Honestly—is the Washington Review of Books too daring?
Links:
Reviews:
- Moul reviews a new collection of poetry by Gillian Allnutt (Lode, July):
The relationship between the end of Laforgue’s poem and Allnutt’s is less obvious. The French poem ends with the speaker turning aside from thoughts of autumn, and repairing in proper French style to a café or tabac. These closing lines juxtapose the speaker flipping through old almanacs with a final dream of beauty: the girl who could unite “the charms of the carnation and of the goldfinch.” In Allnutt’s final lines, the phrase “abandoning us” recalls the beginning of the French passage (tout nous abandonne), and the old almanacs of Laforgue’s final lines have become the “worn devices” with which the speaker is left as summer departs. The final quotation from Keats (“Season of mists and mellow”) looks I think towards both elements of the French poem, because the beginning of Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” is both a “worn device,” a cliché, and the enduring dream of beauty. Such a blend of astringency and romance is typical of Allnutt and one of the most rewarding features of her style.
[Anything that provides Wodehouse the opportunity to write
“There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
“Season of what?”
“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.”
is in both cliché and enduring dream of beauty territory. And the combination is also very Keatsian; later in the poem comes
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
And in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the even more obvious
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
where Keats spins an enduring dream of beauty out of the cliché on the urn. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Kasia Boddy reviews two collections of Dorothy Parker’s work (Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28, 2024; and Dorothy Parker: Poems, March) and a book about her time in Hollywood (Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, by Gail Crowther, 2024):
Parker spent much of her time at Vanity Fair delineating these and other species in reviews, features and a popular series of “hate” poems. Some of her targets have dated, but many are still recognizable: “domestic women” whose “every moment is packed with Happiness”; “Serious Thinkers” who talk about humanity “as if they had just invented it”; poets who demand to be told “honestly—is it too daring?”; and magazine editors who “never fail to find exceptional talents / In any feminine artist under 25.” Her first book publication followed in 1920, in the form of “prose precepts” to accompany the drawings in High Society, a parodic etiquette guide by the cartoonist Fish. The book advises girls which kinds of men to avoid. Futurist artists, for example, “always have a past.”
For Parker, debunking social types meant debunking the forms that went with them, particularly where romance was concerned. As a reviewer, she joked about the possibility, “sometime, in the glorious future,” of a play in which “a penniless girl sets out to capture a millionaire—and doesn’t get him.” As a poet, she adopted traditional verse forms (sonnet, ballad, triolet, roundel) to delineate love’s very modern discontents. Parker wasn’t the first to do this, as she readily admitted. All she had done was walk “in the exquisite footsteps” of Edna St. Vincent Millay, “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” But it’s sneakers you need if you want to get somewhere fast.
[We linked to an excerpt from the introduction to Constant Reader in WRB—Nov. 6, 2024; Dorothy Parker in Hollywood was the Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 9, 2024, and we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 5, 2024.
Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but while Edna St. Vincent Millay was many things, funny was not one of them. And something like “Two-Volume Novel” (“The sun’s gone dim, and / The moon’s turned black: / For I loved him, and / He didn’t love back.”), which Boddy quotes, has its predecessors in Millay’s work, but it also has predecessors in the work of most poets. What distinguishes it from most of them is the length and the punch. Really, Parker was an epigrammatist, but epigram is not a medium that has ever had much popularity in American letters—it’s much more suited to being passed around among friends than published in the newspaper. Or, as Parker did, contributing dialogue to movies. —Steve]
Two in The Lamp; first,
reviews A. N. Wilson’s book about Goethe (Goethe: His Faustian Life: The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World, 2024) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 30, 2024.]:I should stress that this is not a worshipful biography, however much Wilson may revere Goethe (which, commendably, he does). On the one hand, it is a loving portrait of someone who had a fair claim to being the greatest incarnation of the ideal of the truly civilized man, as well as of a soul in which everything was in balance: the Classical and the Romantic, the right and the left hemispheres of the brain, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian, even the masculine and the feminine. It is also, however, a candid picture of someone who was not only the majestic poet and novelist who created Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust but also an irrepressible hedonist who was no less prolific in the consumption of alcohol and exuberant copulation; a man whose heart was open to the world but often sealed fast against the common man, universalist in cultural sympathy and yet utterly undemocratic in social philosophy; a proud son of the literate aspiring bourgeoisie and also a class-conscious climber avid for and delighted by his eventual ennoblement. He was a demigod, but the human and the divine aspects of his nature were not so much blended as always in a state of fruitful tension. As I say, this is an exceedingly entertaining biography; it is also opinionated, extremely intelligent, and absorbing. That said, it has its eccentricities, to which some readers may object but which are a large part of its appeal. One may demur to some of its judgements, and one may find some of its claims slightly jarring (I will refrain from divulging how Wilson calls upon Disney’s Fantasia to cast a slightly candy-colored light on his subject), but no one is likely to regret diving into the book and surrendering to its flow.
[At some point it became WRB tradition to mention Donald Barthleme’s “Conversations with Goethe” whenever Goethe is mentioned; here is the pinch of incense.
In high school, I think, I stumbled across both parts of Faust, was unaware that most people only read Part One, and read right through both. While I am not sure that my high school self was a particularly capable critic, I remember thinking that while Part One was excellent, all the really exciting material was in Part Two. There’s probably something to it; while Part One is “the story of Faust,” Part Two is Goethe getting all of his obsessions out onto the page. And since, as Hart says, Goethe was a man of so many interests and so many contradictory impulses, watching him write it all down while trying to connect it is fascinating. —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:
I attempt to remember other thoughts I had about literature in high school
The kinds of things they’re printing in books nowadays
K. T. on a Poem by Maurice Manning and happiness
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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