Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), conductor, composer, author and pianist, was one of the very few American musical talents to achieve and maintain an international reputation.  Most often associated with the New York Philharmonic, where he served as music director from 1957 to 1969, Bernstein enjoyed a close professional relationship with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic.  A prolific composer of both classical pieces (including three symphonies, the Chichester Psalms, the Mass commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.) as well as music for ballet, opera, Broadway stage, and film.  He is perhaps best known for composing the score for West Side Story, an updating of Romeo and Juliet undertaken with Jerome Robbins.  Renowned teacher – on television, at Philharmonic concerts, and at Harvard, where he delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures (1973) and raconteur, Leonard Bernstein was a prodigal and charismatic figure on the arts scene.  Here are some of his observations on life and music.

1.

Music…can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

2.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

3.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another. . .and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

4.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. To know music.

5.

Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is total embrace.

6.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

Willem Mengelberg (1905)

Mid-twentieth century European classical music was dominated by four titan-conductors:  Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Willem Mengelberg, and Herbert von Karajan.  Toscanini, refusing to have anything to do with Fascists or Nazis, fled to the United States.  The other three stayed in Europe and found ways to deal with the tsunami of repression, deportation, and extermination unleashed by Hitler and his collaborators.

Furtwangler continued to conduct in Germany and Austria and never cleared himself of charges of collaborating with the Nazis; he never joined the Party – unlike von Karajan who joined not once, but twice, to insure his career (indeed, he was known as Hitler’s favorite conductor).  Mengelberg, born to German parents in the Netherlands, served as principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra for fifty years (1895-1945).

In the days immediately following the end of World War II the fates of these four men diverged.  Toscanini returned to Europe in triumph; von Karajan shed his Nazi skin like a snake and became an international celebrity, a glamorous star of matinee idol looks who favored fast women and faster cars; Furtwangler never recovered his reputation: he denied charges of Party membership and collaboration before a de-Nazification tribunal, but died a broken man.  Mengelberg’s case shows some similarity to Furtwangler’s:  he lost his position and after being interrogated by the Dutch Central Arts Council was forbidden to conduct the Concertgebouw for the rest of his life – exiled, he died in 1951.

The cases of Furtwangler and Mengelberg have been the subject of plays:  Ronald Harwood’sTaking Sides (1995) illuminates Furtwangler’s dilemma by focusing on his interrogation by an American army major.  Broken but not unbowed, Furtwangler flashes a well-known imperial defiance as he defends himself and the observer is left to determine the truth (though the weight of dramatic evidence seems to fall against him).

Now the case of Mengelberg provides the material for a play of its own:  Daniel Klein has revised his never-filmed screenplay, The Titan, into Mengelberg and Mahler. His collaborator on the screenplay, the Dutch filmmaker Emile Fallaux, directs the production, which received its world premiere at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts on 12 June.

Robert Lohbauer

Kevin Sprague

Mengelberg and Mahleris a one-man show with Robert Lohbauer taking the role of the Dutch conductor, an assignment that keeps him on stage for ninety uninterrupted minutes.  The play opens and remains set in the year 1947, in Switzerland; the seventy-six year old Mengelberg is in disgraced exile at his mountain villa.  For collaborating with the Nazi regime in the Netherlands, the Dutch Council for Honor in the Arts had initially denied him the right to conduct his beloved ensemble ever again; but that sentence had been reduced to five years and the Mengelberg we see and hear in the play eagerly awaits expiration of the sentence, or perhaps reprieve and an immediate return to Amsterdam.

Structurally, the play is a monologue and though we never actually hear the words spoken by others (Mengelberg conveys their words occasionally), what we have is a series of phantom dialogues as Mengelberg reviews major moments in his career:  his first meeting with Gustav Mahler (in the early 1900’s), whose “decadent” music he championed; his interrogation by Arthur Seyss Inquart, the Reichskommissar during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1900-1945); his later interrogation by the Dutch Council; and his interaction with the Concertgebouw.

What is singularly fascinating here is the absence of a dialogue between Mengelberg and his conscience, but that is the point, I expect.  For what Mengelberg engages in here is an impassioned self-defense, an elaborate exercise in excuse-making for his reprehensible actions.    We may initially feel some sympathy for the suffering artist-in-exile, deprived of what he needs more than anything else in life, his instrument, the Concertgebouw, but as the dialogue with Mahler unfolds, we hear perhaps more than Mengelberg wants us to hear:  vicious racism and the temperamental taunts of any ageing artist directed not only at the great composer who chose a different way – and whose work was so appropriated by Mengelberg as to become his and not Mahler’s – but at the Jewish people and the Dutch who flocked to Mengelberg’s concerts.  Mengelberg sees himself in multiple roles, but the one he likes best is the Redeemer, crucified for all-consuming love (of music, he would have us believe, of himself we do believe).

In the course of his self-mythologizing, Mengelberg rehearses his orchestra and much more.  In his responses to Reichkommisar Inquart we hear him become so accommodating that he will do anything if only he can continue to make music.  No “sacrifice” is too great:  he accedes to the request that the sixteen Jewish musicians in the Concertgebouw be moved to the back of the orchestra, then to their being expelled altogether (the “purification” of the orchestra).  They were allowed to form an all-Jewish ensemble and performed at their own hall for a while, so it’s all right, isn’t it?  That the concentration camps were only a short remove from their hall, well. . .

