Romantic Masterpieces

Schubert   and   Schumann

Last night I attended a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that included two great romantic works, Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in a minor and Franz Schubert's Great Symphony in C Major.  Sometimes considered his greatest work, the Great C Major, his  9th Symphony,  was never heard by the composer, because the Viennese musicians considered it unplayable; rather, it was premiered in a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert in 1839 under the direction of Felix Mendelssohn.

Schubert's Symphony No. 9 begins with a noble, reflective theme that reappears throughout the first movement. Well after Schubert's death, the theme's grandeur and sense of space, together with the sheer length of the Symphony, helped to earn it the nickname the "Great C Major".  Robert Schumann, who brought it to the attention of Mendelssohn, referred to its length as "heavenly" in the critical music revue which he edited.  In fact, the nickname was first applied by a music publisher to distinguish the work from Schubert's shorter and less ambitious 6th Symphony, the "Little C Major." But the name aptly describes both Schubert's evident intent in writing the work, and the stature of the final composition.

Schubert profoundly revered Beethoven. He may have paid the older composer a single visit, but generally he kept a humble distance, content with attending Beethoven's concerts including most probably the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth "Choral" Symphony in 1824. He served as one of Beethoven's pallbearers at the great man's funeral. Perhaps his greatest tribute to Beethoven was his resolve to write a grand symphony with the breadth and profundity of his predecessor's; and his Symphony No. 9 was the result.

It was a perfect vehicle to show off the strengths of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Music Director Riccardo Muti, and their success was rewarded by the enthusiastic response of the audience.  Earlier in the evening the reknowned pianist Mitsuko Uchida played the Schumann concerto with sublime style.  Her experience in this repetoire, she first played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra almost thirty years ago, provided her with the ability to share deep insights into this familiar concerto.  The concert was another triumph for one of the great orchestras of the world.

Versailles in 1919

Paris 1919: 
Six Months That Changed the World 
by Margaret MacMillan


“We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.” ― Margaret MacMillan


It was 1919 and the Great War had ended the previous year when, from January to June, the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and the United States met in Paris to decide the outcome of the war they had just won against the Central Powers. This would be difficult,  for the Great War of 1914-18 had seen the disappearance of four old multinational empires: the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman. The fate of people from places as disparate as Strasburg to Baghdad--hundreds of millions--was to be decided. What should this peace conference consider? A Congress of nations had convened in Vienna in 1815 to reorder Europe after the defeat of Napoleon , but confined itself, like others before it, to adjusting the fates of dynasties and states. The peacemakers of 1919 had also paid attention to principles, promises, public opinion and a fast-changing and unstable political scene. It was a current question whether much of central Europe would follow the direction of the Russian revolution.

The making of the Versailles treaty had early on been written about by two young English participants in the Paris negotiations, who wrote their own accounts of the events. In ''Peacemaking 1919,'' Harold Nicolson sketched caustic vignettes of elderly statesmen adrift in a world they couldn't comprehend. And John Maynard Keynes, in ''The Economic Consequences of the Peace,'' demolished the credibility of the settlement itself, eviscerated the case for war reparations and predicted the disaster that must follow. These accounts are still worth reading.

Margaret MacMillan with her ''Paris 1919'' has written a very good history of the negotiations, full of detail and fairly comprehensive. While the organization of the book is sometimes confusing, for example discussing the 1919 creation of Yugoslavia without first explaining what happened in the Balkan wars of 1912-13. And the author's decision to tell the story of the breakup of the Hapsburg empire after her account of the little states that succeeded may confuse those not already familiar with that story. But the many national narratives were well told and constitute parts of the book that I enjoyed the most.

