Neil Corcoran's Wrong-Headed Criticism of Seamus Heaney

I’m currently reading Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (1998). In the Preface, Corcoran says he hopes his book “offers some original and provocative readings and re-readings” of Heaney’s work. Well, it didn’t take him long to provoke me. In the book’s first chapter, titled “Roots and Readings: Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), he says some of Death of a Naturalist’s poems, including “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed,” “tend toward pastiche.” He writes,

These poems have their eyes so eagerly trained on The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes’s first two books, that, even allowing for the element of comedy that undoubtedly inheres in them too, they tend towards pastiche.

I disagree. Ted Hughes wrote about hawks, crows, sheep, eels; Heaney wrote about turkeys, cows, trout. Both wrote about the natural world. But that’s where the similarity ends. Hughes’s governing aesthetic is violence. Helen Vendler says of him, “This is a poet who wants to write words like “Blood ball swollen” and “sliced … throat strings” and “hacked-off head” (The Music of What Happens, 1988). Heaney’s aesthetic, in Death of a Naturalist, is pleasure – sensuous, tactile description: “He once complained extravagantly / In an overture of gobbles; / He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud / With a grey flick of his Confucian eye” (“Turkeys Observed”); “It seems she has swallowed a barrel. / From forelegs to haunches, / her belly is slung like a hammock” (“Cow in Calf”); “Hangs, a fat gun-barrel, / deep under arched bridges / or slips like butter down / the throat of the river” (“Trout”); “Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions, / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations” (“The Diviner”). 

Corcoran rightly praises certain Death of a Naturalist poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” “Blackberry-Picking,” for their striking alliteration and onomatopoeia. But his characterization of “The Diviner,” “Trout,” “Cow in Calf,” and “Turkeys Observed” as “pastiche” is wrong-headed. Heaney imitated no one. 

February 17 & 24, 2020 Issue

Michaelangelo Matos’s “Night Life: Classixx,” in this week’s issue, is a beauty:

The limpid saxophone solo, redolent of eighties High Street fashion, will always have a place on the dance floor if the Los Angeles duo Classixx has anything to say about it. Michael David and Tyler Blake’s relaxed disco stomp and heavily filtered hooks emit the bawdy suavity of Parisian house; in December, they dedicated a live remake of their single “Love Me No More” to the late French producer Phillippe Zdar.

That “relaxed disco stomp and heavily filtered hooks emit the bawdy suavity of Parisian house” enacts the impeccable rhythm it describes.

Rob Garver's Wonderful "What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael"

I saw Rob Garver’s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019) last night at City Cinema. I enjoyed it immensely. A lot is packed into its one hour and thirty-eight minutes. Swatches of dozens of great movies are artfully interwoven with clips of Kael talking, and of others commenting on her life and work. I particularly enjoyed the way it’s structured around key Kael pieces like “Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood,” “Shoeshine,” “Breathless,” “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “Raising Kane,” and “Tango.” For Kael, it was all about working out her responses. And she did that right there on the page. As she said in the Introduction to her superb For Keeps (1994), 

A friend of mine says that he learned from reading me that “content grows from language, not the other way around.” That’s a generous way of saying that I let it rip, that I don’t know what I think until I’ve said it. The reader is in on my thought processes.

February 10, 2020 Issue

Two of my favorite dishes – lasagna and tiramisu – figure in Hannah Goldfield’s excellent “Tables For Two: Leo,” in this week’s issue. Of lasagna, she writes,

At Leo, you can order a gorgeous slab of it: pillowy layers of thin noodles, stretchy provola cheese, and bright, tart marinara, with a bit of bite from crackly edges and the finely chopped blanched kale folded into the sauce. 

Mm, I’ll have a slice of that, please. As for tiramisu, Goldfield writes two descriptions, one of a tiramisu that she associates with “the kind of red-sauce joint whose charmingly chintzy atmosphere is more alluring than its food”:

It seemed too often to be a stodgy, compacted mass of ladyfingers and mascarpone cream, chalky with cocoa powder and flavorless but for blunt hits of Marsala wine and coffee, as if it were trying to sober itself up.

And the other is a description of Leo’s tiramisu:

Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. 

Goldfield is a master of carnal writing. I devour it.

Best of the Decade: #11 Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

Photo by Carolyn Drake, from Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #11 pick – Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (April 19, 2010). It’s about a chef, Musa Dağdeviren, “who has masterminded an ambitious project to document, restore, and reinvent Turkish food culture.” 

