Prufrock: The Forgotten Robert Nisbet, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Plagiarism Suit, and Other Literary Links

Reviews and News:

Robert Nisbet reconsidered: “Though sadly forgotten by almost everyone today—with the exception of a few sociologists and other academics, here and there, and by a few conservatives and libertarians, here and there—Robert Nisbet once stood as a leading public intellectual, respected and admired in the media and throughout western universities. Even histories of conservatism and the right, such as George Nash’s magisterial The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, have generally ignored or underplayed Nisbet’s contributions to the post-war movement.”

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Was “Stairway to Heaven” plagiarized? Whether it was or not, it will take years to decide in court, “cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars and involve any number of dense and complex 20-page (single-spaced) judicial opinions.”

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J. D. McClatchy’s favorite quotes: “The books of quotations that rarely let you down are commonplace books, those intellectual scrapbooks made for personal use and compiled by a single avid reader. Packed with miscellaneous delights — phrases, jokes, anecdotes, lovely sentences — they read like secret autobiographies, back catalogs of joy and heartbreak. You can apply them like compresses on the ugly bruises of life…These days, it’s rare that anyone publishes one. This is a reason to welcome the poet J. D. McClatchy’s Sweet Theft: A Poet’s Commonplace Book. Another reason is that it’s civilized and civilizing while being intimate and offbeat. It’s a treat to walk its aisles and browse its well-stocked shelves.”

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How immigration will change Sweden: “Sweden’s population is now expected to top 10 million next year, with another million added less than a decade later. Compared with forecasts made in 2008, Sweden will be a fifth bigger in 2050 than previously expected—a difference that’s roughly equivalent to current population of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö combined.”

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A life of Grace Hartigan: “Hartigan’s willpower was a thing of terrible beauty. It got her to New York, no small feat for someone who grew up in suburban New Jersey, married at 19, gave birth at 20, and found herself, at 21, a single mother living in Newark, working as a draughtsman during the week and painting watercolours of Dutch shoes with trailing ivy at the weekends. She discovered modern art when a colleague lent her a book. A boyfriend, Ike Muse, introduced her to the downtown painting scene, and she moved to Manhattan with him, but just as soon decided that if she wanted to paint, she couldn’t do it in a man’s shadow, or as a mother. At 26, she dumped Muse, left her son with her in-laws, and went to live, alone, in a cold-water walk-up in midtown. It was a gutsy, if chilly move. Hartigan wouldn’t see her son again for more than thirty years.”

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Previously unreleased recordings of Robert Frost readings are now available online. (HT: A. M. Juster)

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Essay of the Day:

In The Times Literary Supplement, Morris Dickstein reviews three new books on Jewish-American writing since WWII. While earlier writers created protagonists that tended to be anxious and dislocated, later ones “bring a deeper knowledge of Judaism” to bear on their work:

“In 1959 a long essay appeared in the TLS (anonymously, of course) that took notice of an important new turn in American writing. It had a vague, slightly patronizing title, ‘A Vocal Group: The Jewish part in American letters’, as if the headline writer were not quite sure what to make of it. The author, an unknown young critic named Theodore Solotaroff, had been suggested to the paper’s Editor, Alan Pryce-Jones, by a friend from the University of Chicago, Philip Roth. Roth had recently published a handful of audaciously gifted stories that made him a controversial figure in that vocal group. The article caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the newly appointed Editor of Commentary, and on the strength of it he hired its author as an assistant editor. Solotaroff would eventually make a major mark as an editor and writer; Roth would go on to become, well, Philip Roth.

“The essay covered considerable ground, taking in not only important post-war Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud but also the acute young critics who helped to clear a space for them, especially the literary intellectuals of the Partisan Review circle – Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv and Irving Howe. In his article Solotaroff returned to Fiedler’s account – in an essay published the year before in Midstream magazine – of the “breakthrough” exemplified by Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (1953), notably his shift from small-scale, carefully crafted fictions to messier, more ambitious works, as well as his ability to write from inside the mind and heart of his feelingful protagonists (Herzog was not yet on the horizon). In writers like the hell-raising Fiedler and the newly emboldened Bellow, Solotaroff saw “a willingness to revolt, to take chances, to trust one’s own instincts and insights and standards, to risk a crushing failure and even ridicule”. By casting Augie as a descendant of Huck Finn, Bellow had overcome the provinciality of pre-war Jewish writers to work within the American grain, filtering national motifs through an urban Jewish sensibility. A singular shift had taken place: a literary landscape previously dominated by modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and by social novelists left over from the Depression years, among them John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, had begun to make way for new outsider groups, especially Jews and blacks.

“Today that Jewish literary renaissance is sometimes said to have run its course during the first two or three decades after the war when these writers did their best work. Its oft-quoted but premature eulogy was delivered by Howe in the introduction to his anthology Jewish-American Stories (1977): ‘Insofar as it draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories’. ‘There just isn’t enough left of that experience.’ But that “insofar” left an opening through which dozens of younger writers have since clambered, among them a new wave of young immigrants from the former USSR. Instead of dying out once those tenement memories had been washed away by suburban assimilation, Jewish-American writing has unexpectedly flourished over the past two decades. The New Diaspora, edited by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt and Mark Shechner, is only the latest and largest of a series of anthologies that make a strong claim for these recent writers, most of them more unambiguously comfortable in their Jewishness than were their predecessors. A few of those included are older (among them Curt Leviant, Edith Pearlman and Joseph Epstein), others (such as Steve Stern, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Ehud Havazelet) have been publishing since the 1980s, while some are already well known though a good deal younger (including Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander and Dara Horn), along with other writers just finding their footing.

“They come with a far greater variety of backgrounds and subjects here than one would have found in the post-war generation.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Kites

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Poem: Barbara Lydecker Crane, “Conjuring a Son”

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