MacMillan has a good focus on the characterization of individuals, both leading figures like Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, and peripheral actors like Queen Marie of Romania and many other hapless supplicants from Beijing to Budapest. Wilson is treated fairly and realistically. Despite his good intentions, perhaps because of them, he was widely viewed as petulant, petty and vain. Lloyd George and Clemenceau, while growing tolerant of his obsessions never got used to his peculiarly American brand of idealism. Wilson, just as would prove to be the case upon his return to face the Senate, was unable to adapt and compromise, demurring the requisite political trading that might achieve some of his goals. His obsession with achieving his new League of Nations was not shared by the many Europeans.
Nevertheless, the American president was the key figure in Paris. The French were understandably concerned with keeping Germany down for the indefinite future. The Italians wanted the territorial pound of flesh they had been secretly promised in return for switching sides in 1915. The British sought above all to stabilize the periphery of Europe and protect access to their imperial possessions farther south and east. Only the Americans had a Big Idea -- self-determination. The peoples and nations now released from imperial captivity were each to receive their own spaces, assigned after careful specialist attention to history, geography, language and other relevant considerations. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Armenians, even Kurds were to have a place in the sun. Only Germans, and to a lesser extent Turks, were not free to determine where and with whom they would live -- the price of defeat.
The unintended consequences of this "Big Idea" are still haunting the world today almost a century later. The idea of self-determination was a chimera leading to a disastrous reality. As Robert Lansing, Wilson's secretary of state, predicted: ''It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force.'' He was right. The peoples of central Europe and the old Ottoman empire could not be divided into conveniently distinct communities. They were mixed up together then and we have seen the results in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century and are seeing a continuation of sorts both in the Middle East and the old Soviet Empire today.

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What is Real?

Accident 
by Nicholas Mosley


"I was standing in the hall, the dead time, four o'clock in the morning.  Nothing at the centre, not even pain.  If only I could cease.  Listen to the clock.  A wind.  The wind stops.  I hear a noise like a breath expelled through a dry throat.  Then nothing.  I wait for it to be repeated.  Nothing.  Nothing about death." (p 164)


This is an obsessive short novel that opens with an accident. The narrator, Stephen Jervis - a don at Oxford, has come upon two of his students, Anna and William, who have just crashed their car. The story flashes back to the moment when Anna has just met Stephen, as he has become her Philosophy tutor. As a tutor in Philosophy Stephen seems conflicted. In order to hide from his emotions he focuses on his work. "The consolations of work are that you come from it tired at the end of a long day. A robot, with men working inside you. They pull levers; switch. You watch and move. At the end you have something to look forward to. You go home. To rest. The mechanism sleeps. The men open doors, windows. Look out into the air."(p 18)

In the first meeting with Anna he gives her a brief introduction to the nature of philosophy and how much she must learn about it - existence and persons. What makes a person an enduring entity? What is the real substance of existence and what is an "accident." In his discussion with her it comes to the point where "Now we've got a choice. Before it was Just accident."(p 31)
With this introductory moment we have the theme of the novel. There is the real and the accidents of our existence. These will be played out through the lives of Stephen and his wife Rosalind, lives that include infidelity and the games that Stephen plays with the lives of others; both his student Anna and, in London, Francesca. As he thinks about the events leading up to the accident he wonders: "At what point did the course of events go wrong?" He thinks, "An accident is different from reality."(p 61)  But what is reality?  Is it the truth or an accident?  The novel provides questions, not answers.

The culmination of his affairs comes in the relation of various incidents to the accident of the title, one that is on more physical grounds and one where, another one of Stephen's students, a young man he really doesn't like, William, is killed. What role does Stephen play in all of this? Should he feel guilt or is he even guilty? During the course of the book Anna has exercised quite an influence not only on William, but on Stephen and his colleague, Charlie. And at the close of what has been a demonstration and a defense of free will, worrying about the questions of guilt versus responsibility, Stephen (and Charlie) are left to determine their own conduct. Mosley writes in a style that commands attention. It is allusive, controlled, and with ideas that are implicit. For those who love novels of ideas and their relation to human emotions this is a perfect short novel.

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A Personal Favorite

David Copperfield 
by Charles Dickens


“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”   ― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield


This was the first time Dickens made extended use of the first person and he was effective, particularly expressing both the innocence of youth and wonder of the young David while subtly signifying the older David's narrative voice as he looked back on the events. I was impressed with the relationships David develops in his youth, especially his friendship with Steerforth who is portrayed as a charismatic character with a portent of darkness in his demeanor. As a reader I am not as trusting as the narrator. We are also introduced to the Micawbers, with Mr. Micawber's famous dictum on the nature of happiness and misery:  
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”   Mr. Micawber is merely one of the many memorable characters in David's story - what fun he is!

