WRB—June 7, 2025
“an obviously futile exercise”
Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
Links:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Morten Høi Jensen on Thomas Mann:
The Marxist critic Georg Lukács, one of Mann’s most perceptive and admiring readers, once noted the “complete absence” of utopianism in his work, saying, “Thomas Mann is a realist whose respect, indeed, reverence, for reality is of rare distinction.” It’s true that there is nothing fantastical or visionary about Mann’s writing—indeed, the Joseph novels are a kind of secular retelling of the Bible, in which the most miraculous episodes are recast in human terms. But there is also a strong sense when reading Mann—perhaps too strong, at times—of a writer who has left nothing to chance. One enters his novels as one enters an elaborately well-constructed building; slowly at first, but with increasing admiration for the care and thoughtfulness of the detail throughout. At a reading in Vienna, an admirer once said to Mann: “What lends your works dignity and lovableness is that when you present them you seem to be saying, This is absolutely the best I can do.”
I first read Mann when I was 18, probably at the encouragement of my father and grandfather, on whose shelves Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus loomed with encyclopedic promise. I remember going to the secondhand bookshop in Copenhagen where I liked to spend my afternoons and buying a copy of Death in Venice. When I put the book down on the counter, the owner jerked his head back and exclaimed: “Why, that’s Thomas Mann!” He sounded like someone recognizing a long-forgotten actor assumed to be dead.
[I have a friend who was recently telling me about a copy of Death in Venice, a book she didn’t think she owned, mysteriously showing up at her place. Why, that’s Thomas Mann indeed. —Steve]
Reviews:
- reviews a novel by James Lasdun (The Horned Man, 2002):
We might also consider the scene when Pentheus dresses as a woman and note that he does this in order to disguise himself so that he can spy voyeuristically on women taking part in “revelries” on the mountain outside of Thebes. Miller claims that he “discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in [Pentheus’] behavior,” but is there really something hidden to uncover here about Pentheus’ actions, or is the most obvious explanation the appropriate one? The Horned Man reimagines this scene when Miller disguises himself as a woman to infiltrate a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, ostensibly to gain intel on Trumilcik, but in light of what we learn later, we have to say that there’s nothing dignified about Miller’s sleuthing, and the simplest explanation of his actions is, again, most likely the correct one. In fact, we could even wonder whether Miller, in respecting the text rather than seeking to dismantle it, might have been able to avoid his own demise. Ricoeur writes that in making oneself contemporary with the text, the interpreter makes the text his own and it is “his own understanding of himself that he pursues through his understanding of the other. Every hermeneutics is . . . self-understanding by means of understanding others.” Had Miller sought to understand Pentheus, or to understand Dionysus, rather than to explain their actions through the lens of a strong theory, he might have grasped the self-knowledge he sought.
[Who hasn’t been deranged by reading Euripides? —Steve]
In The New Yorker, James Marcus reviews the LOA collection of Margaret Fuller’s work (Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings, edited by Megan Marshall and Noelle A. Baker, February) and two books touching on her (Finding Margaret Fuller: A Novel, by Allison Pataki, 2024; and Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, by Randall Fuller, January):
The result of her travels was Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, published in 1844. Fuller turns out to be an excellent nature writer, pinning flora and fauna and leviathan-sized Midwest clouds to the page. She sees, too, how the scale of the landscape modified the psychology of its white settlers, who were more accustomed to the close quarters back East. “Here a man need not take a small slice from the landscape,” she writes, “and fence it in from the obtrusions of an uncongenial neighbor, and there cut down his fancies to miniature improvements which a chicken could run over in ten minutes.”
The rawness of the terrain near the Rock River, in Illinois, strikes Fuller as a divine statement. She declares that “there was neither wall nor road in Eden, that those who walked there lost and found their way just as we did, and that all the gain from the Fall was that we had a wagon to ride in.” There are many other such memorable moments. The author also varies the texture of the book by inserting poems, quotations, dramatic dialogue, a veiled account of her unhappy days at boarding school, and a lengthy digression on the German mystic Friederike Hauffe, who claimed to be clairvoyant and to communicate with spirits.
[Bright Circle was the Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 22, 2025. The Managing Editor insists that the best Transcendentalist nature writing can be found in Thoreau’s The Maine Woods:
Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.
