Take the barleycorn and wheat grain, for example, which are two of the oldest ways of measuring weight. Both grains vary according to how much moisture they contain, but generally four wheat grains were considered to equal three barleycorns. Both grains were used in England and elsewhere to determine larger weights like the pound, which was brought to England by the Romans. (The abbreviation for the pound, lb., comes from the Latin libra, which is a shortened version of libra ponda, or "pound scale.")

The troy pound, which may have been named after the French city of Troyes and was used mostly to weigh precious metals, came in at 5,760 grains. But the merchantile pound, which was used for trading, weighed 6,570 grains. William the Conqueror created the Tower pound after he invaded Britain in 1066. It was supposed to become the standard pound and was used to mint coins. It weighed 5,400 grains, but both the troy pound and the merchantile pound continued to be used. In 1588, Elizabeth I created the imperial pound, which weighed 7,000 grains and remained the standard unit of measurement in England and most English-speaking countries until 1959, when it was replaced by the international pound.

The barleycorn was also used to determine the length of a foot, which varied widely from place to place. The Welsh foot was 27 barleycorns. The Saxon foot was 39. In 1324, Edward II decreed that the English foot was 36 barleycorns. Today, one foot is 304.8 millimeters, but according to one scholar it was 294.86 mm in ancient Rome and 302 mm in ancient Greece. In 790, Charlemagne decreed that the Frankish foot "should be set at 1/6 of a toise, which is the span of an average man with his arms outstretched." This set the Frankish foot at 326.66 mm. "Recent analysis of buildings built across Charlemagne’s kingdom during his reign, however," Cock-Starkey writes, "show a number of different values for the foot, from 296 mm to 340 mm, indicating that his decree did not translate into common practice."

I could go on, but you get the idea. I know some people blame "liberalism" for the triumph of consumerism and the rise of a supposed woke international economic order, but if you are going to blame anything, blame the metric system.

Most early forms of measurement, Cock-Starkey notes, were established to facilitate trade. "Fingernails, fingers, palms, forearms, feet," as well as "a good-sized stone," helped to determine the comparable length and weight of things in an exchange (as well as the amount of tax). In addition to the pound and the foot, there were measurements like the rod and perch, the furlong and acre, again, all of which varied from region to region or town to town. But as trade increased, an international standard of measurement became increasingly important. Hence, the metric system. One Mr. Greenall complained to Parliament’s Select Committee on Weights and Measures in 1862 that "a stone of wool at Darlington is 18 lbs., while at Belfast it is 16¾ lbs. A stone of flax at Downpatrick is 24 lbs., and a stone of flax at Belfast is not only 16¾ lbs., but it is also 24½ lbs., so that it was two values in one town."

An international standard of measurement became increasingly important for science, too. This can be seen as recently as 1999 in the example of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, which burned up as it approached Mars. "This was because," Cock-Starkey writes, "the engineers making the Orbiter used imperial tons to calculate the force the thrusters needed to exert, whereas the software used to deploy the thrusters used metric measurements." The imperial ton weighed 2,240 pounds. The metric ton weighs 1,000 kilograms, or 2,204.6 pounds.

One of the joys of The Curious History of Weights & Measures is to learn the history behind English measurements and how they changed over the years. Nearly all of them were first determined with reference to common objects or activities or the human body. A furlong was originally the distance two oxen "could plough without resting." An acre, which can be traced back to the Latin ager for "field," was the area "it was thought a single ploughman could work in a day." The mile comes from the Roman mille passus—a thousand paces. Every other time a foot hit the ground was a pace—or the length of two steps.

Did you know that the word "ton" comes from the French word for thunder (tonnerre), which is the sound huge wine casks would make as they were rolled across the floor? Or—since we’re now on the topic of alcohol—that a keg is not an official measurement for beer, but a hogshead is? (A hogshead is 54 imperial gallons, or 432 pints.) Most British kegs have the capacity of a firkin, which is from the Middle Dutch vierdekijhn for "fourth," and refers to a fourth of a barrel, or nine imperial gallons.

The Curious History of Weights & Measures is a must-read for introverts—or anyone for that matter—forced to attend the occasional cocktail party or business dinner. It has all sorts of odd facts that will keep a conversation superficially interesting for a whole evening.

Plus, it might help you make the most of your expense account. The next time you are out on the company’s dime, why not order a jeroboam of champagne instead of a bottle? That’s three liters of bubbly and more than enough to make any business dinner a delight. The guys in accounting won’t have a clue.

The Curious History of Weights and Measures
by Claire Cock Starkey
Bodleian Library, 200 pp., $25

Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and many other publications.

The post Conversion Therapy appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Since he won the National Book Award for his enthralling debut, Cold Mountain, Frazier’s work has been a bit of a mixed bag. Thirteen Moons, Frazier’s 2006 follow-up to Cold Mountain, is a riveting account of Will Cooper, an orphan who is sold off by his adoptive parents to run a trading post in the hills of the Cherokee Nation. He buys his freedom, falls in love with the mysterious Claire, and finds himself battling both the federal government (on behalf of the Cherokee) and Claire’s husband, Featherstone—a violent man, who rises from petty horse thief to plantation owner. It’s a novel about suffering and how people often "die in ignorance and delusion." Almost nothing in life, Frazier writes, "is epic or tragic at the moment of its enactment. History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic."

Nightwoods (2011) was Frazier’s first novel set in the 20th century, and while it lacks the narrative drive of either Cold Mountain or Thirteen Moons (not that Frazier is known for his tight plots), the setting in Appalachia brings out the best in Frazier. The mountains’ dark forests—both beautiful and deadly—are as inscrutable as the human heart.

But with Varina (2018), which is about the life of Varina Howell, the wife of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America, Frazier clearly sets out to say something "important." The result is a novel that alternates between beautiful descriptions of the American South and on-the-nose political commentary in the guise of dialogue. "If you haven’t noticed," Varina says early on, "we’re a furious nation. … The only bright spot is, the right side won."

Alas, we have a fair amount of this sort of claptrap in The Trackers. The novel is set during the Great Depression and follows Valentine Welch, an artist sent to rural Wyoming to paint a Post Office mural. He stays at the home of a wealthy art-loving rancher and former World War I sniper named John Long, who hopes to run for the United States Senate. When Long’s wife, Eve, disappears, he sends Welch to find her. This sends Welch across the country—to Seattle, Florida, and San Francisco—where he meets a motley cast of characters.

I don’t think it is giving too much away to share that Eve disappears to get an abortion. In one conversation, she tells Welch and Long’s right-hand man—a character called Faro—that she "knew too many women who gave up dreams, or gave up their actual lives—meaning they died—because they got pregnant at a bad time." Faro responds: "Way I see it, Eve, nobody but you ought to be making the calls here." Her body, her choice, and all that.

When Welch goes hunting with Long, he finds himself wishing his grandfather could have died like the prairie dogs, which is to say, "in an instant, vaporized, instead of three bad years of doctors and hospitals and confusion and pain." Euthanasia pitch? Check.

And when Welch meets the family of Eve’s first husband in Florida, they turn out to be racist, of course, like everyone else in Florida in the novel, except Welch’s longsuffering cabby from Cuba. When Welch hitches a ride with a trucker, the trucker immediately starts to complain about government spending, Communists, and "negroes." When Welch needles him for his hypocrisy—the driver, it turns out, is hoping to get a "fat check" from the government just like Welch—he pulls a gun on Welch and tells him to get out of the car. Welch gets out and thinks, "Florida is an exhausting state." The Trackers is a little exhausting, too.

There are other problems. Frazier has a gift for creating a landscape that is more than the sum of its parts. The forests and hills in Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons are not just background. They are living things. Not so in The Trackers. Other than a few nicely drawn scenes, the landscape is mostly flat.

A few characters tell long stories, which go on for pages, for no apparent reason, and while Welch’s trips across the country may give him something to do as a character, they don’t add up to much of a plot.

Stylistically, the main problem is Frazier’s use of big, implausible blocks of dialogue, where characters give interminable philosophical responses to simple questions and, eventually, tend to all sound alike. In one scene, Eve describes pictures for a page and a half. In another, Welch tells his cabby about the "wealth centers of the nation" and the injustice of the American experiment for a page. In another, a deputy takes 10 lines to explain why he likes billy clubs. None of the characters sound like they are living in the 1930s, except perhaps Faro, but even at his most distinctive, he sounds second-hand, stitched together from other Western characters in American literature, at once too old and too contemporary.

Thirteen Moons gave us Bear and Featherstone and lines like "All you could do was try to go on living as a form of vengeance." The Trackers gives us the wisdom of the day served up by unlikeable characters as they drive around Florida or ride across the Wyoming desert.

What happened to Charles Frazier?

The Trackers: A Novel
by Charles Frazier
Ecco, 336 pp., $29.99

Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and many other publications.

The post Charles Frazier’s Claptrap of a Novel appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Each night spent raving with that fierce desire
Which in my heart has kindled into fire
Seeing your acts adorned for my dismay;

Grant henceforth that I turn, within your light
To another life and deeds more truly fair,
So having spread to no avail the snare
My bitter foe might hold it in despite.

But Petrarch did not think of himself as a sonneteer, as two newly translated volumes of his letters show. He was a poet, yes, but a Latin one. His original title for Canzoniere was Fragmenta rerum vulgarium, which could be translated, as Elaine Fantham notes in her introduction, "Bits of Stuff in the Vulgar Tongue." He worked most of his life on his epic Latin poem Africa, which tells the story of Scipio Africanus's exploration of Africa; he expected to be remembered more for that work than for his Italian sonnets.

Petrarch was also a scholar, a traveler, and a friend of princes. He is sometimes called the "Father of the Renaissance," but it's helpful to remember that Petrarch's interest in ancient writers was not divorced from either religious or political concerns. He longed to make Rome—and Italy—great again, and devoted himself to copying ancient Roman texts and extolling their virtues. Cicero and Seneca provided the wisdom; Julius Caesar, the example.

And so, in a long letter to Francesco de Carrara, a friend and ruler of Padua, Petrarch (unlike Machiavelli nearly a century later) encourages Carrara to foster love rather than fear in his subjects because there is nothing more antagonistic to the stability and length of a monarch's rule than fear. Quoting Cicero, Petrarch writes that fear "is a bad preservative, whereas kindness is faithful unto eternity." "Whom people fear they hate; whom each man hates he wants to die." Moreover, if a ruler is feared by his people, he in turn must fear them all, which is not great for the nerves.

He tells Carrara to exercise justice with mercy ("It is a noble form of vengeance to spare a man"), though he warns him not show any leniency to "cutthroats and traitors": "you don't want to be cruel to the majority just so you may seem compassionate to the few." He also advises Carrara to build roads and walls ("walls are a safe protection in war, roads are the most welcome adornment of peace") and have the city's laws read on a regular basis.

