Dirty Pictures
This past weekend I spent a too-short hour in the National Gallery of Art wandering through a big retrospective exhibition devoted to George Bellows (1882-1925). Bellows is most commonly remembered today for his paintings of boxers, including a famous one of Jack Dempsey being knocked out of the ring. There’s also a fairly well known picture called Forty-Two Kids, depicting a troop of naked boys swimming and diving off a wharf—I first saw it as an illustration for one of Walt Whitman’s poems.
Wonderful as these are, I was most taken with Bellows’s urban landscapes and street scenes. He depicts the titanic excavations for New York’s Penn Station, huffing laborers on the Hudson River docks, parks filled with snow, the skeletal girders of skyscrapers, carnivalesque tenements, and the whole hurdy-gurdy world that was early 20th-century Manhattan. Bellows also contributed uplifting cover illustrations to The Masses, the almost legendary socialist magazine. In his early days he comes across as very much a social-realist painter.
Years ago, when I thought I might one day collect prints, I was drawn to etchings and engravings depicting factories, steel mills, and other industrial sites. There’s something about slag heaps and rusting ironworks that just makes my soul sing. I’ve even been known to admire the ravaged, lunar landscapes created by quarries and strip-mining.
Most obviously, my fondness for foundries and blighted terrains goes back to my hometown Lorain, its one-time motto being “Industrial Empire in Ohio’s Vacationland.” That vacationland, believe it or not, would be the shores of polluted Lake Erie, not far from Cleveland, where—notoriously—the Cuyahoga River once caught on fire because of the oily chemical slick floating on its waters.
When I was growing up, daily existence in Lorain was dominated by the National Tube division of U.S. Steel, the American Shipbuilding corporation, Thew Shovel, and a Ford assembly plant. As a result, my notions of grandeur and the sublime were shaped by views of smokestacks and half-built lake freighters and diesel cranes stretching their long steel necks toward the sky. The men who worked in these mills and factories—my father and uncles and cousins—were tough, self-reliant, and, to my childish eyes, almost heroic. These guys could fix a car, build a garage, lay bricks, install plumbing, wire a house, raise a garden, hunt and trap and fish and drink and play cards and go to church on Sunday. I, by contrast, always had my nose in a book and now sit in a chair all day while my lily-white fingers type out words on a screen. Sometimes I feel ashamed at how far I’ve fallen short of the omnicompetence of the hard, quiet men I grew up with.
When I first arrived in Washington I was shocked to see that this city was, and is, the reverse of my hometown. Here people put on a coat and tie to go to work during the week and on Sunday slouch around in jeans and flannel shirts. In Lorain, people wore old, patched clothes to work and saved their good outfits for the weekend. “Sunday best” wasn’t just a phrase. Unless they were helping a relative with some big, dirty project, come Sunday my father and mother always wore something “dressy,” as did their sullen children, just in case relatives came calling in the afternoon.
One reason I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, is that—before the urban development of recent years—it used to be the sort of place you would go if you needed some spot welding done, where you might buy a cheap wig, or have a muffler replaced, or visit an old-style junk shop. The place had character. Its downtown felt real to me in a way that most of marbled Washington, pretentious Potomac, and the traffic nightmare called Northern Virginia never have. Some of the old Silver Spring still survives, but it is passing quickly.
As they age, most painters grow deeper, more introspective, and often weirder in the way they apply paint or see the world. But in Bellows’s case, the opposite occurred. His late work is much weaker—wan and pallid and over-finished and conventional—compared to the muscular energy and boldness of his youthful achievements. Some of the figures in those early paintings look like Boschian grotesques, others scarcely have any face at all. His World War I propaganda paintings of the Hun are truly shocking, including depictions of naked men and women about to be executed. But many of the paintings he did after 1920 when he moved to Woodstock, New York, look like magazine illustrations and sometimes were. Alas, I forgot to notice the dates for his portraits, several of which—notably one of a young girl, lent by the Butler Art Institute of Youngstown, Ohio, where my wife grew up—are as good as anything by John Singer Sargent.
So, the Bellows show was quite wonderful, and yet slightly worrisome too. Artists, and that includes writers, like to think that they get better as they grow older. But sometimes we kid ourselves and that just isn’t so. Our youthful ambition and originality disappear, replaced by a boring and bland smoothness, usually dubbed mature professionalism. By contrast, I’m sure that my father and uncles didn’t always know how to do a lot of what they did around the house, but, being unable to afford plumbers, roofers or mechanics, they slowly—by trial and error, supplemented by some creative swearing—gradually figured out how to do it themselves. I, of course, just write exorbitant checks to skilled people who come to the house in vans or panel trucks.
It’s an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” while T. S. Eliot proclaimed that “Old men ought to be explorers.” More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever “piece of iridescent mediocrity” we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.
Sigh. All of which means that I really should take another stab at writing that novel. Maybe tomorrow.
