Remembering Joseph Frank

Joseph Frank died in early March at the age of ninety-four. His biography of Dostoevsky was, from the first, hailed as a masterpiece of incomparable importance for scholars and as a fascinating study for all readers. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," published in the Sewanee Review in 1945 when he was still in his twenties, was destined to be influential (and controversial) throughout the rest of the century. I want to note his other contributions to literary criticism and the history of ideas—and to remember him as a friend for over fifty years.

Warner and I first met Joe in 1955, the new husband of Marguerite (Guiguite) Straus whom we had known from graduate-school days. The ship carrying us to Sicily (for my husband's Fulbright professorship at the University of Catania) stopped for a day at Cannes; Joe and Guiguite were spending the summer in a nearby village, and true to their radiogram received in mid-Atlantic—"Rendezvous Cannes"—they met the boat and transported us to a house set in a Bonnard garden. After admiring one another's children and the local wine on their terrace, we went in for lunch at a Bonnard table—rabbit, as I remember, followed by fresh cherries. The conversation begun on the terrace continued at lunch—and for decades thereafter.

Joe was profoundly American, but his attachment to Europe, to France especially, helped define him. He knew the languages, the literature, the intellectual history of Europe; and for many Europeans he had deep sympathies, along with an occasional amused impatience. Among his friends he counted European and emigré poets and philosophers, critics and scholars. He wrote about them, championed them, and as director of the Gauss seminars at Princeton he invited them to present whatever ideas they wished to have considered in circumstances that, with Joe's careful questioning and easeful geniality, made for conversation enjoyed by everyone in attendance.

Joe was at home with French and German critics and philosophers, both contemporary and from earlier times. In any conversation about the state of criticism, we would anticipate his amused cry, "It's all in Hegel!" When he wrote about pretentious critics, he didn't waste time scolding; but, when it came to illogical argument or mistaken allusion, he was a master of the put-down. When Lionel Trilling cites Hegel on Gemütlichkeit, the defining characteristic of art as he wished it to be understood, Frank observes that it is "unfortunate that Mr. Trilling decided to venture into such deep philosophical waters. . . . The ideas he so generously attributes to Hegel are entirely of his own devising." (And in a long footnote he shows that in the context of Hegel's disquisition, Gemüth means barbaric stupidity. Ouch!)

In explaining the significance of the Yeatsian title of his first collection of essays—The Widening Gyre (1963)—Joseph Frank defined the terms which were to engage him throughout his writing career: "The image it evokes seems to me to picture one of the crucial dilemmas of modern culture, a culture whose creations more and more tend to deny or negate some essential aspect of the human agency at their source and to escape from its control. Whether through a preference for the mythical imagination, the dehumanization of art, or the depreciation and renunciation of spirit, the same dialectic may be observed at work all through modern culture. The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

Together with articles on Mann and Ortega and four Americans, The Widening Gyre includes two long essays that had originally appeared in the Sewanee Review: "Malraux's Metaphysics of Art" and "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." In the Malraux essay Frank describes the "the imaginary museum"—Malraux's idea that photography has made available the entirety of world art, thus transforming "the relation of modern man to his past." "The chief architect of the imaginary museum" is modern art, which has rediscovered "the power of art to transform the world independently of verisimilitude or representation." He defends Malraux from the scorn of certain art historians as well as from uncritical appreciation, concluding the powerful essay with this...