[This article first appeared in the September 1988 issue of Chronicles.] “Le reve est une seconde vie.“ —Nerval T.S. Eliot has become so thoroughly exalted, especially among conservative intellectuals, as the greatest poetic avatar of Western civilization in modern times (a role he must share, though, with Yeats and Pound) that it may shock many...
For all of living memory, they have been making this wilderness and calling it art. If you were there in Paris, as I was, for the public sale of the Picasso legacy belonging to the artist’s mistress and model Dora Maar, you would know whereof I speak. The masterpiece of this collection, Weeping Woman, probably...
“Courage,” said the Philosopher, “is the prime philosophical virtue” (by which he meant the moral kind) “lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice.” It is a notion from another time, in accord with which it came to pass that the philosophical cream of my...
When still relatively small, I sang in a church choir whose quality was the envy of our whole capital city diocese, so that its members, who included a chorus of boy sopranos like myself, were recruited, auditioned, trained, and paid. This last feature helped reconcile to plain song and Palestrina my career army officer father...
Saul Bellow’s It All Adds Up is his first (and given his age probably his last) collection of nonfiction. Mr. Bellow is close to 80. His introduction suggests a mood of self-reformation, not solemn but tending toward testament. He is said to be at work on a novel. He has outlived most of his generation,...
The American poet and man of letters John Berryman created in his half-memoir, half-short story “The Imaginary Jew” what is very likely the most powerfully compressed vision of vulgar, visceral racism in our literature. In this present, honorably intended biography of Ezra Pound by an apparently Jewish and leftist professor at Queens College (whose previous...
“Le reve est une seconde vie.“ —Nerval T.S. Eliot has become so thoroughly exalted, especially among conservative intellectuals, as the greatest poetic avatar of Western civilization in modern times (a role he must share, though, with Yeats and Pound) that it may shock many to notice the unmistakable oriental elements embedded in even his most...
“He fell with a thud to the ground and his armor clattered around him.” —Homer War Music, called by its author, Christopher Logue, an “account” of four books of the Iliad of Homer, is not a minor event. Its reception both in its native England, and now here, has been enthusiastic. For, English writing, especially...
What (to ask one bizarrely unfashionable question) is civilization? Set aside geography, climate, genetics, and luck. The high classical civilizations are marked by certain indispensible accomplishments: a serious respect for facts; related to this, a steady application of work toward stable wealth; a conception of justice moving in two directions, toward society as a whole...