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Links:
In Liberties, Andrew Eckholm on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s post-Gatsby work and life:
Superficially, the Fitzgerald character Dick most closely resembles is James Gatz. But where Gatz’s dreams remain in the realm of fantasy, Dick has to live out his, and where Gatz is delusional, Dick is self-aware. He wanted to save Nicole because she was damaged, destroyed—after all, he literally married a mental patient—and because she might do the same to him. So he’s the dog who caught the bus. He’s the Gatsby who got the girl, who actually understood what he was getting: “He knew her problem was one they had together for good now.” His difficulty in breaking free from a life he no longer wants is that to do so he’d have to acknowledge that marrying Nicole was a mistake. He’d have to give up on the one genuinely heroic act of his life, a freely chosen trial of his much-praised character that, in a bitter paradox, has resulted in a life that doesn’t feel heroic at all. If Gatsby did get Daisy, it’s hard not to think he’d be nostalgic for those long nights spent gazing at the Buchanans’ green dock light. What could beat that?
[The problem with getting what you want is, of course, that you get what you want. With Gatsby’s death he achieves the Keatsian dream, as Fitzgerald would have known—“For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” (This newsletter has mentioned “Ode on a Grecian Urn” a lot recently.) And Sentimental Education, which has a title that would fit basically everything Fitzgerald ever wrote, ends with Frédéric and Deslauriers, as old men, deciding that the best time of their lives was a teenage visit to the local brothel where they were too nervous to actually do anything:
The great heat, the fear of the unknown, and even the very pleasure of seeing at one glance so many women placed at his disposal, excited him so strangely that he turned exceedingly pale, and remained there without advancing a single step or uttering a single word.
Something similar happens when Madame Arnoux, after Frédéric has been fascinated with her for years, comes to offer herself to him:
Another fear, too, had a different effect on him—lest disgust might afterwards take possession of him. Besides, how embarrassing it would be!—and, abandoning the idea, partly through prudence, and partly through a resolve not to degrade his ideal, he turned on his heel and proceeded to roll a cigarette between his fingers.
Flaubert and Fitzgerald are not writers with much in common, but they both understand that the story of a life is more about wanting things than having things. And having things does not freeze anyone on that urn; it merely creates a new situation in which to want and maybe repent of one’s previous wants. (This paradox animates many other essential texts of Western civilization, such as “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”) —Steve]
In The Paris Review, Shane McCrae on an upcoming collection of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs that he edited (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, December 9):
The Dream Songs has no narrative, however, although it features a hero, and it is this lack of a binding narrative that prevented me, and has perhaps prevented others, from recognizing that The Dream Songs is an epic. Just as the United States is an amalgamation of states, The Dream Songs is an amalgamation of lyrics; just as the stories of the states do not melt and vanish into the story of the nation, the lyrics that constitute The Dream Songs do not melt and vanish into it. The states, considered together, give one the idea of the United States, but the single entity that is the United States floats just beyond that idea, whole thanks to the addition of an ineffable element; the individual Songs, considered together, give one an idea of The Dream Songs, but the single entity, the epic, is something more, whole thanks to the additional consideration of Henry as an entity—he is the cover that binds the pages of the book together. And he makes the expansion of the epic with the Songs in the book you are now reading, or hearing, possible.
[Americans just don’t know how to do epic poetry. (That is, unless you subscribe to my secret history of the Aeneid.) —Steve]
Reviews:
In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Stephen Greenblatt’s new book about Christopher Marlowe (Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, September 9):
In that light, it is perfectly possible that the coroner was correct, and that Marlowe was the victim of a boozy brawl. Maybe the labyrinth was all bull. But history has wanted more from Marlowe. You might expect that “Marlowe’s mighty line,” as Ben Jonson called it, would be enough to secure his spot in the literary pantheon, but no. As if exasperated by the elusive, politic, and law-abiding Shakespeare, concealed behind the arras of his creation, we keep dragging the Canterbury hothead downstage, the better to revel in his rakishness. Most authors, in truth, are nothing to write home about; others, like Cervantes or Tolstoy, build up a stock of worldly exploits and then sequester themselves with their pens; but only a handful write as they live, their experiences stuffed into a few short years like syllables into a ten-stress line of verse. Marlowe is the captain of the crew: “Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneeled, / I strewèd powder on the marble stones, / And therewithal their knees would rankle, so / That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples / Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.”
Those are the boastful words of Ithamore, the Muslim sidekick of Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, and they enshrine “the farce of the old English humor, the terribly serious, even savage comic humor” that T. S. Eliot identified in an essay on Marlowe. Fear not, there are plenty of other Marlowes to go round. There is the swoon-worthy Marlowe, best encountered in a 1967 film of Doctor Faustus, in which Richard Burton treats his paramour, Elizabeth Taylor, to Marlowe’s most famous line: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” The look that she gives him in return, through her mascara, is Taylorese for “You bet.” And don’t forget the homoerotic Marlowe of Edward II, which was filmed by Derek Jarman, in 1991, and veiled in an atmosphere both furious and camp. Jarman also made a movie about Caravaggio—Marlowe’s opposite number in the Counter-Reformation, as it were, and his match in the glutting of the senses. Each man left a trail of bruises, blood, and legal footnotes; we know that Marlowe assaulted a tailor with a stick and a dagger in 1592, and that, twelve years later, Caravaggio threw a dish of artichokes at a waiter’s head, in Rome. Genius dazzles down the ages, but so do fits of rage.
[Poor Marlowe, can’t even get his name into the subtitle of a book about him. And I’m pretty sure the greatest rivals of any Elizabethan playwright were bear-baiting and cockfighting and so on. Tamburlaine can make defeated kings pull his chariot, and Barabas can poison an entire nunnery, but neither of them can make bears and dogs fight each other on stage. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Propertius and Decadent poetry
I am jealous of the Uffington White Horse
A Poem by John Donne and funerals
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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