A rummage through The Yellow Book

Some books I read to learn about better books.  A recent one for me was The Yellow Book: Quintessence of the Nineties (1964), ed. Stanley Weintraub, an anthology of short stories, poems, and Max Beerbohms from the short-lived London Yellow Book “magazine,” if that is the right term for a series of clothbound books.

The editors were, for texts, the American novelist Henry Harland, “a sort of lemonade Henry James”* and, for images, young wonder Aubrey Beardsley.  Beardsley’s involvement gave The Yellow Book a sheen of Decadence and Aestheticism, but that does not really describe the contents well.

Even Beardsley is on his best behavior (see right, for example, from the October 1894 issue).  After the first year, Beardsley own work hardly appears anywhere but the cover.

Nothing shocking here, even by the standards of the time.  “A Slip under the Microscope,” for example, an 1896 H. G. Wells story, is about the ethics of inadvertent cheating on a test.  The cheater finally turns himself in, sacrificing his science career (the story is science fiction but not “science fiction”).

Maybe Harland’s own “The Bohemian Girl,” about a non-manic pixie dream girl who is adored by all of the English and American art students in Paris, could not be shown to Victorian pre-teens, but even she ends up marrying an engineer.  Harold Frederic supplies a tale of heroic Irish martyrdom, a Scott knockoff, totally unlike The Damnation of Theron Ware.  George Gissing’s “The Foolish Virgin” is a still young “old maid” in reduced circumstances – a grim and grey tale, typical Gissing.

Kenneth Grahame’s “The Roman Road” is absolutely adorable, about a child who imagines the old road through town runs all the way to Rome (which in a sense it does).  He has seen the Coliseum in a woodcut:

so to begin with I plumped that down in the middle.  The rest had to be patched up from the little grey market-town where twice a year we went to have out haircut…

So the boy’s Rome is full of English pubs and Wesleyan chapels.  It is a story about the growth of the imagination, really.  No problem associating “The Roman Road” with the author of The Wind in the Willows.

William Butler Yeats, Henry James, John Buchan, Baron Corvo, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Arnold Bennett, for some of the more famous names.  A number of women – George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, Ada Leverson – who had just been, to me, names in someone else’s story.  Hey, there’s Reggie Turner, one of Oscar Wilde’s closest friends.  His story, “A Chef d’Oeuvre,” is about a man who spends years writing the perfect short story, an effort so agonizing it kills him.  The (fictional) story turns out to be, you know, pretty good, much like the actual story.  Much like most of the stories in The Yellow Book.

The Henry James stories and Max Beerbohm pieces are by far the standouts, so they are easily available elsewhere.

All of the issues are available at archive.org.  A browse is some fun for students of the period.

* See The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 1056, note 5.

Gardening, cannon-braiding, editing, "magnificence and rats," advice from R. W. Emerson and James Wood

Anybody do any gardening this weekend?  I thought not!  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in The Conduct of Life:

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity.  One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.  (“Wealth”)

It is possible that Emerson is simply a prankster, and that some of his sentences are the equivalent of that time Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green.  He just wants to see me sputter.  Or he is having some other kind of fun:

What would painter do, or what would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells?  And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

That is from the puzzlingly titled “Considerations by the Way.”  There is no denying that the last line is a good’un, and it would be well worth writing an entire diffusive essay just to use it.

Now this, from the same essay, is untrue in a different way, one useful to book bloggers:

Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,—all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt;—begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step.  ’Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order.

And literary criticism, in either its amateur or professional form, is much easier than braiding cannons.  It has fewer steps.  Read, think, write.  The pros re-write, or are at least re-written, as Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books describes in this recent interview:

Aside from Barbara [Epstein], Lizzie [Hardwick] was the major influence.  I would send her reviews and she would say, “Oh, yes, this piece is very good. It just needs a little work.”  And then she would send it back half as long, with paragraph after paragraph cut or compressed.  She had no patience at all for what you would call tired language.

I have a great deal of use and therefore patience for tired language.  It is especially valuable when I am tired or in a hurry or lazy.  I am sometimes tempted to submit a piece somewhere for this single reason, that professional editing would be educational, that it would improve my writing.  Wake it up a little.

Otherwise, I have been unable to see an advantage of more formal publication.  This is James Wood, from a recent interview with Jonathan McAloon (longer version here):

Now my advice would be, try to write longer pieces wherever you can.  One thing that’s changed since I was freelancing is there’s space online to do that kind of thing.  You don’t get paid for it, largely, but there’s the chance to do something at length.

