Saturday Links
Revisiting “Lucky Jim,” the stories of Gene Wolfe, a history of peasants, James Salter’s strange career, and more.
Good morning! Rachmaninoff didn’t care for the new twelve-tone music of his day, but he was no knee-jerk traditionalist in music or other things. He was also very Russian, as I write in my review of Fiona Maddocks’s Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile for The Washington Examiner:
Rachmaninoff was one of the first composers to record his own work. When a fellow Russian, Igor Sikorsky, wanted to build a twin-engine, 14-passenger plane in 1923, Rachmaninoff wrote him a check for $5,000. He was invited to serve as the company’s first vice president, which he accepted. He loved cars and took particular care of his Lincoln limousine. When he began touring regularly in Europe and spending summers in Switzerland, he would ship the Lincoln ahead every year, giving detailed instructions to his agent about its care.
He composed only six works after leaving Russia in 1917 until his death in 1943, none of them masterpieces. It could be that his music was inextricably connected to his homeland. “I am a Russian composer,” he remarked in 1941, “and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music.”
The man who made modern Italy: “The shrewd, worldly Austrian statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich notoriously asserted in 1849 that Italy is only ‘a geographical expression’ — that is, that it had never been a single nation and never would be one.” He was wrong, as it turns out, and no small thanks to the writer Alessandro Manzoni, M. D. Aeschliman writes, who did more than anyone else to bring a people together: “He wrote one of the profoundest and most influential works of the literature of the world. Forty years ago, the English literary scholar Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that Manzoni’s vast novel The Betrothed (I promessi sposi) ‘is one of the greatest books ever to come from a human brain’ . . . Manzoni finished the first edition in September 1823; the others appeared in 1827 and 1842. Much more than his other writings, earlier and later, these three versions, on which he spent 20 years, both revealed and ultimately shaped Italy with a force, significance, and impact comparable only to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The only other works of literary imagination equal to The Betrothed in modern Western literature are the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.”
Jeremy Harte reviews Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World:
Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, which stretch from Loughs Corrib and Mask to the Atlantic Ocean and straddle the border of County Mayo and County Galway. Although his father took the family to England in 1930, he brought his sons back every year and they would fall asleep night after night listening to kitchen talk in English and Irish. Joyce knows what he is talking about, and if his peasants are not always virtuous, they are at least vivid and real.
It is hard to hold on to that reality, for peasants will soon be as extinct as the aurochs and Irish elk. In western Europe, the proportion of the population employed in agriculture now stands at something between 1 and 5 per cent. It is lowest in England, the first country to replace its land-holding agrarian workers with a wage-earning rural proletariat. The ‘ag labs’ of Victorian census entries might romantically be called peasants, but they lacked the two key features of that class: self-supporting work and rights in the land that is worked.
Alexander Larman revisits “the funniest book ever written about academic life,” Lucky Jim: “Generations of readers have found its ending, in which the hapless medieval history lecturer Jim Dixon is granted both the girl and job of his dreams, an unconvincing exercise in wish fulfillment. But the joys of the funniest book ever written about academic life lie elsewhere, in its pitch-perfect skewering of pretension and intellectual vanity.”
Christopher McCaffery revisits the stories of Gene Wolfe: “I don’t recall how I came into possession of the text—it’s not easily available online, and only a few pages long in the document on my computer (which is ridden with typographical errors)—but in Gene Wolfe’s ‘Green Glass’ the old horror, the collapse of man, striving for reality, into the glazing of his own perception, is again dramatized and made even stranger—and strangely American.”
Poem: Gerald Mangan, “Oor Father”
Jeffrey Meyers takes stock of James Salter’s strange career: “Salter’s masterpieces—his novels A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1975) and his memoir Burning the Days (1997)—place him, after Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as the best postwar American novelist. His lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed. But his two best novels had poor reviews and sold few copies, and he did not achieve fame until much later. On September 7, 1997, when Salter had been writing for forty years, Samuel Hynes observed in the New York Times Book Review that ‘his reputation is of a curious kind; no single book of his has a secure place in the canon of modern fiction. As a writer he is both known and not known.’ Why were Salter’s early novels ignored for so long, and why did his literary reputation revive when he was in his seventies and eighties?”
Jeffrey Bilbro reviews Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: “Despair is a multifaceted experience, and Wiman is well acquainted with its various permutations. At times despair can be intense and indeed ecstatic, but it’s also numbingly mundane. It’s the cancer that confronts Wiman with his mortality and exposes him to excruciating pain. And it’s also the ache that accompanies every bowl of cereal, creak of the ironing board, and paying of bills: Nothing will change, purposeless suffering is definitive, and doubts will never resolve into even fragmentary epiphanies.”
Peter Leithart reviews D. C. Schindler’s God and the City: An Essay in Political Metaphysics. Among other things, Leithart writes, Schindler “explores the analogy between the relation of the soul to the body and the relation of church to city. This pairing isn’t merely convenient or epistemological but ontological, so ‘organic’ that a distortion of one relation will inevitably ‘tend to disorder the rest.’”
Scientists discover detailed fossils of a rare ancient tree: “Five tree fossils buried alive by an earthquake 350 million years ago were found in a quarry in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, according to a study published Friday in the journal Current Biology . . . Few tree fossils that date back to Earth’s earliest forests have ever been found, according to Gastaldo. Their discovery helps fill in some missing pieces of an incomplete fossil record.”
The Academy of American Poets has received a $5.7 million grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, it’s largest donation ever, to support “both the Poet Laureates and the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of more than 30 organizations working together to promote poetry.”
Forthcoming: Anthony Daniels, Buried But Not Quite Dead: Forgotten Writers of Père Lachaise (Criterion Books, March 5): “While many famous writers – Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde – are buried at Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, ‘there are also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who have been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited.’ In eight chapters, the inimitable Anthony Daniels dilates on some forgotten writers of Père Lachaise, exploring their literary merit and the amusing byways of history, aiming ‘to entertain while illustrating the inexhaustible depth of our past.’”
That Brueghel is my favorite painting and I visit it pretty often at the Metropolitan Museum. It's an entire three dimensional world on a canvas. Remarkable.
Lucky Jim is perhaps the funniest novel ever written. I can think of no other novel that made me laugh out loud as much as it did. James Salters Light Years is a brilliant novel.It captures a very specific milieu perfectly . As for The Betrothed, it’s a work out and much of it’s overdone and boring but it’s also a great novel.