“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of the Washington Review of Books!”
Links:
In The New Statesman, John Phipps profiles Richard Holmes, author of a new biography of Tennyson (The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, February 10, 2026):
There is a story about Coleridge that Holmes tells to underscore another point about biography: it involves an adventure. As a child, Coleridge carved his initials into a cave roof near his home. One stormy day, Holmes went into a cave to find them. Guided by a cigarette lighter, he looked ahead and saw the letters STC carved in the ceiling. He jumped up, and smashed his head.
Laid out in the dark, he contemplated the moment of impact. The stone was too soft to have retained those three letters so crisply. He realized that people had come before him and carved the letters deeper into the forgetful stone. “It seemed to me that was one of the processes of biography,” he said. “A biographer writes, a story is told, and then another biographer comes. And what we know about someone gradually alters and changes, and is recarved.”
[“Alfred Lawn Tennyson” gets quoted in here but not Auden’s “he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” But while “Alfred Lawn Tennyson” is just funny, Auden is unintentionally revealing. As Seamus Perry said in a review of an edition of Tennyson’s collected works:
But, on the other hand, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the other great Romantics, to whom Victorian intellectuals such as Mill were no less indebted, conceived childhood in quite a different way, as the grounds of a brilliant freshness of perception that constituted the source of continuing genius—“the buoyant child surviving in the man,” in Coleridge’s words. Auden thought about childhood in that spirit too (“to grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence but to make use of them”), so when he singled out “Tennyson’s infantile approach to poetry,” as John Bayley once happily observed, he was doing so “with the knowingness of the man who recognizes his obsession commenting on the man who doesn’t.”
—Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Cath Pound on Rachel Ruysch, the first woman to be admitted to The Hague’s artistic society:
A 1692 portrait of Ruysch by Michiel van Musscher shows the esteem she was held in at this time, while also offering intriguing insights into her working practice. Seated at a desk with a blank canvas behind her, Ruysch holds a palette and brush in one hand while placing a flower in a vase in front of her. Books and prints are piled on the table, suggesting that they will also act as a reference for the final composition. That Ruysch used books and prints as a source as well as live specimens is no surprise. Very few of her works could have been painted wholly from nature. Apart from the fact that the abundant bouquets could never have fitted into the small vases that supposedly contain them, Ruysch also featured flowers that blossomed at different times of year and existed in different climates.
Her inclusion of entomological subjects also shows her taking liberties with the laws of nature. A wide range of animal and insect life can be found in Ruysch’s still-lifes—butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, bees, wasps, ants, dragonflies and lizards all inhabit her works. But while painted in meticulous detail, native and exotic species appear in the same composition, as do nocturnal and diurnal butterflies.
[Pound quotes a review of an exhibit of Ruysch’s work: “essentially—even merely—decorative, like the highest order of wallpaper.” The artistic process mentioned here is its own small refutation of that. The still lifes Ruysch painted are still, yes, but they are not “life” necessarily; they work with the materials of life, carefully selected and arranged in life and in the mind, to make something new that reveals something about the thing being depicted. —Steve]
Reviews:
In ,
reviews a biography of Poe (Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley, March) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 15, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 2, 2025.]:Poe’s borrowing of this voice, perhaps mostly from himself, gives his stories an intensity that is rarely achieved in prose. They are overheated, fraught, and rather obviously ginned up, subjecting their narrators to tangible and spectral intrigues while suggesting, when not saying, that the victims are complicit. Readers will notice these kinds of anxious muddles in Conrad, and later Graham Greene: those two, like Poe, have a taste for the adventure into the exotic, but cannot be called writers of escapist fiction. There is not an obvious American lineage from Poe until, in the twentieth century, H. P. Lovecraft and later horror writers take up the bloody pen. He did not travel in Europe, as Emerson or Hawthorne did, but his legacy is rather cosmopolitan. Kopley ends with the unveiling of a Poe statue in Boston, attended by the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. He looks for traces of Poe in the more immediate sphere, in the work of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, but Poe seems to send his strongest signals in a more fantastic diffusion, not just across the pond but further, to Baudelaire, who liked his synesthetic effects, and to Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky, who were much impressed by the doppelgänger tale “William Wilson.” Nabokov read Poe in his Russian boyhood, and in the original, too. What he brought back to Poe’s native country around 50 years later in Lolita is Poe’s haunted melancholy, to be sure, but also something of his poetics. The attention given Poe by Nabokov, though not uncritical, is the best compliment we can cite to counteract the charge of vulgarity and artlessness, or the catty criticism of Harold Bloom, who had it that the Poe short story is but a myth from the unconscious universal, better in translation or in our own words. We can sense that for Nabokov, Poe, more than just a storyteller, was a teacher of literary art. How is it that Poe at his worst, near self-parody, is so affecting, and why is he outgrown but not discarded, stored like a favorite childhood curio somewhere up in the attic of the memory? Because one learns something from him and knows it is valuable.
