Reviews and News:
Hugh Kenner’s contrarianism: “He can undo a library’s worth of dissertations by mentioning that people mistake ‘Kafka for a physician rather than a symptom.’ William Empson’s fascination with teasing out the ambiguities of individual words is ‘a little like discussing an automobile solely in terms of the weight borne by its ball-bearings.’ And whenever literature is discussed, there’s always those people who imagine that writing ‘reached an apex in Keats.'”
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Flannery O’Connor’s humility and courage: “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument of Your story.”
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Remembering a newspaper’s golden years.
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Vividly colored wallpaper “was the height of fashion for aspirational Victorians – and the cause of countless deaths.”
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Opium and the Romantics: “De Quincey was thirty-six when Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, his sensational memoir of addiction, was published, anonymously, in 1821. At the time, Wilson writes, England was ‘marinated in opium, which was taken for everything from upset stomachs to sore heads.’ It was swallowed in the form of pills or dissolved in alcohol to make laudanum, the tincture preferred by De Quincey.” De Quincy peaked at “four hundred and eighty grains per day, or twelve thousand drops of laudanum. The next several years of his life, though they coincided with the birth of his first child, William, in 1816, and his subsequent marriage to the mother, Margaret Simpson, a pure-of-heart girl from a farm family of primordial English stock, can be understood only in terms of the dark visions and anxieties that dogged him constantly.”
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The Architect’s Apprentice is “both a richly evocative historical narrative and an exercise in sheer
fantasy, a work equal parts Arabian Nights, magical realism, formulaic whodunit, and chronicle of a lost empire at its zenith—an intriguing mixture of things that did, and did not, happen.”
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Essay of the Day:
Both Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot thought Henry Green was one of the great novelists of the 20th century. He remains mostly unknown:
“Waugh blamed philistine book reviewers, but he knew that Green’s image hadn’t helped. ‘From motives inscrutable to his friends, the author of Living chooses to publish his work under a pseudonym of peculiar drabness,’ he wrote. Green was born Henry Vincent Yorke, to a prominent Gloucestershire family, and he worked as the managing director of H Pontifex & Sons Ltd., a manufacturing company purchased by his grandfather; he presented himself as a Sunday writer. (Where other novelists might serve as secretary of pen, Green did a stint as chairman of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers’ Association.) He claimed that he wrote under an assumed name in order to hide his writing from colleagues and associates. The Life profile, ‘The Double Life of Henry Green,’ had the subtitle ‘The “secret” vice of a top British industrialist is writing some of Britain’s best novels.’ But Green’s first book, Blindness, was published in 1926, while he was at Oxford, and a desire for privacy characterized much of his behavior. After a certain point, he refused to have his portrait taken. Dundy had first recognized him from a Cecil Beaton photograph that showed only the back of his head.
“The literary scholar Nick Shepley, in Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday (Oxford), writes that ‘the search for an identifiable or classifiable Henry Green retreats into the shadowy distance as the layers accumulate.’ But, as Shepley notes, and as NYRB Classics’ new reissues of Green’s novels illustrate, his fiction was autobiographical—at times consciously parasitic. He claimed that he disliked Oxford because ‘literature is not a subject to write essays about.’ In reality, he had discovered that Oxford was not a subject to write novels about—at least, not his time there, which was mostly spent watching movies, playing billiards, poring over Proust with his Eton classmate Anthony Powell, and ignoring his tutor, C. S. Lewis. In a letter to his father, Green explained his decision to abandon his degree in favor of a stint working on the floor at the Pontifex iron foundry: ‘Of course I have another book in my mind’s eye. . . . I want badly to write a novel about working men.'”
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Image of the Day: Interlaken
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Poem: Osip Mandelstam, “Untitled,” translated by Svetlana Lavochkina
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