Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the ’sletters which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
N.B.:
This month’s WRB Presents, with readings from Osita Nwanevu, Lewis Page, Lyle Jeremy Rubin, and Tonya Riley, will take place this Tuesday, October 15.
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Is art more beautiful than nature?”, will take place on Friday, October 25. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The Paris Review, Merve Emre interviews Sally Rooney:
Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics. I always find it funny when people say “That’s an interesting character,” or “That’s a good character,” because I don’t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change.
The textual lineage of the novel fascinates me, but when I sit down with my Word document, it would be a lie to say I’m thinking about it. What I’m thinking about is, I’ve got this guy, and he has a brother. I want to know how their relationship grew and changed through their childhoods. I want to know what sort of pressures it exerted on them. Did one of them feel in the other’s shadow? Did they resent each other? Did they really love each other? Did the younger brother idolize the elder? I fell in love with these characters. Every novel I have written has been that process of falling in love with these totally fictitious individuals, and, in that way, their relationships become the plot.
[Cf. various reviews of her most recent: I would highlight in this connection Ryan Ruby’s (linked to in WRB—Sept. 28, 2024), Lilian Fishman’s (linked to in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024), and ’s (linked to in WRB—Oct. 5, 2024). And, not to belabor a favorite WRB point, but if the novel is about bourgeois mores regarding marriage and money—and for Rooney it certainly is—it is necessarily about relationships, since both marriage and money necessitate them. Neither can exist solely in one person’s head. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Nation, Rachel Vorona Cote reviews a new translation of a novel by Alba de Céspedes (Her Side of the Story, 1949, translated by Jill Foulston, 2023):
Indeed, de Céspedes seems keen to emphasize the impossibility of all of Alessandra’s romantic desires, whether they are born from a rational expectation of equitable love or, instead, are the stuff of storybook fantasy. What’s impossible to determine is the root of Alessandra’s anger: Is it the perpetual indignity of life under patriarchy that feels most untenable, or is it men’s inability to perform the chivalric masculinity for which she yearns?
De Cépedes suggests that the latter is exacerbated by the former. In girlhood, Alessandra observes the bleak drama provided by her neighbors’ comings and goings: the “cruel and selfish” philandering husbands who “never had a thing to say to the women,” and the dreary domesticity endured by the wives who keep house and, now and then, seek succor in their own infidelities. Her father, Ariberto, is contemptibly “mediocre,” sneering and bullish, “an insidious enemy” who “invaded [the] cozy feminine world” shared by Alessandra, her mother, their housekeeper, and the few friends they admit into their orbit.
[We linked to reviews of a translation of another de Céspedes novel out last year in WRB—Mar. 8, 2023 and WRB—May 4, 2024.]
In The Atlantic, Mark Athitakis reviews a biography of Sanora Babb, whose field notes Steinbeck used while writing The Grapes of Wrath (Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, by Iris Jamahl Dunkle, October 15) [An Upcoming book today.]:
Fuzzier still is the question of how much of Grapes was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s—and how much it matters. Her observations almost certainly helped Steinbeck shape his rendering of the migrants. Babb’s entries were rich and thorough—having grown up on a failing farm in the Oklahoma panhandle, she was particularly trusted by Collins to connect with the migrants. When Babb shared her jottings, directly or indirectly, she was likely motivated by the urge to get their experience across through whatever medium might help them.
So what would you call the ensuing fame of one novel and the preemptive burial of another? Appropriation? Theft? Bad timing? Sexism? Perhaps, in the end, it was simply evidence of a cruel flaw of publishing: Sometimes its decision makers conclude—not always for good reasons—that there isn’t room for many stories about one major event. That a short-term judgment about what the market will bear can choke off a literary legacy and, to some extent, impoverish a culture.
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Simon Callow reviews Richard Sennett’s new book (The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, April):
Tears can certainly be faked. And in many cultures they are an almost ritualistic response to misfortune, the crier appearing to be quite separate from her or his tears. Sennett reports seeing professional mourners in Morocco, “one mourner taking up just on the last notes of another, the timing linked to starting and ceasing to weep.” He adds that “just this staging of tears among the paid professional mourners allowed others at funerals to release their emotions.” Is that moral ambiguity? Or social service? On the stage, it is a function of great mental connection with an image. A fellow actress in David Hare’s play Plenty asked Kate Nelligan how she wept every night when she spoke the line, “I mean, there are girls today who mourn Englishmen who died in Dachau, died naked in Dachau, men with whom they had spent a single night.” And Nelligan replied, “What I do is think of men, men dying naked in Dachau, and I cry.”