This last recommendation had a surprising origin. Apparently, the people of Padua had been ignoring a city ordinance against allowing pigs to run freely in town. The result, Petrarch complains, was that the "celebrated country of Padua" was being transformed into "a sty for pigs": "wherever you turn you may hear them snorting at random and see them uproot the ground; a loathsome sight and an ugly noise." If the ancient statute against the practice and its attached penalty (anyone who sees a free pig may take it) had been read on a regular basis, the law would never have become obsolete, Petrarch argues. The point is a practical one, but a reminder of the importance of reading founding documents regularly.

In other letters, Petrarch laments the many wars of the period and extols the benefits of a rustic and solitary life. Petrarch travelled widely, visiting Paris, Ghent, Cologne, and much of Italy and southern France—sometimes simply for pleasure, which was rare for the time. But he also spent several extended periods in the countryside outside Avignon, delighting in its simplicity. "I live with one dog and just two servants," he writes Francesco Nelli. "I wish I had sent them all away in India never to return, as they are the sole stormy disturbance of my rest!"

He also defends contemporary writers against critics who only praise the past. "Good poets are rare, I admit, few; but there are some," he writes, and goes on to point out how frequently the ancients lamented the poets of their own age—in the time of Virgil and Horace. "This was and will be unending," he writes: "reverence accompanies antiquity but envy dogs the contemporary."

One of the pleasures of the volumes, as is probably evident by this point, are the many striking lines, rendered beautifully in translation by Fantham. On historical ignorance in Rome, Petrarch writes: "nowhere is Rome less known than at Rome itself." On the ravages of chance: "there is nothing so wretched that it cannot befall even those who are called most fortunate." Or, on a lighter note, on an unattractive woman: "her face is such that, if Helen had owned it, there would have been no Trojan war." (Harsh, yes, but he goes on to praise her for other qualities.)

As with all the books in Harvard's I Tatti Renaissance Library, these volumes are beautifully designed and come with helpful footnotes, a brief chronology of Petrarch's life, and a comprehensive list of his primary works. They also include his letters to ancient writers and his famous autobiographical letter "To Posterity."

Petrarch lived in uncertain times; we less so. Still, the past is always relevant. In Petrarch's hands, it is also a source of great pleasure.

The post Petrarch the Man appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

I know this because I've just finished the poet's thirteen articles on the "Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body" called "Manly Health and Training," first published in 1858 by the New York Atlas newspaper and recently discovered by an industrious English graduate student named Zachary Turpin. In one article, under the subheading "MEAT AS THE PRINCIPAL DIET FOR THE INHABITANTS OF THE NORTHERN STATES," Whitman (using his favorite pen name, Mose Velsor) writes that if men ate "an almost exclusive meat diet" they would be much more like those "noble-bodied, pure-blooded" ancient Greeks. In another, he recommends "fresh rare lean meat" for breakfast. For lunch it's "fresh meat (rare lean beef, broiled or roast)." For dinner: "some digestible dish, fruit, or cold meat."

Readers of Whitman's poetry know that physical health and beauty were important to him. He was also something of a moralist. In "Song of Myself," despite his claim to ignore "Creeds and schools," he is constantly telling us what to do and think:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things
from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

The moralizing continues in Manly Health and Training. Whitman hopes to teach young men to be moral by first teaching them to be fit. The "first requisite" for a young man, Whitman writes, "is that he should be well and hardy; and that from such a foundation alone, he will be more apt to become good, upright, friendly, and self-respected." The columns are saturated in the utopian fervor of the time, feeding a misplaced hope that if the right external things were changed—food, education, religion—in a person's life, human nature and society could be perfected.

But it's a fun, crazy-eyed sort of utopian fervor, and Whitman regularly surprises. In addition to eating meat, Whitman recommends that men go on long walks, take cold showers, abstain from tea and alcohol (though "good ale or wine" is far better than "one of those mixtures called 'soda'"), do calisthenics, and box—preferably bare-fisted. Bare-fisted boxing, which was illegal at the time in the United States, should be reinstated, Whitman argues, not only because it teaches men's bodies to "endure long and serious attacks," but because it teaches men to fight "not by rote merely, but for the love of the fight."

Healthy men should also wake up early, take as little medicine as possible, cut down on sex, and avoid too much "brain action." He tells readers to grow a beard (for its beauty and protection against cold) and offers an unusual remedy for depression: "If the victim of 'the horrors' could but pluck up energy enough to strip off all his clothes and give his whole body a stinging rubdown with a flesh-brush till the skin becomes all red and aglow, he would be thoroughly cured of his depression by this alone."

The columns were clearly written for money. As Turpin notes in his introduction, it had been a hard couple of years for Whitman when 1858 rolled around. His first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, sold poorly and was panned almost universally by critics. The second edition in 1856 sold even worse. Strapped for cash, Whitman began churning out copy. In 1857 alone, Turpin remarks, Whitman wrote roughly 1,000 words a day, six days a week, for the Brooklyn Daily Times, drafted 70 new poems, and at some point began drafting the "Manly Health" columns, which ran to about 3,000 words.

Turpin speculates that the columns may also have been written in response to Whitman's own health scare in the summer of 1858, when Whitman, who was proud of his perfect condition, suffered from what he called "sunstroke," but what one scholar, Turpin writes, "attributes to high blood pressure." He was suffering from depression at the time, too.

Whatever the reason Whitman wrote the columns, he did, and they are full of pseudoscience, strange suggestions, and common sense. They are a reminder that however much a writer might transcend his time, he is also always of it.

The post Eat Meat Like Whitman appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

As it turns out, "created and used as an engine" in the Cold War was a bit of an overstatement. When The Paris Review was founded, Matthiessen was indeed working for the CIA and used the magazine as cover. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1967 to have been funded indirectly by the CIA, apparently made occasional donations to the magazine and would regularly syndicate the magazine's popular interviews in the 16 magazines it did fund directly. But even if the early editors knew of the CCF-CIA connection—and it's not clear that they did—syndication hardly qualifies as founding a magazine.

Nor can the magazine's early publication record be called an "engine" of hostilities between the United States and the USSR. Beyond checking with the CCF on potentially controversial articles or taking into consideration the Congress's interest in interviews for syndication, the magazine pursued its innocuous aestheticism in poem after poem, interview after interview—Eugene Walter on a new production of Weber's Obéron, Christopher Rand on Buddhism. The review published prints by Picasso, fiction by Jack Kerouac and Italo Calvino, and poetry by Geoffrey Hill, Adrienne Rich, and Thom Gunn.

But for Whitney, who has the conspiracy theorist's gift for finding evidence where there is none, The Paris Review's "belletristic" style is the very proof of its collusion to "weaponize" culture in America's fight against communism. You see, the magazine's avoidance of politics was not only the result of the early editors' interests or personalities. It was also evidence of their duplicity. Articles that did not discuss working-class conditions in America and interviews with international writers that avoided politics show, according to Whitney, that Plimpton "consciously aligned" the mission of the magazine with "the CIA's growing propaganda and censorship networks." Plimpton's interview with Ernest Hemingway, for example, in which he does ask Hemingway about politics but not enough for Whitney's tastes, is particularly damning in Whitney’s eyes. "Did Plimpton realize," he writes, "that he was making the defiantly leftist Hemingway into a US propaganda tool, even vaguely."

Did the CCF's money influence The Paris Review's editorial decisions? Of course. Editors tend to avoid publishing articles that will play poorly with subscribers or foundations that give them money. Does this mean that Plimpton's editorial decisions were made in order to serve the CIA's goals? No, though Whitney regularly suggests that it did ("Was it just coincidence," Whitney asks, "that this editor whose magazine had positive propaganda ties, secret though they were, was now writing pieces that celebrated American pastimes?") Does it mean that The Paris Review willingly played a "bit part" in a "massive secret performance that drove a nation for nearly two decades?" If by "massive secret performance" Whitney means the construction of what he calls "a totalitarian system where secret agents spy on the media and sabotage free speech and press freedom," then, again, no.

Even Whitney is occasionally forced to admit this. Before all the insinuations and accusations of quid pro quo later in the book, Whitney writes that unlike "official CIA magazines, The Paris Review was left almost entirely to its own devices." But Whitney has a bee in his ushanka, and he must swat at the buzzing. It is directly after this that he claims that Plimpton "consciously aligned" the magazine's mission with the CIA's.

While Finks is an expanded version of Whitney's 2012 Salon article on the ties between the CCF and The Paris Review, he fills it out with details about the CIA's support of cultural activities—some of which have been known for over thirty years now—to imply that the American government's attitude toward artistic freedom was not so different from the USSR's. For Whitney, America's persecution of journalists like Julian Assange (yes, he names Assange among other "persecuted journalists") and practice of propaganda and censorship began in these early Cold War years.

As proof, Whitney retells the relatively well-known story of the clandestine publication of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which was critical of Soviet communism and which, along with his other works, helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Pasternak was forced by the Soviet government to renounce the award, but Whitney blames the CIA. Pasternak had planned to publish the novel only outside Russia because he knew, Whitney writes, that to "publish the novel cautiously in Russian outside the territory, on terms he set out carefully with his Italian publisher was one thing. To smuggle it back in was another." But smuggled in it was, and with the help of the CIA no less, who printed and handed out clandestine Russian versions of the text, lamentably full of typos, at the World's Fair in Brussels.

Shortly after this, Pasternak was forced to refuse the award. Whitney writes: "The assumption [in 1958] was that the Soviet authorities had in fact forced Pasternak to renounce the prize for having published his novel," but "the CIA had shaped these events and the news cycle both." The implication is that the CIA is somehow to blame for Pasternak's renunciation—as if the Soviets would have let a writer toward whom they had long been antagonistic accept the most prestigious literary award in the world for a novel critical of the state, which they had long tried to suppress, had only the CIA not helped the novel across Soviet borders. There's no doubt that both the Americans and the Russians used Pasternak. What's missing throughout Finks is a sense of proportion.

Whitney claims that the three recorded cases of the CCF nixing articles in the British Encounter, particularly its decision to renege on its acceptance of Dwight Macdonald's essay "America, America," are no different from Soviet censorship. But they are different. Refusing the publication of an article in a single magazine that was supported in part by governmental funds is quite different from preventing an article from appearing in any magazine. After Macdonald's essay was rejected at Encounter, he published it in Twentieth Century, another magazine with ties to the CCF.

Whitney rummages through the grass to find a few more examples of "editorial coordination" at other publications. The examples, in my mind, mostly show the surprising amount of freedom these publications—which the CCF went as far as to list on its letterhead—had.

The book has a couple other annoying quirks. He insists on calling National Review "The National Review" and has a gift for mixed metaphors (a hangover "drives" our nation, for example, which may be true, but not in the way Whitney means it). While parts of Finks are entertaining and remind us of how complex things were during the Cold War period, Whitney's insistence, without sufficient evidence, that the CIA in the 1950s and 60s "swallowed media, the arts, and academia in one large covert gulp" spoils the soup.

