Saturday Links
The difficult Carson McCullers, the poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien, the other Byron, a history of amulets in medieval England, and more.
Good morning! In this month’s fiction chronicle, John Wilson writes about the varied appearances of fact in fiction: “This theme—the contrast between murder and crime more generally and indeed reality at large as presented in fiction and the way things actually are—runs explicitly through the entire book. And yet, the reader can hardly help but reflect, A Coffin for Dimitrios is itself a work of Crime Fiction.”
Last week, Guernica published an essay that showed a little sympathy for Israel following Hamas’s murder and abduction of civilians. Writers and editors were incensed. Some quit. The magazine pulled the essay and apologized. Meghan Daum has the best take so far at her Substack:
But as maddening as the whole episode has been, the words that best describe these sorts of machinations are, well: standard operating procedure.
Literature, and the arts more broadly, is supposed to serve as a vehicle for the aesthetic manifestation of ideas. Now, however, it is more often than not a delivery mechanism for simplistic notions about social justice. I’m tempted to call it a form of idea laundering, given the way it takes muddily reasoned talking points and passes them off as legitimate artistic expression.
But the truth is, no one is being fooled. Everyone knows the deal. With some exceptions (and there are exceptions—for instance, Chen’s essay), the relationship between author and reader has devolved into an unholy and codependent alliance between a terminal narcissist and a boundaryless empath. The narcissist controls the narrative, no matter how wrongheaded or self-indulgent, and the empath laps it up unquestioningly. Any author who diverts from that role by presenting something too complex to be swallowed in one gulp risks punishment for wrongthink.
Sasha Abramsky isn’t impressed either. She writes in The Nation: “If this is what passes for the left today, God help us. Guernica’s cringeworthy backpedaling is redolent of the self-denunciations of Stalin’s purge victims or the coerced linguistic self-flagellations of academics during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. There’s no effort at genuine debate, no room for competing opinions, no space for historical nuance or complexity; there’s simply a demand that the party line be followed and that those who don’t be immediately censored.”
M. D. Aeschliman revisits Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed: “Like his far better-known books A Clockwork Orange and 1985, it is a dystopian satire, written in the light and shadow of predecessors such as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. But Burgess’s satire is richer and deeper than that of 1984.”
A history of amulets in medieval England: “To make an amulet, it wasn’t enough to jot down a few prayers on a spare piece of parchment. For text to be efficacious, it had to be written in the right manner, on the right substance, and used in the right way. Some amulet charms were simple, with incantations or prayers to be uttered. Others recommended cryptic ceremonies: one charm for swellings instructed the healer to take a stick of hazel, cut the patient’s name into it and fill each of the incised letters with blood, throw it over their shoulder (or between their thighs) into running water, stand over the patient, and then strike through the inscription. ‘And do all that silently.’”
Bill Coberly reviews Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz for The Bulwark and explains why noir and alternative history go hand-in-hand:
[L]ike any good noir, Cahokia Jazz has a memorable detective moving the case along. Barrow is exemplary. When we meet him, he is a man who has been content to provide the brawn to complement the brains of his partner, Phineas Drummond. That doesn’t mean he’s a slow-fingered meathead, though: Barrow is also an accomplished jazz pianist. (“Muscle work was a stupid thing for a pianist to get involved in. But to stop it he’d have to decide that he actually was a pianist, not just muscle who played a little sometimes.”)
Though Barrow is part Native American and part African American, he grew up in an orphanage far from Cahokia, which leaves him unfamiliar with the great city’s culture: He doesn’t speak the language and is frequently (perhaps too frequently) confused by Cahokia’s idiosyncrasies. As circumstances and the personal attention of Cahokia’s lapsed royalty pull him into the spotlight for an unexpected solo performance, Barrow comes into his own as a detective, and the metropolis begins to give up its secrets to him.
More:
Cahokia Jazz belongs to what has become a well-established subgenre of alt-history noir mysteries. The most well-known is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), whose detectives try to solve a murder in an imagined city founded in Alaska by Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler. But the book I thought of the most while reading Cahokia Jazz was The City & the City (2009), a novel by China Miéville whose plot unfolds in two overlapping cities that occupy the same physical location even though they are entirely separate political entities . . . Noir and police procedurals are natural means for exploratory projects: In addition to noir’s stock of sumptuous, atmosphere-generating tropes, a typical noir premise authorizes the main character to go everywhere a reader would want to see.
