July 11, 2017 Books A Woman with All the Advantages By Daniel Mendelsohn Sybille Bedford in 1989. “Oh, shall we never escape the muddling consequences of our family history?” Luckily for readers of Sybille Bedford’s novels, the answer to that question—asked rather rhetorically by the heroine of A Favourite of the Gods, Bedford’s 1963 novel about a woman who has “all the advantages one would wish for and more,” with the exception of some very difficult relatives—is “no.” All of Bedford’s fiction, including A Favourite and its 1968 sequel A Compass Error, is preoccupied with the muddling consequences of history on whole families and their individual members. One of the epigraphs Bedford chose for A Compass Error is Victor Hugo’s observation that “the past is a part of us, perhaps the most essential.” The inescapability of the past, embodied above all in family histories and family behaviors, leads inexorably to a truth evoked by another epigraph she chose, this one from Middlemarch: “Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves … Ay, truly, but I think it is the world / That brings the iron.” The intersection between our deeds and “the world”—the larger histories of families and nations that often mock our belief in our ability to act freely—is a place to which Bedford returned again and again in her writing. The families in question are always of a given type: European, upper-class, sometimes titled, moneyed (usually as the result of an advantageous marriage to non-upper-class, non-titled outsiders), sophisticated, undogmatic except when their own self-image is concerned. The histories in question are sometimes private—the crucial background drama in A Favourite results from the cultural clash between an American heiress and her charmingly dissolute Italian husband—and sometimes political, even global. In A Legacy, Bedford’s remarkable 1956 debut, the military ambitions and protocols of Wilhelmine Germany set in motion a sequence of events that begins as absurd and ends in a tragedy that engulfs all of the novel’s families. The rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s impinges on the lives of that American heiress and her descendants in both A Favourite of the Gods and, even more strongly, A Compass Error, at whose conclusion the woman with “all the advantages” finally runs out of luck as she flees from Paris in 1940. Read More
July 11, 2017 On the Shelf I’m in Love with a Card Catalog, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Some people fetishize librarians. Me, I fetishize the card catalog. It’s a lonely fetish—no pornographer, to my knowledge, has yet written a starring role for a card catalog, or even a cameo. But I think it’s only a matter of time. I mean, look at these catalogs! They’re so big—so full—so … alive with utility. The way a card catalog oozes democratic spirit and well-organized accessibility, it just gets my heart racing. A new book by the Library of Congress, The Card Catalog, is almost titillating in its portrayal of objects in obsolescence. As Michael Lindgren writes, beneath its sumptuous photography, the book mounts a compelling and perhaps depressing case for bygone forms of information technology: “The text provides a concise history of literary compendia from the Pinakes of the fabled Library of Alexandria to the advent of computerized book inventory databases, which began to appear as early as 1976. The illustrations are amazing: luscious reproductions of dozens of cards, lists, covers, title pages and other images guaranteed to bring a wistful gleam to the book nerd’s eye … Now, waxing nostalgic about card catalogs or being an advocate for the importance of libraries is a mug’s game. You can practically feel people glancing up from their iPhones to smile tolerantly at your eccentricity … Although some contemporary readers might consider this book outrageously quaint, the card catalog’s conceptual structure was the underpinning of the Internet; the idea of something being ‘tagged’ by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card catalog system was the original ‘search engine’ … The card catalog stands with other great twentieth-century works of civic architecture as testament to the potential of what a society—and a government—can achieve … ” Are you an artist over sixty? Are you tired of hot young bucks getting all the fame and glory? Marlena Vaccaro wants to be your gallerist. As James Barron reports, her Chelsea gallery represents only older artists—an attempt to thwart entrenched ageism in the art world: “The gallery began several years ago when Ms. Vaccaro decided that someone should counter an art world problem: Older, lesser-known artists were being passed by just because they were, yes, older. She had heard stories. Ms. Vaccaro was a painter and printmaker who also worked in mixed media. She had owned a gallery in TriBeCa. ‘If, by the time you’re forty, you haven’t demonstrated earning power in terms of sales, it’s hard to get the attention of a big gallery,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s only ageism at work. It’s the economy of running a gallery. Sure, there are tons of galleries that show older artists, but they are the high earners. Everyone who was big and famous in the sixties and seventies is older now. They’re still represented if they’re still alive, and their paintings still sell for gigantic dollars.’ ” Read More
July 10, 2017 Look So I Traveled a Great Deal… By Dan Piepenbring “So I traveled a great deal. I met George, Ebbe, Joy, Philip, Jack, Robert, Dora, Harold, Jerome, Ed, Mike, Tom, Bill, Harvey, Sheila, Irene, John, Michael, Mertis, Gai-fu, Jay, Jim, Anne, Kirby, Allen, Peter, Charles, Drummond, Cassandra, Pamela, Marilyn, Lewis, Ted, Clayton, Cid, Barbara, Ron, Richard, Tony, Paul, Anne, Russell, Larry, Link, Anthea, Martin, Jane, Don, Fatso, Clark, Anja, Les, Sue, and Brian,” a group exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, is up through August 18. Organized by Vincent Fecteau and Jordan Stein, the show includes six Northern California artists, and it aims to capture “the lesser-known, the ahead-of-its-time, the hard-to-classify, the ecstatic, the hermetic, and the strange.” Works by two of the artists, Isabella Kirkland and Jack Mendenhall, are below. Isabella Kirkland, Egg Cases, 2014, oil and alkyd on wood panel, 7 3/4″ x 7 3/4″. ©Isabella Kirkland, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Read More
