Archives for 2004

“Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors, or the architect his three dimensions. In composition, the triad or its direct extensions can never be avoided for more than a short time without completely confusing the listener. If the whim of an architect should produce a building in which all those parts which are normally vertical and horizontal (the floors, the walls and the ceilings) were at an oblique angle, a visitor would not tarry long in this perhaps ‘interesting’ but useless structure. It is the force of gravity, and no will of ours, that makes us adjust ourselves horizontally and vertically. In the world of tones, the triad corresponds to the force of gravity. It serves as our constant guiding point, our unit of measure, even in those sections of compositions which avoid it.”

Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition (1937, trans. Arthur Mendel)

Supermaud has a review in this week’s Washington Post Book World. It’s really, really good.

(I do, however, have a question: why didn’t she mention her blog in the reviewer’s bio?)

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose the following:

I’m the editor of an important book-review supplement. You’re a well-known professional writer of good repute. I commission a review of a controversial book from you. You submit a piece that is extremely strident in tone (but not obscene or actionably libelous) and with whose political implications I disagree very strongly. What should I do?

Here are some possible answers:

(A) Kill the review without further discussion.

(B) Rewrite and publish the review without consulting you.

(C) Insist that you rewrite the review to bring it into line with my views.

(D) Insist that you rewrite the review, leaving the opinions intact but toning down the rhetoric considerably.

(E) Sit on the review for two months, then run it in the back of the book.

(F) Run the review on time and feature it prominently, but with a disclaimer stating that it does not represent my views.

(G) Run the review on time and feature it prominently.

These things happen. They’ve all happened to me at one time or another. But if you answered anything but (G), you have no business being a book-review editor. Period. End of discussion. And if I did anything but (G), my guess is that you’d post a violent anti-me rant on your blog (assuming you had a blog) before the sun went down, accusing me of censorship, prior restraint, and every other awful thing you could think of.

Of course I’m talking about Leon Wieseltier’s review
of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint in this week’s New York Times Book Review. And Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is an old friend of mine (with whom I have not discussed this matter), meaning that you’re perfectly welcome to disregard anything I have to say in light of that disclosure. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the First Commandment of Book-Review Editing is that a review commissioned from a professional writer should be published essentially as is, unless it’s actionably libelous or incompetently written (by which I mean “written,” not “argued”). To kill, rewrite, or request the revision of a review because you disagree with what it says smacks of censorship, perhaps not de jure but certainly de facto, and compromises the integrity of your publication.

Like him or not–and I don’t, to put it mildly–Leon Wieseltier is a distinguished editor and writer who runs one of the most admired book-review sections in the magazine business. If you ask him to review a book for you, it’s on the assumption that you’ll run what he writes. If I asked any of you to review a book for me, it would be on the same assumption.

I’m not defending Checkpoint, which I haven’t read. I’m not defending Wieseltier, whose writing I don’t admire, meaning that I wouldn’t have asked him to review Checkpoint in the first place. I’m not defending Wieseltier’s review, which I thought inadequately argued to the point of unseriousness (I think Beatrice gets this just right). I’m not holding forth on the complexity of life in the bloody crossroads (though I think it’s worth pointing out that a novelist who writes novels with political content invites political comment–you can’t have it both ways). I’m just trying, not for the first time, to explain how the book-review business works, and to encourage the many bloggers who are understandably angry about Wieseltier’s review to ask themselves some searching questions about how they think it ought to work.

Start with this one: how would you feel if you thought a review of yours had been killed because of the political views you expressed in it? Or if the editor excused his decision to kill the review by telling you, “I don’t feel that you’ve made your case”?

Then try this one: if you were the editor of a magazine, how would you feel if your readers took it for granted that you agreed with every word printed in it?

UPDATE: The Elegant Variation responds:

I don’t think a single blogger is taking issue with Wieseltier because he evinces political ideas we might disagree with. We object because he didn’t fulfill his brief as a book reviewer. (If his piece had appeared in The Week in Review, I doubt you’d have heard a peep about it.) Let me pose yet another counter-scenario – I manage to land a NYTBR freelance gig and, reviewing a controversial novel, I hand in, word-for-word, the piece in question. What do you think my future as a reviewer would look like?

Of course I see what Mark means, but it’s beside my point: when you ask professional writers to review books for you, you should print what they write, whether you like it or not. I suspect that a lot of people who are weighing in on this issue think otherwise, and I wonder if they realize how slippery a slope they’re standing on.

