All your collegiate
Grief has left you
Dowdy in sweatshirts
WRB
N.B.:
March’s D.C. Salon will meet this evening to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
April’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Diana Brown, Owen Paul Edwards, Celeste Marcus, Will Snider, and Kelly Xio, will take place on Wednesday, April 9 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”
And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.
Links:
In UnHerd, Colm Tóibín’s introduction to a new edition of Washington Square by Henry James (1880, 2024):
James was prepared to disrupt the sacred seamlessness of his fiction to evoke this square as belonging to his memory, his primary sense of himself which could be brought back now only in words. He was claiming Washington Square for himself as much as for his fiction.
What he was doing also was registering the complexity of change. The house in memory, the house that has been demolished or erased, was not merely a vehicle for soft recall, easy nostalgia. Using an old house in a novel, naming it even, taking back what had been lost, was, for him, a process whereby rooms, once familiar, once full, become alive or almost so. These rooms were handed to characters who had themselves come to claim them.
[It’s a more restrained version of Joyce’s desire “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book,” and one that recognizes that the city in memory is unique to the person remembering and built up from those memories. —Steve]
In , an excerpt from a collection of essays from Benjamin P. Myers (Ambiguity and Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, and Poetry, 2024):
In [Joy Harjo’s] newer poems, the urge is often expressed very directly, interrupting the lyrical flow with plain statement. “I will find my way home to you” ends the delicate and lovely “Cricket Song.” “Goin’ home goin’ home” forms the blues-like refrain of another poem. Another musical poem, “One Day there will be Horses,” ends with a strong sense of yearning: “One day, I will have love enough / To go home.” When these poems of longing for home are read alongside Crazy Brave (2012), in which Harjo recounts a childhood disrupted by an absent father and a series of lost homes, it is not hard to imagine where this longing originates. Yet Harjo’s poetic gift is to turn the personal roots of this sorrowful need into something more universal, something more Augustinian. She does this largely by avoiding direct confessional narrative and instead channeling the poem’s emotional energy into image and lyricism. “Every poem is an effort at ceremony,” she says in “In Mystic,” which begins with the arresting image of “a cross of burning trees, / Lit by crows carrying fire in their beaks.” In “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet,” she says, “Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return / in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.” For Harjo, the ceremony of return is a ceremony of wholeness.
Dylan (repeating what St. Augustine said in a dream):
“No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own
So go on your way accordingly
But know you’re not alone”
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”
“Home,” he mocked gently.
“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.”
[A much better and more complicated poem than the one bit that gets quoted (“‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’”) would tell you. —Steve]
Reviews:
In the local Post,
reviews Andrea Long Chu’s new collection of essays (Authority, April 8):“At least until the 1970s,” Chu writes, “criticism in the United States was . . . an amoral institution with an openly political mission: it posited the critic’s openness toward all ideas as the taproot of a liberal temperament.” She can make this claim only because she omits to mention any of the most fabled magazines that emerged during this period. Commentary, Dissent and, above all, the Partisan Review were far from open toward all ideas; they were decidedly leftist, as were many of their most celebrated contributors. Similarly, Chu can maintain that twentieth-century criticism became “a kind of informal state agency, and the critic a kind of bureaucrat” because she declines to clarify what in the world she means. What are we to make of the baffling assertion that the mid-century critic’s job “was the general expansion of thought by technocratic, rather than political, means”? Her example of a supposed technocrat of the mind, Lionel Trilling, did just what Chu herself does: He persuaded readers by making arguments when he could and charming them the rest of the time. In what sense is this strategy “technocratic”? And what would a “political” critic do instead—make threats, or unionize readers?
[It’s not just Chu arguing that Trilling is a supercilious bureaucrat; here’s A. O. Scott:
While Trilling and other academic power brokers succeeded in placing The Great Gatsby on the highest shelf of modern literature, they also turned the novel into homework. Reading can be fun, but in a democratic culture the argument from authority—the idea that we’re supposed to read certain books because they’re important—often backfires, branding the books in question as boring, and their admirers as bureaucrats and snobs.
