Back Where I Came From, A J Liebling (1938)

"People back where I came from are receptive to artistic influences from outside, and among the visiting priestesses of the arts I remember was a dancer named Princess White Wing. Shortly before her arrival the City License Department had prescribed opaque clothing over the critical portions of all dancers' anatomies.

"What's the use of opaque clothing?" demanded the Princess. "You can see right through it."

The Princess, who was a graduate of a college in Sherman, Tex., had abandoned the brick-and-stucco teepees of the Cherokee nation to carve out a career as a feather dancer. She employed as many as two feathers at a single performance, and she had been all set to open at a new night club when along came this theatrical reform business..."

Thus begins the first story in the section entitled "The World of Art" from A J Liebling's book called "Back Where I Came From", originally published in 1938.

Liebling had a long and successful career writing columns and stories, primarily for the New Yorker. This collection of stories and profiles was written early in his career but his style, tone and subject matter had already been set. He introduced his readers to both ordinary and unusual people, mundane and specialized professions, likeable and sometimes unsavoury characters. If you want to meet in print, at least, jockeys, hairdressers, pickpockets and the police who chased after them, feather dancers, grifters and punters who lived in NYC in the 1930s, this lovely book will satisfy.

Liebling was a master of understatement and hyperbole; he had an acute ear for dialogue, the vernacular, and could convincingly leverage the rhythm and syntax of spoken English of numerous ethnic groups. If you like Leo Rosten's books, (another New Yorker from the same generation) particularly "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N", you will enjoy the friendly way that Liebling handles ethnic dialogue.

The stories and prose are measured and when read out loud, they flow well, constituting an oral history of a fascinating time that is long gone.

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La Symphonie Pastorale, Andre Gide (1919)

"La Symphonie Pastorale" is a novella written by Andre Gide in 1919 when he was 50 years old, and despite its small size (70 pages), it is both structurally and thematically sophisticated.

The characters, for example, are complex: some grow, some change, one dies, while one, the narrator, damns himself to perpetual moral stagnation. He is the most interesting figure in this sad story: a sort of anti-hero, he is a country minister living in a remote part of Switzerland in the 1890s, who, imbued with some kind of truncated Christian charity, takes on the academic and moral education of a blind, initially mute orphan girl, and two and a half years later, at the girl's demise, falls to his knees, now broken and pathetic but still not enlightened, petitioning God for forgiveness.

Poor us. We have waded through the theological distinctions he has made between Protestantism and Catholicism, Pauline doctrine and Jesus' teachings; listened to his theories of language acquisition; and patiently stood by as he puzzled out the role of knowledge in happiness. In fact, the minister at first seems erudite, quoting Scripture and Virgil but his logic proves faulty and his self-described Christian core shows itself to be empty. He is always almost coming to self-understanding but always falling short, retreating...

The last line, "I would have wept but I felt my heart more arid than a desert" should signal understanding and remorse but only a paragraph or two before he dismisses the authenticity of his son's newly discovered vocation and instead of asking for his wife's forgiveness, asks her to pray for his redemption...as if he is all that matters.

The form of the book is appropriate to the characterization: divided into two notebooks, the first, written in the past tense and told after the fact, describes how the narrator educates Gertrude, ending with the girl moving to another home, inadequately formed perhaps, but happy; Jacques, his eldest son and his competition for Gertrude's affections is temporarily sent away; and Amelie, the minister's watchful wife, while purposely ignored by him, anchors the events in some kind of objectivity.

At the close of the first notebook, redemption is possible and no irreparable damage has been done but the second notebook is different. The action in this one moves quickly, it is set in the narrator's present, writing it as it happens to him, so that in the span of a few short weeks, the minister's life unravels and he lacks the time to figure out how he is responsible: Jacques, disillusioned by his father's ministry, joins a Catholic order, converts Gertrude and offers her real understanding of the world. Gertrude in turn, comes to see her guiltless but central role in the disintegration of the unity of her host family, and accepting the impossibility of love with the priest, she dies by her own hand. This is a perfect, lyrical tragedy.

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First Love by Ivan Turgenev (1860)

I love well-written, autobiographically inspired novels because I believe they reveal the heart of the writer in a way that a completely invented plot and cast of characters cannot do. Ivan Turgenev's novella "First Love" is one of my favourite examples of this form. Written when he was 42, it opens with three middle aged men recounting the circumstances of their first love. Vladimir Petrovich (a thinly veiled Turgenev) is one of these gentlemen, the one whose bittersweet story is told.

