9.28.2003
A literary double-header
[Posted 4:34 PM by James Panero]
This month we mark the release of two books from Ivan R. Dee, both of which draw on material that first appeared in The New Criterion: Roger Kimball’s revised edition of Art’s Prospect, and Brooke Allen’s Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times.
A week and a half ago, The New Criterion held a book party at the Grassi Studio for the double release. What follows is a writeup of the event from the New York Sun, as well as two recent reviews. (Readers can follow these links [Art’s Prospect / Twentieth-Century Attitudes] for, ahem, ordering information).
New York Sun
New Criterion Toasts New Books Among Old Masters
Dawn Steeves, New Criterion director of special projects, with publisher Ivan R. Dee
Brooke Allen, Roger Kimball, and Hilton Kramer
(both photographs courtesy of The New York Sun)
The New Criterion hosted a double book party celebrating the publication of Brooke Allen’s “Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times” (Ivan R. Dee) and Roger Kimball’s “Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity” (Ivan R. Dee) on lower Broadway at the Grassi Studio in New York.
For more than 100 years, the Grassi family has been involved in the field of dealing and restoring Old Masters and 19th century paintings. The studio contains a large collection of European period frames as well as an art reference library of more than 18,000 volumes.
“It’s appropriate that we are here,” said Mr. Kimball, New Criterion’s managing editor, because the setting matches the magazine’s “care for tradition and love for beautiful things.”
Among the cultured crowd were director Tom Palumbo, who is working on a play called “Chasing the Tiger”; Patricia Bosworth, who has written a biography of photographer Diane Arbus; attorney William Warren, who attended a Midtown group that afternoon called “Anglophiles Over Lunch,” where a U.S. Trust senior vice president, Stephen Kelly, spoke on the diary of Samuel Pepys; Michael Anderson, who has been researching Lorraine Hansberry, author of “A Raisin in the Sun”; Alex Kliment of the Architectural League, who is working on an exhibition of different approaches to urban housing called “Urban Life”; Wendy Lehman talking with Thomas Moore, who wore a pin of the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, of whom Mr. Moore is a 40th-generation direct descendent; Umit Dhuga, who is studying tragic choral odes; Ivan Dee, whose publishing house will issue a new translation of three of Arthur Schnitzler’s novellas; Gloriana Calhoun, who is at work on an interactive book; Ben Downing of the magazine Parnassus: Poetry in Review; New Criterion associate editor James Panero; Marc Arkin of Fordham University School of Law, and architectural photographer Peter Aaron, husband of Ms. Allen.
Also in attendance was Ambassador Bruce Gelb, whose wife, Lueza, is writing a novel. Mr. Gelb told the Knickerbocker he once had lunch with both Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of the New York Times, whose book “City Room” (Putnam) comes out next month. He said the trio met to try to find some genealogical link between their families but were unable to do so.
–Gary Shapiro
****
Weekly Standard
Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in An Age of Celebrity by Roger
Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 275 pp., $26).
Nothing so conduces to make one’s
opinions seem incontrovertible as to find a critic who announces them as his
own. I think Richard Diebenkorn is the greatest American painter of the last
forty years; Roger Kimball ranks him among the best four or five. I think
the huge ark of minimalist art at the Dia:Beacon museum is an aesthetic
boondoggle on a par with Teapot Dome. Roger Kimball is no less appalled and
inveighs against its New York Times promoters as “cynical” and “ultimately
pathetic.” Clearly, Kimball knows his business.
The only judgments he makes that I can’t vigorously second are of painters I
haven’t seen: John Dubrow, Odd Nerdrum, William Bailey. His reviews make me
hungry to see what I’ve missed, if only in a color plate. Sadly, his book
lacks that pricey amenity. But in his summary assessments of painters
familiar from books and museums he allots stars and demerits judiciously,
demurring as to the greatness of Paul Klee, who is only “a major minor
artist,” and giving a gentle boost to Fernand Leger’s sagging reputation.
