All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, “there goes the greatest Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books that ever lived.”
Links:
Reviews:
In Literary Review of Canada, Irina Dumitrescu reviews a novel by Susannah M. Smith (The Alchemy of Paradise, May):
These are not spoilers. The plot serves merely as an occasion for short, essayistic meditations on collecting, transforming, and creating. All the characters, including the narrator, resemble mythic figures rather than real people—and they all sound the same. They live in a fantasy version of Europe and suffer absolutely no money worries. Luckily, Smith gives her readers a clue about how to approach her work at the beginning. “What if a book could be an elegant sheltering structure?” she writes. “What if a book could be a protective place? An enclosure, a garment, a building for the self.”
The reader is thus invited to move through the lush space Smith has created, collecting material for their own “process of transforming what is dense and heavy into what is clarified and bright.” I read the book twice and flipped through it several times more. What I found was glimpses of my younger self. Take, for example, the curator’s description of falling in love with her older, knowing husband: “When I thought about him, I could feel myself hook into something larger than my own perception, as if I were standing on a high hill looking out over a vast landscape.” This sensation was precisely what I felt when I took my first English course at the University of Toronto—and what moved me to dedicate my life to literature.
[Many books are enclosures and garments and buildings for the self. Personally, I like living in books. That’s why I manage to edit the WRB. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Andrew O’Hagan reviews a biography of Anita Brookner (Anita Brookner: Art and Life, by Hermione Lee, November 17):
There are parts of the story, of course, that only the novels can take up, the business of daily life being a process of deliberate omission for someone like Brookner. Even friends, who are fairly celebrated in this book, could be omitted when it suited her, and it caused some of them more pain than Lee finds herself willing to record. Shyness, embarrassment, reticence: they can be a form of aggression with some people, and, whatever regrets she had, Brookner preferred the world her way, which is the reason that the terrifying self-encirclement of her best characters is so completely authentic. She had an almost anorectic understanding of her own desire and the powers involved in containing it.
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Lucas Jorgensen reviews a book of poems by Forester McClatchey (Killing Orpheus, February) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 18, 2026.]
The texts—the classics, what we would identify more with the scriptures—cast doubts on truth and knowledge (which is, in their own way, a part of the knowledge these texts impart). As McClatchey writes in “Wringing Lilies from the Acorn,” “Books are packed / with autumn answers, crispy, rotten things.” Meanwhile, in a poem like “Adam’s Task,” the ineffable truths contained in the natural world are celebrated: “Before he named the world, Adam heard / the whorled language of fern.” That is, the natural world communicated purely until Adam named it, cementing it in language. As stated more directly at the end of the poem, “He owned it now. The songs / of birds were passionless. Cold quiet soaked / the woods. He begged the trees. Now nothing spoke.” By putting the natural world into language, so the collection argues, we put it into the same realm as the classical texts that we return to—and thereby they require more skepticism, a separation between the natural truth and its written facsimile.
[“Wringing Lilies from the Acorn” is a reference to Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which, if it doesn’t quite argue that books are full of “rotten things,” portrays a man who has gotten so wrapped up in books that he fails as both a person and a poet. He cannot see things for what they are, instead reducing everything into artistic comparisons:
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.
Better poetry, then, requires almost an abjuration of poetry, or at least a deep awareness of its limitations. —Steve]
In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Farrington reviews a book about philately (The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting, by Robert Irwin, June):
Stamps, Irwin observes, are also a potent device for plot advancement, being “like heroin or cocaine in that a stamp collection can be low in bulk but high in value and therefore something to be smuggled and fought over.” Louise Erdrich’s “weirdly and intricately plotted” novel The Plague of Doves (2008), he writes, features a morbid collector who specializes in “mail damaged in . . . floods, fires or air crashes, but then sent on.” (Such enthusiasts really exist, he notes.) The collector eventually descends into stamp forgery before killing himself over the careless destruction of a rare collectable.
By the end, the hyperbolic term “madman” seems like an understatement for Irwin’s subjects, many of whom are, at a minimum, fantasists. Abdurrahman Bruce Alfonso de Bourbon Condé, born Bruce Chalmers in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., imagined himself the descendant of French royalty and talked himself into a job as head of the Yemeni philatelic office in the 1950s, having been a boyhood pen pal of King Muhammad al-Badr. (Their correspondence started with a request for stamps.) After an antiroyal uprising, Condé ended up in exile, where he supported himself by writing for stamp magazines.
[I’d like to link a stamp magazine in the WRB one of these days. It’ll have to make up for failing to get the WRB royal patronage by sending off requests for stamps as a boy and letting things go from there. —Steve]
N.B.:
Malls are back, maybe.