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In his first collection of selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry, compares things by accumulation. Many of his poems begin in media res, with a response to a question or a thought about a previous event, and progress by observation. Sometimes the speaker addresses a "you," sometimes not. While a handful of poems take on the voice of a character, many are straight lyrics, written in a voice that alternates between description (of an apocalyptic Texas landscape, for example, or downtown Chicago) and intonation ("I am a ghost of all I don't remember, / a grown man standing where a child once stood") with an occasional touch of playfulness.

His style, in other words, or his primary style in the volume, is very much the fashion. But a couple of things set him apart. The first is the precision and clarity of his language. It's easy to throw adjectives and nouns together to create an image that seems evocative (or provocative) but fails to evoke much at all. This is what makes surrealistic poetry both fun and frustrating to read. After the cheap thrill of contrasting images (as in Tristan Tzara's "Vegetable Swallows," which has lines like "the nimble stags storms cloud over / rain falls under the scissors of / the dark hairdresser-furiously / swimming under the clashing arpeggios"), a hunger sets in for something substantial.

Wiman never takes such shortcuts. He risks saying what he means. The "fevered air" and "green delirium" of leaves "whipped and quickened" by a thunderstorm mirror a late relative's "sudden eloquent confusion." One poem opens:

It is good to sit even a rotting body
in sunlight uncompromised
by God, or lack of God,

to see the bee beyond
all the plundered flowers
air-stagger toward you

In another, which touches on his experience as a cancer patient that eventually led him back to the Christian faith, he writes:

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

In "Keynote," the speaker feels in a dream, "the Sisyphean satisfaction of a landscape / adequate to loss."

Wiman, as the above selections show, also has an excellent ear and turns to various kinds of repetition to mostly great effect. Reversals of structure (chiasmus) and inversion (anastrophe) are used frequently—maybe too frequently—but not heavy handedly. His mix of internal and end rhyme gives his poems a quickness and coherence, and his religious verse, like Donne's, is both immediate and meditative. "When the time's toxins / have seeped into every cell," Wiman writes in one poem,

somehow a seed
of belief

sprouts the instant
I acknowledge it:

little weedy hardy would-be
greenness

tugged upward
by light

There are, unfortunately, a handful of otherwise taut poems that are marred, in my view, by a sudden over-articulation. In a wonderful poem set in Prague, for example, the speaker sees a falcon on a windowsill as a woman walks out of the bath behind him, naked, "dripping, as a bloom // of blood" forms on her cheek:

Wish for something, you said.
A shiver pricked your spine.
The falcon turned its head
and locked its eyes on mine,

What a shame that these beautiful lines are followed by this final stanza:

and for a long moment I'm still in
I wished and wished and wished
the moment would not end.
And just like that it vanished.

The feeling suddenly seems trumped up. Is he really still "in" the moment—especially if "it" along with the falcon vanished the instant he wished it lasted? The repetition of "wished" communicates a kind of straining, but not the right kind.

In "One Time," his confession that "I do not know how to come closer to God / except by standing where a world is ending / for one man" makes it seem like he's trying too hard to make the important statement, especially when it is followed by "and for an hour I have listened / to the breathing of the woman I love beyond / my ability to love." The use of repetition for mimetic or rhetorical effect falls flat in a few others. A pumpjack bows to the ground "Again, again, again" in one poem. In another, leaves are "Spinning and spinning without sound." "I come back to the world. I come back / to the world," he writes in a poem on the Canyon de Chelly, "and would speak of it plainly, / with only so much artifice as words / themselves require." Alas, not always.

Still, Hammer Is the Prayer is full of far more successes than partial successes. The volume also shows Wiman's skill at narrative and translation. He includes the wonderful long poem "Being Serious" (the title alludes to Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest) from Hard Night, and a selection of his Osip Mandelstam translations. Few poets today can write lines like this: "I have no illusion / some fusion / of force and form / will save me, / bewilderment / of bonelight / ungrave me."

The post The Faithful Poetry of Christian Wiman appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

If Shaw himself had bothered to take off his blinders, he would have discovered that those "real facts" included about 25,000 Ukrainians dying of starvation every day at the same time he wrote these words. Between three and five million Ukrainians and about one-and-a-half million Kazakh peasants died in the first half of 1933 alone. These were all a direct result of Stalin’s ambitious Five-Year Plan, as it was called, to collectivize the nation’s agriculture and make Russia an industrial powerhouse. Ukrainian and Kazak peasants were either killed or enslaved and their farms requisitioned in order to redirect resources to workers in the cities. Yields plummeted, and the remaining peasants were accused of hiding surpluses. Party activists charged with finding those supposed surpluses took the farmers’ seed corn to make their quotas, and before long, there was nothing left to plant, and nothing left to do except wait for death.

When Shaw visited Russia, he saw none of this. Neither did many Soviet writers, most of whom were from the city. Members of various Soviet writers unions were sent into the country to visit model, working farms, and returned with glowing reports of Russian productivity. Some hinted in their work that something was wrong, while others, like Maxim Gorky, welcomed the extermination of the peasants. "You’ll pardon my saying so," he once remarked, "but the peasant is not yet human…He is our enemy, our enemy."

One of the few to write openly about the Holodomor, or Terror Famine, was Andrei Platonov (1899-1951). Unlike other writers, Platonov knew actual peasants. A supporter of the 1917 Revolution, Platonov left his budding writing career in 1921 to work land reclamation projects for the government, digging 763 ponds, 331 wells, and draining 2,400 acres of swamplands. In the early 1930s, as a member of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, he visited farms and reported on the collectivization effort. His entries in his notebooks were damning: "State Farm no. 22 ‘The Swineheard.’ Building work—25% of the plan has been carried out. There are no nails, iron, timber…milkmaids have been running away, men have been sent after them on horseback and the women have been forced to work. This has led to cases of suicide…Loss of livestock—89-90%."

His novel, The Foundation Pit (1930), and his plays during this period, The Hurdy-Gurdy (1931) and Fourteen Little Red Huts (1933), capture the surreal horror of Stalin’s collectivists programs, where activists and workers mindlessly repeat Soviet progressive jargon about the bright future of Mother Russia while actual mothers mourn their dead children or contemplate using them as fish bait. All of these works were suppressed and only first published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The latter two plays, plus an unfinished draft, have recently been published by Columbia’s excellent Russian Library Series, with revised and new translations from the long-time Platonov apologist Robert Chandler.

The Hurdy-Gurdy follows two cultural workers who wander around the country visiting district towns with a robot who spews Soviet propaganda, and who play old-fashioned tunes on the hurdy-gurdy to reach "uncollectivized peasant households" and "dekulakize"— or "organize"—them. They are also supposed to sing the praises of Stalin’s "shock workers" who were committed, as the slogan went, to the "Five-Year-Plan-Now-Being-Fulfilled-in-Four." But the cultural workers don’t really care about collectivization, and neither does the director of the district office, Ignat Nikanorovich Shchoev.

Under Shchoev’s management, the district runs out of food. When the workers try to catch a supply of fish, a huge flock of birds sweeps in and eats the catch. Shchoev turns to a Danish researcher to create a new "scientific" food—"black earth cutlets," "kasha made from locusts and ants’ eggs," a dessert of "glue and kvass," and other items. The entire town is invited to sample the dishes, which they can barely finish before exploding in "collective nausea." Shchoev, who is snacking on sausage and cheese, commands them to school themselves "in self-control—you are opening a new epoch of radiant food. The whole world is developing, thanks to patience and torment." Shchoev’s assistant responds that "They stuffed themselves till they burst, the monsters. They’re yelping now…but they’ll get used to it!"

While Platonov claimed to be an atheist, his works are packed with religious allusions, and some critics have speculated that he may have been a covert Christian. In The Hurdy-Gurdy, not only is there an allusion to the plague of Egypt before salvation of the Jews from the oppression of Pharaoh, but to the Last Supper. In the Biblical accounts, God executes judgment on others—the Egyptians in one case and Christ in the other—to redeem his people. In the Eucharist, Christ’s body is the bread, "broken" for us, and the wine is his blood, "shed for the remission of sins." In The Hurdy-Gurdy, however, it is the peasants who must suffer, who must be broken, for the benefit of those who are supposedly saving them.

Fourteen Little Red Huts follows Johann-Friedrich Bos, a one-hundred-year-old "world-renowned scholar" and "chairman of the League of Nations Commission for the Resolution of the Riddle of the World Economy," who is visiting the Soviet Union to see the successes of the "second Five-Year Plan" and tell the world of socialism’s superiority.

Bos is based on Shaw, who turned 75 during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1931. Bos, like Shaw, only wants to see the good in socialism. "Where can I see socialism," he asks almost immediately as he steps off the train. "Show it to me at once. Capitalism irritates me." Yet unlike Shaw, Bos follows a beautiful local woman who appears by chance on the train platform and goes to live with her in a village by sea. Here, he sees collectivism in all its absurd, gory detail. The play ends with Bos leaving the village after most of its children have died. "I’ll go on my way," he tells Futilla, "I’m bored of you all with your youth and enthusiasm, your capacity for work, and your faith in the future. You stand at the beginning, but I already know the end. We can’t understand one another."

Platonov is sometimes called a surrealist because of the jarring juxtaposition of diction and situation in The Foundation Pit and these early plays. His characters speak with cool detachment in scenes depicting the gruesome results of Stalin’s collectivization—a child sleeping on her mother’s corpse or an emaciated mother trying to nurse her dead son.

The truth is, he’s a realist—a realist of the absurd, and one whose work is all the more necessary as the siren song of socialism tickles young ears again.

The post Russia's Forgotten Anti-Stalinist Playwright appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Nor is it too difficult to sympathize with Achilles’s impossible choice between glory and a long quiet life in the countryside. Like him, we can sometimes seem to allow circumstances to make the choice for us while, at the same time, acting on subconscious desires we refuse to acknowledge fully. While it is the death of his friend Patroclus that finally shakes Achilles from sulking over Agamemnon’s confiscation of Briseis and sends him back into battle, when he finally faces Hector, it is not vengeance he has on his mind. He is "bent on glory."

Of course, the violence with which these characters defend their honor has always been at least a little shocking. When Odysseus returns home after 20 years away he and his son, Telemachus, kill all but one of the over 100 men who have been courting his wife in his absence. With jaws "dripping red" with blood and thighs "splattered with gore," Odysseus hangs, on a single rope, the dozen women who slept with the suitors. As "doves or thrushes beating their spread wings / against some snare…in thickets," Homer tells us, "so the women’s heads were trapped in a line, / nooses yanking their necks up, one by one…they kicked up heels for a little—not for long."

But what is increasingly foreign to contemporary Western readers, perhaps, is the strong sense of duty—the duty of kings to be generous, wives to be faithful, subjects to be loyal—that rules these characters’ lives, however imperfectly. In short, the world of two of the foundational texts of Western civilization, which have always seemed to belong to a remote past, risks seeming even remoter.