In The Taking of Christ, Sennett again insists on “the moral ambiguity of performing.” If Judas’ distress is fake, then he’s not being morally ambiguous, he’s lying. The situation of the Player in Hamlet, “all his visage wanned, / Tears in his eyes,” is quite different. There is no suggestion that he’s being dishonest or false.
[I once spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out crying on demand and couldn’t do it. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Colm McKenna reviews a translation of a new novel by Alejandro Zambra (Childish Literature, translated by Megan McDowell, October 8):
Zambra has no desire to satisfy these curiosities regarding his own lost years. He feels no need to “materialize or maybe verify [his] conjectures,” and is content with keeping them nebulous. Why, then, would he feel that his son might want to satisfy this desire? Is he simply responding to a paternal instinct, keeping dispatches to punctuate the years his son will forget? Zambra admits that it seems unfair to keep his son away from a “shiny new forgetting” the absence of these records would allow. Perhaps childhood amnesia serves a purpose. “Gaps are my starting point,” Paul Valéry declared. They allow us to appear on the scene well after the first act. With our gaps, we arrive already partly formed. “Like moviegoers who missed the first few minutes,” as Zambra puts it, we arrive confused and enigmatic, somewhat out of the loop.
[I personally want to satisfy my desire for the knowledge of all things my soul had before birth like Plato says. Seems more useful than remembering whatever happened in my childhood that I don’t remember—I assume it can’t have been very interesting. —Steve]
In our sister publication in the City of Angels, Rhian Sasseen reviews Lauren Elkin’s debut novel (Scaffolding, September):
Cities have a habit of imprinting on their denizens. “All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends,” wrote Ivan Chtcheglov, an early Situationist, in his 1953 essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism.” A city’s past lives are inescapable and built into their very architecture. “[W]e are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it,” Chtcheglov later claims. “Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines.”
In Scaffolding, there is voiced resistance to this sentiment. “Everywhere you look they talk only of towers, machines for living that turn the people who live in them into machines in kind [ . . . ] helpless little creatures with no independence. This is what the twentieth century has done to the body.” This contemporary-sounding thought, appearing near the beginning of Scaffolding’s second section, does not come from Anna but instead belongs to a man named Henry. A radical shift has occurred: as readers, we have time-traveled back into the early 1970s and switched points of view.
In ,
reviews a folk horror novel by Andrew Michael Hurley (Devil’s Day, 2017):The way Hurley unfolds the infernal horrors of his story are written in much the same way as are the more grounded family and community conflicts. And why should it be any other way, when the person telling us about it all is John Pentecost, a man very much from and of the Endlands? He feels a certain guilt over having left his home village, leaving his father and grandfather to tend their farm alone, the two of them moving into middle and old age, while young John enjoys a more traditional and prosperous life in the city. John has no delusions about what the Endlands were, and are. He knows the Devil is real, the Devil has spoken to him. More than that, John also feels no guilt, no moral conflict, about any of the things he did, or witnessed, not about Lennie Sturzaker’s death or anything else. When Kat’s feelings about this community that raised her husband become disrupted, when she begins to feel frightened by the place, John’s reaction is to become frustrated by her. This is going to be her new home, regardless of whatever objections she might put forth. And because of the way Hurley begins his novel, the reader knows from the start that John is right.
N.B. (cont.):
Congratulations to Han Kang on winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. [More on the Nobel and associated discourse in Critical notes below.]
Women are wearing glasses with large frames.
- on the history of misprints in poetry. [I’ve never liked “Daddy” but “a bag full of Goo,” even counting the rhyme, is much worse than “a bag full of God.” The Larkin errors definitely improve it, too. —Steve]
The Atlantic is returning to 12 print issues a year, up from 10.
New issue: The New Atlantis No. 78 | Fall 2024 | The Builder Issue
In memory of Elias Khoury, who died last month (R.I.P.):
Khoury bode a respectful farewell to old styles, ushering in a new era of literature, using a more fluid, colloquial Arabic, which confronted life as lived and experienced, however horrific or dispiriting. In Lebanon, we call it “the literature/art of defiance” (al-adab/al-fann al-muqawim).
Thomas Rockwell died on Friday, September 27. R.I.P. [I had not put together that the author of How to Eat Fried Worms (1973), which I read when I was small, was Norman Rockwell’s son until reading this obituary. —Steve]
Poem:
“The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish
Upon the coals, exuding odorous smoke
She knelt and blew, in a surging desolate wish
For comfort; and the sleeping ashes woke
And scattered to the hearth, but no thin fire
Broke suddenly, the wood was wet with rain.
