Reviews and News:
Voltaire’s luck: “It was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that ‘our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix.’ The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris; the country’s most celebrated writer of epic and dramatic verse had a keen eye for investment opportunities. By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins.”
* *
Wayne Hsieh reviews James Lee McDonough’s judicious biography of William Sherman: “Sherman’s troops in the vast majority of cases limited themselves to the destruction of property. Complaints of post-war Confederates aside, and even accounting for the harsher treatment meted out to South Carolinians during Sherman’s later march through that state in 1865, Sherman’s army did not massacre civilians, execute captured prisoners, or rape women in large numbers. Sherman’s soldiers were hardly saints, but neither were they vandals and thugs. The sources back this argument, and in comparison to the ferocity of Indian fighting on the American frontier, along with early modern warfare in the western world writ large, the violence Sherman’s soldiers inflicted on Confederate civilians had ample precedent, for better or for worse.”
* *
In praise of David Jones’s Parenthesis—the “greatest book about the first world war,” according to W. H. Auden.
* *
* *
In Case You Missed It:
The harm of smarm: “Broadly speaking, smarm is a form of extremely ingratiating behavior—unctuous attempts to curry favor while remaining insistently ‘positive.’ It’s always been around in mild form (mainly in the world of advertising), but in recent years it’s been on the rise in popular culture, journalism, and, more immediately, in politics. Smarm’s imperial assault on the larger cultural conversation became evident a few years ago when the website BuzzFeed announced that it would no longer publish negative book reviews. The decision was heralded by the site’s bosses as though it were a virgin birth.”
* *
The pleasures of Paradise Lost.
* *
Cynthia Ozick’s long crusade: In 1978, she argued that Harold Bloom’s “conception of poetry as a self-enclosed system that referred to nothing but itself…was a form of idolatry. The very idea of belatedness, so central to Bloom’s theory, was, in Ozick’s view, anathema to the Jewish tradition, according to which there were no latecomers. This was the meaning of the words in the Passover Haggadah, ‘We ourselves went out from Egypt,’ and the midrash that states, ‘All generations stood together at Sinai.’ In Jewish thought, there is ‘no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator.’ The idol-maker, by contrast, ‘hopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator.’ In short, her adversary had violated the Second Commandment, and must be punished… Ozick, who is now 88 (‘piano keys,’ as she sprightfully said when I congratulated her on her recent birthday), has not ceased from the mental fight in the intervening years. She remains a crusader, a missionary or, as she recently put it to me, ‘a fanatic’ in the cause of literature.”
* *
Richard John Neuhaus wasn’t a cultural warrior, Matthew Rose argues in the latest issue of National Affairs. He was “a defender of a consensus”
* *
Classic Essay: G. K. Chesterton, “French and English”: “It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan.”
* *
Interview: Michael Graham talks with Philip Terzian about three books to better understand Brexit.
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