[The decision to go after the Poe short story and not the Poe poem baffles me. (At one point in here Robinson writes “Poe’s best verse”; my immediate thought was “well, that’s an oxymoron.”) The same reliance on repetition that makes the poetry feel trite and overly cute and like a record skipping gives the short stories an oneiric power. It has something like nightmare logic; the only way out of the trap and the only way to get the monster to stop chasing you is to wake up. Anything else keeps you in the same place. —Steve]
In Public Books, Naomi Levine reviews Stendhal’s study of love (De l’amour, 1822):
Crystallization is most thoroughly elaborated in my favorite part of the book, a short story (or is it an autobiographical reminiscence?) appended to the posthumous edition of 1853. “The Salzburg Bough” recounts the metaphor’s genesis, a trip the narrator takes to the Hallein salt mines with a charismatic Italian friend named Madame Gherardi. At the mines, the friends are enchanted by the salt-encrusted twigs offered to tourists. And another tourist, a young Bavarian officer, is clearly enchanted by Madame Gherardi, becoming ridiculous in her presence.
The narrator has a brilliant epiphany: What has happened to the branch in the salt mine is happening in the imagination of this young man. He is “crystallizing for” her, turning a perfectly human woman into a dream-encrusted ideal. The friends are delighted by the discovery of this metaphor, and it becomes a running joke for the rest of the trip and a punchline in the theater boxes and drawing rooms back home. But there is the subtlest of suggestions that our narrator, for all his ironic detachment, might be a little besotted with his friend too. . . .
[Writing anything about love requires a little bit of ironic detachment. Writing the sort of things about love Stendhal does here, like the hilariously overprecise classifications of love and the process of falling in love, requires a lot of ironic detachment. But ironic detachment is a pose just as much as naked sincerity is, and the ironic detachment affords the lover the opportunity to really wallow in it. After all, would you read a whole book of things said sincerely about love? We talk of love in quotes and clichés for a reason.
As for crystallization: we’ve all been there. —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Helena Aeberli reviews Joanna Walsh’s book about internet culture (Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters, September 23):
Reading Amateurs! is not unlike scrolling a Tumblr blog circa 2017. Wide-ranging, dense, and passionate, it hopscotches from Sigmund Freud to Sianne Ngai, McKenzie Wark’s 2004 Hacker Manifesto to Jia Tolentino’s 2017 retrospective on Jezebel. Walsh is an enthusiastic defender of the amateur, and Amateurs! is itself a project of enthusiastic amateurism. At several points, she describes her jumps in thought as “hyperlinks.” In true Web 2.0 style, these hyperlinked connections are founded on interest and passion rather than true coherence, on breadth of engagement rather than studied depth. If this all sounds a bit exhausting, that’s because it is. Some of Walsh’s references are underdeveloped; others rely on a hefty level of prior reading. Little-known artworks are mentioned without context or reproduction. This is theory about the internet, but it is also internet-as-theory, rich in its own striking neologisms and wry asides, a pick and mix of highbrow and lowbrow, skating somewhere between the meme and academe. We are far from the traditional academic tome, but we are even further from the ever-scrolling, algorithmically curated feeds passively consumed in the contemporary online world. Amateurs! demands the engagement it theorizes, engagement that is a form of amateurish attentiveness, that is also a form of love.
