Modes of dismembership

The most decorated work of overseas

journalism since the Indochina wars,

Philip Gourevitch's "Stories from

Rwanda" (1998), carries the title,

We wish to inform you that tomorrow

we will be killed with our families.

Against the objection to comparison

of the repressive siege in the United

States, with the genocidal "dignity"

of the tribal bloodbath in Rwanda, I

offer the defense only of his ingeni-

ous elevation of the darkest certainty

to the height of proving the report.

We resist distraction to the mode

of embedding severe social cleavage,

to highlight denial of the constant.

Dawn after dawn, missing almost never a

day, and persistently escalating nicely

since the riots he praised in Charlot-

tesville last Summer, the President of

the United States has incited barbaric

tribesmen and statesman-enablers to dis-

member every integument of civil space.

This is nothing new. Only the portrait

is new. Is there any coffee left?

Javier Biosca

  photography

Reading, 2017

I think of this ornament of the col-
lections of the Musée de l'Orangerie
as the very image of free choice in
what to consume. I think of how of-
ten we've awakened to a day of free
time, say, and scanned our shelves
for that one volume that anticipates
us, from many we'd have named with-
out even looking. Hundreds and hun-
dreds of times, through the years,
I've stood as any reader in posses-
sion of his senses, to allow them to
be led, challenged, succoured, even
revealed, in the biting in to their
seeming ripeness, by literature's
opportune incisors. Shelved thoughts
anyone's taken on, as if allowing
the choice to be theirs, having en-
joyed the prerogative of their se-
lection. One asks, as we say these
days, call me by your name. An ex-
change of self-possession is not
unexpected.

So much, for customs in common.

Now, for the first time, since
the great Depression of the 1930s,
Americans have been staggered by in-
formation of the most voluminous in-
tensity and calculated artificial-
ity, not to assuage bad times but to 
foment them. This we lack the irres-
ponsibility to ignore. Now a whole
government has promulgated such per-
petual emergency and disorientation,
as to rival the blistering effects
of the Dust Bowl. Against this ex-
otic environment, we've stood be-
fore our bookshelves to specify
something none of us had needed -
defenses, shaped to the affront.

Now, this is not the rôle of liter-
ature, but of prostitutes. How ex-
traordinarily the brusque velocity
of this abduction has driven any
reader off his bearings, is only the
measure of a pimp's triumph. We un-
derstand, much as we do not begrudge
the Third Reich in Germany its manip-
ulative genius, it is time to honor
that of the new American government.

Not as our author of the year. But as
the last year, the reading of a free
people had been so interrupted. Most
of us saw many fewer of the books en-
titled to our elective exploration,
than we might ever have done outside
of active military duty. And they are
the real literature of the resistance.
Apples, biscuits, glowing choice.

Paul Cézanne

Apples and biscuits

ca 1880

Franz Kline

untitled

1956

Aeneas, Isabel Archer and "the conquest of time"

What has brought about such recurrence

of scrutiny of these two figures in

literature, as to have made it impos-

sible for anyone in the generation in

which I participate ever to be free of

asking oneself, how much one cares a-

bout them? The question is not entire-

ly the same as, how settled one may

be in understanding their story, giv-

en that it is so frequently raised by

ventures - critical, creative, indus-

trial - committed to reopening every-

thing one has thought of them. Now we

come upon another Christmas season,

with two unquestionably leading lights

in our language, presenting the ques-

tion yet again, and competing for our

attention and laurels with fine works

without their notorious provenance.

This year, there can be no doubt that

Aeneas and Isabel ride in on conveyances

of such prestige - the poet David Ferry,

the novelist John Banville - as to draw

an almost nervous apprehension that, per-

haps, one's lifetime indenture to their

stories had not actually been as sincere

as we'd supposed. But how often this is

the case, whenever the chance exists to

learn anything about what one already

likes; one doesn't really resist, it's

just a question of how appallingly dull

one's going to be revealed to be.

