Weekly Readings #162 (03/10/25-03/16/25)

temperament, sensibility, intuition

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I posted “A Free Man” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The episode is about Heinrich von Kleist and his novella Michael Kohlhaas and their anticipation of modernism with its series of pessimistic “K” creators and “K” characters, from Kafka and Josef K. through [K]oetzee and Michael K, all created by Kleist’s own Krisis of Kultur upon consulting Kant; Kant plunged him into the state of epistemic nihilism and radicalism in which we still live, however we try, platitudinously and self-righteously, to deny it.¹ A lot of fun asides in this episode. Thanks to all my paid subscribers! We have big episodes coming up over the next month and a half in the modern western world literature in translation sequence: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, three short novels by Tolstoy, the drama of Ibsen and Chekhov, and more. Please offer a paid subscription today so you don’t miss a minute!

Another big event coming in the next month is the release of my novel Major Arcana on April 22. You can pre-order it here. (Please note at the Amazon link that the official audiobook has also been announced and can now be pre-ordered; that will be released on May 20, for those who prefer the audio format.) Reactor lists it among the season’s “Can’t Miss” indie press books:

There’s a lot going on in John Pistelli’s novel Major Arcana—and, as you might guess from both the title and the fact that one character is named Simon Magus, some of it involves magic. In interviews, Pistelli has spoken of the influence of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on this book, with some recent comic book history also in the mix.

The local release event here in Pittsburgh will be held at 7PM on April 17 at Riverstone Books in storied Squirrel Hill. I am going to request, gently, that everyone within a 1000-mile radius attend so I can sign your book. The event is free; you can register here. If you are obdurately metropolitan, however, I should also be making a New York appearance sometime in May. I’ll keep you updated with the details soon.

For today, in conformity with the online world’s unappeasable appetite for lists to organize the world of art and culture, I enumerate the best poems and poets for a novelist to read and the best novels for a poet to read. Please enjoy!

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Switch List: Novels for Poets, Poems for Novelists

Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)

I received three readerly inquiries this week at my super-secret Tumblr the answers to which I thought would make a good Sunday Substack post. All three focus on the relation between fiction and poetry. Questions and answers follow.

1. What five novels would you recommend for a poet to read?

There are two ways to interpret the unspoken question lurking behind this question. The esoteric question might, on the one hand, be this: “How can we novelists make poets less precious, less self-involved, less obscure, and less generally annoying by using novels to re-program them with more lively priorities?” In that case, these poets in need of prose’s chastening ministry should read the least poet-like novelists, if we have in mind the lyricism that causes the poet (in Northrop Frye’s words) to “turn his back on the audience” or that makes the discourse of the poet (in Georg Lukács’s words) “the language of the absolutely lonely man.” It is this type of poet who might reflect on the potential superiority of the ultimately social and narrative Uncle Tom’s Cabin over the lyrical and antinomian Huckleberry Finn. Maybe this lonely poet should start with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then. What else? Above all Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which, from the title forward, abrades the poet’s ambition with the novelist’s keen awareness of all in modernity that makes this ambition vain, bathetic, even wicked. But then does Don Quixote not found the novel as an aesthetic institution in a variant of the same critique, performing a reductio ad absurdum on the very idea of poetic idealism (in this case, the quest romance which lyric poetry would, per Harold Bloom, “internalize”). Perhaps a demonstration of even relatively graceless prose’s anti-poetic power of absolute mimesis is also in order, in which case we go to Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina is, among other things, a Cervantine polemic against a certain type of lyrical sensibility. And for something more recent, there is always Iris Murdoch, who might be said to have completed the novelist’s ethical critique of poetry, if in the richest and most poetic of prose, in something like The Sea, the Sea—unless we want to read Nabokov’s Pale Fire instead, which actually uses a poem itself for this purpose.

