WRB—May 24, 2025
“thrilling way to think”
The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in reading an issue of the WRB which has already been read by others.
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:
Two in Harper’s:
John Jeremiah Sullivan on Mark Twain:
On a Wednesday night in March, according to the Civil and Military Gazette, he lectured in a “queer rambling style” before a “large and enthusiastic audience.” The crescendo came when he read aloud the passage involving that moment, the famous moment, in “the story of Huck Finn and Jim the slave,” those deathless sentences “with whose humor such a quaint strain of pathos is blended,” and which describe “the struggle of a sound heart against a deformed conscience.” At the end of the struggle, the reporter had Twain say, “My conscience was very sick, but I myself was powerful glad.” That language does not appear in the novel itself. Either Twain read a variant draft or the reporter mistranscribed his remarks. Most likely the latter. Huck is not being cute, at that moment in his and Jim’s story, after he has decided, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” (Those italics on “go”!—the full meaning of them, of the sound of them, could never be explained to a non-native speaker, and can hardly be parsed by a native one; they represent, without a doubt, a high-water mark in the history of idiomatic American prose; to have italicized “I’ll” or “hell” would have put the emphasis on Huck’s personal heroism, but to italicize “go” indicts, instead, an entire monstrous moral code: “Fine, you motherfuckers. I’ll go to hell, before I send Jim back to the plantation.”)
[You can see what Sullivan got from Guy Davenport later in the piece, when he introduces a reflection on Twain by Adele Amelia Gleason, which was also published in the Civil and Military Gazette:
It has never been noticed or quoted or cited before, not even by the Twain scholars. I am not sure how that happened, how it slipped through the net. I suppose its being published in Lahore had much to do with it.
That contemptuous article in “the Twain scholars” recalls a footnote of Davenport’s in an essay in The Geography of the Imagination (1981):
You can also see in this book a photograph of Edgar Allan Poe inspecting the fossil skeleton of a prehistoric horse: a photograph still unknown to the Poe scholars.
(My attention was first called to this footnote by here.) And, besides knowing Davenport, Sullivan also wrote an introduction to a reissue of The Geography of the Imagination that came out last year. (We linked to it in WRB—Jan. 13, 2024.) Being a great writer—and Sullivan is great, one of our greatest—involves knowing from whom and how to steal. —Steve]
Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Olivia Lasky and Damion Searls) on the digital age:
Images draw even the most distant things closer, but their presence is illusory; it is a fiction. This perhaps applies to nature as a whole—we see it as an image, as something we aren’t part of, something that’s out there and that at the same time we have been drawn toward and are close to, familiar with. The ambivalence of the image—showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and non-fictional at once; both near and far—can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren’t entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world. When I recognize, for example, that forests are disappearing, species are going extinct, the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are getting warmer and rising, deserts are expanding, fires are ravaging ever-larger areas, there is something unreal about it all. I know that it’s happening—it’s not that I don’t believe it—but at the same time it’s like it isn’t happening. It has a whiff of the abstract about it. And although I’m horrified, I’m not connected to it, not really. It’s something out there that I see in here. I’m not a part of it; I’m standing outside it, watching. Surely the most precise word for that condition is “alienation”? The loss of the world.
[The Wordsworth classic states:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The argument is not that we cannot see nature, or that we have lost our powers; it is that we use our powers to create our own alienation. —Steve]
In Liberties,
on the hundredth anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader:She does this with chiasmus too. Tolstoy proceeds “not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards.” Like Johnson, she makes snappy judgments that might at first sound parochial but which are sharpened by an under-the-skin understanding of literary construction: George Eliot “allows her heroines to talk too much”; Defoe “leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a large part of human nature.” And she genalises with Johnsonian magnificence (who wrote in the Life of Cowley that “Great thoughts are always general”): “The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces.” The Common Reader is founded on such general phrases. “The impressions of childhood are those that last longest and cut deepest.” “There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly.” All Johnsonian phrases, all written by Woolf.
[The account of Woolf’s excellence Oliver gives (“She selects the right facts—the shining ones, intricate and revealing as carved stone—and she arranges them in careful display”) echoes, surprisingly enough, Pound’s explanation of his method of “Luminous Details” (which, in less high-falutin’ language, is “Shining Facts”) in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911):
In the history of the development of civilization or of literature, we come upon such interpreting detail. A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of a period—a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort. These facts are hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electrical circuit.