But then you do not write about Ktaadn for sociological purposes. —Steve]
In the TLS, Jeremy Allen reviews a book about Jacques Brel’s most famous song (Ne Me Quitte Pas: A Song by Jacques Brel and Interpreted by Nina Simone and Others, by Maya Angela Smith, February):
Smith goes beyond Simone’s studio version from 1965, in particular drawing attention to the emphatic rendition recorded for French television in 1971, where Simone apparently now understands the words she’s expressing, before a telling moment of self-consciousness. Towards the end of the performance, she suddenly slips in “Sorry about the words, y’all,” presumably anticipating any disapproval from the Académie française. During another version, she peppers the song with “Oh Lord,” a jarring though effective interlocution. “Her use of ‘Oh Lord’ in the second verse introduces a world that is not only linguistically foreign to the song and the genre but also culturally rich, historically relevant, and representative of Simone’s lived experiences,” writes Smith. “In my own listening, the ‘Oh Lord’ gestures to Black spirituals and their role in survival.”
Like the song transmogrifying to be heard, Smith seeks out other versions, most prominently Shirley Bassey’s “If You Go Away”. Bassey infuses her cover with exaggerated facial expressions and dramatic, interpretive hand movements, elevating the interpretation with theatre. “I’m blown away every time I hear it,” writes Smith. “I just don’t expect my heart to break a little more every time like I do with ‘Ne me quitte pas.’” Intriguingly, Bassey’s version has the line about becoming the “shadow of your dog” reinserted (although, of course, it’s hard to imagine the Diamond Diva cowering in a kennel). It’s in this chapter on Bassey that Smith digs deep into song translation, presenting it as a fine balancing act where singability, sense, naturalness, rhythm and rhyme are all held in productive tension.
[I probably have stronger opinions about which of Scott Walker’s Brel covers are good and which are not than is fitting for someone whose French is basically nonexistent. So much of it, I feel like, comes down to an uncanny valley between English and French popular music—listen to Scott Walker’s “The Girls and the Dogs” and then hear the organ sound on Brel’s original “Les filles et les chiens.” Could Brel not hear how tacky it was? (If you really want to experience the uncanny valley start listening to the “rock and roll” of Johnny Hallyday—the name already gets you there.) And any native of the Anglosphere who has watched an Éric Rohmer film will be familiar with watching his characters enter a bar or club and immediately hearing some of the worst imaginable music. What are they doing in France—is it entirely a question of stress patterns in the language?
Lest this seem too harsh towards the French, let me attack an iconic English-language pop song by saying that Claude François’s “Comme d’habitude” is much better than “My Way,” which Paul Anka produced by writing new lyrics to the melody of “Comme d’habitude.” —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
An interview with the guy who selects new flight routes for United Airlines.
“Scientists Can’t Get Enough of Watching Seagulls Steal Your Food” [I should have been a scientist. Never gets old. —Steve]
New issue: The Dial Issue 29: Fathers
Edmund White died on Tuesday, June 3. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Water Makes Many Beds” by Emily Dickinson
Water makes many Beds
For those averse to sleep—
Its awful chamber open stands—
Its Curtains blandly sweep—
Abhorrent is the Rest
In undulating Rooms
Whose Amplitude no end invades—
Whose Axis never comes.
[I have the same birthday as Emily Dickinson, which is something I’ve told people when trying to propel them to remember it—an obviously futile exercise and moreover emotionally ill-advised—and we are also both from Massachusetts. As such, I feel a certain reverential affinity. These inanities aside, it's difficult to find something to say about Emily Dickinson that hasn’t already been more capably expressed elsewhere. Nevertheless! I chose this poem to inaugurate a series of poems that I’m planning to write about for the next few Saturdays. The first of the interlocking subjects will be “water,” followed by “the body,” and then finally “beauty.” I wanted to bring some different pieces into conversation with one another rather than writing about one poem alone and this seemed like a straightforward (if possibly hamfisted) way to do so.
To me, this poem is first animated by its contradictions. “Water makes many Beds” but apparently just “For those averse to sleep.” What is a bed for someone averse to sleep? Something a little haunting, maybe, or else perhaps electrifying. And also, the sea, its potential ferocity, an “awful chamber,” stands in contrast with the supposed blandness of its movement. The back half of the poem builds in part on this notion of blandness, calling forth awe or even dread, but not because the sea is terrifying. Because it is seemingly interminable. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Princeton University Press | June 10
The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear
by Nan Z. Da
From the publisher: At the start of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between The Tragedy of King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist and post-Maoist China. Da, who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, brings Shakespeare’s tragedy to life on its own terms, addressing the concerns it reflects over the transition from Elizabeth I to James I with a fearsome sense of what would soon come to pass. At the same time, she uses the play as a lens to revisit the world of Maoist China—what it did to people, and what it did to storytelling.
