The evidence of the Managing Editors’ own superiority caused them pain. As they maintained immoral propositions, they must needs be immoral: calumnies were invented about them. Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds, that of observing stupidity and no longer tolerating it. Trifling things made them feel sad: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a shopkeeper, an idiotic remark overheard by chance.
N.B.:
This month’s salon will meet this evening to discuss the topic, “Is order more important than justice?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson; first, Frances Wilson on writing biographies of Iris Murdoch:
But, as Bayley may have suspected, Murdoch’s characters are alive for only as long as the novel is being read. There is no Miss Bates in her fiction, or Mr. Micawber, or Jude, or Humbert Humbert. Her characters, like their faces, are abstract, as though a fuzzy cloud were hanging over them. My own suggestion is that what Bayley understood from her first four novels was that Murdoch saw herself, in her facelessness, very clearly: her mysterious psychology was the material she worked with. The character of Anna Quentin in Under the Net (1954), for example, was “not all that it should be,” her existence being “one long act of disloyalty.” Anna is constantly involved in “secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.”
Reviews:
Second, Francesca Wade reviews a book about The Little Review (Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review, by Holly A. Baggett, 2023):
After Heap became coeditor in 1916, her vision, Baggett argues, shaped The Little Review from its bold but incoherent beginnings into “the premiere avant-garde journal of international modernism in the twentieth century.” Under Heap’s exacting eye, Anderson decided it was necessary to raise the quality of contributions. In her editorials she began to chastise her own contributors for not writing well enough: “Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called ‘The Tree.’ It is not Art. It is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it every time, for the love of the gods!” She once threatened to leave the next issue blank if she didn’t receive pieces that were “really beautiful”: “Come on, all of you!” The September 1916 issue did indeed contain several blank pages, as well as a cartoon by Heap, signed “jh” and titled “Light Occupations of the Editors When There Is Nothing to Edit,” showing Anderson swimming, playing piano, and listening to Emma Goldman lecture.
[The Little Review is a great name for a magazine. You have to figure everyone else at the time was annoyed they didn’t think of it first. As for the light occupations of the Managing Editors of the WRB—there is always something to edit. —Steve]
In The Dial,
reviews three novels involving translation (The Nursery, by Szilvia Molnar, 2023; Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, 2021; and Taiwan Travelogue, by Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin Kang, November 12):Depression makes the narrator feel invisible, but as a translator, she relished being in the background. “I don’t mind standing in someone’s shadow,” she says, noting that she likes being able to give something to readers without the pressure of making it herself. “And if a mother’s work is mostly work that is unseen, then translating is perhaps more mother-like than I have given it credit for in the past.” Another quality that translation and motherhood share is the inevitability of failure. The narrator obsesses over the things she is doing wrong as a parent, but as a translator, she relishes the impossibility of rendering a word from one language perfectly into another. In her work, she knows how to make choices, to improvise. “I have also caught myself slicing out a sentence or two to make the translation, if not the original work, ‘better,’” she confesses. “Adaptation is my partner. Negotiations are necessary.”
[Reminds me of Lucretius’ complaint/boast that the poverty of his language and the newness of his subject matter have required him to use a bunch of new words (in reality, existing Latin words to which he gives new technical meanings), which is its own kind of adaptation and improvisation. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Kasia Boddy reviews two collections of short stories by Lore Segal (An Absence of Cousins, 2007, January; and Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories, 2023):
“So, what do you conclude?” This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: “I’m not in the concluding business, I’m in the describing business.” Just when you think you’ve pinned down one thing, something new happens, undermining your previous “facile conclusions.” Segal’s preferred account of herself, therefore, was as “an Austrian Jew who was educated in England and lives in America”; a formulation in which nothing is ever lost, just added to.
