WRB—May 7, 2025

“this is a record”

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that the Washington Review of Books was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

N.B.:

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

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane on books people wrote about their time at said magazine:

  Given that each of us is possessed, or oppressed, by what Proust calls “a vast structure of recollection,” how we choose to organize that structure, when we come to tell our tale, can be a trial of honesty. Many memoirists, for cogent reasons, stick to a steady chronological tread, from childhood to a retrospective calm, yet is that not a reassuring lie? If one chapter of your mortal span—your wartime experience, or a love affair—has pierced you more sharply than any other, why shouldn’t that chapter go up front? The trove of memory, as Roger Angell says in Let Me Finish (2006), is “rich and fraught and jumbled,” and like Botsford he honors the jumble by shifting around the pieces of his life. By his calculation, there were “ten thousand mornings” on which he went to work at The New Yorker, so it’s little wonder that the magazine should earn so much of his attention. (He discloses that Shawn was “anxious first of all that the magazine might stop being funny.” Indeed.) Yet Angell is all too alive to the perils of an in-house narrative. So, out of the house he goes, off to tour the other habitations of his past.

  [I did laugh at Nora Ephron writing in a review of Brendan Gill’s memoir that it was characterized by “smug self-congratulation.” I’ve seen Heartburn (1986) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from a translation of a book by Iman Mersal (Motherhood and Its Ghosts, 2016, translated by Robin Moger, May 13):

  This passage from Nagler prompts me, in turn, to imagine the mother behind the camera, in her child’s field of view. She doesn’t take the picture herself: there’s a professional photographer, of course. If the mother is not in front of the camera holding her child then she is standing to the right or the left of the photographer, as though she is the camera’s eye, gazing into her child’s eyes, trying to project a sense of security from distance.

  Browsing through this book, the reader is able to track the evolution of the ingenious means by which the mothers concealed themselves: as a throne strewn with flowers, a duck behind a bench, a life-size doll holding a baby. Assembled in a single volume, the images have the capacity to inspire laughter since we, as readers, are aware that someone is hidden and are, on the whole, able to guess where they are and how they are posed.

  But there is something sad there, too. We encounter children who are unfamiliar to us, and realizing that a century or more has passed, we assume that they are dead. We encounter mothers who look like pieces of furniture, as though they represent death.

  Surely at least one of the children from these photographs, after they had grown, their mother now dead and gone, sat down to inspect her blanketed silhouette, or perhaps her ghost that had once stood before the lens (or behind it), and said to the person beside them: “Look. This is my mother. My mother was there.”

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Jeremy Wikeley reviews a collection of British poetry from the Second World War (Poetry of the Second World War: An Anthology, edited by Tim Kendall, January) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 8, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 2, 2024.]:

  The Second World War was a vastly more complex conflict than the first: warfare was increasingly professionalized and took place across a greater variety of theaters. There is a mismatch between the war we tend to remember, and the war British poets lived through; many of the best, like Douglas and Lewis, were based in North Africa.

  Meanwhile, poetry’s relationship with the public had changed. The poets of the Second World War were competing with the radio and the cinema, while poetry itself had been blown apart by modernism in the wake of the First World War and put back together in ways the public didn’t always recognize. The war was, perversely, good to poets: verse sold well, despite the shortage of paper, and many on the Home Front found work in the cultural organs of the state: “the bigger the machine of government becomes,” George Orwell noted at the time, “the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it.”

  [To me the defining characteristic of poetry involving the Second World War is the planes. Part of this is merely because the planes are new—no one before would have been able to imagine, as Eliot does in Little Gidding, the Holy Ghost as an enemy bomber, coming with fire. But the planes also indicate that, for the first time, technology had really been able to separate the act of fighting a war from its immediate impact. Ted Hughes wrote as much in “The Ancient Heroes and the Pilot”:

  Even though I can boast

  The enemy capital will jump to a fume

  At a turn of my wrist
  

  The vast earth be shaken in its frame,—

  I am pale.

  When I imagine one of those warriors in the room
  

  And hear his heart-beat burl

  The centuries are under his foot; my heart

  Is cold and small.

  —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 Beatles as conservative revolutionaries (revolutionary conservatives?), musically

• Amazon, novels, genre, love, and post-literacy

• Hannah on a Poem by Emily Dickinson about summer

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]