Finally, as with most collections of reviews, pith and vinegar are at a
premium, and it is in Kimball’s pans and pot-shots that he comes into his
own. Few critics are candid in their detestations, but Kimball is an honest
hater: deadpan in delivery, deadly in his accuracy, especially against
critics writing in doublespeak, like the lamentable Rosalind Krauss. Any art
lover who has despaired of the debased currency of contemporary art
criticism will find good cheer in “Art’s Prospect.”
–Thomas M. Disch
****
New York Times
’Twentieth-Century Attitudes’: Erudite Gossip
By EVELYN TOYNTON
Published: September 28, 2003
While sense and sensibility are the basic equipment of any good literary critic, the mixture will vary in each individual case. Judging from the essays in ’’Twentieth-Century Attitudes,’’ most of which originally appeared in The New Criterion, Brooke Allen is a critic in whom sense decidedly predominates: one can more easily imagine her reading Pope than Keats.
Many of the pieces deal as much with the lives of writers as with their work, and Allen’s tart dissection of their characters is notably clearheaded as well as highly entertaining: ’’The real Colette was a supremely selfish, greedy, ruthless and often ridiculous woman. It is hard to like her much; it is even harder, though, not to admire the brute force with which she grabbed everything she wanted from life, just as one cannot but admire the talent that capricious Nature bestowed, as is so often the case, on a very unlikely recipient.’’
Another of Allen’s gifts is for seeing through various kinds of pretension, false piety and sheer nonsense. Thus, she pours scorn on those feminist critics who, in their breathless adulation of Virginia Woolf, have made her out to be not the beneficiary of her husband Leonard’s concern for her fragile health but the victim of his control-freak, superrationalist paternalism. She also skewers John Barth’s wearying insistence, in his novels, on reminding readers that art must never be mistaken for life, and attacks the ’’congenital dishonesty’’ that makes Carson McCullers’s posthumously published reminiscences so ’’egregiously unrevealing.’’
As with every critic, it is interesting to see which writerly faults Allen can forgive and which she finds unbearable. Thus, she is much more tolerant of the brittleness of Nancy Mitford’s relentlessly sophomoric light romances than the ’’mess’’ of James Baldwin’s ambitious, wildly uneven ’’Another Country,’’ perhaps because Mitford is always smoothly in control of her material, whereas Baldwin, trying to accomplish so much more, unquestionably is not. Similarly, she admires Mitford’s stiff upper lip in dealing with the infidelities of her aristocratic Parisian lover, while condemning out of hand Baldwin’s ’’paranoid raving’’ about racism in America.
Unlike Baldwin, the sensible Allen eschews sweeping generalizations; nor does she work herself up into passions, get carried away by abstract ideas or go in for flights of fancy. Allen can sound disappointingly reductive, as when she defines Evelyn Waugh’s ’’greatest strength’’ as ’’rude energy, amounting really to brutality’’; she leaves out the idealist’s obsession with honor, the savage moral outrage powering the rude energy, the elegant clarity that is such a counterpoise to it.
ALTHOUGH she says in her preface that the writers she has chosen to discuss ’’embody, in various ways, the values and attitudes of their time’’ and ’’in some way typify or encapsulate their historical moment,’’ few of the novelists Allen talks about — poets do not appear in the book at all — would appear on anyone’s list of the century’s major writers. (Woolf, perhaps the sole exception, is discussed only in terms of the drivel that has been written about her by her loony acolytes.) Instead, she gives her attention to more modest talents, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, Angus Wilson and Christopher Isherwood, whose lack of grandiosity she can approve. Her appraisals of their work are both shrewd and generous; her accounts of their lives, which read like skillfully compressed novels, are perhaps even better.
In her essay on Mitford, Allen contends that ’’great gossip is as rare as great literature.’’ ’’Twentieth-Century Attitudes’’ is filled with the most high-level, erudite gossip imaginable — gossip so thoroughly enjoyable to anyone with an interest in literature that Nancy Mitford herself might have applauded it.