WRB—Sept. 18, 2024

“hung up on the whole European thing”

To Washington I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of Managing Editors.

N.B.:

The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place on Saturday, September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In The Lamp, Jude Russo on literary models:

  There’s a lot of game on the American reserve for the youthful literary hunter. Making Mark Twain or Faulkner your main model is a big bite to chew, probably a choking hazard; aping Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitz is almost as bad as pretending to be British. A lot of writing happened in the years between 1880 and 1930 that has been all but forgotten; plenty of it was dross, but you find by chance some frank diamonds in there. Occasionally young people ask me for advice (which is hugely depressing—set your horizons of success a little higher, kids), and I’ve taken to telling them to read a lot of Theodore Dreiser. Not because Dreiser is a flawless prose writer; far from it. You don’t want to give your rising generational rivals too much help. It’s just something different; it makes the game a little more interesting.

  But if the young person is someone I particularly like, I might point them at Ambrose Bierce or Ring Lardner pere. There’s an archaism there, but a familiar one, the warm sepia world of old photographs, of brown suits and straw hats and highballs and race tracks; they put the rangy American language through its paces. They aren’t hung up on the whole European thing. Perhaps most importantly, they are very funny, Bierce in a nasty way, Lardner in (mostly) a nice way, at least until his late career. Bierce, before wandering into the Mexican desert—where, I believe, he still lives and waits like an American Barbarossa—published his collected works in ten volumes. Surely there’s something in there nobody has used before.

  [I have no advice on these matters, having never really tried consciously to imitate anyone’s style. It’s probably all just magpieism, but tracing it would be boring even to me. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Deborah Levy’s upcoming collection (The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, October 1):

  Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups!

  May the waiter (calm, contemptuous, organized) please bring to the table the shivering Sacher torte with its dark, oily cacao.

  Observe Herr K. in his great coat lined with fur, gazing at Frau K.’s petticoats, white as frothing alpine milk. Is he still in love with his mother? Does he wish to murder his father, who regularly engaged in bestial coitus with the governess?

  Today Frau K. likes her coffee the Turkish way. As she lifts the small cup to her lips, her right arm freezes in midair. Oh no! Is this the same arm that pulled a handsome Herr closer to her breast when they embraced on the big wheel at the fair in the park?

  Near-death trance, vertigo, and strudel under the new clean light of electricity!

  [Near-death trance, vertigo, and twice-weekly ’sletters in the new clean light of your email inbox! —Steve]

• In The American Scholar, Allen C. Guelzo on Charles Ives’ use of music from the Civil War:

  If the 114 Songs contain the widest samples of Civil War musical echoes, it is Ives’ instrumental and symphonic works that contain the clearest intellectual and cultural messages from the war. Some of this was surely tied to his memories of George Ives, “memories of an old soldier, to which this man still holds tenderly,” as he wrote in the epilogue to Essays Before a Sonata. But another part served as Ives’ endorsement of what Barbara Gannon has called “the Won Cause,” the persistent loyalty of both white and black Union veterans to the memory of a war that was caused by slavery, fought over slavery, ended with the destruction of slavery, and pointed all Americans toward a society that erased the “badges of slavery or servitude.” And it was surely no accident that Ives, as the son of a Connecticut veteran, caught more than a little of the close connection that Connecticut veterans like George Ives made between their wartime service and emancipation. As Gannon has shown us, Connecticut’s 20-odd volunteer infantry regiments spent most of their time on battlefields outside the large-scale campaigns of the war, and, significantly, in close contact with the peripheral battles fought by the new Black volunteer regiments at Olustee, Charleston, and Port Hudson. And in the years after the war, Connecticut veterans organized Grand Army of the Republic posts with no color lines: “We have no separate posts here,” reported one newspaper, “as colored and white are united.”

  [We linked to an earlier piece in the Scholar’s series on Ives in WRB—Sept. 11, 2024. “The Won Cause” would exist in music for decades after the Civil War, and Ives’ revival of it is part of that tradition. Taking Oscar Brand’s Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789–1996 (1999) as indicative, the last Republican campaign song to explicitly mention the Civil War is Harrison’s, but the McKinley song, “Marching with McKinley,” is set to the tune of “Marching through Georgia,” and the Roosevelt song connects the Democrats to the assassination of Lincoln. Ives has a more capacious sense of his cause than most of this material, though; as Guelzo notes, “He is there!” links American involvement in WWI to the Civil War, but it also invokes the revolutions of 1848; 

  Fifteen years ago today

  A little Yankee, with a German name

  Heard the tale of “forty-eight”

  Why his Granddaddy joined Uncle Sam,

  His fathers fought that medieval stuff

  and he will fight it now

  Ives is parochial, but New England contains multitudes. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Grace on the merits of memorizing poetry, Steve on knowing yourself, Marx, Auden, Tolkien’s poetry, autumn, health resorts, modern architecture, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]