Sheer Virtuosity in the Penny Press!

Granted, the Penny Press might let me down from time to time - but the main reason I love it is on full display at the newsstand this week. Clever people writing prose on deadline can be (present company of course excepted) moved to write the damndest things, and if you root through a huge swath of periodicals every week the way I do, you're therefore of a certainty going to encounter your fair share of crapola. At which point, if you're an old fan of the Penny Press as I am, you'll do what comes naturally: you'll fire off a peppery letter to the editor, tear out and archive the pieces that move you favorably or otherwise (always only a small fraction of the whole - most deadline writers being alarmingly forgettable), and move on. After all - infamously - magazines like The New Yorker tend to just keep coming, so if you pause for even a moment, you'll be pulled to the dirt like an impala in the middle of a lion pride.

So you keep reading, hoping for the best. And the last two decades of the 20th century have spilled into the first two decades of the 21st an amazing inheritance: we live in an age of great literary journalists, people who routinely do fantastic work even though they're working on deadline for money.

Take last week's New Yorker - it featured a fantastic, sumptuously detailed review by Daniel Mendelsohn of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of Homer's Iliad, complete with shrewd insights into both the poem's history and the art of translation in general. Or take The New York Review of Books, in which Gary Wills rounds off a fascinating little chunk of his smart new book Verdi's Shakespeare and makes a fine short essay out of it - an essay that's frustratingly short on Verdi but delightfully long on Shakespeare:

There are many signs of Shakespeare's crafting roles for particular boys. In three plays of the late 1590s, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, he had one boy who was short and dark and another who was tall and fair. The contrast was so striking that Shakespeare made his lines play on it. He began with particular boys' talents, and then wrote his scenes around them. He must have had a boy from Wales when he wrote I Henry IV, in which a woman speaks and sings in Welsh. One of the experienced boys, in As You Like It, was good enough for Shakespeare to create his second-longest woman's role for him - Rosalind (686 lines).

True, even the NYRB has its idiosyncracies (NO idea how long they're going to let Robert Darnton keep writing about his cockeyed and retrograde dream of a National Digital Library, for instance), but oh! they fade into the background when put alongside something as flat-out wonderful as Helen Vendler's Olympian review of the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. Her review is titled "Are These the Poets to Remember?" - and her answer is a resounding 'no.' I myself dipped into the Penguin anthology with mixed feelings. Dove is a bad poet - a creation entirely of gender and demographics rather than even a shred of actual literary talent - but literature is full of great anthologies assembled by bad poets, so it's no confirmed impediment. But I was immediately struck by huge problems in the works selected, and Vendler puts it better than I could:

Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Antologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as "elitism," and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn't be abl to take on the long-term commitment of a novel find a long-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff. Which of Dove's 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

The issue had a larger-than-average amount of great stuff (the letter exchange in the back between Peter Singer and Herbert Terrace is alone almost worth the price of the thing - and will certainly lead to a second round), and reading it all and rejoicing in it all very handily compensates for tepid weeks and dunderheaded deadline stuff - which we all on occasion write, alas.

Best Nonfiction, 2010!

Of course you all know where I stand: I have a very large, very roomy space in my heart reserved for nonfiction, so I've left Best Nonfiction of 2010 for last. This, too, was a crowded field - I read 97 works of military history alone this year, for instance. Books on every time period came to me, books on a host of historical figures major and very minor, books on trends, ideas, technology, science, nature, computers, business, gardening, and a dozen other things. And in all cases my criteria were unchanging - and stricter here than anywhere.

Nowhere is the insufficiency of mere Wiki-writing more evident and more merciless than in the writing of fact-based nonfiction, and these writers all seemed to know that; they went well beyond the staked borders of their topics and delivered of themselves as well, or delivered their subjects with much-needed clarity. I recommend all the wonderful books here in the 'Best of' section of our year-end roundup, but I recommend these particular books with just a sliver more enthusiasm than the rest.

10. Denys Wortman's New York - The great artists who did their work quickly, under deadline, to supply the exploding periodical market of the early 20th century have never been given their due. Retrospectives on big advertising names like J. C. Leyendecker have made moves in the right direction, but of the men working in quick pencil-strokes to capture the zeitgeist, the book-buying public has seen comparatively little. This magnificent volume honoring the enormously talented Denys Wortman would thus be a cause for joy even if Wortman's work weren't so great. Luckily, it is - in scene after scene, he perfectly captures a now entirely vanished world of stoops and water-towers and fire escapes and an endless array of people, and he limns it all with a gentle, knowing humor. The reproduction quality here allows every minute decision of Wortman's to be scrutinized and enjoyed, and that's all the more amazing since he seems never to have made a bad one.

