Herman Wouk died on Saturday. In Commentary, John Podhoretz remembers the writer and his work: “In 2013, I commissioned and published an apology to a writer who I felt had been mistreated in the pages of Commentary—and by my father, no less! ‘How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk’ was the name of the article by Michael J. Lewis, and the occasion for it was the fact that the then-97-year-old Wouk had just published a new novel called The Lawgiver—a comic epistolary novel, no less, concerning the making of a movie about the life of Moses in which Wouk himself appears as a character. As Lewis wrote, ‘Wouk adapts the form to the modern world of instant messaging, faxes, and Skype, and pulls it off successfully—a startling achievement by an author who was born two years before the United States entered World War I.’ Wouk, who died Friday just two weeks shy of his 104th birthday, was extraordinary not only for his age, his durability, and the freshness of his ageless mind, but for his career as a popular novelist determined to explore themes of the deepest seriousness with all their moral complexities for a mass-market audience.”

Many readers will know that during the Second World War, Ernest Hemingway was a correspondent for Collier’s magazine. What you may not know is that, as far as Collier’s was concerned, Hemingway was a disaster: “His editors in New York were unimpressed with the six articles he filed. They were heroic portrayals, as requested, but of himself as much as of the protagonists in the epic events he was covering. Though he’d proven himself a capable war correspondent in Spain, China, and elsewhere, he had grown to dislike journalism. The relationship with Collier’s was cursed from the outset, and by the end of the war it had descended into a spat over an expense claim for about $13,000—or $187,000 in today’s money.”

Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, talks about his first book in 13 years: “For nearly 45 years, Harris has terrified audiences with his grisly novels, which have sold more than 50 million copies, and introduced one of the most memorable fictional villains of all time — up there with Darth Vader and Dracula. But relatively little is known about Harris or his creative process. He doesn’t do book signings or author appearances. He hasn’t given a substantive interview since the mid-1970s, because he prefers to let his work speak for itself, he says. Over the decades, his silence has only fueled public fascination with the elusive man behind the monster. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Cari Mora, his first book in 13 years, is that Harris is willing to talk about it at all. ‘You try to reinvent yourself,’ he says.”

Knopf fires longtime editor who worked with Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Dillard, among others. The cause is “breach of company policy.”

Nick Clairmont reviews Tim Blake Nelson’s play Socrates: “It’s clear that Tim Blake Nelson sincerely loves Socrates. You may know Nelson as an actor from his turns in Coen Brothers works like the impossibly sympathetic and goofy Delmar in O Brother Where Art Thou, freaking out about his buddy being turned into a frog. Or, more recently, you may have seen him as the cheery and violent gunslinging ‘songbird’ Buster Scruggs on Netflix. Now he’s written a play, Socrates, currently running at the Public Theater in New York, about the second-most salient self-sacrifice in human history. It’s poignantly set and incredibly cast, conjuring a world of Plato and Aristotle and Aristophanes that’s engrossing. It’s full of love, and it’s full of rage.”

Richard Rex on the return of Jeeves in Ben Schott’s Jeeves and the King of Clubs: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le Vodeouse. Schott is pretty damn good, but he still falls short of the target here and there.”

Essay of the Day:

In Public Books, Eleanor Johnson discusses the responsibilities of the translator in a review of a handful of new translations of ancient literature:

“Wilson’s Odyssey is a marvel: it is beautiful, powerful, present, rich, brave. And I think that if I had only been reading Wilson’s Odyssey for myself, I would have loved it, full stop. But I was also reading it because I was teaching it to a group of Columbia first-year students. In that context, I found myself frustrated. Because Wilson’s Odyssey really is Wilson’s odyssey. She is a splendid poet, and a great translator, but she is also—and I say this as a credit to her—a sharp-eyed, fleet-footed interpreter. Her poem is not just a rendering of the Odyssey, but a reading—her reading—of the Odyssey.

“In the Odyssey, we are supposed to root for Odysseus, but are we supposed to like him? Odysseus is the best at so many things—storytelling, sailing, tricking monsters, charming women—but he is also, as my students often point out, the worst. He lets his own men die. He cheats on his wife. He rarely accepts blame for his conduct. He’s a murderer. Homer registers Odysseus’s ethical complexity in a host of epithets—polytropos, polymetis, polymechanos, and polytlas. He is the man of many turns, the man of many means, the man of many devices, and the man of many torments. Are we, then, supposed to admire Odysseus for his cunning, for his resourcefulness, for his sorrows, for his devices? Or are we to recognize—as the prefix poly- urges us to do—that Odysseus’s nature may be multiplicitous, unpredictable, inconsistent, and, hence, undecipherable? Yes, he is the man of many sufferings, but whose sufferings are they, anyway? His own, to be sure, but also the sufferings of those to whom he brings suffering. He is the torment of the Phaiakians. He is the torment of the Cyclops. He is the torment of all of his crewmen, who die en route to Ithaca under his leadership. Odysseus is a hero, but he is also a villain. Homer’s Odyssey makes readers recognize and wrangle with their willingness to root for a villain, to get behind someone who is, in many ways, quite terrible.

“My only complaint against Wilson’s Odysseus is that she reduces that ethical ambiguity and ambivalence. For her, Odysseus is ‘lord of lies.’ Not a lot of ambiguity there. Now, having read Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I too have a hard time seeing Odysseus’s conduct in anything other than condemnatory terms. Wilson’s Odysseus—lying and sadistic as he is—is my Odysseus, too. But it’s decisively not Homer’s Odysseus, precisely because Homer is not decisive about Odysseus. Wilson’s interpretation of Odysseus’s moral character takes out of the poem the ethical kaleidoscopism that makes it such an ecstatic puzzle to teach and learn.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Santa Maria del Fiore

Poem: Andrew Frisardi, “Stream”

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