The Sagrada Família Nears Completion
Also: The summer issue of “Portico,” a new Edith Wharton story, the return to print in Japan, Auden’s faith, and more.
Good morning! Barcelona’s Basilica of the Sagrada Família is nearing completion, but, as the Wall Street Journal reports, locals are increasingly frustrated by the tourism the church generates:
The Sagrada Família is the magnum opus of the brilliant Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudí, who died 100 years ago and whose sinuous and eccentric buildings are synonymous with Barcelona. But today, the most visited tourist attraction in Spain has become a symbol of Europe’s overtourism problem. Frustrated locals have often staged protests around it, sometimes squirting tourists with water guns.
“The ambition of Gaudí was to write the Bible in stone,” said Gijs van Hensbergen, author of a biography of the Catalan architect. “He never ever could have predicted this.”
On a recent visit, it was hard to decide what was more surreal: the carved statues of snails, chameleons and turtles that decorate the church’s exterior or the circuslike scene around it. A brass band played lively jazz, while a man made giant bubbles with a pair of sticks and clowns sold balloon animals. A tourist from Kazakhstan filmed an Instagram video of herself dancing with the church as a backdrop. She hoped it would help with clicks. “It’s a very popular place,” she said.
The private religious foundation that manages the Sagrada Família has taken some steps to mitigate the chaos. Tickets must be purchased online for specific time slots, the number of simultaneous visitors is capped at 1,500 and a daily morning “quiet hour” was recently introduced to facilitate prayer and contemplation.
But on top of the five million people a year who buy tickets to enter the church, millions more visitors come to mill about outside it—and the foundation says there’s little it can do about it.
The church will be finished in 2034. When Evelyn Waugh visited Barcelona in 1929, he became obsessed with Gaudí. Here is what he writes in his Mediterranean travel book Labels:
But the glory and delight of Barcelona, which no other town in the world can offer, is the architecture of Gaudi. In England we scarcely know the meaning of Art Nouveau. Mr. John Betjeman, the chief living authority on the subject, traces it chiefly in the decorative motive of the roots of the water-lily which became prominent in this country at about the time of William Morris’s death. . . . Then after a warm but inconclusive flirtation with Holland when painters made heavily patterned pictures of windmills and umber sails, and put tiles round their hearths and pot-bellied jugs of burnished copper in their windows English decorative fancy went whirling off among timber and thatch and black old oak. But this was not the case with the Catalans, who responded to the movement with all the zeal of their exuberant but wholly undiscriminating nature. They never concerned themselves with the Decadence or with archaism. Art Nouveau came to them at a time of commercial expansion and political unrest, and they took it to themselves and made it their own, even christening it and importing it into Florida under their own name as the Neo-Catalan style. . . . They exhibit the same predilection for very bright colours and iridescent surfaces, more particularly those achieved by glazed tiles or a mosaic of broken china and pebbles embedded in cement. This last is one of the chief decorative devices of Neo-Catalan architecture; there are examples of it sparkling and blazing all over Barcelona, but Gaudi alone was able to use it with precision and enterprise and make of it the craft which, in New York, is reverently known as “Tiffany bathroom.”
Gaudi bears to these anonymous contractors and job-builders something of the same relation as do the masters of Italian baroque to the rococo decorators of the Pompadour’s boudoir, or Ronald Firbank to the author of Frolic Wind. What in them is frivolous, superficial and chic is in him structural and essential; in his work is apotheosized all the writhing, bubbling, convoluting, convulsing soul of the Art Nouveau.
I could discover very little about his life save that it began in Barcelona, was for the most part spent there, and ended there less than five years ago, when the aged and partially infirm master was run down and killed by an electric tramcar in the main boulevard of the town. In his later years he did very little creative work, devoting his failing energies to supervising the construction of the great Church of the HoIy Family, which I shall shortly describe. The period of his grossest and wildest output is the last two decades of the last century; it was then that his art, cautiously maturing, broke through all preconceived bounds of order and propriety, and coursed wantonly over the town, spattering its riches on all sides like mud.
Waugh goes on to describe a park and various buildings designed by Gaudí before visiting what had been built of the church at that point—“the crypt, a part of the cloisters, the south door, two of the towers, and part of the east wall.” Waugh thought it would never be finished: “unless some eccentric millionaire is moved to interpose in the near future, in spite of the great sums that have already been squandered on it, the project will have to be abandoned.”
If you have never read Waugh’s Labels, summer is the perfect time, and Waugh is at his best in the book. Here’s the first sentence: “I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me, I said to Russia. Thus my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification.” Perfect.
