Prufrock: The Problem with Quantum Mechanics, What It Was Like to Be a Pirate, and Anthony Burgess on Reviewing

* *

What it was like to be a pirate: “Pirates could be found in nearly every Atlantic port city. But only particular locations became known as “pirate nests,” a pejorative term used by royalists and customs officials. Many of the most notorious pirates began their careers in these ports. Others established even deeper ties by settling in these cities and becoming respected members of the local elite. Instead of the snarling drunken fiends that parade through children’s books, these pirates spent their booty on pigs and chickens, hoping to live a more placid and financially secure life on land.”

* *

Revisiting Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin: “A friend of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, De Maria was radically opposed to Italian clericalism (even publishing a short story about the assassination of a fictional pope), but in the late ’70s abruptly re-converted to Catholicism and stopped writing fiction. Finding The Twenty Days of Turin is like discovering a prophetic prose relic containing a fundamental message about being human.”

* *

The cover article of The Washington Post‘s Express on a women’s rights rally is accompanied by a huge pink symbol of Mars, which represents men.

* *

Behind the exhibits: “Whatever Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Museum in Baltimore, thinks of the larger world, he has a somewhat jaundiced view of the art world itself, or at least that corner of it that forms his main area of expertise, medieval and Byzantine art. And the impression we are left with from this lively volume is that the holy and the unholy rub elbows rather more frequently than we imagine…This book really comes alive when the author turns, with manifest relish, to the wheelings and dealings that go into the sale of antiquities and the creation of exhibitions. Each one of the stories Vikan tells comes with head-spinning twists and turns, and nothing is ever as it seems.”

* *

The early fiction of Knut Hamsun.

* *

Essay of the Day:

The Times Literary Supplement republishes a short piece by Anthony Burgess on a subject that never fails to interest me: book reviewing. This space is usually for contemporary pieces, but I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, even if Burgess is wrong that the choice of the hack reviewer is between honesty and entertainment. Here’s a taste:

“Sitting as I am at this moment in a Bedford motor caravan, somewhere between Rome and Naples, with a portable Olympia on my lap, I am not well able to be properly bookish. Certainly I am in no position to place references or verify quotations, and I invite the reader (who probably requires no such invitation anyway) to feel superior. I am thinking of a short piece by George Orwell which everyone except myself can place a precise finger upon – the one about the reviewer. Orwell presents him, I seem to remember, as a dressing-gowned, unshaven, tea and tobacco addict sitting at a table strewn with old bits of paper which he may not throw away, since there may be a cheque somewhere underneath. The room which is filthy, is crammed with review copies which he has not yet got down to setting at half price. He himself is crammed with self disgust. He regards his trade as ignoble and dishonest, but he lacks the courage to leave it. To become a schoolmaster would be, for some reason, even more ignoble and dishonest. He has not the talent to live off writing works of the imagination, he is not sufficiently a scholar to attempt genuine criticism. Even if he possesses talent and scholarship, he is too disillusioned or exhausted to write a new book. He is fit only to be the Reviewer.

“This goes too far, of course. People never set out to be reviewers. They have to be writers first. They have to show some public evidence of literary ability before editors will ask them to do a little reviewing. Having published a novel or so, they are invited to review novels. Having written a witty brief study of Erasmus Darwin, they are persuaded to review the latest biography of Samuel Rogers. Then they become alive to the attractions of literary journalism. It does not pay much, but it pays regularly. A deadline is a fine substitute for a genuinely literary urge. But sooner or later the self-disgust sets in. It has to do – Orwell seems to say – with whipping up a factitious emotion about the book or books reviewed. About most books published it is hard to feel anything at all, but even hack journalism has to have some feeling behind it. And so the reviewer flogs himself into an attitude: ‘The fatuity of Mr Manningtree’s opening sentence makes the mind boggle, and it is a fair earnest of what is to come after’; ‘I have always been a sucker for novels about the Bog People, and so I devoured Mr Tumbrill’s new offering at a sitting’; ‘If I have to read another novel about Primrose Hill adultery I shall scream.’

“The reviewer, like any other journalist, has to entertain, and there is not much entertainment in ordinary drab indifference, which is to say honesty. Mr Manningtree’s opening sentence (‘Of Jabez Manducastis’s life, only one fact seems sure – that he died in 1672’) is decent enough, but you must think of your duty to your readers and make it sensationally stupid. You have never heard of the Bog People before, but now is your chance to present yourself as a fine mad eccentric in the great British tradition. You have not previously even thought of Primrose Hill adultery, but the blurb obligingly states: ‘This is not just another novel about Primrose Hill adultery’, giving you your cue. I recognise that this kind of showing-off is not relevant to reviews that carry no by-line but it is amazing how much the reviewer can get away with even here: ‘To anyone who is an aficionado of fiction about the Bog People – and there is probably one – Mr Tumbrill’s new offering will prove a positively esculent treat’, and so on. It is, incidentally, always possible to insinuate the name of the reviewer into an unsigned article.

* * *

“Reviewing – as this game seems to imply – is not merely dishonest but frivolous. I mean, of course, present day reviewing, not reviewing of the old Walter Bagehot kind. Ask for five hundred words on any new book, and you at once absolve the reviewer from reading it. There was once in London a sort of magazine which merely reproduced the blurbs: the income of its quite unliterary owners was derived from the sale of review copies.”

Read the rest.

* *

Image of the Day: Fighting bulls

* *

Poem: Daniel Corrie, “Augustine Chanting”

Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.