December 7, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here’s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived in America, in 1939, published much later as The Prolific and the Devourer: The image of myself that I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others that they may love me. It strikes home, yes? Perhaps because, for all my public bonhomie, I have so many more serious things on my mind. Or because the love I want from others will aways have a measure of fear in it, fear of my rigor or my temper—but really, all I want is to bring out the best in them. Or because I am so considerate, so habitually obliging and flexible—but I do have my own views, and when the time is right, I will make them heard. Whoever I am, Auden’s aphorism knows me, certainly better than others do, perhaps even better than I once knew myself. Read More
December 6, 2017 On Art Reading Between the Lines: “Gilded Age Drawings at The Met” By Cynthia Payne Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson. 1878 “Gilded Age Drawings at The Met” is a curious attic cleaning of an exhibition. It includes the seldom seen Thomas Eakins 1878 watercolor The Dancing Lesson, featured on the show’s advertising. The painting is not an obvious choice to exemplify the Gilded Age, and yet, in its reproduction, it is given an importance that is otherwise left unexplained. The exhibition includes a hodgepodge of other work, some of it by lesser lights, and lacks accompanying material about the relationship between art and era. Perhaps more explicit commentary would have run the risk of offending the patron class upon whose riches the Met always has depended. The Walton Family Foundation funded this exhibition, an irony too large to remark upon except to confirm in Jamesian sotto voce that, yes, Walmart supplied the fortune. Three of the paintings shown are intended bequests. Thomas Eakins, The Pathetic Song, 1881. Lush portraits by Louis Comfort Tiffany, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt reinforce our dutiful impressions of the undeniable aesthetic pleasures of material wealth as well as the dreamy sadness leisure can bring, especially within the domestic sphere. A drawing of a woman done in silverpoint by Thomas Wilmer Dewing has a timeless quality, amplified by the use of an antique artistic technique. There also is the seductive suggestion that the past can be bought or had—if only one has money or sensibility enough. Eakins himself often painted and photographed women in historical dress and was as capable as any artist at getting lost in the luxurious folds of a fine damask or watered silk. We can see that in The Pathetic Song (1881), another Eakins watercolor included in the exhibition. The viewer can hear the rustle of the singer’s dress as well as the purity of her voice. Equally heard are the pianist’s maniacal focus (Eakins’s wife, Susan, was the model) and the cellist’s perhaps less accomplished accompaniment—isn’t he just a quarter beat off tempo? The homey setting reinforces the tame and unthreatening democratic ideal that true art can be created anywhere, even in the front parlor. It is Eakins’s earlier, carefully worked watercolor, originally titled Study of Negroes, that suggests the more revolutionary idea that art belongs as well to the dispossessed—that it is, perhaps, the first fruit of freedom. This canvas also depicts a grouping of three: a sturdy boy of at most eight years old dancing, a slender young man playing the banjo, and, in the center, a man as wiry as a child but old enough to be their grandfather. The clothing is again there to be touched, the music to be heard. The child wears the rough blue and gray homespun attire of a laborer, his pants rolled to the knee to reveal his dancing legs; the young man is clad in a clean but somehow aspirational white shirt and less laundered black trousers; the old man supplies the pizazz with his frayed orange jacket worn over a rusty black suit, top hat and cane resting on a chair at his side. The boy looks to the banjo player, perhaps for guidance; the banjo player stares out as if into the music itself; and the older man scrutinizes the boy, his foot lifted as if moving to the beat or perhaps to demonstrate a step. Theirs is a circle of intent: the music, the dance, the boy initiated into their mysteries. Read More
December 6, 2017 Arts & Culture The Literary Prize for the Refusal of Literary Prizes By Ursula K. Le Guin I first learned about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of London’s Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.” Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a fifty-thousand-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.” Read More
December 6, 2017 Our Correspondents Eight Public Cases By Anthony Madrid Norman Rockwell, Russian Schoolroom, 1967. 1. Our teacher (young, malevolent, witty) was holding forth about the “curlicues and inefficiency” of Derek Walcott’s poetic style. Our teacher said, “It’s like he wants to go to the kitchen to get a banana. So, he dresses up like Henry James, striped pants, fresh pressed—tails, top hat—and stands with supreme dignity on the curb next to his bed. A Rolls-Royce pulls up silently. It is dazzling, five hundred pounds of chrome front and back, and a chauffeur jumps out—white gloves—opens the passenger door for Walcott. Walcott glides into the seat, frowning deeply and nodding toward the kitchen. He is now sitting bolt upright. The chauffeur closes the door, takes his own place, and drives six feet to the kitchen. He hops out, assists Walcott toward the kitchen counter, where the bananas—somber yellow with coffee-colored freckles—are situated in an animated rhombus of light, rain seeded, coming from the kitchen window. At which point we are doomed. Those bananas will turn to baby food before Walcott is finished describing them … ” We all laughed, but one of the students said, “Yes, but doesn’t that description apply to the first three quarters of the Norton Anthology—?” Comment. It does if you think Shakespeare and all those people were just describing bananas. The real question isn’t whether the description applies to the Norton; it’s whether it applies to Walcott. And here is an aphorism: Every laugh—deflects. Read More
December 5, 2017 Redux Redux: P. D. James, Walter Mosley, Georges Simenon By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Read More
December 5, 2017 Document If I Had a Sense of Beauty By H. W. Fowler H. W. Fowler and his dog. “He is merely shallow and—oh! so banal and trite.” —Pall Mall Gazette) “This group of self-conscious, verbose essays.” —Yorkshire Observer “A true autobiography of a second-rate soul.” —Morning Post These are some of the “Extracts from Press Notices” at the beginning of If Wishes Were Horses (1929). They refer to the 1907 edition, published under another title. They are the very first thing we find in the book, before even the author’s name. Only Henry Watson Fowler—who by this time had authored two of Oxford’s all-time classics, The King’s English and A Dictionary of Modern Usage (see my other post on this subject)—could have had the humility and the sense of humor to begin a book by citing the most acerbic sneers he could find on it. If voluntarily quoting those scalding blurbs were not enough, Fowler further proved his humility by publishing many of his books anonymously or under pseudonyms, one of which was Quillet, as in “little quill”—literally, a diminutive pen name. In addition to his work as a linguist, he wrote several books that defy classification. One of them, for instance, is a collection of “lay sermons” for boys (Fowler’s atheism cost him his teaching position), signed as Quilibet (Latin for “anyone” or “no matter who.”) Another was an attack on popular fallacies (“Childhood Is the Happiest Time,” “Time Is Money,” et cetera), much in the vein of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues or Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, only with essay-length entries. Read More