“THE LIVES OF ARTISTS”by Clark

The kind of writing I really enjoy is like Chuck Wendig at Terrible Minds. For instance, this post: https://wp.me/pv7MR-a1Q It’s about fixing breakfast, wildly profane, accurate and funny — with recipes. It comes from living in a certain way: educated, confident, wealthy enough to travel and be picky about brands, and willing to experiment. It is NOT like small rural towns where people are just getting by and breakfast means hoping no one ate the last of the Captain Crunch in the night.

Connected but not the same as Wendig’s writing, lately I’ve been thinking about really high quality writing and subscribed to the Slant Books blog called “Close Reading.” It’s a kind of academic thinking that I left long ago but newly hunger for. I’ve found https://slantbooks.com/close-reading/ Also, https://imagejournal.org. Much of the content in these is based on Christian thought, which I don’t use despite seminary since I’m a post-post-Christian meta-modernist, but I know the jargon and don’t mind people in that thought system. I mean, I’m not threatened. But I understand why others might find it . . . well, not appealing. At least the present corrupt version of it which is opposed by these people.

Apart from those sources I just read “Lives of the Artist” by Robert Clark as he is considered a very fine writer in several fields and I know a lot about the lives of artists, just not always the kind of fancy aspiring people who live in Tuscany but made their money in Seattle. (The writers I know are cowboys and Indians.)

So far, I note that admired authors must write poetic metaphors, maybe attached to material culture in daily living: shopping, coming down to breakfast, choosing wine and furniture, all closely examined and possibly brand-named. The spirit of the James family hover over these people so there’s a lot about their character and their idea of success which never seems to arrive, even for the most inspired and ruthless of them.

Part of being “literary” is having read the proper canon of books everyone knows, which don’t necessarily include the Bible. (Few actually read the Bible.) When I was in undergrad school at NU, it was the James family one should have read. Marked in this book is “Portrait of a Lady.” There are mentions of Rilke and Ruskin and Dante. You’re supposed to have read them. I have not.

I have a shelf of books about the Jameses that I bought long ago because I thought they were key to fine writing. I’ve never read them. Just below them in this bookshelf is a row of Transcendentalist biographies, which are more appropriate to my life, but I never get around to reading them either. Maybe I’ll have time later.

Clark is a meta-modernist who makes gentle fun of twee descriptions. p. 45 “Alexi was walking between two opposing sets of walls, broken now and then by a gate, and the olive leaves hung over them. He saw what bullshit it was to say the leaves were “silver” or “dusky” or “pewter” or “burnished green.” They were in fact the color of olive leaves, exactly, precisely, no more or less, the color itself of the thing itself.” Pretentiousness is one of the themes of the book. Condescending, patronizing. Earlier he had written dense metaphorical description in a murder mystery, but now he is “post” that.

The problem is not just vocabulary or the constant invention of new terms for newly encountered concepts. The book has an entertaining running joke about translation in which the Americans struggle with Italian, resulting in goofus malaprops while the Italians indulge them in order to sell something. The problem in reading this is not the casual use of curse words — which have lost their punch. Fuck is just another word now, but the sex act, plainly but accurately examined, is a big part of the plot pivots. It’s not porn and not meant to be.

Part of this fever to achieve is stoked by searching for one’s gender-association. Clearly the art obsession is part of a struggle to justify identity as determined by others. That’s not “writing” except in terms of finding an engaging thing to write about. I mean, one doesn’t have to be a fag (his word) to write, but it might help.

Smoothly reading, sentences are clear and follow each other in the order one expects, in passages of dialogue one can tell who’s speaking — all good. This is largely about location in a villa in Tuscany, which is a situation highly romanticized and storied, so it’s important to know where people are — what room, what time of day, what the light is doing. What earlier luminary lived there.

It’s curious that they drink oceans of coffee and we only sometimes know what kind: filter, plunger, espresso, etc.

Mostly percolator, I guess, as a coffee pot is sometimes there. Clark has been a food writer and wrote a whole book about James Beard. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780393020151 Maybe there was a conscious decision to step away from all that. Now that I’ve liked this book, I’ll order the Beard biography because I used to take lone trips to the Astoria beach near his place. A little deli on the highway sold his food. I also need “Love Among the Ruins,” which is the most praised book of Clark’s. The trouble with fine writing is that one needs to read a lot of it and where do you find it on Twitter? But that’s how I found Slant Books.

The Unitarians that I once “served” (they would say I was “employed” to be secular and mercantile — modern and unsentimental) lived like the people in this book. I did not fit with them nor would I fit with the Wendig household, but I liked them both. They all cooked in a certain way that I didn’t know but that was communal and accompanied with wine and chat. I ended up being assigned to peel and mince the garlic, which I didn’t mind, but it annoyed them that I didn’t drink alcohol. Their money was in investments, so they haven’t suffered so much currently, but the investments were often in cyber-platforms, which could be a sudden disaster as in this book.

The underlying assumption here is about aspirations, what future allows success, and what to do when there’s nothing in the way until suddenly the moment is over. The times have changed. The people are older. They settle. It’s not bad really.

In fact, the goal, once achieved, still exists after the artist is gone. The high point of the novel is unrolling the paintings of the dead mentor of the strongest male artist character on his studio floor. It is described as like a deep pool of water in which the protagonist, the would-be writer, is immersed, drowning, nearly killed by longing and beauty. Even the little “maggot” delinquent with no education at all sees it. It’s not imaginary.