The events in the story take place in the Russian countryside during one short summer when the narrator is 16 and Zinaida, the object of his desires is 21. In the first half of the novella, Vladimir describes the personalities, events and emotional games that Zinaida plays with the suitors she regularly gathers together to tease and torment. "But my blood, I remember, used to rise when Malevsky would sidle up to her like a sly fox, lean gracefully over the back of her chair, and begin to whisper into her ear with a self-satisfied and whedling little smile - while she would fold her arms and glance at him attentively, then smile at herself and shake her head". Zinaida, we can all agree, is wicked: in full view of the half dozen young men sitting at her feet, she, in turn, transfixes, arouses and humiliates each one.

At the mid point of the novella, another dimension is added to the story: the narrator convinces himself that Zinaida has fallen in love with one of her suitors and pursues any clue that will reveal who that man may be, all the while imagining how he can win her love. The man-boy says, "I saw a vision of myself saving her from the hands of her enemies; I imagined how, covered with blood, I tore her from the very jaws of some dark dungeon and then died at her feet". Poor young Vladimir, poor young Ivan, poor young us...

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Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life (2004) by Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable was an architecture and media critic, Pulitzer Prize winner and preservationist who sometimes wrote books with odd, endearing titles like "Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters" (1986). Her book, "Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life" was first published in 2004 when she was 83 and it is pitch perfect, a joy to read.

Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935

In this book, Ada Louise Huxtable combines the skill and knowledge that architectural historians and biographers require to do their job properly, with the sensitivity and humour of a good storyteller.

It's a mix that in my case allowed me to understand on the one hand Frank Lloyd Wright the school of thought, the architectural phenomenon and the professional iconoclast, and on the other hand Frank Lloyd Wright the deeply flawed, reckless, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel human being.

Try looking at a photo of Falling Water or the Johnson's Building and describing it to someone who has never seen either before. Good luck! In this book, Ada Louise Huxtable does it often and beautifully each time. She can also help the reader understand and evaluate the work being examined, both as a building (whether it be a church, a house, a museum or an office tower, all of which Wright sought to re-imagine) and as an historical artifact, a sign of the times.

The first paragraph in the book sets the tone for this lovely homage to the great Wright:
 "The life starts with a lie: a changed birth date, from 1867 to 1869, the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men... In Frank Lloyd Wright's case, it had the desired effect - it made a case for a precocious talent with an impressively youthful, early success in Chicago in the 1890s... The change did no harm to anyone, although it annoyed his sister Jane all during her lifetime, since it was her birth year that Wright usurped."
Frank Lloyd Wright may have stolen his sister's birth year but he gave Taliesin and the Guggenheim Museum to the world...a fair trade.

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Francis Bacon

Comparatively few people of substantial means collect and hang Francis Bacon paintings in their homes. They're beautiful but too intense, too disturbing, exhibiting a "terrible beauty" that both attracts and repels.

Imagine, however, finding a venue that opens up (quite literally) the door that leads to Francis Bacon's home, studio, library and even his kitchen. Would you enter that place, knowing that you were admitting yourself into a space that only Bacon's closest friends were ever allowed to visit? Would you be afraid of finding bizarre or all too intimate objects that were supposed to be hidden, private, secret or even meant to be destroyed upon the death of the artist? Or would you be afraid of finding out that Bacon was an obvious borrower or a fake and not the inscrutable, complex, cupid-faced original that we take him to be?

Go to the Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane to see the "prodigious mess" that was Bacon's home and studio accurately reconstructed, bare light bulbs and all. Or wander through the Bozar Centre in Brussels which is exhibiting hundreds of torn, stepped-on, painted-on magazine and personal photos, postcards and medical textbook drawings as well as the four paintings which Bacon left unfinished in his home at the time of his death. The amateur connoisseur in you will be satisfied because we now see who Bacon's influences were, how he composed his figures and laid down the paint, and we see the very strict delineation he made between work space (filled to overflowing, pack rat style) and living space (small, basic and utterly spartan). The material on show is revelatory and exhilarating.

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My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel (1983)

Bunuel by Salvador Dali

Salman Rushdie calls Spanish film director Luis Bunuel's memoir My Last Breath, “pure delight”. I agree and would add that from the dedication page, through the photographs and to his last chapter, aptly-titled Swan Song (Bunuel died shortly after the book was finished), Bunuel treats the reader to an entertaining, sensitive chronicle of his personal and professional life.

