WRB—June 29, 2024
Ignatius Gallaher puffed thoughtfully at his cigar and then, in a calm historian’s tone, he proceeded to sketch for his friend some pictures of the corruption which was rife abroad. He summarized the vices of many capitals and seemed inclined to award the palm to Washington.
N.B.:
The next D.C. Salon (formerly known as the WRB x Liberties salon) will take place on the evening of July 20. The topic will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.
Links:
In The Yale Review, Langdon Hammer on Thom Gunn’s early work in said journal:
But those reviews are worth revisiting. They show us Gunn’s motives and values in formation. The young critic had no patience for self-absorption, mere virtuosity, or rhetorical extravagance, and he policed his own work for these “vices” (his word).
Gunn’s idea of what constitutes a good poem in these reviews may strike readers today as narrow, prescriptive, and foreign. His easy confidence in the objective authority of his preferences might seem presumptuous. But turn the perspective around and poetry reviewers in our day seem strikingly mild and undiscriminating. The pluralism of the current poetry scene and the manners it encourages stand in a contrast to the period in which Gunn was writing for The Yale Review, when battle lines were drawn between experimentalists and academics with their “open” and “closed” forms, and critics like Gunn had no trouble saying what was right and what was wrong.
[This column, “Annotating the Archives,” in which The Yale Review has writers reflect on something previously published in it, is one of my favorite things going today. As Hammer says here, it lets the past shame the present—turns out criticism wasn’t invented in Barack Obama’s second term, after all. —Steve] [I sleep soundly at night knowing no one will ever accuse me of being “mild and undiscriminating” as a poetry critic. —Julia] [Let criticism be discriminating, though the heavens fall. —Steve]
In ,
on Barbara Comyns:The Willoweed matriarch is an awful, selfish, abusive woman (as bad in her way as the father in The Vet’s Daughter (1959)). Meanwhile, her son, Elbin, the father of the four children at the story’s center, uses this tragedy as means to restart his failed journalism career. There is suicide, a terrible murder carried out by a frightened, angry mob, unaccountable loss. All of which, finally, ends. When the sickness is flushed from the town, things return to normal. Some characters even move on, conceivably to better things. Avril Horner puts forward a reasonable argument that what might appear at first to be a surprisingly happy ending to such a dark novel in truth depicts everyone returning to conformity (conformity being the not-so-secret villain of much of Comyns’ work). Horner isn’t wrong, but I would add that Comyns is continuing with another common theme of hers, which is that life goes on. There’s not much to say about this idea, as it doesn’t allow for a lot of deep thought. Because of course life goes on. What else would it do? But life going on does not mean that it goes on happily. (What is Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) if not an unhappy story about life going on?)
Reviews:
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Wurgaft reviews a book about jokes (Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life, by David Shoemaker, May):
Not that wisecracks are free from psychological complexity, or for that matter from aggression and competition. Freud would remind us that our jests with friends can reflect subterranean hostility, lust, and envy, as well as anxieties and fears we may prefer not to recognize. The term “wisecrack” itself, I was curious to learn while researching for this review, is quite new, beginning with the verbal use of “cracking wise” in early twentieth-century America. To “crack” could mean to boast, and while boasting may seem a little far from the contemporary English use of “wisecrack,” the exchange of wisecracks is indeed often competitive, with each friend trying to top the other’s lines. The “wise” in “wisecrack” carries the sense of “a wise guy” or even a “wiseacre,” someone who considers themselves clever but who uses their cleverness to provoke. The “guy” is worth remarking here: How much of cracking wise is rooted in the microdynamics of masculine aggression?
[It isn’t a man, as I recall, who says “Why, he is the Prince’s jester, a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders. None but libertines delight in him, and the commendation is not in his wit but in his villainy, for he both pleases men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him.” The difference between “the microdynamics of masculine aggression” and the methods of romance depicted in screwball comedies—or those used by people in real life who are good at talking—isn’t that big. (I consider myself an aficionado of both and so am qualified to make this judgment.) —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Tim Parks reviews a collection of James Fitzjames Stephen’s writing (Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism, edited by Christopher Ricks, 2023):
In any event, however heated the battle with Dickens became, there was no question of an attack ad personam. In 1858 Dickens separated from his wife of many years, the mother of their ten children, banishing her from the family home and publishing an ill-advised and defensive letter about their split in The Times. Stephen does not take advantage, even in an essay of 1863 on “common forms” in novels, in which the convenient death of David Copperfield’s foolish first wife, followed by a wiser second marriage, is offered as an example of a now-hackneyed plot formula: “You get an affecting deathbed, two courtships . . . wounded affection . . . all by the help of a process which enables the hero to have his cake and eat his cake.” “It is, indeed, a pity,” he ironizes, perhaps looking forward to modern academe, “that technical names should not be invented” for such tropes, “so that their peculiarities might be announced in the advertisements.”
