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Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson

review by Brian Charles Clark

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinean writer, led a fascinatingly diverse life almost entirely within the city limits of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was, in the early twentieth century, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet, and so it is fair to say that Borges experienced numerous worlds without needing to leave home. Born in 1899, he was bilingual from the first, as his grandmother was British. His parents were in conflict over Argentinean politics, which perhaps influenced Borges’ seeming non-partisanship in his writing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Williamson’s Life, it is the reduction of Borges’ life, character and work to this conflict between his parents. Williamson frequently tries to psychoanalyze the life and work in terms of this conflict and, as far as it goes, this provides insight. But did his parents really shape Borges’ entire life? The evidence provided by Williamson himself indicates otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

review by Brian Charles Clark

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michale Houellebecq
Publisher: McSweeny’s, 2005

French bad-boy novelist Michel Houellebecq (pronounced well-beck) is famous for his Platform and Elementary Particles, books stuffed with depressing, depressed and amoral characters who love to sexually humiliate each other. Houellebecq has been accused of writing misogynistic narratives, but you’d have to have tunnel vision to see them that way: Houellebecq doesn’t just hate women, he hates the entire human race. Houellebecq is, in other words, an misanthropic existentialist’s dream date.

Houellebecq’s dream date, in turn, is H.P. Lovecraft. If Houellebecq is the international star of a new wave of illiberal misanthropism, Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) is the pater familias of that wave. Read the rest of this entry »

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History

review by Brian Charles Clark

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History
by Harriet Rubin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest poem written in any language, ever. Harriet Rubin has written a wonderfully passionate account of the back-story of La Divina Comedia: how it came to be written and the world Dante wrote it in. Indeed, the book is passionate to the point of devolving into emotional mayhem.

Alighieri was a minor Florentine politician who ended up on the wrong side of Roman papal power in 1302. For the purpose of staying alive, he went, in essence, into hiding. It is no coincidence that the Divine Comedy is the story of an exile in Hell, and that it is full of political intrigue and revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

A new biography of de Kooning

review by Brian Charles Clark

De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Knopf, 2004

Willem de Kooning painted big canvases that reflected the way he lived: large. He juggled up to five love affairs at one time (and kept them all secret from each other and his wife, Elaine, with a variety of code door knocks), out-painted his rivals, such as Jackson Pollock, and was perhaps only happy drunk and asleep in a gutter. It was there, to riff on Wilde, that he saw the stars. De Kooning was the bohemian: part artist, part intellectual, part alcoholic playboy and pure adventuresome genius.

He was born in Rotterdam in 1904, and stowed away to the U.S. in the mid-twenties. He was already a master draughtsman, and went to work in New York as a commercial artist and window dresser. He made a pretty good living that way. In the 1930s, though, he abandoned commercial art in favor of the more dangerous path: “pure” art. De Kooning quit his jobs at the height of the Depression and just in time to help formulate a major wave in American (and world) painting: Abstract Expressionism. Read the rest of this entry »

The Green and the Gold

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Green and the Gold: A Novel of Andrew Marvell: Spy, Politician, Poet
Christopher Peachment
Thomas Dunne, 2004

Andrew Marvell was a contemporary of John Milton and John Donne. As a poet he is a far lesser light than Donne or Milton, although as far as poems read in their entirety, Marvell may be the better known, as he was the author of “To His Coy Mistress,” the classic “let’s make hay while the sun shines” seduction poem. It was Donne who wrote such memorable lines as “for whom the bell tolls” (in a sermon that is rarely read anymore) and Milton who wrote Paradise Lost (and other huge poems that few people read today), it was Marvell who made the marvelous line, “my vegetable love grows ever grows / vaster than empires and more slow.” Donne and Marvell are typically remembered as members of a group of “metaphysical poets,” which Donne certainly was, though Marvell wears the title reluctantly. “One final piece of advice if you seek to become a poet,” Christopher Peachment’s fictional Marvell says: “Resist the temptation.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
by Nicholas Dawidoff
Publisher: Pantheon, 2002

Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron is a household name-if, that is, you happen to be an economic historian. Or, as is the case with the author of The Fly Swatter, a member of the Gerschenkron household. Nicholas Dawidoff is Gerschenkron’s grandson, and he’s written a fine, if impressionistic, biography of his famous grandfather.

Gerschenkron was born in Odessa, Russia in 1904 and grew up to be, in his grandson’s words, “typically Russian… in a nation of show-offs.” Russians are strong as bears, which “led to an epidemic of Russian hernias,” strong talkers and strong intellects. All his life Gerschenkron was reckless, inclined to leaping off, if not tall buildings, then, for instance, high walls, yelling (in Russian, of course), “Two deaths cannot happen to one person and one death cannot be avoided.” Read the rest of this entry »