9. Dickinson by Helen Vendler - It's a match made on Olympus: one of America's greatest 19th century poets, a crafter of dreamily jagged verse badly in need of explication, gets a whole book's worth of explication from one of the world's greatest poetry critics. It's signature Vendler work: she pours over the poems line by line, word by word, lavishing as much care and attention as the poet did herself (perhaps more? I've long had the impression that she found significances in Keats that he himself didn't see) and yielding a multi-faceted reading richer and more rewarding than any Dickinson has ever had. If I had my way, Vendler would live forever and do a volume like this on every major poet in the world's canon.

8. Ratification by Pauline Maier - In a book-market sludged to the eyeballs with sticky Founding Fathers pap, how refreshing it is to read this long, satisfying book about the state-by-state ratification of the Constitution, written (the book, not the Constitution! Our author isn't quite that old!) by our greatest authority on the American Revolution. Bracing complexity is everywhere on display in this invigorating book, Meier's best, and when you're done reading it, you're struck by how marvellously unlikely it is that the process worked at all. Many books have dealt with this subject, but none nearly so well as this one.

7. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid Macullough - As far as opuses go, they don't get much more magnum than this (included on a technicality because I read it this year!). Macullough tackles the whole incredible breadth of his subject with the gusto of a twenty-something graduate on his first book-contract trip to the Widener, and the result is a work of massive scholarship that's nonetheless immediately approachable an even occasionally lighthearted (not an easy feat when dealing with a religion as soul-crushing and bloody as this one). I've had the stomach to read only four comprehensive histories of Christianity in my life, and this one is the only one of its caliber in English and may well be the best one ever written in any language. Certainly the wit, the perspective, and the erudition expended here are worlds better than their subject deserves.

6. The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegee - The modern reading world, caught in the revolution of the digital marketplace, is closer to the world Pettegee so spiritedly excavates than any previous era. Then, as now, established formats of books were under assault from a variety of new technologies and viewpoints, and then, as now, the universe of the written word seemed to be expanding in all directions faster than readers could adapt. Pettegee shows that they of course ultimately did adapt (he fills his pages with lively descriptions of all the geniuses, hucksters, and misfits who did the adapting); in addition to this book being first-rate history, it's also quite accidentally (or is it an accident?) encouraging.

5. Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff - How much more clearly can the paramount importance of execution be demonstrated than in Schiff's fantastic biography of Cleopatra, a subject who's received, by a conservative estimate, one million previous biographies? The facts of the last Egyptian queen's life are well-trod - and yet Schiff makes it all feel new and fresh, almost solely through the sparkle and vigor of her prose. There's a thought-provoking re-evaluation on virtually every page of this book, and the whole of it is about as entertaining as ancient history gets.

4. Americans in Paris by Charles Glass - This book matches a great subject - the thousands of Americans who for one reason or another were trapped in Nazi-occupied Paris for the duration of the Second World War - with a really talented writer of nonfiction, and the result is an absorbing examination of what incredible daily pressure does to people, how it forces them to be sometimes completely different from their usual selves, or sometimes heavily concentrated versions of themselves. Again, many previous books have covered this subject - but none so thoroughly, or with such a good ear for yarns.

3. American Caesars by Nigel Hamilton - The simplest temptation with this book would have been to treat it only as a high-spirited hoot: a modern version of Suetionius' "Twelve Caesars," substituting postwar American presidents for Roman emperors but keeping most of Suetonius' angles and obsessions. And that level of entertainment is here in abundance (this is the most enjoyable book on American presidents you're ever likely to read), but Hamilton delivers more than that, a surprisingly more passionate, heartfelt book, very much including his mandarin assessment of George W. Bush.

2. Lost Dogs by Jim Gorant - Really, this is probably the only worthy book anybody could write about the whole story of unrepentant coward and asshole Michael Vick's dog-torturing ring - it's the story of the dogs who survived and thrived with loving families, and it's the story of those families, heroically patient and giving, who opened their homes and hearts in an effort to heal these dogs Vick had ordered tortured and fought. Reading this book isn't quite as satisfying as would be reading a morning news report of Vick's sudden and violent death, but it's the next best thing.

1. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee - In the celebrated tradition of Zinzner's Rats, Lice, and History, but at once grander in scope and more empathetic in tone, Mukherjee's 'biography' of cancer utilizes dozens of patient profiles and interviews to shape a full-scale portrait of this most personal and devastating of all families of illness. The author's dogged research and fieldwork is matched by the earnest grace of his prose. The combination creates a book of remarkable power and pathos, the single best work of nonfiction I read in 2010.

Literary hacks in the Penny Press!

Can we pause from profundity long enough to cheer a little cheer for the best hacks in the world of hackery, the literary journalists?

They don't have a beat, these particular hacks; they aren't obsessed with cutting-edge goth-fusion, or Buffy, or the United States torturing people. They aren't advocating safer parenting, or pond-lining techniques, or same-sex marriage. They don't keep up with the Palins.