[Cf. Katie Kadue’s review of a book on second chances in WRB—May 18, 2024.]
Natasha Wimmer reviews a new translation of a short story collection by Ángel Bonomini, now “scarcely better known now in Spanish than in English” (The Novices of Lerna, 1972, translated by Jordan Landsman, May):
Fantastic literature can seem to spring from an overheated fascination with logic and rationalism. In some cases this produces stories that tick like clockwork and spit out clever plot twists; in others, stories that dare the reader to reach for solutions and then drift beyond the grasp of reason. Bonomini experiments with both modes, but his most characteristic stories fit firmly in the latter category. “The Novices of Lerna” gestures in many directions: psychological, political, spiritual. Bonomini himself, in a rather startling footnote at the end of the story in the Manguel edition, opts for a religious reading, earnestly invoking man’s responsibility to answer for himself before God. But what impresses the reader most—and what crops up again in Bonomini’s later, more mature work—is the image of the self as a fickle, mutable thing.
Adam Roberts reviews a novel by Barry Unsworth (Pascali’s Island, 1980):
Most of Pascali’s Island is about the end of things, the Ottoman Empire dying, Pascali’s facing the finis of his life, the impending nothingness we all face, eventually: the novel’s epigraph is from Demetrius Capetanakis: “nothingness might save or destroy those who face it, but those who ignore it are condemned to unreality.” Unsworth flirts with this unreality in his telling: early in the book, he has Pascali draw attention to “the predicament of the tiny, amber-coloured fly entrapped in the frond of my wrist hair . . . the fly struggles and swoons in this swamp, amid the miasmic exudations of my skin.” But in fact “there is no fly, no actual fly. The fly belongs to the realm of fancy.” It is introduced into the narrative, he tells the Sultan, “only as an image of my insignificance in your eyes.” Pascali returns to this in the penultimate paragraph of the novel, teasing his reader—the Sultan, us—with the thought “maybe none of this happened. Like the fly, the fly on my wrist, remember?” This, though it chimes with a thematic of sacrifice, misfits a more melodramatic climax of betrayal, gunfire, death and disaster.
In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Rebecca Hanssens-Reed reviews a new translation of a novel by Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo, 1955, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, 2023):
In the event of a retranslation like that of Pedro Páramo, there is something a bit disingenuous about the way we discuss it, and maybe even dissonant with broader pressure points for translators. It gives off a paternalistic advocacy that implicitly derides the act of translation itself: the text deserved to be translated again (according to what rubric is this merit evaluated?), the reader deserves to have a less obviously mediated version (this one promises to be more neutral, more true, more faithful). There’s an occasional whiff of self-hatred I’ve found puzzling in some fellow translators—why read the translation when you can read the original? why read this version that so quickly fell into obsolescence?—that’s counterproductive to dogged pleas to critics, publishers, agents, and other figures of power in the industry to please, please engage with the art of translation more holistically.
In the Literary Review of Canada, Sarah Hampson reviews a compilation of short stories and essays on the life of a writer from six Canadians (Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf, 2023):
She writes about being influenced by a mother who was an on‑again, off‑again scribbler herself. “Her gaps influenced me as much as her passionate attachment” to the craft. Later, when Lambert was working for eight years in the peace movement, “the desire—the need—[to write] came to me as a feeling of floating above my body, wanting to slow down, and to find a way, no matter how difficult, to speak in my own voice.” There were snags and dead ends, as well as “the Berlin Wall of the Imagination”—a memorable metaphor for writer’s block. “Each novel or story posed its own internal puzzles.” Each needed “its own visitation of something interesting, some flare of light, or multiple flares, outside of my conscious control.” But Lambert persevered, and she remained fully committed to the challenges of each story. At the end of her contribution, she offers up a lovely passage, describing her discipline as “the daily climb into the branches of a tree, which you have been lucky enough all these years to call home.”
