The Best American Poetry

How the Times Reviewed Fitzgerald, Forster, Woolf, Henry James et al

YThis is how reviewers at the NY Times treated certain books:

Scott Fitzgerald:
“Bad news is best blurted out at once: ‘Tender Is the Night’ is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form. … His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Reviewed by J. Donald Adams, April 15, 1934

Henry James:
“In ‘The Golden Bowl’ we find, standing for subtlety, a kind of restless finicking inquisitiveness, a flutter of aimless conjecture, such as might fall to a village spinster in a ‘department store.’ … How like ancient and tedious cronies the ‘wonderfullys’ and ‘preciselys’ and ‘adequatelys’ and ‘competentlys’ turn up on these pages — as a rule in places where no self-respecting adverb would choose to be discovered.” Reviewed by H.W. Boynton, Nov. 26, 19

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out:
“Aside from a certain cleverness — which, being all in one key, palls on one after going through a hundred pages of it — there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension. As for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest.” Unsigned, June 13, 1920

E. M. Forster, Howards End:
“As a social philosopher, evidently, Mr. Edward M. Forster has not yet arrived at any very positive convictions. … He evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem.” Unsigned, Feb. 19, 1911

If, on the other hand, you want to go against the grain in a big way, hire Vladimir Nabokov to take on Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, ‘La Nausée’ ['Nausea'] was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters … Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst.” Reviewed by Vladimir Nabokov, April 24, 1949

Who said it? [quote of the week #2, 2025 series]

"Hans was mediocre in the most honorable sense of the word."

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also the truth."

"Speaking French is, for me, like speaking without saying anything -- as in a dream." 

“Don't you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime.”

“Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism."

"Terror is what our age needs, what it demands, and what it will get."

"“Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.”

[The picture is unrelated to the quotations.]

"Who Said It?" [quotes of the week: no. 1, January 20, 2025]

A novel's true suspense is felt not by the reader but by the author, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Europe is the negative that American developed into the finished photograph.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Hell man, every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."

The happy ending is our national belief..

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

A doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole.

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Ed. note: Who wrote or said these things? The picture on the left contains no clues or hints.

This week's harvest

"God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." -- Bismarck

"The greatest danger to most men is not that they aim too high and miss the mark, but that they aim too low and reach it."

--- Emil Ludwig

 

-- "Show me an actress who isn't a personality, and you'll show me a woman who isn't a star." -- Katharine Hepburn

 

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.”
― Marlene Dietrich

 

"I praise loudly. I blame softly." -- Catherine the Great

 

‘There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." – Oscar Wilde

 

“When I want to read a novel, I write one.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

 

“Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's”
― Madame de Stael, De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations

 

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“If I had to choose. . ." [by E. M. Forster]

 

 

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

 

-- E. M. Forster

Do you agree? Is this an honorable or a wicked doctrine?

 

Oscar Levant nails it again. . .

Oscar Levant defined a politician as a man who will "double-cross that bridge when he gets to it." Has anyone read hs book Memoirs of an Amnesiac? It's the sort of book I must have read, but I can't remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact.  Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance -- not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. "I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients," he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly's native optimism in An American in Paris. He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: "It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." He also wrote "Blame it on My Youth" and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day "before she was a virgin," it was a valuable reminder of the band singer's brilliance -- with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," in duets with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" -- which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, "now that Marilyn Monroe's kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her." -- DL

Cardinal Newman's Cri de Coeur

A Meditation

God has created me to do Him some definite service.
He has committed some work
to me which He has not committed to another
I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection
between persons.
He has not created me for naught.
I shall do good.
I shall do His work.

-- Cardinal John Henry Newman

Proust's Dunkin' Donut

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with
water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without
character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves
and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or
people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our
garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the
good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and
the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes
and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my
cup of tea.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Happy birthday, Marcel (10 Juillet)

The Square Root of Despair [by Kierkegaard & Walker Percy]

"The specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''

— Kierkegaard

Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer

"The specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''

— Kierkegaard

Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer

Dostoevsky says. . .

 

“The world says: 'You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

-- The Brothers Karamazov

"Man is so fond of systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to deny the truth intentionally; he is ready to deny what he can see and hear just to justify his logic.” -- Notes from Underground

Fulke Greville's Epitaph for Huxley's "Point Counter Point"

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound,

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’

—Fulke Greville

the epigraph for Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point

E. M. Forster on "Jew-Consciousness"

 

"Jew consciousness is in the air, and it remains to be seen how far it will succeed in poisoning it. . . .A nasty side of our nation's character has been scratched up -- the sniggering side. People who would not ill-treat Jews themselves, or even be rude to them, enjoy tittering over their misfortunes: they giggle when pogroms are instituted by someone else and synagogues defiled vicariously. 'Serves them right, really. Jews.' This make unpleasant reading, but anyone who cares to move out of his own enlightened little corner will discover that it is true.. . .To me, ant-Semitism is now the most shocking of all things. It is destroying much more than the Jews; it is assailing the human mind at its source." -- E. M. Forster (1939)

from Two Cheers for Democracy by E. M. Forster

Emerson of the week: Why travel?

<<
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
>>>
Emerson, "Self Reliance"

Emerson: "Are they my poor?"

<<<
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
>>>

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

Here comes GBS

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

"“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

"If at age 20 you're not a liberal you have no heart. If at age 40 you're not a conservative you don't have a brain."

“The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”

"“Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation.”

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

Somerset Maugham: on Art, with Heart

“I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.”

"There is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul. Then you see that no one is so trivial or debased but that in him is a spark of something to excite compassion.”

"There is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art.”

"“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

"I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."

 

The Square Root of Despair [by Kierkegaard & Walker Percy]

"The specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''

— Kierkegaard

Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer

--DL

"The Birth of Tragedy" [Nietzsche's opening shot]

<<

Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly -- rather than merely ascertaining -- that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian - Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation.

>>

A great opening, the first sentence in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy states the thesis of the book, introduces a critical distinction ("apprehending directly" as superior to "merely ascertaining"), and illustrates the main point with a complex simile, ostensibly a subordinate clause but one that threatens to eclipse all that preceded it. Before you have quite begun to grasp the idea of the "duality" between Apollo and Dionysus, and its significance for understanding why Aeschylus is superior to Euripides, we're asked to accept the casual observation that the sexes are in constant conflict. No wonder a couple in the heat of love concludes its quarrels with nothing resolved but the force of sexual attraction triumphant.

-- DL

Lionel Trilling on Matthew Arnold (and on Mark Twain in Vienna in 1897)

The Secret

1.

Of Matthew Arnold’s habit
of meditating on the sayings
of great thinkers, a different one
each week, after writing them
down in his pocket diary,
Lionel Trilling wrote,
“It was as if he were obeying
as literally as he might
the commandment to fasten
the truth upon the door
of his house and upon his hand
and to set it as a frontlet
between his eyes.” Aha.
Welcome to the minyan, Matt.

2.

You ask what I like
about Trilling’s writing
and I pull out the Viking Portable Arnold
and turn to page twenty-five
of his introduction:
“He could join Goethe
in agreeing with Homer
that our life is a kind of Hell,
yet with Goethe he believed
that it must be lived
with as much pleasure as may
be dragged from it.”
It’s even better in prose. 

-- DL

*

 

Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:  "As to the make-up of the

House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all  the walks of life and

from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts,  barons, priests,

mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants,  bankers,

shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere,  devoted, and they

hate the Jews."  Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added  that "This hatred of

the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which  was torn asunder

by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." 

Epigraph of the Month: Poe

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

Virginia Woolf explains why the English would rather live in ancient Greece

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

 

from the archive; first posted March 2018