Alan Hollinghurst, "It's queer how I'm lonely"; Edmund Wilson, "A Revival of Ronald Firbank"; Evelyn Waugh, "Ronald Firbank"

EMILY WILSON'S SMACKDOWN of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey no doubt got more attention than anything else in the August 13 issue of the London Review of Books, but the real keeper in that issue,  the real gem, the real prize, was almost 8,653 words from Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. 

Hollinghurst is one of the great British novelists of his generation, I am convinced. His recurring theme is English queer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, could serve as a history of that culture from Wilde to the advent of AIDS, as The Stranger's Child could for the period from World War I to Tony Blair. The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair cover shorter time frames but are likewise vivid historical portraits.

I should emphasize that I do no mean that Hollinghurst is a chronicler, or produces elephantine historical novels like those of Edward Rutherford or James Michener. He is, I suppose, a historical novelist, but one more like Anthony Powell or Proust--sharp, observant, writers of graceful and assured prose.

Novelist Ronald Firbank is a kind of icon in English queer culture because his novels (which appeared in the teens and twenties of the 20th century), while far from realistic, capture something of the queer sensibility of their time. It's hard to say what that something is. The novels are campy, but not simply that; they have a gravitas even while seeming to float free of reality. The effect is hard to describe, but Hollinghurst comes closer to explaining it than anyone else I know of has.

That "anyone else" includes such distinguished writers as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh. Wilson and Waugh, as it happens, are the ones who got me reading Firbank forty-five years ago or so. They too tried to get at what makes Firbank's novels much more than period pieces, and I appreciated Hollinghurst giving both of them a shout-out. I would say, even so, that his is now the go-to short piece on Firbank. As Wilson and Waugh got me once to read Firbank, I suspect Hollinghurst will get me to re-read him.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?

Richard Siken, _I Do Know Some Things_

 I HAD READ and heard that this book is good, but I was still taken by surprise. It is...jaw-dropping good. 

I thought very well of Siken's first book, Crush, which twenty years on from its publication stands as a contemporary classic, if we are ready to concede there is such a thing.  I don't know why I never picked up his second collection, War of the Foxes, published ten years after Crush. Checking my records, in 2015 I seem to have been reading Lisa Robertson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Susan Howe, Mary Hickman, and Patricia Lockwood, so I was not wasting my time...still, looking back, I feel like scolding myself. I hope to rectify the omission soon.

As you probably know, Siken suffered a debilitating stroke in 2019. Somehow, besides re-learning how to talk and walk, he re-learned how to write poems. 

In many respects, these poems feel different from the poems of Crush. Siken's earlier poems performed a variety of feats of legerdemain with lineation and sentence construction while orbiting various men over whom Siken was obsessing. The poems of I Do Know Some Things are printed as prose, with no special lineation at all, and the sentences tend to be short. Most of the poems are about his own situation or those of family members, especially his father, who died in the period when Siken was writing these poems.

Unchanged, though, are Siken's audacity, powers of invention, and ability to land some startling leaps.

"I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a  long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

Some leaps launch him into the surreal, as in "Fear":

"I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves."

But I was most amazed by "Sentence" in the book's seventh and final section, where Siken reflects on his own practices, explaining how lines differ from sentences and then dropping a sentence whose length and elaboration David Foster Wallace might envy.

The backstory of this collection, compelling as it is, is overshadowed by the poems themselves.

_The Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956_, Rupert Hart-Davis

MAX DOES NOT give away a lot about himself here. Although editor Hart-Davis believes one of the letters to Florence Kahn, whom Max later married, suggests that Max was asexual (and perhaps it does),  Max is not one for confessions and revelations, generally. Charm, perfect manners, inimitable style, piercing eye--the reader does get all that, and a generous helping of reproduced drawings as well. 

I can hardly explain to myself why Max always dazzles me. He's one of the great caricaturists, I'd say, and this collection of letters makes clear that a lot of his caricatures were of friends...and that they stayed friends. Perhaps because however unflattering the caricatures are, one never senses malice.

And then there are those Max sentences. Perfectly clear, perfectly turned, yet still able to come around from behind and startle you. 

And different as I am from Max, unlike him in so many ways, I enjoyed finding out that we both admire the prose of Lytton Strachey.

Sybille Bedford, _The Trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover_

 THE 1960s REALLY were the golden age of long-form journalism. Rachel Carson. Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote. Norman Mailer. Gay Talese. And Sybille Bedford, who is perhaps not as famous as the others but whose account of The Crown v. Penguin Books, the trial over the legality of publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, was published by Esquire magazine in 1961 and is available as an 80-page book from Daunt Books.