[This is certainly something like internet-as-theory, but if the description applies equally well to some of the most important works of modernist literature I hesitate to ascribe the ideas purely to time spent online. And if it demands you pay attention to everything it includes, it’s pretty far away from any vision of the internet. —Steve]
N.B.:
The history of vanilla.
[I realized while reading this that Mr. Peanut wears spats. As far as I can tell this is the only place spats still exist in American pop culture. —Steve]
Poem:
“Two Shadows” by Maurice Manning
The little one belongs to her
and the taller one is mine, though I doubt
she knows the shadows walking hand
in hand ahead of us in the field
are ours. If I walk behind her mine,
without a word, overshadows
all of hers, a magic I think she likes.
And when I walk at her side again,
the two of us return, a giant
and his long-legged little helper,
who’s new enough to walking still
she manages a wobble or swings
a foot in picking the place to put it.
None of this beautiful, secret love
will last. Other shadows will come
along, and she’ll see her own one day
apart from mine. But before those fates
arrive, I’m going to stretch my arms,
and tipping and twirling, I’ll show her how
to turn her shadow into a bird
and rest it softly in the tree,
and afterward, when she sees a shadow,
perhaps she’ll think of birds or me.
[Manning allows himself to embrace the enchantment of childhood here. All this reflected wonder is a gentle counterweight to the heart of the poem, the inevitable fracture of growing up. His daughter’s shadow will both become her own and become cognizable to her as her own and “[n]one of this beautiful, secret love / will last.” But any grief Manning might feel in his awareness is sublimated by his willingness to delight in his daughter’s life on her terms: the magic in his bird-figure ombromanie and the vanishing act absorption of his daughter’s little shadow, a brief but totalizing embrace. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
New Directions | September 30
The Wax Child
by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
From the publisher: In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people’s happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake.
The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.
[Chris on a recent Ravn novel: “It’s about feeling. Don’t you want to feel something?” (As I did there, I demur about that sort of thing.) —Steve]
Also out Tuesday:
Dorothy, a publishing project: The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi [We linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 24, 2025.]
Penguin Press: The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Slant Books: Child of These Tears: A Novel by Molly McNett
W. W. Norton & Company: The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization by Owen Rees
What we’re reading:
Steve is still reading The Faerie Queene.
Critical notes:
- with two notes on Dylan:
But now I think again—as in a second dream—that a “ditch” is not a grave but, the side of a road.
(Compare these lines from Street-Legal’s (1978) “Changing of the Guards”: “I stumbled to my feet / I rode past destruction in the ditches” (“Cast a cold eye, / on life, on death”?); and, though they share the image not the word, these lines from the same album’s “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”: “I fought with my twin, that enemy within, ‘til both of us fell by the way.”)
To cast one’s impedimenta in the ditch is to lighten oneself for the road—it is for those “Running to Paradise.” But they have no need yet to run. Paradise is—in this Aubade—already where they are, already where they are being expelled from. The visions are falling from them, but are visions still. “And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”
[“Señor,” also off Street-Legal, is the other side; Dylan asks the titular figure (probably Señor Jesuchristo: “Señor, Señor, let’s overturn these tables”) questions like “Is there any truth in that, Señor?” and “Will there be any comfort there, Señor?” And he has similar questions about what is a vision and what is not: “A gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring / Said, ‘Son, this ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing.’” —Steve]
- on Falstaff’s death:
I said at the beginning of this that I love the line “a table of green fields.” But I don’t love it because it makes sense in context: it doesn’t. I question the idea that “making logical sense” is the Shakespearian criterion—the premise that an editor’s job is to revise and alter Shakespeare until it makes consecutive, logical, semantic sense. This results in a smoothening, a blandifying, of the texture of Shakespeare. The point of Shakespeare is to make poetic sense, not to adhere to some vision of logical consistency. When McCartney, composing “Hey Jude,” put-in “the movement you need is on your shoulder,” as a lyrical placeholder, he assured Lennon that he would change it later. Lennon told him to keep it, and was right to do so. The sense it makes is poetic, not semantic and logical.