By the time we hear of Mengelberg’s exchanges with the Dutch Council, he has sunk below our sympathy, certainly below our pity, his response nothing more than elaborate denial and a transparent tissue of evasion and rationalization. Whatever pity we might have felt for him early only, whatever belief or faith we might have invested in him has evaporated.  All that’s left is contempt and the faint whiff of sulphur said to filter through the air in the devil’s presence.

This is drama with a point – thought-provoking and intellectually-engaging – from a dramatist, director and actor too wise to interpret for us:  Like Mengelberg, we are left on our own to decide.  While it may be possible to still feel pity for Mengelberg by the end of the play, we are more likely to come away feeling that this is a deeply flawed human being who valued music too much, who made fatal compromises with evil all the while rationalizing bad choices in the name of art.

In the end, at least three of the sixteen Jewish musicians expelled from the Concertgebouw Orchestra were exterminated in the death camps among the millions of other Jewish victims of Hitler’s insane campaign; Seyss Inquart was sentenced to death at Nuremberg; but Mengelberg lived on, dying in Switzerland in 1951, just shortly before the expiration of  his sentence.

Shakespeare and Company has succeeded in staging a difficult play – the perils of producing a one-person drama are well known; here, in addition, that device of having the protagonist play the roles of several antagonists through relayed speech and description becomes just a little formulaic and tedious.  That aside, the production shines:  Lohbauer gives a demanding performance of sustained passion and flair, appropriately shaded with nuance and gesture.  Emile Fallaux’s direction is sure-handed and non-intrusive.  The main stage with its three-part division into office, podium, and sitting room is economical and evocative; the use of black and white film footage screened against the backdrop wall and the integration of gorgeous excerpts from four of Mahler’s symphonies and the Kindertotenlieder enhances the experience of Mengelberg and Mahler.

“Summer theatre” this is not:  Mengelberg and Mahler is theatre.

Picasso looked at Degas all right – early on and often throughout his long and prolific career.  The question is, what did he see and what did he do with what he saw?  This major exhibition, tucked away in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, answers those questions and far more.

The result of over ten years’ work by Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall, curators at the Clark, and undertaken with the generous cooperation of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and Picasso’s heirs, especially his grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, “Picasso Looks at Degas” is an extraordinary and invigorating excursion into the mystery of creativity, at once an informative lecture and a caution about our own prejudices concerning what Harold Bloom has called “the anxiety of influence.”

Connections between Picasso and a number of his predecessors have been long acknowledged and fairly well researched-certainly the Old Masters of the European tradition, particularly Delacroix, Ingres, and Velasquez, since, despite impressions generated by the later work of the mature artist, Picasso was an academically-trained painter capable of producing works in the tradition.  Likewise, connections between Picasso and the modern artists like Manet, Rodin, and Cezanne have been documented.  But, though as early 1901 Monet, Pissarro, and Degas were advanced as likely influences on the iconoclastic Spaniard, until now, no one has explored any one of these three.

Picasso traveled to Paris several times before settling there in 1904.    He and Degas became neighbors in Montmartre several years before Degas’ death in 1917; but they never met.  And that is perhaps not so surprising.  Though they frequented some of the same haunts (cafes, theatres, brothels) and shared a predilection for certain subject matter (ballerinas, prostitutes, cabaret singers, café habitués), they were vividly different characters.  Certainly Picasso knew Degas’ work – how could he not, given their affinities?  And though it seems to have been customary to focus on the year 1958, when Picasso purchased some of Degas’ work, as the moment of connection, “Picasso Looks at Degas,” with its witty, uncanny, and extraordinary juxtaposition of  works by the two men from early on in Picasso’s career makes the case for much earlier influence and connection.  And that – aside from the concept of the exhibition itself – is the genius of this show:  patient, careful, and detailed laying out of an aesthetic and cultural argument in six galleries:  to move through them in sequence is to follow the logical thread of argument from hypothesis to conclusion.

(Left) Degas, Study for “Dante and Virgil”, c. 1856-57.

(Right) Picasso, Academic Study from Life: Male Nude, from the Side, with a Pole; Sketch of Head and Bust of Male Figures, 1895-97.

Gallery One provides an introduction and overview.  Gallery Two, “Early Years:  Drawing the Human Figure,” emphasizes the academic training of both artists and starts the sequence, beginning with self portraits set side-by-side, Picasso’s done when he was a mere fifteen years old, tousled-haired, melancholy, and introspective; Degas’s done at age 23, the image lacking the bravado of Picasso’s, but infused with the same wistful self-absorption, with the subject positioned so like Picasso’s.  Of the other studies juxtaposed here, two sets stand out:  Degas’s “Study for ‘Dante and Virgil’” (1856-7) and Picasso’s “Academic Study from Life:  Male Nude. . .” (1895-97), each demonstrating sure, elegant line;  and Degas’ “Standing Nude” (1860-65) alongside Picasso’s “Female Nude” (c.1899),  both breathtaking in the artists’ ability to create sinuous line and shadow whether in pencil (Degas) or in charcoal (Picasso).