My Last Breath is also a work of art in and of itself, demonstrating how beautifully and precisely the filmic expertise of its creator has been adapted to the the written word. Descriptions are not overly long or adjective-heavy but they are carefully measured so that scene after scene opens, reveals a moment, an incident, then closes and a new scene opens elsewhere in time, giving us another detail or an idea which eventually leads to a full and satisfying story. Here is a filmmaker who is able to use words as effectively as celluloid to create close-ups, panoramic shots and flashbacks to relay a story.

Memory, the first chapter, lasting a mere three pages, introduces us to Bunuel's skills. In these dozen paragraphs, he tells us about the relationship of memory to old age, identity, fidelity and tragedy. Here is the first paragraph:

During the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually lost her memory. When I went to see her in Saragossa, where she lived with my brothers, I watched the way she read magazines, turning the pages carefully, one by one, from the first to the last. When she finished, I'd take the magazine from her, then give it back, only to see her leaf through it again, slowly, page by page.

Imagine this scene in a film: short, compact, silent, devastating....

Luis Bunuel was, of course, best known for his surrealist films, his collaborations with Salvador Dali (indulging as he did, in “vestimentary provocation”), his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca but above all, he was a storyteller of great elegance.

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Intimacy (1998) by Hanif Kureishi

Some authors are bigger than their works – their lives are larger, more complex, more controversial than their protagonists' lives ever are. Some authors lead quiet lives and they create characters who do all their sinning for them. Hanif Kureishi lies on the edges of the first camp and his novel “Intimacy” encourages the reader to think about how to read a work of fiction that is so obviously grounded in the author's own life.

“Intimacy” is a short book written and published shortly after Kureishi left his wife and two young sons to pursue another woman. In the novel, Jay, the narrator, does the same thing. The comparison between Hanif and Jay should ideally stop here, but it doesn't...

Jay is a complicated, intelligent but altogether disagreeable character who, when asked by a friend, “Don't you believe in anything? Or is virtue only a last resort for you?”, will answer, “I believe in individualism, in sensualism and in creative idleness. I like the human imagination : its delicacy, its brutal aggressive energy, its profundity, its power to transform the material world into art. I like what men and women make. I prefer this to everything else on earth, apart from love and women's bodies, which are at the centre of everything worth living for.”

This is a Big Statement made by Jay in this novel and other characters in other Kureishi novels and by the author himself in interviews he has given over the years. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with such a credo (it would make a good topic of conversation in an ethics class or a reading group), the problem remains this : how does the reader of literature assess a work of art when the artist's own life and opinions are transposed onto the life of the characters?

Do I like Jay? No. He is an existentialist fool.  Do I understand him? Yes. Do I like Kureishi? Well, how much like Jay is he really? And finally, should this matter?

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A Sweeper-Up After Artists : a memoir by Irving Sandler (2003)

One could say that the title Irving Sandler chose for his memoir is perfect. After all, it comes from a Frank O'Hara poem which names Sandler personally (a kind of immortality already) and it implicates poet and art critic in the altogether exhilarating moment in American culture where abstract expressionism (Americana, pure and simple) is born. Frank O'Hara registers the moment in his poetry and Irving Sandler sweeps it up, organizes it, makes sense of it, shows us the glorious dirty/clean floors, splotches of paint, discarded early efforts – and every sentence is pure gold.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko,
Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell,
Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne.
Photo by Nina Leen in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.

Sandler shows us the main players as well as the odd, minor pundit and punter. Take the Vogels, for example : Herbert and Dorothy – two tiny people, he a post-office worker, she a librarian, both with a modest salary but an uncanny eye for the new or the up-and-coming – in the span of 50 years, they fill their tiny New York apartment with avant garde art that they eventually bequeath to Washington's National Gallery. Sandler knew them and many other unusual people personally. The Vogel's is a lovely story and one which Sandler squeezes into pages that also recall the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

There is also a brilliant chapter devoted to the clash of the titans: the unmovable, curmudgeonly, formalist art critic Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the existentialist and inventor of the term "action painting" (with the focus on "action"). Sandler regales us with stories of his encounters with these two but he also teaches us a great deal about art history, connoisseurship and the real life battles that produce what we come to regard as the canon.