Going, Going, Gone
On any given day I’m likely to be working here at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles. Anyway, I’ll be working steadily along when suddenly, as D. H. Lawrence remarked at the beginning of Sea and Sardinia, there “comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”
I’ll then hop into the car and drive to the Friends of the Montgomery County Library bookstore in Wheaton or the Second Story Books Warehouse in Rockville or Wonder Book and Video in Frederick. I’ll poke around. Time will pass. And three hours later I’ll realize that, oops, I really need to get back home to check over the proof of a review, or reheat some leftovers—I’m no cook—before my Beloved Spouse comes wearily trudging through the backdoor. Yet by the time I pull out of the bookstore’s parking lot it is almost invariably rush hour and I will inch painfully along the clotted roadways of greater Washington, frustrated that I should live in this hellhole.
But, ah, those three hours or so of wandering the shelves, pulling out interesting-looking titles, checking prices, trying to remember if I already own this book or that and, if I do, whether I really owe it to myself to upgrade to an incredibly pretty copy for only $5. Before long, my one or two books is a stack, then a boxful. Should I, perhaps, put back a few? Naaah. You only live once. Besides, with any justice, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good café in one corner, serving coffee and Guinness and kielbasa to keep up one’s strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria’s Secret catalogs. All my old friends will be there and sometimes we’ll take off a few millennia for an epic poker game and. . . .
To continue: it’s true that even $5 book purchases do add up. Yet what, after all, is money? It’s just this abstraction, a number, a piece of green paper. But a book—a printed volume, not some pixels on a screen—is real. You can hold it in your hand. Feel its heft. Admire the cover. Realize that you now own a work of art that is 50 or 75 or 100 years old. Bernard Berenson is, on a grander scale, any collector’s semblable and frère.
Not that I have BB’s gift for periodically raking in millions of lire by “authenticating” a Giorgione or Tintoretto for art
dealer Joseph Duveen. In fact, my Beloved Spouse constantly berates me for failing to stew sufficiently about money. When she tells me to send in my quarterly taxes or deposit cash in my IRA, I do as she says—I am nothing if not uxorious—or I work really hard to accumulate the savings so that I can do so ASAP. For 30 years I diligently set aside every extra penny to cover the college educations of my three sons. I paid off my home mortgage long ago. I even have some kind of mutual fund.
Nonetheless, it’s hard for me to feign even mild interest in investing or studying the stock market. What a weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable—okay, make that profitable—way of life it is to think constantly about the bottom line. Keogh plans, Roths, Schedule C, deferred income, capital gains, and rows and rows of little numbers. . . . The heart sinks.
Sometimes I try to care, I really do. But show me an old issue of Weird Tales and the latest Bank of America Annual Report, and you’ll see where my eyes turn. Of course, both publications deal in fiction, but the lies of art are more honorable than those of plutocratic and deceitful scuzzbags. (Ah, freedom of speech—you got to love it!)
Still, I’m an American, and so can’t help but sometimes wish I were lolling in the “one percent.” But for me, the cost of even trying to become rich is just too high. Some people can balance the two cultures, artists like Picasso or writers like science fiction’s Robert Silverberg who are able to keep track of their portfolios while also creating moving works of art. Sad to say, such multitasking, any multitasking, is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I’m reviewing a novel or biography, I then have to write the review before I start my next project. I particularly hate any interruption to what one might laughably call my train of thought. After all, my trains of thought don’t precisely resemble the Acela skimming along to New York so much as the Little Engine That Could huffing and puffing up a steep incline.
Most days I’m irrationally content simply turning pages and fingering keyboards. Essayist Logan Pearsall Smith—Berenson’s brother-in-law—once remarked, “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” I wouldn’t go that far. As Chaucer’s wife of Bath remarked,
But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world, as in my tyme.
As I say, even now when I grow foggy-headed or restless, I still hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world—they call me the wanderer, yeah, the wanderer, I roam around, around, around. . . . Hmm, I seem to have flashed backed there to the ’60s. Dion on the radio, that night in the Admiral King High School parking lot with. . . . Sigh.
Truth be told, I know I should be more mature and think seriously about my future and make better preparations for whatever dark days await. Naïvely, though, I keep hoping there won’t be any really dark days. My ideal farewell to this wicked, wonderful world of books and art and beauty and people was long ago summed up by Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station, his superb account of 19th-century socialism. Its greatest chapter is titled “Karl Marx Dies at His Desk.” That’s the way to go.
Castles in Space
The other day, while roaming through the book-sale room at a local library, I spotted eight or nine issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. All of them were from the early 1960s, with the muted, matte covers of that era, most of them with illustrations by the late Ed Emsh (whose wife, Carol Emshwiller, is one of the greatest living writers of fantasy and sf). Each digest originally cost 40 cents, but now—50 years later—they were only a quarter apiece, and I bought them all.
For me, such magazines resemble Proust’s madeleines: they are vehicles of sweet memory, bibliophilic time machines. An old joke goes: What is the golden age of science fiction? Answer: 12. Back in 1960, when the earliest of these issues of F&SF first appeared, I would have been 12. The 1950s and ’60s weren’t just the heyday of science fiction digests. Corner drugstore racks were crowded with weekly or monthly issues of Life, True, Mad, Sixteen, The Saturday Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Modern Romance, True Confessions, Reader’s Digest, Popular Mechanics, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among many others. People read a lot of periodicals in those days. Not anymore. These are especially tough times for genre fiction, even though the magazine short story has always been its best showcase.