In Gallery Three, “Paris:  Picasso Discovers Degas,” the canvases proliferate, pulsating with scenes of la vie Parisienne:  theatre, café, cabaret, and the rather more intimate bathing scenes.  Picasso had seen some of Degas’ pastels and painting on visits to Paris before he settled there and at very turn the influence of the older master shows.  The viewer experiences the shock of similarity on seeing Picasso’s “The End of the Performance” (1901) in the same space as Degas’ monotype, “Café-Concert” (1878-80).

Degas;The Tub, ca. 1876–1877

Gallery Four, “The Private World of Women,” focuses on representations of women bathing and arranging their hair.  Degas had shown his models in real life settings going about ordinary, everyday activities; and his images were greatly simplified.  Again the older painter’s influence is telling; in the years after Degas’ death, Picasso, time and again, returned to this very same subject matter.  The debt of pose and composition is nowhere more telling than in the juxtaposed “Leaving the Bath” (Degas, 1879-80, dry point and aquatint) and “Woman in the Bath” (Picasso, 1921, pencil on paper).

Picasso; The Blue Room (The Tub), 1901

Gallery Five, “The Ballet:  Homage and Humor,” centres on Degas’ best-known sculpture, “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” (1879-81), the only sculpture exhibited in public during the artist’s lifetime and emblematic of his longstanding interest in the world of ballet.  The extent of that fascination became known only with the sale of the contents of his studio after his death (1917), when so many similar images were discovered.  Paris was still under the spell of Diaghlev’s Ballets Russe and so was Picasso, particularly taken with the ballerinas, one of whom, Olga Khokhlova, would become his wife.  Picasso’s preoccupation with creating images from the world of ballet for a decade or so reflects his very considerable debt to Degas.  Just compare his “Two Dancers, 1919” with Degas’ “Three Ballet Dancers,” or Picasso’s “Three Ballet Dancers” (1919) with the latter and the verdict stands:  Picasso’s artistic debt to Degas was considerable.

Degas; “Resting on the Bed,” c. 1876–77

Gallery Six, “Brothel Scenes:  The Artist as Voyeur,” is the most fascinating room in the Clark’s exhibition, not simply because of its erotic – perhaps pornographic for some – aura but moreso for the problem it presents in determining – ultimately – the relationship between Degas and Picasso.  The works displayed in this gallery may well cause a re-evaluation of conclusions reached based on seeing what’s offered in the previous five.  Between 1958 and 1960 Picasso bought nine provocative works by Degas for his own collection, a series of monotypes depicting scenes in a brothel.  From all account, Degas was a straight-laced gentleman; it has been speculated than an early sexual adventure in which he may have aggressively raped a young woman caused trauma sufficient to render him permanently impotent.  Whatever the case, he led a circumspect, chaste life and in that regard he could not have been more different from the priapic Picasso.

Picasso;Prostitute with a Bracelet and Degas…, 1971

In 1971 Picasso began a series of variations on Degas’ monotypes and as the selection on offer indicates, ultimately determining the relationship between the two artists becomes highly problematic.  Exactly what are these variations?  Critique, homage, satire?  Certainly it was a project that consumed Picasso’s prodigious energies; he worked on this series nearly up until his death in April 1973:  speed, spontaneity, and incompleteness characterize the work.  It is almost as if Picasso worked feverishly to finally articulate his relationship to Degas.  Perhaps those fortunate enough to get to Williamstown to see “Picasso Looks at Degas” will find the answer.

This is not your blockbuster, let’s get the bodies into the museum summer show; rather, it is a thought-provoking, intellectually engaging experience in contemplation, consideration, and connection.

“Picasso Looks at Degas” is a magnificent exhibition carefully planned and designed to allow viewers to move from gallery to gallery with growing comprehension and appreciation for an argument-in-process.  The exhibition lays out a focused, defined, limited, and convincing argument for the influence of the older artist on the younger, yes; but beyond that, it makes a larger argument about the mysterious, synergistic, sometimes ambiguous, not always comfortable, relationship between two acknowledged masters.  The amplitude of evidence leaves the viewer – appropriately – not only with new knowledge of two great European painters but with questions to frame consideration of connections between other artists, specifically, perhaps, the unexplored relationship between Pissarro and Picasso as well as that between Monet and Picasso (the latter seems a natural, given the Clark’s Monet holdings, in  another ten years).  Meanwhile, get to the Clark.  It is the only American venue for “Picasso Looks at Degas.”  In the autumn it moves to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.