What is the identity of David Copperfield? David, through the first two dozen chapters of the novel, is called by various names: David by his family; Daisy by Steerforth; Trotwood by his Aunt Betsey; Davey by Mr. McCawber; the list goes on and will be continued and expanded. What is interesting is that David assumes these names as his own. He does this not only in the company of the person who names him but, in the case of Trotwood, in the school he attends as well. The question of David's identity is one theme of this novel that I believe deserves further exploration and attention. For the moment I wonder at the connection, if any, with all of these names and the opening paragraph of the book where David meditates about whether he will be the hero of his own life. As for the question - who is the hero of the novel? - that is another major issue. I should also note the importance of the sea and nature, for example when Steerforth was staying in Yarmouth at the Pegotty’s we see him in meditation by the fire, where he expresses his wish that he “had had a judicious father”. . . “to better guide him”. It is moments like this that also provide a deepening of our understanding of Steerforth’s character.

Continuing on his journey, David completes his schooling and with the financial backing of his Aunt Betsey becomes an apprentice "proctor" (a sort of agent). When David was 10 or 11 years old he seemed old for his years, but he has kept much of his child-like innocence and naivete as he enters his late teens and now seems young for his age. His maturation will have to wait for much more experience and a deepening of his thought much later in the novel. He is able to avoid being taken advantage of by his friend Micawber, but he does not avoid Cupid's arrow and he falls in love with Dora Spenlow. This event with other complications provides growing suspense for the reader. In addition, Dickens continues to provide for David's intermittent commentary from the perspective of his older self. This provides the reader with curious suggestions of the action that will ensue in the rest of the novel.

I find Dicken's notion of marriage somewhat strange. David continues to dote on Dora after his marriage and a first year where they discover their inability to maintain there household. Dora , whose complete lack of common sense is irritating (at least to this reader), provokes David with her innumeracy. The situation does provide Dickens with an opportunity for a humorous set-piece when David tries to "form" Dora's mind by reading Shakespeare to her. Needless to say the project flounders on the rock that is located where her mind should be. In a book that is Dickens's best to date (greater novels loom on the horizon) it does disappoint in the use of coincidence and just a bit of melodrama in the saga of L'il Emily who returns to Mr. Peggoty with the help of mysterious Martha. That aside, David does seem to be maturing just in time to become a successful writer just like the author of his story.

As the novel closes David's story ends and his new journey, with Agnes by his side, begins. Dickens deftly brings the novel to a climax, as David narrates the resolution of each of the novels main characters' fates. But I was most impressed by Dickens's use of the theme of nature and how it signals the final true maturation of David. While nature and the sea have been recurring motifs throughout the novel (see above), in the final section we have nature brought home to David as he meditates on his life (following the deaths of Dora and Steerforth). We get the first intimation of this in Chapter LII:
"Early in the morning, I sauntered through the dear old tranquil streets . . . The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers ; and the towers themselves , overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air, as if there were no such thing as change on earth."(p. 747)

Then in Chapter LV, Tempest, natures brews a storm leading to the shipwreck and discovery of Steerforth's dead body. But it is three chapters later while David is travelling in Switzerland that he narrates:
"I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast."(p. 821)

I believe David's feeling here which is followed swiftly by a reassuring letter from Agnes, allows him to regain his artistic vigor leading him to write once again after a hiatus. It also signals his final maturation; and the reader delights in his return to England and the ultimate moment when he and Agnes share their long delayed testaments of love for each other.  Thus ends one of Dickens' most famous and my personal favorite of all his delightful novels.

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Poems by Frost

New Hampshire 
by Robert Frost


"It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can.  The figure a poem makes.  It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."  -  Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"


In 1923 Robert Frost published his Selected Poems in the spring followed by this collection in November. The following year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it. In addition to the titular poem this collection includes the famous "Fire and Ice", a short poem with resonance from Dante and others. 
  One of my favorites is "The Onset" that seems an appropriate poem to meditate upon as spring approaches.  I think we can see a hint of Dante again in this poem with "the dark woods", and there is also the symbolism of winter coming, of snow falling, a beautiful imagery that a time will descend upon us where our lives are dull, tragic, painful or lonely.  Yet in the second stanza hope appears with the recognition that "winter death has never tried the earth but it has failed:".  By the end of the poem the transition from death to life is complete when one contrasts the white of "the gathered snow" at night to the living white of the birch tree and hope in family life symbolized by "a clump of houses" and the spiritual life of the church.