Instead, they roam over the whole of the pop culture/literary landscape in search of ... well, I'm not sure what. I'm not sure they're sure what, from day to day. A steady paycheck, yes, but once you've got some momentum going, that can be obtained by writing medical safety compliance pamphlets, or vinyl siding repair manuals, or fifth grade science histories - and yet, the hacks I'm talking about here, the literary journalists, don't write about these things (or maybe they do, but it's done quietly, late at night, with much wine and much shame, solely in order to pay persistent creditors). Instead, they're constantly groping along the contours of the landscape, feelers swaying in the breeze, hunting for something they either know enough to write about or have always wanted to know enough to write about. They aren't specialists, but neither are they quite amateurs. They aren't philosophers, even though they're often pursuing a fairly consistent ideology. And they aren't experts, even though the best of them are rarely caught in open error.

That last point is explained by their peculiar work habits. Once they settle on something, some person or book or movie or school of thought or general topic, the literary journalist will do far more than simply take in the specific artistic item in question - no, in addition to that, they'll take armloads of related books out of the library, or track down endless supplementary items online. In one very concentrated amount of time, they'll allow that subject to utterly consume their lives - and at the end of that very concentrated amount of time, they'll know their subject.

It's a weird kind of knowledge, however: it's often acquired so fast - and often, truth be told, with such a lack of deeply personal reasons - that the literary journalist finds himself aesthetically bifurcated: one the one hand, he's now something of an expert on his new subject (he can tell you the relevant books, he can rattle off the extant controversies and has pet theories about all of them, etc.), but on the other hand, he's still an outsider to it all (he's only been steeped in it for a month at the most, after all).

The result can be incredibly valuable. It's as if you went to the world's leading authority on some subject (World War One? Boer society? Viking ship-building?) and gave him a month's vacation, all expenses paid, in some tropical getaway where the only thing he wouldn't do is give even one thought to his specialty - then you bring him back and ask him to write an article about something in his bailiwick. The articles that would result from such an unlikely procedure - freed for once of academic insularity and infighting, geared for once to a jocular, populist accessibility - would be wondrous invitations to all manner of subjects.

Specialists almost never write such articles, but literary journalists write them for a living - and we're all the richer for it. And the Penny Press is where you go to find such articles, and such writers.

Long-time readers of Stevereads will already be familiar with some of the people I mean. There was, once upon a time, the likes of Gore Vidal and Wilfrid Sheed and Mary McCarthy. And today, there's Christopher Hitchens and Gordon Wood and Jill Lepore and James Atlas and a baker's dozen more.

And in the Atlantic, there's Ben Schwarz, who in the latest issue reviews several books touching on what the average German citizen during the Second World War knew of the campaign of extermination being carried out by the Nazis toward the Jews of Europe. And perhaps even more so, there's the great Caitlin Flanagan, a literary journalist who possesses the quintessential gift of all first-rate hacks: she can take any subject and make her readers interested in it.

Even if the subject is Alec Baldwin.



In the latest Atlantic, she finds herself in the unlikely position of reviewing Baldwin's account of his divorce and single-fatherhood, A Promise to Ourselves. It's not anything she could have predicted:

'I never wanted to write this book,' he tells us at the outset, in a hangdog advisory that we shouldn't expect too much. It was also a book I never wanted to read, but here we are, Alec and I, making the best of a bad situation.

The focal point of that bad situation is of course the leaked cell phone rant Baldwin yelled at his daughter, castigating her for her rude behavior and calling her a "pig." The transcript of that call is, I suppose, appalling (although in all fairness, I myself have never met a teenage girl who wasn't a self-absorbed little A-hole ... my only qualm would be in using the term "pig," since I happen to know pigs are very outgoing, giving individuals); certainly Flanagan opens that it is:

his [Baldwin's] real purpose [in the book] is to exonerate himself from an incident so grotesque that it's hard to imagine any piece of written communication short of a suicide note changing our opinion of it.

Flanagan takes this unpromising material and crafts out of it a review/meditation that will keep you feverishly reading, one delicious paragraph after another (for instance, on the indifferent intimacy of families: "Dad doesn't get too excited by the sight of Mom in her shimmy anymore, for the same reason Buddy's never taken a hankering to Sissy: they've seen too much. It's not community censure that has kept incest in check all these centuries; it's stomach flu"). The piece is easily the best thing in a typically strong issue of the Atlantic, and it keeps returning to that one catastrophic phone call, which Baldwin took outside a restaurant:

Standing on the street, once again confronted by life's inability to meet him halfway with his simple desire to be the center of the universe, he snapped. He raved at the child in the ugliest language imaginable, threatening her and calling her terrible names. Shortly thereafter, the message was leaked to an Internet scandal site (By whom? Cherchez la femme.) And the incident became infamous.