Now, in the summer of 2010, two twentieth-century pontiffs of the Roman Catholic Church are being considered for sainthood.  Their lives and works are being studied thoroughly as they make their way through a rigorous investigative process.  Perhaps no more unlikely pair could be imagined:  Eugenio Pacelli, who reigned as Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958; and his successor, Angelo Roncalli, who reigned as Pope John XXIII from 1958 to 1963.  Pacelli – tall, pale, thin, ascetic, aristocratic with dark, piercing eyes, elegant carriage, and a fondness for pomp and pageantry; Roncalli – short, ruddy, rotund, from peasant stock, informal with little patience for any more ceremony than the essential.  Though both served in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, Pacelli spent no time in traditional pastoral work while Roncalli would spend considerable time in that endeavor, rising to become Patriarch of Venice before his election to the throne of St Peter.

The cause of John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council that attempted to awaken a somnolent medieval church, advances smoothly and no one expects he’ll be denied sainthood.  The cause of Pacelli, however, is another matter.

Eugenio Pacelli spent his whole career in the diplomatic corps.  Carefully groomed for diplomatic service – certainly talented at it, with an elegant, engaging manner, shrewd powers of observation and negotiation, and command of many languages – and favored by Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI, Pacelli’s star rose until it outshone nearly all others.  He became the most important Roman Catholic prelate in Germany, prior to his appointment as Vatican Secretary of State in 1930.

Why, then, problems with the cause for his sainthood?   Well, perhaps, it can be blamed on two writers, one German, the other British:  Rolf Hochhuth and John Cornwell, who, more than any others, are complicit in besmirching the name and reputation of Pius XII.  In 1963 Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, premiered in Germany; in 1964, in translation, it was produced in Britain and the United States.  Hochhuth’s Pius is an elegant, aristocratic, imperial pontiff, roundly condemned for doing nothing in the face of Hitler’s rabid attempts at genocide.  Cornwell, a British historian, took after Pius in his Hitler’s Pope (1999); the title says it all.  Though Cornwell maintains that he undertook his research hoping to revise, if not reverse, the negative judgment of Pius, he came rather to endorse it:  he argues that Pacelli played a strategic role in facilitating Hitler’s rise to power – and that as Pope, his indifference to Hitler’s “Final Solution” makes him an accomplice to genocide.

Both texts are less than trustworthy.  Hochhuth’s play distorts the smattering of historical material it uses and ignores testimony from a number of Jews – available even then – about Pius’s substantial efforts on behalf the Jewish people. Indeed, Hochhuth’s approach to historical fact seems rather creative:  in his next play Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva (1967), his allegation that Churchill had been responsible for the death of the Polish Prime Minister resulted in a libel suit, with verdict delivered against him.  Cornwell’s book did make use of Vatican and Jesuit archives never before opened to a layman; but critics took him to task for sensationalism and intemperance as well as speculation.

And now we have Hubert Wolf’s Pope and Devil, published in German in 2008, available in translation by Kenneth Kronenberg (Belknap Press of  Harvard University, 2010).  Wolf, Professor of Church History at the University of Munster, seems to have had no agenda other than to refocus attention on Pius and his times through the filter of new data.

During Pacelli’s time in Germany (1917-1929), the political power structure shifted as the Weimar Republic faded and the Third Reich came into power.  Examining the only-recently-opened archives containing materials for the years leading up to 1939, Prof. Wolf documents the bitter conflicts that raged among factions within the Holy See.  Though influential bishops and cardinals sparred and took different sides, all were united in fear of new movements – liberalism, communism, fascism, National Socialism – sweeping Europe.  Disagreement focused on how to deal with these threats to the faith and the Church – appease, accommodate, or attack?

Wolf makes it clear that Pacelli was not part of the anti-Semitic faction within the Vatican; though traces of anti-Semitism occasionally crop up in his private writing, he was not sympathetic to Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.  With the assent and encouragement of Pius XI, Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State (1930-1939), negotiated a concordat with the Third Reich in 1933, clearly believing that it would protect the Church and the faithful from Hitler’s rampage.  Virtually forced to accept terms within one week, Pacelli assented, telling a British diplomat that he felt a pistol had been held to his head.  Furthermore, Pacelli explicitly stated that the Concordat did not constitute approval of Hitler or his policies.  Critics have leveled two other charges at Pacelli, one concerning his role in dissolving the Catholic Centre Party, the other concerning his later failure to proscribe Hitler’s Mein Kampf .  Wolf asserts that both actions were motivated by a desire to protect Roman Catholics, not by approval of Hitler’s policies.

Wolf’s extensive research illuminates Pacelli’s instrumental role in writing a refutation of Nazi racism for Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, a document vigorously asserting that National Socialism and Catholicism were irreconcilable.  Shortly after it was proclaimed from pulpits throughout Germany, the Nazis resumed persecution of the Church and Pacelli learned the lesson:  public denunciation brought only suffering and slaughter to Catholics.

Wolf makes several other points about Pius XII.  Trained as a diplomat, he thought and acted as a diplomat throughout his career, seeking reconciliation and accommodation.  Unfortunately, that could sometimes be interpreted as weakness, worse as cooperation or approval.  Of supreme importance to him as a Roman Catholic was his faith and the Church which embodied it.  It is manifestly unfair to expect that he would have acted to endanger those who shared his belief, and over whom he was given charge, during one of history’s most violent periods.  And perhaps, like so many others, perceiving that “atheistic communism” was the greatest threat to the Church, he sought not to validate National Socialism but to mitigate, if not eliminate, its impact upon the church, leaving greater energy for the fight against communism.  And particularly so during the early years of his pontificate, Pius felt it unwise to issue publication condemnation of the Nazis for fear of reprisals against his flock.