The Onset                                                                    

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured again maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.

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Two Comedies by Two Waughs

Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh


“...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.”  ― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall 


Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, is a delightful satiric comedy. It is based in part on Waugh's undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher in Wales. He is sent down from Oxford and as a result takes a position at the Llanabba school in Wales.  The school itself is dingy, depressing, and seems always on the verge of coming apart at the seams. The masters, Captain Grimes, Mr. Prendergast, and Paul, are all unqualified for their positions, the students are frightfully undisciplined, and little or no learning ever takes place within Llanabba Castle's walls.  In this episode and others I encountered the author's not so subtle satire and characteristic black humor in lampooning various features of British schools and society in the 1920s. 

The novel's title is a contraction of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it also alludes to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel.
I tremendously enjoyed the picaresque adventures of its hero, Paul Pennyfeather, as he encountered barely believable difficulties in "getting along". Waugh's characterization is superb while his satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and themes of cultural change and confusion, moral disintegration and social decay all drive the novel forward and fuel its humor. This book was a joy to read even if you do not participate in all of Mr. Waugh's inside references. It is a worthy introduction to the novels of one of the finest authors of our century. 


 The Foxglove Saga 
by Auberon Waugh


“There is an old story about the boy at Eton who committed suicide. The other boys in his house were gathered together and asked if any of them could suggest a reason for the tragedy. After a long silence a small boy in the front put up his hand: 'Could it have been the food, sir?”  ― Auberon Waugh



Auberon Waugh's first novel, The Foxglove Saga, is a comic novel very much in the style of his father's earlier books and the result is very successful. Its hero, Martin Foxglove, is an abominably flawless paragon. While at school Martin chooses a set of friends considered inappropriate by his family and he abandons his Christian faith. His story and that of his friends, particularly the ugly, middle-class Kenneth Stoat and the unfortunate Martin O'Connor, makes for a slyly humorous and sometimes sadly funny novel. 
The plot is intentionally absurd, built around the central character's desire to implement the seven corporal Works of Mercy. The catholic Lady Foxglove parades them one by one, treating the list as if it provided some definitive road map to saintliness, while liberally reinterpreting her own self-interested actions as charitable ones, in order to cross another required work from the list. The irony here is that while the list provides some guidance as to how the merciful should act in advancing the welfare of others, Lady Foxglove's interventions always reduce the happiness of her intended beneficiaries.

I do not claim to have understood all of the sardonic details that Waugh includes but the story has plenty of references that are clear to anyone familiar with twentieth century British literature, especially if the name Waugh is below the title. The comic attitude of the book seems to be that any official machinery—the school, the hospital, the Army—can be made to go wrong by individual determination and lying. I would suggest that it is not Mr. Waugh who is amoral and cruel, but the machinery in which his characters are caught. Anarchism of this sort is viable, if not as a basis for life, at least for a comic novel and in his creation Auberon compares well with his more famous father as his first novel continues the family tradition of irreverent humor.

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An Antique Violin

Canone Inverso 
by Paolo Maurensig


". . . my mind had become accustomed to severity, to discipline, to the pursuit of perfection. I suddenly felt as if I were a stranger among all those noisy people who had nothing to do with music, talked about everything but, and were concerned with things I didn't understand."(p 91)


An antique violin is the heart of Paolo Maurensig's exploration of art and the artist. The question is: who is the greater artist? The one who owns his art or the one who is owned by it? Structured almost like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the buyer of the violin is accosted by a stranger who relays the history of the instrument, the rivalry between budding artists Kuno and Jeno at a horrific music academy, and the playing out of their lives against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Deeply layered, full of symbols and themes, this is almost a perfect novella. In fact that is one of the themes of the book:

"Perfection, you see, is related to infinity, but infinity is not the only infinitely big. It is also the infinitely small. Perfection can suggest the idea of forward movement, but also the idea of coming to a halt. The search for perfection proceeds with a pace that becomes infinitely slower. It is a continuous progression that nevertheless gradually reduces itself as it approaches its goal."(p 37)

The main character, a Hungarian peasant boy named Jeno, is haunted both by his obsession to achieve perfection in playing the violin and his obsession for Sophie, a violinist and music teacher. While still a young boy he is sent to study at a serious music academy where he meets and becomes friends with another young boy, and Aristocratic Austrian boy named Kuno. He at first seems to be Jeno's doppelganger, but we soon find that he is filled with contrasts to Jeno that complement him. They are linked by the violin.