Enter Barbara Graziosi, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Greece, and her short, charming new book, Homer. The volume is part of the "Living Poets Project" at Durham University, which studies "how listeners and readers imagined the Greek and Roman poets." Representations of ancient poets, the researchers write, "tell us something crucial—not about the actual poets of Greece and Rome, but about their readers" and the value and relevance of the poems in "particular contexts." The first part of the volume, therefore, is devoted to the old question of the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the person of Homer. Nothing new is revealed—the poems were probably composed around 700 BC and show evidence of both the oral tradition and the voice of a single poet—but it is one of the most readable and succinct overviews of the key questions and most plausible answers, supported by historical, textual, and archeological evidence.

The real pleasures of the volume, however, are in Graziosi’s comments on the poems. In a book devoted to showing the enduring relevance of ancient poems to a contemporary audience, what a relief that Graziosi avoids the temptation to focus on power and sex through that most constricting but fashionable of academic lenses: gender theory. She writes about men as fathers and sons, women as mothers and wives, male friendship as male friendship, the courage and divine help needed to die a good death, and the cunning self-centeredness that is sometimes required to live.

She remarks that the Iliad, for example, is both war memorial—each man "dies in a particular way" and "has a name, a family, and a specific life that has been cut short"—and warning: not so much of the devastation of war, though it is that, but of the effects of failed leadership. "Leaders fail in the Iliad, and the people die as a result," Grazioisi writes. The very first lines announce the scandal: Achilles, because of his rage, "inflicts ‘countless agonies’ upon the Achaeans, the men on whose side he is supposed to be fighting. In his wrath, Achilles plans the destruction of his own side; other leaders in the Iliad, by contrast, lose their people out of incompetence, selfishness, or even a sense of shame."

The poem is also a consolation. Hector—the one good leader in the poem—is guided by his duty to his people and devotion to the gods. Still, he dies alone in front of the city’s gates, and Troy falls. Graziosi writes that in book 22, "the poet gives us unprecedented access to Hector’s thoughts…All other Trojans have taken cover inside the city, fleeing ‘like fawns’ before Achilles’ onslaught. Only Hector remains outside, planted in front of the Scaean Gates, ‘like a snake full of venom in front of his lair’." These final passages highlight Hector’s loneliness, but they also bring us, as listeners and readers, close to him, creating another kind of community for the warrior—and for us—through art.

Odysseus, by contrast, is a survivor. Like most critics, Graziosi thinks the Odyssey is weaker than the Iliad. The narrative occasionally lacks purpose and the ending, which features the intervention of the gods, is not very satisfying. Still, Odysseus shows us, among other things, how trickery can be used both for selfish ends and to fulfill one's duty. Penelope remains faithful to her long-departed husband by tactfully and cunningly postponing her many suitors’ proposals. Some of Odysseus’s decisions cause his men to die, but it is also because of his wits that the eloquent warrior finally arrives home, albeit alone.

Longtime readers of the poems will find little that is new in the volume but much that is true and worth considering once again.

The post Reading Homer Today appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Not so with Bowen. While her difficult childhood and novelistic accomplishment would have made for particularly interesting personal asides, she refuses to indulge herself. What matters are words and ideas—other people's words and ideas—and she gets right to them. So, The Crying of the Wind by Ithell Colquhoun, she tells us in the first sentence of one review, "is a travel book—subject, Ireland." "Elizabeth Taylor, whose ever-unfolding powers are to be watched with joy," she starts another, "gives us her fourth novel A Wreath of Roses. This has been awaited with confidence by those who remember At Mrs. Lippincote's, Palladian, and A View of the Harbour—and few who read those three can have forgotten them."

The other pleasures of this collection are Bowen's encyclopedic knowledge of the modern novel, her wit, openness, and insight. This won't come as a surprise for readers familiar with Bowen's fiction. In books like A House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), and The Heat of the Day (1949), as well as in nearly 100 short stories written over four decades (Bowen died in 1973), economy of expression and patient characterization are punctuated by remarks on the human psyche that still ring with clarity, truth, and humor. In A House in Paris, the young Henrietta, who has lost her mother, builds her character "by herself" and "for herself." She had come, Bowen writes, "to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be someone without disliking things." In The Death of the Heart, one character is described as belonging "to a junior branch of emotional society, in which there is always a crisis due."

This gift for quickening a passage in her fiction with a statement that is both à propos to the situation and that transcends it can be found in her criticism as well. She filed a weekly column for the The Tatler and Bystander, a magazine for "the horse-and-hounds set," as Allan Hepburn puts it, between 1941 and 1950, and again between 1954 and 1958. She also wrote regularly for The New Statesman, The Spectator, and The Observer. In reviews on Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and many more, her judgments on individual writers and works have, for the most part, stood the test of time. Often they double as direct commentary on the art of the novel or the function of criticism, as the case may be.

In a review of Virginia Woolf's The Death of the Moth, for example, she writes that "the great attraction of novels is that while they make life seem more interesting, they do also appear to simplify it. We expect the novelist to put this and that in its place. Virginia Woolf, who was above all a truthful writer, could not perform this trick of making life seem simple, because it never seemed simple to her." In another, she writes that Eudora Welty’s "vulgarity is surgical. Like all Southern writers, most notably William Faulkner (whom she resembles in no other way), Miss Welty is a great painter of decay." One of the great poets of the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon, manages to excel at autobiography where others fail. "Both shyness and pride must be overcome," Bowen writes. "Also—the first rule for all writers—'one must interest,'" can only be achieved by "great selective skill"—it is this skill that often fails writers when it comes to writing about themselves.

While always fair—she more often damns writers with faint praise than condemns them outright—, Bowen is not afraid to drag the occasional soul over hell's coals when needed. In a review of Upton Sinclair's Between Two Worlds, her opening remark that Sinclair is "a prolific writer, and obviously a very impassioned one" is not intended as a compliment. Sinclair once bragged about his writing that "all I have to do is turn the spigot and the water flows," to which Bowen responds: "It certainly does … Mr. Sinclair has no time for style: his narrative method reminds one of an incoherent person talking in a train. But one must honor his important intention—which is to save the world."

All aspiring novelists should read her short "The Technique of the Novel." In it, Bowen suggests that character and plot are inseparable, and that the primary danger for the novelist is to develop "one at the expense of the other." Dialogue is "action," she writes. It is "the nearest thing to drama and the emergence of passion and feeling which we have." Style is "a way of seeing things," and the form of a novel is "implicit in the conception of the story."

Master novelist, queenly reviewer—Bowen is a pleasure to read and an example to follow.

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That almost every defense of Bob Dylan’s recent Nobel Prize for Literature has reminded us that Dylan read Rimbaud and Joyce and Chekhov and hung out with the Beats—or has mentioned the troubadours or Christopher Ricks’s Visions of Sin, the distinguished professor’s thematic study of the singer’s lyrics—almost gives the game away. It’s as if Dylan’s words alone don’t quite warrant the most prestigious literary award in the world. Something else needs to be added. The Nobel committee may have felt so, too, which is perhaps why they cited Dylan’s creating "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"—whatever "poetic" means—rather than saying anything specific about those "expressions," which they have done with most previous winners (like their praise of Tomas Tranströmer’s "translucent images" and Mo Yan’s "hallucinatory realism").

This isn’t to deny that there are genuine reasons to be pleased with the Nobel’s choice. He seems like a humble guy, and is, according to his kids, a good father. His songs are free of the tripe that gets lauded these days as profundity, and he has remained very much his own man despite over 40 years of fame. Who didn’t enjoy his ignoring the Nobel committee’s announcement for a week before acknowledging the prize and graciously accepting his invitation to the award ceremony?

More importantly, in an age when poets have turned against the music of words and see form as a tool in a seemingly never-ending class struggle, Dylan shows an obvious pleasure in the sounds of words and serious commitment to the ancient story-telling function of song.

In one of the few defenses of Dylan that risks an analysis of his language, the poet A. M. Juster makes just this point. Dylan’s selection, Juster writes, "is a slap at the 'postmodern' English-language poetry guild, an inbred group that denounces clarity, craft, values, and ideas. This guild has walled off poetry from the public so that it has become just a stimulus for mutual back-scratching, laughable jargon, sloppy criticism, and easy ideological pronouncements. It goes without saying that postmodernists have drained music and musicality from poetry—the very features that made poetry popular ever since humans began to brood about topics other than what we should eat next."

But how much musicality has Dylan actually added to the language? Juster goes on to claim that Dylan’s lyrics should not be considered apart from the music of the actual songs. Lyrics, he writes, "are a form of poetry that we must judge on its own terms." It’s an intriguing argument, but a little contradictory, perhaps, in lamenting the lack of music in postmodern poetry, on the one hand, while claiming that Dylan’s words alone should not be required to carry that same music, on the other.

Most troubadour poetry, which was also written for musical accompaniment, stands on its own and follows a regular, often complex, meter. Take "The Skylark," for example, by Bernart de Ventadorn, which begins:

Now when I see the skylark lift
His wings for joy in dawn’s first ray
The let himself, oblivious, drift
For all his heart is glad and gay,
Ay! such great envies seize my thought
To see the rapture others find,
I marvel that desire does not
Consume away this heart of mine.

Compared to the light verse of the troubadours, some of Dylan’s best lyrics are certainly poems. They have a unity, coherence, and music that make them interesting enough to read on their own. Take "Maggie’s Farm," for example, from Bringing It All Back Home, which if not particularly profound, shows Dylan’s ability to use a constrained monologue to create a meaningful narrative. The second stanza goes:

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
Well, he hands you a nickel
He hands you a dime
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more

This is a welcome relief from Dylan’s other lyrics, which can be disconnected and mushily ambiguous (like "You said you’d never compromise / With the mystery tramp, but now you realize / He’s not selling any alibis / As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes"), which allows listeners and readers to assign whatever significance they please to it.

But even his best lyrics possess a line or two—sometimes a stanza—that make Dylan’s shortcomings strikingly evident. The final stanza of "Maggie’s Farm," for example, ends in philosophical slop ("Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them") and includes Maggie’s bizarre confession that "I just get bored." In "Tangled Up in Blue," Dylan tells the story of a couple who ran away together, separated, and later reunited in New Orleans at a topless bar. They go back to the woman’s place, and she hands the speaker "a book of poems…Written by an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century." The speaker responds:

And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you

Glowed like a "burnin’ coal / Pourin’ off" the page? Far out.

This is Dylan at his best. Sure, you could find lines in "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," "Visions of Johanna," "Idiot Wind," or "The Times They Are A-Changin’" that are poignant. But you’ll also find redundancies like "final end," nonsensical metaphors like "Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it," and bloated references to writers who "prophesize" with their pens and lifetimes of "toil and blood."

