Wednesday Links
Over-intellectualizing pop culture, on taking literary risks, the 50-year-old search for a stolen Jackson Pollock, staying in Jack Kerouac’s home, and more.
Good morning! Towards the end of his long review of the new Malcolm Cowley biography in Harper’s, Vince Passaro writes this:
As we look back on this extraordinary era, it’s time to admit not that this once triumphant American literature is dead—that’s a song people have been banging out since Bing Crosby was still alive and Truman Capote was making his last hopeless, inebriated appearances on Johnny Carson—but that American literature simply isn’t. It didn’t die, it just disappeared: gone, evaporated into the thin air of bureaucratic-consumer corporate life. The death or aging out (or buying out) of the final generation of serious and erudite editors has deeply changed the literary wing of trade publishing. The biggest losses I’ve observed have come with the deaths of Sonny Mehta of Knopf and Dan Frank of Pantheon. (Howard dedicates The Insider to Frank.) To this working critic, the people who have replaced them seem avidly committed to the values of book chat, likability, and The New York Times Book Review’s promiscuous email newsletter touting 8 new books we love this week and the juiciest poems you’ll ever read! There are smaller presses that publish very good work (e.g., New Directions), but much of it is in translation. The few excellent editors I still know say that they continue to look for great and important writing; they report that their bosses will actually permit them—so long as they don’t spend too much—to publish it. But there isn’t much of it out there, and when it does appear, almost no one reads it or talks about it or is affected by it.
This situation has obtained for two decades, possibly three. People today, especially younger people, have to go out of their way to know literature qua literature—to understand it as a living thing separate from trade publishing as presented to them by mainstream reviews and Goodreads. They live in a world in which people are happily (always happily) “creative”; they understand an activity called “creative writing”; they might even know that there are many professional writers spread across the land like peppercorns spilled across a hardwood floor, teaching at universities and community colleges while paying off debts to Home Depot and Subaru, watching Netflix, and checking their retirement accounts. They understand, at every level from pillow design to haute cuisine to wet-sand sculpture, the whole idea of “art”; but what is meant by “literature,” in the sense that Howard deploys it throughout his study of Cowley, has largely passed from view. The idea that a small number of people belonging to each generation have thrown themselves at literature, have tried to become part of it and pound it and reshape it and alter its history—that they have risked their chances of satisfactory, comfortable lives for it—all of that is becoming increasingly difficult to explain.
More:
I once took part in a panel at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, where thousands of writers and would-be writers gather each year. In a vigorous literary culture, this event would demand the presence of the National Guard, but in reality it only creates a staggering need for tote bags. The panel was on how one might make a living outside academe, a dull topic that I was stunned to see had packed the room. The event featured me and three poets, each of whom loved their day jobs at nonprofits. I spoke last. I started by asking how many in the room who were just starting out wanted one day to be serious, talented writers. I sensed a reluctance at first, but I urged them not to be shy about their ambition. Why else be there? Soon most hands were up. Then I said, How many of you are willing to be poor? Virtually all the hands went down. You have a fucking problem, I said. I go to work every day because I have to. Someday you might have to as well. Me, I hate it. I hate every minute of it. I know what I should be doing and this isn’t it. But if you’re going to have a family and help support a household, this is what happens. We make compromises that we swore we would never make.
Thus ended my inspiring appearance. Obviously poverty is not required—the well-off can write great literature, and often have. But let us recall that Cowley once fainted on the street from hunger. Today, taking such risks is hardly imaginable—not just financial risks, but political, psychological, cultural risks as well. Everybody’s got a good refrigerator. This life is the triumph of something else altogether.
I tend not to believe absolutist statements (other than “Jesus lives!”), and so I think the current literary situation is more complex than what Passaro suggests. There are still writers who take risks and produce great work. But he is likely right that the willingness to take such risks, and to suffer because of it, has declined.