Certainly, the fate of Roman Catholics in Holland had a chilling effect not unlike that of the 1937 reprisals on Pius:  on 26 July 1942 the Dutch bishops denounced the Nazi deportation of Jews.  Immediately, the Nazis expanded their campaign of deportation, terror and murder to include baptized Jews among the ranks of those rounded up.  Among those taken were Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who had become a Carmelite nun, and her sister:  arrested on 2 August, they, along with hundreds of others, were gassed at Auschwitz on 9 August.

The historical record shows that Pius quietly and earnestly did a great deal:  many Jewish people were saved from slaughter because of his efforts and a number of famous and not-so-famous Jews came to his defense, including Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, Rabbi David Dalin, and Pinchas Lapide, who, in his Three Popes and the Jews, documented examples of papal initiatives indicating that Pius’s efforts directly contributed to saving more than 700,000 Jewish lives.

Prof. Wolf’s exhaustive archival research, and his objective, detailed, and documented presentation of his research as well as his refusal to trade in conjecture and speculation, or accept received opinion, make Pope and Devil essential reading for anyone interested in getting at the truth of some of the twentieth century’s most troubled times.  Certainly, Wolf’s scholarly project does not exonerate Pius – nor does it airbrush the portrait of the Pontiff.  But it does make it impossible to condemn Pius out of hand or to denounce him as “Hitler’s Pope” or demonise him.  It will certainly demand that his detractors re-evaluate his actions during the first part of his pontificate, those dark days when the National Socialism of Germany was the scourge of the earth.

Portrait of William Somerset Maugham

26 May 1934

Bon vivant, raconteur, dandy, and wit, William Somerset Maugham ( 1874- 1965), was probably the most prolific, certainly the most financially successful English writer of the twentieth century. Creator of the spy story in his Ashenden stories and chronicler of sojourns abroad in his travel essays, novelist of character and manners, Maugham dined out on his stories for years, always a sought-after guest for weekend house parties and formal dinners. Here are some of the remarks that earned him his place at table.

1.

A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

2.

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

3.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.

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4.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve a continuation of the species.

5.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

6.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

7.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.

8.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

9.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

10.

It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

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11.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

12.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

13.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

14.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

15.

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

16.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably. . .have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

Born to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, educated largely at home where she was given free run of her father’s extensive library, Adeline Virginia Stephen became one of the major figures of twentieth century English literature and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. She wrote nearly everything but poetry – biography, essay, drama, novel, short story, letters, polemic – and assumed a formative role, along with Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Stein, in the Modernist movement, essentially a literary and aesthetic assault on the Victorian heritage. From a prolific output, she is likely best known for several works: Mrs Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A Room of One’s Own (1929); and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1947). In her fiction she sought, as she put it, to capture “this loose shifting material of life,” and in order to do that, she experimented boldly. In her non-fiction, she challenged received assumptions: in A Room, she revised English literary history by including women writers, and encouraged her readers to write their own stories; in Three Guineas (1931), she wrote a stinging polemic linking male sexuality and the war culture. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf; he was her faithful support: together they founded the Hogarth Press (1917). Leonard was the recipient of one of the most touching love letters ever written, left for him by Virginia on that day in March 1941 when she drowned herself in the River Ouse. The following quote collage gives some sense of her life and thought:

1. Letter, 22 September 1926

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls. We all have, doubtless, but I like the suffering soul which confesses itself. I distrust this hard, this shiny, this enameled content.

2. A Writer’s Diary, 21 April 1928

And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

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3. A Writer’s Diary, 12 April 1921

What I had feared was that I was dismissed as negligible.

4. “The Moment: The Artist and Politics”

Art is the first luxury to be discarded in times of stress; the artist is the first of the workers to suffer. But intellectually also he depends on society. Society is not only his paymaster but his patron.

5. Mrs Dalloway

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

6. Jacob’s Room

As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never const to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it.

7. The Waves

It is strange that we who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.

8. “Moments of Being: Am I a Snob?”

The snob is flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other people’s faces so that they may believe and help him to believe what he does not really believe – that he or she is somehow a person of importance.

9. The Years

Pleasure is increased by sharing it. Does the same hold good of pain. . .Is that the reason we all talk so by increasing the surface diminish them.

10. To The Lighthouse

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

11. Diary, 25 October 1920

Why is life so tragic; so like a strip of pavement over an abyss.

12. Letter, 31 March 1928

Suppose one had wine every day, at every meal – What a enchanted world!

13. Letter, 18 June 1939

. . .how it liberates the soul to drink a bottle of good wine daily and sit in the sun.

14. Letter to Leonard Woolf, 28 March 1941

Dearest,
I want to tell you that you me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall not get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can’t write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that. V.

Edward Lucie-Smith’s The Glory of Angels is a sumptuous feast for the eye and spirit, a volume carefully researched, knowingly written, and elegantly illustrated, no illuminated. It’s an oversized (11” x 14”) production, a coffee-table book so beautiful that care must be taken that neither coffee nor any other beverage be spilled upon it. Priced at $35 it is an investment well worth making.

