United States - Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal.

I remember watching Gore Vidal on television, usually on one of those talk shows he seems to view with contempt. He seemed to be a living opinion. Switch him on and opinions stream out. But usually those opinions, though often partisan and colourfully stated, we’re always pertinent, well-informed and incisive, despite the fact that, verbally at least, he tended to play the Gore Verbose, often using five words where one would do. But what words they were.

In print, he is much more economical with language, and often delivers a point like a poniard stab. Succinct perhaps is a strange word to describe a book that runs just short of 1300 pages and around 600,000 words. But this is a collection of essays, criticisms and occasional pieces spanning forty years, 114 of them, loosely bound into three sections - State of The Art, State of the Union, and State of Being. Literary criticism forms the bulk of the material, with the politics the author became famous for largely intruding as asides and comments. There is very little here on the process of his own writing, so this is far from autobiography. When he does engage with his own work, it is often to answer criticism of what he wrote. In these instances, he does not pull the punches he throws.

The wit is certainly there, as are many of the super egos of US politics, media and literature, not to mention a sprinkling from Hollywood. But here Gore Vidal is mainly analysing the written word, both from his contemporaries and from the past. Here is my own selection of that wit.

On criticism. The best a serious analyst (of a novel) can hope to do is comment intelligibly from his vantage point in time on the way a work appears to him in a contemporary, a comparative, or historical light. 

On changing taste. The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century.

On education and Reagan. Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president.

On stars. In England, after Guelph-Pooters and that con-man for all seasons, Churchill, Bloomsbury is the most popular continuing saga for serious readers.

On Ford Madox Ford. Certainly, Ford never lied deliberately in order to harm others, as did Truman Capote, or to make himself appear brave and strong and true as did Hemingway, whose own lying finally became a sort of art-form by the time he got round to settling his betters’ hash in A Moveable Feast. Ford’s essential difference was the fact that he was all along what he imagined himself to be that latter day unicorn, a gentleman.

On attitudes. Today’s reader wants to look at himself, to find out who he is, with an occasional glimpse of his next-door neighbor.

On literacy. Having explained that rulers never wanted general literacy, on the grounds that it might provoke ideas of revolution. The more you read, the more you act. In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries sine our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That’ what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic.

On empire. Historians often look to the Roman Empire to find analogies with the United States. They flatter us. We do not live under the Pax Americana, but the Pax Frigida. I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade, and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire.

On ornithologists. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

On a Moscow hotel. We had all met at the Rossya Hotel in Moscow. According to the Russians, it is the largest hotel in the world. Whether or not this is true, the Rossy’s charm is not unlike that of New York’s Attica Prison.

I confess I once stayed in The Rossya, and for more than one night. It was colossal and was demolished because its unimaginative glassed-in concrete box kept intruding into pictures of Red Square, Basil’s and the Kremlin. I was told not only which room to use, but also which entrance, with the qualification that “it might be difficult” if we use any of the other doors. Red rag to a bull… Yes, we accessed the place via one of those other entrances and we found that inside the place was a veritable rabbit warren, with floors in one part of the building not matching floors elsewhere. We got so lost that we had to find our way back outside and approach our room from our usual entrance.

It is an image that informs a review of this book, in that taken as a whole, it is a very long, arduous and at times repetitive read. I am sure that the publishers and certainly the author wanted these pieces to be read singly, and that way the ideas remain fresh.

Overall, we are reminded that the standard of debate, both political and literary, has declined since Gore Vidal left us these superb essays.

G. F. Watts by G. K. Chesterton

GK meets GF sounds like the title of one of those mid-twentieth century albums when a producer with an eye for a buck teamed up some ancient crooner with an equally aged instrumentalist to perform newly arranged standards. In this case it’s a book from early in the 20th century when the Christianity-inspired art-trained writer G. K. Chesterton put pen to paper to analyse the work of G. F.  Watts, the renowned Victorian painter. Chesterton´s style has been described as dealing in popular sayings, proverbs and allegories, and then turning them inside out. Basically, he follows this model in presenting the reputation of George Frederick Watts in this biography.

Watts was a grandee of English painting during the Victorian era. Chesterton starts by claiming Welsh roots for the painter, along with Celtic sentiments, but the theory is vague and frankly contradicted by the eventual location of the Watts museum, close to Guilford in the utterly English Home Counties.

