No Anxiety of Influence in the Penny Press!
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Throughout the year, the New York Review of Books is celebrating its 50th anniversary by reprinting excerpts from pieces by some of its most lauded contributors. The excerpts appear on the last page of every issue, and considering the lineup of literary powerhouses the NYRB has always boasted, you’d think the presence of such a Parthian shot would cast a pall backward over the whole issue.
Case in point this latest issue, which features an excerpt from Gore Vidal’s famous two-part review of the 1973 bestseller list, aptly titled “The Ashes of Hollywood. It’s one of Vidal’s most famous pieces, and it’s a cocksure periodical that assumes – even hopes – that its present-day contributors can measure up.
The wonder of the NYRB, of course, is that they can. It’s what makes that final page so oddly, reassuringly triumphant.
This issue is odd, however. The front cover bills it as the “University Press Issue,” but in reality this seems to describe no so much a theme as a tic: of the 20 books reviewed in the issue, only 7 are published by university presses, and that’s not even the highest percentage – 8 of the issue’s slots are given to essays that don’t review books at all. The NYRB might just as well have called it the “Special Reporting Issue”
This is bittersweet news to somebody like me, since I’m just about as aware as a layman can be of the sheer number of fascinating books put out every season by university presses (including all the ones that don’t have 5 million dollar endowments like the ones backing most of the presses that are reviewed in this issue). The vision of an NYRB issue genuinely devoted to university press offerings is tantalizing, but luckily, the issue’s overall quality softens such pining.
David Cole’s piece on gun control, for instance, hits all the usual sobering statistics, but with fresh vigor:
We read with horror of terrorist attacks around the world, mostly in far-flung places that regularly endure suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, and the like. We breathe a sigh of relief that we don’t have to live with such violence, while we spend billions of dollars annually to prevent such attacks occurring here. But every year, about twice as many people are killed in the United States by guns than die of terrorist attacks worldwide.
Likewise Anna Somers Cocks, in her essay “The Coming Death of Venice?” hits some very familiar notes – how endless politics and bureaucracy in Venice are thwarting any real attempts to save the city from spiritual and even physical destruction. Cocks takes particular aim at the head of Venice’s powerful Port Authority, Paolo Costa – I wouldn’t be surprised if the man fires off an angry retort for the next issue; in fact, I can’t see how he can avoid doing that, or getting a flunky to do it, since Cocks pretty much blames him for single-handedly sinking the city:
In the meantime, the city is being eaten up by damp. Every inch of sea level rise counts now, because the water has overtopped the impermeable stone bases of most buildings and is being absorbed into the porous bricks, fragmenting them and washing away the mortar. The damp has reached the upper floors and is rusting through the iron tie rods that hold the houses together.
Of course, this being the Penny Press, it’s not all brie and Chablis. Andrew Butterfield turns in a review of a new Albrecht Durer exhibit up at the 
National Gallery, and although the piece in general is very good (as I’ve come to expect from this author), it’s also got its share of dippy art-writing, as when he loses himself in admiration of the quick drawing Durer did of his fiancée Angnes:
In its frank portrayal of an informal moment of unguarded emotion, there had never been a drawing quite like this before. Typically portraiture was honorific and meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Durer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion.
A glance at this miraculous sketch suggests that Durer was in fact ‘fascinated’ with learning how to draw the folds in Agnes’ sleeve – her face, clearly an afterthought, barely has two lines in it.
Even worse comes from an even better writer: the great Eamon Duffy starts his review of The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity by Robert Louis Wilken and Trent: What Happened at the Council by John W. O’Malley with this supremely annoying line, no doubt foisted on him by the NYRB’s copy desk:“If an anthropologist from the star system Sirius were to teleport to earth to conduct a field study of Christianity, where would she go?”
So idiotic political correctness has expanded along the starways even as far as Sirius? So intergalactic civilizations, too, must forever atone for the fact that Mrs. Pankurst wasn’t allowed to vote? So it’s not PC even to hint that a field anthropologist from the Sirius system might be an it? Yeesh.
Even so, reading these fantastic pieces and all the rest in this issue naturally prompts a subversive question: just how legitimate is the question of influence-anxiety, anyway? In other words, just how good were those illustrious names of yesteryear?
A look at Vidal’s famous essay doesn’t exactly allay the suspicion that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Vidal’s attack is withering of course, but on a re-reading, its blunderbuss nature becomes more evident. He lays out his case that the bestselling authors in question aren’t even novelists at all – his insinuation is that they’re all failed screenwriters. And that would be fine and even funny if there weren’t some seriously good authors on the list he’s mocking – and if there wasn’t such a strong impression he’s dismissing them too:
I think it is necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties as a preface to the ten bestselling novels under review since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to recreate new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film maker) recall past success and respond accordingly. Certainly none of the ten writers (save the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn and the classicist Mary Renault) is in any way rooted in literature.
Catch the subtle cattiness even when he’s trying to be nice: Solzhenitsyn and Renault may be in SOME way rooted in literature, but they’re still interlopers, pointedly identified by non-novelist professions. However positive Vidal may be about them (and it’s not all that positive, or rather, it’s not all that much about them – he spends his entire section on Renault, for instance, talking about his own gay novel The City and the Pillar), it’s pretty clear they appall him not much less than their peers on the list. It’s a low move (and his super-subtle blink-and-you-miss-it vicious canard about Aldous Huxley in the same piece is even lower), the type of thing you might have been able to do if you were dear friends with Barbara Epstein, but not actually up to the standard on display in the rest of this issue.
So the present is safe from the past, in this case. Sighs of relief all around, especially from those of us who toil to bring out a literary review journal every month.