Now what’s going to happen to us without Managing Editors?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Links:
In Socrates on the Beach, Rebecca Ariel Porte on Cavafy and the unrequited:
Historically, poetry—and especially love poetry—tends to side with the unrequited over the unrequiters, who, because they deny, are typically denied language to describe their experience. Dramas of not-having can go either way, ethically or politically speaking, though the aesthetic possibilities are obvious: lacking is more obviously sympathetic, more provocative, than having or refusing. If you want to understand how projection works, where better than the dizzy letterlocking of a Donne elegy, in which desire’s pleasure in its own inventions makes its object an arbitrary occasion? Lacan described the poetry of courtly love as a witness to the mismatch between reality’s asceticism and the demands we can’t, nonetheless, resist making of it, which resulted, he thought, in the longing poet’s need to posit an object the psychoanalyst can only describe as “terrifying, an inhuman partner.”
[As someone said somewhere, if a man writes a woman one sonnet, he loves her; if he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Josh Mcloughlin on imaginary libraries:
Many of Donne’s “entirely new” and non-existent titles were “attributed” to real people, including Jacobean authors, politicians and divines, which explains why he hid the manuscript. They show Donne at his most playful: The Judæo-Christian Pythagoras, proving the Numbers 99 and 66 to be identical if you hold the leaf upside down, by John Picus, was probably a satire of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola; Afternoon Belchings satirized the diplomat Sir Edward Hoby’s table talk; and What not? or, A Refutation of all the errors, past, present and future, not only in Theology but in the other branches of knowledge, and the technical Arts, of all men dead, living, and as yet unborn: put together in a single night after supper, by Doctor Sutcliffe viciously lampooned Matthew Sutcliffe (who founded the controversial theological college at Chelsea in 1609) and the absurdities of English theologians more generally. Yet The Courtier’s Library doesn’t just tell us about Donne’s wit, but also about how the knowledge that libraries house might be abused, distorted, or simply invented altogether. The trend was not confined to England, but found expression in the French Bibliotheque imaginaire de livrets, lettres, et discours imaginaires (Imaginary Library of Booklets, Letters, and Imaginary Speeches, 1615) and the German Catalogus etlicher sehr alten Bücher, welche neulich in Irrland auff einem alten eroberten Schlosse in einer Bibliothec gefunden worden (“Catalog of several very old books that were recently found in a library in Ireland in an old conquered castle”).
[If you are interested in reading What not? or, A Refutation of all the errors, past, present and future, not only in Theology but in the other branches of knowledge, and the technical Arts, of all men dead, living, and as yet unborn: put together in a single night after supper, you can obtain the knowledge the title promises, put together in the manner the title details, by reading the Washington Review of Books. (Actually—for the sake of truth in advertising—I put much of this one together yesterday afternoon while sitting in the back seat of a 12-passenger van on its way from New York to Columbus, Ohio.) —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Paris Review, Sheila Heti reviews Sam Shelstad’s writing advice (The Cobra and the Key, 2023):
I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things? The indifference to the unique relationship between the writer and their story (or between the writer and the reason they are writing), which is necessarily a by-product of any generalized writing advice, is part of what makes the comedy in this book so great. As a teacher, “Sam Shelstad” is so literal, and takes the conventions of how to write successful fiction on such faith, that when he tries to relay these tips to his reader, the advice ends up sounding as absurd as it actually is.
[The only writing advice I swear by is that you should read it to yourself sotto voce as part of the editing process. —Steve]
Two in The New Criterion:
William Logan reviews a collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters (The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, April):
In interpreting poetry, insights into personality often seem intrusive or merely imaginative, assumptions scattered over barren ground. However seemingly personal, poems possess only haunting links to life—at least, few that would convince a wary jury. Letters, though sometimes no less fictional, offer open season for such trespasses on privacy, even that of writers long dead, trespasses that are often mere guesswork. The presumption that letters or diaries are straightforward as oak planks is wishful thinking; but scholarship rarely accounts for the hedging and half-truths embedded even in everyday conversation. Dickinson was far more devious than she’s sometimes given credit for—but her behavior, as recorded by Higginson and others, should make us wary of anything she says. Her concealments were themselves revealing. The poems, indeed, work their magic through ambiguity, even misdirection—she was a master at feathering her meanings. Unless a large cache of lost letters surfaces, it’s unlikely that another edition of her letters will be necessary for decades to come. The editing here is meticulous, and I noticed no obvious errors except an odd slip in alphabetical order among the short biographies of Dickinson’s correspondents and after one letter a note set in the wrong-sized font.