The piece begins with a visit to Dağdeviren’s restaurant, Çiya Sofrasi. Batuman writes,

To get to the restaurant Çiya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ferry ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him. 

Those are the first lines of the piece, and they totally grab me. I love their exoticism (“Çiya Sofrasi,” “old city of Istanbul,” “Asian side of the Bosporus”). And I love that “me”; it tells me that Batuman is writing from personal experience – my favourite form of journalism.

The piece unfolds in five exquisite scenes: a meal at Çiya Sofrasi; an excursion to Kandira; lunch at a Kandira fish shop; a visit to a Bozburun turkey farm; and a tour of Dağdeviren’s country mansion. The theme running throughout is Dağdeviren’s constant search for Turkish authenticity.

Çiya Sofrasi

At Çiya Sofrasi, Batuman and her friend sample a number of dishes:

The first sign of anything unusual was the kisir, a Turkish version of tabouli, which had an indescribable freshness and suddenly reminded you that wheat is a plant. The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make. Likewise, the stewed eggplant dolmas resembled my grandmother’s version even more intensely, somehow, than those dolmas resembled themselves.

As the meal progresses, Batuman notices that the tastes grow stronger and more varied:

One inscrutable salad contained no recognizable ingredient except jewel-like pomegranate kernels, nestled among seaweed-colored, twig-shaped objects and mysterious chopped herbs, nutty and slightly bitter. A stew uniting beef, roasted chestnuts, quince, and dried apricots in an enigmatic greenish broth tugged at some multilayered memory involving my mother’s quince compote. 

Batuman is a superb describer. Here, for example, is her depiction of “an array of marvellous, doll-like desserts” in Çiya Sofrasi’s window:

Candied tomatoes, dull-red translucent disks, resembled ancient talismans. Miniature candied eggplants had a troublingly sentient appearance, inky and squidlike. Kerebiç—round cakes with pistachio filling—were served with a gooey sauce. My friend thought it might be whipped cream; I thought it was some kind of high-end marshmallow. Finally, I asked a waiter. He said it was made from “the pulverized root of a local tree from Antakya.”

Kandira Market

Batuman joins Dağdeviren for an excursion to Kandira, “two hours east of Istanbul, on the Black Sea coast.” They visit the town’s market. Batuman writes, 

After a second circuit, during which he bought a total of thirty kilos each of borage and mallow, seven kilos of corn poppy, six kilos of curly dock, and twenty bunches of watercress, Musa seemed to relax. He made some sundry purchases: buffalo-milk yogurt and two kinds of honey, one made with chestnut and linden flower, the other with chestnut and rhododendron. Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury. In Turkey, the turkey is called hindi (“Indian”) and is often roasted on New Year’s Eve, which was two days away.

That turkey description (“sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”) is excellent.

Fish Shop Lunch

When Batuman and Dağdeviren finish shopping in the market, they look for a place to have lunch. Batuman writes,

For lunch, we walked to the town center, which Musa described as “authentic,” his highest term of praise. There were three busy commercial streets, whose businesses were all local. “There aren’t any streets like this left in Istanbul. Look, they have a simit oven, and no Simit Sarayi.” A simit is a pretzel-like ring of bread covered in sesame seeds. Simit Sarayi (saray means “palace”) is a ubiquitous Turkish chain whose owners have plans to expand into Europe. “They sell what I call pastane simit”—a pastane is a French-style pastry shop—“and now that’s what people are used to,” Musa said. “In the old days, every region had its own way of making simit. There’s an incredible variety of simit, and it’s all being lost.”

That last sentence is a variation on the piece’s main theme: Dağdeviren’s determination to recover the foods that Turkey is forgetting. 

Dağdeviren suggests lunch at a fish shop. While they eat, Dağdeviren talks about, among other things, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Turkey known as the “Safranbolu Houses”:

“Nobody lives there anymore—it’s all pensions and hotels,” he said. “You might go to a place like that once, just to see it, but you won’t go back a second time.” The moral of his story was that “the moment you say, ‘Hey, let’s revive this’—no matter what it is—it’s finished.” This is exactly the paradox that Çiya has avoided. “The people’s” lost food is rescued not only from disappearance or mechanization but also from foodie fetishism. The restaurant is an ark in which every tiny species is salvaged, represented, preserved—but still alive, changing, and growing.