And it would be hard to confuse the critics who took Pound’s vision most to heart—Hugh Kenner and the previously-mentioned Davenport probably foremost among them—with Woolf or Dr. Johnson. That such different critics can be said to have the same excellences indicates, under all differences and style and approach, what the work of a critic is: to identify what in the vast material under consideration is important, and then to explain why. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Lizzie Hibbert on the hundredth anniversary of Mrs Dalloway:
Then into all this longing stumbles war-ruined Septimus. A car backfiring in the street sends him into paroxysms of terror. He believes he sees his dead comrade, Evans, in the park. He believes “the leaves [are] alive; the trees [are] alive.” These are the symptoms we associate with shell shock: crippling anxiety and paranoid delusions. But Septimus is more a creature of Shakespeare than of modern psychiatry. Before the war, he fell in love with a Miss Isabel Pole, who “lectur[es] in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare”; he volunteers in 1914, the narrator tells us, “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square.” He returns from France as the archetypal Fool who speaks the truth. Septimus is the only character in Mrs Dalloway who really reckons with the war: with “the voices of the dead”; with “how wicked people are.”
Mrs Dalloway depicts a world in the wake of a catastrophe, but a catastrophe which virtually no one can acknowledge. One “[gets] over things,” as Peter assures himself. Life “ha[s] a habit of adding day to day.”
You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on! . . .
O yes, you would . . . why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft . . . they never cease—
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.
In The New Criterion, Jonathan Gaisman on Beethoven’s last piano sonatas:
Beethoven’s last piano sonata, in C minor, Op. 111, is in two movements only. There is nothing particularly unusual about a two-movement sonata. His teacher Haydn composed several, and there are five preceding examples in Beethoven. Nor is there anything novel about such a work’s comprising a resolute opening movement in the minor followed by a more singing finale in the contrasting major. The Op. 90 Sonata, composed as late as 1814, observes just this scheme. But what was a merely aesthetic differentiation of character in the earlier work becomes here a matter of the profoundest philosophy. The elements of classical music are now exposed in fundamental terms. The argument of Op. 111 at its most basic is reducible to two chords: a diminished seventh—a series of superimposed minor thirds—and a major triad. Here are question and answer, dissonance and harmony, conflict and resolution. And these in turn give rise to yet deeper meditations on the relationship between opposing values: how it is that concord is implied by and hidden within discord—that there is never just “either/or” but always “both/and.”
[I have to quibble with Gaisman’s suggestion that
The dotted rhythms and syncopations of the third [variation] suggest paroxysms of exultation rather than, as is often (and disappointingly) proposed, some sort of prefiguration of jazz or boogie-woogie.
Well, as he says, it’s “never just ‘either/or’ but always ‘both/and.’” I’ll grant that the specific influence of Beethoven’s last piano sonata on the development of boogie-woogie is almost certainly zero. But both Beethoven and black pianists in Texas at the end of the nineteenth century found that this sort of approach to the piano could convey “paroxysms of exultation,” and so they set about using it. They can be compared by their embrace of a similar discovery made at different times in different traditions. It doesn’t mean that Beethoven foresaw boogie-woogie. To steal from Davenport myself, sculptors in the Cyclades in the ninth century B.C. did not foresee Constantin Brâncuși, but we can still remark on the similarities of their art. And besides, Beethoven couldn’t have been Jerry Lee Lewis even if he had wanted to; those early pianos couldn’t have taken it.
(If you have not heard Jerry Lee Lewis’ performance of “Mean Woman Blues” from Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964), you owe it to yourself to click that link. If I were permitted one track to demonstrate what rock ’n’ roll is, it would be that one.) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Art crime is up in the past couple years.
A brief history of Tristan da Cunha, the most remote populated island in the world.
Adrian Chiles [The best in the game. —Steve] on how to end a phone call properly. [I love phone calls. Whatever happened to them? —Steve]
John Donne devised his own method of letterlocking.
