The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
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In the New York Times, Alexandra Alter profiles Helen DeWitt:
From the start of her career, DeWitt has played with language and pushed the boundaries of narrative forms. With Your Name Here (October), the guardrails completely came off.
When DeWitt first sent it out to literary agents, they were bewildered by the story—a disjointed maze of narratives that featured chaotic emails between DeWitt and Gridneff.
Told by agents that the book was hard to follow, DeWitt’s response was to make it even more disorienting. She added a series of second-person narrators. She wove in a novel-within-a-novel by her fictional doppelgänger Rachel Zozanian, titled “Lotteryland,” which used chapters from one of DeWitt’s unfinished works, a satire about a country where everything is distributed by lottery. She made difficulties that she and Gridneff had writing the book, and their arguments about where it was going, part of the story.
“The only solution, I thought, was to make the impossibility key to the book and use it for comic effect,” she explained.
[A bit earlier in the profile appears “Lately, she’s been reading A. J. Woodman’s scholarly commentary on the work of the Roman historian and politician Tacitus, which she finds reassuring.” This has to be the only time “Tacitus” and “reassuring” have been used in the same sentence. —Steve]
In the TLS, Miles Leeson on the previously unpublished poetry he discovered in Iris Murdoch’s notebooks in 2016 (Poems from an Attic: 1936–1995, edited by Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson, Rachel Hirschler, and Frances White, November 6 in the UK):
Readers can, I think, feel this throughout the collection. The “Conversations with a Prince” sequence, written in the 1950s and revised through the early 1960s, dramatizes that paradox with formal poise. The sonnets, a dialogue between the poet and the personified figure of Love, echo the Elizabethan moral allegory of Spenser or Donne while anticipating Murdoch’s own moral metaphysics, which can be found in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and beyond. Love is both tormentor and tutor—“a gatekeeper, a gamekeeper,” to borrow Sarah Hall’s phrase in the introduction to the collection—another version of the divine idea that her philosophical writings would describe as “the Good.” The poet’s submission to this force mirrors her philosophical conviction that goodness is something seen, not chosen: “Love keeps the maze,” she writes, collapsing ethical striving into a form of visionary perception.
[Two poems from the notebooks appear below the essay. “Tormentor” is a bit strong, but Hall’s “a gatekeeper, a gamekeeper” combination otherwise reminds me of George Herbert’s “Love (III),” in which Love is at the door “observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in” and later takes ownership of the meat his guest will have: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.” —Steve]
In The Dispatch, Nic Rowan on American ghost stories:
But is a ghost ever just a ghost? It’s a question that Americans have been asking ever since we made landfall on the continent. In Europe, the answer is fairly simple. There are megalithic sites scattered all throughout the Old World that predate human memory, and it stands to reason that the spirits of civilizations long gone should linger about them, haunting their distant descendants in weird, spooky ways. No need for explanation; it’s just the natural order of things. But in America we have no ancient history on which to draw when confronted with the inexplicable. Yes, there are wispy memories of the Native Americans, whose burial grounds precipitate the horror of, say, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary—but for most of us, these ghosts are not our own, and the pre-Columbian past is too alien for us to access. We are left to our own powers of invention.
[It is not, I think, an accident that the best piece of horror involving Native American myths is Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo, which was written by an Englishman and ends with a statement that, although the Europeans had no idea what they were dealing with, the Native American member of the hunting party could identify the signs of the wendigo and upon noticing them immediately went home. And the American interest in witches is, among other things, a way of coping with the general lack of suitable “ghost story” material. Witches are not remnants of an earlier time; they are your neighbors. They are associated not with decayed buildings—civilization in decline—but with the woods, from which civilization is absent. An important subcurrent in much of this material, ranging from “Young Goodman Brown” to The VVitch (2015), is that the woods at night are full of things you would rather not run into. Who knows what’s out there—wolves?—bears?—your neighbors, performing Satanic rituals?—the wendigo, seeking whom he may devour? —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:
T. S. Eliot, music hall, and cultural hierarchy
The reception history of The Faerie Queene is a land of contrasts
K. T. on a Poem by Tracy K. Smith and addiction
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. 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 WRB with other people. —Steve]
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