This book was a pleasure to read. It ended too quickly. More Irving Sandler in my library, please.

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Marie Laurencin, Marmottan Museum in Paris

I once met an art historian who made it his retirement project to seek out and photograph all known Johannes Vermeer paintings. After seeing five of Marie Laurencin’s paintings in a corner of the Orangerie Museum in Paris last year, I half-thought about doing the same (so lovely and so haunting were those works). A bit of digging revealed that the bulk of Marie’s paintings, watercolours and ballet costume sketches had been bought and whisked away to Japan where her biggest fan, industrialist Masahiro Takano, established a museum in 1983 to house her art. Thankfully, after a half century of relative anonymity (she was a much sought-after portraitist in the 1920s but then forgotten) 90 of Marie Laurencin’s works have been reassembled at the Marmottan Gallery in Paris. 

Marie Laurencin’s trademark pink, blue, grey and turquoise palate, her interior, mostly female and small animal groupings, and her outdoor, girls-astride-horses impressionist-inspired scenes are simultaneously innocent and voluptuous. They have been described as “Sapphic”, “fresh”, “ambiguous” and “evanescent”. 

It has been suggested by the curatorial staff at the Orangerie that over time, “la magie s’évente”, that the magic of the early and middle works turns stale despite modifications and nuanced changes in her style. Essentially, her late work “trades in its mystery for smoothness”.

Perhaps. Marie’s declining eyesight may have been a factor. And, late in her career she did introduce the occasional (misplaced) dark line into her paintings to delineate boundaries and stem the fuzziness. Nevermind. She was one of only three or four women painters in Paris during the Picasso-Braque revolution who helped invent modern art. Those lovely figures, most of whom have piercing black eyes and pale oval faces will forever hail the viewer, and ask us all to look and look some more.

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Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait (1974), Gertrude Stein Remembered (1994)

Let’s play a literary guessing game. The clues go from hardest to easiest. Ten points if you get it on the first go (you won’t). Guess who this couple is...

1. One is a “rhomboidal woman”, the other is a “deciduous female”.
2. The first one looks like a “great pyramidal Buddha”, the other, a “sleepy vulture”.
3. A is an “Easter Island idol”, B is a “gypsy”;
4. The dominant one looks like a “caesar” and has the “assurance of Cleopatra”, the one in a supporting role is a “swarthy-faced shrew with a furry mustache”.
5. The writer penned “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”, the cook is best known for her hash brownie recipe.

You guessed it — Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas.
Linda Simon has edited two excellent collections of reminiscences by people who knew the couple personally. They’re an entertaining read, mixing academic seriousness (is Gertrude an “eccentric innovator with no inheritors”) with plain, friendly gossip. Any student of modernism, American expats in the first half of the twentieth century or any traveler going to Paris today will enjoy these two books.

Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society, Yale University

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On Henry Miller, The Devil at Large by Erica Jong (1993)

“He was always seeking 'life more abundant' as he says at the end of 'The Colossus of Maroussi'. Sex was one path towards abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others.” “He” in this quote is Henry Miller, most famously the author of 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn', two semi-autobiographical novels written in Paris between 1934 and 1939, banned for a quarter century and finally published in North America in 1961.

What was all the fuss about?

Erica Jong, herself a controversial writer, author of 'Fear of Flying' (1974) has written 'On Henry Miller, The Devil at Large' to help explain the checkered history of this 20th century American artist.

Even if all you know of Henry Miller comes from cultural references, footnotes, occasional sightings in films like Warren Beatty's 'Reds' (1981) or in documentaries like 'Dinner with Henry Miller' (1979) or if you've only seen the Philip Kaufman film 'Henry and June' (1990), you will understand the 'life more abundant' reference. With Henry Miller, stream-of-consciousness passages are abundant; depictions of bodily functions are abundant; slang words too; as are the descriptions of erotic acts and thoughts penned and uttered every chance Miller got.

Erica Jong's book is enormously entertaining even if it is somewhat preachy or self-indulgent in places. But to be fair, the book is not exclusively a biography of Miller - it is also the story of her friendship with Henry, it delivers a scholarly and literary assessment of him as a personality and a fellow artist.

Jong's book also contextualizes the legal and literary debates that have taken place over issues of erotica, pornography and publishing over the 20th century. A bit of chest-thumping is to be expected and even encouraged from the literary godchild of Anais Nin.

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