Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand
Page 43
25 MacDonald took holy orders in 1892 and died four years later of mysterious causes at the Monastery of St. Dunstan, in the words of his confessor Fr. Noyce, “shaking, trembling, crying out in pain, and most grievously beseeching the Lord’s mercy.”
26 Hugo Ayling owes his survival, and that of The Gathered Clan, to the accident of his having fallen asleep beneath his easel on the lawn at the front of the estate, where he had taken the canvas for the purpose of making some final adjustments.
27 Eight years later Mrs. Shell would reappear as the fiancée of the prominent Conservative politician Lord Auric Twysdon. Her “ageless beauty” was much remarked upon, as was her bewitching charm. Upon the death of her husband in 1905, the wealthy Lady Twysdon removed herself to America, where she was reunited with “Lord” Wren in the city of Climax, Michigan. The pair went on to found Aetherism, an authoritarian religious cult. [Rodney Messner, We Were Aetheric (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Sephiroth Publications, 1919).]
28 Richard Dadd had likely been an influence on von Kreitz and the painters of the New Tremor. Prior to the second fire, von Kreitz had informed Baron Hayward that “chief amongst the works of art to survive into the glorious Dark Age to come” was Dadd’s masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Von Kreitz had apparently visited Dadd in Bethlem sometime after his arrival in the UK. Curiously, in his former life, Dadd had been an accomplished graduate of the Royal Academy, and a member of “The New Clique” of British painters, along with none other than Hugo Ayling’s later employer, William Powell Frith. Von Kreitz also referred to a specific paragraph from Dadd’s autobiographical musings upon the great transformative event of his life, a lengthy 1842 tour of Egypt with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips:
On my return from travel, I was roused to a consideration of subjects which I had previously never dreamed of, or thought about, connected with self; and I had such ideas that, had I spoken of them openly, I must, if answered in the world’s fashion, have been told I was unreasonable. I concealed, of course, these secret admonitions. I knew not whence they came, although I could not question their propriety, nor could I separate myself from what appeared my fate. My religious opinions varied and do vary from the vulgar; I was inclined to fall in with the views of the ancients, and to regard the substitution of modern ideas thereon as not for the better. These and the like, coupled with an idea of a descent from the Egyptian god Osiris … [Patricia Alleridge, The Late Richard Dadd: 1817–1866 (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), pp. 22–23.]
“Had Dadd but brought his art into greater alignment with his concealed thoughts and considerations,” von Kreitz told the baron, “he would have ended not in a madhouse but on a throne.”
29 According to the Rice Lake Telegraph of August 13, 1930, Haxton Hayward was murdered by a never-identified man “in a Stetson hat and box-back coat.” Following his death, the painting passed into the hands of his American family, where it spent two decades in the cellar of Robert Hayward’s house on North Forty-Fourth Street in Milwaukee. The painting languished in his cellar until it was claimed by his ex-wife, Margaret (Margot) Hayward Mountjoy, who attempted to have it installed in a private art gallery established by her millionaire husband, Harry Mountjoy. Rejected by Mr. Mountjoy as “too bizarre,” the painting was given to a cousin, Tillman Hayward, who hung it in the den of his house in Columbus, Ohio. In 1958, Tillman Hayward’s wife loaned The Gathered Clan—without her husband’s knowledge or consent—to the Milwaukee Art Gallery, where, claimed as personal property by both Margot and Tillman in a pair of contesting lawsuits, it has remained locked in storage ever since, unseen.
30 Franz Marc (1880–1916), one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter group, had heard tales of von Kreitz from his father, Wilhelm Marc, a landscape painter briefly under his spell. In his unpublished autobiography, Fruchtbares Leben eines Kunstlers, the elder Marc describes “the many occasions [when] I told my art-smitten little boy of my few but profound meetings with Master von Kreitz, both in Mannheim and Munich, the cities where I sought him out. I was never a philosopher, and much of what the great painter told me I did not have the capacity to understand. Of contradiction, which he found essential to ‘true sight,’ his master goal and central teaching, I grasped little. Yet I believed wholeheartedly with him that painting of such true sight would be capable of altering in some way the material of fact. Any person who has been stirred to tears when beholding a great and speaking work of art knows this to be true.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
RAE ARMANTROUT’s most recent collection, Itself, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015. Her book Just Saying (Wesleyan) has appeared in Italian translation on stampato presso.
GABRIEL BLACKWELL is the author of Critique of Pure Reason (Noemi) and the novels The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men and Shadow Man (both CCM). With Matthew Olzmann, he edits The Collagist.
Longtime Conjunctions contributor CAN XUE has been short-listed for the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature for 2016, and received the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for The Last Lover. Her story in this issue is from her novella Story of the Slums.