In many ways, it is easier to describe Watts by starting with what he was not. He was not a Pre-Raphaelite, but probably sympathized with many of the group’s artistic aims. He was not an Impressionist, preferring always the classical, centrally placed, consistently-lit subject. He was not a modernist in any sense, but many of his images have a curiously modern feel. Perhaps he comes closest to being an English Symbolist, but that is not what Chesterton thinks.

Watts was a Romantic. He was an establishment figure who was also arguably anti-establishment. He took commissions from the state, often donated works to grand projects and painted the rich, famous and significant. But he also refused national honours and used the earnings from his celebrity portraits to fund projects to depict the social conditions of his age. He was not a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, but his wife was, and he was clearly a sympathizer. Next to the Watts museum is arguably Britain’s finest example of Arts and Crafts Celtic Revival architecture, the Watts Chapel at Compton, which essentially was his wife’s project. We may return to Chesterton´s opening at this point to record the fact that Watts, himself, did not claim this linked to his own heritage.

Watts’s work is highly individualistic within a framework that might appear at first sight to be conventional. Chesterton, in his characteristic obfuscation, defines three fundamental characteristics of this work. “…first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general good." Apparently, such things as cosmic utilitarianism can be gleaned directly from the visual image, though a modern reader of this biography might find that rather difficult.

 

Chesterton, as ever, cannot resist moralizing about his own opinions. “So far the result would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.” Perhaps, as a writer, GK should have read this quote before writing the analysis just quoted. The author, nevertheless, does occasionally deal with the visual content. Watts did have a tendency, perhaps a proclivity for the human back. “The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor”

 

Chesterton does describe some of Watts´s memorable work. He concentrates on the portraiture and the poetic, dreamlike works, such as Hope. What is missing is any description of the social comment. But, after a hundred pages of embroidering the artist and his work with his own brand of prolixity, Chesterton concludes with “And this brings me to my last word. Now and again Watts has failed. I am afraid that it may possibly be inferred from the magniloquent language which I have frequently, and with a full consciousness of my act, applied to this great man, that I think the whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been still deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already pointed out, the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet evening, he has made lines and something has happened. In such an hour the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally fulfilled. He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.” Not really talented, GF, it seems, got lucky, at least according to GK. One hopes the meeting was cordial.

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

 

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was first published in 1961. It is hard in 2020, to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, especially since many of the works reviewed in this volume of criticism, containing essays as late as 1966, would probably not make it into the mainstream today. If - and if must be repeated for emphasis - if the objects of her criticism in the 1960s were manifestations of the current mainstream in the arts, then 60 years ago, at least to this reader, then contemporary theatre, film and art of today seem much more conventional, even conservative. No-one now, it seems, takes risks.

There are names that remain familiar in Susan Sontag’s critiques. We have a Genet, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Godard, Brooke, Arthur Miller, but there are many others who would now claim only anonymity. But what is truly interesting is how reluctant Susan Sontag is even to mention trends from popular culture, the term I personally regard as a misnomer.

Indeed, the essays are, by contemporary standards, elitist. Ironic, isn’t it, that they come from the decade which became notorious for challenging elite status? Perhaps we forget that an element of 1960s culture was to invade elite structures, to cram them with experience it would find both challenging and uncomfortable. Susan Sontag herself obliquely refers to this attempt at change by noting “…the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reduced to cliché, and the function of cliché is to castrate an idea.” The implication is that much needed change via infiltration was already happening. One wonders what her opinion might be today.

As already stated, these essays on criticism unashamedly intellectual. There is not a hint that they also want to address popular themes in popular language or on its own terms. Susan Sontag does address popular culture, but sometimes, as in her analysis of science fiction movie scenarios, to record her belief that it relies on the formulaic. She was not alone in casting an apparently academic eye over mass market culture. At the same time in Britain, we had Kenneth Tynan and Bernard Levin, both young Mavericks in their way, but also both securely establishment figures, despite Tynan’s enduring celebrity drawn from his use of the f-word on a live television chat show. And Bernard Levin, for those who care to remember, offered a satirical and critical monologue late on Saturday nights on That Was The Week That Was, the satirical revue populated by largely upper-class intellectuals who would later become superstars and pillars of the establishment. This was a fate not to befall Susan Sontag and some of her ideas still sound contemporary.

