The Art of Seeing
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE ART OF SEEING BY PEARL K.BELL IT is rather a pity that Eleanor Clark's gathering of her short fiction written between 1937 and the present, Dr. Heart: A Novella & Other...
...In bringing the volume up to date, Miss Clark has wisely left the main body of her original text unchanged...
...Of course he is writing his doctoral thesis on Stendhal, and a coveted fellowship has brought him to the novelist's birthplace, Grenoble, for a year...
...This is a sack from within...
...Her modern version of Julien Sorel, that archetypal figure in 19th-century fiction whom Lionel Trilling has described as the Young Man from the Provinces, is Tom Bestwick, a young American academic who, like Julien, is ambitious, eager, bookish, open-hearted, poor, and appallingly innocent of the wicked ways of the world...
...In "The Beauty," a bitchy and desperate faculty wife is caught pilfering another guest's purse at a dinner party...
...The breadth of Miss Clark's vision is extraordinary-from the grandiloquent splendor of St...
...Neither, unhappily, can her own fiction in Dr...
...The power of Rome and a Villa derives from the fine art of seeing, of sight as the root of insight...
...Ultimately, though, the novella fails because it goes perversely against the grain of Miss Clark's talent, which is above all, and gloriously, visual...
...from Hadrian's calculated hyperbole of stone and yearning in Tivoli to the purring colony of cats in the Piazza Vittorio...
...Even more curious is the idea of writing a Stendhalian story that is totally unconcerned with politics...
...His despairing contempt for the Bourbon monarchy restored in 1815 is inseparable from his complex, ironic iconography of corruption, romance, heroism, farce, and the precarious survival of the pure in heart...
...The more intensely we come, with her guidance, to understand Tivoli as Hadrian's gaudy defiance of destiny-the villa's art and architecture as his delaying action against the doom of the Roman Empire-the more we marvel at Miss Clark's passionate intelligence discerning the vanished hubris of particular men in the faceless rubble of antiquity, the genius of continuity hidden in the ancient frozen music...
...The most ambitious and most recent narrative of this collection is the novella, Dr...
...Heart begins to approach this grandeur of mind, reach and spirit...
...Heart comes to life only in the rare moments when she is describing the mountains that ring Grenoble...
...from a recapturing of Julius Caesar in the Forum to a recollection of Pope Paul VI on television...
...You find new favorites, new antipathies...
...a retarded child wreaks havoc at a supermarket in "The Fish...
...Stendhal was obsessed with the political and social aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon...
...Yet without a political frame of reference, without the theatrical counterpoint of social and political turmoil and upheaval-And our own era of incessant crisis is hardly dissimilar from Stendhal's-a work of fiction is not Stendhalian in tone no matter how cleverly his themes have been cut to a contemporary measure...
...Though one no longer approaches Hadrian's villa on foot, as she had to do in 1950, along a fine alley of cypresses-the buses now disgorge their tourist cargo "smack into the heart of the matter"-the place still casts a spell...
...The key words for the differences since 1950," she writes, "are automobile, air travel, TV, overpopulation, pollution and runaway capitalism...
...The shorter pieces are either flatly predictable or so insubstantial that they dissolve as you read them like sugar in tea...
...Moreover, Miss Clark's mockery of the French new novelists is too broad to be witty and too parochial to succeed as farce...
...Heart hopes to discover and divulge about this young American from the provinces and his frantic effort to survive in a hostile world...
...Like the bogus sophistication affected by Julien in The Red and the Black, Tom adopts the world-weary languor and soporific ennui of characters in a chic nouveau roman and-voila-he is lonely no more...
...Blessed with excellent French acquired as an Army brat, Tom waits for the Grenoblois to welcome him as one of their own?he'd sworn to have a hundred percent French year, not hang around with his compatriots or other foreigners"-and nearly goes mad with loneliness...
