Wednesday Links
Growing up in a house of jazz, Le Corbusier’s chapel, revisiting Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” the films of Éric Rohmer, and more.
Good morning! Yesterday I announced that I have started a print literary quarterly with First Things called Portico. If you missed it, here is the announcement.
Dominic Green is something of a modern Renaissance man. He’s a professional jazz musician, historian, and prose stylist extraordinaire. In the first issue of Portico, he writes about growing up in a family of “jazzers” and then letting it go. Here’s a snippet:
I am the black sheep of the family. I taught myself to play the guitar by translating the theory I’d learned from classical piano lessons. Still, the clangorous apple did not fall far from the tree. I did not expect to become a jazz musician. I did not expect to become a musician at all. I started by playing along to Chuck Berry and the Ramones, and as I got better, I played along to music with more chords and notes, until one day I was asked to join a student jazz band. Then, having gone to the trouble of learning to play and the even greater trouble of traveling all over Europe and America in vehicles of varying comfort, I threw it over in my thirties, just as my grandfather and father had done before me.
I decided that, as with a career in soccer or crime, you should do it while your knees are up to it and you have all your teeth and some of your hair. Leo, who still has a little of both, still plays a bit, but he, too, sought an honorable discharge, in his case into booking concerts. He is currently leading the band every Tuesday in a club on Piccadilly about a two minutes’ walk from the site of the Kit-Cat.
I grew up in a house of jazz. I thought it was normal. I thought everyone listened to jazz at home. I thought all children went to Ronnie Scott’s. Plenty of people go into the family business. Ours happened to be music. The Greens were one of several dynasties in the little world of British jazz. Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s daughter became a singer and their son a bassist. Ronnie Scott’s business partner, Pete King, passed the running of the club on to his son. The drummer Clark Tracey was the son of the pianist Stan Tracey. The bassist Leon Clayton was first the son of the drummer Eddie Clayton and then, after donning a frock and declaring himself to be a woman, Eddie’s daughter. The saxophonist Alex Garnett was the son of the saxophonist Willie Garnett. Both of them called everyone “son.”
More:
For jazzers more than any other species of musician, what you play is who you are. The vocabulary of your solos is the aural projection of your taste, which is itself a condensation of your personality. One of the many false ideas people have about jazz is that improvisations are made up. They aren’t. A soloist works within a tradition. He recombines fragments and motifs from other players and blends them with his own research into chord changes to create a personal melody that, while it descends from an original melody, amounts to a new one. Compare the live recordings of indefatigable improvisers like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and you’ll find that, like the truncated mini solos that Louis Armstrong put onto 78s, they’re basically refining an interpretation rather than inventing it on the spot. If you know the man’s music, you feel what he’s going to play next. It’s not really telepathy. It’s psychological profiling.
Also in the first issue of Portico, Dana Gioia reviews Gerald Howard’s biography of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley. Was Cowley the last of his kind?
Even during his most radical days, Cowley had never let ideology play a significant part in his literary judgment. His imagination was poetic, not political. His relationships with artists existed outside partisanship. He had, for example, worked on Exile’s Return while staying with arch-conservative Allen Tate in rural Tennessee. Cowley even joined Tate to attend a reunion of the Fugitive poets, Southern agrarian traditionalists who were dedicated to fighting communism (and nearly every other progressive trend). Having enjoyed his stay in the remnants of the Confederacy, he returned to New York to continue his political campaigns. Not only could this incident not happen today; it could hardly have happened to anyone else in 1933. Cowley was an aesthete. No wonder his politics were so well-meaning but incoherent.
In his years of exile Cowley did some of his most influential work. He had a genius for writing long essays of advocacy for the authors he loved. Howard calls him “a master middleman of literature,” but that phrase seems too flat; Cowley was a salesman of the sublime. Finishing one of Cowley’s great essays—on Fitzgerald or Hawthorne or Whitman—one wants to put down everything else and read the author in question. When Cowley combined his critical and editorial talents to help direct the new Viking Portable series, thick anthologies that presented a selection of a writer’s best work, he changed the American canon. His first undertaking, The Portable Hemingway (1944), renewed the writer’s relevance just as his career had started to dip. His Portable Faulkner (1946) had even greater impact. He championed the Mississippi author who had only one book in print and made a compelling case for his artistry. The book instigated a national revival of Faulkner’s career. Six years later the novelist won the Nobel Prize.
Both of these pieces are available for free. To read the rest that Portico has to offer—Alan Jacobs on the Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, Barton Swaim on growing up in Myrtle Beach, Amit Majmudar on form and faith, and much more—subscribe here. Paid subscribers to Prufrock receive $20 off the subscription price. (If you haven’t received a discount code, please let me know!)
