• Richard Eder’s view of Ted Hughes is more chilly than my own, but his review of Hughes’s collection of letters, just released stateside, is still worth a read.
• A great interview with Kelly Link, whose new collection of short stories Pretty Monsters I got this past weekend and am loving. (Via Gwenda. She also notes that Link’s previous collection, Magic for Beginners, is now available for free download.)

In the October issue of Poetry, William Logan writes about the responses he received to his review of Hart Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters, which ran last year in the New York Times Book Review. As Logan puts it, “I’ve always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual.” Perhaps inevitably, some readers took issue with this mixed assessment and wrote in “furious” letters to the editor, leading Logan to conclude, “[r]eviewing Crane, if you don’t review him fondly, is like poking a pencil into a hornet’s nest.”
Little of Logan’s experience will surprise anyone who’s ever expressed a dissenting opinion as a critic, but it can be enjoyable to have a look at other people’s hate mail. And an interesting side issue crops up in the essay about the factual, if not critical, errors that Logan made in his review, all of which fell in the review’s first sentence, “Before Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship’s rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley.”
As Crane biographer Paul Mariani pointed out in his own letter to the editor, that sentence contains three errors: Crane was wearing a light topcoat that day, not a jacket, the sea in question wasn’t the Caribbean but the Atlantic, and the water wasn’t “glassy” but had “sizable waves.”
Logan cedes the first two points but notes there’s conflicting opinion among Crane’s four biographers about what exactly the conditions of the water were that day at noon — which then leads him to a nice consideration of the role of fact vs. fantasy in the summing up of someone else’s life (or is it factual truth vs. truth truth?):

Mariani fails in The Broken Tower to describe the roughness of the ocean (he mentions the “impenetrable waters off which the noon sun gleamed,” which doesn’t sound choppy or rugged); Philip Horton in Hart Crane claims the “sea was mild”; and Clive Fisher, quoting Guggenheim in Hart Crane: A Life, says the sea was “like a mirror that could be walked on.” [In a later version of the review] I changed my “glassy sea” to a “violent wake” (the wake, some think, dragged Crane under). On balance, however, the “glassy sea” seems likely.
In his description of Crane’s death, Mariani was attracted to the captain’s notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark–“Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?” This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer’s fantasies–and gruesome fantasies they are–don’t mitigate the critic’s error of fact. (The biographer then throws some of Crane’s purple prose–or rather purple poetry– back at him: “But this time the calyx of death’s bounty gave back neither scattered chapter nor livid hieroglyph.” The allusion is to “At Melville’s Tomb,” but as prose it sounds like a canceled passage by Sir Thomas Browne.) The aggrieved reader’s fondest delusion is that a critic’s sidelong errors undermine a disagreement about taste; yet don’t we prefer Eliot’s opinions, despite his habitual misquotation, to the arguments of some bozo supported by quotes correct to the last nicety? That doesn’t make the errors less embarrassing.

In the run of things, a small scholarly kerfuffle, but one that’s stayed with me, maybe because it’s suggestive of the two great difficulties of writing — how hard it is to enter other people’s minds, to see the world and think as your characters or subjects do (we don’t know what was in Hart Crane’s mind before he leapt, we can’t even agree on what the sea looked like in front of him), and then to actually write well & with accuracy about what you find there. For example, it is hard to write well and with particularity about the sea — whether it is “glassy” or “violent” or “immense” or “wet.” Here, for what it’s worth, is Herman Melville describing conditions at the outset of Benito Cereno, “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that had cooled and set in the smelter’s mould.”

• O happy (yet ominously overcast Gothic) day! From Galleycat, news of Donna Tartt’s third novel.
• The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell makes clear how the poets “developed in tandem”: Editing, inspiring, cold-mugging one another.
• A tour of entrepreneur Jay Walker’s incredible personal library. (Via Gwenda.)

David Foster Wallace appreciations, remembrances and re-prints abound right now. A few addenda you may have missed: The syllabus to a Literary Interpretations class he taught at Pomona (via Book Bench; via Crooked House); the text to the commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005 (if you’re at all interested in DFW you’ve probably already read this one but it merits a re-read); and an old interview he gave to Amherst College’s alumni magazine, where he talks about his five-draft method.
If you didn’t catch it at the time, I also urge you to go read author Erin Hogan’s fine piece on Wallace, which appeared in this space last Friday. Erin notes that DFW didn’t use footnotes to appear clever but “because they are the closest approximations in a literary form to the mass of nonlinear parenthetical thoughts that is the monkey brain of all of us doing its job,” an observation that made my monkey brain cough up these two footnoted thoughts:
1. It was strange, wasn’t it, how the layout of “The Host” in The Atlantic, in which the footnotes were color-coded and looked like molecular globules floating on the page, was an almost too-literal progression of this idea of diagramming thought on paper.
2. I’ve always thought DFW cold-mugged Wittgenstein’s Mistress for parts of Infinite Jest, particularly David Markson’s technique of having a character’s (seemingly) abandoned thoughts re-surface as non sequiturs in later pages. Very rhythmic, like a swimmer surfacing then disappearing then resurfacing again. If it hasn’t already been done, someone should write a paper on that.

When I heard Junot Díaz read last spring, he mentioned how when he started writing he was “stealing from the writers I loved the best. I cold-mugged the books.” Cold-mugging your favorite writers — a fine literary tradition. Reading John Updike’s appreciation of William Maxwell, it was nice to learn this anecdote about Maxwell’s first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, which was first published in 1934 and later suppressed by the author on the grounds it was “stuck fast in it is period” and “hopelessly imitative.”

