Tag Archives: New York Review of Books

‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk

In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes:

Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded as if he were a latter-day Goethe by a would-be Eckermann, revealed his hatreds quite plainly.

Two notes:

1. The Goethe-Eckermann reference is, of course, to Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, the book famously referred to by Nietzsche in the following section (#109) from The Wanderer and his Shadow:

The Treasure of German Prose.  Apart from Goethe’s writings and especially Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again?  Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms, the first book of Jung Stilling’s Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter’s St.  Martin’s Summer and Gottfried Keller’s People of Seldwyla — and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.

2. I’ve never read anything by Hitler, but I have seen videos of his speeches, where he does not seem to ramble.  But in The Mask of Command, John Keegan does us all a service by providing us a sample of Hitler’s “table-talk.” As Keegan notes, these transcripts were recorded by a note-maker, Heinrich Heim, who was ordered to do so by Martin Bormann. Here is an excerpt:

When all’s said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might have abandoned Gothic architecture for the light, airy, bright architecture of the Counter-Reformation? In the face of Luther’s efforts to lead an upper clergy that had acquired profane habits back to mysticism, the Jesuits restored to the world the joy of the senses….Fanaticism is a matter of climate—for Protestantism, too, has burnt its witches. Nothing of that sort in Italy, The Southerner has a lighter attitude towards matters of faith….It’s remarkable to observe the resemblances between the evolution of Germany and that of Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the ecumenical desires of the papacy….I must say, I always enjoy meeting the Duce. He’s a great personality. It’s curious to think that, at the same period as myself, he was working in the building trade in Germany. Our programme was worked out in 1919, and at that time I knew nothing about him….If the Duce were to die, it would be a great misfortune for Italy. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars….Italy is the country where intelligence created the notion of the State. The Roman Empire is a great political creation, the greatest of all. The Italian people’s musical sense, its liking for harmonious proportions, the beauty of its race! The Renaissance was the dawn of a new era, in which Aryan man found himself anew.

And on and on and on. Albert Speer notes, ‘[T]he collection includes only those thought significant. Complete transcripts would reinforce the sense of stifling boredom’. Phew.

Incidentally, I’ve only just discovered Hitler’s Table-Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations (Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Introduced and with a new Preface by H.R. Trevor-Roper, Enigma Books 2000). I certainly don’t have the time or the inclination to read the whole thing, but there is plenty of material in there to strike us numb.

Banville on Beckett: Can There Be An “Abstract Literature”?

Can there be an “abstract literature”? In his review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956 John Banville says No. At best, abstract writing can aspire to some form of, to quote Beckett, “nominalistic irony.” Banville  rejects Pascale Casanova’s claim that Beckett’s Worstward Ho was “the triumphant culmination of Beckett’s effort to forge an “abstract” literature,” a “pure object of language, which is totally autonomous since it refers to nothing but itself.” Banville counters that Worstward Ho ”cannot but refer to things outside itself” and notes Casanova admits “One cannot advance the hypothesis of an absolute independence of the text with respect to the world, grammar and literary convention.”

Beckett himself had written that “my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it,” and hoped for a time “when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused” and where he could “drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.” Beckett also asked, “Is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting?… Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved?”

Banville suggests such aspirations are futile:

[W]ords are not like paint or musical notation. Language is a vulgar medium; it rubs up against actuality at every point…it is not anything sacred that sets the word apart, but something profane. Language must speak, that is its essence. There could only be an abstract writing, as there is abstract painting, if words were to lose their meaning, that meaning that we have commonly consented they should have. And what then would they be? Mere noise.

In this vision: writing is not like those representational or plastic arts capable of entertaining abstraction; music or paintings are not “vulgar” media; they do not “rub up against actuality at every point”; music is not committed to “speaking” in the way that language is; musical notations are not like words. Somehow, because of their looser anchoring with “actuality,” music and painting accommodate abstraction; language cannot; total loss of meaning is required for abstraction in language, literature, and writing.

Two contestations.

First, Banville is certainly correct to say that words have their meanings by our “common consent.” And the suspension of this consent could render them “noise.” But is this noise just “mere noise”? Wouldn’t the creation of such “noise” at least make possible an “abstract” literature that bears the same relation to “concrete” literature that, for instance, noise bears to “structured, melodic” music?  Would Banville consider noise music artists provide abstract music? They employ, for example, distortion, to engender a suspension of “common consent” for understanding sound.