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Steven Shapin reviews a book about drinking water (The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage, by Christy Spackman, 2023):
Another bureaucratic response has been to relegate complaints about color, taste and smell to the status of what the EPA in the US calls “secondary standards”—guidelines on managing drinking water “for aesthetic considerations, such as taste, color and odor.” In general, these unenforceable guidelines amount to managing the volume of public complaints, keeping them at reasonable levels. Spackman presumes the government position is something like: “Good-tasting water is a luxury while safe water is a right.” But sorting complaints on that basis isn’t unproblematic. For one thing, public complaints can translate into political action, putting authorities’ budgets, contracts and independence at risk, and encouraging a switch to bottled water. Even where water is privatized, it’s bad for business to put out “funny tasting” water. In these circumstances, Spackman optimistically suggests that public distaste for corporate water has real consequences: “Funny tasting or smelling water can undermine business relationships and undo contracts, all to the detriment of business growth.”
Bon Appetit ran a piece on the world of water sommeliers last year:
She doesn’t drink out of single-use plastic water bottles, and she treats these waters as she would wine, only drinking them as a treat or on special occasions. On the other hand, she said, people import soda, kombucha, and wines from all over the world and no one bats an eye. Why should water get such scrutiny?
[“Has the Perrier gone straight to my head?” —Steve] [Okay, I’m sorry, but if you’re buying kombucha imported “from all over the world,” I, personally, am batting an eye. Kombucha is one of the easiest things to buy locally. There’s simply no need for that. —Julia]
Clare Bucknell reviews a book about Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool (Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man, by Peter K. Anderson, 2023):
That you could never be sure what he was thinking made him unsettling and useful in equal measure. Polemicists were quick to see Somer’s blankness and fill it in: religious writers on both sides invoked alleged “sayings” of his in support of their causes, claiming authority on the basis that this was a man who was unable to lie. (A 1582 history of Catholic martyrs asserts that at the moment an imprisoned Franciscan, Thomas Belchiam, starved to death in Newgate in 1537, Somer was found running about the court crying: “The simplicity of one mendicant breaks the pride of the king.”) Character traits that seem distinctive may be simply a reflection of the court environment. Somer’s sleepiness, Andersson suggests, is perhaps a little convenient, given contemporary views on sluggishness, or mental lethargy, and their connection to folly; Somer’s slothfulness may have been positively encouraged by Henry and the court as comical, the kind of behavior that marked a fool as a fool. It probably made for a nicer life.
N.B. (cont.):
The Times has put out a guide to being a good party guest and party host. [I recommend you read Max Beerbohm’s “Hosts and Guests” to learn which, spiritually, you are, and then proceed from there. (As for me, I believe I am one of the shyest hosts in the world, but then you already knew this, because you know that I am a Managing Editor of an email newsletter.) —Steve]
The Journal, not to be outdone, claims “The Drink of the Summer Is an Icy-Cold Glass of Dry Sherry.” [I’ll support it. You can be assured, at least, that “The Cask of Amontillado” is not set in summer. —Steve]
“In the index for volume one of Sylvia Plath Day by Day, I have over 100 entries on shopping—by herself, with her mother, with boyfriends, with a boyfriend’s mother, with girlfriends, with her grandparents, with the children she babysat.”
A rundown of how the local Post got into its current trouble.
New issue: Literary Review of Canada July | August 2024 [As linked to above.]
Kinky Friedman died on Thursday, June 27. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Hidden Entry” by Leslie Williams
Look for me in the fields of hospice-heather, thistledown, bold
skeleton & cotton dress, pomegranates hem-stitched, begotten
fleece—unassisted wooly scene, bittering
to abscond with morphine stream above the winter
landscape—here’s Moses putting down
his arm, the dwelling place, the wrecking
ball, the shining thing I sought—you know I’m out here
mudlarking, skyfaring among the broad
contrails and recommitted to the cricket, my wild twin.
[This is from Williams’ Matters for You Alone (May), her third collection.
I love the playfulness and intimacy that runs throughout this collection. Some of my favorite moments are ones, like the closure of this poem, where Williams pulls in a second- or third-person pronoun, and with it, that sudden intimacy of direct address. She does this in the opening to another poem, “Dream of Being Alive,” where she says
Because we most love what we best lose
ourselves in, let’s pull on sweaters, enter
the story again
And then again in “Love is the Crooked Thing,” which ends
All this, and what I could never see
was any space between us.
