Joe Moshenska, _Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton_

 “MOSHENSKA HAS WRITTEN a new kind of literary biography,” announces the blurb from Adam Phillips on the back of Making Darkness Light, which is just the sort of thing that makes you mutter, “pfft, yeah, right,” but having read the book I can only agree.

Moshenska fulfills all the key criteria of a literary biographer. One, he has the archive down cold; he’s a genuine Milton scholar. Two, he has an excellent grasp of the historical context in which Milton lived, not only of the unbelievably messy political-cum-theological controversies of that time in England,, but of what was going down on the continent as well. Three, he has a lively understanding of why Milton’s work is still interesting all these centuries later, what the unique pleasures of reading him are.

For mastery of the archive, you might say Barbara Lewalski has the advantage of him; for grasp of 17th century controversy, Christopher Hill may surpass him; for seeing why Milton’s poetic imagination still gets to us, especially in its representation of becoming, of unfolding process, Regina Schwartz may have an edge. But can one book combine the virtues of all those essential Miltonists in a well-paced, ingeniously organized, vividly written 390 pages? Moshenska has written it.

And that’s not all. As Phillips’s blurb notes,  Moshenska’s book is also “glancingly a memoir,” but not at all in any self-indulgent way. He travels to many of the places Milton visited or lived in, giving his impressions of what they are like now, always deepening his portrait of Milton as he does so, especially of young Milton’s European tour. He is also candid about being an atheist and a Jew, culturally separated from Milton in a couple of significant ways, yet turns that separation to account as well, making his insights into Milton’s thinking all the mote striking for those differences. 

It took me a while to appreciate Milton; on first reading him at 19, I admit, I wasn’t at all sure he was worth the effort. But now I find my appreciation ever growing, and Moshenska’s book ha done a lot to deepen it.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, _Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation_

 IT’S ONE OF the leading conundrums of our time: why do evangelical Christians so fervently support Donald Trump? Not only is he a twice-divorced adulterer and sexual assaulter, which would seem to bar him from consideration for people as keen on sexual morality as the evangelicals are, but he seems also to have no familiarity with or genuine commitment to Christianity itself (seen, for example, in his reference to “Two Corinthians”).

Meghan O’Gieblyn argued years back that evangelicals saw Trump as a Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan prince who supported and encouraged the true prophet Daniel (= Mike Pence?), and I have heard similar arguments that they see Trump as Cyrus, the gentile king who delivered Israel out of its bondage to a hostile government. Helpful…but I think Du Mez has the best explanation yet.

In a nutshell, she argues that white evangelicals in the USA have long been energetic in turning Christianity into a prop for patriarchy. She begins at the the turn of the 20th century, with the “muscular Christianity” of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday and takes a close look at the mid-century efflorescence of John Wayne and Billy Graham, but really digs in when showing how pushing back against second wave feminism shot to the top of the agenda for evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s. Patriarchy was taking a hit—women working outside the home, practicing sexual freedom, not having babies—and God was recruited into the effort to Make Men Great Again.

I’m amazed at the sheer perseverance Du Mez must have had to trawl through the mountains of self-help guides to reclaiming masculinity written by evangelical men for evangelical men—not only the famous ones, like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and the Promise Keepers, but weird, impossible-to-mainstream ones John Eldredge, Steve Farrar, and Mark Driscoll, with their celebration of William Wallace as the exemplary Christian man—not the real William Wallace, of course, but the one played by Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

If a ruthless, sword-wielding, revenge-seeking warrior with blue facepaint is your idea of a Christian hero, well…you’re ready for Trump, aren’t you? If you see Jesus as a brawny, straight-talking dude who took no shit and probably knocked out a couple of centurions as he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, you are really ready for Trump.

Du Mez’s final chapter addresses why the evangelicals can so readily forgive Trump his wide and frequent deviations from strict sexual morality: they have had lots and lots and lots of practice, as Du Mez shows with story after story of evangelical star preachers caught with their pants down.

I found myself wondering (not that she owed her readers any explanation) what Du Mez’s own relationship to Christianity is. She teaches at Calvin College, which is steeped in the Dutch Reformed tradition, but probably Calvin is willing to hire faculty of other faiths or of no faith. She seems to have seen this whole phenomenon from very close up, though. 

I’d like to buy a copy and just slip it onto the shelves of the local evangelical bookstore. 

Kaveh Akbar, ed., _The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine_

 BREATHTAKING GEOGRAPHICAL RANGE, with every continent represented, and the widest chronological range possible, starting with Enheduanna, “the earliest attributable author in all human literature,” who wrote in the 23rd century BCE, and ending with three still-living poets. The anthology works with a broad idea of “spiritual” as well, with poems reflecting mystical experience, of course, but also poems of doubt and despair. We get bewilderment as well as affirmation, poems of praise and poems of terror (Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), poems of our many kinds of relationship with the dead.