Second, Banville claims, “There could only be an abstract writing, as there is abstract painting, if words were to lose their meaning.” But is there a loss of meaning in abstract painting? That seems counterintuitive: in abstract paintings there is a playfulness with convention and with anchored meanings but the result of this, especially in the encounter of those who “look,” is the further creation of meaning. So, if this abstract “literature” is to be “read” then how could words lose meaning? To be “read’ implies meaning-making. There is further tension here: if words are to lose meaning we do not even have “writing” any more.

Banville’s imposition of the condition that words lose meaning for an abstract writing or literature is well-meant, but it is excessive; the “absolute independence” that Banville seems to think impossible for an abstract literature is actually self-defeating for the project, it is not something it needs to, or should, aspire to. The “abstract” literature Beckett aspires to could merely be a partial dispensing with representational or syntactic convention. It need not be an absolute terminus but rather, experiments with dismantling linguistic convention that provide partial glimpses of the loss of meaning. We might even see the glimmers of abstract literature in nonsense rhymes! We certainly would see it in the experimental forms of writing that Beckett might have in mind, in his attempts to “effectively abuse” the language and “tear apart” its “veil.”

But these encounters with the possible or partial losses of meaning can not but be further conducive to the creation of meaning. So Banville is certainly right that an abstract literature would not be possible because of the total loss of meaning, but the reason for that lies elsewhere. Such an abstract literature would not be “literature”; it would not be “writing” being “read” any more.

Chiasson on Pinsky: Meeting Poetry with More Poetry

Reviews of poets and poetry can often be tedious: the poet is sometimes trampled by the reviewer’s exegesis and analysis; sometimes we wish merely to be pointed toward the poem. But sometimes the reviewer can, in his responses, show his own poetic instinct. In his review of Robert Pinsky‘s Selected Poems (New York Review of Books, January 12 2012, Volume LIX, Number 1), Dan Chiasson pulls off this rather neat trick. He writes sympathetically on Pinsky, and in his responses finds a poetic register of his own.

In writing on Pinsky’s “The Green Piano” which includes the line “Ivory and umber, so you stood half done, a throbbing mistreated noble”, Chiasson responds:

This thing is doomed, a sacrificial beast; but also poignant, precisely because it is so cruelly and excessively disembodied. Its body gets budged, bonged, dinged, cracked, swabbed, antiqued, painted green, painted pink, and finally junked. It then goes out of existence, until Pinsky writes a poem named for it, that replaces it, the “iron and brass, ten kinds of hardwood and felt” reconstituted by, and therefore trumped by, language. You can memorize “The Green Piano”; to carry the green piano with you would be a much more cumbersome proposition.

Then, writing of Pinsky’s “Rhyme”, whichconcludes with the stanza:

In a room, a rhyme, a song.
In the box, in books: each element
An instrument, the body
Still straining to parrot
The spirit, a being of air.

Chiasson responds:

 The crucial moment here is when the word “parrot” becomes a verb; by “parroting” we become stuffed parrots, taxidermy versions of ourselves, suspended forever in the art we leave behind. It’s a brilliant trick, used to deliver the news, both good and bad, that our artifacts…outlast us. New, future souls, assemble inside them.

Later, Chiasson continues, in speaking more generally of Pinsky’s work:

The vision of poetry as a cross-temporal congregation of souls is something Pinsky wants his poems to represent, rather than just imply. It is not easy in poetry–a medium that favors compression and symbolic substitution–to devise a style that honors the actuality of individual persons while also suggesting their cosmic inconsequence, as well as one’s own. This problem impels all of Pinsky’s writing; his imagination toggles constantly between panorama and detail, big picture and individual pixel. Both scales have a moral justification; both imply one sort of truth; but neither one is in itself a complete assessment of human reality and the one tends to negate the other.

Chiasson’s essay is a good example of how to find the right sort of pitch in responding critically to a poem; show us the poems; let us read them; and make your responses poetic as well. Stay away from theory; if it is the power of language that is to be gloried in, then do so not by burying it in stultifying, exegetical indulgences, but rather, by providing, in the critical response. ever more examples of poetic skill and facility. In his essay, Chiasson comes close to seizing on a truth we often feel but rarely articulate: we  approach the poetic heart only by the poem.

Epistolary Warfare in the Letters Section

Readers of the New York Review of Books are used to the sometimes intemperate, bordering-on-pedantic, yet-always-carefully-crafted display of bruised egos that takes up so much space toward the end of each issue. I am referring, of course, to the Letters section. Here the author, formerly delighted to find out his masterpiece was to be reviewed in the supposedly-essential resident of every serious American intellectual’s magazine rack, and finding instead to his horror that it has been subjected to a ‘scurrilous’ or ‘ignorant’ reading, has written in to complain.  The reviewer, seeing the cudgels on the floor, picks them up and joins the fray. The rest of us watch and wince.  Or go get a second helping of popcorn. (I’ve often wondered why the NYRB does not conduct online polls to see who ‘won;’ this would be a surefire crowd-pleaser and would spark many watercooler conversations aka tweetstorms.)

