We have listened too long to the courtly muses of New York. The spirit of the Washingtonian freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.
Links:
In Lapham’s Quarterly, an excerpt from James Marcus’ book about Ralph Waldo Emerson (Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2024):
Of course, he had already passed judgment on whatever was contained in those volumes, declaring in his journal that between 1790 and 1820, certainly the heyday of the Reverend William Emerson, “there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought” in the state of Massachusetts. Why save the mementos of such a wasteland, over which his father had so conspicuously presided?
I don’t mean to stuff Waldo and his father into an Oedipal pigeonhole. But there is a mystery at the heart of that relationship, a friction and sharp sense of disappointment that is hard to ignore. Sons imitate fathers. Sons also struggle mightily, when the time comes, to differentiate themselves from those enormous and engulfing figures. Fathers, meanwhile, feel the draft of time on the back of their necks—the slight coolness of age and obsolescence—and sometimes they blame their sons.
There is, in other words, plenty of room for hostility. Much of that hostility is never expressed directly. It takes the form of slights, omissions, misunderstandings, betrayals: the emotional equivalent of paper cuts, which may nonetheless leave the relationship in anemic shape.
[We linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 21, 2024.
There is something Oedipal about this too:
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.
In other words, will we continue submitting to this ancestral tyranny, or will we do away with it and begin something new? And it wasn’t just Emerson. The intellectual life of Jacksonian America seethed with similar impulses. I discussed Daniel Webster’s obvious resentment that the previous generation, by founding the United States of America, had accomplished something the current generation of politicians could not hope to match in WRB—Dec. 14, 2024. The nation’s literary life at the time reflected this feeling too. Poe wrote a number of short stories portraying the decadence and corruption of Europe, and Hawthorne was so committed to distancing himself from his Puritan ancestors that he changed the spelling of his last name in order not to share it with his ancestor who played a role in the Salem witch trials. But in order to portray that corruption Poe needed to borrow the Gothic from Europe, and in order to condemn Puritanism Hawthorne had to write a lot of stories about the Puritans. There is no escape. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Yale Review, Maggie Millner reviews a new collection of Mary Oliver’s work (Little Alleluias: Collected Poetry and Prose, September 9):
Once I began looking for it, I saw the telltale traces of lyric shame all over Oliver’s work. Many poems seem to announce their own shortcomings outright, as if preempting accusations of self-indulgence and sentimentality. “Welcome to the silly, comforting poem,” Oliver’s book-length poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, begins. An ode to beans worries, “I know what you think: this is fool- / ishness.” In another poem, daisies flaunt their yellow centers, “their—if you don’t / mind my saying so—their hearts.” This sort of coy address to a generalized “you” appears in many of Oliver’s poems, and certainly in the ones most often cited by preachers and yoga instructors. (“You do not have to be good,” goes the oft-quoted opening line of “Wild Geese.”) Oliver’s use of the second-person can confer a sense of intimacy or instruction, but can just as easily evoke scrutiny: her human audience, unlike her nonhuman subjects, reads her poetry—and has the power to either befriend or reject her on the basis of it. When I flipped back through Little Alleluias, and then through Oliver’s older books, in search of poems that truly retreat from society—without apostrophizing, defending, seducing, beseeching, or arguing with another person—I was hard-pressed to find a single one.
[There’s a line I vaguely recall from somewhere but have never been able to track down, something like “Using cliches is bad. Using cliches on purpose is worse, because it means you know better but did it anyway.” (If you know what I’m thinking of, please write in.) In a similar spirit I would like to offer “Self-indulgent and sentimental poetry is bad. Poetry that apologizes for being self-indulgent and sentimental is worse, because it means the poet knows better but did it anyway.” To be fair, regular readers of this newsletter will know that the poets who convinced me that there was really something to this whole poetry thing were T. S. Eliot, the metaphysicals, and Catullus, and being formed by that list does not engender sympathy for poetry that apologizes for existing. Better to come at it the other way. Horace follows up Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (“I loathe the vulgar crowd and keep them away”) with a declaration that he sings a new song for a new generation—“he that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” How can a poem hope to show anyone anything, let alone teach, if it abjures authority and judgment?
And what did E. E. Cummings do to get mentioned in the same sentence as Kahlil Gibran and Rupi Kaur? —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Mahika Dhar reviews translations of two pieces of seventeenth-century Chinese literature (The Peach Blossom Fan, by Kong Shangren, translated by Wai-Yee Li, 2024; and More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, collected by Zhang Yingyu, translated by Bruce Rusk and Christopher G. Rea, 2024):
Zhang’s stories are parabolic, cleanly divided into the categories of shrewd spins and scams honest people may fall prey to, from the sex scandals of “Illicit Passion” to the easy trickery of “Fake Silver.” Each story concludes with a paragraph highlighting who is susceptible to these scams and how to guard oneself against them. While the stories themselves—each only a few pages long—are explicit enough in their lessons, Zhang’s inscriptions transform the book from a collection of parables into a kind of guidebook for navigating the tumult of the times. The advice isn’t revolutionary—don’t trust flattery, question easy money—yet its plainness is the point. The world is complicated enough; can’t literature be a simple but effective crutch?
In The Peach Blossom Fan, characters feel the same way, weaving the canonical prose of the past into their own words. While this is, of course, a convention of Chinese dramas of the time, the characters seem insistent on using literature to engage with the world, from making their mark in a rapidly changing culture to building connections with each other. Take, for example, the titular peach blossom fan. Given as a gift to Li Xiangjun, the hardy heroine, by Hou Fangyu, the morally upright hero, the fan metamorphoses as the play progresses, beginning as a token of love and eventually transforming into a symbol of political and cultural resistance. The key to the metamorphosis comes through changing scripts on the fan.
[If anyone is still interested in writing the Novel, or Short Story Collection, of the Internet—well, Gaddis beat you to it with J R (1975), sorry. But framing it around scams seems to me a promising way to go about it; everything that brings economic and cultural upheaval also creates opportunities for flimflammers and confidence men. While the reasons they succeed are as old as the human heart, their techniques have to change with the times, and what they say and how they say it reveals something about the society in which they operate.
In the review Dhar compares Li’s translation of two couplets to an earlier translation (by Chen Shih-hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch, 2015), which creates a neat dichotomy between “Chinese poetry translated by people who don’t mind sounding like Ezra Pound circa 1915” and “Chinese poetry translated by people trying not to sound like Ezra Pound circa 1915.” —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:
Are novels literature?
Ophelia as symbol
A Poem by Robert Herrick and the request from dying writers that their friends burn their unfinished work
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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