Many of the other lyrics in the 679-page The Lyrics: 1961-2012 show a songwriter who either doesn’t know what words mean or is more interested in making the words work for the music rather than making the music work for the words. "But is your heart," Dylan asks in "Temporary Like Achilles," "made out of stone…Or is it just solid rock?" Pick one. He’s got "holes in the pockets in my clothes" as opposed to the pockets in his shoes or his hat. Doves, not seagulls, nest in the sand, and people refuse to die—to "go down under the ground"—because "somebody tells me that death’s comin’ round."

With so many great poets who take music and story-telling seriously today, it’s hard to see the Nobel’s choice of Dylan as anything other than a missed opportunity to honor a writer who has a greater understanding of meaning and musicality, and who has enriched language rather than merely capitalized on it.

The post Bob Dylan’s Words appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

While not defending Waugh’s Catholicism, Christopher Hitchens took exception with Orwell’s couching of Waugh’s accomplishment in a 2003 piece for the Atlantic. Waugh wrote "brilliantly," Hitchens argued, "precisely because he loathed the modern world"—a loathing that preceded his conversion to Catholicism (and was used to great effect in Decline and Fall).

What Hitchens missed in an otherwise entertaining look at Waugh’s satirical gifts was how Waugh’s Catholicism gave his loathing fuel and complexity—the world will be burned, but it will also be made new—while preventing him from writing his most bitter novel, Vile Bodies, over and over again. That Hitchens thought Waugh’s decision to write obliquely about sex in his novels rather than with a schoolboyish relish in mechanical detail was a sign of immaturity tells us more about Hitchens than it does Waugh, who could be unabashedly frank about sex in his letters to his friends and second wife.

Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited—the first biography of the British novelist in nearly twenty years—provides a fair overview of those trenchant opinions, judiciously colored with Waugh’s best repartees. At 11, for example, Evelyn told a family friend: "Terrible man, my father. He likes Kipling." After he lost out on a possible position with a Major General Ivor Thomas for showing up drunk in his mess hall, Waugh wrote: "I told him I could not change the habits of a lifetime for a whim of his." When John Freeman of the BBC asked Waugh in 1960 why he agreed to be interviewed on television if all he wanted, he claimed, was to be left alone, he replied: "Poverty. We’ve both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way."

They’re all here. So, too, are the major events of Waugh’s life: His early years at home, where he was known as "Wuffles," and his attachment to his mother and his nanny, Lucy; his increasing bitterness toward his father, publisher and critic Arthur Waugh, for his preferential treatment of his older brother Alexander; his precociousness in academics and bullying at grammar school and Lancing; his dissipation and homosexual trysts at Oxford; his graduation with a humbling "Third" and two-and-a-half years of teaching at increasingly less prestigious secondary schools; his short-lived marriage to Evelyn Gardner; the surprising success of Decline and Fall; his conversion to Rome; a long and happy marriage to Laura Herbert, the granddaughter of Lady Evelyn Charteris de Vesci, and his many years of ambivalent fatherhood to six children; his courageous service in WWII; his trips to Israel, British Guyana, the West Indies, Mexico, California, and elsewhere; his addiction to pain killers and temporary insanity caused by bromide poisoning; his 300-bottles-of-wine-a-year habit; and his purchase of Piers Court and, later, Combe Florey, where he died of a heart attack in his bathroom after Easter Mass.

There are a few new details drawn from new source materials. Eade gives a more accurate account of when the two Evelyns met thanks to the discovery of her 19-page account of her marriage to Waugh, which she left for her children. Otherwise, we don’t learn much we don’t already know. Shevelyn, as Gardner was called while she and Evelyn were married, was from an old, respectable but not particularly wealthy family, good looking and thoroughly modern. She claimed Proust was her favorite author, but always referred to him as "old Prousty-wousty." The marriage was doomed from the start.

More substantially, Eade provides the most detailed portrait to date of Waugh’s failed courtship of Teresa "Baby" Jungman and sets straight Waugh’s military record. While Waugh was generally lauded for his bravery in battle, he and his commanding officer, Bob Laycock, were posthumously accused of disobeying orders, evacuating early from Crete, and lying about it. As Eade shows, drawing from new secondary research and recently discovered documents, including Laycock’s unseen memoir, neither Laycock nor Waugh did anything dishonorable or break or fabricate any orders in leaving Crete when they did.

What’s missing in Eade’s Evelyn Waugh, however, is the man himself. We are told a great deal about Waugh—about what he said and did—but are rarely treated to any exploration of why he said and did those things. Eade chalks most of them up to Waugh’s bitterness at his father’s preference for his brother and Napoleonic competitiveness. (Waugh was short, we are reminded.) As real as Waugh’s bitterness and competitiveness may have been, surely there was more to the man.

Strangely, Eade devotes a mere two pages to Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which was so important to him throughout his life and which, as we see above, all critics took seriously in evaluating his work, whatever they thought of the Church itself. This is a man, after all, who told John Freeman that faith in God "isn’t a sort of added amenity of the Welfare State that you say, ‘Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll have a little icing on top of religion.’ It’s the essence of the whole thing." How faith connects to architecture and history, beauty and truth, for Waugh is ignored completely. (Those interested in this can turn to Michael Brennan’s 2013 study Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith, and Family.) While Eade’s life of Waugh is not a "critical" biography, the absence of any extended analysis of his work for what it tells us about the man is puzzling in a biography of a writer whose fiction was so autobiographical.

Eade is a gifted narrator and a master at providing the right quote at the right time at just the right length, avoiding, thankfully, the temptation (which must have been acute in the case of Waugh) of ventriloquism or the overuse of block quotes. With two of Waugh’s three biographies currently out of print and with Waugh’s Complete Works scheduled to be published in 43 volumes (including 12 volumes of Waugh’s letters and diaries) between now and 2020, Eade’s account of Waugh’s life (undertaken at the request of Waugh’s grandson, Alexander) will be a useful starting point for the biographies or more specialized studies of Waugh to follow.

The post The Trouble With Evelyn Waugh appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Some was high minded gibberish à la L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (or språkmaterialism, as the Swedes call it), some was social realist plodding, much simply struck me as anemic—too many short lines, too much white space hinting at a significance that the poet had foregone the hard work of articulating, too little music.

Not Sandell’s poetry. It didn’t "speak to me," Coyle writes, "it sang to me." Coyle bought the book and spent the rest of the day acquainting himself with "one of the most gifted poets writing in Swedish today, and the most distinctive." The result of that fortuitous discovery is the first collection of Sandell’s poems in English, translated by Coyle, and published earlier this year by Carcanet.

Sandell is a poet of contrasts. He is chatty and precise, musical and imagistic, carnal and spiritual. A typical poem steps out into the street with a casual observation, turns suddenly philosophical or formal, walks a bit further, perhaps meets a friend, and ends with insight or an image. The shifts in diction and syntax can sometimes dilute Sandell’s musicality, as in "Xmas. Kruse Street, Oslo," which begins:

Pull up to the table: the ghosts of Christmases past
have joined us, and man, wasn’t that a weird
winter, snowflakes burning like tears
on cheeks as insensitive, I thought, as a wax mask’s.
Because nothing means anything more in the end
than one’s empathy is able to mediate…

"I thought" and "in the end" are superfluous and, in the first case, unnecessarily break the simile. The impersonal "one’s empathy," which somehow "mediates" meaning, sounds like a German whispering in a library.

But mostly, these are poems of refreshingly foreign particularity. In the third section of "After the Concert," for example, Sandell writes (in Coyle’s fluid translation):

I wonder what you’d make of these notations
about to push off and head home, while I just hang,
all of the onions on my plate, still, the tomatoes,
too, like in childhood—that much, anyway, hasn’t changed,
although the time’s been used up. Outside the remains
of the Norwegian working class in overcoats
and some kind of pyjama-like sweatsuits, one gang
laughing, sky-high, at a sign on the convenience store,
the falling snow. And others closing time lures forth—
Somalis with their purple lips in outer darkness.
Enchanted words, still. Slush, splashes from passing cars,
all this seen from amidships. I remain on board.

Onions and tomatoes, the childlike obliviousness of a slowly dying Norwegian working class and the silent Somalis on the periphery, falling snow and darkness—the individuality of light, feeling, texture, and thought are clarified in contrast. Poetry enchants by comparison, metaphor, showing us a world full of life and death—a world of blood and hair, Sandell writes, "like a ball of snakes in a flower basket," of "fine, fish-netted calves" and eggs like "liquidated suns," or of a newborn’s fluttering hands as her "thirsty / mouth finds its sanctifying raspberry touchstone."

If poetry doesn’t enchant, what’s the point? This may be the gist of "Requiem for a Returnee," where Sandell laments Czeslaw Milosz’s return to Krakow, Poland, where he died, when it would have been better—and here’s the subtle critique—that he remained in "a California / of perfected loss," where "not the Beach Boys / but Chopin, Brahms and Shostakovich / are played at the cultivated funeral":

Nicely-built young American female
poets would have sparkled in the backmost benches,
hour-glass shaped after a lifetime of salads,
elegant too in the most stylish clothing
with small straps of cotton over their shoulders.

For Sandell, perhaps, too much contemporary poetry has become like this imagined funeral for Milosz—cultivated, trendy, and lifeless. At its best, it is full of poems of "perfected" but predictable loss.

In 1995, Sandell published On Retrogardism with his friend and fellow poet Clemens Altgård, which argued, Coyle tells us, that poetry had "become too insular…too contemptuous of its own medium" to "communicate meaningfully." Sandell put it this way in a recent English-language blog post: "the oral was lacking, the epic was lacking, the music was gone, and so on. Not true for the Modernist pioneers and masters to be fair, but certainly for what was coming out of the contemporary festival microphones…Even the vulgar was lacking. The heaven in those poems had not God, the streets in them had no life."

There’s certainly life in Sandell’s streets and perhaps even a God in his heaven. The "Dalai Lama’s exile," he writes in "Words for Justyana on Her Departure for a Retreat in Tushita," "can’t change the fact that everything unwinding / around you will be hard and soft and tactile / …the blue sky arching above you will / continue most definitively still / not to have you or your gaze for its origin." Buddhism views the world as a fiction, but in "our tradition," as Sendall calls it, "It’s in a mortal body God is made man, / not motionless at a mandala’s midpoint."

Coyle has done a great service in introducing Sandell to English-speaking readers. Buy and read the fleshy, spiritual Dog Star Notations.

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He has another desk at his house in Cornwall. This one’s in the attic of a barn on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. It’s sunny and sail boats are being pushed around in the "ridiculously perfect Mediterranean blue" by a gentle eastern breeze. A family of barn owls lives in a rundown cottage a few hundred feet inland. He likes to watch the "golden-white shadow" of one of the adult owls (whom he imagines is the father) "skimming low over the ground" beneath his window.

He also likes to lunch­­—a lot—and not with the local vicar. He meets an aging Václav Havel at a private luncheon in London, and happens to be having lunch with Joseph Brodsky when the Russian learns he’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who’s "a fan," invites him and his wife to lunch at Quirinal Palace in Rome. He’s summoned to 10 Downing Street to eat with Margaret Thatcher. When Rupert Murdoch’s Times reports wrongly that he asked for £150 from a struggling post-communist Warsaw theatre group to put on a stage version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he faxes Murdoch to demand a "generous apology," a "handsome donation to the struggling Polish theatre," … and lunch. Murdoch accepts.

