Books

Philip Larkin — whose centenary was this week — was a misogynist. A “casual, habitual racist and an easy misogynist,” according to the literary critic Lisa Jardine. Alan Bennet, Britain’s favorite playwright and supposedly a friend of Larkin’s, even described the poet as looking “like a rapist.” Not content with one insult, he even compared him to the necrophiliac serial killer John Christie. Tough review, that one. The sheer number of reviews, essays, and articles which decry Larkin’s character and attitudes — “a porn-addled, two-timing, racist misogynist” reads the headline for one — seem to suggest this is a settled judgment. And, indeed, the evidence is all but damning.

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim. It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

At the beginning of 2021, author Blake Bailey might have been forgiven for thinking that his literary career was not merely assured but stellar. He had gathered significant accolades for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He had specialized in writing about heavy-drinking Great American Novelists, including the perennially underrated Richard Yates, John Cheever and The Lost Weekend’s Charles Jackson. His most recent subject was the elusive Philip Roth, a man whose literary brilliance was matched by his checkered reputation both on and off the page. Eighteen months later, matters have changed beyond recognition.

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

I put off writing this article for ages. Initially, I decided I would write it from bed, but the temptation of simply giving up and falling asleep again was too great. A change of tactic proved no less helpful: out of bed, it took every ounce of effort I had to avoid getting straight back in again. Not a jot was left over for the exertion of writing and typing. This isn’t the status quo for my productivity, I promise; it is more a reflection of the subject matter. It is absolutely impossible to write about indolence while running around busily ticking off a to-do list. You have to relax into it. Call it method article-writing, if you will. Indolence gets something of a bad rap these days.

Summer has arrived in full force — at least here in southeastern Virginia, where the temperature has been creeping up towards 100 degrees — and so, too, have those lists of the best beach books, hottest summer reads, high temp tomes, etc. But fall is just around the corner, so why not take a peek at what’s in store? Here are a few forthcoming books that piqued my interest for one reason or another. This isn’t a list of the fall’s “biggest” books. Some of these might not be covered at all in the national press. But if you want a list like that, just wait. You’ll have 20 to choose from before long. Here is mine. Robert Crawford’s Eliot after The Waste Land (August 23, FSG), the second volume of his biography of T.S.

Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person — double the figure from just seven years earlier — and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.

The writer Maxim Gorky edited the Menshevik newspaper New Life during its short run from May 1, 1917 to July 16, 1918, before Vladimir Lenin gave the personal order to shut it down. Gorky was a one-time friend of Lenin’s and a committed socialist (when Lenin gave the order to shut down New Life, he is reported to have said, “Gorky is one of us”), but he was also a frequent critic of the Bolshevists. In his column for the paper, which ran under the heading “Untimely” — because it focused on culture and morality rather than on practical matters of the revolution — he complained frequently about the politicking of party leaders and the stupidity of the masses.

Recently, several prominent writers have left jobs at national newspapers and magazines to go it alone on Substack or other email subscription services. In 2020, Matt Yglesias left Vox and Glenn Greenwald left the Intercept — both for Substack. That same year, Andrew Sullivan brought the Dish out of retirement and to Substack. Bari Weiss and Charlie Warzel left the New York Times and started a Substack in 2021. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet, started a newsletter in 2021. Others who have written for a variety of publications — Matt Taibbi, Glenn Lourey, Jesse Singal, Erick Erickson, Freddie DeBoer, Roxanne Gay — have all made Substack their home. And the list goes on.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Nine words into her 1925 classic, Virginia Woolf has taken us to another world. London — Westminster to be precise — in mid-June 1913, a world in which it is unusual for a woman to buy the flowers for her own party. Clarissa Dalloway only steps out into the early morning air (“fresh as if issued to children on a beach”) because her maid, Lucy, “had her work cut out for her.” The Wednesday in the “middle of June” on which the action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place is debated. The year is 1923, which would make the 13th of June the most likely candidate. But as academics are wont to do, there has been some disagreement.

I am convinced that the sweet-smelling tycoons that run candle-making companies must have read too much Proust when they were younger. With scents like “Inspire,” “Bohemia,” and “Sunny Daydream,” they cannot be aiming for something as cheap and transitory as mere tawdry olfactory pleasure. They must have become all but obsessed by À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and be aiming for something akin to his narrator’s nostalgic odyssey upon tasting a madeleine: “and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Rather pretentious, oui — but what other excuse can there be for a candle that proclaims it can smell like a cool library at midnight, or the depths of some dreamy reverie?

By her own account, Eudora Welty had an idyllic childhood. Born in 1909 on Congress Street, two blocks from the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty spent her early years playing with friends from school, reading voraciously and riding her bicycle to the local store to pick up some flour or eggs for her mother and, of course, a treat for herself. Her father, who was devoted to his wife and children, advanced from a cashier to vice president at Lamar Life Insurance before his daughter had finished high school. He had, as Welty put it, a love for “all instruments that would instruct and fascinate,” including a toy train set, a telescope and a folding Kodak, with which he would teach the young Eudora the pleasures of photography.