Reviews and News:
Monet painted or sketched well over 2,000 works. What sort of work did he collect? Renoir, prints by Katsushika Hokusaiand, and the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whom Monet viewed as “the only master.”
Mary Dearborn is preoccupied with Hemingway’s lust for action and violence in her new biography of the writer. Mark Bauerlein reviews: “There are so many hunting expeditions in Africa; ski trips in the Alps; drinking binges in Paris, New York, and Havana; mental breakdowns at various points (near the end he underwent shock treatments in the Mayo Clinic); stormy marriages (four) and boyish infatuations with Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, and others, that you wonder where the energy came from. What mania drove him from place to place, woman to woman, and war to war? Only injury could stop him—concussions and broken bones that put him in the hospital, most famously in 1918 on the Italian front when an explosion led to a long convalescence and sad love affair with a nurse that became the basis for A Farewell to Arms (1929). The conflicts and perils didn’t end until the July morning in 1961 when Hemingway, now in Ketchum, Idaho, slipped downstairs, grabbed a shotgun out of the storeroom, lay the butt on the floor, set his forehead on the barrels, and pulled the trigger.”
Horace Walpole’s model epistolary art: “He had his eye on posterity, and polished his prose and his perceptions for our benefit. He saw himself as an informed witness to events, at court, in the House of Commons, in society, in the streets. He was a Member of Parliament for some years, but never even visited his first constituency, and rarely spoke, and then only when prompted to defend his father, the former and first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He was more a bystander in public affairs than an actor. His day-by-day accounts of the wars in America and the loss of the colonies, of the Scottish rebellion, of the Gordon Riots, have been invaluable source material for historians, as he knew they would be.”
National Review and John J. Miller start a podcast on Great Books.
Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s latest work is on the public library. In Tablet, Sean Cooper revisits the 87-year-old’s oeuvre: “The writers Wiseman returns to often are Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe, as well as Henry James and Laurence Sterne. He’s read Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater many times. Patrick Modiano is on his nightstand now. ‘It’s not a literal one-to-one relationship, where I stole this from that,’ he says. ‘It’s in how I’ve seen a character presented, or the passage of time. Because the abstract issues in all art forms are the same—characterization, metaphor, abstraction—and those are all the issues that I’m dealing with in editing. When a movie works, it proceeds on two tracks: on a literal track and an abstract track.’”
Essay of the Day:
Evelyn Waugh was a difficult man and one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose stylists. Paul V. Mankowski in the latest issue of First Things:
“In addition to works published in his lifetime, Waugh left behind several hundred pages of diaries and thousands of letters. And in reading these we become aware that sometime between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he acquired an almost freakishly mature mastery of English prose. For the remainder of his life, he was all but incapable of writing a boring sentence. Even in his commonplace and perfunctory communications—business correspondence, military reports, letters to agents and headmasters—Waugh wrote a clean, elegant, beautifully precise English that is appetizing in the most unpromising circumstances. Just as it’s unsettling to be reminded that Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was a set of keyboard exercises composed ‘for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning,’ it’s remarkable how much eerily flawless craftsmanship Waugh displays even when the occasion of his writing is casual or mundane.
“The most outstanding characteristic of Waugh’s prose is its lucidity. Every sentence is clear. Even where his subject matter is thorny, I don’t believe I’ve ever had to read a sentence twice over to get its meaning. His friend and fellow novelist Graham Greene remarked that what struck him about Waugh’s writing was its transparency, that you could see all the way to the bottom, as with the Mediterranean in days gone by. This transparency is partly attributable to perfect syntax—grammatical solecisms are almost nonexistent—and partly to Waugh’s care in choosing the right word, the word that not only conveys but illuminates. Sometimes Waugh employs a recondite word from his compendious vocabulary, but never an obscure word for the sake of its obscurity. As a boy I learned the meaning of many words I had never before encountered from the perfect fit they were given by Waugh in a single memorable phrase. Reading Waugh, you don’t need a dictionary at your elbow; the sentence provides sufficient light on its own.
“Waugh also had a genius for conveying spoken English matched only, perhaps, by James Joyce. Like Joyce, he lets us hear the speakers through their dialogue—their accents; their treble or contralto, their coughs, stammers, and lisps; their whining or their barking—and he does this with almost no departure from standard spelling. We recognize cockneys without resort to dropped aitches and Scotsmen without resort to tripled r’s; we recognize them because the speeches Waugh gives them convince us that only this cockney or only this Scotsman could utter them. Their language informs us about his characters’ class, age, education, and provenance with a certainty that makes further description superfluous. So too their brief speeches give us a glimpse into his characters’ souls that clumsier authors would require many pages of narrative to communicate.”
Photo: Cape Cod
Poem: Andrea Cohen, “Road Trip”
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