Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style by Carlo Pedretti (review)

Books 171 ‘emphasis is placed on the artistic or aesthetic aspects of experience’. So it is an anthology of literature that treats in some way the process of creating, a modest enough claim, but it also implicitly claims to illuminate this process and this puts a strange didactic straitjacket on the range of literature represented. In the end one feels that literature is being examined as a curious human deviation by some well-meaning and utterly interested alien creature, the better to be categorized, labelled and tucked away. There are seven categories, from Classicism to The Twentieth Century, and the text is interpolated with black and white illustrations of works of art from a bust of Homer to Rauschenberg’s ‘Monogram’. It may be the Mormon connections of the University that have made the selection of extracts very conservative or it may even be that one eye has had to be kept on American syllabus requirements. Thus, Willa Cather but no Proust, an astonishing omission for a tone including the wliole of Ibsen’s The Master Builder and purporting to deal with the ‘aesthetic aspects of experience’. Nothing from that most painterly poet, Apollinaire, and nothing in the ‘Realist’ section from Zola. It is disappointing to see vigorous contemporary American prose writers such as Nabokov, Mailer, Bellow and Malamud ignored in favour of the safe Irving Stone and Robert Lowell. But what of the didactic purpose, the scanning of the nature of artistic experience? The picture that emerges is vaguely depressing, stressing as it does the problematic side: the difficulties of the artist’s relationship to life, the humiliation of the artistic vocation. There is a grotesque and one-sided tale by Thomas Mann about a fawning lawyer’s public humiliation by his superficial wife and lover, which does less than justice to Mann’s subtle lifelong preoccupation with the yearnings and conflicts between artist and ‘bourgeois’. The snowstorm scene in The Magic Mountain, and its aftermath, would have been far more telling. St. Augustine is represented by a passage deploring his youth,’misspent studying The Aerieid and similar, now decreed as ‘poetic fiction’ leading minds from the straight religious path. Oscar Wilde’s contribution is the preface to Dorian Grey, ending: ‘All art is quite useless.’ The last four works in the book reflect either a legitimate questioning of the role of art or the prevailing mood of slightly melancholy cynicism, depending on one’s viewpoint. There is a poem by Ferlinghetti, picturing the artist as a ‘little charleychaplin manlwho may or not catch/(Beauty’s) fair eternal form’,/then Yevtuskenko’s well-known but weak ‘Babii Yar’ (I seem to be/Anne Frankltransparentlas a branch in April). In Voznesensky’s ‘Parabolic Ballad’ the artist wishes to describe a parabola in spite of jibes but then comes political oppression and: ‘Galoshes sink in the Siberian spring ... Perhaps the straight line is shorter after all?’ The final image one is left with is Rauschenberg’s tongue in cheek model of a ram stuck through a tyre. The whole concept of such a book is questionable. It does not point to sources or further reading, indeed the bibliographical references are scant, no dates are given for the extracts and so no follow-up in libraries, a key to independent thinking, is expected. Everything that is not in standard mid-Atlantic English is translated-even Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. All the work-and there must have been a lot of it-has been done to make the package uniform and easily digestible for the student. The compilers might object that this is meant as a ‘companion’ only, for ‘numerous experiences in the visual arts ...and in music should be provided for the student in the basic text and through the use of slides, films, recordings and so forth.’ This sentence does not bear too close an examination; but it is indeed odd to recommend only second-hand ‘experience’of art and even then these diluted ‘experiences’ to be ‘provided’ for the student. Most artists will want to discover literature and its links with their art in a library rather than in a nutshell. But for those who do...