Thursday, June 17, 2004
Bringer of Monsters
Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn. Vintage. 256 pages. $13
Goya by Robert Hughes. Knopf. 429 pages. $45.00.
Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S. Connell. Counterpoint Press. 272 pages. $26.00
In the Abu Ghraibs of 200 years ago, they didn't have digital cameras; they had Francisco Goya. In "Disasters of War," the great series of etchings that wouldn't be published until 40 years after his death, the 19th Century Spanish master chronicled his own country's war with Napoleonic France with the kind of unstinting realism that skirts the unreal; these pictures of piled corpses, orphaned children, people either impaled on trees or with their dismembered parts swinging from them, are so bloody as to seem hallucinatory. "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" reads the caption of his most famous etching, in which a slumbering artist is bedeviled by bats and owls, and the words are as true for Goya as they are for the age he lived in. The world we see in his paintings -- particularly those he created following a mysterious mid-life illness that left him permanently deaf -- is one where madness and cruelty are very much the normal order of business.
Aside from his war reportage (which may well have been entirely imaginary) Goya had a genius for nightmares in general, due in no small way to the tumultuous public and private worlds he lived in. Besides the war, the tortures of the Inquisition were still dragging on after centuries, and the painter's deafness seemed to unleash a raw and enigmatic imagination that had only been hinted at before.
"Goya is throbbing in everything around me," a young Eugene Delacroix wrote in his famous journals, and he isn't alone; Goya's art seems to affect people personally. His latest crop of biographers often seem to regard Goya the way Goya regarded his work: like a fever dream to be exorcised.
For her Old Man Goya, occasioned by the impending death of the author's artist mother, Julia Blackburn actually goes to the effort of plugging her ears with wax to approximate Goya's deafness. In the introduction to his own book on Goya, the art critic Robert Hughes says an auto accident forced him into facing his subject, who in turn served as a kind of impish muse. Laid up in the hospital with a prosthetic brace screwed into his leg, Hughes would dream of Goya mocking him: "Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny."
This kind of personal attachment between biographer and subject doesn't come highly recommended, as there is always the chance of a narrow or biased approach. On the other hand, there is the example of a third recent biography, by the novelist Evan S. Connell; sane, detached, pristine and, compared to the other two, pretty thin gruel.
Blackburn tries to see Goya, tries to feel his spirit at a bullfight, to hear him in the enigmatic captions to the etchings – which are "a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say." As other critics have, she senses his deafness in compositional terms, noticing the thickness of the walls, the sheer sense of brutal silence that the paintings communicate to a viewer, as well as the noise: "a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices."
Her book is a captivating, intimate and sometimes overreaching account of one artist trying – through research, travel, and force of imagination – to immerse herself into the life of another. Hughes' book, on the other hand, is an education in itself; whatever tricks Goya's emissary from beyond might have played on him, he didn't keep him from delivering one of the liveliest and immensely entertaining portraits of an artist I've ever read.
Written with the same conversational elegance he brought to his great PBS series of a few years ago, "American Visions," Hughes explains in captivating detail both the political, social and historic milieu of Goya’s world, and the particulars of his craft. He richly and often hilariously recreates the Bourbon world of Goya's employers, the revolving door of one dunderheaded Carlos after the next, and his fascinating description of all the hard work that goes into etching makes the results that much more stunning.
More than all this, Hughes is a great viewer. Looking at Goya's "Picnic on the Bank of the Manzanares," he writes of how the fetching orange-seller "is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free." In another famous portrait, where the pretty little son of a duke has a bird on a string while a pair of cats watch nearby, Hughes sees a sly comment on the class system: "The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as well as people." He points out how in Goya’s famous etching of "Sleep of Reason" an owl becomes a symbol not of wisdom but of stupidity, offering the sleeping painter "an artist’s chalk in a holder -- the better to draw incorrect and misleading interpretations with." With "Bandit Stripping a Woman,'' the averted face of a rape victim denotes the complicity of the viewer: "And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze." Goya's "Dead Turkey" is for Hughes a still life that is truly still: "Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art." Goya is similarly attuned to the vulnerability of the body, and Hughes is right there with him. Hughes' own damaged leg can't be far from his thoughts when he's looking at Goya's depiction of a matador gored through the thigh: "A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upwards and exiting through the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem."