[We linked to previous reviews in WRB—Apr. 13, 2024, WRB—May 18, 2024, and WRB—Aug. 17, 2024.]
Paul Dean reviews the new LOA edition of some of Hemingway’s work (Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927–1932, edited by Robert W. Trogdon, October 1):
Two older critics have written penetratingly about Hemingway’s conception—or misconception—of ethics. D. H. Lawrence, in a brilliant review of In Our Time (reprinted in Phoenix, 1936), admired the volume for its spare style and realism, but he summed up Hemingway’s stance as “Nothing matters. Everything happens.” He also diagnosed Hemingway’s condition as “a healthy state of nothingness inside himself, and an attitude of negation to everything outside himself.” (“Healthy” is being used sarcastically there, I assume.) The cardinal principle, Lawrence paraphrased, was not to be committed to anyone or anything. “Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it.” There was something of that in Lawrence’s own temperament, but he nonetheless saw that in Hemingway it concealed an inner vacuum.
In the Journal, Dominic Green reviews a biography of the brothers Grimm (The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, by Ann Schmiesing, October 29) [An Upcoming book today.]:
Jacob called his sacred goal “authenticity.” His profane was literary “artificiality.” The Grimms compared the innocence of fairy tales to “the bright eyes of children,” though their sources were mostly “educated young townswomen” who read French. Jacob claimed to present the oral originals. Wilhelm justified his editorial tweaking as sympathetically “spontaneous.” Brentano complained that the brothers had not edited their garrulous sources enough. The manuscript of the 70 tales in the second volume of “Children’s and Household Tales” is lost, so the extent of the Grimms’ editing is unclear. Wilhelm said they never cut with “a critical knife” but Ms. Schmiesing’s analysis of “The Donkey” shows that the Grimms excised the sexual imagery and learned references from a Latin manuscript.
[If we’re cutting sexual imagery and learned references what’s the point? —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Tim Riley reviews a biography of Randy Newman (A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, by Robert Hilburn, October 22):
If you want more from Hilburn’s narration, he tilts the balance with the sheer number of Newman quotes, which take unexpected turns. When the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs asked about his favorite recordings, he picked Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135—the Hollywood String Quartet recording from the 1950s, a worthy contender for a definitive selection. “I love musicians, and I always have,” Newman says. “They’re people who’ve accumulated tens of thousands of hours alone in a room getting good at what they do—much like snipers do.”
N.B. (cont.):
- : “What makes a good newsletter?” [The WRB makes a good newsletter. —Steve]
“One of the fascinating things is just how influential booksellers have been in determining what gets published, but also what gets sold and seen.”
- on weird punctuation.
Clothing is now bad.
On Aesop’s fables.
New issues:
The New Criterion Volume 43, Number 3 / November 2024 [As linked to above.]
Socrates on the Beach Issue Ten [As linked to above.]
Gary Indiana died at the age of 74.
From the in memoriam in The Paris Review,
:Gary liked to make us look up words. He was always right. He drew on all the resources of the English language with great exactitude, humaneness, and sympathy. So I said stet. They stetted it. They sent me the contracts and tax forms. I was planning to bring them over today to get his social security number and then take him to the party. Oh well. We’re going to miss him, to put it mildly.
Local:
A review of Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 at the National Portrait Gallery.
The Washington National Opera is putting on Fidelio at the Kennedy Center until Monday, November 4.
Lux Choir is performing William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices at St. Jerome Catholic Church in Hyattsville on Thursday, November 14 at 8 p.m.