Of course I urge you to read the whole of this issue - of every issue, even in these slightly dumbed-down days of the Atlantic. But even if you skip around and pick and choose, you should make sure not to miss this piece. Back in the pre-Internet days, I used to photocopy (Google it; it was cumbersome) articles like this and make little packets of them to hand to uncaring friends, because these pieces are just that good.

And they're crafted by literary journalists, those most despised of writers, those Parnassian guns for hire - so let's all raise a glass of the cheap stuff to those working professionals! May they all be as magisterial as Helen Vendler, as thrilling as William Langeweische, as well-read as Ben Schwarz, as funny as Anthony Lane, and as damn good as Caitlin Flanagan!

In the Penny Press! Poems and Nukes!

Here we are again, huddled together as I prepare to bombard you with the very latest in printed trivia!

So let's start with a BANG! In the latest New Republic (how on Earth did I get along all these years without including it in my regular reading? Just LOOK at how many times it's featured here, which is, after all, the Academy Awards of magazine-recognition!). The odious Alice Quinn has published a collection of previously-unpublished Elizabeth Bishop poems, and the New Republic gave it to the mighty Helen Vendler to review. I consider Vendler to be the greatest poetry-reviewer ever to put pen to paper, and never is she more terrifying than in her anger:

This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of "Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments." It should have been called "Repudiated Poems." For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to publish them. They remained unpublished (not "uncollected") because, for the most part, they did not meet her fastidious standards (although a few, such as the completed love poem "It is marvellous to wake up together" may have been withheld out of prudence). Students eagerly wanting to buy "the new book by Elizabeth Bishop" should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are "Elizabeth Bishop" as a poet. This book is not.

It will be argued that Bishop could have burned all these pieces of paper if she did not wish them to see publication (I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts). But burning one's writing is painful, and Bishop kept her papers, as any of us might, because the past was precious to her. Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems and some drafts and fragments should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified 'No.'

It seems to me a betrayal of Elizabeth Bishop as a poet to print items from the archive in magazines and journals as if they were 'real poems' and not attempts that were withheld by the poet from just such public appearances.

And in conclusion: "In the long run, these newly published materials will be relegated to what Robert Lowell called 'the back stacks,' and this imperfect volume will be forgotten, except by scholars. The real poems will outlast these, their maimed and stunted siblings."

Hee.

This review has already sparked a storm of controversy - two articles in the New York Times, a spate of planned debates in Poetry magazine ... and of course a REPLY from the odious Alice Quinn, which will no doubt show up soon in the New Republic. Plus, I guarantee you, the TLS will get wind of this and write something - this is just exactly the kind of bandwagon they can't resist. It's not just that Vendler is entirely right - I've been reading her for years, and I've never once known her to be otherwise - it's that she's the proverbial 500-pound gorilla, not some hack from the back benches.

And speaking of the TLS, this week Edward Luttwak reviews two new books on the Cold War and gets off to what I think is a very interesting start:

There is no justification for Cold War nostalgia. The sanguinary threats of truculent preachers, pious murderers and elected fanatics and the variegated violence du jour of fanatical Islam are all small potatoes compared to the peril of nuclear obliteration that attended entire decades of the Cold War. And to think of the unthinkable, even if Islam's true believers were to acquire one or two nuclear weapons and use them, there would still remain a world of difference between the detonation of a bomb or even two by wild-eyed fanatics and of 20,000, 25,000 and 30,000 megaton-yield weapons systematically delivered on target by disciplined military professionals dutifully obeying verified release orders. It was a credibly contrived implacability, along with the undoubted lethality of nuclear weapons, that gave us a Cold War of devastating reciprocal threats instead of the bloody battles of real, non-nuclear wars between the greatest powers.

"Nuclear weapons prohibited the optimism without which few wars have ever been started. If they were used, outcomes only remained unpredictable at the margins, while it was entirely certain that there would be catastrophic consequence. That unprecedented certainty induced unprecendented caution on the part of everyone concerned, even Stalin and Mao, monsters in human form who calmly encompassed the deaths of millions and tens of millions of their fellow citizens, but who behaved as cautiously as ordinary political leaders when it came to nuclear weapons.

That's all probably boring stuff to you, but it was a little revelation to me, since Luttwak's never written that well about anything (I suspect he has a book in the works on the subject). My only quibble is one you can probably see coming a mile away: nowhere in this very long review does President Kennedy get even a brief mention. Which irks me because the one time a "monster in human form" maybe WAS willing to go beyond threats, it was JFK who stared him back away from the precipice. The world came within flimsy hours of nuclear annihilation, and I think it's worth mentioning that it was a Kennedy who saved it. But that's just me...



And there you have it! An oddly SHORT installment, from an oddly light week of periodical reading! Of course, the week hasn't been light at on the book-reading front, but that's an entirely different tedious entry!