknell reviews a biography of Vermeer (Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon, April) [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 15, 2026.]:
What buyers of the period did want was pictures of figures in domestic interiors: recognizable people doing recognizable things, at leisure or at work, surrounded by traces of their lives—babies, animals, furniture, pots and pans, musical instruments, pieces of fabric, jewelry. “Seventeenth-century artists must, indeed, have had an irrepressible need to grasp things,” the cultural historian Johan Huizinga has observed. “Nothing in their environment was too slight to be noticed.” Like his contemporary Gerard ter Borch, the master painter of fabrics so resplendent they seem to crackle, Vermeer was pleased by “slight” things: the way a satin ribbon holds the shape of a previous fold; the cleft in a lower lip; a sleeve puckering under a pinafore. His attention to coiffure, Anthony Bailey points out, was exceptional. He could do it all: hair “pulled straight back from the forehead, held in place with bows, tied in a bun or braided in a chignon,” hair in ringlets, turbans, scarves.
Just because someone is interested in ribbons doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in God. Vermeer’s pictures are often observed to harbor spiritual meanings as well as material ones, flickering back and forth between the two. In Woman with a Balance, the delicate set of scales that the subject suspends between her finger and thumb is symbolic as well as literal: they take the measure of earthly goods and spiritual ones, setting one kind of value in the context of another. But the picture’s theological implications, as the Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke has pointed out, do nothing to stop us noticing that the woman is beautiful, or that, in general, “Vermeer’s women are never faulted for their love of things.” He infused objects with so much light that they appear almost immaterial anyway.
In the local and free Beacon, Joseph Epstein reviews Harold Bloom’s letters (The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, edited by Heather Cass White, May):
Anxiety, gloom, and doubt infest the letters White has assembled. Bloom won various prizes and awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, or so-called genius grant. He was interviewed or written up, as White reports, in “the Atlantic, Esquire, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair” and elsewhere. But none of this seems to have eased his depression. At one point he claims to have wanted to write a modern version of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is surely high on the list of books the world could do nicely without.
The letters to and from Northrop Frye, whose views Bloom admired more than that of any other living literary critic, are marked by Frye’s rejection of the argument in Bloom’s magnum opus, The Anxiety of Influence, a rejection that stung Bloom badly. Frye wrote: “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament.” Frye would later write that Bloom “seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical tradition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding.” C. S. Lewis, in a review of Bloom’s book The Visionary Company, wrote: “This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. . . . Sometimes by a small emendation I can hammer out a meaning, but I don’t know for sure whether it is Mr. Bloom’s.” T. S. Eliot died in 1965, before Bloom came into prominence, so one can only imagine his response to Bloom’s oeuvre.
[Bloom’s flattery of his correspondents, as quoted by Epstein, is hard to read. No doubt he meant it, and no doubt many of its respondents appreciated it. (Writers can be insecure.) But it isn’t even interesting criticism; he just finds new ways to say he liked the writing without offering a single reason. He’s just sucking up, and it feels desperate. But then I suppose Bloom enjoyed content-free descriptions of himself as a genius, and he assumed everyone else was like him. —Steve]
N.B.:
A history of searching for Timbuktu.
Restoring Edvard Grieg’s house.
Old coupons for Bed, Bath, & Beyond.
“Where Has All the Cottage Cheese Gone?” [In Villon’s Mais où sont les neiges d’antan the snow is a metaphor for cottage cheese. They’re both white, you see. —Steve]
Colors you can’t see on a screen.
New issue: Harper’s Magazine July 2026 [As linked to above.]
Carlo Ginzburg died on Wednesday, June 17. R.I.P.
Mark Singer died on Friday, June 19. R.I.P. [That Ricky Jay profile is—for lack of a better phrase—how it is done. —Steve]
Poem:
“I Looked Up from My Writing” by Thomas Hardy
I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.“Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.“And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind.”Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.
[In continuation of the notes about gazing in WRB—June 10, 2026. Hardy frames the moon’s agency in the terms of sight: “full gaze,” “I’ve been scanning,” “I am curious to look.” This emphasis revives the otherwise dead image of the poet’s mind as “blinkered.” He is incapable of looking back, and his response to the challenge of the moon’s gaze is to flee it: “I edge to shun her view.” Doing so, he removes himself from the moonlight and hides in the dark, connecting him to the suicide at the poem’s center “who has put his life-light out.” —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Faber & Faber | June 30
Devotions: Eight Stories
by Lucy Caldwell
From the publisher: In Devotions, “one of the finest short story writers at work today” (Wendy Erskine) explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love. Transporting and profound, these are stories of love, grief, longing, of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.
Also out Tuesday:
Harvard University Press: Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders: In Defense of Persian Poetry by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi, edited and translated from the Persian by Alyssa Gabbay
What we’re reading:
Steve read I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (by Hu Anyan, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves, 2025). [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 25, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025. More interesting when about day-to-day life in China more generally than when about delivering parcels in Beijing. —Steve]
Critical notes:
BDM on pop music fandom:
Sometimes, upon contact with online pop fandom, people will say something like, the problem with this stuff, in particular its obsession with chart positions and records, is that it’s really misplaced sports fandom. To the extent that is true, you can tell it’s true because sports fans love whining. You whine about the refs, you whine about your team, you whine about the other team, you whine about people you’re imagining in your head who are judging you for loving sports, whatever.
. . .
On the other hand, there is something about it that smacks of a “real problem” when it becomes clear that the online fandom world is gamed by accruing fake fans and then picking fake fights. If this kind of Potemkin beefing works for pop music, people are going to try to replicate that success in other spheres of life where “winning” actually matters. And that is where I feel like a problem begins to emerge that is not only about how I spend my time online—though it is also about how I spend my time online, don’t get me wrong. It’s just kind of inescapable how lucrative people’s negative emotions are—spite, envy—and how bad that is for all of us. But what does one do, other than wake up each day determined to whine no more?
[From a footnote in here I learn the real reason I am, spiritually, a Gen X dad. (And I thought it was the Steely Dan.)
“Of all the unimportant things in life, football is the most important.” the line goes—of all the important things in life, fighting about pop music online is the least important, or something like that. At least we all, I think, understand sports fandom as a sickness, even if one with some benefits to the sufferer—would that we could carry this through to “sports substitutes for nerds.” —Steve]