The beauty of the prose is like music and its structure mimics that of a work of music. Reminiscent of the short fiction of Sandor Marai or Isak Dinesen this novella is exceptionally poignant and affecting on many levels. Most importantly, it questions the reality of the very lives that we live - are they merely a dream? Reading books like this makes the question one that could lead to obsession.


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Mann the Teacher

  Final Notes on 

Joseph and His Brothers

"That my brothers mutilated me and threw me into the pit and that they shall now be standing before me--that is life.  And life is also the question of whether one should judge the deed by its consequences and so call what is evil good, because it was necessary for a good result.  Those are the questions that life poses.  One cannot answer them with a long face.  The human spirit can rise above them only in serene delight, so that in its own profound amusement over what is unanswerable, it may move God Himself, the great unanswering God, to laughter." (p 1304)



As Joseph and His Brothers moves inexorably toward its conclusion the reader is reminded again by the narrator of this fact.
"We are astonished to note that this story is moving toward its end--who would have thought it could ever run dry and come to an end?  But ultimately it no more has an end than it actually had a beginning, and instead, since it  cannot possibly go on forever like this, it must at some point excuse itself and simply cease its narration." (p 1431)

At the beginning of the story we were regaled with the "Tales of Jacob" and his clever wresting of the birthright from his elder brother Esau.  Now, as Jacob is reunited with his lost son Joseph in Egypt he bestows his rightful blessing on Ephraim, the younger of Joseph's two sons, instead of Manasseh, the elder.  Thus we have the beginning in the end and as Joseph points out to his father Jacob what he has done Jacob says to him, "What I have done, I have done, and it is indeed my will that it become a proverb and saying in Israel, so that whenever anyone wishes to bless, he shall say, 'God make you as Ephraim and Manasseh.'  Let Israel take note." (p 1461)

Again, the narrator has lectured the reader about what to expect, "How remarkable, how it tickles one's fancy, to note how events in this story are ordered in such lovely correspondence and one piece finds its fulfillment in its counterpart." (p 1388)  
Jacob's sons have just returned from Egypt with the news that his son whom he thought was dead is instead alive and prospering in Egypt.  Yes, Joseph has risen to the penultimate level in the whole country.  Thus the second fall into the pit of prison has led to an even greater outcome than the earlier apparent death and rebirth from the first pit.  In the meantime the narrator has regaled the reader with Joseph's dream interpretations and his continued faithful adherence to what he believed to be God's plan for his life. Yet his life story was interpreted in light of episodes that mirrored Mesopotamian and Greek mythology, and involved Joseph becoming an Egyptian. In Jacob's eyes "Joseph was the man set apart, who in being exalted had stepped back, was now separated from his tribe, and could not be a tribe himself." (p 1450)  This would devolve upon his sons as we saw above.  

At the end of the fourth and final novel in the massive tetralogy, after his sons had buried Jacob, the brothers are united in a positive spirit respecting Jacob's last wish and the story ends on a beautiful note.  The magnificent story of Joseph and His Brothers was complete, a story in the even greater comedy of humankind.

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods, trans. Everyman's Library, 2005 (1933-43)

The Artist of Despair

The Tunnel 
by Ernesto Sabato

“I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.”  ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

"True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;  but why will you say that I am mad?  - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

"It should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne."  - Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel

Ernesto Sabato writes about an artist, Juan Pablo Castel, narrating his own story about desire and obsessive love through the lens of madness. I would describe the nature of the narrator, but let me quote his own assessment from early in the book:
"My brain was in pandemonium: swarming ideas, emotions of love and loathing, questions, resentment, and memories all blended together or flashed by in rapid succession." (p 47)
Juan had just discovered that his beloved Maria Iribarne was married to a blind man. He thinks, "why hadn't she warned me she was married?"  There is much he does not know about Maria in spite of his longing for her;  a longing that leads him to the brink of despair.

