by William Boyd
And Lika? Clearly, when she met Chekhov she was a young woman of tremendous beauty and incandescent sex-appeal, coupled with an unaffected, bohemian nature. She started as a teacher, failed as an opera singer and a milliner, worked as a secretary, tried to be an actress, had too many love affairs, smoked too much, put on weight and lost it again. Masha speculated that the fastidious Chekhov might not have been able to cope with such a rackety personality. And maybe Chekhov sensed that. He wrote to her once explaining his persistent reticence: “A huge crocodile lives in you, Lika, and as a matter of fact I’m doing the wise thing in obeying common sense and not my heart, which you’ve bitten into.” The crocodile bit Chekhov’s heart and he recoiled, reluctant to go there again. What would life have been like with the lovely, dangerous crocodile Lika? Chekhov decided to play safe. One wonders what regrets he lived with.
2004
Richard Yates
(Review of A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey)
“Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,” Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. “We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.” There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not.
Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a thoroughly dysfunctional family and his own tortured psyche and that of his mother and relatives provided him with the raw material of his fiction for his working life. Yates was mentally unstable and an alcoholic (as was his only sister). Their mother was a self-appointed “Bohemian” sculptress who divorced her dull, middle-management husband as soon as was feasible and took her children off on a series of flits through pre-Second World War New England and Greenwich Village, somehow managing to keep one step ahead of the bailiffs and the creditors but royally messing up her children in the process (in her cups, she was in the habit of slipping into bed with her pubescent son).
A scholarship pupil at private school, Yates was the talented poor boy who wanted to be a writer and he achieved relatively early success with his short stories. After graduating he served briefly with the US Army at the tail end of the war, married early and spent some time learning his trade, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, in France and London. The trouble with Yates was that he wanted to be a writer—and a “writer.” The ghost of Scott Fitzgerald haunts his life both as an artistic exemplar and as a ruinous role-model. Yates’s writing career was lived out against a background of eighty cigarettes a day, prodigious boozing and manic depression. The handfuls of pharmaceuticals he took to keep himself relatively sane were never designed to be washed down with Jack Daniels and it has to be said that, very early on, Yates placed his finger squarely on the self-destruct button and held it there. Marriages and relationships collapsed with regularity and the literary career that he embarked on so promisingly with his first novel Revolutionary Road (1960) soon evolved itself into a long, slow slide of falling sales, missed deadlines, alienated publishers and the law of diminishing returns.
Yet throughout his life Yates was sustained by grants, prizes, spells in Hollywood writing scripts, temporary creative-writing teaching posts (with a brief, unlikely period as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy) and the affection and support of steadfast friends and colleagues. As a young man he was tall and moodily good-looking. Yet for all his charisma he was, I suppose, that sad literary figure the “one book wonder.” His first novel, Revolutionary Road, turned out to be his chef d’oeuvre. It was written to be the Great Gatsby of the 1960s and it still has its fervent adherents. Reading Yates’s fiction today one has to say that, looking at the work as a whole (six novels and two collections of short stories), there don’t really seem to be grounds for resurrecting him as a forgotten master. His style is classically realistic and elegantly turned but the one-note tango of his inspiration finally enervates. John Updike—who one might argue overtook and outshone Yates as the pre-eminent chronicler of middle-class American angst and adultery—is in a different league. Yates is like many figures in twentieth-century American literature: an early flowering of an intriguing talent rendered nugatory by crowding, tormenting demons—drink, drugs, self-doubt, self-loathing, burn-out and so on. Fitzgerald is the obvious precursor but Hemingway was equally undone, as were writers like Berryman, Capote, Kerouac, Cheever and many more.
Yates in his middle age wound up in Boston, living in a bleak, roach-infested apartment with just enough money to feed himself in an Irish pub up the block. He looked like a derelict with a crusted beard, greasy clothes, muttering to himself as he trudged between his apartment and the bar. What sustained Yates—what kept him alive, I suppose—was his romantic vision of himself as an artist. He wrote all the time, even if what he wrote was inferior stuff, and pursued his vocation with a dedication that is in the end amazingly impressive, even if it was self-delusory. A friend described him as “fun to be around but a pain in the ass.”
Unfortunately, as his life spiralled downwards the “pain in the ass” aspects seemed to dominate. Yates was both bitter and aggressive, his moods swung violently because of his bipolar disorder and the vast amounts of alcohol he consumed. He fought with friends and his family; through his drink-driven dementia he made a regular public spectacle of himself and was in and out of mental institutions. But it was, so his doctors claimed and pleaded with him, his refusal to give up alcohol that was destroying his life. Eventually, however, it was his manic smoking that killed him. In the early 1990s Yates wound up teaching creative writing at a university in Alabama. Virtually immobile owing to his chronic emphysema, he became a familiar figure driving around campus in a clapped-out Mazda alternately puffing on a cigarette and clamping an oxygen mask to his face. He quit smoking a few months before he died and was astonished at how easy it was to give up. By then it was too late: he was rushed into hospital for a routine operation on an inguinal hernia (caused by his fits of coughing) and died alone in the night, asphyxiated by his own vomit. It was 1992: he was sixty-six years old.
