WRB—Nov. 29, 2025

“metaphor of marriage”

I’d rather you not read the WRB unless you must.

Links:

Reviews:

• In the Journal, Danny Heitman reviews a collection of Eudora Welty’s letters to and from Frank Lyell (To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty’s Correspondence with Frank Lyell, edited by Julia Eichelberger, October):

  Welty’s trips abroad offered an occasion for some of her best letters to Lyell. In a November 1949 dispatch from Paris, she reports on her trip to the Louvre: “It gets dark very early, so there are only about two good hours during the day when the museum is both open and bright enough—which suits me, for I see too much as it is.”

  It’s the seeing, varied and brightly inexhaustible, that makes Welty’s letters such a sustaining pleasure. “You could smell the heavy loam in the deep cool woods—the Yazoo and Big Black rivers were running along,” she tells Lyell after an autumn drive through rural Mississippi in 1935. “The roads were dirt and wound around as if made by somnambulistic cows.”

  [Once you see a road as if made by somnambulistic cows you’ll never see it any other way. —Steve]

  • Guy Davenport: “Mirage is a way of talking about many of Miss Welty’s effects. She arranges images so that we see them in sharpest focus and simultaneously as a ghost of reality.”

  • Davenport, later in that same essay: “She is the most articulate of writers, and her subject is the incoherent buzz of experience, the way we live.”

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, John Banville reviews a book about Henry James’ 1904 tour of America (Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, by Peter Brooks, April) and a book about his late novels (The Correction of Taste: On the Late Novels of Henry James, by Denis Donoghue, June):

  Given so much expectation and thrilled trepidation, anticlimax was inevitable. Even before he set sail there had been ominous rumblings. In particular, William, apparently alarmed to the point of panic by the prospect of a visit from his brother, had written to him of the “good many désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and . . . the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” He went on to cite some of the prospective unpleasantnesses, ranging from the manner in which Americans eat their boiled eggs to the way they speak: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really . . . so ignobly awful . . . It is simply incredibly loathsome.” In the event, William took himself off to Greece, alone, in the last months of his brother’s stay in America and only returned shortly before his departure for Europe.

  But Henry was not so thoroughly Europeanized that he did not remain, as Brooks writes, “in so many ways an American in his allegiances and moral concerns.” For all that he admired Europeans such as Balzac and George Eliot, “there was an irradicable strain of Nathaniel Hawthorne in his writings as well: an underlying melodramatic conflict of the children of light and the children of darkness.” It is perhaps this almost primitive ranging of opposites that led Jorge Luis Borges to characterize his work as uniquely strange.

  [Henry James Comes Home was the Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 9, 2025; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Apr. 5, 2025 and earlier reviews in WRB—Apr. 2, 2025 and WRB—Nov. 19, 2025.

  That “underlying melodramatic conflict of the children of light and the children of darkness” is a Hawthorne thing, but it is more generally an American thing too. And the sort of American who tries very hard to be something else tends to have their Americanness come out in one way or the other. (Cf. T. S. Eliot.) Take something like Daisy Miller. It takes a certain temperament to write a novella in which Daisy Miller, a young American woman in Italy, dies as a result of the callousness of Frederick Winterbourne. The disease she dies of is Roman fever. James might as well have written “I am employing symbolism” at the top—it would hardly be less subtle. —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication on the Thames; first, Clare Bucknell reviews a biography of Robert Frost (Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, by Adam Plunkett, February) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 12, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Feb. 19, 2025 and an interview with Plunkett in WRB—Mar. 19, 2025. I had some notes about uncertainty in Frost in the last of those. —Steve]:

  Much here is oblique: we don’t know exactly what “notion” Len might or might not take, or what it is she can’t be “sure enough” about (though given she was once committed to an asylum, we can guess). Many things are oblique to her too, as appears from the “expressive breaks” in her speech, in Reuben Brower’s phrase, those “seeming ineptitudes of the monologue”: “I don’t know!”; “I almost think if . . . ”; ‘But it might be . . . ” Often, she seems happy to remain in the dark. Browning’s monologuists are performers, rhetoricians at the top of their game. Here, the speaker can’t parse her own feelings, let alone persuade others of theirs. “It’s got so I don’t even know for sure / Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything,” she says. The incompetences of speech—the artless repetitions, incomplete clauses, non sequiturs, illogical transitions—are more eloquent than full sentences for what they reveal: a patchy, impressionistic intelligence, seeing dimly, up against something it doesn’t have the answer to.

[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:

• One reason translations of poetry are bad

• The development of English prose style

• K. T. on a Poem by Carl Phillips and forgiveness

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]