“It’s Time to Kill the Casual Workplace” [Machiavelli put on his regal and courtly garments to read the classics; I put on a tailcoat before I start working on the WRB. —Steve]
“Mocktails Cost $15 and Nobody Knows Why” [What we really need is a kind of soda that is less sweet. (What I personally need is a ginger beer that is less sweet and has way more ginger in it.) —Steve]
New issues:
Harper’s June 2025 [As linked to above.]
The Lamp Issue 28 | Easter 2025
The New Criterion Volume 43, Number 10 / June 2025 [As linked to above.]
Alasdair MacIntyre died on Wednesday, May 21. R.I.P.
In The Lamp, Robert Wyllie:
I think MacIntyre was one of those few individuals who are seized by a fundamental questioning mood, deeper than any practices or institutions, a perplexity that can be described in art or phenomenology but not by a linguistic analyst of maxims.
Poem:
Sonnet 99 by William Shakespeare
The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love’s breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol’n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol’n of both
And to his robbery had annex’d thy breath;
But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or color it had stol’n from thee.
[The warm season is upon us, a perfect time for love poetry. With love poetry, there are poems that drop us in medias res and immerse us in the romance—sometimes the first glances of a new, shy love or the deep currents of a years-long relationship. But others reflect back on a love gone by—torn by evils or death or distance.
As compost from last year’s plants feed this spring's blooms, death provides rich soil for love. Shakespeare was keenly aware of the cruel passage of time and what it takes from us. The ghost of his lost love lives on in the beauty of the flowers, but this beauty wounds him. The remembrance brings no solace, only rage. He happily consigns the flowers to death though he knows it will not bring back his love. This is not a poem of happy endings and closure. —Grace]
Upcoming books:
Pamela Dorman Books | April 27
The Bombshell: A Novel
by Darrow Farr
From the publisher: Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Séverine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes, and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French American daughter of a politician, Séverine knows she’s destined for bigger things.
That is, until one night, Séverine is snatched off her bike by a militant trio fighting for Corsican independence and held for a large ransom. When the men fumble negotiating her release, the four become unlikely housemates deep in the island’s remote interior. Eager to gain the upper hand, Séverine sets out to charm her captors, and soon the handsome, intellectual leader, Bruno, the gentle university student, Tittu, and even the gruff, unflappable Petru grow to enjoy the company of their headstrong hostage.
As Séverine is exposed to the group’s politics, they ignite something unexpected within her, and their ideas begin to take root. With her flair for the spotlight and newfound beliefs, Séverine becomes the face of a radical movement for a global TV audience. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Séverine steps into the biggest role of her life.
An electric novel by an extraordinary new talent, The Bombshell is filled with seduction and fervor, and explores the wonders and perils of youthful idealism, the combustibility of celebrity, and the sublime force of young love.
Also out Tuesday:
Random House: Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty
Riverhead: Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston
Slant: Vanishments: Poems by Eric Pankey
Thames & Hudson: The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story by J. P. Mallory
What we’re reading:
Steve started reading The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams (1943). [Since La vita nuova is a Certified Stevie Lark Classic I’ve had this one on my list for years. —Steve]
Critical notes:
In Defector, Dan Sinykin on close reading:
But close reading is not just for academics, and it deserves a bigger audience. Not because it’s virtuous. Not because it makes us better people. (I know some great close readers who are real assholes.) But because it’s a thrilling way to think with others, to claw back some of the time taken from us daily by tech oligarchs (I have looked at Twitter impulsively several times while writing this pointedly long, difficult sentence), and relearn some of our capacity, atrophied into passivity by algorithms, for aesthetics, a term that arose in modernity to name a storehouse of values in dialectical opposition to those of capitalism: above all, treating texts as ends in themselves rather than as means to productive ends—treating them, that is, as art.
[I am reminded of these tweets from Katie Kadue:
If you think close reading is a “rare” practice you do not know what happens in countless girls’ group chats every day. They are submitting text messages, Instagram captions, DMs, dating app messages, etc. to levels of hermeneutic attention that put the average literary studies monograph to shame.
A friend recently told me that she thought part of the appeal of Jane Austen’s work to generation after generation of young women is its focus on determining what boys actually mean. (It can be very difficult, I hear.) On occasion this takes the form of literal close reading—when Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr. Darcy’s letter justifying his conduct, she “commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence,” and that careful repeated scrutiny enables her to determine the truth of the letter’s assertions and, by doing so, understand her own situation as well.
