WRB—May 27, 2026
“moment of fashionability”
Gradus ad Washington Review of Books
Links:
In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Susan Choi’s introduction to a reissue of Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories (1981, May 26):
Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself.
[My knowledge of Houston mostly comes from The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003). It’s a shame Barthelme died too early to see that saga. I would have loved to see what he could make of it. —Steve]
In Harper’s, Katie Thornton on the Esparantist dream:
There’s a pattern here: whenever the global order enters a new state of disarray, the movement sees a resurgence of interest, just enough to keep the crusade from dying out. Its historic proximity to success is a legitimizing anchor for the movement. But it can also function as a bit of an excuse—allowing believers to attribute its failures to repression or bad luck, a fluke of history, rather than consider the possibility that language alone may be insufficient to foster world peace. Compelling as Esperanto’s interna ideo may be, I found it hard to imagine mere mutual comprehension overcoming the worst of human politics.
Making my way through Mendel University’s campus buildings en route to one of dozens of available breakout sessions, I was approached by Seyed “Amir” Javadi, an Iranian hotelier who now lives in Germany. “Come to my hotel!” he shouted in Esperanto, waving brochures at me. “Free for Esperantists! I cook! I teach dance classes!” To prove this last point, he grabbed me by the waist and led me firmly through a basic German waltz, counting—“unu, du, tri”—before breaking into an a cappella rendition of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” with tweaked lyrics: Esperanto estas la lingvo por ni, por ni! Esperanto is the language for us!
[To me, this is Jacobitism. —Steve]
Reviews:
In the Journal, Michael Dirda reviews a reissue of a book by Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960, April):
Certain established giants—Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser among them—earn Fiedler’s disparagement, usually for overemphasizing realism. He’s not even particularly fond of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though he praises Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) as “an utterly convincing and terrible fiction” and suggests that Robert Phelps’ neglected Heroes and Orators (1958) is a better novel about same-sex desire than more celebrated books by Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Turning to Hemingway, he contends that For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) features “the most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel,” mainly because its author is “only really comfortable in dealing with ‘men without women.’” Fiedler even suggests that Moby-Dick (1851) might be our “greatest love story,” though “cast in the peculiar American form of innocent homosexuality.”
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 8, 2026.
Men are from America, women are from Europe. This is in Henry James somewhere, I think. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Joanna Biggs reviews a new novel by Makenna Goodman (Helen of Nowhere, 2025):
In a play such as David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992), about a conflict between a successful male professor and a struggling female student, the man might be confronted more directly onstage. But Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. Goodman’s prose is clear rather than complex, and carefully calibrated to each of her characters; the book’s form corrals the natural speed of her sentences into act-length shapes that one moves around in one’s head like puzzle pieces. In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t yet spoken to whom? How on earth is this going to end?
[The closet drama is going to make a comeback, I tell you. (All that time I spent thinking about Seneca is finally going to pay off.) This new wave, though, will I think have in mind being read aloud by small groups just as much as being read alone. —Steve]
In the Times, Christian Lorentzen reviews a novel by Gwendoline Riley (The Palm House, April):
It’s the aptly named Shove who tells the staff that he wants to make Sequence, a haven of critics and historians, into “a sort of London version of The New Yorker.” Putnam and his colleagues ask what this will entail. Listings? Restaurant reviews? More newsy items and lifestyle coverage? “As long as it’s not boring,” says Shove. “That’s our motto now.”
It’s not exactly what the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown called “buzz.” The staff wonders if Shove considered Sequence boring when he took the job. He starts opening his editor’s notes with lines like “What is it about dogs?” and “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T. S. Eliot famously wrote.” His other colorful habits include chattering about Twitter and celebrities and wheeling about the office on his chair. One senses that Sequence comes from a time before chairs had wheels and that its editors would have preferred to stay there.