July 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Freud Fainting By Nausicaa Renner Seymour Chwast, Freud Had It (detail), 1970s. Yesterday, inexplicably, I fainted. I was stepping off the subway and I collapsed onto the platform. I’d known it was going to happen for maybe a minute beforehand. I thought if I could just get to my stop, sit down, and get some fresh air, I’d be okay. But as soon as the doors closed at the stop before mine, I knew it was unstoppable—I crossed the threshold from “might happen” to “will happen.” A grayness clouded my vision. I made eye contact with a woman and absently wondered if I should tell her I was about to faint, if she could read it on my face. I’ve never fainted before in my life. I came close as a kid: kneeling during mass and standing up too quickly. The grayness would creep in, and I’d lean my weight against the side of a pew. But before now, I’d never fully fainted. I’m sure there’s a physiological explanation: I was probably overheating, dizzy from standing. But that’s no fun. So I looked into the psychological, emotional reasoning behind fainting. Read More
July 10, 2017 On the Shelf It’s No Fun to Be a Governess, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jean-Simeon Chardin, The Governess, 1739. Most writers need day jobs. I recommend the Charlotte Brontë approach: become a governess. It’s your destiny. Yes, it will leave you feeling lonely and downtrodden, and it will nurse a sense of righteous indignation in your soul. But it’ll furnish all the “material” you need for your sensational debut, and isn’t that what really matters? John Pfordresher, who has a new book out about the writing of Jane Eyre, notes that Brontë’s various stints as a governess brought her nothing but heartache, even as they informed her work: “Charlotte’s first ‘situation’ as a temporary governess began in May 1839, at an estate named Stonegappe, a large house of three stories set on a hillside surrounded by woods, enjoying a vista in the distance of the valley of the River Aire. Charlotte was to care for a young girl and her brother—the stone-throwing son of the Sidgwick family we have seen as a model for John Reed. For the socially awkward and impoverished Brontë, at age twenty-three, the inferior position of governess in a wealthy family was an almost intolerable position, far worse than teaching at Roe Head. She was ignored by adult family members, charged with insolent and rebellious children, and denied respect by all, though she considered herself not only more than their equal in terms of intelligence and ability but also a potential writer of genius … Winifred Gérin, in her beautifully written biography of Brontë, pictures Charlotte in the Sidgwick’s handsome country home during a ‘long summer evening when she sat alone, her lap filled with Mrs. Sidgwick’s “oceans of needlework” … no one from the noisy self-absorbed house-party below to share her solitude.’ ” Speaking of writers on the job: Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography of Thoreau highlights the indignities of his career as a surveyor. Jay Parini writes, “Despite Thoreau’s achievements as a writer, environmentalist and social activist (he was, among other things, a passionate abolitionist and supporter of John Brown), many of his contemporaries considered him little more than a crank, a self-involved Pied Piper for the children of Concord, MA, whom he led in search of huckleberries on hot summer days … Walls does not miss the irony that Thoreau’s profession made him ‘complicit in destroying the forest he loved.’ In 1850, for instance, he ‘walked over land he had surveyed the year before, which the owner had clear-cut and subdivided into fifty-two house lots.’ Not surprisingly, he expresses guilt over this work in his journal: ‘Today I was aware that I walked in a pitch pine wood which erelong, perchance, I may survey and lot off for a wood auction and see the choppers at their work.’ In 1851, he completed a substantial commissioned survey of Concord’s boundaries and recalled that the task had left him feeling as if he had ‘committed suicide.’ He says darkly: ‘Trade curses everything it handles.’ ” Read More
July 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Candlelight, Cellmates, Cult Leaders By The Paris Review From the cover of The Book of Emma Reyes. Emma Reyes grew up in astonishing poverty in Colombia—illiterate, illegitimate, and abandoned. Remanded to a Catholic convent, where she endured a strange mix of manual labor, religious fear, and wonder, she escaped at age nineteen. This is where her memoir, The Book of Emma Reyes, leaves off, but as an adult, she became an artist and an intellectual and befriended a host of Latin American and European notables, including Frida Kahlo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guiseppe Ungaretti, and Alberto Moravia. Hers is an incredible biography by any measure, but the book’s most startling element is Reyes’s clear-sighted, unsentimental remembrance of her difficult childhood. The narrative comes in the form of twenty-three epistolary sketches written by Reyes between 1969 and 1997 to her friend, the critic and historian Germán Arciniegas. (He once showed them to García Márquez, who effused about them to Reyes herself; furious with Arciniegas’s breach of privacy, she didn’t write him another letter for some twenty years.) Reyes is gloriously unceremonious in her telling: the memoir begins in a garbage heap and ends with a dog sniffing another’s behind. —Nicole Rudick Fans of the Parisians, our softball team, know Tony Hatch as a power hitter and stalwart first baseman. I know him as Cousin Tony—a man of intense enthusiasms, most recently English literature of World War I. Which is how I was slipped a copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the follow-up to his slightly better known Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man. I was up reading it most of last night. And if your blood stirs to the grim pluck of young officers reading Thomas Hardy by candlelight, with trench mouth, in months before the Somme, it may keep you up reading, too. —Lorin Stein Read More