Nassau County before the suburbs.
New issues:
The Drift Issue Eighteen
Literary Review of Canada October 2026 [As linked to above.]
The Paris Review No. 257 | Fall 2026
Poem:
“The Boston Evening Transcript” by T. S. Eliot
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”
[In a blog post from a couple years ago, Geoffrey Ross takes on the question of whether when Eliot says “corn” he means maize or wheat and comes down on the side of wheat, mostly because wheat actually sways in the wind. Maize stalks are too rigid for that. I had not previously considered this possibility—as an American I read “corn” and think maize. (I assume I am not alone in encountering my first reference to the Corn Laws somewhere and wondering why maize was such a big deal in nineteenth-century Britain.) The poem is set in an American context too, and it was published in Poetry, an American magazine. For all that, I think Ross is right. The image is nonsensical otherwise.
Ross notes that, at the time this poem was published, Eliot had lived in England for over a year (I’m not sure exactly when it was written). Perhaps he had adapted his use of “corn” in general—but a poem, unlike a spoken remark upon seeing the stuff, has a deeper level of intentionality to it. The poem amounts to a kiss-off to Boston, the Boston Eliot would have known and lived in; insulting it further by opening a poem about its miserable conformity with an image it will fail to understand is another layer of disrespect.
Ross goes on to describe the poem (hinging on the reference to “Cousin Harriet”) as a “very specifically sexist satire of women” in the tradition of “Prufrock” and its “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” but in its screaming hatred of the middlebrow it reminds me most of one of Eliot’s “London Letters” on the death of Marie Lloyd, a music-hall star:
The middle classes have no such idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt. That is to say, it is themselves and their own life which find no expression in such a person as Marie Lloyd: nor have they any independent virtues as a class which might give them as a conscious class any dignity.
And this last has nothing to do with “The Boston Evening Transcript,” but as I read through the piece on Lloyd to pull the quote above I was reminded that Eliot has this to say about the cinema:
The working-man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and he will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art.
Arguments along this line about the passivity of watching movies are back in the (well, relatively) popular imagination due to David Thomson’s new book, but this is the earliest instance of it I know. That Eliot’s main point of comparison is not reading but dramatic art is not an approach that current versions of this argument would take up, though. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out Saturday:
Pennyworth Publishing: Music and the Destruction of Music by Donald Antenen
University of Chicago Press | September 21
The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction
by Michael Gorra
From the publisher: The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.
What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.
What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.
Out Tuesday:
Da Capo: Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music by Chuck Klosterman
W. W. Norton & Company: The Unbecoming: Poems by Kathy Fagan
Yale University Press: A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality by Terry Eagleton [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Aug. 12, 2026.]
What we’re reading:
Steve read The Boxer by Gabriele Tinti (translated from the Italian by David Graham and Nicholas Benson, September 15). [The book is a series of short poems from the perspective of the Boxer at Rest, a Hellenistic bronze now on display in Rome. He speaks as both the boxer the sculpture depicts and the sculpture itself (“I can’t hear what you’re saying. My face is made of bronze, can’t you see?”). The confrontational approach demanded of a boxer in his work (“give me two more rounds // —you scream / Heads up, // gloves to the heart!”) becomes the confrontational approach of art itself to its audience, and even to the artist who made it:
You started to follow me
as if I were an ancient relic to worship.
Well, here I am, posed in this bronze,worn down by the poison of an old deception,
relentlessly hounded by an obscene conceit.
There is an aggressiveness to this that borders on contempt:
He is on his feet again.
He asks for no mercy.He seeks only a little truth,
a new wound.
The opponent—whether the other fighter in the ring or the observer in a museum—thinks they want “no mercy,” but they don’t actually want that; the boxer’s job is to give it to them anyway. (The influence of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and its “you must change your life,” while prevalent throughout, is clearest here.) In contrast, the boxer has, through being depicted in art, achieved transcendence:
and everything
is splendor
in the place I am
everything
is calm
and rapture
and pleasure
everything
is love
“Everything / is splendor”; only from this position can the boxer carry out his work as art. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Victoria Moul on spring in twelfth-century poetry:
The twelfth century saw a particular flowering of Latin verse in which old themes were handled with a new spirit and in increasingly perfected new forms, with a particular kind of self-conscious pleasure in the play of word upon word and something like a characteristic mood, which Waddell describes with typical eloquence and great romance as “the eternal April of the heart.”
The creative ferment of twelfth-century Europe was centred upon France; but at the same time, far off in the eastern part of India, Jayadeva wrote a great poem which works upon Sanskrit something not entirely dissimilar to the alchemy worked on Latin by the greatest medieval verse—and it too is about love in the springtime.