[The old Sequence would have gotten linked to all the time in here. —Steve]
In the local and free Beacon, Dominic Green reviews a biography of the Rolling Stones (The Rolling Stones: The Biography, by Bob Spitz, April):
The Jagger-Richards power-sharing agreement worked, with Jagger offshoring the business and Richards leading the band. It also reflected the band’s songwriting balance of power. But Jagger and Richards realized after Altamont that the rock business is a death cult, with someone always marked for sacrifice. They insist that “It’s only rock ’n’ roll,” but, as in the Athenian drama, it is and it isn’t. If it’s a show, it’s the greatest show on earth, and if it’s the greatest show on earth, it has to be much more than a show. But after Altamont, no one wants to die anymore. What remains is, as the movie title had it, performance, reenacting the Boomer ritual.
Thus corporatized, the Stones roll on forever. No one ever wonders whether it is an accident that their early erotic triangulations coincided with their best music. No one apart from Anita states the obvious: Keith is the recurring point in all the triangles. Everyone, especially Mick, wants Keith. Richards affects not to notice this, though for decades he taunts Jagger as a homosexual by mocking him as “Brenda,” Private Eye magazine’s nickname for the old queen, Elizabeth II. As Jagger wrote in “Angie,” “There ain’t a woman that comes close to you.”
[“It’s Only Rock ’n Roll,” that statement of purpose, contains these lines:
If I could stick a knife in my heart
Suicide right on stage
Would it be enough for your teenage lust?
Would it help to ease the pain?
The answer to this, as to all the other questions Jagger poses, is “Oh, no, it’s only rock ’n roll . . . ” That “oh, no” has a double meaning. It denies that the Stones are in the business of suicide on stage, but it is also a literal answer to the questions. It would not be enough for your teenage lust, it would not satisfy you, it would not be enough for your cheatin’ heart. The song can gesture to death, but the Stones aren’t in that business anymore. —Steve]
N.B.:
The UK is using beavers to prevent flooding.
If you write a bunch of letters you can get profiled in the Journal. [Is this how I can get the WSJ to cover the WRB? Do I actually have to start sending out the fabled Print Edition? Also one of Patrick Kurp’s blog posts this week featured a Timothy Steele poem, “Old Letters.” —Steve]
Joyce Johnson on Jack Kerouac. [For those interested in this kind of thing, which I am not. —Steve]
Turkic influences on Narnia. [For those interested in this kind of thing, which I am not. The Horse and His Boy (1954) was my favorite Narnia book as a kid, though. —Steve]
[The best YouTube channel released a 50-minute video about Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Fux (1725). I am sure that at least one reader of the WRB is attempting to learn counterpoint and will find it helpful. —Steve]
New issues:
Harper’s Magazine June 2026 [As linked to above.]
The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 10 / June 2026 [They have a cricket column now. —Steve]
Sonny Rollins died on Monday, May 25. R.I.P.
Poem:
Délie 237 by Maurice Scève, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth
As my Lady reached toward the honeycomb,
Out darts a Wasp, testy as Death,
And stabs its sting into her tender flesh:
Her face ashen with pain, she says
Ha! it’s not this little Bee
Whose bite I find so dire:
I fear love may have opened fire:
Why fear? I say, coming to the point.
It’s not love, my Dear: When he attacks,
His sting is sweeter, & more entire.
[I love the move from the bee sting to Cupid’s arrow to the more ambiguous work of the poem (“I say, coming to the point”), as well as the poem’s images circling around sweetness and pain until they meet in the last line.