Useful in thinking about the question of critic as bureaucrat is Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017). (Chris had some notes on it in WRB—Mar. 1, 2023.) As Daniel Smith noted in a review (which we linked to in WRB—Aug. 23, 2023), North addresses a shift in criticism and finds the technocrats in a different place than Chu does:
In the late 1970s literary studies embraced literary theory. This adoption of theory as a dominant mode of doing literary criticism, followed by a theoretically-informed turn to historicist analysis of literary works, is often celebrated by academics as a victory for the left. But this is, North notes, better seen as the triumph of the forces of neo-liberalism. Following the 1980s, North writes, literary studies became increasingly technical, a discipline of “professional scholarship, or ‘technological expertise’” (he is quoting Terry Eagleton). The scholars won, the critics lost, and literary studies turned away from the world.
Even if we take “technocrat” at its most pejorative—“bloodless blithe unconcern, for experts only”—how this would apply to Trilling is beyond me. As Scott sees it, critics who make judgments open themselves up to charges of being snobbish bureaucrats by doing so, in which case, yes, Trilling makes judgments. Being charitable and taking this to mean only critics who conflate criticism and judgment still makes me wonder why Chu and Scott would single out Trilling; why not make one of the New Critics the whipping boy, if you have to?
North:
In Leavis, and in the tradition that followed out of and reacted against him, this emphasis on criticism as a scene of judgment rather than of education can at times become very pronounced. . . . What can one say about this reduction of criticism to facile questions of rank?
“Facile questions of rank”—at least Leavis, attempting something similar to but not quite criticism, had to put four Romantic poets into an order there. Now you can just make the appropriate thumb gesture depending on whether the work (or critic, as the case may be) has good politics or not. It’s even easier—and a kind of judgment removed from critical judgment, drawing on other sources of authority.
I sympathize with the impulse to rid criticism of questions like “what is the correct ranking of these Romantic poets” (even if that battle was fought and won a long time ago), but judgment is still essential. As John Guillory notes, we need to be aware of what is being judged; “if the relation between literary study and the criticism of society is not one of identity, neither is it one of mutual exclusion.” To judge a text is a different thing than to judge the world. But to throw judgment out altogether is to throw out an important source of critical authority. Judgment is unavoidable, and being afraid of it is pointless. —Steve]
In our sister publication across the pond, Tessa Hadley reviews Mavis Gallant’s uncollected stories (The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg, January) and a reissue of one of her novels (Green Water, Green Sky, 1959, 2024):
The details matter because they are clues to the lives in the stories. Gallant’s temperament is the opposite of a universalizing one: she doesn’t believe that people’s experiences and feelings are the same under their different clothes. She thinks, like an anthropologist, that the clothes—and the rooms and the domestic habits and the politics on the streets—make all the difference to the way lives and feelings are experienced. She needs to speak with omniscient authority about what she sees (nobody inside a story can see the whole picture as she can) yet must at the same time submit to the worlds the stories describe. Judgment is opaque, only realised through the particularities of each case. Gallant was a hugely self-doubting writer—there are those scraps in the waste basket and also her anxious letters, hungry for validation, to Maxwell. (“I have no judgment of my own work . . . and really, very little confidence except during the actual period of writing, so that I rely a great deal on what you think.”) And yet inside the stories her narrative positioning is forceful; she has a journalist’s preference for statement over hesitation, objective overview rather than subjective immersion. This is the paradox of her style.
[We linked to an earlier review of the uncollected stories in WRB—Jan. 25, 2024.]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Mitchell Abidor reviews a translation of the last volume of a novel by Peter Weiss (The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III, 1981, translated by Joel Scott, March 25) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 22, 2025.]:
The best known of the historical characters in the novel is Bertolt Brecht, who briefly lived in Sweden before coming to the United States. While there, the novel’s Brecht plans to write a historical play about clashes among royal families in medieval Scandinavia. He sets his large crew of assistants and admirers to work assembling documentation for its composition. Weiss’ recounting of the plot of the proposed unfinished play is a master class in literature as a production process. We watch amazed as Brecht converts the royals of over 600 years ago into avatars of the class struggle of the present day. Weiss presents Brecht’s famously egocentric character in a simple image: the protagonist, who is part of the research team (and whom Brecht ignores as a nonentity) tells us, “I struggled against the thought that it should be enough of an honor to be allowed to enter into his house, and thought that he might at least have offered us a glass of water.”
