"They Wrote to Render Justice to the Art They Loved"
Also: London's lost gardens, Zora Neale Hurston’s "Herod The Great," "An American Tragedy" at 100, turmoil at Royal Society of Literature, and more.
Good morning! In Persuasion, William Deresiewicz remembers the dance critic Arlene Croce and writes about the sad state of arts criticism in America:
The great age of American dance was also, inevitably, the great age of American dance writing. It was Edwin Denby, the leading critic of the previous generation, who remarked that art is an attempt to prolong our experience of pleasure. If so, then criticism is an attempt to prolong our experience of art. In dance’s case, this is a devilishly tricky task: because you have to translate movement into words, the most corporeal art into the most cerebral medium, but even more because of dance’s very evanescence. By the time you get to your desk—by the time you get to the lobby—the thing is gone, and all that’s left is quickly fading memories, or as Croce put it in the title of her first collection, “afterimages.”
Nobody did it better than she—her prose was magisterial, her knowledge comprehensive, her eye and ear (for dancing is also a musical art) impeccable—but a lot of people were doing it really well . . . New York Magazine had a dance columnist. The Nation had a dance columnist. The Village Voice had a dance columnist (The Village Voice existed, as more than just another website). The New Yorker still has a dance columnist (it is Jennifer Homans at present), but she has published all of 13 reviews in the six years she has occupied the position. For most of her tenure at the magazine, which ran from 1973 to 1996, Croce wrote at least that many every year. Like dance itself, dance criticism was a presence in the culture.
And not just dance criticism. The cultural environment I entered when I came of age in New York and began to tune into the arts was one defined, in part, by the vividness and variety of its critical voices: Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris on film, Robert Hughes on art, John Leonard and Elizabeth Hardwick on books, Michael Sorkin and Ada Louise Huxtable on architecture, Robert Christgau on rock, Stanley Crouch on jazz. The decline of arts criticism, since the arrival of the internet and the collapse of journalism’s business model, is by now a much-told story, but if it’s ever going to reverse itself, we need to understand why criticism mattered in the first place—what it did and how.
What all those very different figures had in common, aside from the excellence of their prose—and this is what distinguishes their criticism from most of what passes for cultural discourse today—is that their writing was grounded in a direct encounter with the work. They weren’t distracted by moralistic agendas, topical talking points, or biographical chitchat. They started with their own response and built out from there, seeking to grasp how it was that the work had incited it. Which also means that they trusted their own judgment. They weren’t looking over their shoulder; they couldn’t give a damn about the discourse. They didn’t write “takes,” which are not about the work but how you want the other kids to see you. They wrote to please themselves. They wrote to render justice to the art they loved.
Interestingly enough, two weeks ago, London Magazine republished this note by T. S. Eliot, which appeared in the inaugural issue in 1954. Eliot writes about his unwavering “belief in the value of literary review” and the difficulty of running a successful one:
What we need is the magazine which will boldly assume the existence of a public interested in serious literature, and eager to be kept in touch with current literature and with criticism of that literature by the most exacting standards.
But will the public give its support? In England, there are far too many people, professing to be lovers of literature, who are ready to say either ‘this magazine lacks support, and therefore there is no point in my supporting it’; or else ‘this magazine is substantially backed, and therefore can do without my support’. Too many of the people who ought to subscribe to a literary magazine say ‘I haven’t time to read it regularly, but I shall buy a copy when there is something that I ought to read’. Such people most frequently overlook the number containing something that they ought to have read. They say then that they are sorry they missed it.
He goes on to identify the three functions of a literary magazine in his view:
The first function of a literary magazine, surely, is to introduce the work of new or little known writers of talent. The second is to provide critical valuation of the work of living authors, both famous and unknown. The third is to be in the best sense international. The magazine must be aware of what is happening in other countries and of what is being written in other languages; and must keep its readers informed of what is happening – but never, I would say emphatically, merely in the way of ‘news’ or gossip. The readers must be encouraged to read books, not merely to talk about books they have not read.
The idea that the critic should “boldly assume the existence of a public interested in serious literature” is not so different from Deresiewicz’s praise of critics who trusted their judgment and attempted to “render justice to the art they loved”—regardless of the larger public discourse.
In other news, Cosmo Landesman complains in the latest issue of The Spectator that “Fanboys are ruining the arts”:
Arts media, especially in the UK, has been infected with a kind of fanboy mentality, where interviewers are reluctant to ask the gifted one any kind of challenging question that might be considered critical or hostile. It has given rise to the phenomenon known as the ‘blowjob’ interview. (For a good American example of this phenomenon, please see David Remnick’s 2003 interview with Philip Roth on YouTube.)
I remember once reading a critic who said about Clive James that ‘he couldn’t write a boring sentence if he tried’. To which any sensible person would reply: oh yes, he can! And did. (See his essay on Sophie Scholl in Cultural Amnesia, in particular his whole Natalie Portman fantasy riff.) But that’s OK. There is no writer who hasn’t written a boring line or two. So why pretend the artists we love are creatively invincible?
One, of course, can be a fan and critical at the same time.