I love those lines, and they function well as a kind of mini ars poetica for the collection: there’s so much attentiveness to peculiarities of the landscape and how they can be painted beautifully—lines like slick ice crust into soft confectionary or the orange fox last night, sighted like a lantern / in the open place—but again and again in the book, Williams lands on human intimacy, in all its beauty and shortcomings and failed attempts—as her primary concern: the wrecking / ball, the shining thing I sought. I love how “Hidden Entry,” the penultimate poem in the collection, merges her attentiveness to landscape and her attentiveness to intimacy in its final gesture: recommitted to the cricket, my wild twin. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
July 2 | Belt Publishing
Best of the Rust Belt
edited by
From the publisher: Many have an opinion on what the Rust Belt is. It’s the “blue wall,” “Trump country,” the “flyover states,” or the “real America.” Or maybe, as our own president has said, it’s a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness. But undeniably, there’s something that connects the region. Maybe the question isn’t what defines that connection, but who.
Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We’ve collected our favorite writing from our dozens of anthologies, from Pittsburgh to Gary, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more, documenting growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidating the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan. Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier, Connie Schultz, Brian Broome, Megan Stielstra, Vivian Gibson, Aaron Foley, Kathleen Rooney, Sarah Kendzior, Phil Christman, and more.
Also out Tuesday:
Tin House: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams
What we’re reading:
Steve has been out of town and so didn’t read anything.
Julia is still reading Gravity’s Rainbow and Paul Mariani’s The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of the Poet in the Twilight of Modernity (2019).
Critical notes:
Since the late 2000s—that is, since the rise of the first all-pervading social media platforms—self-franchising has dominated the literary world in two different ways. The first, obviously, is through the emergent genre known as autofiction: Jenny Ofill, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Chris Kraus, Sally Rooney and Karl Ove Knausgaard, among others, who have marketed a sensibility, a lifestyle, a vibe, directly through their writing, which is famously not about stories, characters, dramatic events, but rather about a fictional stand-in for the author, who has a highly wrought sensibility and a lot of leisure time to be able to think about things.
Autofiction is a form of solipsism refined into a high art: as Knausgaard once put it, echoing Margaret Thatcher, “in reality, there is no such thing as the social dimension, only single human beings . . . if you want to describe reality as it is, for the individual, and there is no way, you have to really go there.” It’s also highly antagonistic toward the novel as a preexisting genre: writers of autofiction view fictional characters and plots as artificial, manipulative, banal, and escapist.
- details the motivation for and construction of her recent piece in our sister publication on Lake Erie on paranoia in the internet novel:
Second, that there’s an approach to highly political art—what she calls “legibly political art,” which clearly establishes its ideological convictions through mapping out abuses of power—that is aesthetically facile and just . . . boring. It explains too much; it proselytizes to the viewer, instead of allowing the viewer to participate in the work. This work is critically acclaimed, Gogarty suggests, because we assume that informative art is politically useful art. What if that’s not the case? Why do we believe that simply presenting information about some systemic evil is enough to solve it?
An excerpt from Charles Taylor’s new book (Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, May):
Eliot, in The Waste Land, articulated in unparalleled fashion the mood of searching among the younger generation, and all the more effectively in not jumping in with ready-made answers. I would bet that it is the most read and cited poem Eliot ever wrote. (Later, he does attempt to answer these questions, in a Christian frame, and those works were brilliant, but perhaps less widely appreciated.) But even without the answer to its defining question, the poem helps define its epoch, and to orient those who lived through it. They were looking for orientation, for a “way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”; what Joyce tried to do through myth, and Pound through his ordering of the literary tradition.
[We linked to reviews in WRB—May 29, 2024 and WRB—June 19, 2024.]
- on meter and Donald Justice:
Metric verse also seems, to Justice, “to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable.” If you can later recall, and then express, an emotion in metric verse, you must to some degree have mastered it; you were not left speechless and at its mercy. If this is meant as a claim about meter’s aesthetic power, the power is an extrinsic one: the virtue is not in the verse’s perceptible rhythm, but in something that the rhythm is a distant sign of. Justice acknowledges as much when he says that “the very act of writing at all” implies “an attempt to master the subject well enough to understand it”; meter just “reinforces” this impression already given by other features of the act.
[Cf. Dr. Johnson on “Lycidas”:
It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of “rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel.” Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.
Now Dr. Johnson is right that the death of Edward King is maybe seventh on the list of what “Lycidas” is concerned with, but on the principle of the thing I side with Justice. —Steve]