How about this as a plea to writers that they should imagine a status other than Godly? “The immediate cozy recognition that the lifelike in most novels induces is, and should be, suspect… I wholeheartedly sympathize with what she objects to in the old fashion novel. Vanity Fair and Buddenbrooks, when I read them recently, however marvelous they still seemed, also made me wince. I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful, with his obstreperous irony, his confidential air of perfectly knowing his characters and leading me, the reader, to feel that I knew them too. I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.” How many subsequent writers took note of this advice? My suggestion is a few, but none of them popular.

At the heart of Susan Sontag’s ideas about art, theatre, literature and criticism is the need for audiences to be open to challenge. She writes “Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experience, for one may see what is ‘said’ but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art possesses a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.” Perhaps the 60 years that intervened have conspired to reduce this willingness to tolerate the unexpected? Or perhaps nothing has changed. Audiences were never very good at it.

In the Modern Classics edition of her work, Susan Sontag had the opportunity, some 30 years after publication, to offer her own reflections on the significance of the writing. She reflects on how the artistic climate had already changed and on the characteristics of the decade in which her critical essays were written. These three short quotes from the final essay from the 1990s indicate why Against Interpretation is now an achievement in its own right, and not simply a response to the work of others.

“Perhaps the most interesting characteristics of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian movement.”

“Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people and when allowed - an arbitrary decision of temperament - probably unhealthy, too.”

“The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”

Truly we live in a different age.

Like Life – the catalogue by Luke Syson, Sheena Wagstaff, Emerson Bowyer, and Brinda Kumar

Like Life was a 2018 sculpture exhibition at New York's Met Breuer Museum. Its catalogue of the same name not only illustrates many of the exhibits but also presents several analytical essays of a substantial and challenging nature. The catalogue is worthy of recognition in its own right and can be appreciated by anyone interested in art, even those who have not seen the exhibition. It presents a significant contribution to our appreciation of the three-dimensional art which we tend to label “sculpture” and its insights go significantly beyond what may be described as art criticism. The convoluted nature of this description will be understood by anyone who reads this book, because its approach is always to question the received values through which we interpret our experience of art. Indeed, these essays might even challenge our understanding of anything we might see through the lens of prejudice, assumption or merely interpretation. In short, everything. Like Life, the catalogue, thus becomes almost a disturbing experience. We know much more by the end, but only by realizing how little of ourselves and our perception that we actually understand.

Like Life is obviously a pun on life-like. It may also be read as a command, associated with liking life, which would be ironic, since the still life that these forms present is translated in many languages not as still, but dead. One of the threads that binds the discussion is that when sculpture becomes literally like life, it has generally been dismissed by critics as artefact, thus relegated and denied the label art. And at the heart of the discussion is the use of colour.

Modelled on a misplaced assumption that classical sculpture was expressed via a visual language derived from the unblemished whiteness of marble, the story of sculpture unfolded via this misunderstood desire to reproduce classical values through both purity of whiteness and fineness of finish. Like Life not only reminds us that these classical works were originally polychrome, it also asserts that this false set of values conveniently coincided with the European view that whiteness was always superior, and that anything coloured was, by inspection, inferior. Anything polychrome was thus firmly relegated to the ambit of the artisan, not the artist. And it was this assumption that for centuries effectively separated the worlds of sculpture and painting.

The original Met Breuer exhibition displayed sculpture from the later medieval era up to the present day, but non-chronologically. It juxtaposed items to illustrate themes, contrasts and contradictions in a thoroughly stimulating way. The catalogue of Like Life also does this, but the intellectual arguments within its texts are perhaps even more arresting than the visual punches the exhibition delivered.

Why is it that in painting, an attempt to render flesh flesh-coloured is normal even laudable,, whereas in sculpture it has for centuries been seen as devaluing the object? Why is it that we expect a sculptor to start with stone, wood or wax and work it into an image of their choice, rather than mould directly from the human form? Why do we still reject realism, when that realism depicts the everyday objects we normally do not associate with art? Why do expect idealised human forms, rather than real people, defects, foibles and all? Why is it that the sculpted naked human form still generally does not depict genitals? Why do we devalue sculpture that is modelled directly from life? What becomes clear quite early on in this journey through a history of sculpture is that the process it illustrates could be applied to any artistic form upon which we are willing to offer opinions. It could be painting, music, theatre, literature, poetry, etc. Upon what basis do we describe value or worth, upon what set of rules do we ascribe artistic value? And what controlling role do our presumptions play in editing what we see, or at least our interpretation of what we see? And, perhaps most important of all, if we are slaves to our presumptions, who or what generated them?