In the TLS, Ben Hutchinson reviews two German biographies of Rilke (Rilke: Dichter der Angst: Eine Biographie, by Manfred Koch, January; and Rainer Maria Rilke oder Das offene Leben: Eine Biographie by Sandra Richter, January):
It was at this point that Rilke’s major work began. Koch’s biography acknowledges as much by starting, counterintuitively, with death in Paris, and in particular with the novel that would ultimately emerge from this period, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). The protagonist, Malte—a young poet who is essentially a placeholder for the author, as Richter shows by drawing on Rilke’s unpublished diaries—sees death everywhere around him in the modern metropolis, drawn as he is to dispossessed figures such as beggars and street sellers. While it has become something of a trend in contemporary criticism to reclaim Malte as Rilke’s central achievement—a way, perhaps, of pushing back against the kitschier excesses of the poetry by foregrounding the harder, expressionist prose—it allows for some nice comparisons across the genres. Richter sees Rilke’s prose, in contrast to his poetry, as refusing redemption; Koch works in the other direction, seeing Rilke’s emblematic panther not as an objective “thing,” but as a subjective sufferer, trapped in his cage in the same way that Malte’s marginalized figures are trapped in their city. Both biographers agree that the early prose is significantly stronger than the poetry, functioning as social criticism—at times even, as satire—of fin de siècle Prague.
[Modernist poets loved starting off their careers with nineteenth-century kitsch. Especially for the English-speaking ones it’s an understandable mistake—the only people interested in historicizing were Pre-Raphaelite types—but still. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
A Ford employee, recently retired, recorded thousands of his colleagues’ mixed metaphors and malapropisms over the past decade. [I’m going to start saying “too many cooks in the soup.” —Steve]
The correspondence between Dorothy L. Sayers and Ezra Pound. [Basically what you’d expect. —Steve]
On Sir Francis Carruthers Gould, the first staff political cartoonist at a British daily evening newspaper.
Novels based on other novels. [That’s the problem with novelists these days—they’re all reading novels instead of going on whaling voyages and things like that. —Steve]
New issue: The Believer Issue One Hundred Forty-Nine | Banquet Ghosts | Spring 2025
Poem:
“To the Evening Star” by William Blake
Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves, and while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wing sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares through the dun forest.
The fleeces of our flocks are covered with
Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence.
[The evening star is Venus, which unfortunately is not visible at the moment from the Eastern Seaboard. In fact, for the rest of the year, Venus won't be the evening star at all. In April, she will reemerge as the morning star, visible near the horizon just before sunrise.
As for the poem itself, I love the sonics. The sibilance of the repeated S is soothing. Venus is visible at dusk, as the sky is pink and lavender and things are dimmed but not yet too dark. The mood is restful, safe, and calm. While no rhyme carries you through the poem, the alliteration serves a similar purpose, linking together the lines as you progress through the evening. In the turn, Blake contemplates the loss of Venus (the very astronomical period we are in today) and considers the danger of the wolf and the lion. The last couplet, though, shows a firm faith in her powers. It is a statement that the sheep are graced with her silvery dew. His supplication is polite—you learn from the Greeks you should never command a god to do anything for you—but it is full of confidence in her benevolent protection. —Grace]
Upcoming books:
Scribner | April 1
The Usual Desire to Kill: A Novel
by Camilla Barnes
From the publisher: Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983.
Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”
This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.
Also out Tuesday:
Belt Publishing: The Pocket Rhubarb Cookbook by Nina Mukerjee Furstenau
New Directions: Covert Joy: Selected Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson
Oxford University Press: Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon by Frederick Reece
Wave Books: Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Education of Henry Adams. [Mostly I have been thinking “he’s just like me!” after each complaint that he just wasn’t educated for these times. (The Education of Steve Larkin is not coming to bookstores near you anytime soon.) He does have that his last name is Adams, though. Man, I wish. (This is the kind of thing I’m talking about.) —Steve]
Critical notes:
Patrick Kurp: “[Montaigne] describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger.”
In Slate, Laura Miller on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) at 40:
Social media feeds lack coherence and nuance; the medium itself discourages both. As Illing told Klein in their podcast episode, “McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed; look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed; look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” In the 40 years since Amusing Ourselves to Death came out, we’ve learned that the more competition there is for the audience’s attention, the more inflammatory the content vying for it tends to become.
