Saturday Links
Winners of the "First Things" Poetry Prize, how Mike Herron became a bestseller, revisiting the siege of Leningrad, and more.
Good morning! In August, we announced the winners of the inaugural First Things Poetry Prize: Josiah Cox and Ryan Wilson. Their poems have now been published in the October issue of the magazine. Here is Cox’s “Two Owls,” and here is Wilson’s “Gather Ye”—both excellent, I hope you’ll agree. I would like to thank the Tim & Judy Rudderow Foundation again for sponsoring the prize and Amit Majmudar for serving as this year’s outside judge.
By the way, the October issue of First Things is chock-full of good stuff—two more poems (a free translation of a Philip Melanchthon poem by Eric Hutchinson and a poem on artifice by Wendy Videlock), Matthew Schmitz on “Clint Eastwood’s Law,” Michael Toscano on tech neutrality, John Duggan on Frank Furedi’s new book, and much more. Why not subscribe?
Thomas Kidd writes about writing when you have no time to write:
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a splendid profile of the spy novelist Mick Herron, who toiled in obscurity for years before a series of breaks turned him into one of the best-selling writers in America and the U.K.
I’m a sucker for writer’s stories, but I was especially struck by one passage about Herron’s early career as a writer. Back in those days, he was working as an editor at the Employment Law Brief (scintillating!) in the U.K.: “He was commuting every day from Oxford to London. He came to work early so he could leave early. When he got home around 6 p.m., he had the energy to write for an hour. By aiming for 350 words a night, he pumped out five well-reviewed detective novels. But they ‘hadn’t set the world alight,’ as he puts it, and they weren’t nearly successful enough for him to write full time. So he kept commuting.”
Herron’s account offers an inspiring example of someone who had almost no time for his long-term writing projects. He had a full-time job, plus a long commute, in work that had nothing to do with what he really wanted to be writing.
Andrew Motion on W. H. Auden’s localism:
Previous studies of Auden have tended to prioritise the postmodern stylist (who ingeniously combines time-honoured rhetorical flourishes with up-to-date telegraphic urgencies), the left-leaning internationalist (quick to report on wars in China and Spain), and the restless didact, whose departure from the UK to the US in 1939 was either a form of betrayal or a necessary act of self-preservation, depending on the critic’s point of view. Jenkins is at once vaguer and more accommodating than his predecessors. “My focus on Auden’s explorations of the condition of nationality,” he says, “does not reduce his poems to a set of ideological polemics but is rather an attempt to expose more clearly the collective history distilled into their aesthetic structures. The Auden portrayed here looks more like a kind of lyric novelist than he does a poetic essayist or philosopher.” Jenkins’s Auden is more local, less radical, “more focused on the feel and workings of the social world and on relations between people in that world” than he is on international politics.
Central to this re-presentation is Jenkins’s effort to connect the private world of love, friendship and community with the public world of national identity and responsibility. It’s a theme that Auden himself often stated explicitly in his later work (“Private faces in public places/Are wiser and nicer/Than public faces in private places”), but in his early work it has a particularly rich and organic identity.
James Matthew Wilson reviews David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life: “David Bentley Hart has published a gigantic, compendious, exasperating, bombastic masterpiece of a book that every serious person should consider reading. It’s the most thorough and rigorous account of the nature of reality to be published in a century.”
Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Annihilation, which he claims will be his last, is just as bleak as his previous work, but it is also “suffused with a particular kind of sadness.” Sam Byers reviews:
Annihilation is a lengthy novel, and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer. The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey; tension is almost superstitiously avoided. Paul’s mournful acceptance of life’s cruelties leaves the book feeling at times as if the despair of his marriage has saturated every aspect, including Houellebecq’s wilfully textureless run-on sentences.
Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances. Annihilation may present itself as a political thriller, but at its heart is a far more intimate catastrophe: the debilitating, near fatal stroke suffered by Paul’s father, and the decline of his once empathetic care facility into a neoliberal nightmare of cost savings and creeping neglect. Viewed through the eyes of Maryse, a care assistant and migrant worker, Houellebecq’s vision of old age in a society that sees “the value of a human being declining as their age increases”, is at once hellish and viscerally accurate.
