“Encountering what appears to be a kindred spirit is always exhilarating, perhaps especially so when sexual consummation is not a part of it.”
Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“Encountering what appears to be a kindred spirit is always exhilarating, perhaps especially so when sexual consummation is not a part of it.”
Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
The first time I took a driving test (and right there you see where this story is headed), I hit another car while pulling out of the parking spot. Short test, short story. My second try was more successful, though requiring lots of tongue-biting on my part as the instructor lamely cracked wise about my “record.”
As he mentioned earlier, Terry recently licensed me to contribute to this blog’s “Top Five” feature (appearing in the right-hand sidebar), and without a road test. I find his faith touching, and without wrecking or denting anything have contributed a squib for Garden State, which was about ten times better than the coy television ads had led me to expect. I also discovered last night that Zach Braff is keeping a blog as part of the movie’s official site; it’s interesting and well worth a look.
I’m having a week of fielding ecstatic phone calls from friends on art-centered road trips. Terry, who says hello, is looking at paintings wherever it is he finds himself today. Meanwhile, Our Friend on the Block, whose writing occasionally graces this site, is out west researching a book project on land art. This week she’s in the Salt Lake City area looking at Spiral Jetty. Later she’ll be, enviably, at Lightning Field. She is, by the way, soliciting suggestions of places to stay and sights to see around Flagstaff, Albuquerque, and Overton, Nevada. Color me green, despite the impeccable weather in Chicago, of which I have a very fine view from my desk.
I’m gobbling up these letters like so much popcorn. Sad to say, I’ll soon run out. I have only one volume (vol. 3) of four from Scribners’ 1928 South Seas Edition of Stevenson, a ratty red pocket-sized book scooped up at a library sale some years ago for a quarter.
TO HENRY JAMES
Honolulu [March, 1889]
MY DEAR JAMES,–Yes–I own up–I am untrue to friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to civilisation. I am not coming home for another year. There it is, cold and bald, and now you won’t believe in me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me. But look here, and judge me tenderly. I have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years. And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like. In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more. Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found, the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate; perchance of an American Missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (tant bien que mal) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James’s. I jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough, sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, “the highly popular M.P. of Tautira.” My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient. I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even [–
It might be a bit of an understatement to say that Daniel Asa Rose admires Cynthia Ozick’s new book, Heir to the Glimmering World. I don’t know when I’ve seen such self-abasement in the service of such a good cause.
Confession: It’s not Virginia Woolf I’m afraid of–it’s Cynthia Ozick…. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.
And a little of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And a lot of that odd-duck dyad, Charlotte Bront
Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, personal and professional, will charm your socks right off. They’ve already kept me from several tasks (including going to bed at a reasonable hour) tonight. And they’re worth every squandered minute.
To William Archer, October 1887:
I am now a salaried party; I am a bourgeois now; I am to write a weekly paper for Scribner’s, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence….I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution: well, I would prefer that to dying in my bed; and it would be a godsend to my biographer, if ever I have one.
To Henry James, “I know not the day; but the month it is the drear October by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” 1887:
Our house–emphatically “Baker’s”–is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley–bless the face of running water!–and sees some hills too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones, or else largely qualified with whisky. As I write, the sun (which has long been a stranger) shines in at my shoulder; from the next room, the bell of Lloyd’s typewriter makes an agreeable music as it patters off (at a rate which astonishes this experienced novelist) the early chapters of a humorous romance; from still further off–the walls of Baker’s are neither ancient nor massive–rumours of Valentine about the kitchen stove come to my ears; of my mother and Fanny I hear nothing, for the excellent reason that they have gone sparking off, one to Niagara, one to Indianapolis. People complain that I never give news in my letters. I have wiped out that reproach.
Again to William Archer, February 1888:
Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been said in one, then it’s amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to belong, to fill up hours; the story-teller’s art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off the bones.
I would rise from the dead to preach!
I’m always resolving to learn more about Stevenson, who cut a rather dashing figure in the transatlantic literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century. He know most everybody and, as far as I can tell, was universally respected. It’s heartbreaking to see his illnesses turn up again and again in these late letters, where the restless vigor of his imagination and affections is so palpable. When he died in 1894, Stevenson was 44 and probably still had enough books in him to fill another lifetime on top of his truncated one.
An ArtsJournal Blog