In other news, Paige Williams writes about the “backcountry emergencies” in America’s most popular national park, the Great Smoky Mountains:
In the Great Smoky Mountains, which have been called a Bermuda Triangle of volatile conditions, a hike can start at noon in tank-top weather and end at night in a snowstorm. Visitors have been known to climb to a high point to watch a sunset, forgetting that they’ll need light to get back down. They don’t think to bring water. They misjudge distances and underestimate the landscape, which isn’t just steep; it’s slippery, snaky, rocky, rooty, humid, buggy, foggy, and misty. Each year in the national park, there are more than a hundred backcountry emergencies. Andrew Herrington, a former park ranger, told me, “The people that get in trouble are the ones that are wearing flip-flops and shorts, and they buy a one-dollar trail map and decide to hike—and take a wrong turn. Now it’s dark, they’re trying to navigate with their phone, the phone’s dying, the kids and the wife are screaming, everybody’s mad and crying and scared.” Sometimes accidents just happen. Lodged in my brain is a photo that Herrington showed me of a woman’s right leg, bare from the knee down and shaped like a hockey stick: the foot cocked ninety degrees to the left. She had snapped her ankle while hiking to Laurel Falls, which search-and-rescue workers have nicknamed Everybody Falls. (The park recently shut down the trail, for refurbishments.)
Park rangers respond to and manage every emergency, but they routinely need outside help to conduct rescues, especially deep in the backcountry. Herrington, like Sharbs, is a seasoned search-and-rescue volunteer. They, and others like them, are essential to public-safety operations in the Smokies, in part because they have so much experience in that highly specific environment.
One afternoon in October, I met Herrington at Look Rock, the apex of the Foothills Parkway, on the western end of the park, near Townsend, which calls itself “the peaceful side of the Smokies.” The crowds and traffic are less intense than in Gatlinburg, and the mountain views are unimpeded; decades ago, Townsend limited development. A Ripley’s Peaceful Side is unimaginable.
Herrington and I left our vehicles in a deserted parking lot and followed a manway through a band of trees, stepping over roots the size of boa constrictors. At the dizzying edge of a sandstone cliff, he spread a park map on a boulder and ran a hand across it. “It’s hard to grasp the immensity,” he said. A particularly remote pocket, Tricorner Knob, has a reputation for being one of the nation’s “true wilderness areas.” When I asked Herrington to describe the park’s personality, he said, “The park is just neutral. People are, like, ‘Mother Nature’s out to kill you’ or ‘Mother Nature’s out to help you.’ It doesn’t care. It just does its thing.”
The 50-year-old search for a stolen Jackson Pollock:
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Merry White, her parents and two younger brothers used to visit Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, at their home in Springs, an artsy hamlet in East Hampton, Long Island. On those visits, Pollock was often drunk and sometimes violent. Being in the same house as him, White felt vulnerable and unprotected. But she felt she could not communicate this, because her parents were so proud of their friendship.
“Dad was always interested in proximity to fame,” remembers White. “He wore his proximity to Pollock like a medal.” So “Number 7, 1951” stayed on the wall above her bed.
If the painting triggered unpleasant childhood memories, it also triggered memories of the days and weeks after an afternoon in 1973 when thieves broke into her parents’ apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stole “Number 7, 1951,” along with two other paintings by Pollock. One of those works, a combination of paint and collaged ink drawings called “Painting 1028,” 1948, is still missing. Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, which represents Pollock’s estate, told The Washington Post that depending on several factors, especially its condition, the missing artwork could be valued at up to $20 million.
A “recidivist fraudster” and the battle over a masterpiece:
A venerable London art dealer, Patrick Matthiesen was in his second-floor gallery office last year surrounded by stacks of books on the old masters when he opened an email that confirmed his worst fears.
“This will be short,” the March 4 email began. “I lied…” The sender was an American that Matthiesen knew as A.J. Doyle. Over a correspondence spanning more than two years, Doyle had regaled the dealer with tantalizing tales of life as a former Navy fighter pilot with connections throughout the art world and control over a $2.5 billion family fortune.
Matthiesen, who is 82 years old, grew to trust his new acquaintance sufficiently that he allowed Doyle to broker the sale of a 19th-century Gustave Courbet painting, “Mother and Child on a Hammock,” which the London dealer had been trying to sell for $650,000.
Through Doyle’s maneuvering, the painting was ultimately sold to none other than rock ’n’ roll legend Jon Landau, the longtime producer and manager for Bruce Springsteen who also ranks as one of the country’s top art collectors with a trove including pieces by Donatello, Titian and Tintoretto.
But for months Doyle had stalled in sending Matthiesen his cut of the Courbet sale. In that March email, Doyle was making clear that he had no intention of passing along the proceeds—in fact, he planned to disappear.
Autofiction’s lawsuits: “The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms. Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies, who on Wednesday was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.”
