“How did you start managing to edit the Washington Review of Books?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Steve said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Links:
In UnHerd, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert on Hemingway and talking about your feelings:
Contrary to popular belief, if you look carefully in Hemingway’s work, you find it absolutely full of characters who talk a lot about their feelings—it’s just that these characters are inevitably the frauds and phonies and self-deceivers, men who could use a hunting expedition or two to clear their heads. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), the role is performed by Robert Cohn, champion boxer at university and reader of far-fetched romances set in South America, who spends most of the novel punching people, then tearfully seeking amends by explaining how lovesick he is for Brett. You can hear an adumbration of 2026: Oh, I’m sorry I ignored your messages, but that’s how my trauma response manifests. Won’t you forgive me? In perhaps the greatest Hemingway short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), the structure is even clearer. For three or four pages, the male protagonist inveigles his girlfriend into having an abortion by going on and on about how it is her choice and he will support her no matter what. He is communicative, attentive, and articulates his own preferences in a spirit of what seems to be openness and honesty: “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” It is, I think, one of the saddest scenes in twentieth-century fiction.
[I once read something about an abusive husband who went to therapy and used everything he learned there to further emotionally manipulate his wife.
Hemingway’s loathing of his characters who talk about their feelings is of a piece with his style. Fearing that eloquence as traditionally understood is a means of shading and concealing the truth (as Humbert Humbert says, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), he simply abjures it. This is not a new worry—Plato expressed it in the Gorgias:
Socrates: And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?
Gorgias: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?—not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?
Socrates: Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows?
(Translated by Benjamin Jowett.) Gorgias’ questions there get to a point not explicitly in Robert Cohn or the man in “Hills Like White Elephants”; do these guys actually have any idea what they are talking about, or have they merely discovered that talk in this vein gets them what they want?
Cohn, at least, comes across as very pleased with his discovery that he is behaving like a maniac because he is lovesick—so pleased that he has to let everyone else know about it too. The man in “Hills Like White Elephants” is harder to read. And in making him so opaque Hemingway runs up against the limits of his style:
The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
“They look like white elephants,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”
Hemingway gives us a description of the hills in his style (“white in the sun”) before the girl’s metaphorical description reveals more about them, and reveals more because it induces a response from the man that he never would have made had she said the hills were white in the sun. There is no escape from artistic decisions, and feigning to have escaped them is merely one more. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, David Womersley on the reception of Gulliver’s Travels:
In the light of contemporary horrors, it was no longer plausible to dismiss the darker patches of Swift’s imagination as inhuman, for they had become our very element. The energies of Swift’s mind (no matter how bleak his vision), and his ingenuity in giving that energy and vision appropriate and disturbing literary expression, now began to be more generously recognised. Following pioneers such as Flaubert and Conrad, even novelists as fastidious as Nabokov drew imaginative strength from Swift. In The Enchanter (1939), a dry run for Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s protagonist is obliged to marry the mother of the child he secretly desires. On his wedding night he imagines himself as a “little Gulliver” lost in her “multiple caverns,” and repelled by the “rancid emanations of her wilted skin.”
But perhaps the most faithful modern response to Gulliver’s Travels is to be found in the philosophical fictions of Borges, pre-eminently in “Brodie’s Report” (1970)—an engagement supported and informed by Borges’ many reflections on Swift in his critical writings. When he read Gulliver’s Travels, Borges understood that this ostensible account of voyages to remote nations was really the record of a voyage through a library, and his imagination vibrated in sympathy with that aspect of Swift’s project.
In The Point, Ben Cosman on the baseball novel:
In this way, Coover’s novel is the most honest of baseball novels, because it is about the impossibility of a baseball novel. Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance. The game is, as Coover might remind us, an artificial construct that requires something like a suspension of disbelief—or, rather its opposite, the adoption of belief, the acceptance that the rules of the game matter—but one that adheres to no single participant’s narrative. Baseball can be used as a literary device, a metaphor, but a fictional baseball game can never provide the same experience as an actual baseball game because a fictional game is, despite Coover’s hopes, always the “definitive utterance” of its creator. It is, definitionally, contrived. Whereas I watch baseball because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither does anyone else. An alternative approach to baseball fiction is to forgo fictionalizing the game altogether and instead fictionalize around the game, as in Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall. Initially published as a story in Harper’s, Pafko is the novella that opens DeLillo’s Underworld and was reissued as a standalone volume by Scribner in September to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the actual baseball game it depicts: Pafko is Andy Pafko, left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers in game three of their three-game playoff in 1951 against the New York Giants, and he’s at the wall because he’s watching Bobby Thomson’s game-winning home run fly into the stands. This was “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” in one of the most famous baseball games in history, in which the Giants completed the most improbable of improbable comebacks to overtake the Dodgers and win the pennant.
