Reviews and News:
Leonora Carrington’s flapdoodle and alchemy.
A man in the South after the Depression: Edwin M. Yoder reviews Jennifer Ritterhouse’s book on Raleigh News and Observer’s Jonathan Daniels.
A monumental but selective account of all things Victorian and Edwardian.
The use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” to refer to the ideas and culture of English-speaking countries has increased markedly over the past twenty years in France. Why? “And why have the French continued to use it when few in the English-speaking world do?”
A truly original book on Dante and what it means to write theologically.
A French murder and its aftermath.
Essay of the Day:
In Quarterly Conversation, Adam Kosan revisits The Peregrine at 50 and the hermitic life of the man who wrote it:
“‘East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Above it, the eastern sky is bright with reflections of distant water, and there is a feeling of sails beyond land. Hill trees mass together in a dark-spired forest, but when I move towards them they slowly fan apart, the sky descends between, and they are solitary oaks and elms, each with its own wide territory of winter shadow. The calmness, the solitude of horizons lures me towards them, through them, and on to others. They layer the memory like strata.’
“So began my introduction to Baker’s Essex, which, though pleasant-looking, is no Lake District. The Peregrine makes it otherwise. Baker dedicates to this land an imagination that is foil and febrile kin to Wordsworth’s genius. His prose has a sheer disorienting power: the words of a place raised out of time yet shaped through historical time. The uncertainty of wildness is at its center, bound to a persistent human namelessness that hangs on the fringes: ‘As so often on spring evenings, no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song. Like all human beings, I seem to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across, that sears away all life. When I stand still, it cools, and slowly disappears.’ Such prose slips the reader out of the here-and-now and into a middle position between the narrator’s searing hoop and a mirage of vitality.
“Not much is known about the person who wrote of the joys and pains of this circumscribed condition, this man who saw himself as chained to his own life-repelling life. The biographical facts that have been established do little to diminish the myth that has formed around his life and work: he was born and lived in Essex, he was married and doesn’t seem to have had children, he worked at the Automobile Association but never learned to drive, he got around on foot and bicycle; later in life he worked at the soda company Britvic, he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and died of cancer. More details, especially about Baker’s early life, have been collected in recent years through interviews with a few close friends. This fall the first biography of him will be published. The Peregrine originally came out in 1967 and won the Duff Cooper Prize for nonfiction in 1968. Since then it’s been enthusiastically praised by Robert Macfarlane, Andrew Motion, Barry Lopez, and Werner Herzog. We don’t know what relationships Baker had to other writers, or editors and publishers, but they were probably minimal. He wrote only one other book, The Hill of Summer, published in 1969. When he died in 1987 he was hardly a public figure.”
Photos: Qudra Oases
Poem: Francisco de Quevedo, “Undying Love Beyond the Grave”
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