[The twelfth-century Latin poets built much of the plane out of the Song of Songs. These lines are from Carmina Burana 143:
Iam liquescit
et decrescit
grando, nix et cetera;
bruma fugit,
et iam sugit
veris tellus ubera.
(“Now hail, snow, and the rest melt and go away; winter flees, and now the earth sucks at the breasts of spring.”) It amounts to a versification of Song of Songs 2:11-12 (“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth”). And it shares with the Song of Songs a simplicity and an infectious eagerness that prevents the reader, or listener, in the moment from remembering that Horace wrote some poems about spring that come to melancholy conclusions. The most famous even opens by saying that the snow has fled (diffugere nives), and yet the feeling is so different that it doesn’t immediately suggest itself as an intertext. —Steve]
Phil Christman on William McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
You would think, reading this, that McGonagall had never marked a solemn occasion before. But you’d be wrong. [“The Burial of the Rev. George Gilfillan”], for example, is a thoroughly pedestrian elegy, with nothing to make it stick in the memory, and nothing to offend. Read around in the man’s catalogue; you are always getting an arrangement of cliches, but rarely, outside “Tay Bridge,” are they so precisely the wrong cliches for the occasion. Writing about Greenland, he gives us “churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass”; the calving of a glacier makes a noise like “big guns.” Cliches, but the ones we expect. (The use of “nice” as a line ending in that poem does yield a little hint of the anti-genius he’ll show throughout “Silvery Tay.”) His “Little Matchstick Girl,” about an underage matchstick hawker frozen to death, is tasteful and decorous in its unoriginality: the girl is so poor she hasn’t proper shoes; she is covered with snow; now she’s with Jesus. Nothing about the poem surprises. It is the poetic equivalent of showing up to a funeral in a dark suit and saying “What a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.” Whereas the images in “Tay Bridge Disaster” are the poetic equivalent of showing up to a funeral wearing your three loud ties, one on top of the other, and accentuating your crying with the blast of an airhorn.
[Christman is too nice about McGonagall’s other work. None of it is as funny as the last stanza of “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” but the bathos there of over-explaining everything is not unique. Consider this from “The Burial of the Rev. George Gilfillan”:
I’m sure he will be greatly missed by the poor,
For he never turned them empty-handed away from his door;
And to assist them in distress it didn’t give him pain,
The second and third lines hardly add any new information to the first, but McGonagall puts them there anyway lest the reader miss his point. The inverted word order in the third line reminds me of a line from Roger Ebert’s review of Battlefield Earth (2000): “The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” McGonagall has learned from better poems that poets sometimes invert standard word order, but he has not learned why. Most of McGonagall’s awkward inversions are transparently motivated by getting the rhyme, but this one isn’t even necessary for that (“And to assist them in distress didn’t give him pain,” which works as well, or as poorly, metrically)—he’s just doing it for love of the game.
Later, the poem ends like so:
Then took one last fond look, and in sorrow did leave;
And all the people left with sad hearts that day,
And that ended the Gilfillan burial in the Hill o’ Balgay.
Yes, it is my experience that everyone leaving signals the end of an event.
Christman also identifies in “’Twas about seven o’clock at night” that McGonagall is caught between the poem and the newspaper article:
We expect both poems and newspapers to be precise about time, though the poem might do so in one way—giving you descriptively and atmospherically the 6:58PM darkness rather than 6:49PM darkness—and the newspaper another (“The disaster occurred at 6:58PM”). McGonagall disclaims both sorts of precision.
The funniest way this shows up is at the end of the poem, when McGonagall introduces the figures of “many sensible men.” It’s as if he’s writing a mediocre op-ed and wants to introduce an idea without either being bold enough to claim it as his own or diligent enough to do some research and find the name of someone who is saying it. He does similar things in other poems, as in these lines from “The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir”:
Arabi’s army was about seventy thousand in all,
And, virtually speaking, it wasn’t very small;
The second line adds no information to the first, and what is “virtually speaking” doing there? There have been many bad poets; McGonagall’s anti-genius is to be a poet who believes that poems are op-eds that rhyme.
I should say that I appear in this piece as a reader who “will gather in the comments to kick numbers in my face” in response to any incorrect discussion of scansion. It’s good to have a brand, I guess—I get asked about scansion a lot, or at least more than I assume most people are. I never have any idea what to say when asked about it; a friend once asked me how to write verse in a specific meter and I eventually stammered out something like “uhhhhhh you just hear it?” How you train yourself to hear it I don’t really know. (We should certainly make children in elementary schools scan poetry, though. That and play musical instruments.) But you have to learn to hear it somehow. As Ezra Pound says, almost at the start of ABC of Reading:
The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
—Steve]