Are Writers Too Chummy?
Also: On Eastern scripts, when Norman Podhoretz met Robert Silvers, the plight of Japanese lacquer artists, France’s next Michel Houellebecq, and more.
Good morning! In the Washington Post, Samuel Ashworth argues that literary culture in the United States is too friendly:
Literature has become boring. I don’t mean the books themselves. Even as publishers conglomerate into a Borg-like hivemind, writers are still crafting transgressive, sophisticated, brilliant work. When I say boring, I mean the book world itself. The collective of writers, critics, readers, booksellers and tastemakers that we call the literary establishment has lost the one thing that every compelling narrative depends on: conflict.
Books aren’t dead, the literary feud is. And it is high time we resurrected it.
More:
The history of literature is, in many ways, the history of its feuds. Byron wrote “Don Juan” as an up-yours to then-poet laureate Robert Southey; Theodore Dreiser slapped Sinclair Lewis over losing the Nobel Prize; Mario Vargas Llosa slugged Gabriel García Márquez in the eye over a matter involving Vargas Llosa’s wife; Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy fell out over Hellman’s inflexible support of Joseph Stalin (yes, really) and went on to hate each other very productively for half a century.
It’s not just that all this makes for good gossip, though gossip has its own virtues. Literary movements essentially consist of writers getting so sick of what’s being published around them that they decide to create something wholly new. Writers are by nature jealous, judgmental, insecure and very good at saying so. We call one another out for dishonesty and sloppy prose. Or at least, we used to. Looking around today, one could be forgiven for assuming that literature is as chummy and supportive as a yoga retreat. My wife compares it to chimps grooming each other, with the same delicate hierarchy. We’ve equated good literary citizenship with being cheerleaders, which for most of us takes the form of clicking a button or two on a social media app, or claiming we’re “screaming, crying, throwing up” at an acquaintance’s cover reveal. In public, we’re trained to speak like politicians, or actors on an endless press tour. The only chance most of us get to blow off steam is within the safe confines of an internet dogpile, which is not nearly as invigorating or entertaining as a feud. What we want is to be able to say, as Clive James so gloriously put it, that “the book of my enemy has been remaindered.” Instead, writers are now expected to gush over one another, on the pretense that “we’re all in this together” — even though we absolutely are not.
In other news, Adam Roberts writes that the idea “that the Latin script consists of ugly blocks, ‘paving stones’, compared to the elegant fluidity of the ‘rain’ of ‘running Arabic’, is a fairly common one.” Is this right?
The latest issue of Commentary contains several essays remembering Norman Podhoretz. Gerald Howard writes about attending a cocktail party at the Strand with Podhoretz:
As we were retrieving our coats to depart, who should arrive but Robert Silvers. Norman had told me that in fact he had been the first candidate, before Silvers, to serve as the inaugural editor of the New York Review of Books way back in 1963 when it was being started by Jason and Barbara Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell. But he had a good thing going at Commentary, so he decided to stay put rather than take a gamble with his career on a chancy new enterprise likely to fail after a few issues. How very different our intellectual history would have been if he’d taken the job!
Anyway, Silvers and Norman could not avoid talking to each other in the cramped circumstance, and an outwardly perfectly cordial catching-up exchange took place before my astonished eyes. In my imagination, the ions between the two men, both of them brilliant, neither of them likely to agree on much of anything, in truth ideological enemies forced by circumstances into politeness, were crackling with electricity. It struck me then, and still does, as an extraordinary if very brief summit meeting.
Andrew Ferguson writes about his prose: “‘What mattered most to him was writing,’ says someone (his son) who knew Norman Podhoretz well, and after revisiting his tall stack of books in the weeks since he died, I don’t doubt it. The body of work he left behind is astonishing in its quality and range. The range took him from precocious essays (in his early 20s!) of wise and worldly literary criticism to fulminations on foreign policy to a long, late-life meditation on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible; the quality, sentence by sentence and essay by essay, places him in the top ranks of 20th-century prose artists. One question is how he did it. In my trek up Mount Norman, I think I found a few clues.”
The New York Times reports on Japanese lacquer artists who have struggled since the 2024 earthquake decimated Wajima—“a singular place in the lacquer firmament, prized for its exceptional durability and honed by craftspeople whose family know-how goes back five generations and more”:
