Recent stories of note:
“New Cézanne Mural Discovered in the Artist’s Childhood Home in Aix-en-Provence”
Daniel Cassady, ARTnews
Émile Zola and Paul Cézanne grew up just a few minutes apart in the French town of Aix-en-Provence. The two called themselves “the inseparables,” and their sunny town provided a backdrop for a youth Zola remembered as a “romantic frenzy,” “burning with enthusiasm for art and literature.” Zola later memorialized their friendship in The Masterpiece (1886), wherein the author describes a crotchety artist eerily similar to Cézanne in obsessive pursuit of an impossible ideal, his masterpiece. But his efforts go unappreciated, and he never finds the self-satisfaction he desires. Finally, the artist slashes his long-labored-over canvas and hangs himself. Only two friends show up to the funeral. When Cézanne received a copy of the book from his friend, he wrote “Thanks for the book” on the inside cover, mailed it back to the author, and never spoke to him again. The betrayal must have been all the more poignant given that the painter had recently returned to Aix, the setting of their youthful adventures. In his thinly veiled portrayal of Cézanne, Zola recalls that the artist often painted murals on the walls of his childhood home. Nine of these fabled murals were actually found in the twentieth century—and a tenth was just discovered. As ARTnews reports, the mural shows “what appear to be flag-topped masts of ships . . . and a row of buildings.” No images of the work have yet been released, though they will soon be added to John Rewald’s online catalogue raisonné of the artist.
“It feels somehow improper to witness an author groping for the right words”
Philip Hensher, The Spectator
So wrote T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets: “Words strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision/ . . . Will not stay still.” The insolence of language is well-known to writers and non-writers alike, though the hundred indecisions, visions, and revisions that a published work goes through prior to publication are typically a mystery to the reading public. Many authors prefer it to stay this way, destroying their imperfect manuscripts as soon as possible. When an early draft or working notes of an important work survives, however, it is often snatched up by Oxford’s Bodleian Library. A new book edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon and reviewed in The Spectator by Philip Hensher, Write, Cut, Rewrite, aims to shed light on such half-formed creations. Van Hulle and Nixon’s collection boasts draft pages of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Murphy, myriad poems by Yeats, Frankenstein, Bleak House, Brideshead Revisited, and, of course, much more. The revelations, Hensher writes, are sometimes deeply illuminating. But peeking into these pages also feels somehow voyeuristic—it is a “borderline smutty glimpse” into something never intended for public consumption.
“Humanizing the Humanist”
Bradley J. Birzer, Law & Liberty
There is something a little tragic about the life of Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Widely criticized in his time and mostly spurned since, he is at once neglected as a thinker and an undeniable source of one of our time’s most pervasive philosophies: secular humanism. Those averse to secular humanism tend to consider it a pipeline to relativism and immorality, though Babbitt’s own notion of the concept was ostensibly designed to prevent this. His appeals to the classics and his aversion to political romanticism allied him with conservatives, but these same conservatives had little taste for his refusal to grant lasting authority to religious traditions. His most famous student, Eliot, admired him in his undergraduate years but later wrote a treatise against the thinker’s ideas titled “Second Thoughts About Humanism.” But Babbitt’s legacy, according to Bradley J. Birzer in Law & Liberty, is due for reconsideration: Birzer’s defense of the humanist argues, for example, that Babbitt’s oeuvre was a vital predecessor to such works as Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Birzer’s apology is a useful introduction to Babbitt. After reading it, one ought to turn to James Tuttleton’s subtle consideration of the philosopher in these very pages.