[In contrast the great football novel, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968), is mostly about watching football on TV, as God intended.
Here Coover is right and yet not right enougb:
Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance.
This is also true of life, in which we are all at different moments players and coaches and umpires and fans. As the man says:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
And while we do not know what is going to happen in a baseball game, we do know that it will be baseball. There will be pitching and hitting and fielding, and there will be nine innings of this unless it’s tied, and so on. Life has no such rules to limit what might happen to us. Sports give us the unknowability and suspense of life, and they let us invest as much of ourselves as we want into them, all with the knowledge that it is always, just barely, only a game. There is only so much we can gain, and, more importantly, there is only so much we can lose. —Steve]
Reviews:
In Harper’s, Benjamin Kunkel reviews the new Cormac McCarthy biography (Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, by Tracy Daugherty, October 6) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 30, 2026.]:
In his novels, McCarthy apprehends the world as a scene of material dilapidation and social disorder, few if any governments or corporations in sight. Somehow this vision is that of one of the central writers of postwar consumer society, a place of mass higher education, of industrial plastics, consumer electronics, and personal automobiles, of cheap and attractive clothing. For all that this society furnished the historical ground of McCarthy’s career, it barely registers in his fictional accounts of ragged and desperate illiterates making their way on foot or on horseback through an almost immemorial scene of stone, wood, metal, fire. To restrict his style only to the objects that suit it, McCarthy must flee contemporary society to set his novels in the remotest parts of Appalachia, untouched by the TVA, as in the earlier novels; along the bloody frontier of westward expansion in the American Southwest of the mid-nineteenth century (Blood Meridian); and in the lonesome backcountry of the desert Southwest during the Forties and early Fifties (the Border Trilogy). The Road leapfrogs the period between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of some future world war—“A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions”—altogether.
In The Paris Review, Alessandro Tersigni reviews a collection of essays by Turner Brooks (Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, October 27):
The buildings that the adult Brooks likes and designs are replete with mazes, alternate routes, spaces within spaces. He loves a secret garden, exulting in labyrinthine spaces because they force us to “reconnoiter with where one is, where one is coming from, and where one is going to next.” One of his primary influences regarding the virtue of architectural interstices is Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” in which an unidentified animal loses itself, to Brooks’s delight, in the tangled bowels of its own den to elude home invaders. Another is Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Visiting Soane’s Frankensteinian Georgian townhouses, he found that, though their “spaces are intimate, the wandering among them, as among trees in a forest, seems infinite.” He sees in both the Kafka tale and the museum some echo of his own philosophy: that what we undergo within a work of architecture is encoded in its infrastructure and blueprint, its tangible twists and turns.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion” (translated by James E. Irby):
I have also meditated on the house. All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are fourteen (infinite) in number. The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world. However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and dusty gray stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea. I did not understand this until a night vision revealed to me that the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number. Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in the world seem to be repeated only once: above, the intricate sun; below Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.
N.B.:
Adam Roberts on where Marvell got his chariot and his desert. [Bring me my Bow of burning gold: / Bring me my desert of desire: / Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! / Bring me my Chariot of fire! —Steve]
Ernest Hemingway: “I write standing up because sitting down broadens the ass.” [And narrows the mind? —Steve]
“Just like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back, so we want our Winnie-the-Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends.” [You’d think this would be a joke at the expense of the British, but no. —Steve]
New kinds of literary scams.
That one tree that got cut down in the UK.
New issues:
The Baffler Issue 86 | Tight Ship
Harper’s Magazine November 26 [As linked to above.]
The New Criterion Volume 45, Number 3 / November 2026
Poem:
“A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
[Have you ever met a spider that wasn’t noiseless and patient? And yet those adjectives get right to what a spider is. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out Friday:
Columbia University Press: The Book of China: A Persian Merchant’s Description of the Ming State for the Ottoman Court by ʿAli Akbar Khatayi, edited and translated from the Persian by Kaveh Hemmat, John Curry, and Hyunhee Park
Ecco | November 3
Totem: The Untold Story of Scripture
by Jo Baring
From the publisher: Why have we always made sculpture? What draws us to carve, cast, and mold forms from the materials around us? What do these objects say about the artists who create them and the societies they belong to?
