Hermann Hesse’s parents—pious ex-missionaries—“were befuddled by their oldest son’s steadfast determination to become a famous writer and to alienate them in any way possible, by smoking packs of cigarettes at their expense, reading Turgenev and Heine with a revolver next to him, and producing scores of derivative poems.” Christoph Irmscher reviews Gunnar Decker’s biography of the German-Swiss writer.
Guy de la Bédoyère tells the story of how Nero tried—and initially failed—to kill his mother. Before he sent Roman soldiers to her house, he tried to drown her on a self-destructing boat.” The voyage progressed without incident to begin with until, suddenly, the canopy over Agrippina’s area collapsed, thanks to the lead with which it was roofed. This failed to kill Agrippina and her servant Acerronia Polla because the bed they were lying in had such high sides. The farce continued with the boat’s failure to disintegrate, leaving the crew arguing over how best to make the vessel sink. In the chaos the selfless Acerronia made a futile gesture by insisting that she was Agrippina. She was promptly beaten to death under a hail of blows from pikes and oars, while Agrippina dived overboard and swam for it. She was picked up by some boatmen nearby and taken to her villa.”
“One evening in late 1908, Henri Matisse introduced a short, dapper visitor to the community of often struggling artists who tended to congregate at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. Picasso was there, as was his iconoclastic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then still known by its original title, Le Bordel d’Avignon. Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover and muse, was underwhelmed by the newcomer. He was, she later recalled, ‘a small, wan figure, with a heavyset, hoggish head and a terrible stutter’. Picasso himself would caricature the gentleman shortly afterwards as a bristly pig, inscribing the sketch ‘Monsieur Stschoukin Moscou’.” This third son of a Russian textile magnate would go on to assemble “one of the greatest collections of modern Western art.”
Jane Austen’s unfinished novel comes to the stage.
Is this how the Egyptians built the pyramids?
The mystical vision of Father Brown: “Though Chesterton frequently expressed his admiration for the craft of the Sherlock Holmes stories, he still suspected that there was something fundamentally unrealistic about the way the Baker Street Bloodhound went about solving crimes. Chesterton’s own detectives never rely on any special knowledge of the coagulation of blood or encyclopedic familiarity with cigar ash, or a copious awareness of every headline in every paper on any given day. Instead we see them making sense of evidence from a broad familiarity with the common patterns of life and the common natures of things.”
In the latest issue of the Standard, I write about Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa: “On his way to Samoa in December, he wrote his literary agent Sidney Colvin that he planned to stay only long enough to learn about the recent war…Yet a month later, he had bought a 314-acre plot and arranged for an estate called Vailima (‘five streams’ in Samoan) to be built on it. In March, a mere three months after he first visited Samoa, he told Baxter that he was sure he would ‘never come home except to die.’ In the end, he didn’t even do that.”
Christopher Urban reviews Charles J. Shields biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner: “John Williams is both different and interesting enough to merit a book of his own, Charles J. Shields’s The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. It certainly helps that, like Williams, Shields knows how to tell a good story, one that will appeal especially to those interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry and the ups and downs of a writer’s life (spoiler alert: there are many).”
Essay of the Day
In GQ, Michael Paterniti tells the story of a time capsule in an Austrian salt mine that offers a “‘bottom-up’ history of the world”:
“When Martin Kunze was 13, he was on vacation with his parents in Spain, and at a beach next to the Mediterranean, did what kids sometimes do out of curiosity and boredom while their parents apply sunscreen and read and kibitz about the other tourists: He started digging a hole in the sand. The process intrigued him. About two feet down, fresh water started filling the hole from underneath. There was a plastic bottle his parents had brought with them, and on a childish lark, Martin took a piece of newspaper and jotted his name, number, and address on it in German with a message: If you find this, please contact me. ‘I put this into the bottle, and put it into the ground, hoping that some beautiful girl would find it in the next year,’ Martin says.
“He waited and waited. ‘I never forgot this,’ he says. Years passed, then decades. No beautiful girl called out of the blue. Then, something astonishing happened. Three years ago, more than 30 years after Martin had buried the bottle, a dog-walking retiree from the area, after having the note translated for him, contacted Martin’s parents, who were still at the same scribbled address, saying he’d found the bottle and read the note inside.
“Martin, who is now 50, says it was probably the bottle’s vintage and shape that helped it get found. What amazed Martin, though, was that someone had taken the time and effort to call after all those years, because of the jottings on a scrap of newspaper. It was all so simple, really, a naive impulse on a beach, a missive fired from the past to the future, and now from the future back to the past. And for Martin Kunze, who’d by then gone from being a scrappy boy with a curious mind to a shaggy university student with a passion for ceramics to a middle-aged father of five kids whose urgent mission these days has become the construction of an enormous time capsule meant to survive for thousands of years, it was also affirming. He had imagined a beautiful girl, and the pensioner from Spain had imagined someone on the other end of the message, too. Who was the sender, and the receiver, and what was each looking for?
“‘Some communication through time,’ says Martin now, ‘some kind of contact.’”
Photos: Spider and 50-ton Minotaur in Toulouse
Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Trouble Brewing”
