Saturday Links
Remembering Nan Shepherd, Robert Caro’s library, lunching with Thomas Mann, the Montreal-based Obolus Press, Seamus Heaney’s baptism poem, and more.
Good morning! As noted earlier this week, the director David Lynch has died. There have been several articles on Lynch’s work, as you might imagine, but the best so far is from Noah Millman in Modern Age. Here’s a snippet:
It’s 2001, and I’m working on Wall Street. I still go to the movies, of course, but I have less time than I used to . . . A friend and I go to see David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive. I’m confused by it, disoriented. Lynch seems to be playing a game of candy-colored tropes with a sinister undertone that I can’t take seriously; it feels like it’s all artifice. Then suddenly the film turns inside out, and reveals itself to have been a dream, layered over a reality that is its negative, all dim, a world of frustrated longing and failure. What does it amount to, though? I can’t find any real people there, anything solid to grab hold of; it feels like an insubstantial pageant and leaves not a rack behind when it has melted into air.
My friend and I walk out. He says to me, “That was arse,” and I don’t disagree. But that night he goes home to his wife, tells her what he thought of the film, and it’s his life that turns inside out. She’s furious, she’s outraged: if he doesn’t understand the film it’s because he never understood women, never understood her. She’s been having an affair for months and he never noticed, and she throws this revelation in his face before stomping out. It feels to him like a nightmare, but it’s his prior life that was the dream, and this really is the end. Within weeks, his wife has left not only him but her entire life: her home, her career, even the country.
Movies are as insubstantial as a dream, but when we meet them on the dreaming plane, their power can be overwhelming. My friend’s wife met David Lynch there, on that plane, and so I understand how, even if their marriage hadn’t already been falling apart, hearing “that was arse” about that dream, a dream that had become her dream, might have caused her to wonder, who am I even married to?
Millman is right that Lynch somehow used corniness and clichéd tropes to make films and TV series that were more than simply ironic. I don’t know that he was an important director, but he certainly was original.
A film that is so corny that almost no one has paid to see it is the new Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. What’s corny about it? Williams is played by a CGI monkey. Alexander Larman, however, defends the film: “As soon as Michael ‘Greatest Showman’ Gracey’s bold decision was announced, it was met with both incomprehension and ridicule. As if anyone was going to go and see that, especially in America. It would be nice to say that the naysayers were wrong, but the film’s failure has been total. It hasn’t been much more successful internationally either — even in Britain, where Williams routinely sells out the country’s largest stadiums — and seems fated to remain a cautionary tale, largely unseen and unappreciated.”
Yet, Larman continues, “Better Man is very good. Its central device sounds like a gimmick, and perhaps it is, but the decision not to have Williams played by, say, Taron Egerton, but instead to be represented in full, simian form is an arrestingly daring artistic decision that pays off remarkably well. At a time when virtually every other musical biopic demonstrates the “same old, same old” approach (hello, Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan! Come on down, Jaafar Jackson as Uncle Michael!), Gracey and Williams deserve kudos for doing something wholly different to everyone else. It should be noted that most people who have seen Better Man (mainly critics at this point) have raved about it, but unfortunately Paramount’s marketing failed to persuade people of its achievements enough to go and see it. Chances are that, tax breaks aside, it will go down as one of the biggest box office bombs of the decade. And that is not a fate that it deserved.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s The Abandoners: “Urzaiz, who is the mother of two young kids, acknowledges that she has long been fascinated by stories of mothers who leave their children, mostly to pursue their professional ambitions. This book is her attempt not only to understand where that fascination comes from but also why she—an enlightened cosmopolitan woman—is so judgmental about these ‘abandoners.’ ‘Why is it so hard for me,’ she asks, ‘to accept someone that might want to separate from her children, for a while or forever, if I think of myself as such a devoted feminist, if I believe I have a proper understanding of human complexity and empathize with so many deviations from the norm?’ Her obsession with the topic leads to some fascinating and disturbing investigations.”
The historian Robert Caro gives Sophia Nguyen a tour of his home library:
Most of the shelf space is crammed with the signed and inscribed work of friends and colleagues. With some difficulty, Caro pulled out David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers,” from 1967. Like Caro, Kahn had worked at Newsday, a newspaper on Long Island, where it seemed that everyone had a half-finished novel lying around. Kahn left to work on his passion project — a history of cryptography starting in ancient Egypt.
When the book didn’t quickly appear, Caro said, “I noticed that, although he had been a very popular guy [at Newsday], after a couple of years, there was a tone in people’s voice of ridicule. And I realized they hadn’t had the guts to quit — and they were not unhappy that he apparently had failed,” Caro said. “But he hadn’t failed. It just took him seven years to do this book.” It became an international bestseller.