Speaking of circling around: wanting to read more on Scève I read an article by Katie Kadue on the emblems Scève puts in the Délie as a kind of meme, in which she says:
The Petrarchan lady, whose typically aristocratic profile is sometimes reproduced in the frontispieces to these collections, is generically singular: Tu sola mi piaci, Petrarch sighs to Laura; Seule je te choisi, seule aussi tu me plais, Pierre de Ronsard sighs to Hélène (a similar tune to the one he was sighing to another lady, Cassandre, not long before); “Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed,” Fulke Greville proclaims, twice, of Cælica. All these poets seem to be relying on an old trick from an old book, Ovid’s early first-century Art of Love, which instructs its reader to “choose to whom you will say: ‘You alone please me’ [tu mihi sola places],” a smooth line that, as it happens, Ovid ripped off from an older book, by Propertius. What these special ladies have in common—indeed, what makes them special—is their quintessential commonness, their infinite iterability. The poet-lovers, too, are in possession of a paradoxically generalized hyperindividuality. Nothing could be more conventional than for a lover to feel like he is inventing something, even if, as any Renaissance poet trained in the rhetorical art of inventio would know, to “invent” is simply, etymologically, to find something that was already there.
The problem faced by all of these poets is this: they desire to have invented their ideals while being aware that they have not. This failure to have been invented is a kind of betrayal—the betrayal that, as it happens, Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) is yelling about at the end of Vertigo (1958):
He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over, only better! Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words! And those beautiful phony trances! . . . Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say?
In other words, did he, and not I, invent you? Is this creation that I poured myself into not actually mine at all? In crafting my poetic ideal, did I mostly crib from Petrarch? (Sieburth notes in his introduction that Petrarch is the only poet the Délie mentions, in one case as “this Tuscan Apollo”—there are archers more effective than Cupid. And in Astrophel and Stella Philip Sidney tries suggesting other people not do what he has done: “You that poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes / With new-born sighs and denizen’d wit do sing: / You take wrong ways.”) In Scottie’s case, he has to believe that he has made his fantasy real on his terms; the mere suggestion that he has not ruins it. Petrarchan poets, working with tropes instead of women, are well aware that they have not made their fantasies real and, having consulted the literature, find what is already there.
Going back beyond Petrarch to the Roman poets we find a strange approach to originality that at least honestly confronts the problem; they all claim to be the first to do this or that, but the specific thing they are the first to do is bring something previously existing (Greek) into Latin. Virgil does it in the opening of Georgics 3: Primus ego in patriam mecum, modo vita supersit, / Aonio rediens deducam vertice Musas (“I will be the first, as life lasts, to lead the muses from the Aonian peak back to my own country”). Horace does it in Odes 3.30: princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos / deduxisse modos (“first to join Aeolian song to Italian rhythms”). In Book 5 of De rerum natura Lucretius does the same thing with Epicureanism: hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus / nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces (“I am now found the first able to translate this into our native language.”) And Propertius, near the start of Elegies 3.1: primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos / Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros. (I’ll let Pound take this one: “I who come first from the clear font / Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy, / and the dance into Italy.”) These are all claims to originality, but the originality of the poet is the originality of the inventor in the old sense.
Maybe best to let Berryman have the last word here (this the sestet from Berryman’s Sonnets 40):
A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled.
We dinch “eternal numbers” and go out.
We understand exactly what we are.
. . . Do we? Argent I craft you as the star
Of flower-shut evening: who stays on to doubt
I sang true? ganger with trobador and scald!
While trying to track down whether Scève’s use of ampersands was an influence on Berryman (Sieburth says in his introduction that he has preserved them from the original) I ran across this 2012 interview of Sieburth in the Brooklyn Rail. The whole thing is worth your time—one of the best interviews I’ve read in a while—but here’s a sample with some connection to the above:
Sieburth: Well they fairly soon figured out that this was what is called “a craft course.” We would say, okay, here’s a sonnet, what are you going to do with it? Because if you go back to the Renaissance, translation was taught in the schools as part of an overall training in rhetoric. You’d be asked to take a French text and rewrite it into Latin, or a Latin text and rewrite it into French, and somehow in the course of the back-and-forthing between these two languages you would somehow learn how to capture an energy—the energeia—behind language. In French they still call this exercise thème et version: Latin into French, French into German into Latin. And you know who was a master at this game, the kid who won every first prize?
Rail: Rimbaud.