When he’s not eating with the head of German intelligence or enjoying an "[e]legiac family lunch" with Francis Ford Coppola at his Napa Valley winery, he’s dancing with Yasir Arafat at a school for orphans on a New Year’s Eve, interviewing Russian gangsters after the fall of communism, helping a private French humanitarian in Cambodia, and running around with various war correspondents. These encounters are the experiences behind some of his novels. He occasionally connects the dots for us, like when he tells us he named Issa in A Most Wanted Man after Issa Kostoev, a Russian policeman and later parliamentarian, or when he confirms that the British spy Peter Simms was his model for Jerry Westerby in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But mostly they are the literary equivalent of a politician’s wall of ego.

A pigeon tunnel, Le Carré explains in the preface, refers to tunnels running under the lawn at a Monte Carlo shooting range, in which pigeons were inserted and used for target practice after they exited the tunnels at the sea’s edge. If they escaped unscathed, the pigeons would return to the roof of a neighboring casino, where they were born, and where they would be recaptured and reinserted into the tunnels. Le Carré confesses not to know why this image has "haunted" him "for so long," but it’s probably because he sees himself in the pigeons, returning in his fiction to his broken home and the life of his "conman, fantasist" and "occasional jailbird" of a father.

It’s a good title, but not the right one for a memoir that does its best to avoid home as much as possible. At the end of the book, Le Carré republishes an essay he wrote for The New Yorker on his mother, Olive, who abandoned Le Carré (the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell) and his older brother when they were boys, and on his difficult relationship to his father, Ronnie Cornwell, but no new details are added. In fact, as David Sexton recently noted in The Evening Standard, the reprinted essay has been altered slightly to make both Le Carré and his father look better.

The point of these "true stories from memory," Le Carré writes, is to "reclaim" them as his own following the publication of Adam Sisman mostly sympathetic biography last year and "tell them in my own voice and invest them as best I can with my own feelings." As far as I can tell, that feeling is primarily a desire to be liked.

Le Carré is a master at providing the right self-deprecating details at the right moment to create the illusion of honesty. For example, when a friend in the Foreign Service invites him to an "exquisite" lunch at All Souls College, Oxford, he sits next to Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, Quintin Hogg, the future Lord Chancellor. He has little in common with the "combative Tory," but tries to make small talk nonetheless:

I unveil my pen-name, which does not enthrall him. Or perhaps he knows it already, which accounts for his despondency. I say I am fortunate to have a house in Hampstead, but live mostly in Cornwall…I ask him whether he too has somewhere in the country he can stretch out at weekends…He has indeed such a place, and tells me so in three exasperated words: ‘Hailsham, you fool.’

It’s a funny anecdote, at Le Carré’s expense, and there are other confessional tidbits—his fear under fire and occasional naiveté—that endear him to us, but nothing too damning and certainly nothing too personal.

"I have been neither a model husband nor a model father, and am not interested in appearing that way," Le Carré writes. But that noble sentiment doesn’t make The Pigeon Tunnel any truer to the real David Cornwell, who may be as elusive to himself as he is to us.

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Cambridge is back with a new selection of 100 poems—this time from the work of George Herbert—and it is, for the most part, a pleasure to read. Like the Kipling volume, the selections for George Herbert’s 100 Poems were made by the editor of the Cambridge edition of Herbert’s English Poems, Helen Wilcox. The purpose is also similar: to show how relevant, how modern, how diverse, the work of this early seventeenth-century country parson is.

This may be an easier task with Herbert than it is with Kipling. Not because our world is closer to Herbert’s than it is to Kipling’s or because Herbert is somehow more like us than Kipling is, but simply because he’s the better poet. Herbert may seem modern. He’s quick to express doubt, share anxiety, lament suffering—feelings we flatter ourselves by calling "modern." They aren’t. They’re human ones, and what makes Herbert perpetually relevant is the accuracy with which he captures the warring affections of the human heart—toward love and hate, belief and disbelief—in direct, sonorous, if also complex, lyrics.

At times he is overwhelmed by the futility of life. "My stock likes dead," Herbert writes in "Grace," "and no increase / Doth my dul husbandrie improve." At others, he is tempted by the "propositions of hot bloud." "I know the wayes of pleasure, the sweet strains," Herbert writes in "The Pearl,"

The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot bloud and brains;
What mirth and musick mean; what love and wit
Have done these twentie hundred yeares, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuffe is flesh, not brasse; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Then he that curbs them being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.

Still, while Herbert may seem "so familiar," as Wilcox puts it in her brief introduction, that reading him is "a process of self-discovery," he isn’t a modern man, even if Wilcox’s selections can sometimes make it seem so. The selections are mostly guided by aesthetics. Of the over 160 poems that make up the middle section of Herbert’s The Temple, his only published collection of English verse, Wilcox excludes poems whose obscure images or archaic vocabulary make them less immediate for modern readers. She also excludes the long poems that bracket these middle lyrics—"The Church-porch" and "The Church Militant."  This is the right decision. 100 Poems is an appetizer, not the full meal.

Unfortunately, she also leaves out many of the poems that deal with Christian living. The images and language of these poems is clear enough for anyone with a basic understanding of Christian doctrine and practice. They deal with things like fasting, obedience, and keeping the Sabbath. "Who goes to bed and doth not pray, / Maketh two nights to ev’ry day," Herbert writes in "Charms and Knots." "The Sundaies of man’s life," Herbert writes in "Sunday," "Thredded together on times string, / Make bracelets to adorn the wife / Of the eternall glorious King." In "Frailtie," Herbert writes coyly: "Lord, in my silence how do I despise / What upon trust / Is styled honour, riches, or fair eyes; But is fair dust!"

Herbert’s poems are full of such exhortations, and excluding them gives an inaccurate taste of Herbert’s work and a misleading impression of the man.

Wilcox’s claim that Herbert is "fundamentally optimistic"—stated without context or clarification—is particularly odd. He is optimistic about the hope of eternal life for those who repent and profess faith in Jesus Christ. But the sin and disbelief that Herbert sees around him also makes him long for God’s judgment:

I see the world grows old, when as the heast
Of thy great love once spread, as in an urn
Doth closet up it self, and still retreat,
Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return,
And calling Justice, all things burn.

"Man is no starre," he writes in "Employment (II)," but a "quick coal / Of mortal fire: / Who blows it not, nor doeth controll / A faint desire, / Lets his own ashes choke his soul."

Unsurprisingly, neither poem is included in 100 Poems, and readers looking for a quick spiritual pick-me-up from a sympathetic, inclusive Protestant priest might be surprised to read these and other sentiments in The Temple—like his description of the Catholic church in "The Church Militant":

As new and old Rome did one Empire twist;
So both together are one Antichrist
* * *
Thus, Sinne triumphs in Western Babylon
Yet not as Sinne, but as Religion.
Of his two thrones he made the latter best

If the goal of 100 Poems is to select Herbert’s best work as well as to show "the range, moods, subjects, tones, and styles" of it, it’s odd that so many of the pastoral poems and Jeremiads were excluded. Herbert does have an amazing range, but it is sadly narrowed in this otherwise judicious volume.

The post A Very Modern Herbert appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

It’s a common complaint among conservatives that many tenured professors "radicalize" students with Marx and gender theory while living royally off of state funding and federal student loans. Online and competency-based education will fix both, according to critics like Johnson and Scott Walker, by limiting professors’ unchecked power and improving efficiency with market-based solutions.

There’s just one problem, according to Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and a regular contributor to National Review, Modern Age, and many other conservative publications: It won’t work.

It may be true, Lawler argues in his latest collection of essays, American Heresies and Higher Education, that some professors at American universities use their positions for ideological activism, do very little work, and inflate grades to earn positive course evaluations from students. Still, it’s unlikely that they are single-handedly responsible for the dumbing-down of undergraduate education, nor are they responsible for skyrocketing tuition.

The real culprits are the twin evils of federal student loans and accreditation. The availability of a seemingly endless supply of federal cash for students who, until recently, were willing to drop $50,000 to $100,000 for a credential that is still required for most well-paying jobs, has led to an "amenities race" for students, according to Lawler. Dorms are now like hotels. Concierge services are provided to students via "student affairs" offices to maximize "health, safety, and choice" on campus. On-site "amateur" sports entertain students on the weekends and supposedly build community.

The string attached to this federal cash is accreditation. In order to receive federal funding or accept students with federal loans, colleges must be accredited by a recognized regional body. These bodies are not federal agencies. They are independent and managed by other professors and university administrators. Still, the bureaucratic demands increase every year. Almost everything learned in every course must now be stated and demonstrated with "learning outcomes." Schools must show "continual improvement," develop "quality enhancement programs," constantly measure "institutional effectiveness," and so forth. It used to be that a school was evaluated every 10 years. Now it is more or less ongoing.

The number of administrative staff it takes to provide the lifestyle students expect and oversee the increasing amount of paperwork for accreditation is huge. Lawler doesn’t provide any figures, but they are relatively well-known. To give just one example: The number of full-time faculty in the California State University system increased slightly between 1975 and 2008, from 11,614 to 12,019, while the number of administrators nearly quadrupled during the same period, from 3,800 to 12,183.

In short, American colleges are suffering from administrative bloat, which increases every year at the hand of career managers who value standardization and procedures above all else, and who already put a great deal of trust in technology and market solutions. If the relative reduction in the number of full-time faculty per students over the past 30 years did not lead to a more efficient and affordable college education, it’s unclear how further reducing it could. Furthermore, it is unclear how increasing the use of technology—online education—already embraced at most schools will change anything.

Lawler isn’t against technology, nor is he against market solutions. What we need, he argues, are market solutions to fix the actual problems. His solution to the crisis in American higher education is to greatly reduce the amount of work required for accreditation, which would partially reduce the need for an army of administrators. Instead of a multi-year process, make accreditation a spot-check, where a small team of peers arrives unannounced on a college campus to check the books, faculty credentials, visit a few classes, and look over course syllabi. Whether or not this would be enough is unclear, and it seems that changing how much funding is available to students would have to be addressed as well, but it would be a step in the right direction. It might even curtail the pandering to students we see at a number of colleges—the provision of "safe spaces" and renaming of buildings—to the extent that it’s mostly college administrators who view students as "consumers" and espouse the view that "the consumer is always right."  

American Heresies and Higher Education is about more than fixing the practical problems facing colleges today—much more, in fact. Lawler tackles the role of religion in American democracy and education, the danger of libertarian secularization, the value of the humanities, and the delusions of transhumanism, among other things. He rightly takes the Socratic Method down a notch in one essay and esotericism in another ("I don’t think we should practice esoteric writing, and I don’t even think it ever faithfully or unambiguously served the truth.")