Connell's book, which actually goes into the personal life of Goya perhaps the best of these three books He fills in the picture some more, and capably explores the lasting mystery of whether Goya did or didn't have a fling with the subject of his famous Naked Maja. He also spends rather more time with Goya's family life than Hughes and raises -- and just as quickly retracts -- the possibility that Goya was bisexual. But where Hughes is so riveting on the art and so richly detailed and alive regarding all the complex personalities involved in Goya's world, Connell is either patchy or bland, and his writing lacks fire. He seems to fear getting too close to his subject, whereas for Hughes there's no choice in the matter. Hughes tears through Goya's life and art like a ball of fire: a great teacher delivering a world-class course on a great artist.
Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn. Vintage. 256 pages. $13
Goya by Robert Hughes. Knopf. 429 pages. $45.00.
Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S. Connell. Counterpoint Press. 272 pages. $26.00
In the Abu Ghraibs of 200 years ago, they didn't have digital cameras; they had Francisco Goya. In "Disasters of War," the great series of etchings that wouldn't be published until 40 years after his death, the 19th Century Spanish master chronicled his own country's war with Napoleonic France with the kind of unstinting realism that skirts the unreal; these pictures of piled corpses, orphaned children, people either impaled on trees or with their dismembered parts swinging from them, are so bloody as to seem hallucinatory. "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" reads the caption of his most famous etching, in which a slumbering artist is bedeviled by bats and owls, and the words are as true for Goya as they are for the age he lived in. The world we see in his paintings -- particularly those he created following a mysterious mid-life illness that left him permanently deaf -- is one where madness and cruelty are very much the normal order of business.
Aside from his war reportage (which may well have been entirely imaginary) Goya had a genius for nightmares in general, due in no small way to the tumultuous public and private worlds he lived in. Besides the war, the tortures of the Inquisition were still dragging on after centuries, and the painter's deafness seemed to unleash a raw and enigmatic imagination that had only been hinted at before.
"Goya is throbbing in everything around me," a young Eugene Delacroix wrote in his famous journals, and he isn't alone; Goya's art seems to affect people personally. His latest crop of biographers often seem to regard Goya the way Goya regarded his work: like a fever dream to be exorcised.
For her Old Man Goya, occasioned by the impending death of the author's artist mother, Julia Blackburn actually goes to the effort of plugging her ears with wax to approximate Goya's deafness. In the introduction to his own book on Goya, the art critic Robert Hughes says an auto accident forced him into facing his subject, who in turn served as a kind of impish muse. Laid up in the hospital with a prosthetic brace screwed into his leg, Hughes would dream of Goya mocking him: "Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny."
This kind of personal attachment between biographer and subject doesn't come highly recommended, as there is always the chance of a narrow or biased approach. On the other hand, there is the example of a third recent biography, by the novelist Evan S. Connell; sane, detached, pristine and, compared to the other two, pretty thin gruel.
Blackburn tries to see Goya, tries to feel his spirit at a bullfight, to hear him in the enigmatic captions to the etchings – which are "a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say." As other critics have, she senses his deafness in compositional terms, noticing the thickness of the walls, the sheer sense of brutal silence that the paintings communicate to a viewer, as well as the noise: "a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices."
Her book is a captivating, intimate and sometimes overreaching account of one artist trying – through research, travel, and force of imagination – to immerse herself into the life of another. Hughes' book, on the other hand, is an education in itself; whatever tricks Goya's emissary from beyond might have played on him, he didn't keep him from delivering one of the liveliest and immensely entertaining portraits of an artist I've ever read.
Written with the same conversational elegance he brought to his great PBS series of a few years ago, "American Visions," Hughes explains in captivating detail both the political, social and historic milieu of Goya’s world, and the particulars of his craft. He richly and often hilariously recreates the Bourbon world of Goya's employers, the revolving door of one dunderheaded Carlos after the next, and his fascinating description of all the hard work that goes into etching makes the results that much more stunning.