The commitment to devoted analysis goes beyond written communication from potential suitors; it applies to the whole of the men in question. Austen’s women will not be able to make the most important decision of their lives wisely unless they can see through the Mr. Wickhams and Mr. Willoughbys and Henry Crawfords and Mr. Elliots of the world, and such men try hard not to be seen through. Doing so requires sustained and serious thought. Austen specifically mentions that the prejudices Elizabeth brings to her initial reading of the letter gradually disappear precisely because the lines of argument she follows prove them incorrect. And, as Elizabeth discovers, conducting this analysis carefully forces her to be aware of her own faults that impede it.
For Austen this is not merely an approach to romance; it is an approach to life, of which romance is just one part. Elizabeth’s reflection is not all that different from Fanny Price’s when she refuses to join in putting on Lovers’ Vows or Emma Woodhouse’s realization that her belief in her ability to determine events has prevented her from knowing what is actually going on around her. And Austen’s novels, by inviting close reading, allow their readers to test out that skill in the world of the novel so they can better apply it to real life. On an initial naïve reading something like Emma is a challenge to the reader: were you blindsided like Emma was, or were you more perceptive? And then, on repeated readings, the question becomes: why were you blindsided the first time? What clues did you miss? Why did you miss them? They were there the whole time—were you not reading carefully enough? Why weren’t you? Austen’s challenge is not merely to be better readers of novels, but to be better readers of the life they reflect.
One last thing: out of respect for MacIntyre, I want to quote his defense of Fanny Price in After Virtue (1981), which situates her among Austen’s other challenges to readers:
Fanny’s lack of charm is crucial to Jane Austen’s intentions. . . . the charm of an Elizabeth Bennet or even of an Emma may mislead us, genuinely attractive though it is, in our judgment on their character. Fanny is charmless; she has only the virtues, the genuine virtues, to protect her.
Her virtues give her understanding, and her lack of charm forces readers to use their own understanding. (Unfortunately, the story of MacIntyre bellowing at some poor undergraduate panelist that Fanny Price was Austen’s most virtuous heroine, causing said panelist to faint, is greatly exaggerated. I am indebted to , who was there, for that information. It’s a great story, though.) —Steve]
In ,
on Henry James and the work of a critic:James wrote perhaps his most famous work of criticism, “The Art of Fiction,” in 1884, in response to a lecture earlier that year by English novelist Walter Besant. His syntax communicates his excitement for the subject: “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” Great novels are a “delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting . . . . Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere.”
The novel, James stressed, “must take itself seriously for the public to take it so.”
Throughout the essay, James speaks of the novel as inseparable from life itself. “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life,” he claims, following that with a definition of a novel as “a personal, a direct, impression of life.” James could be rather romantic: “As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel.” Such a sentiment is quite idealistic, but we can forgive a novelist who loves his art form enough that he has high hopes for its cultural effect.
- Moul on Jack Clemo:
Clemo—born in 1916—was significantly older than the other two [poets in Penguin Modern Poets 6 (1964)], though like them he was still quite early in his poetic career in the 1960s. The son of a clay pit worker in Cornwall, he became deaf as a very young man and blind while still in early adulthood. His poetry is full of the landscape of the clay pits, which he combines with a devout Calvinist faith to very memorable effect.
. . .
Clemo returns again and again to an association between the bleak and broken industrial landscape of the clay-pits and the humiliation and suffering of the incarnation and crucifixion. I find this guiding metaphor very powerful and also quite unusual; I would be interested to know if any readers can think of other poets making any similar link to the industrial or post-industrial landscape? Blake, with his juxtaposition of the “dark, Satanic mills” and the new Jerusalem is the obvious example, but his point is quite different—for Blake, mass industry is Satanic, a force working against the salvation of the people. Whereas Clemo sees in the realities of labor and its effect on the land an image of the incarnation.
[“And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the clay would immediately cry out.” I believe Christ said this during his childhood trip to England with Joseph of Arimathea—the specific region he is usually said to have visited is Clemo’s West Country, after all. —Steve]