A Boy at the Hogarth Press is Richard Kennedy’s slender, unassuming memoir of the time he spent working at Leonard Woolf’s publishing house in 1928, when Kennedy was sixteen. As the flap copy has it:

He provides a delightful glimpse into the everyday comings and goings of the Bloomsbury Group and an affectionate recollection of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at work; and, like Lely’s portrait of Cromwell, this record does not omit the warts.

“Affectionate” may be going a bit far. Both Woolfs come off here as more than a little cold, self-absorbed, and even absurd. Bevis Hillier, who provided the book’s brief introduction, notes:

[Kennedy] was of no consequence to the paladins of Bloomsbury. There was no reason to exercise their wit and charm on him. He saw them at their most unguarded and least artificial. That is what makes his account so fascinating.

And it is, both as a irreverent sketch of Leonard and Virginia and as a glimpse of coterie publishing in 1920s London. It takes the form of a diary, despite having been written forty years after the fact, and Kennedy nicely captures the breezy capriciousness that can characterize both diary-writing and sixteen-year-old boys.

Here’s a taste:

I went to supper with the Woolfs. We had strawberries and cream. Mrs W was in a very happy mood. She said she had been to a nightclub the night before and how marvellous it was inventing new foxtrot steps. I thought LW’s back looked a bit disapproving as he was dishing out the strawberries. The other guest was George Rylands, a very good-looking young man who had worked for the Woolfs before going to university. We were publishing a book by him called Words and Poetry and McKnight Kauffer had done a design for the cover. George Rylands egged Mrs W on to talk about how much she enjoyed kicking up her heels. I couldn’t help feeling a little shocked.

Some people came in with huge bundles of flowers to give her. They had been commissioned to write an article about dirt-track racing. As they were very hard up, they were very anxious to get the job, but the editor had turned down their manuscripts. Mrs W had come to their rescue and written a description of the sport, in which she had compared the roaring machines and the arc lights to a medieval tournament.

Some more people came in after supper. Mrs Woolf started rolling her shag cigarettes. She gave one to an American lady who nearly choked to death.

She started talking about the Hogarth Press in a way that I thought didn’t please LW very much, saying it was like keeping a grocer’s shop. I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind rather dreamy way she looks at you. She described Mrs Cartwright as having the step of an elephant and the ferocity of a tiger, which gives a very false impression as Ma Cartwright has no ferocity at all, although she does charge about everywhere. She also described her sliding down the area steps on her bottom, during the frost.

I consider it bad form to laugh at your employees.

All goes well enough until the young Kennedy makes a mistake that gums up Hogarth’s plans for a uniform edition of a Very Important Author: Virginia Woolf herself.

LW had returned from Rodmell in a towering rage. Apparently the whole Uniform Edition project has been ruined by me because I have unwittingly instructed Spalding & Hodge to cut the paper the wrong size.

LW brought back a number of sacks of apples and potatoes from Rodmell and I tried to help him hump them up the stairs, but he would not accept any assistance from me. He refuses to speak to me. He had Gossling in and gave him a terrific tongue lashing. Gossling’s cheeks went quite pale.

I suppose I have really got the sack. LW says I can’t be trusted to do anything but wrap up parcels and that I am the most frightful idiot he has ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools.

I know, I know: beware the testimony of bitter, sacked employees. What made me trust Kennedy’s account, though, is that he doesn’t pretend to have been better than his famous employers. His faults and foibles are less magnified than theirs because they aren’t indulged by everyone around him. But the narrator of this diary is generally callow, petty, insecure, and just plain clueless. Because Kennedy is not at all invested in making his younger self seem very likable or reliable, it’s paradoxically easier to credit his unsparing portraits of others. When I finished the book I wasn’t thinking “Oh, nasty Woolfs” so much as “Oh, foolish humans.” A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a nifty little book, and of course a must-read for Bloomsbury fans.

As regular readers know, I saw two out-of-town plays last week, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and No

I just added several new blogs to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Check ’em out. If you can’t figure out which ones are new, check ’em all out. Think what you could be missing!

P.S. I think I may also have accidentally deleted one blog whose name begins with “S.” If you’re the victim, please send me an e-mail.

“He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice.”

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

From the 92nd St. Y:

NEW YORK, NY: August 5, 2004