Blending literary analysis and personal history, Da begins in her childhood during Deng Xiaoping’s Opening and Reform, then moves back and forth between Lear and China. In her powerful reading, the unfinished business of Maoism and other elements of Chinese thought and culture—from Confucianism to the spectacles of Peking Opera—help elucidate the choices Shakespeare made in constructing Lear and the unbearable confusions he left behind.
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer
Indiana University Press: On the Deities of Samothrace by F. W. J. Schelling, edited and translated by Alexander Bilda, Jason M. Wirth and David Farrell Krell
What we’re reading:
Steve read Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024). [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 21, 2024; we linked to reviews in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024, WRB—Sept. 28, 2024, and WRB—Oct. 5, 2024. It’s good to do things eight months late.
Rooney has such a fine eye for detail, especially in her streams of consciousness. That Peter and his brother Ivan are compulsive overthinkers, intent on finding all the possible meaning in every interaction they have, lets Rooney depict circles of self-recrimination and the almost magical means by which those caught in them are released: the touch of a loved one, something happening in the world around them, the mysterious process by which memory calls up one thing and then another. (The passage after Peter has a fight with his stepmother about his brother is exceptional here; his anger flows into angry memories of the past into more pleasant ones into a struggle and then an articulation of a defense of his brother into something like peace. All very smooth, and all in the space of a page and a half.) Their mutual concern with being “normal people”—Rooney should title all of her novels that—lends itself to the same repeated focus on how to be in the world and act in it that characterized Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), this time thankfully free of tedious emails included in the text. At its core this is a novel of observation and musing.
But to be content with observation and musing fits poorly with Rooney’s desire to give her readers a plot, and in this case one with a happy ending. Ivan starts secretly seeing a woman named Margaret, who has recently left her husband and is a decade and change older than he is. By the end of the novel, she is willing to acknowledge this relationship, despite the potential social consequences in her small town. Peter is torn between Naomi, a much younger woman he sees non-exclusively mostly for sex, and Sylvia, the ex-girlfriend who broke up with him after she suffered severe injuries in a car accident, injuries which prevent her from having sex. Years later, Peter and Sylvia are still not over each other. This story ends, hilariously, with Naomi and Sylvia meeting each other while looking for him and coming up with the idea for a polyamorous arrangement involving both of them. They pitch it to him, and he agrees. These are happy endings for Peter and Ivan only inasmuch as a defined and public relationship is a happy ending. There are several obvious problems ahead for both of them, which the novel does not bother to investigate.
One possible defense of this is that the plot-driven novel has always worked this way; it’s not like Jane Austen described what happened after the marriages of her heroines, after all. But, while Austen does not describe the marriages of her heroines, her novels depict plenty of other marriages. These marriages, only some of which are good, provide a framework for both the characters and the reader to understand what makes a marriage good or bad, and from them the reader can judge the ending. Intermezzo has nothing like this. The only romantic relationships we see are Peter’s and Ivan’s. (Margaret’s husband—she leaves him due to his alcoholism—does not appear in the story and mostly functions as a reason for Margaret to be gossiped about.) And, since the novel has no idea how to judge these relationships, it idealizes them.
The characters do as well, and it is hard to say whether this is the author rubbing off on her characters or vice versa. For them, relationships are proof of that elusive normalcy (especially for Ivan, who associates his abnormality with Peter’s declarations that he’ll never get a girl). This reaches its height in Peter’s thinking about polyamory. He has no moral objections, he just worries at first that it would put him outside the limits of normal: “he almost wants to forget the idea, throw both of them over and find some nice normal girl instead, someone without any radical intellectual commitments or bizarre sexual proclivities, yes, someone normal.” Normal enough for a novelist to consider it a happy ending, at least.
Even as the characters reduce all moral questions to the rather low ground of “normal or not”—the main problem, apparently, with Ivan’s teenage misogynist phase is that it was weird—they end up idealizing those aspects of “being normal” they do not hope to attain just as the novel idealizes their relationships. At one point Margaret thinks the following:
But then Anna has a husband, and now even a baby, both of whom offer her in different ways the love and devotion that supersedes and makes irrelevant the pleasure of praise and compliments. It seems hard in Anna therefore to condemn Margaret’s vanity, which has been so painfully starved in recent years, when Anna’s own is fed by the incomparably hearty nourishment of unconditional love.