In Totem, art historian and curator Jo Baring uncovers the untold story of sculpture, not through a traditional survey but by tracing how it has shaped and been shaped by human experience across cultures and millennia. From prehistoric artifacts like the Lion-man figure found in a German cave to to an ancient Mayan pyramid that conjures a serpent made of shadows, to the icons of the Italian Renaissance and the radical innovations of the twentieth century, Baring reveals how sculpture expresses power, loss, identity, and the need to make meaning through form. Along the way, she introduces us to the artists who have expanded sculpture’s possibilities—including Barbara Hepworth, Constantin Brâncuși, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Antony Gormley—and revisits familiar works with fresh eyes.
Featuring original illustrations by Julia Ashe—line drawings that work in concert with Baring’s lithe, intimate storytelling to bring us closer to this thoughtfully curated selection of sculptures—Totem is a powerful reflection on our need to make, to remember, and to understand ourselves through the things we shape.
Also out Tuesday:
Harvard University Press: The Blickling Homilies edited and translated from the Old English by Robert Getz
Metropolitan Books: Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film by Mark Binelli
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 by Gordon S. Wood (2009). He also, while trying to pull quotes for earlier in the newsletter, ended up going back through the whole of the Gorgias and “Hills Like White Elephants.” [You guys heard about this Plato fellow? Pretty good! Same for this Hemingway character! —Steve]
Critical notes:
In The American Scholar, Bonnie Friedman on remembering what you read:
I’m convinced that a neurological change happens when one analyzes a passage aloud. Doing so must activate a different, more pertinacious function of the brain. Therefore, to build one’s internal library, it helps to have a group or at least a friend with whom to discuss what you read. In the absence of such a group, careful rereading on one’s own does much good. It also helps to copy passages out. And to consider a book’s shape. When you’ve put your book down for the day, spend time recalling the most haunting scenes. Certain images enter us saturated with meaning, like emblems on a tarot deck: Josef K.’s neighbors across the street peering into his bedroom as he demands to be told why he is under arrest, Emma Bovary taking out of hiding the green silk cigar case her husband found (after their thrilling night as guests of an aristocrat) and gazing at the emblem at its center—a coat of arms like a carriage door. Every time you think of a scene like this, you reinforce your hold on it and its hold on you.
[If a sentence or passage really sticks with me I end up remembering whether it’s on the left or right page and about how far down it is. This has occasionally proved useful in finding quotes for the WRB—I only have to scan the bottom half of the left pages, or whatever the case may be. —Steve]
In The Hinternet, Sam Jennings on 30 years of If You’re Feeling Sinister:
And in the center of all this is the ultimate abject child Murdoch, who finds his way into some dozen of the most perfect expressions of adolescent melancholy in the history of recorded music: “All I wanted was to sing the saddest song . . . ” “Kid in the snow, way to go / It only happens once a year / It only happens once a lifetime, make the most of it . . . ” “Second just to being born / Second to dying, too . . . ” “The best looking boys are taken / The best looking girls are staying inside . . . ” “What is it I must do to pay for all my crimes? / What is it I must do, I would do it all the time . . . ” I could gather up half the lines from the record, like this, and they’d serve just as well—they all have that tender, miniature perfection, like the thoughts young people think they’re jotting down in their private journals, only to look back on later in life, realizing they thought the same things every young person everywhere has always thought. And from moment to moment, that’s often exactly what If You’re Feeling Sinister is: the transcription of the world’s own cringy teenage diary, taken to its most exquisite, ultimate expression. Because it’s being written by an older man, with years of loss and hard-won wisdom behind him, it never stoops to bad high school poetry, but makes those sentiments something timeless.
[I came to If You’re Feeling Sinister and Tigermilk too late to love them—senior year of college, I think?—it’s just too hard to get past the fact that they’re metaphorically written in crayon. And, if, like me, you fell for the Smiths first you quickly start missing Morrissey’s anger and winking. Adolescent melancholy is hard to do; it’s all the same but, since none of us know how to have independent thoughts as adolescents, it’s all bound up in the specific music and books and art and objects of romantic obsession we morosely meditated on.
For all that, when “We Rule the School” is on it’s the saddest song you’ve ever heard. —Steve]
Anton Chekhov (h/t Patrick Kurp):
Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.
[Negative capability! Get your negative capability here! —Steve]