In other news, we’ve wrapped the summer issue of Portico. In it, we have a short story by the great Jim Shepard and essays by Nic Rowan, D. J. Taylor, Mark Bauerlein, Kit Wilson, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Peter Tonguette. The peerless John Shelton Reed writes about his favorite New Orleans restaurants. We cover new books on Muriel Spark, James Joyce, Franz Rosenzweig, boredom, and Homer. And we once again have an abundance of great poetry—this time by Aaron Belz, Morri Creech, Stuart Dybek, Forester McClatchey, George Murray, Steven Searcy, Wendy Videlock, and David Yezzi. Here’s the cover:
We are already working on the fall issue, which will include a new short story from Lionel Shriver, essays from Matthew Gasda, Benjamin Myers, Sam Sacks, and others. If you haven’t subscribed, why not give it a try? You need to sign up today, however, if you want to get the summer issue, so don’t dither!
Speaking of little magazines, Naomi Kanakia takes stock of The Drift:
Whenever I tell my friends that I’m reading The Drift, they rush to tell me that the magazine is no longer cool, or that they don’t read it, or that it’s far inferior to any number of other magazines that occupy a similar intellectual space.
It is shocking how unanimous this verdict is. Not once has someone said, “Oh yes, I read The Drift too.”
Even stranger is that everyone has such a fully-formed opinion about a magazine that they apparently do not even read. All they know about this magazine is that it sucks. Not one time has someone said, “Hmm, that’s interesting, I’ve heard about that journal but I’ve never read it—why don’t you tell me what’s inside it.”
No, people already know the contents of this magazine they haven’t read. They know those contents are bad!
In reality, The Drift is famous for a certain kind of takedown piece, very particular to this magazine, that often gets shared widely on Twitter. And most of my respondents are basing their opinion of The Drift upon these pieces.
These mass-culture takedown pieces don’t just take aim at a specific artist or work, instead they try to take down an entire cultural phenomenon! And they have a very unique way of taking down their targets. They usually claim that this terrible thing that they hate is somehow a manifestation of capitalism. That if it wasn’t for capitalism, this thing would not exist at all. So the thing’s badness is an inescapable outgrowth of the bad economic system under which we live.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of AI.
Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the country’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. “I think (paper) is a medium that engages all five senses, (unlike social media),” says 40-year-old photographer Kazuma Obara.
Alan Jacobs writes about Auden’s faith: “The love of God necessarily precedes the love of neighbor. I do not see how statements such as these can be reconciled with Mendelson’s view that Auden “had no literal belief in … deities” and that when he spoke of the love of God he meant it merely as a metaphor for the love of one’s neighbor. Moreover, given Auden’s starkly realistic portrayal of what it is actually like to perceive the love of God — as the author of Hebrews says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” — it is difficult to see why he would go to the trouble of invoking, describing, and commending such a God if he did not believe that God exists.”
An Edith Wharton story is published for the first time:
In a never publicly released story by Edith Wharton, a dinner party goes on in a French chateau during the summer of 1918 as World War I nears its end and while the booms of guns can be heard in the distance.
“The Men Who Saved the World,” a previously unreleased fictional short story by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, appeared posthumously on Friday in The Strand Magazine, a quarterly publication.
The work illustrates the tension between a return to decorum and the final gasps of the war.
The new Literary Arts Fund has made its first round of grants—$7.7 million to 40 organizations: “Recipients of grants ranging from $40,000 to $500,000 include the National Book Foundation, which oversees the National Book Awards; the North Carolina Writers’ Network; Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press and other publishers; and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.” The full list is here.
Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child:
The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades before, cows could be seen ambling through the streets. Equally odd is the fact that this painting, which marks the beginning of Munch’s artistic career, his first masterpiece, is also an end point: he never again made anything that came close to it. The Sick Child is an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist. He worked on it for a year, adding layer upon layer, then, scraping the paint off, added new layers, scraped them off, as if he were burrowing into something, or toward something. When he exhibited it at the Annual Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1886 he still considered it unfinished, and titled it Study. At the exhibition the painting was ridiculed, people laughed and pointed at it, the newspapers slammed it. Nowadays this is difficult to understand. How could anyone ridicule something so palpably heartfelt and vulnerable, and so existentially threatening, for isn’t it the very image of deep emotion and existential threat?
