WRB—May 3, 2025

“lukewarm bore”

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of the Washington Review of Books in driving away love!

N.B.:

May’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Carlo Massimo, ​Molly McCloskey,​ Kelly Sather, and ​Ena Selimović, will take place on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Sudhouse DC. Readings begin at 7.

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Michael Prodger on J. M. W. Turner’s 250th birthday:

  The story behind his Snow Storm (1842)—that he was tied to the mast of a steamship to observe a blizzard at sea—is almost certainly apocryphal but he did have himself rowed to the centre of the Thames to make documentary sketches of pyromaniacal excitement as the Houses of Parliament were consumed by flames in 1834. There is a ring of truth too to the tale of Turner in 1810 standing in the doorway of his friend Walter Fawkes’s house in Yorkshire and jotting on the back of a letter visual impressions of a storm barrelling down the valley. He told Fawkes’s son, who was watching him, that he would see the same storm again in two years, this time in a painting. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, with its swirling vortex of stygian cloud, was first exhibited in 1812 and remains one of his most celebrated works.

  The mature Turner was never a painter of line but always one of mass, tone and light. For him the four elements were interchangeable; he treated land as if it were air and air as if it were water. “Indistinctness is my forte,” Turner acknowledged, but he used that indistinctness to express his pantheistic stirrings. The mists and vapors, deliquescing views and washes of color that took his paintings to the edge of abstraction and so appalled his contemporaries are not just emotions but expressions of the numinous. After all, as he famously said, “The sun is God.”

  [If you want to tell a cool story about a guy, you have to steal it from the Odyssey. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in our sister publication across the pond:

  • Lucie Elven reviews a reissued novel by Janet Frame (The Edge of the Alphabet, 1961, 2024)

    The Edge of the Alphabet is about trash, debris, dreams, the incommunicable and the excluded. It begins: “Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill-judged, costly, criminal—especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products.”

    The story follows an epileptic man, again called Toby Withers; a schoolteacher, Zoe Bryce; and an Irish bus driver, Pat Keenan. They meet on the boat from New Zealand and try to find their “place” in London. Told by Thora Pattern, a sort of clairvoyant with access to all three, the narrative steps into each character’s perspective in turn. Thora lives “at the edge of the alphabet,” a place “where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence.” The proposition Frame seems to be making is that marginality means semantic exile too; vivid, broken images are her characters’ alternative vehicles for communication. The text works according to a principle of difference. Loneliness pervades and lingers like damp.

    • Baudelaire (translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay):

      I swear to you that if I lived a thousand years

      I could not be more crammed with dubious souvenirs.

      There’s no old chest of drawers bulging with deeds and bills,

      Love-letters, locks of hair, novels, bad verses, wills,

      That hides so many secrets as my wretched head;—

      It’s like a mausoleum, like a pyramid,

      Holding more heaped unpleasant bones than Potter’s Field;

      I am a graveyard hated by the moon; revealed

      Never by her blue light are those long worms that force

      Into my dearest dead their blunt snouts of remorse.

      —am an old boudoir, where roses dried and brown

      Have given their dusty odor to the faded gown,

      To the ridiculous hat, doubtless in other days

      So fine, among the wan pastels and pale Bouchers.

    • T. S. Eliot:

      A broken spring in a factory yard,

      Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left

      Hard and curled and ready to snap.

  • Michael Ledger-Lomas reviews a collection of William Morris’ work (William Morris: Selected Writings, edited by Ingrid Hanson, 2024):

    This commodification of medievalism fostered a decorative turn in his verse. The Chaucerian conceit of The Earthly Paradise, the first volume of which appeared to rapturous reviews in 1868, is that a shipload of Vikings on a quest for immortality has pitched up in Byzantium, where they swap classical, northern and eastern tales with their hosts. This anthology of legends is also a rich book of hours. Morris was said as a boy to “know the names of birds” and the prologues to the tales, which evoke the characteristic sights of the months, draw on his deep immersion in nature. In “February,” “One lonely rook doth dare / The gale, and beats above the unseen corn, / Then turns, and whirling down the wind is borne.” These vignettes entangle human striving with nature just as his wallpapers and textiles quoted plant forms to bring the outside into domestic interiors. The interweaving of national mythologies also recalls Morris’s historicist understanding of the way decorative ornament passes between peoples. The “mysterious symbols of worships and beliefs” of one nation are picked up, simplified and recombined by the artisans of another, becoming the “habit of the hand.” Like the Persian carpets Morris admired for their “intellectualism,” his poems interlaced Troy, Byzantium and Arabia. He compared the difficulties of writing his next multilayered long poem, Love Is Enough (1872), to lining up the repeats in a tapestry.

    [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Dec. 7, 2024. There are Anglo-Saxon coins with mangled versions of the shahada in Arabic script on them, which is some evidence for Morris’ theory. And for about as long as there’s been something definable as “medievalism” it’s been commodified—the first instance, maybe, is William Caxton printing Le Morte d’Arthur. —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:

• The new literature épater la bourgeoisie and Philip Roth

• Polite criticism

• K. T. on a Poem by Alice Fulton and dancing about architecture

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]