On the cover of the Daunt version, the words "Would YOU let your WIFE read this BOOK?" are much larger and more prominent than the book's actual title--a canny design call, since Bedford spends less time on what is or isn't obscene about Lawrence's novel than on the prosecutor's assumption that upper- and upper-middle-class men need to be in charge of what women and the laboring classes read. 

Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones clearly does not think reading the book would do him or men like him any harm, but he keeps asking the large cast of writers and academics Penguin call to testify to the book's artistic value whether they would let their wives and servants read it. 

We remember this trial mainly for legalizing the literary depiction of human sexuality--fair enough--but what Bedford also brings out is the overturning of the idea that the upper classes knew what was best for everybody. And that was a big part of the 1960s, too.

Sigrid Nunez, _The Vulnerables_

 THE NOVEL BEGINS, "It was an uncertain spring"--just like that, within quotation marks, because Nunez's novel's first sentence quotes the  first sentence of another novel, Virginia Woolf's The Years. Like The Years, The Vulnerables is a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, of novelistic narrative and essay, of invention and reflection on what actually happened.

The novel mainly concerns how the unnamed narrator, whose circumstances (age, profession, residence) are quite a bit like Nunez's own, managed during the COVID lockdown of 2020. She is parrot-sitting and living in the New York apartment of a friend who is about to give birth in the Bay Area; she is also sharing that apartment with the son of other friends of that friend, a young man who has dropped out of college during his final semester before graduation and is on the outs with his parents.

The Vulnerables does not have a lot of plot--not much intrigue, conflict, suspense, tension, resolution, etc.--although the narrator's relationships with the parrot (Eureka) and the young man (Vetch [ha!]) do develop in interesting ways. Much of the novel, though, has to do with the chance encounters, ruminations, memories of the narrator during those months.

What exactly makes the novel so compelling, then? Why did I enjoy it so much? Why did I find it hard  to put down? I cannot say. Nunez ignores about every maxim one would receive in a fiction workshop (including, as she notes, the recommendation that one not begin a novel by talking about the weather), but for some reason, The Vulnerables is more a delight than almost any of the novels that do adhere to those maxims.

If I had to pin down a reason, I would say The Vulnerables gracefully engages the question of the relation of the written to the real. So ponderous a question, but Nunez spins it like a frisbee and sends it aloft to you. Catch it if you can, or simply enjoy its flight.

Naomi Baker, _Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century_

THE SUBTITLE WOULD be a little more on-point if it were "Radical Religious Women of 17th Century England," but this is an excellent book. I might not have come across it save for Erin Maglaque's review in NYRB, so a tip of the Puritan black felt hat to her.

The middle decades of the 17th century were a time of upheaval all over Europe and certainly in England:  the civil war, the deposition and execution of a king, the founding of a new form of government, the radical remaking of the Church of England, and a brief but intoxicating period when all sorts of books that would never have made it past the royal censorship were being published. Some of the men who took advantage of this opportunity to publish wildly original theological and political ideas, like Gerrard Winstanley and Abiezer Coppe, began getting some attention in the 20th century. Only more recently have the women who published similarly bold pronouncements and proclamations attracted historians' notice. Baker's book brings some of these women vividly to life for the general reader.

None of the dozen-plus women Baker introduces us to is a well-known name to anyone but scholars of the period, but Rose Thurgood, Sarah Wight, Anna Trapnel, Hester Biddle, Mary Fisher, and Jane Lead (to name a few whose stories I found especially interesting) were all remarkable figures. Simply by publishing their experiences and speculations, they were upending hierarchies; they were (a) women, (b) not university-educated, (c) not ordained ministers, and (d) not from the upper classes, and therefore utterly without any of the qualifications or standing that the 17th century would have regarded as conferring authority. That didn't stop them, though. And it turns out what they had to say--about the church, about Christianity, about religion's role in society, and about what is Godly and what is not--still strikes a few chords. Consider this from Jane Lead: "Dive into your own celestiality and see with what matter of spirits you are endued, for in them the powers do entirely lie for transformation." (William Blake's parents may have known Lead's works.)

I wanted immediately to find some of these texts for myself, but most have been out of print for hundreds of years. One can turn up things online--but what I really would like to see is a nice fat Penguin, edited by Baker herself, with choice excerpts from all of these writers. (I have to say that what I found online would benefit from careful editing.) How about it, Penguin?