For an Elizabethan table might mean picture, or notebook (tablet), but it also meant, well, table, the item of furniture, and that’s how I read it, here. A table of green fields becomes a miniaturization of the actual green fields of England; a tabletop version of the landscape—a modular rendering of reality, which is what drama, and poetry, are. This is to connect with Henry V’s prologue, which is precisely about the mismatch between big reality and the small representation of reality provided by the theatre.
[Prospero gets in on this sort of thing: “the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.” And sometimes Shakespeare links the failures of the stage to the weaknesses of the actors, as in Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.” York makes a similar comparison in Richard II:
As in a theater the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious,
Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes
Did scowl on gentle Richard.
But sometimes he contrasts the strength of the theater with the weakness of “real life,” as when Hamlet says:
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?
And sometimes he just flatly equates the two: “All the world’s a stage.” If the combination of all these does not make logical sense, it makes poetic sense. —Steve]
In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Dylan Riley on “post-mass culture”:
Significantly, the unravelling of the peculiarly American phenomenon of mass leisure and mass consumption is not quite a return to the openly stratified culture of nineteenth-century Europe for example, with its great divide between elite and folk culture. Instead, what is occurring is the transformation of a pre-existing mass culture into something else. The fact that what is arising is after is critically important.
Symptomatically, the tech executive does not renounce Disneyland in favor of some more rarefied leisure destination; he instead demands a version of the same experience but tailored to his class position. This is a general phenomenon in the contemporary US. It is common at upscale restaurants, for example, to find menu items that “elevate” a mass-cultural product: an Oreo cookie re-interpreted as a fancy ice-cream sandwich, a Twinkie presented in the form of a bundt cake, or the innumerable plagiarisms of Big Macs in more or less gourmet forms. The high-income consumer still covets the mass-culture original, but wants it in an appropriately upmarket form. All kinds of other phenomena follow this logic: sporting events, bowling alleys, movie theaters are increasingly sold as upscale experiences, offering fine dining, reserved deluxe seating and so on.
[One reason we have not seen a return to the divide between elite and folk culture is that elite culture no longer exists. Reading this I was reminded of something said in his essay a few years ago about the middlebrow: people keep talking about The Sopranos as if it were Finnegans Wake. Something similar happened when Martin Scorsese critiqued Marvel movies; Scorsese’s movies, which are entertaining and accessible—and, to be clear, excellent—were also discussed if they were Finnegans Wake. The highbrow is so dead that basically nobody knows what it is anymore, and so cultural cache has to attach itself to other things. Speaking of The Sopranos, the term “prestige TV” is an early version of the phenomenon Riley discusses, and it makes the trick obvious. The viewer is, in fact, having the same experience as most Americans—watching television—but is having a more elevated version of it, hence “prestige.” And prestige, after all, is not a promise of quality but a promise of status; you, the viewer, are the sort of person who partakes of this elevated experience. (Fun dissertation idea for someone: track the rise of writing involving prestige TV, both through explicit reviews and through references to it in other pieces as part of the common culture readers are assumed to know, in our prestige—there’s that word again—newspapers and magazines.)
At a certain point this obsession with dressing things up distracts from whether they actually improve on the original. Is the experience of watching a movie in a theater better if you can eat a meal from a restaurant during it? No. Are these gourmet imitations of McDonald’s better than what you can get at the drive-through? Also no. (A friend of mine once said something like “the title of Salt Fat Acid Heat (2017), taken literally, suggests that the best food possible is the McDonald’s french fry.”) Many traditional forms of elite culture had some kind of barrier to entry. Set aside Finnegans Wake; opera and ballet are not immediately accessible on a first encounter. Even something like talking intelligently about wine—the taste, not the prestige associated with the label—requires you to have tasted a certain amount of wine and learned how to talk about it. But no development of taste, no work at all, is required to go to Disneyland and spend $900 on the “Lightning Lane Premier Pass,” or to eat a bundt cake Twinkie, or to sit in a plush seat at a sporting event. The status associated with these things can attach itself to anyone—anyone who can pay for them, at least. And in the hunt for prestige when everyone participates in the same mass culture, you get what you pay for.
(And if you, dear reader, were considering inviting me to your box at Notre Dame Stadium, please do not construe these remarks as indicating my opposition to that idea. I’m pretty sure it’s more fun in the bleachers, though.) —Steve]