Wise, funny, and clear-sighted, American Heresies and Higher Education is a book for anyone who wants to know what’s really wrong with American higher education and what might be done about it.

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Such a volume can also stand as the crowning achievement of a poet’s illustrious writing life. This was true of W.H. Auden’s 1976 Collected Poems and T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, which he kept expanding until two years before his death.

But a volume of collected work can also show a poet’s limitations even as it exhibits his or her strengths. Frank O’Hara had only published seven slim volumes of poetry—four of them by the Tibor de Nagy art gallery—before he died at 40 in 1966. When his Collected Poems appeared in 1971, it surprised many people for its length, coming in at a little under 600 pages, and showed O’Hara to be one of the more prolific and original post-WWII poets if also a distinctly uneven one. Allen Ginsberg’s 1,200-page Collected Poems is surprisingly repetitive, and in the 1981 edition of Sylvia Plath’s collected poems we encounter a poet who has a linguistically wide but emotionally narrow range.

A corrected and expanded edition of E.E. Cummings’s Complete Poems: 1904-1962, published last month, belongs in this third category of collected work. In Stephen Dunn’s introduction to the volume, he writes that Cummings was "the Holden Caulfield of American poetry." That’s partly right. Cummings’s two great interests were sex and sex—at least in the first part of his life. In his first six volumes, he describes prostitutes and his own lusty feelings with the precision and imagination of a gifted schoolboy. Here, he is more interested in bodies and qualia—and just the right word for those qualia—than he is in emotions or people. In "Gert," for example, he writes "joggle i think will do it although the glad / monosyllable jounce possibly can tell / better how the balloons move." "Her voice? / gruesome:a trull / leaps from the lungs ‘gimme uh swell fite…’."

While some of the women in these poems have names, like Gert or Marj, what Cummings sees most often is flesh and body parts—"huge dropping of a flesh from / hinging thighs" and a "small manure-shaped head" on a pillow. For "two dollars," he will fill Marjorie’s "hips with boys and girls." He confesses that he likes "best,the,stomachs,of the young (girls silky and lewd)," but he’s also happy with "electric trite / thighs," lips, or any "curve of flesh," really. Women are inanimate objects or events. A girl is "a leaf," a woman is "the wind" or "like / the rain."

When he’s not lusty, he’s angry—at "humanity," at the war, at the stupidity of the "clean upstanding well dressed" boys, at the ladies of Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Humanity i love you," he writes in "La Guerre," but he doesn’t, as becomes clear in the next line: "because you would rather black the boots of / success than enquire whose soul dangles from his / watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both." People are greedy, self-serving, proud, and Cummings hates it. He adds a little self-deprecating sugar in the final lines to make this bitter pill of a poem go down a little smoother ("Humanity…you are / forever making poems in the lap / death Humanity // i hate you"), but it’s not very subtle.

His other poems on the First World War, like the one above, are in the same vein. Cummings joined a private ambulance corps with a group of Harvard friends to avoid being drafted. He saw little combat and spent five weeks in bureaucratic limbo in Paris after being separated from his attachment. A few months after he finally joined them on the Western front, he was arrested on suspicion of treason, largely because of his lack of respect for his commanding officer and condescension towards his fellow Americans. This didn’t stop Cummings from mocking his family’s support of the war effort in one poem and magnifying his suffering and sacrifice.

Still, these earlier poems exhibit Cummings’s ear for diction—which was as good as William Carlos Williams’s—as well as his timing and gift for associations. A poem like "[upon the room’s]," which begins "upon the room’s / silence,i will sew // a nagging button of candlelight / halfstooping to exactly kiss the trite // worm of her nakedness / until it go," possesses both a surgical exactitude and whimsy, a smoothness and a sonorous jaggedness, reflecting the conflicting impulses of love and lust, empathy and objectification, and oscillating moments of clarity and delusion.

Poems like these increase after 50 Poems, Cummings’s seventh volume of poems, published in 1940 when he was 46. He never outgrows the burlesque, but meditative sonnets on love and spring—not as a metaphor for sex but as a personification of some benevolent, long-suffering life-giving being—increase. In Tulips & Chimneys (1922), spring is the "green" devil or a "speechless carnival" that ends in the "sweet / annihilation of swift / flesh." But in Xaipe (1950) it is "a mender of things":

with eager
fingers(with
patient
eyes)re

-new-

ing remaking what
other
-wise we should
have thrown a-

way(and whose

brook
-bright flower-
soft bird
-quick voice loves

children
and sunlight and

mountains)in april(but
if he should
Smile)comes

nobody’ll know

While Cummings is known for his irregular punctuation, chopped lines, and the use of the lowercase first person singular (all of which are sometimes used arbitrarily to create a cheap difficulty), he was also one of the great sonneteers of the twentieth century. He wrote them throughout his life, and it’s striking how consistently accomplished he was at the form. A sonnet from 73 Poems (1963) begins: "being to timelessness as it’s to time, / love did no more begin than love will end; / where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim / love is the air the ocean and the land"). The later sonnets are more philosophic and free from inflated diction than the earlier ones. But even Eliot wasn’t writing like this at Harvard:

Let us lie here in the disturbing grass,
And slowly grow together under the sky
Sucked frail by Spring,whose meat is thou,and I,
This hurrying tree,and yonder pausing mass
Hitched to time scarcely,eager to surpass
Space:for the day decides:O let us lie

So, no, Cummings isn’t exactly the Holden Caulfield of American poetry. But neither is he its Apollo.

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A little fewer than half of the titles are fashionably suggestive. Instead of "On Friendship" (Joseph Addison) or "Of the Standard of Taste" (David Hume), we have "Nobility Eclipsed" (on the Hebrew language and translation) or "The Rhapsodist" (on Harold Bloom). There’s also a predilection for elaborate effusiveness.

What sets Ozick apart is her precision. Adjectives and nouns strung together in ornate expressions of supposedly refined feeling are depressingly easy to find in an age, such as ours, that values artifice over truth. Not in Ozick’s latest collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. Extravagance and exactitude don’t always tango, but missteps are relatively rare. Contemporary poetry, she writes, is characterized by a "slough of trivia and loss of encompassment, the herding of random images of minuscule perspective leading to a pipsqueak epiphany," while in Auden’s "September 1, 1939," she writes, "there are no symbols, no arcane ‘objective correlative.’ Invasion and war, violence and dread, horizon and olfactory nerve, place and time—the kernel of the hour, its history and politics—are intimately knotted in these plainspoken lines."

Even sentences that, at first, seem profligate show themselves to be necessarily so on a second reading. At the beginning of "Transcending the Kafkaesque," for example, Ozick writes: "Franz Kafka…has himself metamorphosed into an empire of boundless discourse, an empire stretched out across a firmament of interpretation: myth, parable, allegory, clairvoyance, divination; theory upon thesis upon theophany; every conceivable incarnation of the sexual, the political, the psychological, the metaphysical. Another study of the life? Another particle in the deep void of a proliferating cosmos." Through a sort of mimicry, Ozick’s proliferation of abstract nouns captures how Kafka’s name has become a catchphrase—divorced from the particulars of his life and work—for ill-defined ideas.

She is also the queen of the thunderbolt. "A critic," Ozick writes, "is, at bottom, a judge, and judgment ought not to be tentative, or it is flat and useless," and tentative she is not. She scolds "academic theorists" who have "marinated literature in dogma" and who write "in a kind of multisyllabic pidgin." She dismisses the contemporary avant-garde by remarking that "nothing is more exhaustedly old hat than the so-called experimental." "Whoever utters ‘Kafkaesque’," she writes, "has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings."

But she can be wrong. Surely Eliot’s fame has not "shrunk to a period datum," nor is she right—as much as I love Bellow—that the novelist, compared to his contemporaries, "alone courts lastingness, he alone escapes eclipse."

I found her opening essay on the need for criticism today, where she draws a hard line between criticism and review writing, particularly baffling. Not only does she overstate the function of criticism—what does it mean to "stimulate a living literary consciousness"?—but she also arbitrarily determines that the length and limits of a review (the focus on a single book) make them categorically different from the literary essay. "Critics," Ozick writes, "belong to a wholly distinct phylum."

But why should this be the case? If a reviewer is not free, according to Ozick, to "summon…multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions," how about one or two? Does a word count limit of 1,500 mean that no general arguments can be made about the meaning of life or the place of a work or style in the history of writing? If so, why did Ozick include her 1,600-word review of Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows in this collection of "literary essays"? Surely, she protests too much, and she knows it.

A lot of junk is called art today, and Ozick is not afraid to take out the trash, but she’s mostly focused on what’s worth keeping. In addition to essays on Bellow and Auden, we have pieces on Lionel Trilling, Bernard Malamud, Martin Amis, and others of that sort. Her preoccupation in most of these is what makes her a great writer and a great critic. The answer—to do the collection injustice—is insight, freedom, courage, genius.

One of the few essays not on an individual writer is "Writers, Visible and Invisible." While academics and magazine editors might render some great writers and texts temporarily invisible by confusing "ideologically narrow prejudices" with taste, the true writer will always become visible eventually, though only in the work. This is why all true writers, according to Ozick, are ghosts. They live but are never fully present in flesh and blood. "The fraudulent writer," by contrast, "is the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will stand and talk to you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck."

She’s wrong about the gossip, but probably right about everything else. Many people can’t tell the difference between real and so-called poets, who have merely mastered the game of book publication and university appointment, which in turn bankrolls the sunglasses and tweeds. A sad state, no doubt, but not all that new, and it’s the critic’s job to make the difference apparent. Ozick’s judgment isn’t perfect—whose is?—but she’s playing the right game in Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, which is always for keeps.

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Why begin a collection of comic verse called Slander with a poem on truth? It’s a joke, of course. Juster’s tongue is firmly in cheek: "Don’t cringe when cynics call us ‘off the wall’!" / "Thank God the tabloids keep us on the ball!" But it’s more than that. Not to be a killjoy (we’ll get to the sleaze in a moment), but it’s helpful to remember, since Juster is something of a Latin scholar and a Catholic, that we get "slander" from scandalum or "scandal." Thomas Aquinas defined scandalum as an evil action that leads to someone else’s sin, but it can also refer to good actions that are wrongly viewed as evil. Christ is a "stumblingblock" or skandalon, according to the apostle Paul, to those who reject him.

The refrain "You never know" is an appropriate opening, then, to a collection that reminds us of how outrageously vindictive, proud, and lusty we can all be. Some of the poems may offend (there’s a translation of the Middle Welsh "Poem of the Prick" and another I’m too Protestant to name), but they’re also humorous reminders of our frailty and excess, bawdiness and bile.

Juster is at his best in his short poems, which are deliciously acerbic. In "Your Midlife Crisis," the first of three epigrams "From the Workplace" (Juster is the pen name of Michael J. Astrue, who was the head of the Social Security Administration until 2013), he writes: "You found yourself, but at an awful cost. / We liked you better when you were lost." In "To My Ambitious Colleague": "Your uphill climb will never stop; / scum always rises to the top." "I kept hoping she would come alone," he writes in "Mismatch." "She’s a gem, but he’s a kidney stone."

