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Speaking of miserablism, I just finished—bolted down—one of my Christmas presents: David Rakoff’s Half Empty. It’s about frustration, illness, and failure, and the Kindle kept falling out of my hands because I was shaking with laughter.
“I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.”
“Dinner at Hersent’s. He’s been stuck with all the art brut leavings. ... walls covered with bandages, mustard, grimaces, onion soup. Certain New York museums look like this.”
--Jean Cocteau, December 1952
“Destroy the Picture: painting the void 1949-1962,” was definitely on to something genuine: starting from zero, scorning cleverness and flash, prizing chance encounters in the street. It was a style, a mood, something in the post-war air. It led to the composition of a lot of beautifully ugly music, and some studiously casual movies. But it was a period style, not a UNESCO-coordinated international scientific project.
That there is something distinctly disreputable and bogus about this miserablist bling makes a compelling exhibition all the more necessary. However, compelling is what “Destroy” failed to be. The curators of made the fatal mistake of being guided by the statements of the artists, rather than their pictures.
Shozo Shimamoto was for me the star of the show. I didn’t know his work and I loved it.
And there was a terrific Alberto Burri—SFMOMA’s Bianco from 1962. A highlight. This really does succeed in being a composition—a construction—while appearing free of any effort. It looks like something found in the street. The other Burris on display—the burlap sacci—faded the more you look at them.
It was the same with Tàpies. You walk into a room full of Tàpies assemblages and exclaim, “How beautifully sad!” But after five minutes, the mood changes to “Enough!”
The obtuse selections kept sabotaging the experience: one beautiful Fontana (MOMA’s Concetto spaziale, 1957) and one beautiful Kline (the tall 1961 fire painting) struggled for attention with a bunch of irrelevant doodles. There are probably some artists of that era who should be rescued from oblivion, but John Latham and Salvatore Scarpitta are not among them.
[Image above: Shozo Shimamoto, Holes, 1950; Image below: Alberto Burri, White, 1962]
Obviously intelligent, obviously part of many different colorful worlds, but nothing in it is quite as good as the title. Lerman’s dissatisfaction with his own life is unhappily obvious. Still, there are some funny remarks by celebrities with their hair down, e.g. Marlene Dietrich in 1951: “My life would have been so easy if I had really been sexy.”
It’s nice that a non-celebrity gets the best line of all: “My mother says that on good days she feels worse than on bad days.”
[Image: Bonnie Cashin, Leo Lerman & Gypsy Rose Lee, 1957]
I went in beside myself with excitement: “Another Magic Flute!" And it was. You go through a similar journey, from darkness into light. You start with the evil Vitellia in full rave. A cousin of the Queen of the Night: she’s transparently selfish, vain, petty, cruel, immoral, manipulative and inconstant. Barbara Frittoli had a ball playing her. Sesto’s infatuation with her demonstrates he’s an idiot. Neither of these characters is very likeable at first.
Then it gets worse. The two of them go on to commit appalling crimes. Too late, they realize what they’ve done. They grieve and repent. In the end, the person they have most wronged, Tito, forgives them. His clemency awakens something in them, and their shallow and vain love is replaced by something nobler.
The music expresses this journey by steadily evolving from agitated recitative and lyric outbursts, to rich harmonies and grand legato arcs.
Elina Garanča made a brilliant Sesto. Lucy Crowe and Kate Linsey played the conventional lovers with grace. Emperor Tito is probably the hardest part to play, and Giuseppe Filanoti was unfortunately not Emperor-y enough to be credible.
[Image: Design for Clemenza by Alessandro Sanquirico (1777-1849)]
Irretrievable is a perfect novel, but it's very strange. It begins like a fairy tale—a castle is built on a dune by the sea—but turns into a leisurely Ingmar Bergman psychodrama about shifting political-erotic relations between the men and women of a Danish princess’s court. It is beautifully composed, and TF never lets the pace drop, even when nothing special is happening. You try to guess where it’s headed, but it keeps drifting along without mooring itself to any single outline.
