Archives for August 6, 2004

A Boy at the Hogarth Press is Richard Kennedy’s slender, unassuming memoir of the time he spent working at Leonard Woolf’s publishing house in 1928, when Kennedy was sixteen. As the flap copy has it:

He provides a delightful glimpse into the everyday comings and goings of the Bloomsbury Group and an affectionate recollection of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at work; and, like Lely’s portrait of Cromwell, this record does not omit the warts.

“Affectionate” may be going a bit far. Both Woolfs come off here as more than a little cold, self-absorbed, and even absurd. Bevis Hillier, who provided the book’s brief introduction, notes:

[Kennedy] was of no consequence to the paladins of Bloomsbury. There was no reason to exercise their wit and charm on him. He saw them at their most unguarded and least artificial. That is what makes his account so fascinating.

And it is, both as a irreverent sketch of Leonard and Virginia and as a glimpse of coterie publishing in 1920s London. It takes the form of a diary, despite having been written forty years after the fact, and Kennedy nicely captures the breezy capriciousness that can characterize both diary-writing and sixteen-year-old boys.

Here’s a taste:

I went to supper with the Woolfs. We had strawberries and cream. Mrs W was in a very happy mood. She said she had been to a nightclub the night before and how marvellous it was inventing new foxtrot steps. I thought LW’s back looked a bit disapproving as he was dishing out the strawberries. The other guest was George Rylands, a very good-looking young man who had worked for the Woolfs before going to university. We were publishing a book by him called Words and Poetry and McKnight Kauffer had done a design for the cover. George Rylands egged Mrs W on to talk about how much she enjoyed kicking up her heels. I couldn’t help feeling a little shocked.

Some people came in with huge bundles of flowers to give her. They had been commissioned to write an article about dirt-track racing. As they were very hard up, they were very anxious to get the job, but the editor had turned down their manuscripts. Mrs W had come to their rescue and written a description of the sport, in which she had compared the roaring machines and the arc lights to a medieval tournament.

Some more people came in after supper. Mrs Woolf started rolling her shag cigarettes. She gave one to an American lady who nearly choked to death.

She started talking about the Hogarth Press in a way that I thought didn’t please LW very much, saying it was like keeping a grocer’s shop. I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind rather dreamy way she looks at you. She described Mrs Cartwright as having the step of an elephant and the ferocity of a tiger, which gives a very false impression as Ma Cartwright has no ferocity at all, although she does charge about everywhere. She also described her sliding down the area steps on her bottom, during the frost.

I consider it bad form to laugh at your employees.

All goes well enough until the young Kennedy makes a mistake that gums up Hogarth’s plans for a uniform edition of a Very Important Author: Virginia Woolf herself.

LW had returned from Rodmell in a towering rage. Apparently the whole Uniform Edition project has been ruined by me because I have unwittingly instructed Spalding & Hodge to cut the paper the wrong size.

LW brought back a number of sacks of apples and potatoes from Rodmell and I tried to help him hump them up the stairs, but he would not accept any assistance from me. He refuses to speak to me. He had Gossling in and gave him a terrific tongue lashing. Gossling’s cheeks went quite pale.

I suppose I have really got the sack. LW says I can’t be trusted to do anything but wrap up parcels and that I am the most frightful idiot he has ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools.

I know, I know: beware the testimony of bitter, sacked employees. What made me trust Kennedy’s account, though, is that he doesn’t pretend to have been better than his famous employers. His faults and foibles are less magnified than theirs because they aren’t indulged by everyone around him. But the narrator of this diary is generally callow, petty, insecure, and just plain clueless. Because Kennedy is not at all invested in making his younger self seem very likable or reliable, it’s paradoxically easier to credit his unsparing portraits of others. When I finished the book I wasn’t thinking “Oh, nasty Woolfs” so much as “Oh, foolish humans.” A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a nifty little book, and of course a must-read for Bloomsbury fans.

As regular readers know, I saw two out-of-town plays last week, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and No

I just added several new blogs to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Check ’em out. If you can’t figure out which ones are new, check ’em all out. Think what you could be missing!

P.S. I think I may also have accidentally deleted one blog whose name begins with “S.” If you’re the victim, please send me an e-mail.

“He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice.”

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

From the 92nd St. Y:

NEW YORK, NY: August 5, 2004

As I mentioned yesterday, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes posted a list of his ten favorite painters as of that moment, and invited other artbloggers to do the same. (Here’s the followup posting.)

I usually jump at the chance to make lists of this kind, but for some inexplicable reason I found this one paralyzing. My ten favorite painters of all time? Ever? No sooner did I start typing names than I clutched–but I still wanted to play. So I decided instead to do something that is both easier and, in a way, potentially more revealing. Here’s a complete list of the artists represented in the Teachout Museum:

– Milton Avery (drypoint)

– William Bailey (aquatint with hard ground etching)

– Max Beerbohm (drawing with watercolor wash)

– Nell Blaine (one color lithograph, one painted tile)

– Pierre Bonnard (black-and-white lithograph)

– Stuart Davis (color serigraph)

– Helen Frankenthaler (color serigraph)

– Jane Freilicher (aquatint with hard ground etching)

– Arnold Friedman (black-and-white lithograph)

– Wolf Kahn (monotype)

– Alex Katz (color lithograph)

– John Marin (etching)

– Joan Mitchell (color lithograph)

– Fairfield Porter (four color lithographs)

– Paul Taylor (assemblage)

– John Twachtman (etching)

– Neil Welliver (woodcut)

– Jane Wilson (pastel)

In my mind, there’s also a space for the Morandi etching that got away. (Sigh.)

What do I long for most that isn’t there? A Vuillard color lithograph, a Hans Hofmann print (that one got away, too), a Kenneth Noland monoprint, and something good (but affordable) by Richard Diebenkorn. As of this moment, anyway.

Why do we read? “General principles!” my dad would say. Can’t argue with that. But over at Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass, they’re getting a little more specific. Erin and her readers are having a lively discussion about some issues raised in Mark Edmundson’s New York Times Magazine essay from last week, “The Risk of Reading.” Edmundson’s is the latest, and I think the best, of a recent flurry of big-media articles springing from discontent with the more insipid varieties of book boosterism. (Christina Nehring’s NYTBR piece last month was another.) In the process of addressing the issues Edmundson raises–principally, “Why read?”–Erin recalls a great scene from Cynthia Ozick:

I am reminded of a passage from Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers, in which the eponymous heroine dreams about a heaven that consists of an eternity spent reading an unending stack of books while consuming an inexhaustible supply of chocolate. It’s an image of consumption without consequence (Puttermesser’s teeth will never rot, she will never grow fat), cost (in paradise, the books are free, chocolate is free, and there is all the time in the world), or return (Puttermesser never aims to talk about what she reads, or to share her books with others, or to write something herself, or even to stop consuming long enough to digest what she has read). Ozick’s portrait of a reader’s paradise is a picture of indiscriminate gobbling, and as such it is both profoundly anti-social and massively regressive: book as breast. It’s a funny image–but in its sheer extremity it reveals a lot about how readers, and reading, are often regarded in a society that is as wrapped up in the display of work and work-related social performances as ours is.

Erin then raises the following questions for her readers:

How social is reading? Is it an isolating, anti-social activity, or is it, in its quiet way, a profoundly communal act? Is there a value merely in the act of reading, independent of content? If so, how would you describe that value? Why read? Why do you personally read–or, why do you personally not read?

Their answers are illuminating. Hop on over and put your two cents in.