It is possible that Open Letters Monthly, say, would jump at a chance to publish a 9,000 word article on Adalbert Stifter and Austrian literary culture. Sorry, I need to double-check – three weeks = 15 days x 600 words a day.  Yes, so I wrote close to 10,000 words in a fifteen part series on that subject, likely the best thing I am going to write all year.

My great early book blogging insight, my correction to Wood, was that there is no reason to publish the longer piece as a single unit, that I can work with the understandable impatience of the online reader, and that there are in fact enormous benefits from letting readers see the cannon-braiding in progress.  Book blog readers are so knowledgeable and helpful.  They challenge my worst ideas and introduce me to new ones.  Taken as a whole, my pieces rarely end up where I had planned, partly due to the assistance I receive.  I am edited in public; the corrections appear the next day, or year.  This editing does not reduce my word count, and my bad ideas are not politely expunged, but rather remain visible as one of the many steps towards boiled granite.  But it works, in its own way it works.

Boiled granite is useful somehow, yes?  That is why Emerson mentioned it?

Do you have a magazine?

No need to actually answer the question.  It is just something I have been wondering about.  I assume that anyone interested in culture – anyone writing a book blog, for example – has a magazine or two, a literary magazine, in the background, but in fact almost no one writes about what they are reading or have read in magazines, suggesting that my assumption is wrong.

By “has a magazine” I mean “regularly reads a magazine,” one that or some ill-defined reason feels like home.  I have read The New Republic, basically cover to cover, for almost twenty-five years (ack, cough – is that true?  Yes, it seems to be true), and The Hudson Review for fifteen, and I poke around in lots of others.

Joseph Epstein, in “New & Previously Owned Books & Other Cream Puffs,” found in Once More Around the Block (1987):

Around the age of twenty I discovered the intellectual and literary magazines – Partisan Review, Commentary, Encounter, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the British weeklies – and I have read them ever since.  They were especially helpful to me as a young man who himself one day wanted to write.  This was during a time when second-rate books were not taught at universities.  Reading great authors is the best method of education; but for someone who wishes to write, they can be discouraging.

The essay is actually a fine ode to the intellectual value of bookstores, used and new, the top-ranked of “the four main agencies of education in my life” – but magazines come in at #2 (“3. libraries, 4. schools”).

If I had more time or energy to read I would read not more books but more magazines.  For anyone not blessed with a rare and particular upbringing, it is magazines that make a person “cultured” – a word that should really be pronounced as if by Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain: KUL-chud.  Anxiety about being unkulchud is a fine motivator, and I have no argument against it.

Magazines are the quickest path to kulcha, although they are not all that fast.  The stuff of culture accumulates with time and repetition.  My new Hudson Review (Spring 2012) has, besides the Ambrose Bierce article I used last week, pieces on Eugenio Montale, Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, the Neue Gallerie, Philip Glass, Gregor von Rezzori, William Carlos Williams, acting Hamlet, topped by a typically expert and thoughtful William Pritchard essay on Ben Jonson’s poetry.  What a hodgepodge, with no organizing principle except that a writer thought the subject would be interesting.  But now I know, at least temporarily, more about all of those things than I did.

I read an enormous amount of literary biography, but almost exclusively in magazines.  Mark Ford’s review , in the May 10 New York Review of Books, of a recent biography of Alfred Jarry is itself a fine piece of biographical writing and a useful overview of Jarry’s work.  The chance that I am going to read the 405 page Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alistair Brotchie is zero, are you kidding?  Or a 528 page Freudian biography of William Carlos Williams?  Or a 700 page account of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War?  But reading about them in considered, edited pieces is enormously valuable.

As a writer of hasty, unedited essays, I have come to put more value on literary magazines, not less.  It is the magazine writers who have taught me how to write about books, how to make arguments and use evidence, how to try to do something complex while paying attention to style.  

Please see Michael Dirda’s piece on Ambrose Bierce in the new NYRB, which arrived at my house too late for me to use it, and which is thorough, knowledgeable and friendly (when bloggers complain about the formal or “academic” writing of professional reviewers I always wonder what on earth they have been reading).  Dirda’s review is a lot better than mine!  Skip mine and read his, if it is not too late.  But: his review is an example of the target I am aiming at.

I wish book bloggers wrote more about their magazines.  Maybe I should, too.