Morten Høi Jensen writes about when Thomas Mann had lunch with Stefan Zweig in a new series at Liberties to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth: “On January 4, 1939, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig arrived at a stately, imposing home on 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New Jersey. Originally built for President Garfield’s son in 1908, its current resident was Thomas Mann, the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. When Mann first heard of Zweig’s arrival in New York a week or so earlier, he’d written at once to invite him to lunch on January 4 at 1:30pm. He was ‘eager to discuss the whole thing with you,’ as he put it in his letter. ‘The whole thing’ meant, of course, the fact that both writers were living in exile from their respective countries.”
Poem: Glenn Arbery, “Exemplary”
Edward Hirsch writes about the poetry of David Bottoms:
A late Friday afternoon in October, Detroit, 1980. I was standing in the aisle in Marwil’s bookstore on the corner of Warren and Cass, shaking off a long week of teaching freshman composition, browsing the new poetry books—they didn’t have many—when I hit upon a thin volume called Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. I had never heard of the poet, David Bottoms, but the title was startling, and the collection had been chosen for a prize by Robert Penn Warren, whose late poems I had been carrying around for weeks (Now and Then, Being Here), and so I stood there reading while the traffic thickened the corridors outside, and the shadows traveled slowly across the store. I did not notice Mr. Marwil at the cash register, eyeing me suspiciously, making sure that I did not steal the book.
It was an urban surround, but I was immediately transported to a southern countryside where a group of rowdy teenagers were getting drunk and driving around in carloads looking for trouble. One night they were vandalizing the local cemetery, walking through a valley of tombs with crowbars and drag chains, prying loose the ironwork, and breaking the arms of stone angels. Another night they were taking out guns and shining their headlights on wasted fields. I was one of them, or could have been, if I hadn’t grown up in Chicago, a different sort of neighborhood, but with the equally sketchy morals of adolescent boys. It was not only the casual cruelty of shooting rats at the local dumpsite that haunted me, though I could not shake the image, but also the self-awareness of the speaker, who did not shy away from convicting himself for killing rodents in some sort of misbegotten, toxic idea of male sport: ‘It’s the light they believe kills./ We drink and load again, let them crawl / for all they’re worth into the darkness we’re headed for.’”
Two poems that Virginia Woolf wrote for her niece have been discovered in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin: “Oliver says she thinks they were missed by other researchers ‘because people are not necessarily looking in a folder of letters to her niece’ . . . . Woolf didn't have any children of her own. This was a "sore point" for her, said Oliver. But these poems reveal something poignant about the relationship she had with the family she did have.”
My parents were not from Cults and they didn’t know many older folk in the village, apart from Nan Shepherd. She had taught my mother, whose name was May Salmond, between 1950 and 1953 at Aberdeen Training Centre, where students were ‘trained’ to be teachers. The general method of instruction conformed to the norms of the 1950s classroom: students were addressed like children, desks were laid out in rows and the lectures were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or so later, she was happy to renew the acquaintance. My mother referred to her as ‘Nan Shepherd’, never ‘Nan’ or ‘Miss Shepherd’; it was always both her names because she was a both-her-names kind of person. People in the class knew of her love of the Cairngorms and of Deeside in particular. They knew she had written novels, but my mother certainly hadn’t read them, nor had most of the other students. The novels weren’t the point. The point of Nan Shepherd was herself. My mother described what a thrill it was to be carried along by her flow, to circle in the eddies of her experience and her asides. She liked to arrange the students in a horseshoe, a corrie of attention, placing herself in its opening and channelling an ice torrent of thought that refreshed or chastened depending on the readiness of the listener. Her lectern was usually adorned with flowers and she would lean on it like the living subject of a Rossetti painting, removing her cardigan with a flourish at the start of the class.
My own recollection of Nan Shepherd is little more than a fragment. I remember visiting her house, Dunvegan, a large granite semi with a garden that sloped down to the old railway line. There was an austere grandeur to the house, as there was about its elderly owner. What stays with me is the boredom: the dreadful stillness of adult conversation in the conservatory, my mother’s irritation with my restlessness. It wasn’t much of an encounter. We were at opposite ends of life, Nan Shepherd and I. ‘She asked to see you,’ my mother told me. ‘She said that I should “bring the child.”’ But my presence tested the patience of host and guest alike, until I could force our escape back up the brae to the new houses Shepherd disliked. ‘The houses stretch up and up the hill as far as my childhood’s playground, the Quarry Wood,’ she complained to her friend Edith Robertson. ‘But at least they can’t build up my view in front ... so I still rejoice in space and distance and the sky.’
The American Historical Society is considering a resolution condemning Israel for “scholasticide” in Gaza. The media is presenting the resolution as “a done deal,” James Hankins writes in Compact. “It is by no means certain,” he continues, “that the full membership of the AHA will vote in favor of the resolution, should it be brought to a vote”:
The AHA previously, in 2015 and 2016, rejected other attempts by the BDS movement to get it to endorse its campaigns, and by 2-to-1 margins. Now, a decade later, the membership may be more inclined to favor a resolution backed by BDS, given the more radical political complexion of the profession’s younger members. Moreover, the scholasticide resolution on its face is less controversial than previous resolutions. It is worded in such a way as to elicit sympathy and outrage from persons who have dedicated their lives to university teaching. Nevertheless, it is vital that the membership not yield to emotion and look more carefully at what it is being asked to endorse. There is a real danger that the AHA will damage its prestige and effectiveness as a professional organization if either its elected council or, worse, the membership at large, should it vote in favor of the resolution.