The hidden question could be the opposite of what I first thought it was, however. This second version of the hidden question presumes the priority of the poet and asks, “What novels demonstrate that the novel as a form can possess the imaginative and stylistic power of poetry, even though we poets all know most novels are risibly mundane affairs written for simpletons trying to turn their meager minds off with pulp and pornography?” If this is the real question, then, if it’s not too mechanical, we might just reverse the first answers: forget the suspense-novel activism of Harriet Beecher Stowe and learn what worlds even the earthy, salty vernacular can conjure in Huckleberry Finn. And ditch Balzac’s indifferently composed reports on the printing industry and the newspaper business for Flaubert’s transubstantiation of watery realism into the intricately precise and vinous prose-poetry of Madame Bovary. Tolstoy? No, Melville. Moby-Dick is a rollicking prose-poem from end to end, Shakespeare, Milton, and the KJV put into anything but plain American, a boat made of words crossing an ocean made of words in pursuit of a whale made of words. Virginia Woolf’s novels likewise, especially Mrs. Dalloway (a city made of words) and To the Lighthouse (a seacoast made of words). But above all, Ulysses, which I have several times suggested readers would have more fun with if they treated it more like Joyce’s Collected Poems than like a novel they’re supposed to read from the first to the last page curled up in bed and hoping for a yarn (though it’s also a yarn); no poet, I want to say, has ever written with more attention, intention, devotion, or passion.

2. Which poets would an aspiring novelist/prose writer do well to read?

3. What five poems would you recommend for a novelist to read?

The esoteric question behind these two similar queries is also twofold, if less involved in enormous questions of value. Should the aspiring novelist read poets to learn something about language they can’t learn from other fiction writers? Or should they (less intuitively) read poets to learn something about narrative itself they can’t learn from other fiction writers? I will divide my answers into five poets who can answer the first mandate and five poems that can answer the second.

For the power of language itself and all it can do—powers of compression, polysemy, and the effects of what can only be called music—I send the novelist to Keats and to Dickinson, the first for richness of texture, the second for density of meaning. Inspired by this essay by the prose writer William Giraldi on what he learned from studying the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in a class taught by the poet Geoffrey Hill, I also recommend Hopkins. I round out my suggestions in the 20th century with Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, whose beauty and precision, whose philosophical depth and artistic breadth, combine the merits of Keats and of Dickinson in something closer to our own idiom.

For narrative power in poetry as exhibited in certain individual poems, for swiftness and clarity in the telling of a story or the conjuring of a character, I first recommend Dante’s Divine Comedy; these Dantean virtues come through even in the most prosaic and literal translation, especially, of course, of the first two canticles, before our poet takes flight to realms where there is less to see and less to tell. My favorite epic or novel-in-verse nearer our own time and in our own language is Derek Walcott’s Homeric revision Omeros whose Dantean tercets survey all of history and half the planet from the marginally central or centrally marginal vantage of St. Lucia with a novelist’s telescope and poet’s microscope. Less intuitive but equally relevant is the lyric-epic free verse of Whitman’s Song of Myself, which first proves free verse itself to demand as much formal care as prose itself and second has its own Dante-like power to swiftly call up and image or a narrative in a few lines. Free verse isn’t free at all, and neither is prose. Then there is Eliot’s Waste Land, from which the artist in prose can learn the arts of allusion and of montage, of how to condense and how to cut, how to make several unreal cities real in a very few well-chosen words and references. Finally, I am duty-bound to quote Auden’s “The Novelist,” a little sonnet about the essential difference between the poet and the novelist. Like many in my generation, I first encountered it when James Wood used it to assassinate novelists he found too poetic, and thus the binary is excessively neat, almost punitive.² If we take it as a witty provocation rather than as canon law, however, then it gives pleasure.

Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

1. Temperament, sensibility, intuition—do not these precede politics, obviating all our vaunted arguments about politics, as if anybody ever persuaded anybody of anything in such an argument? I quote Julius Taranto in The Metropolitan Review:

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

As Kleist learned in his Kantian crisis, nothing is equal to anything else, or, to quote young-Republican Joan Didion’s Kleistian heroine of Play as It Lays, “NOTHING APPLIES.” You can call this kind of wary, skeptical, and politically anti-sentimental attitude “cynicism” or “nihilism,” or even (bizarrely) “Putinism,” though it’s as definitionally American as the ironies Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville devised for the inhabitants of a pluralist society, but we might also consider that the people who have tried to think these painful paradoxes through to the end—Heinrich von K., Franz K., J. M. [K]., and even (yes, sometimes) Anna K.—are in fact more scrupulously ethical, in fact more rigorously avoidant of violence and oppression, than are those who try to coerce political compliance with slogans about kindness and care and empathy and love, as if these translated in any direct way into political legitimacy, and as if, more to the point, these had never been abused, as if no terrorist or assassin or tyrant had ever spoken of his thirst for love and justice. Meanwhile, in aesthetics, the skeptical insight points away from the absurdist priorities of the lit-in-translation crew for all that they are Kleist’s progeny. Because life is only justifiable as an aesthetic phenomenon—a more honorable view than moralists credit it with being, one that inspires the “universal compassion” urged by several spiritual traditions as against the endlessly murderous us-vs.-themism of those for whom life is primarily an ethical or political phenomenon, unavoidable as the us vs. them (moralist vs. aesthete, for example!) may sometimes be—then we owe ourselves and others the most splendid and exquisite aesthetics rather than any wallowing in misery or sarcasm or cheap senselessness. In his pod appearance with friend-of-the-blog Noah Kumin, the novelist Bruce Wagner—please see my long introduction to his work here—speaks eloquently of “loving indifference” in our world of “illusion.”

2. Other literary forms also come into competition as well. The novel vs. the drama, for example. Mary Jane Eyre, in the midst of a searching essay on Andrew Sullivan, whose politics as a matter of temperament and sensibility and intuition may well be the exact opposite of my own, reminds me that I once promised to write a play and even began casting it in my head:

IIRC John Pistelli once wrote on his super secret tumblr that he would cast Salomé as Paglia opposite Anna Khachiyan as Sontag in his yet unmanifested play on the aesthete and the moralist.

As if to warn me against it comes Elon Green’s report on Toni Morrison’s “lost” play Dreaming Emmett. Because of the reverence accorded Morrison and the solemnity attaching to the subject of Emmett Till, our narrator tells the story in somber tones, but it is in fact the comedy of an imperious metropolitan writer and even more imperious metropolitan director descending on a provincial theater with outsized ambitions destined to be thwarted:

In all likelihood, Moses—encouraged by Morrison—thought nothing of allotting an estimated $4,000 for a steel track running along the stage, $2,000 for Phillips’s chair, or $1,500 for Till’s custom-made white suit. That fall, another $3,500 went to Willa Shalit, an artist in the Upper WestSide, for a series of masks to be worn in the first act. Grotesque creations, some small, some large, made of latex and wire mesh were meant to present, said Shalit, “different layers of reality.” A friendly face might conceal a murderer. The addition of the masks were likely informed by Morrison’s knowledge of Greek theater from her days at Howard University. “Ancient, alive, and breathing, their features exaggerated, their power mysterious,” Morrison wrote of her novel Tar Baby, published a few years earlier. “All of the characters are themselves masks.”

The creative decisions kept adding to the bottom line. According to an internal memo, the average Capital Rep production for the 1985-86 season cost $27,686. The budget for Dreaming Emmett now exceeded $70,000. The expenses, as well as Moses’s imperiousness, spurred a contentious meeting in early December. Among the attendees were Morrison and Moses, Capital Rep’s Bouchard and Clough, members of the theater company’s board, the Writers Institute’s William Kennedy and Tom Smith, and Kathryn Gibson—whose idea had started it all.

Moses believed that Bouchard and Clough lacked the skills to produce theater, while Morrison felt that Dreaming Emmett was not getting the support it deserved. “This is me that you are trying to quash by not supporting this play,” one attendee remembers Morrison says, and suggested it would be better not to produce the play at all if it weren’t in line with her and Moses’s vision. Morrison was so upset she began to cry.