[In conclusion read the Washington Review of Books, product of the world’s last eighteenth-century crank.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book, and I’m happy it’s reentered “the Discourse,” but at a certain point you just have to put the phone down. All the books in the world (let alone all the thinkpieces) won’t do it for you. —Steve]
- on Aeschylus and Madame Bovary:
In my view, Flaubert’s blind beggar is the Erinys of the road to Rouen, a place of perdition. Of the dread goddesses’ various spheres, the most relevant to Emma is their guardianship of oaths—specifically, her marriage oath. They pursue oath-breakers the way he haunts her, like an atavistic incarnation of Aeschylean terror dreamed up by the landscape, like the archaic conscience of the place. In his mutilated, oozing eyesockets we see a reflection of Emma’s own psychic miasma and moral blindness which she is able to blink at and ignore only with effort. In fact, the beggar, with his staved-in beaver hat and idiotic laugh, could be the twisted twin of her husband Charles, whose red velvet-and-rabbit fur hat is described in detail in the novel’s first pages; its “dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face.”
[About Flaubert’s details Childers says:
I do recall James Wood, in How Fiction Works (2008), remarking on “the tiresome burden of ‘chosenness’ we feel around Flaubert’s details, and the implication of that chosenness for the novelist’s characters,” a barb Wood aims at an even more minor figure who is only glimpsed once at a ball and never again. I can imagine, for a hard-working critic like James Wood, a sense of responsibility to explicate every detail may indeed feel fatiguing. Nonetheless, I find the Flaubertian “chosenness” much less tiresome than rich.
Maybe every detail in Flaubert carries unbearable symbolic weight and makes his work collapse under their collective pomposity (I certainly don’t think so), but I have no idea why anyone would frame that objection in terms of “chosenness.” It makes the alternative—what, that writers are not choosing what to include and what not to? Even writers famous for writing quickly and with little revision are still choosing what words to write down, and, even if Flaubert gave it more thought than most, everyone has to decide on the details. once gave as a rule of criticism “try to assume everything is on purpose”—if you don’t think writers care enough to do things on purpose, why bother reading them? —Steve]
- on Fanny Price and other “boring” characters:
A criticism that’s often levied against these characters is that they “don’t have any flaws,” when in fact they do have flaws—small lazinesses and cowardices, the choice not to assert their own needs and desires, the inability to stand up to their friends over what they believe in. They have the flaws that we would least like to see in ourselves, so we refuse to see in them—flaws that are much less photogenic than an overabundance of cleverness or fortitude.
We avert our eyes from this interior drama because it would make us ask whether you can avoid big, obvious mistakes and nonetheless have significant moral failings. The character arc these characters often go through—realizing these small failings and overcoming them—does not have the satisfying catharsis of a dramatic apology or an earthshattering realization, but rather the embracing of quiet courage, more unselfrighteous humility, turning away from selfishness and toward others in small ways that will not win us any applause from fascinated masses.
[Paradise Regained is actually about a perfect hero who does nothing, though. —Steve]
- Moul on a new poem possibly by Robert Southwell:
One of the most interesting features here, though, is that the piece of verse attributed to Southwell is different from almost all the rest of the surviving Latin poetry. The Latin verse is fairly classical in style, and it is all written in either hexameter (a long poem on the Assumption of Mary, the single most substantial piece, plus a poem on the Pentecost, dated 1580) or in elegiac couplets (including fragments of what appears to have been originally a sequence of nine or more “elegies,” a bit like the surviving Liber Elegiarum of Thomas Campion). Hexameters and elegiac couplets are the most common meters of Latin verse composition at this period, and they are the meters all boys learnt to compose in first. The only exception to this is a short rhyming hymn or verse prayer to Mary, “O virgo clemens et pia,” not included in the early editions of Southwell but added at the end in Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney’s more recent Collected Poems.
[In the right mood Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” is my favorite devotional poem. I always appreciate taking a conceit as far as it will go, which Southwell does, but he also breaks it apart almost immediately. The child is both the furnace (“my faultless breast the furnace is”) and, somehow, being burned inside it (“‘in fiery heats I fry’”). The connection between the two is this: “love is the fire.” In its self-sacrifice it consumes itself. —Steve]