Saturday Links

Peter Brown on reading Augustine, Phil Christman on masculinity, the campaign against J. K. Rowling, a life of August Wilson, and more.

Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford, England

Good morning. Why not start your day off by reading Peter Brown on how he wrote his Augustine biography in the early 1960s: “At that time, I barely realized that I was enjoying an incomparable privilege. I did not have to look for a publisher. The gentleman’s agreement with Charles Monteith set my mind at rest. I may have been wrong to be so confident: in reality, Faber’s had their own system of screening manuscripts that was as discreet and prompt, and as exacting, as that of any university press. In the meantime, however, my constant contact with Monteith, through his weekend visits to All Souls, spared me much anxiety. I felt confident that I could write what I wished as long as it passed muster at the end of the day. So how did I set about it? First and foremost, these were years of deep reading. I would sit in a large armchair with a board across the arms and read my way through the folio volumes of the works of Augustine published by the Benedictine scholars of Saint Maur between 1679 and 1700.”

What is masculinity? Hard to say, but Phil Christman takes a stab at defining it in The Hedgehog Review: “When I try to nail down what masculinity is—what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence—I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect. By ‘protect’ I don’t mean the actual useful things a man (or anyone else) may do for other people—holding down a hated but necessary job, cleaning the toilet, doing the taxes if he happens to be good at it, even jumping in front of a bullet if he is quick enough off the mark. All functioning adults are ‘protective’ of others in this sense, to the best of their ability. Rather, I mean precisely the activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough: that one must train and prepare for eventualities one has no reason to anticipate, must keep one’s dwelling and grooming spartan in case of emergencies, must undertake defensive projects that have no connection to the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves. We’ve all known families in which the men putter away at Rube Goldberg schemes for ‘securing’ the family’s financial or physical safety while the women actually carry everyone through every day, anticipating every emergency, meeting every contingency. We’ve all known families in which such a man so exhausts himself in this way that he constantly increases the burden he places on those same beleaguered women, whom he then blames, perhaps, for not being ‘supportive.’”

Charles McNulty reviews Patti Hartigan’s “invaluable and highly absorbing” biography of August Wilson: “Wilson’s artistic story, throbbing with the ancestral memory Wilson felt in his blood, is profoundly inspiring in Hartigan’s magnificent rendering. This unauthorized biography, forced to paraphrase many of Wilson’s letters, early plays and poetry, may not offer the kind of detailed critical readings found in other monumental biographies — James Knowlson on Samuel Beckett, Michael Meyer on Henrik Ibsen, Michael Holroyd on George Bernard Shaw. But the work is blessedly free of the endless plot summaries that weigh down Hermione Lee’s biography of Tom Stoppard. A former theater critic for the Boston Globe, Hartigan brings a sharp critical perspective to bear that keeps August Wilson: A Life from crossing over into hagiography. She loves her subject but remains clear-eyed about Wilson’s limitations, including the stereotypical leanings of his female characters and the muddled quality of some of his later plays.”

The campaign against J. K. Rowling: “Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world-famous author’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. Last week, the museum announced that while it will continue to display memorabilia from the Harry Potter books and films, it wants no association with their supposedly problematic creator.”

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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Leaving the Island”

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An “unparalleled treasure trove” of 16th-century Renaissance texts goes up for auction: “Bibliophile T. Kimball Brooker amassed more than 1,300 titles over the course of six decades. The collection, one of the most significant rare libraries to ever reach auction, features French and Italian volumes in their original bindings . . . Up for auction are approximately 1,000 editions from Aldine Press, the pioneering Venetian publisher that was the first to produce small format books similar to today’s paperbacks and to print a book in italics. Published between the 1490s and the 1590s, Brooker’s Aldine collection represents the largest to come to market in a century and is estimated to sell for over $10m (£7.8m).”

Oliver Bateman on the writing market today: “When you're a minor player in the marketplace of ideas, understanding your audience and purpose — or lack thereof — is more important than ever.”

Revisiting Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London: “It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love . . . As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building ‘a new Britain’ forged in the ‘white heat’ of a ‘scientific revolution.’ And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output.”

The New Yorker hires Jackson Arn as its new art critic, following the death last year of Peter Schjeldahl.

Lee Oser reviews Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It?: “I spent much of my reading-energy at war with this opinionated little book, and I am sorry to report that in the end, it won. Joseph Epstein, its distinguished author, has made a name for himself with his crackerjack prose, conservative common sense, and take-no-prisoners reviewing style. Whether we sympathize with his tastes or not, he has the power to communicate them. And yet he often rubs me the wrong way. His seething animus against Philip Roth seems excessively personal. Where the topic of sex is concerned, he fusses like Lady Bracknell, even if at times he is hilariously on the mark: ‘Don’t ask what Count Aleksey Vronsky would have requested of Anna if Philip Roth had written Anna Karenina.’ . . . However, if after reading this book I am not exactly an Epstein fan, I have gained a deeper appreciation of his considerable virtues.”

In case you missed it, John Wilson also reviewed it in a special Thursday newsletter: “Epstein is even more of an old codger than I am (he’s 86 to my 75), and a very distinguished codger indeed—a writer who, long before he reached eminent old age, perfected a persona designed to enrage what we now think of as ‘woke’ sensibilities. I have been reading him with profit for decades while quite often disagreeing with him. So it is with this new book.”

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Forthcoming: Daniel Tobin, The Mansions (Four Way Books, September 15): “From award-winning poet Daniel Tobin comes The Mansions, an epic trilogy of book-length poems which examines exemplary 20th-Century figures Georges Lemaître, Simone Weil, and Teilhard de Chardin, all at the crossroads of science, history, and religion.”