More than all this, Hughes is a great viewer. Looking at Goya's "Picnic on the Bank of the Manzanares," he writes of how the fetching orange-seller "is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free." In another famous portrait, where the pretty little son of a duke has a bird on a string while a pair of cats watch nearby, Hughes sees a sly comment on the class system: "The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as well as people." He points out how in Goya’s famous etching of "Sleep of Reason" an owl becomes a symbol not of wisdom but of stupidity, offering the sleeping painter "an artist’s chalk in a holder -- the better to draw incorrect and misleading interpretations with." With "Bandit Stripping a Woman,'' the averted face of a rape victim denotes the complicity of the viewer: "And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze." Goya's "Dead Turkey" is for Hughes a still life that is truly still: "Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art." Goya is similarly attuned to the vulnerability of the body, and Hughes is right there with him. Hughes' own damaged leg can't be far from his thoughts when he's looking at Goya's depiction of a matador gored through the thigh: "A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upwards and exiting through the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem."
Connell's book, which actually goes into the personal life of Goya perhaps the best of these three books He fills in the picture some more, and capably explores the lasting mystery of whether Goya did or didn't have a fling with the subject of his famous Naked Maja. He also spends rather more time with Goya's family life than Hughes and raises -- and just as quickly retracts -- the possibility that Goya was bisexual. But where Hughes is so riveting on the art and so richly detailed and alive regarding all the complex personalities involved in Goya's world, Connell is either patchy or bland, and his writing lacks fire. He seems to fear getting too close to his subject, whereas for Hughes there's no choice in the matter. Hughes tears through Goya's life and art like a ball of fire: a great teacher delivering a world-class course on a great artist.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Eventide by Kent Haruf. Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pages. $24.95
Depending on your point of view, Kent Haruf's 1999 Plainsong was either a majestic triumph of rural realism or just one more cornball saga of people in small-town America struggling to get by.
Set in Haruf's fictional terrain of Holt, Colorado, the book's main two interlinking stories were about abandonment and protection, with solid, decent men in both cases taking care of the weak and the vulnerable. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher and farmer, tries to raise the two sons left to his care by their slack and selfish mother. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, a couple of aging, salt-of-the-earth cattle ranchers, find themselves taking in a new tenant, the pregnant high school waif Victoria Roubideaux.
Truly, all this had the makings of very sappy stuff, and the Guthrie story even carried with it a strong whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Guthrie's ethical refusal to give a passing grade to the star athlete in his American History class puts his own children at risk. But Haruf followed very much of an it's-the-story-stupid approach; he kept events pared to the essentials, and he took real no chances with the narrative, as if to explore this land with any psychological depth might lead to the slough of sentimentality. The closest Haruf ever got to any kind of a metaphor is in the close attention to the birth of cattle, mainly to underscore the vulnerability of new life in a hard world, for both people and animals.
We return to that scene -- "every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually," Guthrie will point out to his sons -- and a lot else in this sequel, where the plain folk of Holt continue to tough it out against the elements, both natural and social. Death strikes early; as Harold and Raymond struggle to contain an enraged bull, Harold loses his life and Raymond gets seriously injured. Victoria, who had moved with her baby, Katie, to Denver to attend college, drops everything to come home and nurse Raymond back to health. Raymond, facing the prospect of life alone, develops an interest in Linda May, his hospital nurse. A life in the company of Harold and blackbaldy cattle have made him a little too slow on the uptake where women are concerned; it will take another love interest, the social worker Rose Tyler, to initiate the old boy -- or at least it looks like an initiation -- into the mysteries of sex.
At the end of Plainsong, Guthrie has a knock-down drag-out fight with the family of Russell Beckman, the star athlete who kidnaps and terrorizing his two boys, and the book ended with an indication that the two parties would see each other in court. It doesn't happen; Haruf has lost interest in the Beckmanns, if not in showing us small children getting kicked around by a vicious bully. This is the story of Joy Ray and Richie, luckless children of the pathetic Luther and Betty Wallace, who are living in a trailer when Betty's wastrel uncle Hoyt Raines decides to move in. Betty and Luther, besides being irresponsible, are completely spineless around Hoyt, who takes a sadistic pleasure in beating the two children within an inch of their lives.
Two other families of deserted or neglected children are brought into focus as well. There's the single mother Mary Wells, aimlessly raising a pair of girls, Emma and Dena, both of whom are mostly left to fend for themselves. The girls make friends with a neighbor boy, DJ Kephart, who is taking care of his sick and alcoholic grandfather, Walter.