With Karen Gernant, CHEN ZEPING has cotranslated works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including Can Xue’s Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories (New Directions), Five Spice Street (Yale University Press), Vertical Motion (Open Letter), and Frontier (forthcoming from Open Letter).
SUSAN DAITCH is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. Her fourth novel, The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, will be published by City Lights in the spring of 2016.
DESIREE DES (desireedes.com) is a New York–based artist who examines her environment through photography, found objects, and her community. The recipient of the Institute for Electronic Art Print Media Residency, she is currently in the Studio Art MFA program at Hunter College.
ANTHONY DISCENZA is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay area. His collaboration with Peter Straub in this issue marks his first appearance in print.
MARGARET FISHER is the author of Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments (MIT) and The Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera, Collis O Heliconii, and the coauthor and translator of RADIA, a Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto by Pino Masnata (both Second Evening Art). With composer Robert Hughes, she directs the production group MAFISHCO (www.mafishco.com), based in Emeryville, CA.
KAREN GERNANT’s recent cotranslations, with Chen Zeping, of short stories by Can Xue include “Shadow People” (published in Pathlight), “The Old Cicada” (Words Without Borders), “Crow Mountain” (Asymptote), and “The Swamp” (forthcoming in Ninth Letter).
ARIELLE GREENBERG’s newest book is the poetry collection Slice (Coconut). The nonfiction work Locally Made Panties (Ricochet) and the revised, electronic edition of the Gurlesque anthology (Saturnalia, coedited with Lara Glenum and Becca Klaver) are forthcoming in 2016.
PAUL HOOVER is the editor of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology and the literary magazine New American Writing. His most recent book is desolation : souvenir (Omnidawn). A new volume, The Book of Unnamed Things, is forthcoming from Apogee.
POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR is the author of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Atlantic) and The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury). Her memoir Sick is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in 2017.
EDIE MEIDAV is the author of the novels The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner), Crawl Space (FSG/Picador), Lola, California (FSG/Picador), and the forthcoming Dogs of Cuba. She teaches in the MFA program of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
GWYNETH MERNER’s work previously appeared in Conjunctions:61, A Menagerie. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
JAMES MORROW is the author of ten novel
s, including the Godhead Trilogy (Harcourt), The Last Witchfinder (William Morrow), and Galápagos Regained (St. Martin’s Press). He has received the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
ANDREW MOSSIN is the author of the poetry collections The Epochal Body and The Veil (both Singing Horse), as well as Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan), a book of criticism. He has recently completed two new manuscripts, The Torture Papers and Through the Rivers: A Memoir of Theft, portions of each of which were first published in Conjunctions.
YANNICK MURPHY is the author of This Is the Water and The Call (both Harper Perennial), Signed, Mata Hari (Little Brown & Co.), Here They Come (McSweeney’s), The Sea of Trees (Houghton Mifflin), In a Bear’s Eye (Dzanc), and Stories in Another Language (Alfred A. Knopf).
JOYCE CAROL OATES’s most recent book is The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (Ecco), a portion of which, originally published in Conjunctions:63, Speaking Volumes, was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of the President’s Medal for the Humanities and is currently a visiting distinguished writer in the graduate writing program at New York University.
BIN RAMKE’s most recent book is Missing the Moon (Omnidawn). He teaches at the University of Denver and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the poetry editor of Denver Quarterly.
MICHAEL MARTIN SHEA is the managing editor of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology (Wesleyan University Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere.
AURELIE SHEEHAN is the author of two novels and three story collections, including Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA).
MICHAEL SHEEHAN teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. His work has appeared previously in Conjunctions, as well as in Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, and elsewhere.
ELENI SIKELIANOS is the author of seven books of poetry and two hybrid memoirs, most recently You Animal Machine and The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (both Coffee House). Her poems in this issue are from Make Yourself Happy, forthcoming from Coffee House.
PETER STRAUB has written seventeen novels and three collections of shorter fiction. Interior Darkness: Selected Stories will be published by Doubleday in February 2016.
TERESE SVOBODA’s most recent novel is Bohemian Girl (Bison). When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems, 1985–2015 (Anhinga) will appear in November, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner) in January 2016.
LAURA VAN DEN BERG is the author of the novel Find Me (FSG) and the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc) and The Isle of Youth (FSG), the last of which won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize.
PAUL WEST’s most recent books are The Ice Lens, The Invisible Riviera, and Red in Tooth and Claw (all Onager).
MAGDALENA ZYZAK is the author of The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel (Henry Holt). She produced and cowrote the feature film Redland and is currently in production on her directorial debut, Shipwreck on a Hillside, a feature film about poets.
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