What can we learn from two 19th-century philosophy societies in the Midwest? Joseph M Keegin considers:
The Platonists of Illinois were centred around Hiram Kinnaird Jones of Jacksonville. The Hegelians of the St Louis Philosophical Society, meanwhile, were led by Heinrich Conrad (‘Henry Clay’) Brokmeyer and William Torrey Harris. These were movements of amateurs in the fullest and best sense: their ranks were composed of non-professional students of philosophy – lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, factory workers and housewives – motivated by personal edification and the earnest pursuit of truth rather than professional achievement or status-acquisition . . . What example, then, do these schools provide for the enterprise of philosophy today? The first and most immediate takeaway is the reminder that philosophy has rarely been considered just one research discipline among others. The enterprise of philosophy, for both the Platonists and the Hegelians, remained first and foremost what it had been since its birth among the seers and sages of ancient Ionia and Italy: the love of wisdom, the dogged search for knowledge of the whole. The Platonists of Illinois ‘regarded philosophy as a necessary orientation for the whole business of human living,’ wrote Anderson, and for this Plato was the best guide; for the St Louis crowd, Hegel was ‘the last entire philosopher of the Great Entirety, inasmuch as the philosophers since Hegel are but piecemeals in comparison with his wholeness,’ according to Snider. This kind of philosophical activity could not have been secluded within department offices or academic conferences; it was coextensive with the very activity of being human, of putting one’s reason fully to work, and was thus necessary for living a good life.
In the past century or so, the market power and cultural influence of US colleges and universities has greatly increased, driven by the post-Second World War expansion of university education in the wake of the GI bill. As a consequence, the vibrant pluralism of the philosophic way of life has more or less flattened into a single option: that of the university scholar, whose credibility depends upon institutional affiliation. Before this radical transformation of US education, and the monopolisation of intellectual life by the university industry that followed in its wake, philosophy was understood to be – like all other pursuits of the mind and heart – a vocation with a professional expression, rather than the other way round. If philosophy in the US is to have any future, it will demand a return to this perennial picture of things, and ensure that communities dedicated to philosophising proliferate outside the walls of the academy, among groups of people other than just college teachers and undergraduates. It will demand, that is, a turn from thinking about education in terms of bloated, lumbering, hierarchical institutions like colleges and universities, to thinking in terms of that perennial feature of US public life that the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said ‘gathers the efforts of divergent minds in a cluster and drives them vigorously toward a single goal’: the association.
Debunking the myths of the siege of Leningrad: Simon Parkin reviews Prit Buttar’s Hero City:
Hero City focuses on the latter stages of the siege, when, under new leadership, Leningrad’s defenders rallied and reorganized. After Leonid Govorov was promoted to the role of colonel general in early 1943, his priority, Buttar writes, was “not so much to prevent the fall of Leningrad but to break the siege ring.” Once the Russians had prised a gap open, food, fuel and munitions could flow into the city, establishing footholds on which new victories could then be built. In intricate detail Buttar explains the machinations behind the unexpected achievements that followed, particularly the gains in the first two months of 1944, even as the bodies of young men continued to accumulate at a foreboding rate.
Taken in concert, Buttar’s two books provide one of the most comprehensive English-language accounts of the siege. This is history-writing at its most traditionally ambitious, eschewing the characterization and intimate scene-setting detail that might help a less determined reader through the forbidding vastness of the subject, in favor of providing a meticulous survey that includes every available date and namecheck. Narrative compulsion is traded for detail and military analysis, and Buttar establishes a convincing case that the people of Leningrad prevailed despite the uselessness (usually fear-induced) of many Soviet officials, not because of them:
I don’t trust Ron Charles’s judgment, so I am taking his pronouncement that Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, is awe-inspiring with a grain of salt. Still, I hope he’s right!
Forthcoming: Brenda Hillman, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality (Virginia, September 27): “Three Talks is the first prose collection by the award-winning poet and educator Brenda Hillman. These short essays on six M’s of the art of poetry make the form accessible in a novel way, exploring words that might appear incompatible but become dancing partners in Hillman’s artistic vision: metaphor and metonymy; meaning and mystery; magic and morality. First delivered as a series of talks at the University of Virginia, the essays maintain a casual, intimate tone. A consummate artist and technician, Hillman explores a wide array of poetic examples, focusing on method, subject matter, and inspiration to demonstrate how the skills offered by poetry have become critically important for our present moment.”