Although the book is anchored by the story of Raymond's recovery, Haruf's interest is with the children of this world, the Joy Rays and Emmas and DJs who can only fend for themselves and may or may not make it. Their caretakers have long since resigned themselves to misery and the easy way out -- fates the children themselves may or may not escape.
This is not an ineffective book. But while Eventide has the same narrative pull as Plainsong, there's more stickiness in the details; there's something a little more condescending in Haruf's approach to these characters, and a number of the scenes seem lifted from movies. The story never runs out of steam, but it begins to seem manipulative and misty-eyed where Plainsong kept an agreeable distance. The material is a good deal more emotional and Haruf, like the Holt farmers, milks it for all its worth.
Depending on your point of view, Kent Haruf's 1999 Plainsong was either a majestic triumph of rural realism or just one more cornball saga of people in small-town America struggling to get by.
Set in Haruf's fictional terrain of Holt, Colorado, the book's main two interlinking stories were about abandonment and protection, with solid, decent men in both cases taking care of the weak and the vulnerable. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher and farmer, tries to raise the two sons left to his care by their slack and selfish mother. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, a couple of aging, salt-of-the-earth cattle ranchers, find themselves taking in a new tenant, the pregnant high school waif Victoria Roubideaux.
Truly, all this had the makings of very sappy stuff, and the Guthrie story even carried with it a strong whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Guthrie's ethical refusal to give a passing grade to the star athlete in his American History class puts his own children at risk. But Haruf followed very much of an it's-the-story-stupid approach; he kept events pared to the essentials, and he took real no chances with the narrative, as if to explore this land with any psychological depth might lead to the slough of sentimentality. The closest Haruf ever got to any kind of a metaphor is in the close attention to the birth of cattle, mainly to underscore the vulnerability of new life in a hard world, for both people and animals.
We return to that scene -- "every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually," Guthrie will point out to his sons -- and a lot else in this sequel, where the plain folk of Holt continue to tough it out against the elements, both natural and social. Death strikes early; as Harold and Raymond struggle to contain an enraged bull, Harold loses his life and Raymond gets seriously injured. Victoria, who had moved with her baby, Katie, to Denver to attend college, drops everything to come home and nurse Raymond back to health. Raymond, facing the prospect of life alone, develops an interest in Linda May, his hospital nurse. A life in the company of Harold and blackbaldy cattle have made him a little too slow on the uptake where women are concerned; it will take another love interest, the social worker Rose Tyler, to initiate the old boy -- or at least it looks like an initiation -- into the mysteries of sex.
At the end of Plainsong, Guthrie has a knock-down drag-out fight with the family of Russell Beckman, the star athlete who kidnaps and terrorizing his two boys, and the book ended with an indication that the two parties would see each other in court. It doesn't happen; Haruf has lost interest in the Beckmanns, if not in showing us small children getting kicked around by a vicious bully. This is the story of Joy Ray and Richie, luckless children of the pathetic Luther and Betty Wallace, who are living in a trailer when Betty's wastrel uncle Hoyt Raines decides to move in. Betty and Luther, besides being irresponsible, are completely spineless around Hoyt, who takes a sadistic pleasure in beating the two children within an inch of their lives.
Two other families of deserted or neglected children are brought into focus as well. There's the single mother Mary Wells, aimlessly raising a pair of girls, Emma and Dena, both of whom are mostly left to fend for themselves. The girls make friends with a neighbor boy, DJ Kephart, who is taking care of his sick and alcoholic grandfather, Walter.
Although the book is anchored by the story of Raymond's recovery, Haruf's interest is with the children of this world, the Joy Rays and Emmas and DJs who can only fend for themselves and may or may not make it. Their caretakers have long since resigned themselves to misery and the easy way out -- fates the children themselves may or may not escape.
This is not an ineffective book. But while Eventide has the same narrative pull as Plainsong, there's more stickiness in the details; there's something a little more condescending in Haruf's approach to these characters, and a number of the scenes seem lifted from movies. The story never runs out of steam, but it begins to seem manipulative and misty-eyed where Plainsong kept an agreeable distance. The material is a good deal more emotional and Haruf, like the Holt farmers, milks it for all its worth.