Adriana Gallardo talks to Deborah G. Plant about Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumous novel, The Life of Herod The Great, which was saved from a fire shortly after her death and published for the first time yesterday: “She had been interested in Herod as early as 1942 … she had always been interested in religious figures and all of those questions about church and church doctrine and church history and whatnot. Her father was a minister and her mother was a Sunday school teacher... She was interested in researching and writing about the history of the Jewish people after Moses, what became of their civilization, their culture … and as she was researching it and learning about it, she discovered Herod. And more and more Herod became a central figure, moving from the margins of her thought and research to the center.”
The editor who drove Hemingway away from full-time journalism: “Although Hemingway had been somewhat happily employed by the Toronto Star Weekly as a foreign correspondent since 1921, in 1923 he was unhappily transferred to feature writing for the Toronto Daily Star under the notorious Harry C. Hindmarsh. Hindmarsh, personality-wise, was a battle-axe. Rather than tenderly nurture the talents of his best and most profitable writers, as many editors have been known to do, Hindmarsh’s tactic was to chop off an author’s pride at the neck, lest they dare to consider themselves too important and too indispensable to the paper. Hemingway, according to literary biographer Scott Donaldson, quickly become the target of a confidence-bruising onslaught designed to humble him and mold him into a subservient, obedient journalist.”
London’s lost gardens: “As the metropolis expanded and ever more people were pulled into its maw, the tussle between private land and public interest became increasingly acute. An etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, before 1666, presents an astonishing bird’s-eye view of the Strand, with the serene courts and splendid gardens of palace after palace running down to the Thames’s edge: an aristocratic artery of unparalleled horticultural richness, from Temple Bar to Charing Cross.”
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy at 100: “George Orwell once confessed that as a young man he ‘wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound.’ It is not quite certain when Orwell came across Dreiser’s masterpiece — he refers to it in a newspaper article of 1945 and it turns up in a reading list compiled at the very end of his life — but An American Tragedy might have been expressly written with him in mind; at any rate, the terrific sense of fatalism that sends Dreiser’s young anti-hero to the chair would, you imagine, have been very much to Orwell’s taste.”
Rosalind Jana writes about the “weird sisters immortalized in an even weirder novel” in Apollo: “Suzanne and Louise’s meals sound like something from an Iris Murdoch novel. For dinner Suzanne takes soup and compote; Louise, Camembert and chocolate. Saturday lunch is raw horse steak covered in powdered sugar, washed down with sparkling wine. For Louise it’s a change from her previous life as a Carmelite nun, where she lived on a diet of mashed chestnut stew, self-denial and one letter from the outside world per month. For Suzanne, whose husband used to put vanilla ice cream in his omelettes and wrapped up the leftovers to take to his mistress, being fed is an important part of her schedule. She is ill, old, fragile, moneyed. Forty years previously she retrieved her younger sister from the convent and brought her to an hôtel particulier in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where Louise could become her ‘tyrannical maid’ . . . Suzanne and Louise, first published in 1980 and now for the first time in English, Hervé Guibert created a ‘photo novel’ about the pair. In this bravura, melancholy work, portraits of the siblings are interspersed with passages of reminiscence, fantasy and fact; their own memories and stories sitting alongside Guibert’s shrewdly observed vignettes. Now and then the rug is twitched away, the reader-observer reminded that this is not documentation but an ongoing act of collusion.”
Allen C. Guelzo reviews Nigel Hamilton’s Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents: “Lincoln vs. Davis is a remarkably straightforward and spaciously detailed account of the wartime political lives of the two most vital decision-makers of the American Civil War, an account which unfolds almost on a day-by-day basis.”
Edmund Gordon reviews After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon: “According to the latest YouGov polling, 34 per cent of Americans and 22 per cent of Britons believe that extra-terrestrial beings have visited Earth. Not all of them are obvious cranks. Greg Eghigian’s fascinating history of the phenomenon shows that a weakness for UFOs has affected an extraordinary range of people and penetrated to just about every corner of society.”
Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is an “oddly cold” take on the vampire story, Simran Hans writes in a review of the film in The New Statesman, and at times unintentionally funny: “The baroque displays of passion and extravagant flowing blood usually associated with vampire movies are deployed sparingly. Unlike in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula (which is, for better or worse, the one imprinted on this critic’s mind), both necrophilia and the devouring of children are tastefully implied. In that film, the love story at its heart felt real and moving, in spite of its gleefully over-the-top trappings. In Nosferatu, Eggers leans away from, rather than into, anything that might be considered playful, but the deadly serious tone can have the opposite effect.”
The chairman and the director of the Royal Society of Literature resign: “All is not well in the Royal Society of Literature. It now transpires that the bosses of the prestigious 200-year-old organisation have resigned after a rather tumultuous year – and ahead of an AGM that could have seen a vote of confidence called by outraged former chairs, presidents and directors. The reason for the widespread unhappiness within the group? Frustration over diversity hires and growing concerns about censorship.”
The fires ravaging southern California have reached the Getty Villa museum. The museum itself, however, is safe: “A rapidly spreading wildfire in southern California reached the grounds of the Getty Villa museum north of Santa Monica on Tuesday, but officials said no structures had burned and the collection was safe . . . The Getty Villa had ‘made extensive efforts to clear brush from the surrounding area as part of its fire mitigation efforts throughout the year,’ Katherine E Fleming, president and CEO of the J Paul Getty Trust, said in a statement early Tuesday evening. While the blazes reached some of the vegetation on the property, ‘staff and the collection remain safe,’ she said.”
