Books

Hope is seen as “an unqualified good” today, Adam Potkay writes in his excellent history of the idea. We hope that things will get better in the world — that peace will come to Ukraine, that religious violence will stop in Burkina Faso, that fat-cat sexual predators in Hollywood will be brought to justice. For members of the world’s three monotheistic religions, it is a virtue to hope in life after death. This hasn’t always been the case. For ancient Greeks and Romans, Potkay observes, hope was mostly a vice.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the last pages of Naked Lunch at dawn looking for an angry fix of good literature, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection between plot and prose, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up reading Kaddish, who bared their brains to the delights of On the Road in the pursuit of just a fraction of the “angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.” Everyone knows the Beats: from Jack Kerouac to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, their influence has been undeniable, if not always delightful. And on March 12, their lodestar, Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old.

The life of poète maudit and gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud is a puzzle to nearly everyone who knows it. A precocious student who won a regional concours académique for a poem in Latin, Rimbaud left school at fifteen, shortly after the start of the Franco-German War. After two attempts to escape home for Paris, he finally moved in with the poet Paul Verlaine in the fall of 1871, where he succeeded in insulting all the literary lights of Paris in three months. The two men began an affair, which ruined what was left of Verlaine’s marriage to Mathilde Mauté (whom Verlaine regularly beat). They made two debauched trips to London and eventually fell out in Belgium, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist.

Usually, it’s poets who chance their arm with a novel. Rare is the established novelist who switches to verse. This could be because, while poetry is technically daunting with its rhyme and meter, the novel is apparently the easiest of all forms, without even the conventions and directions of the most basic screenplay. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Love Peacock was the most successful poet to turn to fiction, but in our own times poet-novelists rank among the most talented: Sylvia Plath, Ben Lerner, Vikram Seth, Craig Raine, Grace Nichols. Now, after half a century of writing superb novels, the English author Paul Bailey, well into his eighties, is publishing his second book of poems.

The politics of the moment are pompous, bilious, unforgiving, over-stuffed, hypocritical beyond the normal standards for political hypocrisy: in other words, designed — as if by divine ordinance — for the gifts of P.J. O’Rourke. I must add, I’m afraid, the late P.J. Rourke. He died the day after Valentine’s Day due to complications from cancer, at age seventy-four. RIP. The world hadn’t heard a great deal about him in a while, likely because he was ailing. This was rotten timing. The current Washington DC sideshow reflects and confirms what Patrick Jake O’Rourke had been saying about politics for some long while. Such as: “I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name.

At CNN, Leah Asmelash laments the demise of many “long-standing” literary magazines. “The Believer,” she writes, which was started in 2003, “was once at the top of the literary magazine game. A leading journal of art and culture, the Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers.” But the University of Nevada, which has housed the magazine since 2017, announced that it was shutting it down: “In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school's College of Liberal Arts called print publications like the Believer ‘a financially challenging endeavor.’” Oh, boy. Leslie Jamison, an icon? The Believer, a publication that “launched careers”?

Some fiction, regardless of how intimately tethered to a time and place, is timeless. And the work of Agatha Christie certainly seems that way. Christie's novel Death on the Nile is now receiving renewed cinematic treatment under the expert hand of Kenneth Branagh, with the film scheduled for release on February 11. This follows the success of Branagh’s 2017 adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, which grossed $351 million against a production budget of $55 million. “Rest assured," says Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s novel Five Little Pigs. "I am the best!” The same might be said of Christie herself, the world’s all-time bestselling fiction author.

One of the things I did during my nine-month hiatus from Prufrock, the email newsletter I send three times a week (if you aren’t a subscriber, why not give it a try?) was to cycle the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. I started in Cherokee, North Carolina, rode to the start of Skyline Drive, Virginia, and back. It took two weeks — one at the beginning of the summer and one at the end — and I clocked over 900 miles and 100,000 feet of climbing. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I loved it and will never do it again. Cycling is an ideal way to experience a landscape. You feel the ups and the downs. Walking has a pleasure of its own, but with cycling you can experience an entire region — in all its subtle variety — in a single day.

Readers of The Spectator World probably think they are quite au fait with the culture wars. J.K. Rowling, Joe Rogan, even Dr. Seuss — writers and celebrities who have been canceled quickly roll off the tongue. But what if “cancellation” had more dramatic implications than just a Twitter account bursting with notifications? In 1975, the unpublished poet Annegret Gollin encountered a rather different kind of culture war: she was arrested at a music festival and told that she could either spend two years in a prison cell or become an informant for the Stasi. Gollin chose to become an informant, but was a brilliantly ineffective one — she told over a hundred of her friends that she was supposed to be spying on them — and she ended up in prison seven years later.

We live in an explainer age. Pundits, bloggers, TV hosts, professors, journalists, and scientists love to explain why whatever is happening is happening. Visit the New York Times, for example, and you’ll find articles explaining who Boris Johnson really is, why kids are behind in school (no great mystery there) and how to help them, and why the Omicron variant of COVID-19 really isn’t milder. The Atlantic, which loves to explain things, too, also has an article on why “Calling Omicron ‘Mild’ Is Wishful Thinking.” Wondering “Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard”? The Atlantic has an answer for you. Curious about “The Real Reason Americans Aren’t Isolating”?

Did you read Proust in lockdown? Lockdown, it seemed, offered the eons of vacancy apparently required to finally get around to À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, aka “The Big One”: a book to be attempted only by the pretentious one percent in the discharge of their services to intellectual snobbery. I did. I read it twice. I read it because it’s always a pleasure and a novelty, and because I want to get it made as a long-form television series. Proust is perfect for TV: better than anything else, the format can show the passage of time. This is the sine qua non of any Proust reckoning, and it has defeated all attempts so far to make the book into a feature film. We are doing well.