Once you open the cover, a diptych panel with a graceful, glowing angel on each side, you enter a realm of intense and radiant beauty. Though it is impossible, try just to let the pages flutter through your fingers and partake of a moving panorama of heavenly hosts in glorious, profusion. Representations of these remarkable angelic intelligences drawn from several centuries and many cultures – Christian, Hebrew, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu – create a shimmering, full-color spectacle.

Lucie-Smith, an internationally-renowned art critic and practicing photographer, splashes the opening pages with a dazzling gathering of images – a golden shower of Italian angels (Gentileschi, Luti, and Gatti) interspersed with Russian (Chagall and the icon tradition) and American (Tiffany) renderings that prepare the palate for the feast that follows. The volume is organized into eight gorgeous chapters, really courses, for this heavenly banquet; each chapter’s collation of images vibrates round a topic, e.g., “The Heavenly Kingdom,” “Dreaming of Angels,” “Fallen Angels” – for which he supplies just enough learned commentary to enhance appreciation for the pictures. My own favorite chapter is “Archangels,” a stunning gallery devoted to Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.

Some of the images you’ve likely seen before, many you’ve not. Some of the commentary may retrace familiar territory, some of it does not. In the last regard, notice particularly the chapter entitled “Angels from Many Lands” with its four part division into “Islamic Angels,” “Angels in Senegal,” “Ethiopian Angels,” and “Angels in Jamaica” – all new material to this reader. My own understanding of this phenomenon of the heavenly messenger was enriched and expanded considerably by Lucie-Smith’s multi-cultural, multi-religious perspective. Nor did I realize much about angels in contemporary works of art – indeed, if asked, I would have been hard-pressed to cite much more than Chagall’s work; but when I read “Angels in the Modern World,” with its illustrations drawn from unexpected artists like Keith Haring and Ron Mueck, I was enlightened.

Reading The Glory of Angels is a learning experience that delights both eye and heart while refreshing the spirit. A collateral benefit might just be a reawakened belief in these sacred guardians sent from on high, of whom St Francis de Sales wrote, “Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.”

Beryl Bainbridge is dead, of cancer, on 1 July 2010, in London.

She came from a downwardly mobile Liverpool family, born in 1933, to parents mismatched, if ever: her father a bankrupt, melancholic man given to outbursts, her mother a self-pitying woman who felt she’d married down. The home situation was so bad that Beryl and her brother made a pact that one of them would always be home so as to prevent the parents from killing each other. Expelled from Merchant Taylors’, a private girls’ school for writing a “rude rhyme” with illustration (“Today I would be given a medal for it, or some scholarship,” she once said), she became an actress with the Liverpool Playhouse, married and had two children, chucked the adulterous husband and proceeded to have a string of affairs herself, because, “those were the days when you could hardly walk down the road without someone accosting you, and my trouble was I could never say, ‘No’.”

Affairs out of her system, she settled down to write and write she did: in the course of several decades she penned eighteen novels, five of them shortlisted for England’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker McConnell Literary Prize. The early books were written out of her own family story, the best of that lot being The Dressmaker (1973), a chilling, grisly tale of murder and cover-up set in World War II Liverpool and drawing on the lives of her aunts (see the film version with Joan Plowright).

In mid-career Bainbridge moved away from personal memory as muse and inspiration, shifting into collective memory, drawing upon well-known historical events and characters – Scott’s expedition to Antarctica (The Birthday Boys, 1993); the ill-fated voyage of the “Titanic” (Every Man for Himself, 1996); the Crimean War (Master Georgie, 1998); and the larger-than-life Dr. Samuel Johnson (According to Queeney, 2001).

She lived a hard life – smoking incessantly (at one point, three packs a day) and downing plenty of her favorite scotch. She was a party girl, the delight of other guests with her madcap behavior and outlandish stories. In her Victorian manse in Camden Town, a life-sized stuffed water buffalo greeted visitors in the foyer. In her bedroom, an imposing, life-sized male mannequin with a Hitler moustache dominated one corner. The house, set in a now-fashionable district, looked like Dresden after the bomb with statues of saints, dolls, and church trappings scattered about.

Beryl Bainbridge was “one of the most distinctive and admired voices in postwar British fiction,” said the New York Times obituary on Saturday. I’ll say – and unfortunate beyond the telling is that it took her death to alert the larger world to her greatness: a style both elliptical and economical, a wit both sly and caustic, a sensibility both dark and edgy, a heart both generous and faithful. Though she said that DHLawrence, Denton Welch, and John Steinbeck (that’s some trio) influenced her style, in truth, she was all on her own, inimitable, bracing, occasionally shocking, always funny. What Peter Levi once said of Jean Rhys applies in equal measure to Beryl Bainbridge: she was “a major talent disguised as a minor writer.” Though made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2000 and receiving the David Cohen Prize in 2003, Bainbridge found that most honors went the other way, even the Booker: shortlisted five times, she never made the final cut and liked to call herself a “Booker bridesmaid.”