In other news, Alexander Larman reviews a new performance of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Old Vic: “What now seems heartbreakingly clear about Arcadia, as best expressed in the doomed relationship between the splendidly named Isis Hainsworth’s Thomasina and Seamus Dillane’s Septimus, is that it is a play about connection, both intellectual and romantic, and about the ways in which this connection can be either misunderstood or broken altogether.”
Ella Risbridger reviews Angela Tomaski’s debut novel The Infamous Gilberts—“a delicious comfort read about loyalty and despair, and a gentle questioning of the nature of progress.”
E.J. Hutchinson writes about Boris Dralyuk’s poem “Dino Dozes”: “In Hamlet, death, sleep, and ghosts are inseparably intertwined together, and rather dour. In ‘Dino Dozes,’ they are comically reimagined; ‘ghosts’ are memories, and ‘sleep’ is just—well, sleep. No more.”
Who should you trust, art historians or AI?
To the untrained eye, there is very little difference between the three known versions of The Lute Player. Almost identical in composition, the paintings all depict a young, doe-eyed subject in white robes, instrument in hand and turned slightly away from the viewer. Each appears to carry Italian painter Caravaggio’s signature mastery of light and shadow.
To art historians, however, there has long been broad agreement: The versions held by Russia’s Hermitage Museum and France’s Wildenstein Collection were created by the Baroque artist, while the one at Britain’s Badminton House is merely a copy.
Artificial intelligence begged to differ. In September, Swiss AI firm Art Recognition claimed there is an almost 86% chance that Badminton House’s version is, in fact, authentic.
In praise of the Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut:
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—far better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier—was the great guru of Modernist architecture. Starting in the early 1920s, with the Parisian avant-garde as his springboard, the Swiss-born architect (1887-1965) used writings, lectures, radical urbanist ideas, and exquisite geometric residences to persuade the world that it should use concrete, steel and glass to construct flat-roofed buildings, with open plans and horizontal bands of windows. Then, just after the calamity of World War II, in a remote corner of eastern France, he moved Modernism’s goal posts with a single, eccentric, transcendent project.
Designed in the early 1950s and opened in 1955, the hilltop Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut replaced an earlier pilgrimage church destroyed during the war. Hovering above the village of Ronchamp, it still relies on concrete, but any further connection to Le Corbusier’s previous buildings seems to end there.
Notre-Dame du Haut is a religious structure: Built in honor of the Virgin Mary, it still attracts Catholic pilgrims. But it is also an exhilarating work of art, in which the more conceptual elements of Le Corbusier’s architecture—light, space and landscape—are interpreted in new and uncanny ways.
Simon & Schuster names former Amazon executive Greg Greeley as its new CEO: “A spokesman confirmed that the choice of Greeley marks the first time in memory that Simon & Schuster had hired a CEO from outside the company. The 62-year-old Greeley succeeds Jonathan Karp, who announced last year that he was stepping down to found his own imprint at the publishing house, Simon Six.”
Ben Sixsmith writes about Will Self and his new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality, which he calls “richly entertaining and provocative — a satire on middle-class manners that makes other satires on middle-class manners look hopelessly mannered.” More:
Self might hate social media but he is the kind of quote machine who was destined to go viral whether or not he liked it. His recent interviews contain more viral potential than a Wuhan lab.
This has led to heated responses online. Self-hatred is common among Britain’s literati — because of Self’s unpleasant divorce (from the columnist Deborah Orr), and his overbearing manner, and his habit of saying things that sound a bit pompous, like that the novel is dying.
That said, for all that he has courted controversy and performed in popular culture, Self has always been a writer in a concrete sense. He has been prolific as a novelist and essayist — and he has always been ambitious and independent-minded. No one who wanted to maximise their readers would have written Umbrella. Indeed, one gets the sense that Self was almost daring people not to read the book.
The curse of gold: Tim Butcher reviews The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure: “As a metal, gold never corrodes. As a possession, the reverse is too often true. It has the power to warp morality, destroy decency and tarnish humanity. This duality – entrancing beauty alongside corrupting potency – lies at the heart of this magnificent book that engagingly blends African history with a current relevance that reaches far beyond the continent.”
Jaspreet Singh Boparai revisits the work of Éric Rohmer: “Rohmer is not only one of the finest filmmakers of the twentieth century; he is also one of the most original and influential theorists of cinema. He is perhaps unique among major movie auteurs in having spent his first decade and a half of professional life as a teacher of Greek and Latin language and literature. When Rohmer is described as a classicist, this is not merely a matter of a vaguely classicizing aesthetic program. Classics was his profession. Yet by curious paradox, his classical formation left few visible traces on his oeuvre either as a critic or a cineaste. Overt use of Greek and Latin literature is at a minimum until the last phase of his career as a filmmaker. How are we to understand his classicism?”
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