The New York Times’s opinion section is parting ways with Pamela Paul: “Her impending departure is part of a handful of job cuts being made at the section. Last month, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who had been a part of Opinion since 2000, announced to much fanfare that he was leaving. Paul was made an Opinion columnist in 2022 after nearly a decade running the Book Review.”
Diane Scharper reviews a new book on Edna Ferber: “Considered a masterpiece of American film, Giant was directed by George Stevens, from a screenplay adapted from the 1952 bestselling novel of the same name, written by Edna Ferber. Yet Ferber’s name did not appear in the film’s credits. Nor did her name show up above the film’s title. In 1957, as Ingrid Bergman in Paris and Jerry Lewis in Hollywood announced the Academy Awards for the film, Ferber watched the ceremony on a small Magnavox television in a back room in her apartment . . . Ferber is mostly forgotten today, while many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are still admired. Yet she wrote 12 novels including Cimarron, Show Boat, and Giant, as well as the Pulitzer Prize winner So Big. Ferber also composed eight plays, 11 collections of stories, and two memoirs.”
Maggie Phillips talks to Rob Long about his return to Episcopalianism:
It’s not much of a punchline—because this isn’t a joke. The latest act for former Cheers writer and TV producer Rob Long is a stint at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Long’s CV is prolific and varied. In addition to his TV work, National Review readers know him from his satirical column “The Long View,” which pokes fun at current events and politics. Together with Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson (of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” fame), he also founded Ricochet, a conservative website and podcast network.
A decade ago, Long rediscovered the Episcopalianism of his childhood and eventually became a regular at St. James Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But he noticed a gap emerging between his writing and his new religious faith. “As a young comedy writer, people would just say, ‘hey, we’d love a show about, you know, a blended family in an urban setting,’” he told me in a phone interview conducted just before his biblical Greek exam. “And I’d sit there and kind of create one. But as you get older, it’s harder to do. It’s harder to make stuff up. It has to be true to you. And what was true to me was something that wasn’t happening on the page at all.”
Caitlin Flanagan writes about the time Seamus Heaney wrote a poem for her baptism—a baptism she resisted until Heaney read the poem:
Ellen and I were called down to the living room of a rented house in Dublin, where we were spending one of our father’s endless sabbatical years (I went to first, fifth, and tenth grade in Ireland), and tersely informed that we were going to be baptized.
We shrieked in horror. If our parents had told us they were getting divorced, we would have taken the news with equanimity . . . Ellen spoke for us both: “I’m not doing it!” I echoed her: “No way!”
Our parents were up to something, and clearly our mother, Jean, was the instigator. Tom would much later confess that the whole thing was a hypocritical plan that my mother had hatched to get us into Catholic schools (which were like private schools, but cheap) when we returned to Berkeley.
Jean was unmoved by our yelps of disgust and fear. We were to be whipped through the tenets of the faith via weekly lessons delivered at a convent school by two nuns (one for Ellen, and one for me), and the event would occur early one evening in December, in time for a drinks party afterward. The guests would be 25 of my parents’ friends. Would we like to invite any of our own friends? We would rather be buried alive . . . You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible. We lay in our beds at night and fumed . . . But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be, and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.
When Seamus stood up and read the poem, “Baptism: for Ellen and Kate Flanagan,” I accepted everything—all of it, all at once: poetry, God, and myself.
Patrick Kurp writes about Andrew Rickard’s small, Montreal-based Obolus Press, which “translates and publishes works of literature by dead French and German writers that have never appeared in English”: “Rickard translates writers who died on or before December 31, 1971. That places their work in the public domain in Canada and eliminates the need to buy rights or pay royalties, he explains: ‘Unlike just about every other Canadian literary publisher, I’m not on the government tit. I have never applied for, nor received, arts-council money. I will make it on my own or perish in the attempt.’ If a book has already been translated into English, even if the translation is dated and Rickard thinks he could do a better job, he won’t select it. ‘Life’s too short,’ he says, ‘and there are too many other writers to be rescued from the fast-running waters of Lethe.’ His slogan is ‘Books You’ve Never Read.’ The seven Rickard has thus far published are drawn from history, biography, and artists’ monographs.”
Forthcoming: Benjamin Heber Johnson, Texas: An American History (Yale, February 25): “When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, shop for groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to Texas. Tracing the profound and surprising story of the Lone Star State, Benjamin Heber Johnson shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.”
How did I not know about the poetry of David Bottoms? Amazing.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34745/in-a-u-haul-north-of-damascus