Poem:
“Hunting Season” by W. H. Auden
A shot: from crag to crag
The tell-tale echoes trundle;
Some feathered he-or-she
Is now a lifeless bundle
And, proud into a kitchen, some
Example of our tribe will come.Down in the startled valley
two lovers break apart:
He hears the roaring oven
Of a witch’s heart;
Behind his murmurs of her name
She sees a marksman taking aim.Reminded of the hour
And that his chair is hard,
A deathless verse half done,
One interrupted bard
Postpones his dying with a dish
Of several suffocated fish.
[This is not the only poem of Auden’s that references hunting. The other, “Our Hunting Fathers,” is perhaps more well known, or at least, it’s available online and this one isn’t. Auden wrote this poem while he was teaching at the University of Michigan, where autumn is spectacular. Being from the mid-Atlantic, my autumn may not have quite the celebrated glory of the North, where sugar maples grow in more abundance and mountains which miss my house by about 50 miles rear their ancient heads. Despite having never shot a pheasant in a valley in Michigan (in fact I’m not sure we’ve seen a pheasant in the family farm for a few decades) I find the imagery in the first verse stirring.
The second verse feels influenced by the fairy tales (later collected by the industrious Grimms brothers and praised by Auden) that lived on in the imagination of the original New England colonists. There is something so beautiful and so wild and so scary about a towering forest in reds and browns. Rustling leaves hide the footsteps of others who may follow you into the woods. The VVitch (2015) is a great movie for this time of year if you’re looking for Scary New England.
We’re brought suddenly inside, and reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Throughout the poem, Auden has thrown together love and death. The bird-hunter seems to go into a home where he expects a warm welcome. The lover sees the marksman. Now the bard, on the cusp of completing his work, attends to a meal phrased grotesquely. Not a novel subject of poetry, but one that doesn’t feel stale from a talented writer. —Grace]
[I love The VVitch; excellent companion piece to “Young Goodman Brown.” —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Yale University Press | October 29
The Philosophy of Translation
by Damion Searls
From the publisher: Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award‑winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable” cultural nuances. Here, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.
[We linked to an essay adapted from Searls’ introduction to his translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in WRB—Feb. 17, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Abrams: Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan
New York Review Books: Mysticism by Simon Critchley [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Aug. 14, 2024.]
Slant: We Shall Not All Sleep by Tony Woodlief
Yale University Press: The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing [We linked to a review above.]
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Love’s Work (by Gillian Rose, 1994) and then returned to reading The Historical Novel. [Love’s Work was so entrancing and so short that I sped through it—I get the feeling I read it too quickly. I want to come back to it in a month or two and take it much slower. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- on reality in fiction:
Henry James put it like this: “as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.” What matters in the novel is the true representation of things, which relies on the proper artistry of the novel’s form. Opposed to this, James saw all the people who thought fiction was merely for “instruction and amusement,” who could therefore have their own arbitrary criteria about what made a novel good, such as it having lots of incident, or a happy ending, or virtuous characters—, it is not a question of art for these people, but rather one of preferences. James summed up this attitude thus: “The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.”
- Moul on early modern paraphrases of the Old Testament:
There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs—scholars have analyzed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more “gendered” than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.
While I admire the work of a handful of critics—Dryden, Johnson, Winters, Cunningham, a few others—criticism has always seemed secondary, almost beside-the-point. It’s assumed that if you write about books you are a critic, and that’s a mistake. I’m no critic and have no theories. Temperamentally, I prefer to write about good books or even mediocre books with good passages. I feel grateful when I read something funny or incisive, or that sparks a previously unsuspected insight. I like the mingling of surprise with the established and traditional.
The world is overrun with lousy books. They vastly outnumber the good ones. That’s true of all human creations. I’m happy to briefly dismiss rubbish but I don’t want to linger over it.
An excised aside from
:To assert that one has such a grasp of the state of the literary field today—and its likely development two centuries from now—as to know the identity of the next canonized genius is as daring, as literally insane, an assertion, an exercise of an overweening will-to-power disguised as a judgment of taste, as any claim that one’s verses will be a monument more lasting than bronze. To assert that this genius is Sheila Heti, however, is simply risible.