“To write so well and be forgotten is a terrifying legacy,” a critic commented posthumously. Yates was a fine writer, but the very uneven quality of his work will always have him categorized as a minor twentieth-century American novelist despite the tremendous debut he made with Revolutionary Road. However, in a curious way, his hellish life itself may be what he will be remembered for. Blake Bailey has written a fully documented, wonderfully clear-eyed, shrewd and sympathetic account of what must be one of the most nightmarish journeys across this vale of tears that any novelist has undertaken. Yates’s battered, wheezing, ascetic indefatigability is almost heroic but, as with many artists who embark on this kind of slow suicide, one is left with the feeling that at root it is caused by an innate sense of the limits of their talent—by their awareness of just how far they fall short of the genuinely great—that sends them down the slippery slope to their own self-destruction.
2004
Art
In my late teens I decided that I wanted to go to art school and become a painter. I was good at art, I took my A-level a year early and, to be honest, at that stage of my education I was more enthused about art than I was by literature. This was not to be: my father’s implacable objection to this plan provoked no rebellion in me and so I decided to follow the path of literature instead, a calling about which he was marginally less disparaging. Decades on, I have to concede that perhaps he was right to dissuade me. But, all the same, my old ambition still nags at me from time to time. It was Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, who in 1998 unwittingly re-opened this small Pandora’s box when she asked me to write for her journal and then, a little while later, invited me to join its editorial board.
Suddenly, I had a toe in the world I had hankered to be
long to as a schoolboy and I found that, even if I couldn’t be a painter, at least I was happy to write about art. It was not a difficult compromise.
Most of the pieces I have written for Modern Painters and other magazines and newspapers have been largely about British painting, post World War Two. I am no expert in the fine art, scholarly sense, but I feel British painters of that era are both underestimated and undervalued. I was more than prepared to try and boost reputations unjustly in decline.
The other feature of my connection to Modern Painters was that it provided me with the opportunity to invent my fictitious American painter Nat Tate (see pages 306–8) who, for about a week or ten days in 1998, enjoyed a certain notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, as indeed did I, as the perceived perpetrator of a hoax on the New York art world. Nat Tate seemed to have a strange half-life for a while (I was interviewed on Newsnight about his work and there was a Channel 4 documentary made about him) and his réclame still rumbles on. Most interestingly for me, however, is that Nat’s curious existence has returned me, if not to painting, then to drawing again: from time to time I discover a “lost” Nat Tate and give it to a friend as a present. I am Nat’s only begetter, after all, and also the source of all his surviving art: perhaps the old ambition has been lying dormant all these years and may be beginning to stir again.
Georg Grosz
(Review of World War One and the Weimar Artists
by Matthias Eberle)
It is hard to gauge now—in this era of outrage and daily disaster—what the effects of the sinking of the Titanic were on the popular imagination in 1912. Was it simply one of shock and blank astonishment? Or did it give rise to darker premonitions? Matthias Eberle suggests, in this very intriguing if somewhat earnest book, that—certainly as far as German artists were concerned—it was a seminal date, the beginning of a process of profound suspicion and disenchantment with the mechanized forces of industry that reached its apotheosis in the 1914–18 war. That fervid exultation in dynamism and the heroic potential of mechanics so eagerly celebrated by the Futurists and, one suspects, by the world at large as well as the German artists, received its gory comeuppance on the Western Front. The fragility of the human body and the transience and futility of human aspirations were all too cruelly exposed when the machines they were pitted against took the form of trench mortars and howitzers.
No one was better placed to observe this than Otto Dix, a machine-gunner on the Western Front who no doubt on many occasions had the opportunity to observe at first hand the effect of high technology on the lumbering Tommies slogging across the mud. Dix had joined the war full of sub-Nietzschean enthusiasm for the fight. He was swiftly disillusioned and that disillusion manifested itself in his art. The same bitterness occurred in other German artists in a curious unity of vision which was called—in opposition to Expressionist and Futurist excesses—the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “New Objectivity.” Dix, Grosz and Beckmann are the most famous exemplars of the grouping and each is the subject of an essay in this book. Dix and Grosz are the most commonly linked and I suppose the most well known, but one of the bonuses of this book was to discover that the same strains in Dix and Grosz appear in Max Beckmann’s work. Indeed there are stronger parallels between Dix and Beckmann than one might have surmised. Each was influenced by Nietzsche, each saw active service and their war experiences produced in them tortured, morbid obsessions with sex, human cruelty and vague religious impulses. Grosz’s work exhibited similar tendencies but, interestingly, it was not produced by a spell at the front. Grosz was first declared unfit for military service. Later he was conscripted, but after a nervous breakdown of sorts he was sent to a sanatorium. A medical student, who thought he was perfectly fit, ordered him out of bed. In a fury, Grosz attacked him and was promptly beaten up by the other patients with, by all accounts, considerable glee. It was this trauma which accelerated his acerbic cynicism, not any spectacle of mass destruction.