Then there is film vs. drama. As a one-time Wildean, I felt obligated to see Atom Egoyan’s newish film Seven Veils, in which a theater director named Jeanine is called upon to re-mount a production of Strauss’s Salome originally conceived by her late former lover; revisiting the opera-drama of erotic obsession revised by her much-older and now-dead paramour also re-immerses her in the world of her late father, himself an ambitious but frustrated artist, who may have sexually trespassed upon her in her girlhood, with her mother’s complicity. (The film, only now released in the U.S., was filmed in Canada in 2023. The Alice Munro news had not yet broken, but I assume it was an open secret in the soon-to-be 51st state.) I found the film puzzling and uneven, its affect almost humorous, despite the subject matter, with a subplot about understudies the contrasting earnestness of which felt like it came from a Canadian TV drama, probably because one of the understudies was played by someone who also starred in the only Canadian TV drama I ever watched. I think it was supposed to be “Lynchian” or Tár-like but proved too tepid, and then more outrageous in its very tepidness than it would have been had it gone further in surreal eroticism, as if gently to parody the adult hysteria occasioned in the child victim, which, while insalubrious, is not quite the (also insalubrious) point of Wilde’s modern-day Biblical myth Strauss adapted. The supervisor of my doctoral dissertation happens to have written the authoritative essay on this topic, which I duly quote:

The key innovation in Wilde’s drama is that royal mother and daughter become patent rivals. While Herodias remains the depraved queen, the calculating and sterile wife of the former tetrarch’s brother, she now protests rather than instigates her second husband’s leering attention to her daughter and her dancing—and not because of maternal concern, but out of obvious envy. Mother and daughter’s desires only converge with the beheading of the prophet, an act of cruelty Herodias can urge on Salomé only from the periphery of the dramatic action. Wilde’s upstaging of even a menacing Herodias points to an acute shift in cultural power that would have registered with a fin de siècle English audience by then keenly alert to the alarms raised over degeneracy and still subject to a long-reigning queen. At one extreme, Wilde’s demotion of Herodias symbolically renders passé domestic ideology’s sanctification of motherhood, already insinuated by her barrenness. At another, her evident lust, as a divorced woman married to her husband’s brother, devalues that prized Victorian jewel, “the angel in the house.” Wilde’s dramatic rebuff serves not only to highlight Herodias’s wickedness. It also brazenly transfers the prestige and power a woman enjoyed in marriage and motherhood to a mere youth, in this case an impulsive teenage princess, Graham Robertson’s arresting schoolgirl. Wilde, I suggest, seizes from the strong-willed queen mother the lead role and emotional center of the drama, which had prevailed from the Evangelists to Flaubert, and confers them on her pubescent daughter, cast as sexually precocious and volatile. This was as radical a transposition as there could be in the 1890s, given the grave importance that high-minded bourgeoisie assigned to all matters sexual. Putting aside the play’s prescience and prohibition for a moment, consider the hard time Wilde would serve for having his own amorous liaisons become public far too soon.

Egoyan almost understands this erotic asymmetry in our long age of youth and lyricism, our endless 1890s, but he demotes the resulting family romance in favor of a half-#MeToo satire and half-#MeToo fable—in one scene, Jeanine dismisses the intimacy coordinator on the opera set as an unwarranted intruder into eros!—that can’t seem to decide if the best art non-negotiably demands the worst erotic transgressions or not. Like the other recent Canadian movie I watched, the Quebecois Francophone meta-true-crime fantasia Red Rooms, Seven Veils abuses the essential ambiguity of art by not telling us enough about the heroine to provoke a meaningful reaction beyond our wondering at her oddness. For all that, Seyfried’s performance is at once sympathetic and seductive, as the script, not totally unfaithful to Salome, asks her to veer from tormented victim to deranged erotomane; the operatic mise en scène, and long meta-discussions about the operatic mise en scène, will also fascinate those who like art about the making of art, and I do. I recommend Seven Veils, and Red Rooms as well, overall; in neither can the superficial aesthetics be beat. But these film directors should read more novels. We novelists, more than poet or dramatist or director, still feel obliged to make the most sense compatible with the ineffable mystery of beauty.