Honor here now, perhaps, by reading three of her best novels: The Dressmaker, Watson’s Apology, and Master Georgie. R.I.P. Beryl Bainbridge, one outrageous girl, one great writer.

He was an enigmatic figure, inscrutable as a Chinese sage, elegant as any titled gentleman entering his exclusive club in Mayfair, witty as only an assured, cosmopolitan man of the world could be, financially successful in terms nearly impossible to calculate today. William Somerset Maugham may have been the most famous English writer of the twentieth century, he was certainly the wealthiest.

On the outside, he was all that; on the inside, he was something more, for sure – a man whose famous description of the Riviera where he lived for many years as “a sunny place for shady people” was particularly apt: out of the glare of fame, he lived a life in the shade himself: a bisexual man of predominately homosexual tastes whose rabid sex life began as a schoolboy and raged unabated into his ninth decade. “He liked sex, and he liked a lot of it,” according to his latest biographer, Selina Hastings.

This is not news. Maugham’s earlier biographers, particularly Jeffery Meyers, in his excellent Somerset Maugham: A Life (2004), have provided portraits rather than simple sketches of the great writer. Why, then, another biography now?

Because, fairly recently, the Royal Literary Fund, executors of Maugham’s vast estate, rescinded the clause in his will that blocked access to Maugham’s extant correspondence. Adamantly opposed to a biography of him by anyone, Maugham had burned every personal paper in his possession in several grand bonfires at his French villa; further, he had instructed every recipient of his letters to do likewise (some did, some did not and enriched themselves considerably and the manuscript collections of several American universities). In addition, a previously unknown account of Maugham’s private and domestic life in France, written by his daughter, came to light. These new materials fairly well demanded a new biography.

The result of several years’ labor involving extensive research and interviews, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is nothing short of a brilliant achievement. Indeed, Selina Hastings seems only to have been limited by her subject, never esteemed a great writer. Two projects seem to have been important to Hastings: 1. giving Maugham his due as a writer; and 2. illuminating the other sides of Maugham. In the first matter, she is too wise to advance a claim for his being elevated to the first rank of writers; but it may just be that his own estimate (“I know where I stand, in the very front row of the second-rate”) is too severe a judgment. Finishing The Secret Lives and returning to consider some of his best short fiction (“Rain,” “The Alien Corn,” “The Book-bag”), a careful reader will likely accept the place she accords him as “the great teller of tales.”

When she explores the shadows of his life, Hastings is concerned with more than the sexual dimension; to her credit, she renders that without sensationalism or prurience, describing and detailing it as an essential element of the writer’s personality, no more, no less, and showing that, important as it was, reckless as it could be, it was recreational (sometimes intensely so), but always secondary to his rigorously disciplined life as a writer. Though he spent time in the light of glittering dinners and parties in Mayfair and enjoyed weekends at fashionable country houses, Maugham also spent time in the shadows of London’s sexual underworld and in the shadowy world of espionage, serving British military intelligence off and on for several decades. Perhaps it was that Maugham, like his acquaintance, Anthony Blunt, as an active gay man in an England still in the panic following Oscar Wilde’s conviction (1895) and where sexual activity between consenting adult men was a criminal offense until 1967, was eminently well-suited for the double life of a secret agent. Whatever the case, his cloak-and-dagger experience gave him the material for his Ashenden stories, considered the prototype for tales later spun by Ian Fleming and John le Carre.

Maugham emerges from these pages a self-constructed personality carefully concerned with the image he projected and the impact he had on others. Had he lived today, the paparzzi would have pursued him relentlessly. He traveled the world over, with a particular fondness for the Far East and the United States. He lived a grand and high life, hobnobbing with the likes of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. Hastings writes with assured narrative fluency, selecting from what one can only assume was a rich repository of witty remarks and anecdotes to bring this writer to life. Despite the stammer that afflicted him from age of ten, he could be counted on for an apt observation or bright riposte; take, for example, his reaction to hearing that his wife Syrie, whom he had supported since their divorce in 1929, had died (1955): “Tra la la, no more alimony, tra la la.” Or this exchange between Frank Sinatra and himself: “Frank says, ‘Hiya, baby!’ and Maugham replies, “Very well, indeed, but hardly a b-baby.”

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham does not contradict received opinion; it does add an undeniable richness of detail and nuance to Maugham’s portrait. Hastings’ considerable scholarly research is effectively put at the service of a convincing argument that gives us a complex and fascinating man who exercise great discipline and dogged persistence in pursuing his calling: in the course of his professional career, he produced seventy eight books, including one hundred twenty-two short stories, as well as some thirty-one plays. And one more thing: Hastings is at pains to reveal another side to Maugham, one which illustrates the validity of an observation made by the Duchess of Windsor: “What many people did not understand,” she said, “was that Willie was at heart a very kind man.” Arguably the wealthiest writer of the twentieth century – one story, “Rain,” earned him the equivalent of ten-twelve million dollars in today’s terms – Maugham did indeed spend a good deal of that wealth on himself, on his elegant home, and on entertaining like a maharajah transplanted to the Riviera; but he was always most generous to those in need, whether friends temporarily down on their luck or struggling writers who wrote and asked for assistance. He rarely refused a request for help.

