The letters of Flannery O’Connor and Allen Tate’s wife, Caroline Gordon, are “not just a collection of letters, which would be valuable in and of itself as only six of the 100-plus here have been previously published in full, but an academically rendered narrative of just how those letters unfolded in Gordon’s and O’Connor’s careers and personal lives.” Stephen Mirarchi reviews.
Joseph Epstein on Proust’s women and Paris salon life: “Proust’s Duchess describes the world of the gratin of the belle époque and along the way reveals how thin, how shallow, how nearly bogus it all was. ‘Life,’ said Bismarck, ‘begins at baron,’ meaning that in 19th-century Europe, without a title one was rabble, rubbish, scarcely existent. Theatergoing, boxes at the opera, elaborate costume balls—these were the events in which the gratin appeared outside the social fortresses of their homes and salons. Summer months they spent under the roofs of grand mansions in the country; parts of the autumn and winter were given over to shooting foxes and pheasants. A sycophantic press chronicled their comings and goings. The monde, in Caroline Weber’s phrase, ‘existed in a time warp.’ A woman in this select inner circle, Weber informs us, required as many as seven or eight changes of clothes daily, which of course implied a cadre of servants. ‘The “born” Parisienne’s golden rule: always look perfect, no matter how shaky one’s finances or one’s marriage,’ she writes. The game of keeping up was costly. The dirty little secret among the born was not sex, Weber notes, but finances.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at 100: “December 11, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Isaievech Solzhenitsyn. A writer of immense talent and spiritual depth, the century’s greatest critic of the totalitarian immolation of liberty and human dignity, a thinker and moral witness who illumined the fate of the human soul hemmed in by barbed wire in the East, and a materialist cornucopia in the West, the mature Solzhenitsyn remained remarkably faithful to the twin imperatives of courage and truth. A modern Saint George, he slew the dragon of ideological despotism with rare eloquence, determination, and grit. For that alone, he deserves to be forever remembered.”
Solzhenitsyn’s son, the conductor and pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn, is back in Russia to conduct an opera of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at the Bolshoi Theatre.
King Arthur and the Inklings: “The Arthurian tales and themes lend themselves well to the concern of the Inklings with the relations between the natural and supernatural worlds.”
Michael W. Higgins writes about William Blake’s influence on Thomas Merton: “The skill with which Merton choreographed the centripetal forces in his life—as he moved inexorably toward the divine center—had an exalted pedigree: he learned it from William Blake, the engraver, artist, and poet. First introduced to Blake and his paintings by his father, Owen, a New Zealander artist who died while Merton was a teenager, Merton returned to Blake while doing graduate studies at Columbia University in the 1930s. Writing a master’s thesis titled ‘Nature and Art in William Blake: An Essay in Interpretation,’ Merton embraced Blake’s visionary poetics and radical spirituality and made them his own. Blake entered his bloodstream completely. Persuaded that Blake ‘was the most deeply religious artist of his time in England,’ Merton sought to emulate him: an outlier, an epic poet in the paradise tradition, and a radical reshaper of the Christian narrative. And he did so in a traditional monastery, of all places.”
Sylvia Plath’s final letters: “The publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956–1963 will likely renew the debate about ‘the necessity; of Plath’s suicide, as well as clarify how she transmuted her life into art.”
Pressing question of the day: How much ceruse (a cosmetic made of white lead and vinegar) did Elizabeth I apply to her face? “Did Elizabeth use ceruse to excess, as most every filmic representation of the queen from the 20th and 21st centuries would have us believe? Elizabeth had smallpox in 1562, which apparently left her with tell-tale pocks (or pits) on her face. The combination of her ‘swarthiness,’ these blemishes, and the aging process (which would have been abetted by the use of the toxic lead powder) may have led her to apply yet more ceruse as time went on and her skin became more and more unsightly. That might have resulted in a clownish appearance, like Robbie’s in the latter part of the new Mary Queen of Scots. But, Anna Riehl argues, there are very few contemporary testimonies to Elizabeth’s supposed ceruse overuse. One very colorful reference from late 1600 is often repeated in later histories—the aging Elizabeth, according to this account, ‘was continuously painted not only all over her face, but on her very neck and breast also … the same was in some places near half an inch thick.’ But this account seems to have been a street rumor, ‘picked up by Father Rivers, a Jesuit in hiding’ during a time when Catholics (especially Jesuits) were persecuted in England. Riehl sees Rivers’ report as unlikely to be true in every detail, but historically important nonetheless because it shows how Elizabeth’s critics used her habit of ‘painting’ against her.”
Essay of the Day
In Spiked, James Heartfield explains why war poetry matters:
“The strength of the war poets, though, is not that they are all that representative of the opinions of the time. It would be foolish to think that poetry ought to be representative. Their strength really comes from the way that they reworked the words and thoughts of the time and rose above the immediacy of war fervour. They were blessed, if that is not too grotesque a word, with a deeply poetic and literary moment, where words rose up to lead men on to extraordinary deeds.
“In newspapers, church sermons, officers’ words of command and comfort, language was strained to find the metaphors and images that would carry men from one outlook to another. Mundane things were lent intense meaning by the conflict – mud, barbed wire and later poppies were heavy with it. It is marked that the poets of the 1930s, WH Auden, Louis Macneice and Christopher Isherwood, who were at least as good technically as Sassoon and Owen, still did not find that note of profundity that the war poets did, their sincere denunciations of militarism sounding weedy and snarky next to Owen’s posthumous warnings.”
Photo: Shades of green in Palouse
Poem: Dana Gioia, “The Underworld”
