The cliff face

Since our society avoids talking about death, Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (Virago) may initially be confronting reading, but it soon becomes fascinating. Roiphe’s way of understanding death is to investigate six prominent writers – Susan Sontag, Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas (above), Sigmund Freud, James Salter and John Updike – their final months and days, and the manner of their dying. We speak of death as like a curtain, but really it is a cliff face, and in our society its presence is removed from the centre of society, despite its ubiquity in films and the media, sealed off hermetically in hospital rooms. Roiphe suggests that this remoteness does enhance its fascination, while at the same time its unfamiliarity breeds discomfort. She says that her investigation is less about ‘wisdom’ and more simply about confronting a fear of death.

Updike is the only one here with a conventional religious faith, if we can put it that way, growing up Lutheran and spending most of his life as an Episcopalian. Roiphe, while not antagonistic, admits she simply doesn’t get religion and finds it hard to understand Updike’s approach to death, which he calls an ‘adventure’ (a description echoed by Maurice Sendak, below) and about which he writes a final book of poems after learning of a fatal diagnosis. Roiphe is honest about her puzzlement over Updike’s mix of sincerity and irony towards his faith, a mix that many of faith will recognise (even though those without religious faith may find this at odds with a simplistic picture of what faith entails) and that is also to be found in one of Updike’s favourite writers, Kierkegaard.

Roiphe shows how these writers tended to confront death in their works and contrasts Sontag, who clung desperately to life, with Sigmund Freud, who calmly documents his demise as he would a patient’s, and Updike, who tells his wife emphatically that he is ready to go. Then there is Dylan Thomas who although, famously, in his poetry, was to ‘rage against the dying of the light’, seemed to rush headlong towards it via his drinking. Roiphe decides that his marital problems had a lot to do with it, and she opines that in the midst of such woes, sometimes ‘death does not seem like an unsensible solution’. Roiphe is sceptical that we can properly prepare for death, and that may be true, but some of the writers here show that we can go a certain way towards it.

Inhabits the suburbs

Richard Ford, Let Me Be Frank with You, Bloomsbury

Frank Bascombe is a classic modern literary character, an American everyman, like John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, the archetypal divorced and remarried baby boomer who is the product of economic boom-time and freer morals. He inhabits the suburbs, where the overwhelming majority of Westerners live, not Manhattan, not a remote icy island, or the corridors of power. Yet he is not an anti-hero like Jonathan Franzen’s Chip Lambert, out to expose the dark heart of suburbia. Ford’s three previous books featuring Bascombe gave us a detailed life, and detailed appraisals of it. Nothing extraordinary happens plot-wise, but plot is not Ford’s strong suit. “Remoteness joins us,” says Bascombe at one point, and his (and Ford’s) capacity for remote observation and analysis is compelling. Ford puts down on paper the often unrecognised questions and answers we constantly tell ourselves in order to negotiate life.

This new book features four linked stories (the end of one story plants the seed for the next) about a retired Bascombe, his pre-Christmas perambulations in New Jersey set against the background of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Here he is grumpier and cruder than previously, as far as I remember, and his thoughts are preoccupied by ageing and the changing landscape, particularly through natural disaster and his profession, real estate. He is struck by the impermanence of things – people and houses. The only downside to the book is the jokey title which doesn’t do it justice. Although Bascombe’s humour and grumpiness are often highlighted by reviewers, it is the measured introspection of Ford and his alter-ego that stands out. A most welcome return to the literary world.

Updike the acrobat

Hard to believe that we won’t be getting more collections of essays, or despatches from the frontlines of middle class suburbia from John Updike, that great man of American letters. It’s been five years since his passing and his new biography by Adam Begley should be a reminder of this great talent, the chronicler and touchstone for twentieth century American life.

Not that there should be any great revelations, and not that there won’t be much to learn that we haven’t already heard from Updike himself. Trawl through his collections of reviews and his autobiography of sorts, Self Consciousness, and you get a fair measure of the man.