...At every point of Miss Clark's meticulous scrutiny of the mile-long Xanadu that took 21 years to build-with its profusion of libraries, gardens, wine-cellars, baths, tunnels, fountains, and colonnades-the contradictory and seductive Emperor-architect intrudes himself: "a lucid melancholy figure standing tall as Paul Bunyan against these mountains and against his century, with at his back the derelict shreds of the world that he has loved and far off under his gaze the dull seething movements of the barbarians...
...Rome, contained until after the War pretty much within the Aurelian walls, was set in countryside that has now been obliterated by "a howling wilderness of new apartment complexes instant slums, pushing farther out every day like some malign vegetation in steel and stucco...
...One, "A Summer in Puerto Rico," isn't a story at all, but rather dusty notes of a Caribbean journey in the late 1930s, and only dimly interesting as a weak adumbration of the artfully casual journal chapters in Rome and a Villa...
...Instead of tinkering with sentences, she has added a new preface, "Return to Rome," which is by turns angry, philosophical, amused, and horrified...
...It would be sick to have no change of taste in a lifetime...
...throw in some 36 governments since World War II, and a burst of national prosperity from the early '50s for some 20 years, putting many millions of native-owned cars on the streets and roads around, and you have a degree of speed, noise, chicanery, and confusion that can make one nostalgic for an oldtime sack or barbarian invasion...
...Change in Italy and the reader has in no way dulled the flamboyant brilliance of her Roman archeology of the mind and eye, and very few works of contemporary fiction can safely withstand comparison with her remarkable exploration of the Eternal City and the Emperor Hadrian's villa in Tivoli...
...For it is hard to see just what, beyond cultivated gamesmanship, Dr...
...Writing the thesis now becomes an act of communion with the spirit of Stendhal rather than a lifeless, pedantic obligation...
...To hell with the PhD, with academic jobs, with the fear of rejection -Tom will join his idol in the aristocracy of outsiders...
...What exhilarating and youthful audacity there was in the very conception of Rome and a Villa...
...These are little dramas hacked out with much too blunt an edge...
...it is thus not a sensed experience, but merely a static contrivance...
...But Eleanor Clark, knowing better than most how many assaults of different barbarisms Rome has survived through its centuries, does not fall into the trap of apocalyptic wailing or sentimental-ism: "You just have to reform...
...Heart: A Novella & Other Stories (Pantheon, 294 pp., $7.95), has come out this winter only a bit before her new and expanded edition of Rome and a Villa (Pantheon, 366 pp., $10.00), originally published in 1952...
...In place of Stendhal's fiery passion for political intrigue, Miss Clark lamely substitutes present-day academic and literary infighting...
...Sdadly, neither the novella nor any of the stories in Dr...
...To attempt nothing less than a wholly personal yet flawlessly knowledgable account of Rome-as a 20th-century metropolis, as a crowded landscape of history, as the gold-and-marble pageant of pagan mortality and Christian triumph...
...But he realizes in time (further parallels with Stendhal) that the danger of becoming hopelessly alienated from his tender and honest self is more lethal, finally more unbearable, than loneliness...
...What saves him, for a while at least, is the protective ruse Stendhal had devised for Julien more than a century before: a pose that hides his secret feelings...
...Her experience of its power of enchantment, in fact, makes the long, scrupulously detailed account of Hadrian's extravaganza at Tivoli the most tightly integrated chapter of the book, a miraculous interweaving of man and object that transforms architecture into an organic extension of imperial character, like a third eye...
...In disappointing contrast, Dr...
...an evil exterminator in "The Man for Her" strangles birds and a woman...
...Unfortunately, in the course of constructing her elaborate network of allusions and borrowings, whose effect depends on a familiarity with The Red and the Black as great as the author's, she somehow loses her fictional point...
...Rarely has the love affair between a modern sensibility and an ancient locale-consummated in every glance, with every step-been more exuberantly recorded...
...it was never meant to be a guidebook, it was a response to the idea of a city that, through the centuries, has survived everything...
...Peter's to the humble room where Keats died on the Piazza di Spagna...
...Heart, in which Miss Clark attempts the supremely difficult and self-defeating task of writing a contemporary tale that is also a cunning literary game about Stendhal...
Vol. 58 • February 1975 • No. 4