Dan Garisto reports on the superconductor scandal that has roiled researchers over the past four years:
In 2020, Ranga Dias was an up-and-coming star of the physics world. A researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, Dias achieved widespread recognition for his claim to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity without resistance at ambient temperatures. Dias published that finding in a landmark Nature paper.
Nearly two years later, that paper was retracted. But not long after, Dias announced an even bigger result, also published in Nature: another room-temperature superconductor. Unlike the previous material, the latest one supposedly worked at relatively modest pressures, raising the enticing possibility of applications such as superconducting magnets for medical imaging and powerful computer chips . . . Nature has since retracted his second paper and many other research groups have tried and failed to replicate Dias’s superconductivity results.
William Logan on Anthony Hecht: “The arch style of his later poems, beginning with Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), often overwhelms their subjects or makes them merely the occasion for Hecht’s expert flaunting of language and style. He could scarcely contemplate a poem, it seems, without measuring the doors and windows for the advent of a Greek god. He was erudite past the normal boundaries of erudition. There’s a niggling suspicion, reading his work, that he was always trying to prove himself to himself.” Discuss!
Poem: Richard Tillinghast, “The Ends of the Earth”
Since 1998, commissioned statues have sat temporarily on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square. In 2026 and 2028, “Tschabalala Self's bronze and blue homage to a metropolitan woman of colour and Andra Ursuța's resin sculpture of a horse and rider covered in a shroud” will be displayed. Read more here.
I review Andrew Stauffer’s excellent Byron: A Life in Ten Letters in the latest issue of The Washington Examiner. It’s well known that Byron was a bon vivant and womanizer. But he had a serious side, too, as Stauffer shows:
He may have been a libertine, but he was a principled one, telling Lady Blessington that “There are but two sentiments to which I am constant – a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant.” Unlike Shelley, who talked about Republicanism but never got involved with locals and national movements in Italy, “associating primarily,” Stauffer writes, “with a small circle of English expatriates,” Byron threw himself into Italian life, learning the language and becoming a member of the Carbonari, a secret society committed to establishing a free Italy.
That personal involvement continued in Greece, where he spent his days planning with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, president of the revolutionary First National Assembly at Epidaurus, and, Stauffer writes, “dealing with local disputes, communicating with both Turkish and Greek authorities to arrange prisoner exchanges, spending money for the relief of families, paying soldiers, and corresponding with the London Greek Committee.”
David Mason also writes about Byron in The Hudson Review. He doesn’t mention Stauffer’s book (he is reviewing four others), but he makes a similar point: “We often forget how practical he could be as a man of action, how much real good he did for the Greek cause before he died of fever at Missolonghi.”
A collected poems of J. R. R. Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins in September. It will be the first time “all the author’s poems will appear in one volume.”
Scott Bradfield reviews Mary Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers: “By all accounts, McCullers was a difficult person to handle — even for those who loved her. Gore Vidal, a long-time friend and admirer of her work, once said: ‘Fifteen minutes in the same room listening to one of her self-loving arias and I was gone.’ Late in life, she forced friends and nurses to accompany her through a nightly bedtime ritual that dragged on so long that participants couldn’t bring themselves to divulge the details even years after her death. All they did reveal was that it began in the early evening with one incredibly huge serving of alcohol (her doctor restricted her to a glass per night but didn’t specify the size) and concluded much later with a beer before lights out.”
A total solar eclipse will take place over North America on April 8th. Here is everything you need to know.
Forthcoming: James Matthew Wilson, T. S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy (Wiseblood, March 25): “From the beginning of his career as a poet and critic, T.S. Eliot was associated with his Victorian predecessor, Matthew Arnold. In this essay, an introduction to the life and work of Eliot, James Matthew Wilson argues that Eliot sought to correct and deepen Arnold throughout his career. Whereas Arnold celebrated poetry as both a substitute for religion and a way of maintaining moral and cultural standards in an increasingly secular and anarchic age, Eliot recognized that nothing could be a substitute for anything else. Religion was not to be contained within culture as one object among others. Rather, culture was itself an expression of the sacred realm, which transcends it. In his response to Arnold, Eliot insists that far from preparing us for a modern age where all will be reduced to the “natural,” it is the poet's task to recover the “supernatural” and to give critical and poetic expression to the sacred in our day. Although he could not have known it, from the beginning Eliot's career led him down a path that would culminate in the greatest religious poem of the twentieth century, Four Quartets.”
I like "boundaryless empath," a perfectly hideous term for a wholly toxic character type of our peculiar age.