But, let’s just say, I miss him. Sure, he was a show off (in a very polished, polite sort of way). He was like an acrobat, he had a gift for putting together the most sparkling prose, as well as, from his first collection of reviews as a young writer, having an astonishing grasp of literature in all its breadth and depth. He freely admitted that the reviewer’s job is to construct an image of competency hurriedly with cardboard and sticky tape, but nevertheless his work displayed insight, wisdom, yes, arrogance, but also an infectious enthusiasm. Yet, amongst all this, there was a, dare I say, a dark side – a thoughtful Protestant lurking within who found that the shenanigans of suburbia masked an existential longing, and it is this undercurrent that makes his fiction so important.

Moore stories

A new collection of short stories (Bark) has prompted me to return to Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories (sorry – THE Collected Stories). She is hailed as one of America’s best short story writers – witty, razor-sharp observant, charting “America’s changing anxieties”. She is indeed quite a writer, and aims to grip you with first lines that both set up the story and inject a little twist: “When the cat died on Veterans Day…”, “You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names…” Grand sweeps interrupted by tart particulars. But the cleverness can be too much sometimes – the similes, much like John Updike’s, can display a bit of literary showing-off. She describes an L-shaped apartment as being like a life veering off in another direction. (Really?)

She packs whole lives into the stories, even if chronologically the stories span a short time. A gift is her ability to construct a life by focusing not on the highs, but by looking back on the events in a life from the valleys or plateaus. Characters are often empty, weary, and find themselves in a place, both literally and figuratively, they never expected to be. But this can also be very dispiriting. She can enliven her stories with a knowing humour, and yet often they are very sad (in a listless rather than elegiac way).

Art for our sake

Art as Therapy, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Phaidon

Art galleries are the new cathedrals, it is often said. Art used to be in the service of religion, not to mention government, but now art is its own end, with a cult-like air of the sacred. Our art galleries revel in mystification, and glorification, like the nonsense of Hobart’s MONA, with its darkness paraded as light, and its nihilist sermonizing hidden behind a veil of philanthropy. At the same time art is like a toy – an object simply for enjoyment, with novelty and gimmickry often edging out real depth.

Philosophers Alain de Botton and Australia’s John Armstrong have both made careers deliberately at odds with the mind-bending theorizing of much contemporary philosophy. There is a danger that they can suck the life out of something in the search for its utility (witness de Botton’s recent Religion for Atheists), but generally their books try to apply philosophy to everyday life, in illuminating but unpretentious fashion. Here they argue against the mantra of art for art’s sake.

They recognise that art is read in various ways, but Art as Therapy argues for galleries as psychologists’ couches. They propose that art museums should be arranged not historically, but in regard to the emotions of the works displayed. For example, one might visit a floor of a public gallery dedicated to helping with personal relationships. Aside from the fact that this reorganisation is unlikely to happen any time soon, this proposal has a number of problems. This way of reading art is particularly subjective, and what one person gets out of a painting emotionally might be quite different to another’s. They suggest that gallery “captions” (the explanatory cards that hang beside paintings) should spurn the detailed facts of production and concentrate on the human emotions of the scene portrayed. But their example just illustrates the problem with this proposal: Juan de Flandes’ Christ Appearing to his Mother is the depiction of the utterly unique occasion of Jesus, raised from the dead, visiting his mother, but de Botton and Armstrong’s proposed alternative text makes no mention of this and rather talks about the bonds of child and mother that most humans share. For some biblically illiterate viewers, the point of the picture may remain completely obscure.

Additionally, most of the examples in the book are held up us as pinnacles of (Western) art, and the authors seem to be conflating these pieces, which are viewed on a less regular basis, with the art in our homes and in our other public spaces, which make a more regular contribution (or not) to our wellbeing. Although the authors are hostile to art museums as “dead libraries”, and their curators as overly obsessed with the details of art works’ production, it is quite possible that people want to visit museums to find out these facts, which are less subjective. Museums as repositories of history is not a value-less concept. In fact, rather than arguing for the merits of our art galleries’ overhaul, the authors might be better simply to argue for the merits of a book such as the very one they have produced, which is much stronger when they simply respond to the art work displayed.