As far as bawdiness goes, there’s this translation of Luxorius, which Juster renders (rightly in my view) as a limerick:

If his words could equal his penis,
He’d be known as a legal genius.
He is up half the night
Missing laws he should cite
While joined by his servant of Venus.

But there’s humility, too. In "Self-portrait at Fifty," Juster writes:

None of this can be denied:
crabby, flabby, full of pride;
hypertensive, pensive, snide;
slowing, growing terrified.

In "Candid Headstone," he asks us to remember "what’s left of Michael Juster": "A failure filled with bile and bluster," and in "Botches" he laments that "These half-finished poems of mine / lie in pieces on the floor / as if Doctor Frankenstein / couldn’t focus on his chore."

The comparatively longer poems (roughly between 10 and 40 lines) touch on political and literary matters. As a long-time civil servant—and one of the good ones, according to Paul Mariani’s 2010 profile of him in First Things—Astrue may have heard the following excuse from "Mistakes Were Made" more than once: "My people screwed up on their own; / I would have stopped them had I known." There’s a Supreme Court drinking song, "A Panegyric for Presidents’ Day" (which begins with the pleasantly corny "In malls today it is inhuman / Not to talk of Taft or Truman"), and "A Prayer to Bill Gates" ("We call to Thee, though Thou shalt not reply"), as well as a send-up of T. S. Eliot (an early influence), William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens called "Prufrock’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Red Wheelbarrow Glazed with Rain beside White Chickens."

The dialogue in the translation of two of Horace’s satires is occasionally confusing but also refreshingly colloquial. His translation of over 70 of Martial’s epigrams is nearly perfect, and matches or surpasses that of the late James Michie. He renders Epigram 28 in Book One, for example, as "To say Acerra stinks of day-old booze is wrong! / Each drink is freshened all night long!" This is much better than Walter C. A. Ker’s literal translation in the Loeb ("He who fancies that Acerra reeks of yesterday's wine is wrong. Acerra always drinks till daylight") and far superior to Garry Wills’ clunky and charmless "They claimed, with blamings not condign / He reeked at morn of last night’s wine. / He intermits not in such ways: / Not last night’s wine—it was today’s").

One of my favorite original poems in the volume is "Proposed Clichés." Would that they were. "Ask not what your country can do," he writes in one, "for fear of the answer." "Love is like a hard-time sentence," he writes in another, "but better than cancer." "If you’re crazy like a fox, / get tested for rabies."

This is a book for the curmudgeon, the wayward washed-up uncle, and anyone else who knows that life is messy and human beings are ridiculous and endearing. It’s also for lovers of wit and anyone happy to learn from a bit of comic carnality.

The post A Modern Martial appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Caligulan is organized according to the seasons, beginning with "Summer," and immediately something’s not right—not so much with summer itself but with how we imagine it. It may be a moment to sip margaritas in Antigua, but it’s also an occasion to watch a one-footed seagull poke at the trash on a pier at Barnegat Light, New Jersey:

The stump’s a small sharp spear that stings the bird
If ground is touched. He soars to foggy scree,
Alights but flaps to halfway hang in air, spurred
By pain to perform endless pirouettes.

The seagull’s not the only bird in the volume—there are also ospreys, blue jays, and hawks—and like these, the gull is an omen. "Summer," Hilbert writes, "is the center" of the gull’s circling and of our lives that "we try to pretend / Will keep us strong, like love, and never end." In reality, it is, at best, a momentary reprieve from life’s sting. To expect anything more from it is delusional. "Friends," Hilbert writes in another poem, "tell me I should be happier":

But to think is to appreciate that even
This sunshine—brilliant, primeval balm—will burn
If I linger too long, that it can blur
A universe of details to blindness when
One stares fixedly…

It is to avoid such blindness that Hilbert, metaphorically, avoids staring at the sun in the volume. Instead, he looks at farting ATVs, a castrated horse whose testicles are fed to dogs (in the "Spring" section of the volume—you get the idea), daffodils in sidewalk cracks that are "decorated / By the locust shells of Trojans and Nestle’s," and a supermodel who falls on the street while paparazzi take pictures in a semicircle and her boyfriend laughs.

As anti-pastoral as Hilbert can be, he shares Robert Frost’s commitment to describing impressions as precisely as possible, which may offer, as it did Frost, a "momentary stay against confusion," even if such descriptions can lead to contradictory conclusions. In one poem, for example, a hawk "seems almost a sign // That nothing kills more than it creates, / Or is wrong with what we finally become." In another, however, Hilbert suggests that we are, or are becoming, monsters. Looking into dark water from the deck of a boat, he asks:

But where is our monster, the one we thought

Would always be there somewhere, though hidden?
The tiny girl in pink stamps her silver slippers.
No monster today, or ever. I catch the shallow

Smudges of my face in the cabin window.

Poetry is "real," but it’s also a balm for Hilbert. Like the pirouettes of the seagull in the opening poem, poetry soothes us with its rhythm until death brings oblivion. "Your love weeps all night. At dawn, she screams," Hilbert writes in "Kingdom of Spiders":

You can’t know what designs more pain might bring.
Cold streets fill with crowds. You want to fight.
You spit and shout. In daydreams you sing.

Here again, then, we have the old paradox of poetry (and perhaps all art) as both a reflection of and an escape from reality encapsulated neatly in a single quatrain.

Hilbert’s father was a classically trained musician and teacher who used to play Bach and Rachmaninoff at night or in the morning. Hilbert, who currently works as a rare book dealer in Philadelphia and has a doctorate in English from Oxford, learned the piano as a child and played in a heavy metal band as a teen.

The music of Caligulan is, by turns, smooth and jagged. This is by design. Poetry reflects and clarifies complexity. Still, some of Hilbert’s lines seem unintentionally rough, and there are one or two that are little more than confections. The purpose of one irregular sonnet on flying a kite, for example, seems to be simply to set up the final clever, but mostly empty, paradox: "A thing apart; though still tethered / Fatherless, and finally unfathered."

But overall, the volume is full of skillful surprises and insight, as well as occasional moments of humor. In a poem on a "Zombie Fun Run," Hilbert writes sarcastically: "No point being dull / When waging war on a disease that kills."

An honest volume for dishonest times, Caligulan reminds us that "thunder / Sinks your song, because, like the day of birth, / The day you’ll wake and have your death is set." It "just hasn’t happened yet."

The post Ernest Hilbert’s Street Music appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Still, a posthumous collection of his tennis essays, published last week by the Library of America, caught my eye. I grew up playing and watching tennis and enjoyed (with some caveats) Wallace’s essay on the Maine Lobster Festival and his now over-discussed commencement speech at Kenyon College, but I had never read his tennis pieces.

Wallace was, as he puts it, a "near-great junior tennis player" in his teens in Illinois. While he stopped playing competitively after college, he would continue to hit the ball "seriously" for much of his life and watched the sport on TV and live. He wrote about tennis (which also figures in Infinite Jest) more than anything else beside himself—not that the two are always easy to disentangle. String Theory collects his five essays on the sport, published between 1991 and 2006, all of which have been previously collected.

The first is a slog. "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" revisits Wallace’s experience playing tennis in the windy Midwest. While not a particularly gifted player—or so he claims—Wallace found success on the court because of his "robotic detachment" from the capricious wind. His ability to take it into account in his calculation of angles allowed him to upset players with more talent and panache—at least until they began to grow while he remained trapped in a boy’s body.

The frustration that other players felt while playing in the wind, the young Wallace began to feel when he faced increasingly taller and more powerful opponents. "I began," he writes, "to resent my physical place in the great schema, and this resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot, is a big reason why I never qualified for the sectional championships again." The essay suggests that tennis is a metaphor for life, and it’s a rather ominous one at that. Some people, unable to handle life’s seeming unfairness, just give up.

This is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that to get there we have to work through some pretty long asides, confusing metaphors and similes (Is tennis "to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition?" Can you have a "king-vs.-regicide dynamic"?), occasional typos, repetitions, and tortured syntax ("The same soil that’s so full of humus farmers have to be bought off to keep markets unflooded keeps clay courts chocked with jimsona and thistle and volunteer corn, and it splits asphalt courts open…").

These shortcomings are exacerbated by the decision to use the version of the essay that appeared in his 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, rather than the more carefully edited one that appeared in Harper’s in 1991 under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes." In the Harper’s version, entire paragraphs are struck, clunky syntax is fixed, metaphors are revised for clarity, and details are cut to improve pacing. I’m not sure why the editors of String Theory decided to use the 1997 essay—perhaps there’s a financial reason—but no explanation is offered.

While the other essays are slightly longer (and less edited) than the magazine versions, they are, thankfully, much better than the first one. When Wallace reins himself in, he can be a charming guide who can identify the strangeness or sadness of seemingly pedestrian events with an eye for telling details. His essay on Michael Joyce and what it’s like to play the qualify rounds of a major tennis tournament introduces us to the world of second- and third-tier tennis pros—a strange one of unexpected contrasts of wealth and poverty, mindlessness, and physical beauty.

Wallace has a talent for commenting on the action of a game and describing the players. Marc Rosset and Jacob Hlasek move with a "compact nonchalance." When they are working out, they are like "a very powerful engine in low gear." Richard Krajicek plays "like a rabid crane." The purpose of "extreme daily practice" for talented junior players is to refine "the kinesthetic sense" so that they can play almost without thinking.

But he can also exaggerate. There’s always a bit of fudging, perhaps, conscious or not, in all writing, but if you lose credibility with your readers as an essayist, you’re toast. Wallace, for example, explains how some mothers would wail at tennis matches and "clutch childish heads to their bosoms" when there was a tornado warning. A paragraph later, he writes: "Watches and Warnings both seemed to have a kind of boy-and-wolf quality for the natives of Philo. They just happened too often." The wailing seems a touch overdone.

Worse, in his essay on Roger Federer, which may be the best in the volume, he opens with a long description of what he calls a "Federer Moment," which is when the Swiss player makes a shot that seems impossible. Federer is serving, up two games in the fourth, and Wallace description of what follows is almost entirely false. He tells us that after Federer hits a return, he scrambles "to reverse and get back to center." He doesn’t. Agassi does not move in "to take the ball short," nor does he "smack it hard." Agassi does not follow his shot to the net. Federer does back peddle, but not "impossibly fast," as Wallace tells us, and while he hits a winner down the line—a difficult shot, no doubt—it is hardly amazing by professional standards. The crowd does not "erupt." The shot is not "like something out of The Matrix" (which by 2006 was already a cliché).

In short, Wallace’s essay game lacks the consistent elegance and truth of the greats. There are spots of real entertainment and skill in String Theory, but it’s no Levels of the Game.

The post Double Fault appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.