For all their power, there is something unpleasantly pathological in the work of all three artists. There is a kind of righteous nihilism which one can applaud: their portrayals of the horrors of war (no British artist has painted anything so scarifying); their excoriation of the sleek industrialists and corrupt businessmen and so on. It is a little harder to explain away, however, their morbid obsession with sex. One could say that after the war, once the fighting was over, the crude commerce of prostitution served as a useful symbol of the degeneracy of the human spirit, but it rings somewhat of special pleading, especially when one is faced with its lurid prominence in the work of all three men. Both Dix and Grosz, for example, independently produced a series of etchings on sex murders. The answer lies, rather, in the complex individual personalities of the artists than in any Neue Sachlichkeit programme. Their respective traumatization—coincidentally—engendered the same symptoms.
It may be, of course, a national psychosis: it is tempting to see Weimar Germany (or rather one’s received image of Weimar Germany) suffering—so to speak—in the same way as its artists, especially when one takes into account the German race’s propensity for doing things en masse. It is a theory that gains some further credence when we look at Britain between the wars. If we accept that the Neue Sachlichkeit artists represent the most significant cultural response to the Great War in Germany then its corollary in Britain is the war poets—Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Gurney et al. What a fascinating contrast they make. The same shock and condemnation of the horrors of war provides a powerful stimulus for their respective arts, but nowhere in the British response do we encounter this purulent nihilism reflected through overt sexual loathing and revulsion. Is this simply a sign of the dissimilarity between the British and German psyche? Or is it merely the difference between victor and vanquished? Searching for an answer, it is perhaps significant that Grosz himself later (in 1933) disowned and repudiated his post-war etchings because he considered that the relentless cynicism of the Weimar artists and writers had contributed to the rise of the Nazis.
1988
Keith Vaughan
(Review of Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work by Malcolm Yorke)
Keith Vaughan was born in 1912. Later in his life he was to reflect on what he regarded as one of the more auspicious omens of his birth. He was a healthy baby, “but it was also observed that my penis possessed a loose and easily retractable foreskin which was not considered necessary to circumcise. For this piece of good fortune I have had many occasions to be grateful.” We shall see why in due course. In this nugget of autobiographical information are preserved many of the qualities that make Vaughan such a distinctive artist and personality: his unflinching candour, his formal exactitude, his dry wit, his lifelong obsession with his cock. All key aspects of his life as a man and, though perhaps not in every respect, his work as an artist.
Although he expressed satisfaction with his foreskin other features of Vaughan’s childhood were less happy. His father died when he was very young, and he grew up in a close, neurotic household composed of his mother—an omnipresent source of irritation for most of his life—and his younger brother Dick, a weak, insecure boy who totally depended on Vaughan for amusement and regular consolation.
Vaughan’s father’s death reduced the family to a level of bourgeois penury. Mrs Vaughan had to work hard to “maintain standards,” and constant economy was the order of the day. But in compensation the cultural atmosphere of the life they led was rich. At a young age Vaughan was an accomplished pianist and would accompany his mother on the violin. He also won a Royal Drawing Society award when he was seven years old. The intimacy of the family was broken, however, when he was sent away to boarding school two years later, to Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. Here he suffered the usual humiliations visited on sensitive boys at single-sex boarding schools—corporal punishment, bullying, smut, filth etc.—and Vaughan begged his mother to take him away, in vain. By his account his adolescence seems to have borne more than the usual burden of guilt, misery and isolation.
It was at school that Vaughan’s particular sexual nature began to assert itself in a manner that was unequivocally homoerotic and masochistic. And it was at Christ’s Hospital that he commenced a programme of regular and ingenious masturbation that was to prove lifelong. He retained nothing but unhappy memories of his schooldays but, whatever tribulations his psyche was undergoing, the seeds of his education as an artist were also sown. In the fields of music, literature and painting his years at school had not been unproductive.
It was his skill at drawing that led him, almost directly on leaving school, into the advertising world. He became a layout artist in the advertising services branch of Unilever—Lintas—where he spent most of the 1930s. The Lintas years functioned for Vaughan as a surrogate university and art school. Here he found a set of like-minded colleagues and friends who were also artists, intellectuals and eccentrics, happy to accept Vaughan on his own terms. Vaughan still lived at home with his mother but he began to experience a measure of independence too. He would spend weekends in a converted railway carriage on the Sussex coast at Pagham with a group of friends, where they would sunbathe and swim in the nude. In his memories, Pagham became one of the magic places of his life.
In other respects the broad character of Vaughan’s life in the thirties seems to be one of naively earnest and dogged cultural self-improvement: endless courses of reading, playing and listening to music, visits to the ballet (an obsession) and theatre. And in many ways the pattern of life he established for himself at that time was to remain constant. On one side single-minded artistic endeavour, and on the other an equal dedication to enriching his erotic experience.