The art historian and critic Jed Perl,

in introducing us to Alexander Calder

for truly the first time (for all in-

tents and purposes), has subtitled his

critical biography with a suggestion

which certainly applies to this phen-

omenon, "the conquest of time." What

we spontaneously like about Perl's

assertion for Calder, only excites

the keenest interest. For Aeneas and

for Isabel, it conveys almost a chas-

tisement, and the reader enjoys a

gruesome sense of one's mortality, as

having simply stood in the way of an

immortality he has never fathomed. 

Belong as one may, to that pathetic

fan club of the Great and the Good

in literature, with any new burst of

radiance from The Aeneid or subtlety

in The Portrait of a Lady, one is

apt to beg to believe that this must 

be the end, and we'll not be stuck in

Mobile, with the Memphis blues again.

Banville has done this, as you must 

know, with a character not of fic-

tion but certainly of myth, the spy,

Anthony Blunt. Saturated as our lib-

raries are, with tales and counter-

tales of the talented Cambridge

traitors, Banville created the

most penetrating study of Blunt in

print; and it is so convincing that

even (say) Miranda Carter's fine bi-

ography answered, to be fair, to a

simple fan club interest in the nar-

rative of naughty Apostleship. Now

that he opens his imaginative eye

upon the later life of Isabel Archer,

we stand in acute peril of his il-

luminating Henry James. Is anyone

honestly ready for that?

The hazard with David Ferry is en-

tirely the same, only more extreme.

It isn't really Aeneas, we haven't

fathomed; and we know it. It's the

poet. Precisely as the truth of Is-

abel's story is locked within the

structure of her own seeing what it

is, the truth of Aeneas' enterprise

is embedded within the extraordinary

interaction of past tense and present

tense of cognition, within the same

passage. Virgil's "historical pres-

ent" sustains suspense, in a story 

whose every shred of content has been 

known for two thousand years (roughly

as long, many undergraduates must feel,

as they've known Isabel Archer). To

take us with Aeneas is to unpack us

of factual mass and temporal certainty, 

even of memory, in the face of poetry.

In appraising the mastery of Alexander

Calder at his fortieth year, Jed Perl

makes reference to one of the great

critical texts of our time, Charles

Rosen's The Classical Style - finding

in the sculptor's reconciliation of

mass and movement an imaginative elas-

ticity, an optimistic solution to time

which is at the heart of The Aeneid, 

and inherently beats within the heart

of its reader. Perl is gifted, as

Rosen was, with acute learning in a

variety of disciplines, and a fine

polemicist's zeal for principles,

in which regard for form is not mere-

ly pre-eminent, but defining. With

this perspective his guidance through

the evolution of Calder's art has the

buoyancy and grounding it deserves, 

with a thrilling range of delectation.

The projects of David Ferry and Jed

Perl took more than a decade to bring

forth, and probably John Banville has

not known a moment's distance from his

great heroine. What a fortunate con-

vergence it is, for any English read-

er at this Christmas, to find three

such stunning adventures in poetics

by one's side, just now, in our caul-

dron of misdirected fascinations - to 

cite but one of Perl's fierce denig-

rations of populist topicality in the 

arts. These wonderful gifts plainly

disqualify themselves as a Book of 

the Year, for having earned no less

than they give, a better life.

John Banville

Mrs Osmond

Alfred A. Knopf, 2017©

The Untouchable

Alfred A. Knopf, 1997©

April Bernard

Virgil Revisited

  A review of David Ferry's

  translation of The Aeneid

The New York Review of Books

November 23, 2017©

Hermann Broch

The Death of Virgil

  A Novel

Jean Starr Untermeyer

  translation and

  Translator's Note

Random House, 1945©

Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

1881

Peter Washington

  introduction

Everyman's Library

Alfred A. Knopf, 1991©

Jed Perl

Calder

  The Conquest of Time

  The Early Years: 1898-1940

Alfred A. Knopf, 2017©

Charles Rosen

The Classical Style

  Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

W.W. Norton & Company, 1971©

Virgil

The Aeneid

ca 20 BC

David Ferry

  translation

University of Chicago Press, 2017©

Alexander Calder

Eucalyptus

1940

National Gallery of Art

Washington,  DC

Fionn Creber x Cecilie Harris

Nevs Models

2013