Dominic Green remembers Sonny Rollins: “Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophonist who died on May 25 at the age of 95, was a jazz musician’s musician. The last of the big boppers, Rollins was the marathon runner of the chordal labyrinth. But the Theseus of the tenorists was more likely than most of the great jazzers to be seen than heard. For most people, jazz looks better than it sounds. The listening public’s visual taste in Blue Note sleeve designs and black-and-white photography always outstrips its aural appetite. The obituaries emphasized the legend of Rollins’s occultation of 1959, when he was neither seen nor heard for two years on a stage or studio while he reworked his method by practicing amid the girders of the Williamsburg Bridge. When you did hear Rollins, it was likely to be second-hand, in the phrasing and strategizing that lesser players had copped from him. But when you did hear the full strength of Rollins’s musical mind, you knew it. And if he was in full flight, you felt it, too.”
Benjamin Balint reviews Anna Arno’s biography of Paul Celan:
Paul Celan performed one of the 20th century’s strangest acts of literary fidelity: He remained true to German by forcing it to answer for what had been done in its name. He never made his home in Germany, yet became the most consequential German-language poet after World War II, writing in the language that had first reached him through Goethe, Hölderlin and Rilke, and returned as the tongue of his mother’s murderers. His poems can seem like black crystals; hold them to the light and they glint with ash, Scripture, lovers’ voices and breath. They are difficult because a language is being compelled to testify, and because a poet is asking who can bear witness.
A biographer of Celan must decide how to come near poems that seem to resist approach, and a life that has been embalmed by its own legend. Anna Arno, who has written biographies of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Polish activist Konstanty Jeleński, meets that challenge in Paul Celan: A Life. By threading Celan’s poems through the lived record, Ms. Arno restores a proud, wounded, flirtatious, multilingual man often romanticized by reverence. Her account, translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger, is an act of devotion without monument-making.
Barry Schwabsky reviews Harold Bloom’s letters:
The Man Who Read Everything begins in 1954, with Bloom a Fulbright Fellow at Cambridge, about to complete his Ph.D. on Shelley, and the recipient of these earliest letters, written between that year and 1963, turns out to be the least prominent of his interlocutors in the book. Bloom befriended Alvin Feinman in 1951 when they were both Yale graduate students; Bloom was convinced that Feinman had a great future as a poet, and in 1964 helped him publish his first book, Preambles and Other Poems, with Oxford University Press. But the first turned out to be the last; Feinman’s ambition turned out to be fatally inhibiting, and his promise remained unfulfilled. It’s touching to glimpse how energetically Bloom is willing to campaign on behalf of his friend’s work and reputation, but even more poignant is the minimalist credo Bloom utters at the end of the last of his letters to Feinman: “Wordsworth is probably closer to what one wants because he goes naked” (the allusion, of course, is to Yeats’s little poem “A Coat”: “For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked”) “and I don’t really believe in truth—not even in the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.”
The other poets we meet here were far more productive and far more prominent: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, James Merrill and—a particularly close friend of Bloom’s and a longtime Yale colleague—John Hollander. Alongside these men of Bloom’s own generation, all part of that extraordinary flowering of American poets born in the second half of the 1920s, we find the baby boomer Cole, to whom Bloom addressed not only several letters but the answering-machine messages Cole has transcribed, something his elders might not have thought of doing. More surprising might be the late-in-life (for both parties) correspondence with Le Guin. But Bloom had always been fascinated by science fiction and fantasy literature—he’d even tried his hand at it, unsuccessfully, with his only published work of fiction, The Flight to Lucifer (1979), and it’s notable that not once in these letters does Bloom refer to any work of prose fiction that’s not in those genres—and besides, though it is much less well-known than her novels, Le Guin wrote poetry all her life.
The letters with Frye—“Bloom’s idol,” as White says, “whose role in his intellectual formation can hardly be overstated”—date from 1959 to 1969. They reveal Bloom’s difficult coming to maturity as a literary thinker and are marked by the very “anxiety of influence” that Bloom attributed to poets. The letters to Frye are distinguished by an extreme deference bordering on self-abasement; Bloom confesses a fear “that fourteen years of being a student of your writings has made me an echo-chamber at worst, and perhaps a good student at best.”
Simon Heffer reviews The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: Private Revelations from Britain’s Most Famed Diarist: “With this book we probably now know all we need to know about Samuel Pepys. Mr. de la Bédoyère has produced a fine piece of scholarship, though repeated accounts of Pepys’s predations—groping, onanism and much besides—are a little tedious. But then that, according to experts, has been the fault of all pornography down the ages.”
