WRB—May 17, 2025

“the price of his paper”

I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of reading the Washington Review of Books, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

N.B.:

May’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, May 31 to discuss the question “Can lying be moral?”

Links:

• Dustin Illingworth
  on rooms in fiction:

  Looking further back, the garret offered the proto-modernists their own theater of humiliation. It is in the attic room that the Underground Man first emerges, paranoid, alienated, consumed with an ill-defined intensity. To avenge himself against the society that rejects him, he required only his disaffection and the confines of an attic. The narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) occupies a “broken-down coffin of a room,” a tiny space in which he rehashes petty skirmishes, slights, and revenge fantasies against his fellow townspeople. The cramped confines compel him toward the close and unbearable scrutiny of secret wounds. The room comes to resemble his febrile brain: claustrophobic, dimly lit, and inhospitable. (Later in the novel he spends the night in a jail cell. There is little discernible difference between the two spaces.) Hunger touches on Hamsun’s own experiences as a tenant. In an 1898 letter to the publisher Johan Sørensen, he wrote that he was living in an “attic where the wind blows through the walls; there is no stove, almost no light, only a single small pane in the roof.” Out of such rooms boiled the discontent that would define a significant path for the nineteenth century novel.

  [The narrator of Invisible Man puts the humiliation and the superiority together; he has been driven out of society and forced to hide in a room in some forgotten basement, but he lives there rent-free and doesn’t pay the electric bill for his 1,369 lights. —Steve]

• In Compact, Dan Hitchens on Dr. Johnson:

  Yes, you think whenever you read Dr. Johnson, this man knows life. The strange thing is that the effect is almost never depressing. It’s strange because he is so devoted to undermining consoling illusions. Moral illusions: “We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves.” Writerly illusions: “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.” Social illusions, as in his line about self-deprecation: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.”

  [I had some notes about Dr. Johnson’s cleverness in dispelling illusions and Paul Fussell’s book about him in WRB—Feb. 26, 2025. His work not being depressing is especially strange since the man himself was (if we want to apply the categories of the twenty-first century to him) depressed at various points in his life. It speaks to his greatness of spirit. He found these illusions in the world, but probably even more so in himself. And it did not make him supercilious; instead it made him a guide who understands the terrain and the mistakes and errors we are likely to make navigating it. He shows us the work he put in, too—not in his prose, which feels almost magical, but in the evident effort it took to learn what he knew about human nature. He worked and he suffered, and then he was generous enough to give it all away to anyone willing to read him.

  (That Fussell book, by the way, has loomed larger and larger in my mind since I finished it. I was talking to an old friend I hadn’t seen in the better part of a decade last weekend, and, as I was trying to describe to him one of the most important things I had realized in that time, I realized I couldn’t couldn’t have put it into words if not for the book. Can’t recommend it enough.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Peter Thonemann reviews a book about the little things of Rome (The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity, by Emily Gowers, January):

  Alas, at this point the metatextual imp who ruins so much good history-writing leaps up and whispers seductively in her ear: why not make your book about smallness and quirkiness small and quirky itself? “I have,” Gowers writes ominously, “chosen variety over depth in my short and incomplete forays into smallness.” The four heterogeneous and disconnected chapters that follow bear this out: a tightly focused essay on the symbolic significance of edible snails in an anecdote in Sallust’s Jugurtha; a discussion of how Roman historians use anecdotes and one-liners to explore the uneasy relationships between emperors and courtiers; a rather meandering account of the representation of minor annoyances in Cicero and other writers; and an overview of the strategic use of diminutives in Latin poetry and prose. There is nothing resembling a conclusion: with the bald claim that “Singly or en masse, small things can be an inspiration,” the book simply stops.

  It is a pity, because all four chapters are full of productive ideas. Gowers is an acute reader of Latin poetry—I loved her claim that the forest of diminutives in the poems of Catullus reflects a distinctive outlook on the world, “satirical, mocking, intimate, and self-diminishing all at once”—and one often gets tantalizing flashes of a superb, highly focused book on smallness and the Roman psyche.

  [Sallust’s anecdote (here’s the whole thing) really is bizarre: Marius and his army are ineffectively laying siege to a fortress on top of a mountain. A common soldier on water duty sees the snails, starts collecting as many as he can find, and before he realizes what he’s done he’s found a path up the back of the mountain. He tells Marius what he found, and Marius then sends a few men with trumpets and horns up the path and engages the enemy army outside the walls of the fortress. The Roman horns sound in the enemy rear, the enemy panics, and the Romans easily defeat them. Sallust then gives the takeaway—“Thus Marius’ rashness was made good by fortune and he gained glory through an error in judgment.” And it calls back to his programmatic statement at the beginning of the book:

  Without reason do mankind complain of their nature, on the ground that it is weak and of short duration and ruled rather by chance than by virtue. . . . But the leader and ruler of man’s life is the mind, and when this advances to glory by the path of virtue, it has power and potency in abundance, as well as fame; and it needs not fortune, since fortune can neither give to any man honesty, diligence, and other good qualities, nor can she take them away.

  That might be true in the abstract, but the people involved in the Jugurthine War were winning glory because fortune gave them soldiers who liked eating snails. (I have had escargot once and loved it, so no judgment here on the soldier.) —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:

• Johnny Keats, sensitive young man?

• Whether eclogues are good or not

• K. T. on a Poem by Marie Howe and hammers

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.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]