The Artist as Hero
BELL, PEARL K.
Writer & writing THE ARTIST AS HERO BY PEARL K. BELL T o our great surprise, four novelists have recently published books whose central character is an artist. I say surprise because the...
...J. R. Salamanca's Embarkation (Knopf, 274 pp., $6.95) poses a somewhat different problem...
...Unfortunately, midway through the book, she overextends herself, asking us to believe that so maimed and helpless an individual could not only persuade an attractive, voraciously philo-progenitive woman to marry him, but could also do what is necessary to sire five children in less than ten years...
...What really strains plausibility to the breaking point, however, is Jeremy's greatness as an artist...
...Maybe so, yet The Glorious Ones more strongly suggests something else—that perhaps Miss Prose, much as one admires her strenuous avoidance of the familiar autobiographical roads taken by most novelists under 30, has now gone too far in the other direction...
...I say surprise because the practice is much rarer than one imagines—which is just as well, for few fictional subjects are more riddled with pitfalls...
...Unhappily, none of these recent efforts adequately fulfills this indispensable condition...
...and Celestial Navigation crumbles under their nay-saying weight...
...With compassion and precise clarity, Miss Tyler gives us an extraordinary portrait of a pathologically clumsy and inarticulate creature...
...Don't forget that this is a very special man you are dealing with," the bookish spinster Miss Vinton declares...
...Not some run-of-the-mill insurance salesman...
...We were very happy together, she and I, I suppose we were happy together," Caleb intones with typically arch ambiguity...
...None of the human beings in Salamanca's landscape attains the dense, tangible solidity of the implements, wood and boats...
...They must persuade the reader beyond any flicker of skepticism-and using only the arbitrarily imagined detail and narrative method of a work of fiction—that the character being described, whether poet, sculptor, composer, painter, or actor, is truly great at his craft...
...For a while he falls under the spell of a grotesquely eccentric family in Istanbul, whose daughter he eventually marries...
...The best thing about Embarkation is Salamanca's richly affectionate descriptions of rural Maryland, the smell and texture of the Chesapeake shore, of fast boats in dark water...
...When his debts threatened the loss of his shop, he burned the family house to the ground for the insurance money...
...Jeremy Pauling is a middle-aged recluse who owns a dilapidated rooming house in Baltimore full of misfit human leftovers like himself...
...If the film was as fatuous as its creator and the novel he inhabits, its destruction shows flawless judgment...
...But in the end The Glorious Ones is disappointing, because Miss Prose isn't saying anything that matters...
...Our picaresque hero finally shoots his new "masterpiece" on a deserted Greek island and, after surviving an earthquake and escaping an angry mob, flies home to Vermont...
...The everyday practical world is a jungle of menace to Jeremy, who collapses in terror before the need to walk a block from home, make a phone call or answer the doorbell...
...Torrid love affairs and backbiting, jealous contempt and slavish devotion, camaraderie and black rage make up the climate of this gaudy little world, beyond the reach of normal society and ordinary emotion, where artists of improvisatory brilliance hang together by sheer bravura, though they fight like wildcats...
...Within the sphere of fiction, the artist must be a figure of blind faith to the reader, or he is no artist at all...
...He is a master boatwright of the Maryland tidewater, a demonic perfectionist who has dedicated his life to designing and building ever more beautiful, sleek and elegant racing sloops...
...Despite her cleverly executed somersaults and cartwheels through an obscure theatrical pocket of the past, she fails to convince us that a razzle-dazzle stunt is a solution to a young writer's pursuit of originality...
...After this kind of arty claptrap, it is a blessed relief to breathe the air of a born storyteller...
...Yet doubting questions assault our minds—how did Jeremy acquire his skill...
...There, in expiation of his sins, he throws his latest work into the fire...
...In seven powerfully written chapters—each told by a different typecast character such as the Clown, the Miser and the Lover—we learn about the company's triumphs and failures as it performs its repertory of farce and romance wherever it can find a paying audience...
...Besides having a fondness for epigrammatic muttering, Caleb is an icy bastard so inhumanly detached that he was able to make a film of his own father's death agonies...