Armstrong and de Botton are illuminative when it comes to simply looking at the paintings (or architecture), and being more concerned with the feelings they evoke rather than the details of their production. (Though there are more books out there about “just looking” – to borrow the title of one of John Updike’s books of art criticism – than Armstrong and de Botton would perhaps have us believe. As well as Updike, Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son comes to mind.) Art, they say, can make us better lovers. Though lovers value spontaneity, love needs to be practiced, and art can help us move past a more naïve, romantic attitude to relationships as they mature. Art can help us analyse ourselves, it can encourage us to exhibit virtue and spurn vice, to value subtlety, to engage in discussion, to work at problem solving, to be optimistic rather than pessimistic. It helps us see the value in the mundane, and in detail. It can inspire modesty, foster courage, make us think twice, and recognise that hardship is simply a part of life. It can confront our prejudices and upend the assumptions we have that lead to meanness and narrow-mindedness. Politically speaking, it can help us talk honestly and work towards healing, rather than simply denouncing. It can suggest how we should cultivate truth and beauty every day, rather than swinging between moral failure and extravagant amends. Art can alert us to the fact that making money is not a good in itself, but on the other hand, the authors argue, art for art’s sake is no good either, and, ironically, it can help us see that it is not just “artists” who can be fulfilled in their work.

They are not afraid to point out where art goes wrong. They are good also at getting surprising things out of modern art. Many Christians are wary of modern art, and rightly so, as it is often antagonistic to tradition, of which Christianity is a part, as well as being often in service to “do-what-you-feel” philosophies. There is also the reliance on shock value, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing – the Old Testament prophets were out to shock – but in modern art’s case, it is often no more than a childish wish to cause offense. But for those who don’t “get” modern art (an often uninformed attitude to such a wide ranging phenomenon), de Botton and Armstrong suggest that we respond to art depending on what is missing in us emotionally. This may explain wildly differing opinions on a particular artwork, and it also encourages us not to dismiss others’ taste in art.

Good modern art may be troubling but it can point a way out. Minimalist art, in its starkness, may force us to confront our problems, or it may calm us in the midst of a hectic culture. Works that see the beauty in otherwise dismissed products of industrial society may make us consider how our ideas of beauty are often influenced by the values of our society.

In focusing on the high end of art – those artworks held up as icons of our culture – they run the risk of minimising the value of more localised arts and crafts and fostering the view that the more expensive, the better the art is. However their sceptical but warm attitude to art is largely a healthy one. It reminds us that art was made for man, not man for art, and that as a human production art is not transcendent itself, but simply points to transcendence.

Notes

This blog continues the kind of thing found in Notes on Books and Music by Nick Mattiske, for better or worse.

Here is part of the introduction to the book, including the accompanying caricature of John Updike:

He whom nature has made weak. And idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critick. – Samuel Johnson

The communication between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discrimination should curve toward that end. – John Updike

Hopefully the title of this collection conveys something of the on-the-run nature of reviewing. Often one has to come up to speed quickly, scribble a few notes and send off a hastily compiled report to meet a deadline. First impressions dominate, emotion can reign over deliberation, and omissions inevitably occur. If the above sounds like an excuse, well, it sort-of is, and I will add that reviews like these are not usually written with their later compilation in mind, so there will inevitably be contradictions, repetitions and the like. By way of further excuse, I will add that I am a non-expert, a fact that any reader of these reviews will likely find glaringly obvious. But then again, reviewing is a learning process, both for reviewers and readers, and for popular publications, as opposed to scholarly journals and the like, sometimes the non-expert is more qualified to teach. In the process, material under review may be diluted or distilled, but this transformation is one of the thrills of writing and, hopefully, reading reviews. Or, to be more cynical about it, one could just concur with John Updike who says that reviews “excuse us from reading the books themselves”.

If Samuel Johnson is critical of critics, it is because it is often far easier to damn than to praise. In one of his collections of reviews Updike laments the fact that it contains too much negativity, and that the point of a review should be to point to. The best reviews open doors to rooms never previously noticed that enrich the reader’s or listener’s experience. There is sometimes a great need for negativity, if that means the critique of sloppy thinking rather than merely the reviewer’s personal distaste, but Updike is right: when one has the pleasure of being immersed in books and music, some measure of enthusiasm should spark off onto the reader.

The book is available here: https://mosaicresources.com.au/titles/9781743241240