Then, softly stepping forth from her desire,
(Being mindful of like passion hurled in vain
Upon a similar task, in other days)
She thrust her breath against the stubborn coal,
Bringing to bear upon its hilt the whole
Of her still body . . . there sprang a little blaze . . .
A pack of hounds, the flame swept up the flue!—
And the blue night stood flattened against the window,
staring through.
[Edna St. Vincent Millay was born about an hour from where I have lived for the past 23 years of my life, and in many of her poems I sense a contextual and geographical kinship that draws me back time and again. There are certain echoes that sing through this region that, though she and I are separated by nearly a century, still ring as true in her words as in my heart and life. My family’s home, for instance, is primarily heated with a wood stove, and the vivid pictures with which she presents the process of nursing a hearth fire to life are familiar from watching my mother tend it on many a winter morning and eventually finding myself the one sometimes brooding over the nearly-cold banked coals and willing them back to warmth.
I’m captivated by the practical, tactile details of this poem—I can so clearly envision the birch bark fire starter twisting like an anguished perch, the incense of damp, steaming bark, and the chalky dismay of chill ashes and impotent firewood. But within these details there is also painted a pervasive and empathetic emotional picture, like the story within a still life. Her “surging desolate wish for comfort” when juxtaposed with her “desire” and “passion hurled in vain . . . in other days” sums up the bleak and sensual loneliness of a cold, quiet winter night. The sudden shift inward when focusing the energy of “her breath” and “the whole of her still body” upon the yielding coals is imbued with the sense of embodied revelation that I find compelling in so much of Millay’s work—revelations of the strength and wisdom only gained from small encounters with nature itself and the nature of things, the way that the open senses can turn what is blankly before us into a mirror.
Two final metaphors wind the scene to a close—the first is vivid, as victory leaps forth like raucous, flame-red hounds, rushing upwards and baying the triumph of a moment’s discipline over brief, impatient desire. But those hot hounds are silenced suddenly, and the second metaphor is hushed and cool-toned in contrast to the effusive warmth of the moment before. In the impersonal, unblinking nobody of “the blue night” we meet the sole observer of her small saga. Perhaps the pivotal revelation here is that that solitude is, after all, its own kind of comfort. —Hannah]
Upcoming books:
HarperVia | October 15
From the publisher: The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they’d better make the most of it while it lasts.
Also out Tuesday:
Belt: An Alternative History of Cleveland by Jonathan Wlasiuk, illustrations by Libby Geboy
Harvard University Press: Elegies for Empire: A Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu by Gregory M. Patterson
Penguin: Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 2024 Film Supplement.]
University of California Press: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
What we’re reading:
Steve read “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” about thirty times. [I had a conversation with a friend that made me think of the last few lines, realized I hadn’t considered it as a poem—instead of as the thing that enables me to say “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” in inappropriate contexts—in a long time, and found it intoxicating. —Steve] He also read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” once.
Critical notes:
Mark Krotov and Alex Shephard:
Yes, it has been controversial: Look no further than Peter Handke, who took a short break from ruminations on Hey, Slobodan Milošević did a lot of good things when you stop and think about it, to accept the prize in 2019. But the laureates that have been awarded since its return in 2019—Olga Tokaruczuk, Handke, Louise Glück, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, and now Han—broadly reflect a coherent and diverse vision of literature. In fact they constitute a kind of defense of literature in an era when it is constantly sullied and devalued. The Swedish Academy has cast itself as an island of seriousness in a swirling ocean of garbage and filth.
Making fun of the Nobel Prize in literature is, and will always be, fun to do: It is incredibly funny that a group of stuffy academics who live in a fake country that has only produced one worthy piece of art (ABBA Gold) get to give a prize for being the best at doing literature. But this iteration of the Swedish Academy does sometimes make it hard, in large part because it is doing a kind of service: highlighting meaningful, resonant work from across the world in an era when . . . that just doesn’t happen very often.
[I appreciate the jokes about Dylan, but they don’t have a category for “recognizing that the recording technology of the twentieth century allows for the reuniting of the poetic voice with music, which connection was severed with the invention of writing.” Also, anyone who knows ABBA only from ABBA Gold should listen to some of their other songs; they’re great (really, listen to all of their albums except the first two). —Steve]
- in response to A. O. Scott:
All A. O. Scott is really saying is that winning a Nobel Prize isn’t a guarantee of greatness and feels out of step with the times. A more obvious cultural statement is it hard to conceive. But this has been spun out into a long thesis that tells Times readers that “the confusing swirl of emotions aroused annually by the literature Nobel” means greatness is a thing of the past.
