It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Washington Review of Books to Cry
Links:
In The Dispatch, Henry Begler on 70 years of Howl:
But ultimately, Howl’s celebration of humanity in all its wild glory, its reverence for music and intoxication, love and conversation, stands up against these charges. It’s true that idealists often become oligarchs and ecstatic visionaries often become dull clowns. And it’s true that all movements, if they gain any purchase in the public sphere, are quickly absorbed by mass culture and distorted until they become unrecognizable versions of themselves. But the pure products of the initial revolution in consciousness, whether Emerson and Whitman or Howl and “Like a Rolling Stone,” retain their potency. Though Howl is ostensibly an elegy and a lament, one can’t help but read its vigorous, energetic lines and feel called to action. All around you, it says to the disaffected reader, despite the indignities and iniquities of life in the straight world, there are fellow travelers, sympathetic souls; there is a secret army of people who feel the way you feel. Ginsberg, for all his later failings, never spoke of exhaustion, neurosis, and withdrawal, the feelings that seem to terminally afflict the modern world of letters. (“I have seen the greatest minds of my generation / Wait no I haven’t— / I haven’t seen anyone because the forests are on fire and I have asthma” reads a recent riff on Howl published in the prestigious Threepenny Review.) He believed that the imagination was infinitely powerful and could overcome any obstacle.
[That Threepenny Review thing is so funny. I don’t even like Ginsberg much, but he had an ear and therefore did not write “I have seen the greatest minds of my generation.”
When I want this stuff I go back to Blake. Or Kit Smart. Or even further back: “Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” Begler’s right about Ginsberg at his best confirming within you that “there is a secret army of people who feel the way you feel,” but the populist and the prophetic don’t play nicely together (as any number of political speeches will attest). It is very American to try combining them, though.
Howl doesn’t really get anywhere that “I wander thro’ each charter’d street / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow” did not get to (let alone “mind-forg’d manacles”), but it at least has the decency for its American audience to get there in a poem not titled “London.” The feeling is different and American, too; “London” is terse, but Howl aims (as other great American artists put it) to “tear the roof off the mothersucker.” There is something in Americans, and in Americans making art “about” America specifically, that demands maximalism. The innovation of so many great American artists is not necessarily doing anything new but simply doing more than had ever been done previously. Whitman and Ginsberg run over the restraints on the Psalmist’s lines; Moby-Dick frees Paradise Lost from the limits of iambic pentameter and the Biblical source material and sets it among Americans, people capable of anything; Scott Joplin builds on the likes of Chopin turning peasant dances into art by forcing the style of Romantic pianists into the precise and mechanistic rhythms of the march and the rag; Ezra Pound writes “a poem containing history” and decides that “history” means every historical detail that may prove useful to someone somewhere; Bob Dylan realizes that Rimbaud would get through the mind’s defenses easier if the mind were already set reeling by the loudest music available in 1965. Even if none of it were any good, the daring is its own thrill.
I would like to put in a good word for exhaustion, neurosis, and withdrawal, though, and more specifically I would like to distinguish them from laziness and flabbiness, which is what we actually have. (To quote more great American artists: “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”) Plenty of good work has been done by the exhausted, neurotic, and withdrawn, but it requires more than simply being bored and complaining about what everyone else complains about. At their best those feelings create distance and alienation from the world, letting the artist see it from a distance and (to borrow from a great American artist) slant, without the self-indulgent boredom. And, as yet another great American artist quoted his mother saying, “Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.” So much of our exhausted literature is the work of people with nothing in themselves and nothing to draw on, which will help them write neither Howl nor The Waste Land, say.
But I am not Begler, and I read him for the California, the sunniness, the vision, the confidence and enthusiasm in himself and the art and the audience. As regular readers will know I have none of these things, being exhausted, neurotic, and withdrawn, and furthermore being a pessimist, a self-hating American with a case of Kultur envy, a crank, and so on. But, in writing as in friendship, what we like is sometimes as different from ourselves as possible. (There’s a great passage in some novel—I thought maybe Anna Karenina about Levin and Oblonsky but I couldn’t find it—about a friendship that works in part because the two have nothing in common; it comes to my mind a lot despite my not knowing where it’s from.) For all that, I’m with you in Substack.
What I really want to say, though, is this: Ginsberg’s greatest contribution to culture is his backing vocals on Leonard Cohen’s “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On.” —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Anoosh Chakelian on 100 years of Winnie-the-Pooh:
Returning to them for the 100th anniversary, though, I was reminded how far from some kind of cute Myers-Briggs shorthand the premise actually is. None of the characters represent one set attitude to life. Pooh, for example, is no contented buffoon. He yearns for brain enough to understand Christopher Robin as his boy-master tells him unsettling real-world things about suction pumps and kings and queens. He silently wishes he could jump as far as Kanga, or knew what a Heffalump looked like. He is every bit as anxious as Piglet can be. He can be as woe-is-me as Eeyore too—when stuck in the entrance to Rabbit’s burrow, he harrumphs that “it all comes of not having front doors big enough,” and slopes into a corner when Piglet is more useful in the quest to capture Baby Roo.
Having read a great many bedtime stories over the past two years, I can report that it is rare to find picture-book characters with such depth, and such little purpose. “Nothing” with a capital N is their favorite pastime. Milne’s characters are more motivated to do things out of boredom or necessity than some moral teaching about the value of imagination or friendship from the hand of the author.
In The Walrus, Amarah Hasham-Steele on good and bad filmed adaptations of novels:
All of this makes the process of adaptation feel somewhat grand. You’re not just reimagining a single, clearly defined text; you’re contributing to the collective imagination of a story. Put this way, the stakes are impossibly high: a bad adaptation constructs our shared understanding of a story, just as much as a good adaptation. What’s more, bad adaptations and good ones construct our understanding just as much as the “originals.” It’s a little bit terrifying to think that our cultural memory of a story is constructed by adapters—who sometimes read the source material, and sometimes grasp the author’s meaning, and are sometimes motivated by nobler incentives than profit.
[The new Sense and Sensibility is wonderful—as with all adaptations of the novel, it makes Edward Ferrars into something because movies don’t work well when the male lead is a void lacking any charisma or interest. George MacKay is up for playing him as admirable, though; I’ve thought for a few years since seeing him in The Beast (2023) and Femme (2023) that he’s one of our finest young male actors, one who specifically plays inscrutable and unreadable very well, and even an admirable Edward Ferrars remains those. The film also has an idea of how to convey the opposition between the sisters’ ideas in visual language: the shots of nature are wild and free, while the shots of society range between mannered and claustrophobic.
Earlier in the piece Hasham-Steele suggests that Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley is “brilliant” and in need of an adaptation. It’s not; it’s a huge mess about how great Emily and Anne Brontë (especially Emily) are. I can’t blame Charlotte for that too much, though, because they both died as she was writing it. Villette, though—that’s the Charlotte Brontë novel we need on the big screen. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
The truth about Christmas carols
A Poem by Michael Drayton and the thrills of repeating yourself
The ambiguities of Aubrey Beardsley
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