Turkey Farm

After lunch, they drive to a turkey farm in a village called Bozburun. Dağdeviren buys four female turkeys. Batuman vividly describes the killing of the first turkey:

The farmer’s wife handed the first one to her husband, who bent down and swiftly cut off its head with a sharp knife. A loud wheezing came from the stump of the neck, which emitted irregular spurts of blood. The dog stood up slowly and ambled over.

“Hoşt!” the farmer shouted. This is a Turkish word used exclusively for the purpose of chasing away dogs—there are different words for chasing away cats and poultry—but this dog did not respond. Finally, the farmer tossed the turkey’s tiny head some distance away, and the dog went off to look for it. The farmer’s wife handed him the next turkey.

The other turkeys seemed to view these developments with mild concern. Those which had been walking in the direction of the creek casually changed course and walked elsewhere, with one exception: a stately male, with a red wattle and an enormous fan of back feathers, marched pompously, deliberately, almost sinisterly before the scene of carnage. “What could he be thinking?” Musa asked.

What an amazing scene! The wheezing from the neck stump, the farmer shouting “Host!” at the dog, the pompously marching male turkey – Chekhov couldn’t have rendered it better. 

Country Mansion

On the drive back to Istanbul, Batuman and Dağdeviren visit a property that Dağdeviren recently bought “in order to realize his long-cherished dream of a Turkish culinary institute. The idea was to provide a center for Turkish food culture: a school, a library, a research institute, and a publishing house.” The scene unfolds like a Chekhov short story:

By the time we reached the property, night had fallen. We came to a pair of imposing metal gates and Musa rang a bell, several times, to no effect. Banging on the gates with his fist, he began shouting to someone called Ismail. Then he picked up a rock and started beating it against the metal. After five minutes of this, the groundskeeper, who is hard of hearing, appeared, bowing and apologizing. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said, unlocking the gate.

They drive in. Batuman says,

A mansion loomed before us, and Musa stopped the car, leaving the headlights on. As we walked toward the mansion, I became aware of the presence all around us of enormous, shadowy formations, which proved to be topiary animals. A monstrous dolphin reared on its tail in the middle of the circular drive, and, in the murk, I thought I could make out a stag and a bear on the lawn.

The piece brilliantly ends in a blaze of light, a glimpse of yet another one of those surreal topiary animals, and then a final dissolve to darkness:

Entering the mansion, he switched on the electric lights and, one by one, rooms materialized around us. Musa told me his plans for a library, a reading room, a kitchen with stations for students, conference rooms, lecture halls, editorial offices. There would be guest rooms for visiting scholars and writers. He and his family would live on the top floor. He showed me a spot he was considering for his desk, in a window overlooking a giant topiary alligator. Back downstairs, he lingered a moment in the front hall before turning off the lights. Everything dissolved again into darkness, and we got back in the car to return to Istanbul.

Nothing dramatic happens in “The Memory Kitchen,” unless you count the killing of that female turkey. Yet it delights from beginning to end. Part of that delight is sourced in its arresting material – Musa Dağdeviren, Çiya Sofrasi, the Kandira market, the Bozburun turkey farm, etc. And part of it is in its marvellous writing – attentive, specific, vital, perceptive. The piece is double bliss. 

February 3, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody’s “In Revival” note on Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 Stranger Than Paradise contains this superb line: 

Jarmusch lets time run free in stylized and static long takes that blend his characters’ Beckettian inertia with the quasi-documentary fascination of the idiosyncratic performers just being there.

Interestingly, Pauline Kael mentioned Beckett in her 1984 review of the same movie: 

The images, like the characters’ lives, are so emptied out that Jarmusch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those blackouts have something of the effect of Beckett’s pauses: they make us look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently – because we know we’re in an artist’s control. But Jarmusch’s world of lowlifers in a wintry stupor is comic-strip Beckett. [“Faked Out, Cooled Out, Bummed Out,” The New Yorker, November 12, 1984; included in her 1985 collection State of the Art]

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: HK Food Court” brims with sensuous description, including this scrumptious paragraph:

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips.

That “staining my rice with neon drips” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I devoured it.