...In less than expert hands, the artist as hero too easily becomes the instrument of self-cossetting, repetitive narcissism, or simple-minded shadow-boxing between Life (short) and Art (long), with a good deal of heavy breathing about genius and vision...
...We must quickly accept, for example, that Gustave von Aschenbach, in Death in Venice, is a major writer...
...his mother, until her recent death, was his sole connection to life...
...Yet precisely because Embarkation is really a book about a craftsman rather than an artist, it demands not faith but concrete knowledge—highly specialized information about the way boats are designed and constructed —if one is to appreciate Joel Linthicum's mastery...
...Nothing and no one could ever matter as much to him as the "one perfect boat that he had an idea of, somewhere back in his mind, that he was working toward...
...All human life is . . . just a series of stories and plays, most of which are exactly the same," the author tells us...
...Caleb Sharrow, the highly acclaimed director, spends a tedious lot of time in the book airing classy pensees about Creativity and the Camera—as though the laboriously complicated narrative were merely a convenient background for displaying self-conscious aphorisms like "armed with a lens to inject between myself and the world...
...What the novelist must exact from us is our unquestioning assent to a living excellence that is not demonstrable and needs no proof...
...Thus, to the landlubber, much of Embarkation is inaccessible...
...I arranged the world to fit the dimensions of my viewfinder," and "nothing less would do for me than to illustrate the relatedness of all things', of times with places, and places with things, and things with" etc...
...The story of Joel's family, an innocent sacrifice to his "art," is told by his elder son, Aaron, a talented but failed actor who feels that his father has drained him of courage for either work or love...
...A wealthy man, he is now wandering through Europe in search of ideas for a new movie...
...Although the main character, Joel Linthicum, is called an artist, the word doesn't quite fit...
...175 pp., $6.95), recounts the history and adventures of a troupe of commedia dell'arte actors traveling through 17th-century Italy...
...In his littered attic studio, Miss Tyler tells us, this emotional cripple creates marvelous collages out of such found objects as Dixie cups, yarn, bus tickets, buttons, bits of glass...
...what does the work actually look like...
...He has an expert's fondness for the mechanics and accouterments of a boatwright's craft-the "perfectly graded, fine, cold, darkly gleaming tools, chisels, spokeshaves, gouges, bits and augers, adzes, their blades carefully, devoutly honed on oilstone to bitterly twinkling edges...
...After Joel is lost in a storm at sea, Aaron comes home to settle the dead man's affairs, and as he broods nostalgically and bitterly on past and present, we gradually take the full measure of Joel Linthicum's zealous, ruinous dedication...
...that Adrian Leverkiihn, in Doctor Faus-tus, is a musical genius...
...But his novel is wrapped in so many capricious, impenetrable layers of pretentiously mannered prose and overwrought biz-zarerie that it has the consistency of lukewarm glue...
...In Geoffrey Wolff's The Sightseer (Random House, 272 pp., $6.95), the putative artist is a documentary film maker, and Wolff is ostensibly concerned with the moral limits and immoral license of art and the artist...
...The Glorious Ones (Atheneum...
...A genius...
...Francine Prose's curious little novel...
...Unlike her fine first novel, Judah the Pious, a hypnotically resonant tale modeled on Hasidic parables, her latest work seems an exercise in esoterica...
...The most formidable problem authors face in writing about exceptional artists is that of credibility...
...We are taken backstage for several versions of the passionate struggle for leadership between the troupe's founding genius, the mysterious and flamboyant Flaminio Scala, and the cunning usurper Francesco Andreini...
...But to genuinely win the reader's consent, the novel must itself be great...
...For many years only she recognized in Jeremy's thickly textured creations the miracle of a spirit that could sail "by celestial navigation...
...Anne Tyler makes a number of impossible demands on one's credulity in Celestial Navigation (Knopf, 190 pp., $6.95), at least she knows better than the other three novelists how to evoke the seedy, rancid, oppressive reality of decaying things in which an artist can sometimes flourish...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 5