In a 2021 interview with another friend, Cynthia Ozick, Segal declared her devotion to the principle of “and,” the opposite of the “or” that characterises Ozick’s thinking. All of Segal’s books, from Other People’s Houses (1964) to Ladies’ Lunch, have an “and” structure—each component in the “serial story” has its own shape. This has moral as well as literary implications. “I keep thinking about what the other side must look like,” Segal would say when asked about politics. Questioned about her peripatetic childhood, she complained about those who wanted her “to stay appropriately grieved” when she also felt it had been a “fascinating experience for a future writer.”
[We linked to an earlier review of Ladies’ Lunch in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024. Cf. negative capability. —Steve]
Seamus Perry reviews a collection of Wyndham Lewis’ work (The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: Time and Western Man, edited by Paul Edwards, February):
The polemical energy that Hulme drew from all this was partly a result of the excitingly counterintuitive way it turned the old values upside down: “life” and “nature,” shibboleths of Romantic thought, were now bad things, and Hulme has much fun startling the horses by praising “the dead form of a pyramid and the suppression of life in a Byzantine mosaic.” Lewis was quick to learn. “Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all,” opines Tarr, the titular artist-hero of Lewis’s early novel, in which he does a lot of opining: “Deadness is the first condition of art.” Lewis would say similar things in his own voice: “The living death that is represented by Egyptian culture is the very atmosphere for the sculptor and painter to thrive in.” So he must have been flattered when Hulme praised his paintings of people, especially because Hulme admired them for betraying no interest in the human body, aside from “a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as a lever and so on.” Everything that would once have made a painting sound like a failure was now the secret of its success: “The interest in living flesh as such, in all that detail that makes it vital, which is pleasing, and which we like to see reproduced, is entirely absent.”
- on archaeology:
Through this ending’s aperture alone can the beginning can be disclosed, since Kenner likewise identifies archaeology as a pre-condition of modernism. Archaeology re-attached the Homeric signifier, unknown to the Renaissance or Enlightenment classicist, back to the referent dug up in the unburied city, Schliemann’s famous sigh in the wastes that were Troy: “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.” Joyce’s Homer was the archaeologist’s Homer, Kenner observes, a poet of quotidian reality. Ulysses, with its detailed plans of domestic and public space, its exhaustive catalogue of the city’s byways and shopfronts, was written for the convenience of the explorer three millennia hence with pick and pith helmet and brush unearthing the ruin that was Dublin. The problem is not knowledge per se, but one’s becoming a vassal to it. Internalizing the worldview of the archaeologist, Joyce saw himself and his civilization as dead already.
[Cf. Eliot:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
If this is not quite living death, it is at least the archaeological impulse—“dig it up again”—being applied to a situation which is both the living present (“last year in your garden”) and the dead past (Mylae and a corpse). The only thing flourishing is the corpse. —Steve]
- on archaeology:
In our sister publication Down Under, Isabella Gullifer-Laurie reviews two books by Celia Paul (Self-Portrait, 2020; and Letters to Gwen John, 2022):
If one has to try once more, to begin again, to get closer to painting the image that needs to be painted, why not go over things in words? These two books are not so much a matter of Paul’s explaining and re-shaping the past in text, but of approaching this act of self-portraiture by appealing to a new form. Self-portraits are both reflection and disguise; painting, Paul suggests, has an ambiguous and subterranean lexicon. She would like for language to be the commanding instrument of coherence and precision—“send me a horsewhip so I can lash myself into action,” she writes to her sister. Yet Paul mistrusts the written word a little. [Lucien] Freud’s letters are full of adoration and broken promises—such sneaky, clandestine sentences have not served her so well. To be clear-eyed is the aim of the painter and the memoirist. At the end of Letters to Gwen John she quotes Colette: “look at what gives you pleasure, and what gives you pain; but look longest at what gives you pain.”
