One always wants to say that’s not true you haven’t considered the evidence and that’s beside the point
Posted in General on 05. Aug, 2010
One always wants to say “that’s not true”; “you haven’t considered the evidence”; and “that’s beside the point”. Anyone with specialised knowledge of Beckett, or Eisenstein, or Genet, or Lowell, or Matisse, or Pollock – or, really, whoever – will be frustrated by Conrad’s encapsulations. I think the book is short but would not wish it to be longer. Conrad discusses the culture of the last 100 years in 737 pages He does so with enormous erudition and flair Intelligence crackles in every paragraph.
We always want him to say more than he does about the thousands of artists, writers, musicians and film-makers who flit in and out of his rapid prose.And yet, quite early in the day, one has had enough of Conrad He stimulates and provokes but never satisfies. Modern Times, Modern Places
by Peter Conrad Thames and Hudson pounds 24.95
The subtitle of Peter Conrad’s impressive new book is Life and Art in the Twentieth Century, obviously a subject that no single person could hope to describe in any adequate way; and in assembling his materials he must often have wondered how short or, more likely, how long his text should be. There remains beyond all ideas Nature, which will survive us in all its unfathomable complexity, even if it too will perish ultimately, represented by the forestland of Skule up in Angermanland. I write as one to whom this part of Northern Sweden has the deepest emotional and personal significance, and I have read little more beautiful than Kerstin Ekman’s – fictively integrated – evocations of this country: “The forest grows on hillsides and on the steep sides of the dark river ravines. The slopes are covered with moorland and the streams leap from waterfall to waterfall … Only the still, clear-water lochs are smooth-surfaced, but their depths chill the eye.”. She, one infers, has no religion herself, no unifying philosophy; she famously defended Salman Rushdie with a tract on the Right to Blaspheme.
Kerstin Ekman enters fascinatedly into all these pursuits, but ultimately reveals them as illusory, destined to failure. She thought of herself as a wild outsider in disguise, like a tiger trapped in a lace-curtained drawing-room. She was severely split between her “masculine” and “feminine” sides, valuing the former, despising the latter, but still trying to conform to the genteel feminine standard she learned early on. Jane Dunn herself admits that at first she found Antonia White quite unpleasant. Only later did she begin to admire the courage of a woman who struggled against madness, terror, loneliness and insecurity, while simultaneously schooling herself to work as a professional, to become an artist.Born in 1899, she started out in life as Eirene Botting in respectable Kensington, Her clever, ambitious, repressed father taught her Classics and quickly became her god. Paradoxically, therefore, those non-human aspects of Skord’s nature are precisely those that most illuminate our own fractured, desperate existence.
It is surely no accident that repeatedly Skord feels most at home among the groups of robbers – misfits, psychopaths, deformed persons – who haunt Skule Forest, battening on and terrifying those they come across.For much of the action of the book Skord is engaged in literal philosophic activity – travelling with a medieval Magister, working as an alchemist to produce Live Gold, and later practising as a mesmerist when this was fashionable. In this last he is, of course, little different from many humans, most of whose ideas are borrowed and principally for reasons of expediency or gain. (He can converse with equal success with many animals and birds.) In the last resort his nature has a stubborn non-human core; he is essentially an outsider to our race, capable both of seeing through the elaborate devices we construct to protect ourselves from obvious yet frightening truths (religion, art, scientific theories), and yet, chameleon-like, of exploiting these. Yet much of what he does is acquired parrot- fashion, by mimicry, albeit mimicry of great skill and intelligence.