“Supersedes and makes irrelevant”? Only someone who has never had one frank conversation with a parent would think that having a baby could effect this. And this belief of Margaret’s recalls the ending of Beautiful World, Where Are You, where Eileen’s pregnancy, simply by being so, is a happy sign of hope in the future.
Organized religion also functions in a similar way as it did in that novel, with a pervasive “Church Going”-style wish that there could be something there without expecting or hoping for it. I invoke that poem advisedly. Peter thinks in the first few pages “In whose blent air all our compulsions meet” after stepping into Naomi’s room with its “fragrance of perfume, sweat, and cannabis,” Sylvia’s last name is Larkin (and she has a “sincere and transcendent love of Christ,” according to Peter, even if she never articulates how it affects her decisions), and at one point Peter and Sylvia talk about visiting different churches with “audio guides rhapsodizing over Martin Luther” or various popes, depending on whether the church is Catholic or Protestant. The whole thing takes on the sense of “isn’t it pretty to think so?”—somewhere out there all of this is real and means something, but not for us. We can’t get there.
It would be a bit too simple to attribute these underdeveloped complexities to a tension between the “artist” and the “romance novelist” (for lack of better words) in Rooney. There is no necessary opposition between them, for one thing. And yet the immense clumsiness of the ending, where the resolution provided by the form leaves everything unresolved, suggests that Rooney saw the problem and threw her hands up. But the novelist who wrote everything before that is a sophisticated one capable of solving this problem, if she lets herself. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- on some precursors to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”:
The idea of Leda as a precursor of the biblical Mary will be familiar to those who have studied “Leda and the Swan.” In his own commentary, Yeats spells out that he means to portray the rape of Leda as a “violent annunciation” which inaugurated, with the birth of Helen and the consequent fall of Troy, the heroic age of Greek civilization—just as the Christian age came into being with the birth of Jesus two thousand years later and, another two thousand years after that, as he thought, the prophesied birth of the rough beast of “The Second Coming” would usher in a savage, post-Christian epoch.
Could Yeats have picked up from Michael Field the notion that the fertilization of Leda’s eggs by Zeus is a sort of annunciation? There is little doubt, at least, that he read the poem. In 1901, he went to visit Bradley and Cooper, whose work had been neglected for years. “He knows our plays well and seems to care for them with insight,” Cooper noted in the women’s joint diary. “I was not prepared for this.” (She did not, however, care for his manner, disliking the affected way “his hands flap like flower-heads that grow on each side a stem and are shaken by the wind.”)
- Moul on combining Horace and Seneca in early modern English lyric:
The way the titles in Tottel blurs Horace and Seneca (without naming or acknowledging either) reflects connections between the classical texts. Seneca’s moralizing choruses are dependent upon and consciously reminiscent of Horace’s lyric in their meter, theme and often specific allusions. Here in Tottel, the similar titles and thematic overlap points to an “Horatio-Senecan” zone of classical imitation which would have been obvious to the point of banality to contemporary readers—anyone who’d even begun a basic commonplace book would know that Horace and Seneca “go together”—but is very far removed from how scholars and critics generally write about either Horace or Seneca today.
[I suppose if you were reading Seneca in the 1540s you had either the advantage or the disadvantage of being able to read his tragedies without immediately thinking “oh, this is where everyone writing revenge tragedies in English got all of their material.” And none of his tragedies would be translated into English and published for another decade or two. Here’s the not-very-straightfoward version of one of the passages at issue from Jasper Heywood’s 1560 translation of Thyestes:
Eche man him selfe this kyngdome geeues at hande.
let who so lyst with myghtie mace to raygne,
In tyckle toppe of court delyght to stande.
let me the sweete and quiet rest obtayne.
So sette in place obscure and lowe degree,
of pleasaunt rest I shall the sweetnes knoe.
My lyfe vnknowne to them that noble be,
shall in the steppe of secret sylence goe.
Thus when my daies at length are ouerpast,
and tyme without all troublous tumulte spent,
An aged man I shall departe at last,
In meane estate, to dye full well content.But greuous is to him the deathe, that when
so farre abode the bruyte of him is blowne,
That knowne he is to muche to other men:departeth yet vnto him selfe vnknowne.
Where Thomas Wyatt learned simplicity I cannot say—Horace, maybe—but he produced something better than this. —Steve]
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