Sieburth: Bingo. The reason why Rimbaud is so interesting is that we have so few examples of poetic prodigies. We have musical prodigies, we have mathematical prodigies, and we have chess prodigies, and that’s exactly what Rimbaud was, because he had figured out that poetry was numbers—the old term for poetry. He had understood in his Latin classes that poetry was numbers, music, and kind of like playing chess. This is what he learned in high school.
“Rimbaud, poetic prodigy” does a lot to explain “Rimbaud, guy who stopped writing at 20.” —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Atlantic Monthly Press | June 3
Drayton and Mackenzie
by Alexander Starritt
From the publisher: James Drayton has always found things too easy. Ambitious, brilliant, disciplined—he graduates with a top first from Oxford and is on track to become the youngest ever partner at leading management consultancy McKinsey. His former classmate Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive dreamer: charming and restless, his boundless enthusiasm matched only by his knack for self-sabotage.
When Roland takes a job at the same firm as James, the two men only vaguely remember one another. But as the financial crisis starts to unfold, a chance encounter sparks an idea, and an unlikely partnership begins to take shape. Sent to Scotland to shutter offices and lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: What if they were made for more than this? What if they could build something grand and lasting—something that might even change the world?
By turns intimate and panoramic, Drayton and Mackenzie is a deeply intelligent novel about ambition, friendship, and the forces shaping the twenty-first century—the story of two men caught in, and determined to master, the tides of history.
[Also from the publisher: “Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year—the first work of fiction to grace the list in fifteen years.” The next time somebody translates Balzac they should put Marx and Engels’ praise of him on the cover. —Steve]
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy
HarperVia: Meeting New People: A Novel by Daniel M. Lavery
University of California Press: Dionysiaca by Nonnus, translated from the Greek by Robert Shorrock (books 1–12), Camille Geisz (books 13–24), Mary Whitby (books 25–32), Tim Whitmarsh (books 33–40), and Berenice Verhelst (books 41–48)
What we’re reading:
Steve read Richard Sieburth’s translation of selections from Maurice Scève’s Délie (Emblems of Desire, 2007) (as discussed above). He also started on another collection of Martin Amis’ essays (Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions, 1993, February).
Critical notes:
Now, a clever reader might object at this point, “Well, what about a hipster type who doesn’t want people to know about their special tastes? Aren’t they just hoarding social capital?” Yes and no, perhaps. No one gets it like I get it could be someone essentially saying, “Other people who engage with this will see it as agreeable at best, or as a piece of cultural capital to show off their taste, but I perceive the beautiful in this thing, and I want to preserve that experience.” So paradoxically, an apparent snob might be invested in the universality and permanence of an aesthetic experience, while a popularizer might be using it a) to make a buck, or b) to pose with it and have a moment of fashionability before they discard the thing in the trash heap along with all the other fads, thereby destroying the sensus communis, the universal and timeless moment of beauty. I think people who work in museums and art education probably struggle with this: how to make aesthetic experience accessible enough to the public, but also communicate its importance and rarity. I think the best art criticism also does this: it’s welcoming without dumbing down.
Sieburth, in the interview linked to above: “My relation to Pound was I guess always pedagogic. He was this crackpot professor I might totally disagree with but he assigned the best homework.”
[Last month I had some notes on a piece on difficult authors where I described the kind of shameless elitist I like as trying to get everyone to give art a chance. (Pound again: “The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep.”) That’s also what we’re up to here at the WRB—it’s not like society has chosen to award honor to the writers of email newsletters. (Yet! Subscribe!)
The educational work of a museum, though, puts the question as starkly as it can be put. (I’ve studied the question carefully, and it turns out more people visit art museums than make it through 800 words of rambling collage about the Petrarchan tradition to reach the last item in the WRB.) You have to let the art speak for itself, and yet you also have to speak for it. What I think of as the standard bad art museum caption, which focuses on one detail of the work, throws in a little historicization, and then asks you your thoughts about it, is probably the most obvious approach—and also a great example of the most obvious approach not always being the right one. If anything, it trusts the art and the audience too little. —Steve]