In a Paris Review interview, [Maxwell] said, “My first novel . . . is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” especially, is imitated in the drifting weave of action and interior reflection, and in the rhythms, paced by commas, of the long descriptive sentences. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I . . . discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character–the homesick servant girl–lock, stock, and barrel from ‘To the Lighthouse.’ ”

I haven’t allowed myself to read David Foster Wallace’s work for the past few years. He’s one of the writers I love best, but I found that whenever I read him, I inevitably started to ape his voice in my own writing, and if you’ve ever written in that style (intentionally or unintentionally) or read a story or essay by someone in the grip of his or her own DFW enthrallment, you know how impossible it is to do what he does as well as he does it, how in lesser hands those crazy sentences — stilted, stacked, lurching and clanking along on their ugly-beautiful legs before suddenly lapsing forward in some improbable, graceful glissade — become just messy, neurotic, overly footnoted whorls. Because the classic DFW sentence, tic-ish as it may be, is when broken down a wonder of precision: The object (person, thing) is observed fully, describing exactingly. The $10 vocabulary words are slotted into place not to be grandiose but because that word is the precise word, the only word, to describe that particular object or action.
The news of Wallace’s death is heartbreaking, and the circumstances make one grieve for him and his family and friends. When speaking about books, I was trained to stick close to the text, to revere it and leave the poor writer alone. And yet with DFW I can’t. I hold him in such great affection (who, among his fans, doesn’t?) — and I feel … well, a terrible sense of loss and sorrow tonight. I have looked to him for so long (forgive the homeliness here but I’ve thought of him more than once as like a favorite quarterback: someone who you look to to see how the game is going), I always thought I’d know him some day, or if I didn’t, that I would at the very least get to see him grow old.
In formulating my sense of DFW character over the years, I’ve enjoyed picking out what points in it seemed the most Midwestern. In interviews and the “The Charlie Rose” appearances, it amused me to see deep Midwestern-ness – e.g., the earnestness, the homely collegial good manners, the clear desire to keep things on an even social footing (rather than to shock and awe), the occasional terrible haircut — commingled with such great genius. And yet these same Midwestern qualities also seemed part and parcel of the writing, manifesting there not as quaintness or some godawful aw-shucksiness, but in a palpable belief in the reader and the reader’s ability to keep up, to get it — that is, to place the reader on an equal footing with himself. Read him and he never panders, he never condescends (even if he does show off). To write and experiment so boldly, to choose to bring home the whole pig whenever you go to market and invite the reader to the table with you as an equal, is to show the greatest respect and generosity. Bless him for that, and bless him as he moves on ahead.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from Jenny Davidson, author of the marvelous new young-adult novel The Explosionist and proprietrix of Light Reading.
In 2007 I fell head over heels in love — with swimming. This led me to spend as much time as I could in the water, but unfortunately one cannot always be swimming. the insatiable desire for ‘swim lit.’ It was difficult to narrow my choices down to five — what about Diana Nyad’s Other Shores, Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero and Sherman Chavoor’s The Fifty-Meter Jungle: How Olympic Swimmers are Made? What about the complete novels of Chris Crutcher?!? But here’s my list, and I hope you will take a dip or two yourself this summer under their watery influence.
1. Waterlog by Roger Deakin. An altogether magical book, rather in the spirit of W. G. Sebald, about ‘wild swimming’: the author breaststrokes his way around Britain’s less tame spaces and recounts his adventures in angelic prose. (See also.)
2. Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. At age fifteen, Cox set a world record swimming the English Channel. Later she swam across the Bering Strait at a time when political strain made it very doubtful whether she would obtain permission to set foot on Russian soil. An inspiring book by an exceptional athlete whose ability to tolerate very low water temperatures made possible the feat alluded to in the book’s title.
3. The Science of Swimming by ‘Doc’ Counsilman. For the hard-core swim-obsessed only! Almost mystically redolent of mid-20th-century American sports science, Counsilman’s tome includes gems like the following: “The Utopian view of an existence without any form of stress, either physical or mental, is not conducive to the development of a person well prepared for existence in a competitive society.”
4. In Lane Three, Alex Archer by Tessa Duder. A wonderful young-adult novel with a strong autobiographical basis; like her protagonist Alex Archer, Tessa Duder was a talented New Zealand swimmer in the late 1950s with her eyes set on the highest goals in competitive swimming. Appealingly introduces the term ‘togs’ (for bathing suit) and made me grateful for the use of polyester and lycra rather than itchy sagging wool for the suits one wears in the pool nowadays.
5. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Finally, this last selection is incidentally a great novel of swimming, cycling and running, and should be adopted by triathletes everywhere as their literary inspiration.

• Jessa Crispin considers the glut of biographies out there about the various members of the James family and considers the omissions to be found in the latest bio of the family, House of Wits. That biography, written by Paul Fisher, also received an unfavorable review from Hermione Lee.
• La belle et la bête: Eloisa James writes interestingly about the spate of recent romances featuring beastly metamorphoses. (Via Galleycat.)
• And the Translators Association of the Society of Authors (good old TAOTSOA) gives us its list of the 50 outstanding translations of the last 50 years and validates my preference for the Michael Glenny translation of Master and the Margarita. (Via The Lit Saloon.)