Thomas Mann: Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; Frederick Ungar; New York. The true artist living in a time dominated by politics finds himself traversing a path that is both arduous and dangerous. He begins with a search that is committed to life rather than to just the intellect; that search is replete with ambiguity and...
Category: Web
Post
Horrors & Hope
Paul Johnson: Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties; Harper & Row; New York. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe rose to give his address. The year was 1905. “We are witnesses to the greatest moment of summing-up in history,” he declared: in the name of a new and unknown culture,...
Post
Myths, Visions, Passions
Martin Seymour-Smith: Robert Graves: His Life and Work; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York. Douglas Archibald: Yeats; Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. Although the era of “High Modernism” is well in the past, the pantheon of modern literature still seems to many a palace of confusions. The paradoxes and contradictions, the conflicting impulses that informed...
Post
Beyond the Public View
Tadeusz Konwicki: A Minor Apocalypse; Translated by Richard Lourie; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Contemporary Poland, for many reasons, disquiets the West. To those who nurture visions of a painless and peaceful accord between the Soviets and the United States against the supposed “common enemy” of nuclear weapons, the squashing of Solidarity to placate...
Post
Eviscerating the Heartland
Gore Vidal; Duluth; Random House; New York. Gore Vidal has spawned another repulsive novel. Having experimented with historical travesty (Burr, Julian, 1876) and fag chic (Myra Breckinridge), Vidal has turned his fictional abilities to the world of soap operas and drugstore gothic novels. He has not risen above his material. Even the publishers do not...
Post
Small is Significant
Walter Walker: A Dime to Dance By; Harper & Row; New York. Geoffrey Norman: Midnight Water; E.P. Dutton; New York. Existence — which is all there is, to answer Peggy Lee — consists of little things: there was only one Big Bang, and should there be another, none will be around to record it. Toe...
Post
Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment
Joyce Carol Oates: The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews; E. P. Dutton; New York. Kenneth S. Lynn: The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Matthew Arnold knew far more than did Samuel Johnson. Curiously, however, he was far less confident...
Post
Before the Borscht Belt — and Beyond
The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830-1890; Edited by David E. E. Sloane; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. Chicago’s Public Wits; Edited by Kenny J. Williams and Bernard Duffey; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. It is a commonplace that humor arises from the amused recognition of the disparity between the ideal and...