[To be clear-eyed is asking an awful lot. —Steve]
In the Journal, Anna Mundow reviews a book on incomplete drafts (Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, by Kristopher Jansma, October):
Paging through the original drafts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, for example, Mr. Jansma finds the author condemning whole sections of the ill-fated novel, which he did not complete before his death. One of Fitzgerald’s margin notes reads, “all awful,” while another movingly concludes that “this is the familiar Fitzgerald formula but the boy grows tired.” A year later, in 1940, Fitzgerald would die at the age of 44. Not long afterward, in England at the start of the Blitz, a despairing Virginia Woolf found herself unable to read, let alone work on, Pointz Hall, a novel that would, like Fitzgerald’s, remain unfinished. In a short story Woolf wrote around the same time, one of her characters declares “I have practically no emotion left,” and in that sentence we perhaps hear intimations of Woolf’s suicide in 1941.
There can be no shortage of anguish in a book that includes tormented writers such as Franz Kafka, who suffered, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness.” Yet Revisionaries is neither an elegy nor a cautionary tale but rather a manual of sorts for anyone confronting a blank page. The book’s subtitle is “What We Can Learn From the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers,” and Mr. Jansma’s suggestions are admirably practical. Many chapters are followed by a short list of tips gleaned from the preceding essay: Keep a notebook of ideas/impressions; try cutting and pasting with scissors and paper (as old-fashioned as it sounds).
[Every once in a while I think to myself that I should start keeping a commonplace book and then I remember that this newsletter serves more or less the same function. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
“The (Slightly Abridged) Yacht Rock Dictionary” [Every Steely Dan song is about being a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]
An interview with Blue Öyster Cult’s frontman about the “More Cowbell” SNL sketch.
A sketch from Orhan Pamuk’s notebooks. [The Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 20, 2024; we linked to another sketch there as well.]
Both the Times and the New Yorker are extolling the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich.
An exhortation to drink wine and brandy on Thanksgiving. [“Ah, the French champagne—has always been celebrated for its excellence. There is a Massachusetts champagne . . . ” Come on. The drink of Thanksgiving is cider. The French and the Germans weren’t there. Surely some nineteenth-century New England genius argued that the consumption of cider produced virtuous citizens suited for republican government, while beer and wine are conducive to European despotisms. I agree with him. —Steve]
The University of Chicago Press is having a 30% sale on books in its Reading Catalog.
Poem:
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” by Louise Glück
Spiked sun. The Hudson’s
Whittled down by ice.
I hear the bone dice
Of blown gravel clicking. Bone-
pale, the recent snow
Fastens like fur to the river.
Standstill. We were leaving to deliver
Christmas presents when the tire blew
Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . .
I want you.
[Not quite early December yet, and nothing’s frozen over, but I’m in Maine for Thanksgiving and want a poem about it being cold. A kind of unity between the human and natural world—“bone dice,” “fastens like fur” (where fur is both something animals have and people wear)—gives way to an indication of their separation; the tire was blown, but the pines just stood by. The storm that blew their limbs down isn’t interested in flat tires either.
“I want you” is perhaps unpoetic but sometimes no other words will do. Even Bob Dylan when most under the spell of Rimbaud wrote a song with the chorus
I want you
I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
There’s something to be said for avoiding unnecessary complexities. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | December 3
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
by Mark Lilla
From the publisher: Aristotle claimed that “all human beings want to know.” Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?
In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. He also exposes the fantasies this impulse lead us to entertain—the illusion that the ecstasies of prophets, mystics, and holy fools offer access to esoteric truths; the illusion of children’s lamb-like innocence; and the nostalgic illusion of recapturing the glories of vanished and allegedly purer civilizations. The result is a highly original meditation that invites readers to consider their own deep-seated impulses and taboos.
[We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 18, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Belt: Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room: A Philosophy Primer for an Anxious Age by Jonathan Foiles
Bloomsbury: Goethe: His Faustian Life by A. N. Wilson
Princeton University Press: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Nov. 27, 2024.]
Riverhead: Rental House by Weike Wang
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Bouvard and Pécuchet. [Much more on this when I finish, I think. I’d certainly like to thank Flaubert for providing today’s opening joke. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- Moul on Gérard Bocholier:
I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and I always thought about teaching—whether it was an elementary language class or a doctoral student—as helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.
As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations—the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.