This story, set in Buenos Aires, is told from the narrator's point of view, but the narrator, like the narrator of  Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, is deranged, living in an internal world that is filled with discontinuities with the outside world of other people because it is based on his own delusions rather than the real world. His thoughts seem to bounce between two poles represented by moments of acute focus on reality contrasted with a bizarre world where he understands no one and they do not understand him. All of this is enhanced by increasingly complex dreams. He wants to be with Maria but when she seemingly rejects him, by leaving for the "estancia" in the country, he retreats in to a world of "absolute loneliness".  He describes this world:
"Usually the feeling of being alone in the world is accompanied by a condescending sense of superiority. I scorn all humankind; people around me seem vile, sordid, stupid, greedy, gross, niggardly. I do not fear solitude; it is almost Olympian." (p 81)

The novel is short with only thirty-nine short chapters over less than one hundred fifty pages. Even so it is complex and suspenseful although it begins with the seemingly straightforward declaration from the narrator that he is "the painter who killed Maria Iribarne." The obsessiveness of his love for Maria is demonstrated by both his stalking her, watching from a distance, and his imagining what she must be thinking, often extrapolating delusional thoughts from a brief note that she has written. For example, when she writes him the note "I think of you, too. Maria" he immediately begins to wonder if she was nervous and whether the note betrayed "real emotion" followed by exuberance over the signature. The simple act of her signing her name led Juan to a feeling that "she now belonged to me." (p 49)
The narrator gradually becomes more intense in his thoughts about Maria. This is accompanied by difficulties relating to the few other people he encounters in the book; symbolized by the disintegration of his painting and by references to the increasing turbulence of the sea.

The story is not without humor demonstrated best by Juan's encounter with a postal clerk who will not return to him a letter he has written to Maria. He demands that it be returned because he left out an important thought. As a reader you almost feel sympathy for Juan as his entreaties are blocked by the petty bureaucrat, but this lighter moment does not last long and the urge to sympathize melts away as he returns to his delusional world.

Ernesto Sabato has created a mesmerizing story of a man who has lost touch with reality and his obsessions over a married woman who eludes his grasp. He is an artist who cannot abide this world so he creates a world of his own. When the two worlds collide the consequences are grave. His narrator shares the sickness of Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from Underground along with the life of urban denizens found in the works of Hamsun and Kafka among others. Brilliant in its evocation of this modern world it raises questions for any reader who dreams of other realities or shares, even in a little part, questions about the nature of the real world around himself.


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Sculptor, Artist and Genius

Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times 
by William E. Wallace


“The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.”
― Michelangelo, I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation 


Oscar Wilde once said, "I think a man should invent his own myth." One man for whom it could be said that he did this, at least indirectly through his contributions, is Michelangelo. He was born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy to a family of moderate means in the banking business. He became an apprentice to a painter before studying in the sculpture gardens of the powerful Medici family. What followed was a remarkable career as an artist in the Italian Renaissance, recognized in his own time for his artistic virtuosity. It was a career of "an aristocrat who made art" according to his biographer William Wallace. Wallace's biography is compact at less than four hundred pages but it provides a generous amount of detail and interesting theories about the nature and importance of Michelangelo's life. Wallace studied biographies of other artists in his preparation for this work including those written by Richard Ellman, David Cairns, and Maynard Solomon. I think this helped him shape a worthy life of Michelangelo.

That Michelangelo was an artist worthy of note is a notion that began in his own lifetime as his contemporaries were writing about his life when he was in his early fifties. He was the only living artist to be included in Giorgio Vasari's famous Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1550. Although this was an honor, perceived inaccuracies in Vasari's text led Michelangelo to ask his pupil and amanuensis, Ascanio Condivi, to write his biography. This Life of Michelangelo appeared three years later and emphasized, among other things, Michelangelo's noble origins. Thus the potential myth-making began. Wallace relies on many original documents including the letters of Michelangelo, of which there were more than a thousand, his records, and his family correspondence. I was interested in the attention paid to his poetry as I have long been fond of his sonnets. Not unexpectedly, however, the documentation for his life is uneven with gaps that make some of his life, especially the earlier years, more difficult to portray.