Postscript: George Steiner 1929 - 2020

George Steiner (Photo by Peter Marlow)

Back in the 70s, when I started reading The New Yorker, its book reviewers were John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, and George Steiner – heavy-hitters all. Of the three, Steiner was the heaviest – the Boog Powell of book critics. What do I mean by “heavy”? He could crush a book he didn’t like. For example, in his “Old Man and the Sea” (The New Yorker, April 23, 1979), a review of Frederick R. Karl’s Joseph Conrad: Three Lives, he wrote,

It is difficult to believe that anyone could produce an almost unreadable biography of as vivid a figure as Joseph Conrad, but Professor Frederick R. Karl, of the City College of New York, has succeeded in doing so. His turgid leviathan “Joseph Conrad: Three Lives” is a triumph of the academic, in the trivializing sense of the word, over the living. It is composed in a style of the texture of ageing jello.

He could also praise lavishly. In his “Rare Bird” (The New Yorker, November 30, 1981), a review of Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, he said of Davenport’s writing,

Seemingly short sentences and fragmentary phrases open, via unexpected commas, into sequences as opulent as Japanese paper blossoms dropped in clear water.

For me, Steiner’s most memorable piece is “The Cleric of Treason” (The New Yorker, December 8, 1980), a powerful reflection on the British art-historian turned spy, Anthony Blunt. That’s the one that unforgettably ends with Steiner's thunderous “Damn the man.” The piece is included in his excellent collection George Steiner at The New Yorker (2009). 

January 27, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I thoroughly enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Aquavit,” particularly her descriptions of the Arctic Bird’s Nest (“I was as pleased to try a marbled medallion of Mangalitsa pork collar, as tender and shaggy as corned beef and plated with a tart, crimson umeboshi-plum purée, as I was to revisit the Arctic Bird’s Nest dessert, a dramatic trompe-l’oeil featuring white-chocolate eggs with sea-buckthorn-curd yolks”) the dill potato chips (“Here is where you’ll find those remarkable sausages, plus dill potato chips sliced so thin they’re as translucent as green stained glass, yet somehow sturdy enough to hold up to onion dip”), and the princess cake (“A fat wedge of princess cake—whipped cream, raspberry jam, and vanilla sponge layered beneath a thick sheet of candy-green marzipan—looks exactly the way it does on “The Great British Baking Show.” Goldfield writes some of the magazine’s most ravishing sentences. Caroline Tompkins’ photo of the princess cake is also exceedingly beautiful.

2. Another standout is Julyssa Lopez’s “Night Life: Indigo De Souza,” worth quoting in full:

Indigo De Souza’s voice soars over acerbic, acid-washed guitars that, try as they might, never drown her out. Her lyrics are often wired, stream-of-consciousness confessions (“I want to say no when I’m offered a hit and it ruins my weekend”) that whoosh out, sometimes sweetly and sometimes furiously, over punky, propulsive arrangements. Hearing the Asheville artist abandon herself and wail alongside her razor-sharp instrumentals has a raw and healing effect, like cauterizing a deep cut.

3. Cristiana Couceiro’s illustration for Steve Smith’s “New Music: Focus” is eye-catching. I relish the combination of painting and photography.

4. Rebecca Mead’s bracing “Going for the Cold” contains a wonderful example of my favourite kind of sentence: “Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast.” Such lines – personal, active, specific, experiential – beckon me to follow along; I’m happy to do so. Mead is a master of them. Here’s another one from the same piece: “An hour or so later, my nausea had abated and my teeth had stopped chattering, and I joined many of the Buoy 13 swimmers as they gathered at the town hall in Kendal for the Mountain Festival’s session on outdoor swimming.” In Mead’s hands, reporting becomes experience. That, for me, is the essence of great journalism. 

James Wood's Vile "George Orwell's Very English Revolution"

In previous posts, I’ve discussed a number of my favorite pieces in James Wood’s new collection Serious Noticing. Today, I’m going to comment on an essay in Serious Noticing that I strongly dislike – “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution.” This piece originally appeared in The New Yorker (April 13, 2009) under the title “A Fine Rage.” Wood included it in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff. Now here it is again in Serious Noticing. Obviously, Wood is proud of it. To me, it’s a dirty hatchet job, using low snark and twisted logic to attack one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. It perversely links Orwell’s socialism with fascism, a form of government that Orwell abhorred. It calls Orwell a “puritan masochist.” It snidely suggests he “heightened” elements of his classic fact piece “Down and Out in Paris and London.” It reeks of snobbery. 