A confession: I often turn first to the Letters to see if any entertainment is forthcoming before settling down to browse. As a philosophy graduate student in New York in the late 1990s, I, along with some of my colleagues, found the debates between ‘senior’ academic philosophers hugely diverting: to see grown men slashing away at each other, hurt, offended, determined to set the balance right, philosophical sanguinity cast to the wind, was quite reassuring. We felt immature; it was good to know that getting a Ph.D and writing several books hadn’t helped our heroes either.

I have been reading the NYRB for a while now, so I think I’ve seen just about every variant of the angry author-versus-defiant reviewer template.  The author who sets out to reveal the reviewer’s hidden or not-so-hidden agenda; the author convinced the reviewer lacks essential reading comprehension skills; the reviewer who thinks the author is a shill or paid agent (of a variety of forces, whether political or corporate); the list goes on.

Still, there have been a couple of recent additions to this ouevre of literary jousting that are possibly noteworthy for having provided some interesting twists on well-established themes.

Exhibit Number 1: Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Allan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. Galen Strawson jumps in to defend Allan Hollinghurst. Some intemperate language, some artfully constructed phrases; well worth a read. Deviation from template? The author hasn’t managed to get in a word yet, in deference to a defender that has already jumped into the fray. Of course, Strawson isn’t just defending Hollinghurst. He’s defending a whole literary tradition.  Who wouldn’t cast one’s so-called neutrality aside with such high stakes?

Exhibit Number 2: Helen Vendler reviews Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove fires back a 1700 word defense. Deviation from template? Vendler’s response, which was described as ‘cheeky’ by Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire and as ‘professional’ by Cynthia Haven of the Book Haven is a one-liner: ”I have written my review and I stand by it.” I think it’s neither. The review is written and in print; there appears to be no dispute about that. And as long as Vendler doesn’t issue explicit disavowals of it, it’s pretty clear she stands by it. So the need for the gratuitous one-liner is mysterious. (Incidentally, I’ve clearly been living under a rock for the past two months; I hadn’t realized the Vendler-Dove fracas was such a  cause célèbre.)

Lorin Stein on Ben Lerner’s Adam: An Aspiring Poet’s Worries

In reviewing Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station (“The White Machine of Life”, New York Review of Books, December 8 2011, Vol 58, Number 19), Lorin Stein notes that Adam, the novel’s central character, is “a poet who doesn’t have much feeling for poetry, for art in general.” And this poet is confronted a by profound and–for him, crucial–worry: that he was “incapable of having a profound experience of art” and as such,

I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet…I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professor had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

My interest in this excerpt is not so much in the conclusion of our budding poet’s anxiety-ridden thought, but in its initial prompt: that he might be blocked from a particular sort of relationship with art, evidence for which, as the excerpt shows, lies in his being incapable of constructing his own personal relationship with poetry, and finding himself reliant instead on having expert guides do all the heavy lifting.

Adam’s worry, of course, only seems peculiar because he aspires to be a poet; it is a common enough source of angst. Reading poems requires the ability to move past its bare surface, past the barriers of sometimes sparse and spare description, a challenge that can sometimes defeat even those with an acute poetic sensibility; we cannot keep our poetry receptors switched on at all times, and on those occasions, we stare blankly at verse, wondering why this seemingly banal, opaquely phrased assemblage of words, lines and paragraphs has evoked so much literary and philosophical exegesis and reflection. At those moments we can experience the kind of panic that is Adam’s constant companion: Have I been condemned to exclusion from the sphere of aesthetic appreciation, from the ranks of those for whom art can function as passage to the sublime? Will I spend this life with my nose pressed up against the glass panes, looking on enviously at those who do not suffer so? And it is then that we entertain the unkind, yet self-validating and reassuring, doubt that racks Adam: perhaps it’s all a giant sham, merely the latest instance of the Cosmos’ New Clothes.

The antidote for this anxiety can be, as in the case of Adam, a gentle guidance, some hand-holding and accompaniment. Some of us will never move beyond this stage. Others will find that perhaps the ‘secret’ of experiencing poetry is that we must continue ‘reading’ even when not confronted by the written word, that our task of having a ‘poetic experience’ extends to our experience of the world, the source of the poet’s imagination. In the enrichment of that lies perhaps our best chances of enriching our relationship with the poem and the poet.