WRB—Mar. 8, 2025

“a feeling akin to fear”

The WRB was published in pocketable editions, so that men could study it in the privacy of their homes, or could produce it in a church or an alehouse to knock down an argument with a text. Men coming to the WRB with no historical sense but with the highest expectations found in it a message of direct contemporary relevance. Take a young Welshman like Arise Evans, who came to London in 1629. He tells us how his attitude towards the WRB changed in the decade before the Revolution. “Afore I looked on the WRB as a history of things that passed in other countries, pertaining to other persons; but now I looked on it as a mystery to be opened at this time, belonging also to us.”

N.B.:

This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.

March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Leslie Jamison’s introduction to Helen Garner’s collected diaries (How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998, March 11) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  Garner writes with vivacity and precision about the process of writing itself, a subject that often drives writers into the clutches of self-referential tedium. (She is also wonderful on her own dreams, another thematic Bermuda Triangle, describing a dead body stuffed full of pens, or a woman nursing a large red bell pepper: “A slit opened in the capsicum’s side and it began to suck voraciously.”) She nails the frustration of unproductive writing sessions (“now that I’m sitting up in bed, pen in hand, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, all my little stored-up treasures turn their backs and hide in the shrubbery”) and confesses the sting of not being included in the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, but she gives us the good stuff, too, like the triumphant sensation of finding the right place in a novel for a detail that’s been “dogging” her for a decade. If Horace coined the term ars poetica to describe a poem that explains the art of poetry, then perhaps Garner has given us an ars diarii—insofar as these diaries skillfully, glintingly, make a case for their own mattering, a quicksilver manifesto sewn like a glimmering thread through these pages: “Meaning is in the smallest event,” she reflects. “It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

  [Housman says (in that thing on Swinburne that I am always and everywhere quoting, of course):

  It is a clear morning towards the end of winter: snow has fallen in the night, and still lies on the branches of the trees under brilliant sunshine. Tennyson would have surveyed the scene with his trained eye, made search among his treasury of choice words, sorted and sifted and condensed them, till he had framed three lines of verse, to be introduced one day in a narrative or a simile, and there to flash upon the reader’s eye the very picture of a snowy and sunshiny morning. Keats or Shakespeare would have walked between the trees thinking of whatever came uppermost and letting their senses commune with their souls; and there the morning would have transmuted itself into half a line or so which, occurring in some chance passage of their poetry, would have set the reader walking between the same trees again.

  Storing up treasures, figuring out how to use them, letting them reveal their meaning—that’s most of the game. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:

  • Michael Dirda reviews a biography of Ford Madox Ford (Ford Madox Ford, by Max Saunders, 2023):

    In 1908, at thirty-five, Ford launched The English Review, which during his editorial tenure—an all-too-brief year or so—he made the best literary magazine of its time. The offices, as the assistant editor, Douglas Goldring, recalled, “consisted of three floors above a poulterer’s and fishmonger’s shop,” and to reach them you passed by “suspended carcasses of rabbits, fowls, and game birds.” In the very first issue Ford printed Thomas Hardy’s controversial poem “A Sunday Morning Tragedy” (abortion gone wrong), Constance Garnett’s translation of Tolstoy’s “The Raid,” Henry James’s spooky “The Jolly Corner,” the opening of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and some of Conrad’s reminiscences. Later the magazine showcased work by Yeats, Ezra Pound, and E. M. Forster and helped launch the careers of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford paid his writers well, perhaps remembering the mantra of his grandfather Ford Madox Brown: “Beggar yourself rather than refuse assistance to anyone whose genius you think shows promise of being greater than your own.”

    [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—May 13, 2023. I had some notes on Ford’s current status in WRB—Feb. 8, 2025, and I read one of his fairy tales and talked about it down in What we’re reading today. —Steve]

  • Sally Rooney reviews a memoir by a contender for the title of greatest snooker player of all time (Unbreakable, by Ronnie O’Sullivan, 2023) and a documentary about him (Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything, 2023):

    This was a conversation about what a gifted individual owes to the public. With only the black left to pot, the frame and match were already over: O’Sullivan had won. In other sports, the sphere of play is coterminous with the sphere of competition—players are not obliged to do anything in excess of trying to win matches. But snooker is different. Professionals are expected to continue past the point of competitive advantage, until the internal logic of the frame itself has been exhausted, and the table has no more to give. All maximum breaks—indeed all breaks over seventy-five or eighty—have this quality of aesthetic excess, of formal purity, snooker for snooker’s sake. O’Sullivan had already gone far past mere competition by getting down to the final black. In walking away, or trying to, he seemed to be asserting his right to decide how far past that point he wanted to go.

    [In the sport I spend 90% of my time thinking about, football, aesthetic excess and formal purity are more or less opposed; if you draw the plays up well enough—this is the formal purity—no one will have to do anything obviously superhuman—this is the aesthetic excess—to make them work. The idea that they could be combined is thrilling to me. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Playing the hits in What we’re reading: Milton, radicalism and Dante; a fairy tale by Ford Madox Ford; I finally get around to Guy Davenport

• The things that stick in your head

• K. T. on a Poem by Jane Huffman about rest

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

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—Steve]