Fascism

In his piece, Wood pounces on an observation about Nazism that Orwell made in his “The Lion and the Unicorn” (“However horrible this system may seem to us, it works”), plucks it out of context (Orwell is comparing two systems – Nazism and British capitalism – in terms of their ability to build a war machine), and spins it thus:

More striking is that Orwell premises the economic viability of his socialistic planned economy on the economic success of the Nazis’ planned economy, and, in turn, premises the viability of the Nazis’ planned economy only on its efficiency in wartime. Nazism worked, to use Orwell’s verb, because it was good at producing tanks and guns in wartime, but how good would it be at building hospitals and universities in peacetime? He doesn’t say. So the example of efficient Fascism is what inspires the hope of efficient socialism! 

Note that gleeful exclamation mark. Wood thinks he’s caught Orwell in an embarrassing contradiction: a fierce anti-Fascist who bases his thinking on Fascism – how crazy is that? But Wood is wrong; Orwell made no such claim. His position was quite the opposite. In “The Lion and the Unicorn,” he wrote,

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of the Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.

The equation of a “socialistic planned economy” with a “Nazi planned economy” is in Wood’s mind, not Orwell’s. Orwell clearly held the two systems distinct and unrelated. 

Heightening

Wood suggests, without any proof, that elements of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London are “heightened.” Wood says of one of the persons in the book, 

Bozo, whose collar is always fraying, and who patches it with “bits cut from the tail of his shirt so that the shirt had scarcely any tail left,” is both real and heightened. He is pure Dickens, and Orwell almost certainly worked up his speech like a good novelist. Who’s to say that Orwell did not come up on his own with that simile, “like a kipper on hot coals”?

Orwell almost certainly worked up his speech like a good novelist – come on! This is pure mischievous speculation on Wood’s part, intended to undermine “Down and Out in Paris and London” ’s standing as a documentary classic.

Puritanism

Wood calls Orwell puritanical. He says, “There is a long historical connection between revolution and Puritanism (with both a capital and a lowercase “P”), and Orwell sings in that stainless choir.” I find this impossible to reconcile with Orwell’s love of Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, which brims with sex and obscenity. As Orwell said in his famous review of it, “Nearly all the characters in the book are habitués of the brothel. They act and describe their actions with a callous coarseness which is unparalleled in fiction.” Tropic of Cancer was banned as pornographic in Britain and the U.S. for over thirty years. It drew a puritanical response from many people, but not from Orwell. Quite the opposite; he held it to be a “remarkable book.” On this basis alone, Wood’s characterization of Orwell as a puritan is highly dubious. 

Masochism

Wood calls Orwell a masochist (“The upper-class masochist lived frugally, dressed down, and for most of his life, until Animal Farm and 1984 sold well, earned relatively little”) and – really laying it on – a “puritan masochist” (“The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal—the one that was, ironically enough, inherited—was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself”). I take it that what constitutes masochism in Wood’s view is Orwell’s refusal to enjoy the privileges of the so-called middle or upper class life he was born into. Wood is uncomprehending of Orwell’s admiration for and identification with proletarian life. But, in my opinion, this is a flaw in Wood’s sensibility, not Orwell’s. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants,” Orwell writes in “The Road to Wigan Pier.” I think you have to have a strong sense of injustice to feel this way. Orwell has it; Wood doesn’t. 

Snobbery

In “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution,” Wood writes,

“However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Orwell means this as a judgment against Dickens. But it is unwittingly comic. Why should Dickens have wanted to resemble the working classes? Why would anyone want to resemble the working classes, least of all the working classes themselves? (Ah, there speaks a true petit bourgeois!). 

Ah, there speaks a true elitist whose critical imagination has totally failed him. Great writers want to live at the centre of their material. They totally identify with their subjects. Think of Ian Frazier returning again and again to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In his extraordinary On the Rez (2009), he says, “Of course I want to be like Indians, I’ve looked up to them all my life.” Orwell would completely understand Frazier’s view; he felt the same way towards the coal miners of Wigan. Wood doesn’t get it. The reason he doesn’t get it is that he’s a snob. 

“George Orwell’s Very English Revolution” contains some excellent critical evaluations of Orwell’s writing style (e.g., “The details that pucker the journalism are rolled flat in the fiction”; “Orwell is famous for his frank and easy style, and for his determination that good prose should be as transparent as a windowpane. But his style, though superbly colloquial, is much more like a lens than like a window. His narrative journalism directs our attention pedagogically”), but they’re lost in all the humbug about the fascist roots of Orwell’s socialism, etc. Wood should skip politics and stick to what he does best – literary criticism.