Literary Portraits
MERKIN, DAPHNE
WHters & Writing LITERARY PORTRAITS by daphne merkin T he habit of reading takes deepest root, I would guess, in those whose idea of communion is slightly imperious—who want to know others...
...The looseness of Vanessa and Clive Bells' relationship, for instance, may be seen as the forerunner of "open marriages," and Bloomsburyites are obliged always to speak with "absolute frankness...
...loomsbury can hardly be the new frontier of literary territories: It has been so thoroughly explored, indeed ravaged, for its marketplace potential that after the steady flow of biographies and letters and diaries one would have imagined its resources had been depleted...
...And surprisingly, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (Lippincott, 288 pp., $12.95) is a page-turner...
...Impatient with the adulation of Genet's "hymn of hate" by intellectuals like Sartre, Pritchett limns the French author's imaginative enterprise with atypical asperity: "One gets in the novels something of the self-caressing dreariness and pettiness that date, I suppose, from a much better writer like Restif de la Bretonne...
...Peccadilloes of character rarely escape his gaze (this, too, I ascribe to a fiction-writer's engagement with the particularized), yet he is curious rather than judgmental...
...Desmond MacCar-thy, the literary critic...
...Their very violence is a prediction and their inflation of the ballooning self makes it dramatic and macroscopic...
...To begin with, there is the unpretentiousness of Prit-chett's prose, a disinclination to spotlight his own remarks...
...Who prowls around in this house of lions...
...Beside the style, there is Pritchett's ability to slip with chameleon-like ease under the skins of his subjects, such disparate "makers" as Machado De Assis, the playful Brazilian, and Ivan Goncharov, the stolid Russian, and to describe the nature of their projected inner worlds, the "myths" of the title...
...and he, whose notions of sexual love approached those of primitive rape, hated the act he could not resist . . . His sexuality tortured him...
...Although none of the multitude of facts gathered here is new, Leon Edel's craft is so honed that the story of Bloomsbury becomes freshly told...
...Only one writer included in these generally affectionate considerations stretches Pritchett's tolerance, and that is Jean Genet...
...If this slim and captivating collection of essays on European and Latin American authors (a companion volume on British and American writers is forthcoming) does not induce him to pick up Flaubert or Chekhov, nothing ever will...
...What we get is something both more vivid and less mediated than we have come to expect from this sort of writing: a direct access to fictional universes as seen through the eyes of their conjurers—how, for instance, the flagrant personalism of the 19th-century Romantic outlook translated into the torch-singing of George Sand's novels: "It is true, at any rate, that the Romantics...
...This beguiling strain of modesty, probably a mixture of individual temperament and national endowment (the English veneration of diffidence seems to have been artistically beneficial), contributes to a liquid style that moves between the concrete and the metaphorical with astonishing facility: "He is the perpetual autobiographer," Pritchett writes of Strindberg, "who has at least three albatrosses—his three wives—hanging from his neck, and it is not long before he is telling us that the birds shot him...
...WHters & Writing LITERARY PORTRAITS by daphne merkin T he habit of reading takes deepest root, I would guess, in those whose idea of communion is slightly imperious—who want to know others intimately without becoming implicated...
...It is surely Pritchett's own experience with myth-making—his superb short-stories, memoirs and novels—that enables him to describe a given work with deft comprehension of its originating impulses: the nub of ennui (Flaubert, Stendhal, Goncharov), or conflicted passion (Tolstoy, Dos-toevsky, Strindberg), or resonant whimsy (Pushkin and the Latin Americans) out of which the stuff of art is produced...
...Backed by money and intellectual prestige, they break away from Victorian conventions and standards...
...set the artist apart as the supreme seer in society...
...But what if one were interested in swelling the ranks, in breaking open the closed circle of literature for the literary...
...The title is from a phrase of the group's most perspicacious observer, Virginia Woolf...
...fame has touched most of the group, and the ravages of the later years have not yet overshadowed the radiance of their gifts...
...The best way to tempt a reluctant reader into the lair of bookishness would be to give him a copy of Prit-chett's The Myth Makers (Random House, 184 pp., $8.95...
...She was half Literature...
...Pritchett's undisguised distaste for all that Genet represents is not entirely in keeping with a critic's stance...
...Time passes through us as we pass from youth to age...
...The love affair of the week, month or year, along with mysticism, socialism and The People was transposed into the novel that promptly followed...
