WRB—Sept. 4, 2024

“all this music”

Washington, here, had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world.

N.B.:

WRB Presents will return in September with an evening featuring readings from Helen Chandler, K. T. Mills, Samuel Kimbriel, and Kayla Jean. The Managing Editors have graciously excerpted, as always, samples of their writing so you will know the quality of our guests. Being convinced of this, you will join us by signing up at the link below:

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

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Oliver Soden on opening lines:

  Consider another alternative opening. “Kate Croy waited for her father to come in . . . ” But Henry James decided to begin The Wings of the Dove with a syntactical limp: “She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale . . . ” As the book will reveal, Kate, who is never Katherine, is as wounded as the syntax, unable quite to be the subject of a sentence, a novel, or a love affair. James presents us, as the mantelpiece mirror does, with two Kates, caught in the act of self-scrutiny, pale to the point of disintegration, and pared to monosyllables.

  • Eliot:

    After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

    History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

    And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

    Guides us by vanities.

  • Hugh Kenner:

    To what Keatonian risks did James not commit himself, risks of immobilization in mid-chaos, as he essayed for the thousandth time yet one more construction; and with what wit each impasse becomes a node, as the arrested line strikes out of it in an unforeseeable direction, seeking new points of suspension! Suitably paced, after such hints, with hesitations and onrushes, how alive a Jamesian text becomes.

    [For the precedent for this sort of tactic in the opening of novels see Soden’s discussion of Jane Eyre and Bleak House. —Steve]

• In UnHerd, Andrew Doyle on Amanda M. Ros, “the worst novelist in history”:

  Over the course of her career, Ros became better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared as a result. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins, whose operatic warbling was so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as consolation for her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling.

  When her biographer Jack Loudan once asked her why she had named one of her principal characters Lord Raspberry, Ros looked puzzled for a moment and then replied: “What else would I call him?” Loudan took this as evidence of “her complete inability to realize why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be,” but I’m not so sure. There are so many elements to Ros’ novels and poems which are clearly meant to be funny that I find it funnier still that they have been overlooked.

  [My kingdom for a novelist not engaged in an elaborate form of trolling. —Steve]

• In The Walrus, Tajja Isen on therapeutic memoirs:

  But there’s a deeper therapeutic move taking place in the segment of the iceberg below the surface—a zone one might call the book’s unconscious. Not therapy language, but therapy logic. It is a marked symptom of contemporary memoir: the tendency to impose a diagnostic structure. Such books are usually about mental health. They exhibit the propensity to attribute the author’s suffering to a single cause—the patriarchy, say, or familial dysfunction. Every anecdote the writer offers thereafter becomes a symptom of the diagnosis.

  Such a tight weave between writing and therapy is understandable. The two share core similarities. Both are catalyzed by storytelling, require deep psychic work, and reach for insight; mental health is a fertile subject for memoir, and the prose can suffer if events are narrativized before they’ve been processed. But therapy and writing are also fundamentally different projects. Transposing the aims of one onto the other can feel defensive, even litigious. An elbow jammed between the ribs, a hissed see? The author presides, smacks a gavel. Each scene feels not like the bloom of self-discovery but evidence that snaps toward a verdict. As if to inflict any other interpretation might be a form of—therapy speak again—trauma.

  [Cf. my notes on autofiction in WRB—Aug. 28, 2024. It always comes down to judgment. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on second chances, English pessimism in pop music, and his version of the French 75, Nietzsche, “lady detectives,” Auden, pennies, 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.]