At a time when reading is in decline and the value of literature is everywhere ignored or overlooked, instead of promoting this easy philistinism, we might hope that the Times would offer us something more like actual criticism. That is, the work of knowing about art, rather than opining about the culture surrounding art, and helping it, in Merve Emre’s words, “pass gracefully from my hand to another’s, from the present into the future.”
[As I said complaining to a friend, one problem with Scott’s piece is that at best this sort of thing is a surrender, but at worst it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If this is the best a critic-at-large at the Times can do in defense, why should anyone think there’s any merit to “greatness”? —Steve]
- in response to A. O. Scott:
It is hard to read the contemporary as a historical materialist. One of the virtues of mid media is that they allegorize—dramatize, fret over, clumsily try to dodge and trip over themselves in the process—the conditions of their own circulation with a special, insistent, almost stupid transparency. More than the real slop, which can sometimes seem like random firings of hedonic sensation detached from meaning, and more than the stuff that announces itself as Art, with its aspirations to autonomy, mid media give us corporate art’s frankest account of what it is up to in our world. To want any more from it would probably be a mistake, but to ignore what it is so blatantly telling us would be an abdication of our responsibility as critics.
[On the one hand, yes. On the other, there are few things we need less than the people who read recaps of “prestige TV” discovering a way to feel superior to it while still consuming just as much of it. Whatever happened to shame? —Steve]
- on politics and aesthetics:
But this is also where we wind up in the cul-de-sac of so much contemporary criticism: if all art is political, and the purpose of art is to send a message, then isn’t style a mere affectation: why shouldn’t fiction send its message as plainly and obviously as possible, so that it can’t possibly be misinterpreted? Why have subtlety, or nuance; shouldn’t good characters just be good, and bad characters be bad, so we know who to emulate, and who to despise? Or—from this point of view—maybe the only reason to write beautifully and with subtlety and nuance is to convince readers of a writer’s political purposes: and therefore beautiful language is at worst suspicious and should be avoided, and is at best a useful tool to be wielded only for utilitarian purposes. These arguments are annoying, but they’re also narrow-minded. If the political is inextricable from the aesthetic, then the aesthetic is also inextricable from the political. Beauty might make its own arguments, assert its own right to exist. Characters in fiction ought to be fully developed because all human beings are human beings but also because stories are just better that way, and the betterment of art—the increasing power and beauty of fiction—is a meaningful end in itself.
[The arguments about art taken to task here are also extraordinarily unimaginative in their understanding of how a work of art is experienced, as if the audience merely accepted the surface of whatever the artist gave them at face value and had no further thought about it. This is called “telling on yourself.” —Steve]
- Taylor on politics and point of view in Henry James:
Lukács makes an interesting point in the essay about how fiction that retreats from ideas also retreats from its political potency. Characters who are naturally in sync with the issues and ideas of their time will naturally form situations that emerge from those issues and ideas, and they will argue and struggle with each other in a recreation of the social process. But characters who are divorced from the issues and struggles of their time will pass their days in the petty, mundane observations of the everyday. They will approach averageness, but not typicality.
I think that characters who do not think or talk very much are a result of technical flaws in the writing. Even Hemingway’s most addled characters occupied narratives of tremendous emotive and expressive capacity. When one retreats behind a wall of silence, that is not profound. That is just choosing not to write. The mind that turns wrenchingly and brutally from the thing it cannot bear to contain turns somewhere, surely, with equal force. Sublimation is a thing. You cannot reproduce trauma’s haunting omissions and gaps by simply not writing. You must reproduce the record in order to demonstrate that something has been lost.
Theodore Dalrymple:
The mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum: and if no absorbing interest has developed in childhood and adolescence, such an interest is soon manufactured from the materials at hand. Man is at least as much a problem-creating as a problem-solving animal. Better a crisis than the permanent boredom of meaninglessness.
- Moul on variety in reading:
I think this is the most precious thing that my (indescribably excellent) A-level education gave me. It was so free-ranging, so generous in what we read and thought about, that it made everything feel readable, nothing off limits. As a fairly sheltered fifteen year old who had never really traveled at all, the 1970s theater world of The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and the 1980s Californian setting of The Golden Gate (1986) were as alien to my experience as Chaucer’s London or first-century Rome, and almost as mysterious. I learnt that to feel out of your depth in a new text—that sense of an artistic achievement that lies almost entirely beyond what you are yet able to appreciate—is one of most exciting feelings you can have, and that however much you have read, there are always new opportunities to feel like a beginner.
[This got me to go out and buy To the Hitchhiking Dead (by Khaled Hakim, 2022) at once. That’s what happens when I see the words “the modernist (or, as a classicist might put it, the Callimachean) tradition.” —Steve]