Though I have minor reservations about The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham – the discussion of his works is too often less than literary; some telling remarks and observation are not sourced; and the “Select Bibliography” is thin, listing a mere thirty-five books, most either reminiscences or bibliographies, with not one scholarly article – this is the biography of W. Somerset Maugham, an endeavor likely to stand the test of time. We now need no other.

Christopher Isherwood once described Maugham as “an old Gladstone bay covered with labels. God knows what is inside.” It is to her lasting credit – and Maugham’s – that Selina Hastings has unpacked that valise for us.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg, another addiction memoir chronicling the heartbreak of a bright young person’s fall. Do we really need to read another sad story?

Well, yes, because Portrait is something much more: it is a love story – the story of a bright and talented young man who fell in love – not so much with another human being, though that plays a role here and it is certainly part of the tragedy – as with little plastic bags of chunky, milk-colored crystals delivered at great cost (at one point, he spends $1000 each night for three “straight” weeks) by sketchy dealers/couriers with names like “Rico” and “Happy” (get that?)

Clegg’s first experience with crack came at age 25, courtesy of a respected lawyer from his hometown, a distinguished man in his mid-60s who seduces him (Clegg is no virgin, either sexually or pharmacologically, he’d already had both girls and boys as well as crystal meth at 15, coke and pot later). The first experience was intoxicating, and so is Clegg’s prose describing the moment:

A kind of peace breaks behind his eyes. It spreads down from his temples into his chest, to his hands and everywhere. It storms through him – kinetic, sexual, euphoric – like a magnificent hurricane raging at the speed of light. It is the warmest, most tender caress he has ever felt…

That introduction to crack by a man older than his father unleashes a hurricane all right, and in its wake nearly everything gets swept away – a real love affair and a successful career as well as his physical and emotional well-being. The insatiable love for crack (the memoir’s first words say it all, “I can’t leave and there isn’t enough”) leads to Clegg’s descent into the maelstrom. He careens from one place to another – behind a 7-Eleven in the shadow of an underpass near the Newark airport; suites in the Carlyle, W 60 Thompson hotels; a hospital psych ward; video booths at porn stores; bathrooms at McDonald’s – from one dealer to another, from one quick sex partner to another (cab drivers, escorts, casual street pick-ups) and becomes a wanderer in a city bleak as Dante’s Inferno lit by a crack pipe,blasted as Eliot’s London in a reefer haze. The once-familiar city becomes forbidding, threatening, alienating (“I feel as if I’m seeing a city I’ve never been to,” he notes at one point). Dislocation, distortion, delusion, hallucination become part of a numb, nomadic existence.

The costs are just terrible. Friends and family become strangers. Clegg loses forty pounds and notes that at age 34 he weighs less than he did in eighth grade (130 pounds). And here he describes his last meeting with “Noah,” his longtime lover::

It is never said, but it is clear that it is over, that our lives, bound together for so long, will now be lived apart. Everything that we were, the whole magical, horrible opera, is now over. We are only a table apart but we’re in different worlds. He seems less like a person and more like a fragment from a dream I once had, some nocturnal wonder I cannot revive after sleep, only remember.

This excerpt – and the one preceding it – illustrate what makes Portrait something more than your garden variety addiction memoir: deep, intense, real feeling conveyed with honesty in prose that is at once matter-of-fact and lyrical.

And something else raises Portrait beyond the typical confessional psycho-babble, 12-step idiocy of so many accounts. Clegg addresses the question, why did I do it? In searching to determine how he reached physical and emotional ground zero he never plays the victim, never assigns blame anywhere else other than himself – no dealer, no partner, no acquaintance, no parent, no circumstance, no star gets tagged. He tells of a number of unsuccessful sessions with several therapists; my guess is that writing this memoir did more for Clegg than all those sessions put together. Not just the physical act of writing but the very construction of the book was likely therapeutic: interspersed among the accounts of high and harrowing episodes are a number of chapters which are flashbacks to Bill at various points in his life – age 5, in third grade, in fourth grade, in eighth grade. Here and rarely elsewhere Clegg fashions a narrative in the third person, obviously detaching himself, attempting to figure how he became a man who so often felt radically inadequate and out-of-place; typical is his comment about himself at a fancy party held to celebrate the opening of his own literary agency: “I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here.”

In the course of this memoir Clegg explores the longstanding feeling of being out of place with its correlative death wish gradually becoming more powerful. As a twelve-year old boy, the excitement of clandestine Scotch-drinking registered as “a place where he doesn’t have to bring himself along. What he also loves is the dark project of it.” In the same impulse he locates some of the attraction of smoking crack and the thrill spirals into a conscious death wish: in the last throes of crack addiction, he realizes full well what he seeks to do:

. . .I know I will smoke every last bit of it. I wonder if somewhere in that pile is the crumb that will bring on a heart-attack or stroke or seizure. The cardiac event that will deliver all this to an abrupt and welcome halt.

Another time,

I quietly pray for one of these hits to finish me off.