Akbar includes a good number of the greatest hits, so to speak, the poems you would immediately assume would be included in an anthology with this title: Rumi, Hafez, St. Francis of Assisi, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, George Herbert. We also get a few curveballs—I didn’t expect to see Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, or Nâzim Hikmet here, but the poems Akbar chooses work beautifully in this context. And there is a wealth of poems by poets I had not even heard of: the Inuit poet Uvavnuk, Sarojini Naidu, Edith Södergran…this would be a long list, actually, so I will stop here.

The book makes a worthwhile read, but there are some eccentric decisions, great and small. For a small one: each poet gets a page with name, dates, place of origin, title of poem, and, when called for, translator. Those poets from a politically distinct nation-state are identified as coming from Ghana, Chile, Vietnam, and so on. But all the poets from the United States are said to be from “America.” This seems a little perverse.

Also eccentric: 

Only one poem from each poet? It seems like one could make an exception for Rumi or Dickinson.

Including Rilke’s Second Duino Elegy in David Young’s very idiosyncratic translation. I had to go re-read Stephen Mitchell to clear my palate.

The selections from the big canonical names go for the famous bits rather than something that might be less familiar but better suited to the rest of the anthology. Why Canto III of Inferno, not “En la sua volontade é nostra pace”? Why a Homeric passage in which the gods comment on Odysseus’ situation and a very similar Virgilian passage of the gods commenting on Aeneas’, both of which seem mainly exposition, when we could have had the final choruses of Oedipus at Colonus or The Bacchae or Artemis's final speech in Hippolytus? Why Satan’s speech on top of Mt. Niphates rather than something from Samson Agonistes?

No T. S. Eliot? Worse, no H. D.?

Well, you can’t please everyone. 

Lucy Ives, _Loudermilk, or, The Real Poet, or, The Origin of the World_

 IT OCCURRED TO me recently that, much as I would like to read a biography of Jorie Graham, I am unlikely ever to see one. Literary biography does not attract scholars quite as magnetically as it did in the days of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, and George Painter—it is no longer the royal road to academic eminence—and, more crucially, I am only four years younger than Graham and will likely be on the wrong side of the grass before her first biographer has even gotten a research grant. 

Fortunate for me, then, that Graham is glimpsable in a couple of interesting novels: Samantha Lan Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (see LLL for Feb 26, 2023) and this one. Moreover, Ives provides a quick sketch of the era when Graham’s marriage to James Galvin was ending, which I suspect will be one of the more compelling chapters of the biography I will not get to read.

Loudermilk is a campus novel, then, but more in the high farce vein than the satirical one, and witty and poignant even when its characters are in embarrassing binds, as they frequently are. The cleverest touch is that Ives builds the plot around the Cyrano trope. Troy Loudermilk is a handsome, campus stud type of guy who sees a graduate creative writing program as the best way to continue to live the life he desires—a nice stipend, access to lots of young women, etc. However, Loudermilk cannot write, so he recruits Harry Rego, a shy friend who can, to accompany him to the prestigious program he has gotten into and write his workshop submissions for him.

Loudermilk/Rego are the hit of the workshop—a big bonus in the novel is that Ives, a poet, can write poems that in their originality and eccentricity do seem like the sort of thing that would draw admiration in a workshop. Loudermilk/Rego's success also fires the envy, naturally, of the workshop’s super-ambitious would-be Top Poet, Anton Beans, whose investigations will eventually topple Loudermilk’s precarious dissimulation. But Harry Rego, one is happy to see, lands on his feet.

Tucked into the novel is the story of Claire Elwil, an aspiring fiction writer with a bad case of impostor syndrome. Her circuitous route to finding her voice and her confidence by writing a short story about an encounter with Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde creates a neat contrapuntal melody to the main plot’s story of fraud and ambition.

Emma Wippermann, _Joan of Arkansas_

 I SPOTTED THIS on the shelves at North Figueroa Bookshop (worth a visit when you are in Los Angeles) and plucked it out, fanboy of La Pucelle that I am. I turned it over to read the back cover and saw a blurb from…Cole Swenson! Ring that item up!

When asked for a contemporary figure comparable to Joan, I usually mention Greta Thunberg. Addressing the U.N. Is not quite the same thing as leading an army, but the two young women had to overcome the same kind of prejudiced resistance—why should we listen to a little thing like you?—and did so through moral clarity and sheer persistence. Wippermann’s take on Joan goes along similar lines, setting her story in the present-day United States and making her a climate activist.

The book begins with “The Legend of Petit Jean,”  for whom a state park in Arkansas is named. Christened Adrienne Dumont, Petit Jean dressed as a male and got taken on as a cabin boy on a French ship to North America in the 18th century. He, she, or they died and was buried in Arkansas before Arkansas was Arkansas or the United States was the United States, giving his, her, or their name to a nearby mountain and the park established much later.

Wippermann’s Joan hails from Arkansas, and in the text’s first main section, “Joan of Arkansas,” written in dramatic form, her voices tell her she must persuade a politician from her state—Charles VII (ha!)—to run on a platform of combating climate change. He does, he wins, then immediately becomes the tool of energy interests. 