...And how does Duncan Grant fit in...
...and Roger Fry, art critic and painter...
...Edel's premise is that Bloomsbury can be viewed as a fictional trope?nine characters in search of an author...
...The link that binds them is a shared vision of the inherent possibilities within the framework of the class-ridden, past-clinging England for which they feel mingled love and scorn...
...About the Tolstoys' marriage he writes with sympathetic acumen: "She hated sexual intercourse and was consoled by the thought that by yielding to his 'maulings,' she gained power...
...We dream, we wake up...
...Without giving the problematic (Virginia Woolf s madness, Clive Bell's hedonism, Lytton Strachey's passivity, etc...
...Serious readers, in fact, make up an odd, tight group...
...The Myth Makers abounds with the delectables gleaned from a lifetime of bookish foragings...
...Pritchett...
...His conception provides him with a useful vantage point?that of a coordinator, an arranger of coherent patterns...
...The other four are: John Maynard Keynes, the economist...
...We are defined and re-defined as the days melt and remake us...
...He hated any woman after he had slept with her...
...This approach is uniquely suited to Edel's ordering instincts, his tendency to look for the note of harmony among discordant elements—a tendency that allows for psychological close-ups and for the larger historical picture...
...The passions of her characters, their powerful jealousies, their alternations of exaltation and gloom, were her own...
...It is a strikingly graceful work—Pritchett carries his erudition so slightly, one forgets that scholarship is integral to the fluency of his manner—and as an invitation to read Boris Pasternak or Jorge Luis Borges or any of its far-ranging subjects is, in a word, irresistible...
...One of the suprising consolations of his life was that he liked going out into the country for a day's shooting, and it is a striking aspect of his lifelong paranoia in human relationships that he loved what he killed...
...she spoke of herself as 'the consumer' of men and women too, and the men often turned out to be projections of herself...
...The lack of charity is an appalling defect and one rebels against the claustrophobia...
...Edel's focus is on the emergence and blossoming of Bloomsbury between the opening years of the 20th century, when four of the members first stumble upon each other at Cambridge, and 1920, when they are already confirmed kindred spirits—aligned through marriage, love or friendship...
...He is, above all, a connoisseur of implied atmosphere: "The sentiments, the passions, are a dream," Pritchett comments on Eugene Onegin, "we are mocked but without ill-will...
...And since most writing about books is directed at them, it is hardly surprising that literary criticism has so often the stifling air of an inside job...
...A House of Lions is an elegant, complexly-structured book that reads like the most absorbing of novels: One keeps turning pages simply to discover what happens next: Will Leonard find his way out of the jungles of Ceylon...
...For while Pritchett's mind is capable of flexing itself with astonishingly youthful agility, it balks when it perceives a violation—even in art—of certain standards of civility and morality...
...But apparently not, for Leon Edel, that most tireless of reconnoiterers, has now added his offering to the pile...
...He will pass off the most penetrating insights—of Stendhal, for instance, he observes, "The perpetual cry of this adolescent, whether he is with Napoleon's Army in Germany or Russia, whether he is back in Italy, is that he is bored to death"—as though they were lying around for anyone to pick up and he has just happened to bring them to your attention...
...Duncan Grant, the painter...
...and that for all their extravagance of feeling and even because of it, they were excellent pre-Freudian psychologists...
...If most of them are shameless egotists, they are also capable of generosity and devotion...
...short shrift, he nevertheless manages to convey a sense of achievement, the commitment to work—be it writing, painting, politics, economics, or criticism—and the ceaseless self-evaulation that were as much a part of the Bloomsbury ethic as their much reported bisexuality and high jinks...
...There are, of course, the "zoo's" more publicized denizens, the Woolfs, the Bells (Vanessa, Stephen and Clive) and Lytton Strachey...
...They are all, in different ways, devout modernists: "In their work as in their affections, they believed in the individual and in freedom—the freedom to create one's own life...
...There is, in that case, V.S...
...We have to add that she [Sand] is shamelessly autobiographical...
...One would do well to remember, though, that he is just short of 80 years old, and that Genet's excesses are the harbinger of a very contemporary fascination with deviant behavior...
...His book leaves off at the formation of "The Memoir Club," the first of Bloomsbury's many tributes to itself...
...Will Vanessa and Roger Fry fall in love...
Vol. 62 • July 1979 • No. 14