Only near the end does Holk slip off with Ebba. And from that point the pace accelerates precipitously. And the end is a shock.
As brilliant and humane as this is, I sometimes felt that TF overdid the nimbleness and lightness of touch. He very much wants the reader to realize what a conscientious and serious writer he is. Chekhov and Turgenev—to name two writers working in a similar vein—at least trouble themselves to create a sense of spontaneity.
Fontane’s gifts are well displayed at the end of the calamitous Chapter 28, where Holk is about to reveal his love of Ebba to the Princess. The mixture of subtle social perception, broad farce and personal tragedy plays out very like the Duke and Duchess’s dismissal of Charles Swann at the end of Guermantes’s Way. It's that good.
But there are differences: where Proust’s sympathy is comes out clearly for Swann, Fontane betrays no sympathy for Holk. And instead of Proust’s eloquence, Fontane is curt and laconic. He means us to feel the completeness of Holk’s humiliation, and how completely his status has changed:
“These words could hardly have been better chosen to encourage Holk to say what was already trembling on his lips and, for a moment, he was about to unburden his heart to her and reveal all his plans. But however encouraging the words, her attitude and the tone in which she uttered them were not so in the least. Everything about her was listless and, however anxious Holk was for certainty, he saw quite clearly that this was not the best but the worst possible time to make his confession. In this completely senile old lady sitting underneath the solemn portrait, there was no longer the slightest trace of the free-thinking princess who normally delighted, or at least was interested, in amorous escapades and mésalliances, divorces, and marital squabbles. The only lesson that could now be read in her haggard face seemed to be that boldness and excess had little to offer as a rule of life; that keeping a promise and obeying the law were the only things really to be recommended and, above all, that a genuine, not a reluctant, marriage, was the only safe haven. Holk would have liked to find something else in the Princess’s expression but it was so plainly impossible to do so that, instead of making his confession, he merely asked for several days’ leave of absence. In doing this, he had no clear plan in mind and if asked why he wanted it, he would not have known the answe3r. But the Princess who, from the beginning of the interview, had had only the one desire, to withdraw as soon as possible into her private study, was only too glad not to ask any indiscreet questions and graciously granted his request. And then, with a kindly nod of her head, she ended the audience, if audience it could be called.”
(Eternally grateful for Douglas Parmee’s lucid translation)
[Image: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Sunshine in the Drawing Room III, 1903]
Timon is anti-dramatic, and pretty much void of poetry. The name in the title is the only real character, and he’s completely mad throughout: a profligate millionaire in the first half, a homeless misanthrope in the second. The rest of the parts are allegorical figures: Greed, Ingratitude, etc. The tone is monotonous outrage, full-blast, from start to finish. And the villains triumph.
It’s probably the least stageworthy of the tragedies, so why would anyone bother with it?
Lots of better Shakespeare plays concern the intersection of debts of money and debts of love, the economic basis of civility. But this pushes aside all nuance and all other issues and presents a diagram of profligacy, debt and over-the-top communal madness. There have been lots of examples of such since the play was written, but the 2007 credit crunch unfolding around the National Theatre no doubt caught Nicholas Hytner’s eye. So he dusted off the text, edited and rearranged, and produced a show that what may not be what Shakespeare intended, but had a point.
The beginning is tedious—impossible to make interesting. But as soon as Timon’s debts accumulate, it gets interesting. Simon Russell Beale’s Timon was a frightening depiction of a personality given incredible power and no internal resources. In a very wicked stroke, Alcibiades was modeled on Gerry Adams, turning without a hitch from the people’s freedom fighter to suited-up VIP.
One of the problems with the original text is that there’s no parts for women, and Hytner corrected that by making Timon’s steward Flavius into a Flavia (Deborah Findlay), who leads the most humane scene in the play, when Timon’s discarded staff try to cheer each other up:
And we, poor mates, stand on the dying deck,
Creative destruction, and all that.