Literary Studies

In his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work. Asserting the primacy of her later poetry, the ‘war trilogy’ (1942-44) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Pearson recovers H.D. from her accepted but ‘inadequate’ typecasting as an Imagist, identifying her deployment of Freud as ‘a great mythologist’ in her highly personal engagement with hermetic and kabbalistic sources.

Colm Tóibín has that special distinction among contemporary writers of being both a first-rate novelist and an acutely discerning critic. In recent years, as well as publishing some magnificent novels, among them Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024), he has written searching critical studies of other writers, including Elizabeth Bishop (2015). His latest critical work, On James Baldwin, was published in 2024 to coincide with the centenary of Baldwin’s birth. It grew out of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities that Tóibín delivered at Brandeis University, but it also draws on a long and passionate engagement with Baldwin’s work, including an essay on Baldwin and Barack Obama published in the New York Review of Books in 2008.

Fredric Jameson, who died in September 2024 at the age of ninety, was one of the great literary and cultural critics of our time. He spent most of his academic career at Duke University in North Carolina and published two books around the time of his death: Inventions of a Present just before, The Years of Theory just after. The first is a collection of essays on the novel originally written between 1972 and 2022, mostly for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. The second is a transcript of a seminar series on French cultural thought between 1945 and the 1990s that Jameson taught at Duke in the first semester of 2021, at the age of eighty-six. These classes were recorded for posterity because they took place during the Covid era and were captured on the video technology he was using for teaching.

Like its precursor movements in the modernist avant-garde (Futurism, Cubism, Dada), Surrealism was primarily initiated as an innovation in poetry. The central Surrealist activities were the collaborative experiments in automatic writing, influenced by psychologist Pierre Janet’s Psychic Automatism (1889) and, in poetics, by Pierre Reverdy’s theory of the image as ‘the juxtaposition of two more or less distanced realities’. These experiments, undertaken between 1919 and 1923 by André Breton and his associates (Phillippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and others), provide the theoretical basis for Breton’s 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, the main tenets of which he would follow consistently for the next forty years.

In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fintan O’Toole seizes on this self-serving, deluded commentary as an instance of a widespread misconception of Shakespeare’s tragic art and one that can be traced, in part, to the playing fields of Eton.

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

There is a moment early on in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – think of it as the novel’s opening gambit, the disturbance which sets its plot in motion – when the impish Clarisse McClellan attempts to rouse the book’s stolid and otherwise self-possessed protagonist, Guy Montag, from the partial oblivion in which he lives his life. She shadows him on his walk home from work one evening, verbally prodding him in the hope of puncturing what is evidently less a form of sincere conviction than it is a state of unthinkingness. After Montag rebuffs her questions one time too many, Clarisse finally complains, ‘You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.’