Art Versus Life for the Heavyweight Title of the World

In an essay entitled “Examined Lives,” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2013) the prominent biographer Phyllis Rose makes the following statement: “The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite. The work creates the material. The art creates the life…it’s the imagination that creates the life not vice versa.” As Rose points out, Proust argues a similar point in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve which is condemnation of the biographical interpretation of literature as practiced by the Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, the l9th century critic who was a thorn in his side. It’s a stunning statement by someone who has devoted her life to the study of writers. In one sense, Rose starts her essay by closing the door on a whole area of understanding that involves following the footsteps of the author. But she soon makes a turn around. Citing the case of Paul de Man, an exemplar of the French school, who turned out to have written anti-semitic screeds, she concludes denying the validity of the writer’s life, as the American counterparts of the French school the text oriented new critics did, discountenances much valuable anecdotal material that can illuminate a writer’s work. Rose writes, “To take Edmund Wilson’s essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow as an example: he explored how Dickens’s childhood experience of being sentenced to what he saw as slave labor by his parents affected his future sympathies and themes.” So in the end what Rose is advocating is that the biographer must navigate a fine line between what Kierkegaard called the esthetic and the ethical view. Whether biography ever climbs to the most evolved of the categories Kierkegaard offers, the religious, might in the end depend on the equanimity with which the biographer is able to approach the two sides of a writer’s life. In any event, the study is of literature is for Rose as spiritual act. “We want to learn the secret of creativity, because it can be the secret to happiness,” Rose writes. “We  turn to all kinds of literature, biography and fiction both, to learn how to live, and in a way, all books are self-help books."

Vietnam Journal III: Hanoi’s Old Town

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Taking a cyclo, or bicycle taxi, through Hanoi’s Old Town one wonders if there is the equivalent of a Vietnamese Dickens who has written or could write his Sketches by“Boz.” Structures are piled one on top of the other in a crush of humanity that defies gravity.Tiny stores manned by steely eyed vendors sell everything from crackers and candy to jewels. Lifetimes and products are squeezed into every inch of these mini worlds while on the street an even more micro economy of ageless women hovering over tiny stoves serves meals to squatters (literally those who squat around them). Even narrower alleyways are everywhere, each one possessing its own microscopic. Vietnam has a population of 90 million who employ around 33 million motorbikes. Hanoi’s population is 6 million with approximately 3.2 million residents owning motorbikes. The Wild One was an early Brando film about two motorcycle gangs who reek havoc in a town. It’s probably safe to say that the effect of any 50’s movie dims in comparison to the ubiquitous herds of motorbikes that indifferently pour through the old town. Yet the bikes are also like water that seems to effortlessly flow through even the most foreboding of terrains. Hitch a ride on someone’s bike and take a l0 minute ride to Ngoc Ha (where some of the more affluent residents of Hanoi escape the roaring crowds). In the middle of the district on Hu Triep Lake there a plaque proudly proclaiming the Dien Bien Phu of the air along with the wreckage of a B-52 shot down on December 31, l972.

Rembrandt at Work

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is unquestionably the greatest autobiographical play of all time. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and David Copperfield are two of the great autobiographical novels and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from l663-63 recently on view in the Rembrandt at Work: the Great Self-Portrait from Kenwood House show at the Met is, one could argue, one of the great works of painterly self-scrutiny. We know in the case of the O’Neill, for example, that the Aristotelian unities of space, time and action were essential to the playwright’s ability to turn the raw matter of life experience into a masterpiece. But what accounts for Rembrandt’s virtuosity in the painting under discussion? The casual viewer is first engaged by painter’s piercing eyes. The curators comment that while the earlier portraits and etchings (some of which are on display in another recent Met exhibit, Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), enabled Rembrandt to display his  “inventiveness and emulation” of huge talents like Durer, Raphael and Titian, “in contrast the later self-portraits (ca. 1650-69) seem more straightforward: the aging artist is seen in work clothes, in everyday attire with a beret or linen studio cap, and in some cases, as here, a palette, brushes, and maulstick.” It’s disconcerting to compare Rembrandt’s early etchings from the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man show to the almost impressionistic nature of the Kenwood House painting. It’s almost as if Rembrandt were turning the radical realism for which he was known on its head, but age both diminishes the vision and provides a totally new level of insight. Could the author of a screed called A Doll’s House have really composed the surrealistic When We Dead Awaken in his old age? The Aristotelian unities don’t explain what was going on in the Kenwood House portrait, but Aristotle did contemplate the bust of Homer in another Rembrandt on view in the same gallery.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”