Presented for your consideration, as Rod Serling used to say in his introduction to The Twilight Zone, the contents of these eight issues of F&SF. I count at least four modern classics: Theodore Sturgeon’s novella “When You Care, When You Love,” Avram Davidson’s “The Sources of the Nile,” Ray Bradbury’s “Death and the Maiden,” and Joanna Russ’s “My Dear Emily.” The incomparable John Collier—best known for his collection Fancies and Goodnights, currently available as a New York Review Books paperback—is represented by a novelette “Man Overboard” and Robert Sheckley, whose funniest and most imaginative stories are also available in a volume from NYRB, contributes “The Girls and Nugent Miller.” There are also science articles by Dr. Isaac Asimov, book reviews from Damon Knight and Alfred Bester (author of that most seminal of modern sf novels, The Stars My Destination), even some examples of light verse by Brian Aldiss, not to overlook the silly punning stories of “Ferdinand Feghoot.”
Yet there are lots of real surprises here too. In the September 1960 issue appears “Goodbye,” described as the first published story of Burton Raffel. Raffel would make his name not as a pulp fictioneer but as one of the world’s most versatile and admired translators, with a special interest in epic works such as The Nibelungenlied, The Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. In other issues I find a reprint of Truman Capote’s “Master Misery,” stories by such largely mainstream authors as George P. Elliott, Howard Fast, and Bruce Jay Friedman, and even an early work by one of my favorite people, that luminary of Wesleyan University, Kit Reed. Given a weekend at the beach, with no looming deadlines, I could be quite happy just reading my two dollars worth of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Even the classified ads are redolent of a now-vanished whizbang era. “Develop a powerful mind while asleep. Also, reduce tension, stop smoking, lose weight without drugs. Clinical tests 92% effective. Join International Research group . . . details free.” Now what could this be? A come-on for Dianetics? A course in self-induced hypnotism? There’s no way to know, except to write in for those free details. Another ad advertises “rocket fuel chemicals” and still another “Birth Control, 34 methods explained”—and not only explained: “Illustrated. $2.98.”
The back covers of several issues carry endorsements of the magazine’s quality from such literary eminences of the day as Clifton Fadiman and Orville Prescott, not to mention Hugo Gernsback (after whom the famous sf award, the Hugo, is named). Even Louis Armstrong turns out to be a fan: “I believe The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction appeals to me because in it one finds refuge and release from everyday life.” Unfortunately, the great jazzman goes on: “We are all little children at heart and find comfort in a dream world, and these episodes in the magazine encourage our building castles in space.” I don’t think any modern sf writers or readers would agree with those saccharine sentiments. And yet, what I’m describing here is exactly that: the comfort found in a dream world.
Today The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is overseen by my friend Gordon Van Gelder, and it’s still great. You should try an issue. As it happens, I will be picking up a few more golden-age digests this weekend at Capclave, the local Washington, D.C., science fiction convention, where—as its motto proclaims—“reading is not extinct.”
But let me end with a story. A few years ago Elaine Showalter, long a distinguished professor of English at Princeton, retired to Washington. One afternoon we had lunch in Bethesda, and somehow science fiction came up in the conversation. Laughingly, she said that she once taught a student who told her that
he had yearned nearly all his life to become the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She couldn’t quite place his name. I quietly said, “Was it, by chance, Gordon Van Gelder?” With a look of astonishment, she said, “Why, yes. How did you know?” When I told her that Gordon had, in fact, become editor of F&SF, she said, and I agreed, “How wonderful to be able to realize the dream of one’s life.” Happily, some dreams turn out to be more than just castles in space.
Waving, Not Drowning
People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I’m addicted, that I’m no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers. There may be a little truth in this view, one sometimes enunciated by my Beloved Spouse when she’s feeling less than pleased with me. Moreover, I do drop by the special biblioholics meeting whenever I attend Readercon, the science fiction convention I wrote about in an earlier column.
But the deeper truth of the matter is somewhat different. All these ziggurats of books in the bedroom and on the attic steps and on top of the piano are future projects, awaiting that time when the stars are finally right. Then great Cthulhu will rise. . . . No, that’s something else that happens when the stars are right. As I meant to say, each stack will sooner or later be transformed into an essay, article, or long review.
For instance, just behind me are a half dozen books by or about Julian Maclaren-Ross, a hard-drinking, elegantly raffish bohemian of postwar London who wrote comic novels (Of Love and Hunger is about a vacuum cleaner salesman), parodies, short stories, and a volume of reminiscences titled Memoirs of the Forties. Paul Willetts helped bring his work back into print, first with a biography—Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia—and then with new editions of the principal works. Maclaren-Ross is, by the way, a model for X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s 12-part A Dance to the Music of Time.
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