Apparently humbling herself before her work—or before Heti’s work—the critic commands us to bow down, acceding to a vague, inhuman “mattering” vibe-ily manifesting itself in writing feminine enough to set ambition in the second degree, hidden behind impersonal values. Criticism as priestcraft, botched cross of vocations, perennial ruse of un-self-knowing devils.
And
in response:Is this a box of poison? I will say no, I don’t think it is. I do think it’s what Smith means by belles-lettristic puffery. Puffery aside, to characterize my own writing as “belles-lettristic” seems perfectly accurate to me, but I don’t see any such prescription in the piece for others. The only real prescriptive statement is that if immortality is your actual goal, you should probably go into the arts and not political science. But even that is only a slim increase of the odds.
To Smith’s comment that these statements represent “liberal pseudo-resignation to one’s own mortal irrelevance”—I’m not really sure either of us knows how “pseudo” my resignation is here (it’s only really put to the test at death, after all). It is quite true that qua Catholic I do not view any mortal life as irrelevant in the eyes of God, but we’re talking presumably of future man off on terraformed Mars or whatever, and I do think my work and Smith’s work and Stanley’s work are unlikely to matter very much to him. I would never say it’s impossible, though, because I don’t know the future.
[A rather heated Substack exchange with real merit—what will they think of next? Smith is certainly correct that “we aren’t yet mad enough at what’s inadequate.” Time is short, and everything inadequate is stealing it from us. And I appreciate his willingness to mention specific writers. I find it both more precise and more honest than the usual method of clearly writing about someone else’s work without identifying them. We’re playing for serious stakes here, and there are no benefits to ignoring that. The only time you run into problems is if your criticism turns out to be a monument more lasting than bronze, in which case what made it timely also makes it much harder for future generations to use it. As Pound wrote of Pope’s direct attacks:
The Dunciad in large chunks is very hard reading simply because we have the very greatest possible difficulty in beating up ANY interest whatever in the bores he is writing about. Even if one does remember a particularly lively crack it is almost too much trouble to find it again (confession of present author, looking for a few lines he would like to quote). Nevertheless, Pope should be given credit for his effort at drainage.
Among other things, The Dunciad has kept the name of Colley Cibber alive, which I do not think was Pope’s intention.
Smith is also correct in wanting to attack a school of thought that would make art light entertainment, an insubstantial toy for us to amuse ourselves with because we have to do something with our time. But I agree with BDM that this is not what the (very good) essay in question argues. The heart of it is here:
Most scholarship is also not going to live forever. Is it therefore not worth doing? I wouldn’t say so. It’s worth it to maintain gardens and repair buildings and restore artworks. No one’s work lives forever on its own. It stays alive because someone keeps it so. Here again, greatness requires humility: other people’s. The task of thinking is worthwhile even if your thoughts prove to be of limited usefulness. The tasks of reading, of appreciation, of interpretation, are worthwhile, even if next year there is a new essay that supersedes yours, or a new book. If we have chosen to live our lives this way, it is because something about it strikes us as the best way we can spend our time.
To erect monuments more lasting than bronze belongs to the greatest, and just as a matter of percentages most of us are not that. We should aspire to it, but we should also recognize the odds. But those who will erect the monuments are not isolated individuals. They work in times and in places, in conversation with their society, other art being produced in it, and the artistic traditions they work in; they draw on the intellectual and artistic resources available to them; their ability to devote themselves to their work is affected by their economic and social situation and that of their society as a whole. Those who don’t make the monuments contribute to all of this. If I may push the image rather too far, they are working in the marble quarries, or looking for new materials to use in sculpture, or improving the manufacture of chisels, or stirring up more demand for monuments, or identifying people and events worthy of a monument in commemoration, or studying the history of monuments, and so on. There will always be genius, and there will always be a need for genius to respond to the situations it finds itself in. But the extent to which it can flourish and the resources it can draw on are to a great extent out of its control. The great artists don’t invent most of what they do; they refine the materials at hand, and those materials are only there because of the work of others. Most of us, despite the loftiness of our goals, will be those others, and that will be our heritage and our legacy.
If this is what someone who manages to edit the Washington Review of Books would say, well, so it is. —Steve]