WRB—May 29, 2024

Like a D.C. cowboy

In one of the comments on a draft Google document (which contains notes on a theory of consciousness), a Managing Editor writes, “This newsletter should fully develop the art of citing without citation marks.” As you know, citation serves a strategic function in the Washington Review of Books. Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writ­ing of the past and the present a similar kind of meeting tran­spires; citation functions as go-betweens in this encounter. It is therefore not surprising that Managing Editors must be discrete and know how to perform their work incognito. 

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on the evening of June 15th. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Propaganda: do you know it when you see it?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In The Hedgehog Review, a discussion with Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman about poetry, faith, and grace, directed by Abram Van Engen. Wiman:

  You mentioned Milton, Abram. He said, “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights and live laborious days.” So it is a clear spirit in that poem. He thinks of fame as a kind of noble ambition. But it is also an infirmity—the last infirmity of a noble mind. It’s both. I always wanted for the dead to make a place for me. It’s not necessarily projecting forward. Instead, I want to be recognized by the dead. I want Yeats and Eliot and Milton to scoot over a little bit on the bench and make a place for me. And that seems okay. I mean, it’s good to have a noble ambition. It’s always seemed to me the greatest compliment for a poet is if someone would come up to you and have your poem memorized but not know who you were—not know who wrote it. They just had the poem itself. That seems to me the greatest honor. And freedom. Because the poem has done it. You’re not involved. You’re gone. So I think there’s always this tug between the ambition for the work and the need for humility in the world. But it’s ambition for the work. The kind of ambition that wants to win the Pulitzer Prize—that is not a noble ambition. We all have it, but it’s not noble. That’s more than an infirmity. That’ll kill you. Because you’re feeding a hunger that is not finally able to be filled. You get one thing, and you want the next. It’s just endless.

  [There is, of course, the rather crude method of having the dead make a place for you Dante employs in Limbo; but who else could use it? —Steve] [Wiman references the poet and critic R. P. Blackmur here, who appears in Eileen Simpson’s memoir Poets in Their Youth (1982). Simpson writes that Berryman cited the essay that Wiman references as the one that “changed my life”: 

  The art of poetry
  is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
  by the animating presence in the poetry
  of a fresh idiom: language

  so twisted & posed in a form
  that it not only expresses the matter in hand
  but adds to the stock of available reality.

  —Julia]

• In The Montréal Review, Haim Marantz on Solzhenitsyn:

  My point is simply however to draw attention to something that seems to me to be typical and universal in Natasha’s cry and the way in which her author’s mind, though it clearly is deeply concerned with her plight, is yet drawn in the comments she makes about the table and the regulations, one pathetic and the other ironic, in a way that reminds me of Charles Dickens, as to the meaningless cruelties and stupidities of the Soviet regime, and how little they seem to yield to his—Solzhenitsyn’s—attention, and, therefore, how clearly and forcibly his bitten frustration sounds through. I intend no criticism in this comment. After all, what else could he do? His task, as I understand he saw it, was to bring to life a world in which there was no life, a world, that is, in which the kind of novel Lawrence had in mind when he spoke of the novel as “the one bright book of life” cannot exist. It is not surprising that in place of the complex, immoral, lively, generous, heartless Oblonsky, we have the shallow, simple crook Rusanov; that in place of the social web, in which Obonsky lives and grows, we find in Solzhenitsyn’s novels generally a close grid of regulations, in the tiny interstices of which isolated, and so consequently reduced, individuals hide. It is clear to me—and not just to me—that Solzhenitsyn spoke and wrote as a victim—a powerful great victim, but a victim nevertheless—of his own society.

• In the Times, Benjamin Balint on Kafka’s legacy:

  It struck me then that the readers who come closest to the essence of Kafka’s singular vision are those who recognize the irony of taking a proprietary attitude toward a writer so faithful to his own non-belonging, and so careful to set his characters—antagonists against authorities divine, political and paternal—in no particular time or place. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka writes of his “infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things.” Despite his deep feeling for Yiddish theater and for the Hebrew language, that yearning unmoored him from any kind of collective belonging and untethered his imagination to sail beyond any national canon, “obedient,” in his words, “to its own laws of motion.”

  [Happens to the best of them. Florence is still occasionally trying to get Dante’s bones back. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on the Beatles and Max Beerbohm, Chris on “purple and breathless” adjectives, Julia on eros and resistance, Charles Taylor, “referential fiction,” Tom Lehrer, showing and not telling, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]