Functionality has always been a consideration. If an object is wholly divorced from use, then it has always been more likely, in our Western mode of thinking, that is, to be regarded as art. Mannequins in shopfronts, just like polychrome inflated cherubs decorating altarpieces, have always been seen as functional rather than artistic. A sculptor who chisels at a block of jasper to model a bust produces art, sometimes, whereas an undertaker who plaster-casts a death mask does not. But then, a death mask is not representing life, is it? It shows a form incapable of movement, after all. But then how can we see a still life as art, because that cannot move, can it?

Viewing the exhibition itself and certainly reading the catalogue can literally change the way a person looks at the world. A flea market that used to offer repeated tables of junk, now presents objects that have a reason to exist. What the observer must try to glean is why the maker of the object decided to represent that thing, in that way, in that material and in that colour. Like Life thus leads to complication. What previously was seen, and perhaps largely ignored, becomes objectified, separate, worthy of being looked at actively, rather than received in a passive, even dismissive way. Not many books have this kind of effect on their readers.

Like Life is as much a challenge as it is a presentation. Yes, we are presented with images of sculpture and asked to react. But the commentary often offers such a radically different approach from that which we may assume that it really does challenge us to reinterpret and re-evaluate our presumptions. It is what art is supposed to do, isn’t it?

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys

In his One Hundred Best Books, John Cowper Powys confidently selects a reading list for all humanity. Written in 1916 by a man already in his forties, it offers a selection that can be labelled as distinctly pre-war, pre-First World War, that is. Given that the author was the product of an English public school - that means private, by the way, if you are not English - and then Cambridge University, one would expect the list to be dominated by the classics, ancient and modern. And, indeed it is, but there are numerous surprises.

One Hundred Best Books is a short text and offers only a potted critique of the works chosen. More often than not, John Cowper Powys chooses an author rather than a work. So, for example, Sir Walter Scott manages to have three books listed, and Dostoyevsky four, while Chares Dickens manages just one. So, in fact this list is not one hundred best books, more like a hundred favourite authors. The critiques, therefore, more often than not relate to the author’s perception of the writer’s overall oeuvre, rather than to a specific work.

This list might be almost a hundred years old, but it remains an enlightening and enjoyable tour of the literary perception and, to a certain extent, the bigotries of the time. Selections are often more revealing in what they omit rather than what they include and One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is no exception. Indeed, towards the end, the text appears to descend into mere advertisement, but this part can be safely skimmed or ignored.

A statistic that reveals much of its time is the stark reality that only two of the hundred writers listed are women. A third woman, who chose to write under a male non de plume, George Eliot, is omitted altogether, which, given that she had died over thirty years before this list was published, is a surprise. Though the list covers ancient classics and includes works from Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, there is no place for the naturalism of Emile Zola.

But neither is the list merely a safety first trip through big names. A number of the French and Italians listed would not be immediately recognised by a contemporary reader. And some names, such as Gilbert Cannan, Vincent O’Sullivan and Oliver Onions have apparently almost disappeared.

John Cowper Powys is not afraid, however, to describe those he has chosen in colourful terms, sometimes revealing much about prevalent ideas of the day. How many people, in the twenty-first century, would advise the following: “a few lines taken at random and learned by heart would act as a talisman in all hours to drive away the insolent pressure of the vulgar and common crowd,” especially when referring to The Odes of Horace? And today would the phrase “the greatest intellect in literature” be attached easily to Rabelais?

On Nietzsche, we are advised that “To appreciate his noble and tragic distinction with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most persons are able to summon up.” Theodore Dreiser is lavished with praise: “There is something epic—something enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books…  All is simple, direct, hard and healthy—a very epitome and incarnation of the life-force, as it manifests itself in America.” What literature of the Unites States in the early twenty-first century, I wonder, aspires to simplicity coupled with directness, hardness and health? If it exists, I bet it’s not fiction.

Thackeray has one work included. One wonders whether John Cowper Powys really wanted it. “Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.”

Charles Dickens is nowadays credited with being a great social realist. Powys includes only Great Expectations and seems to regard Dickens as something less than real. “His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination.” And who, today, would say this about a writer? “Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America.”

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is a quick and easy read. It is always useful to remind ourselves that perhaps the way we think about the world changes our psyche as much as changes in fashion alter our appearance.