In a brilliant move, Wippermann’s next section is a kind of erasure poem carved out of the transcript of the original Joan’s trial for heresy. This is an audacious leap, but it makes the point that her Joan would get the same kind of vilifying pushback that Thunberg got from the people whose profits she endangered, and this campaign would be analogous to Joan’s show trial and martyrdom.

Drama, poetry, and in the concluding section, “The Dove,” fiction—a short story written from the point of view of a devoted and loving friend of Joan’s named…Adrienne. (Perfect.) A wildfire breaks out, as is becoming increasingly common, and (spoiler alert) Joan dies fighting it, but Adrienne sees a dove fly out of the fire…just as a witness saw one fly up as the original Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen.

Joan has inspired a multitude of well-meant but hokey tributes and a few that are actually worthy of her. Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas belongs in that smaller and more distinguished company.

_Granta_ 163, "Best Young British Novelists 5"; Merve Emre, "The Critic and Her Publics" podcast

A SURPRISING NUMBER from Granta's 2023 roundup of the best young British novelists: in the twenty author photos, only five of the novelists are looking right at the camera. All were taken by Alice Zoo, so perhaps it's just a stylistic idiosyncrasy of hers, or maybe it's a new trend. If you are an up and coming new novelist, don't look at the camera. Adds mystery.

A less surprising number: of the twenty best young British novelists, fifteen are women. That surprised me when I first made the count, but on thinking about it, I realized a couple of things.

(1) This has been going on for a while. In 1983 and 1993 there were six women and fourteen men, then eight women and twelve men in 2003. The balance shifted in 2013, with twelve women and eight men, and the 2023 count fits the historical trend. 

(2) And that trend reflects who is actually publishing fiction. For a while now, I've been noticing that the "new fiction" displays in libraries and bookstores have two or three new novels by women for every new one by a man. At least that's true in literary fiction--in the genres, thriller, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, it's closer to fifty-fifty. But women are producing quite a bit more literary fiction than men are, so it's to be expected that 75% of the best young novelists are women.

I'll tell you what I was not expecting, though. Merve Emre's podcast "The Critic and Her Publics" includes her conversations with the "best and most prominent critics working today," as she announces in her introduction to each episode. I've enjoyed every episode--she's had eleven great people on, e.g., Andrea Long Chu, Anahid Nersessian, Christine Smallwood, Lauren Michele Jackson--but, as hinted in the title's pronoun, every one of them was a woman. That 75% of the best young novelists are women makes sense...but none of the "best and most prominent" critics are men? That doesn't sound right.

All of Emre's guests were worth hearing, and there are lots of great women critics who weren't even included; I would love to hear Emre talk with Amia Srinivasan, Ange Mlinko, Meghan O'Gieblyn, Patricia Lockwood, Stephanie Burt, Anna Weiner, or Emily Witt if the podcast continues. 

But no men? Not even one? Martin Filler ? (Too old?) Fintan O'Toole? (Too old and too Irish?) Ta-Nehisi Coates? George Scialabba? (Also too old?) Joshua Cohen? Terrance Hayes? Tom McCarthy? Peter Orner? Mark Greif? 

I mean, women may be doing most of today's best criticism, yes. But not all of it.

Howard Sturgis, _Belchamber_

 HOWARD STURGIS WAS the son of a wealthy American man of business who chose to move his family to London. Sturgis attended Eton and Cambridge and was only in his early thirties when both his parents died, leaving him with an enormous fortune. He bought a handsome house in Windsor, set himself up there with "his stolid, pleasant lover, William Haynes-Smith, known simply as 'the Babe'," and for years entertained an "unending stream" of friends, "many of them younger homosexuals," drawn there by "the lively conversation, the alternate currents of stylish bitchiness and genuine affection, and the studied luxuries" (all quotations are from Edmund White's introduction to the NYRB Books edition). Guests included a panoply of literary men, including Henry James, and a few women, including Edith Wharton, who referred to the rest of the set as her "male wives."

I wish Sturgis had written a novel about the scene at his house, but the one he did write is nonetheless worth reading. Belchamber is about Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, the first-born in (obviously) an aristocratic English family who is still a child when the early death of his father leaves him with a vast fortune and a collection of titles.

Sainty (as he is always called) is, however, in for a hard time. For one thing, as his nickname hints, he is a holy fool, guileless, unsuspecting, unselfish, too good for this world.  For another thing, Sainty is ill at ease with his assigned gender. He likes sewing better than hunting. The word for him in 1904, when the novel was published, would have been "sissy," but we might go with "queer."

Things go about as well for Sainty as they do for Dostoevsky's holy fool, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot, with the added complication of his queerness. Various prospects for happiness open up for Sainty, but something always goes wrong, usually in consequence of someone or other opportunistically taking advantage of Sainty's trust and innocence. The end is heartbreaking.

Sturgis reportedly was quite cast down by Henry James's not liking Belchamber. James's stated reason was that Sturgis did not know the English upper class well enough to present them in a novel, but one wonders if the Master found the portrait of queerness disconcertingly close to home. In any case, kudos to NYRB Books for bringing this unique novel back into print.