I appreciated the biographer's attention to the culture of the Renaissance and Michelangelo's place in it. The cultural history of society was presented with a focus on his times in Rome and Florence during progressive artistic periods of his life. The story of the artist reminded me of the story of other artists as Michelangelo was like many others who had difficulty persuading their father that the career of an artist was better than a prestigious profession and an advantageous marriage. Yet, even while Michelangelo insisted on an artistic career he still sometimes harbored misgivings and had doubts; nonetheless forging ahead in a direction that he thought would "resuscitate" his family name. Even more important to him, and this was an aspect of the life of painters and sculptors of his day, was his insistence that he was truly an artist; not a mere artisan running a workshop.

With works that include the "David" and "Pieta" statues and the ceiling paintings of Rome's Sistine Chapel, including the "Last Judgment" we look at him today as one of the greatest sculptors and painters of all time--a true genius. While Michelangelo lived most of his life in Rome, where he died in 1564 at age 88, he always considered himself a Florentine. He also was a generous family man who created great works of art for patrons that were more often than not his friends.

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The World and the Why

I Like School

Am I a freak?

Or rather a geek?

For I absolutely have to admit,

That I like school.  I really love it!

The idea of learning the answer to why

The brook runs dry or there's blue in the sky,

Delights me no end, and is likely to send

Me to a place that I wish would not end.

When I'm in a class I feel comfortable

For this is where I am most capable,

Exploring the issues of now and then.

Yes, that's history with its where and when.

And what about math and studying space?

There seems no more appropriate place

Than school for learning that vast expanse

Of knowledge that will my mind entrance.

You may ask what it is that makes me this way,

When so many feel that school spoils their day.

I guess that I would quickly retort, with a reply

That for me the world's a school.  That's why.

James Henderson, The Kingdom of Music, March, 2014

Leading Lady visits America

In America 
by Susan Sontag


"Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”  ― Susan Sontag, In America


In America is an historical novel, yet it is more. It is a novel about identity, about names and words and people who leave their homeland for a new unknown and undiscovered land called America. The novel is one where the stage and all that it represents mirrors life -- a story set near the end of the nineteenth century.
On the first page of the novel the motif of the stage is hinted at by how snow flakes seen through a window are described as a "scrim" for the moonlight in the background. The unnamed narrator looks out on the wintry landscape from her vantage point in a warm corner of a large room filled with people. Slowly the narrator, who is Sontag herself embedded in this prelude to the novel, gradually introduces the main characters who are gathered at a private party. These characters include an actress, Maryna the greatest leading lady in Poland; her husband, Bogdan; and a budding writer, Ryszard, who will eventually become her lover.

Language is an important aspect of the novel as the narrator meditates on all the words in the air swirling around her at this party. Her meditation leads he to comment that "I mean here only to give these words their proper, poignant emphasis. And it occurred to me that this might explain, partly, my presence in this room. For I was moved by the way they possessed these words and regarded themselves bound by them to actions. . . . I was enjoying the repetition. Dare I say I felt at one with them? Almost. Those dreaded words, dreaded by others (not by me), seemed like caresses. Pleasantly numbed, I felt myself borne along by their music . . ." (p 8) While musing on the Polish diva who holds the company spellbound, Sontag notes: "I remember when I first read Middlemarch: I had just turned 18, and a third of the way through the book burst into tears because I realised not only that I was Dorothea but that a few months earlier, I had married Mr Casaubon... It took me nine years to decide that I had the right, the moral right, to divorce Mr Casaubon." (p 24) She indulges herself and suggests that this will be the story of a Dorothea who does not, like George Eliot's heroine, bury herself in the obscurity of "private" good works. She will shine in the public blaze of celebrity.
The party is in Poland, but some converse in French as well. This is their home where they are known and comfortable--yet there is more--ideas are in the air. The narrator hears bits of conversation that hint at plans Maryna has to leave Poland. These words suggest the possibility of a project to create a "perfect" society, one influenced by both Voltaire and Rousseau. After further ruminations on these people surrounding her at the party the narrator decides to write their story: "I decided to follow them out into the world." (p 27)
After this unusual introduction the actual story, an historical one, continues for nine more chapters chronicling the journey of Maryna, her close friends, family, and entourage, to America. They fairly quickly settle in a dusty southern California village established originally by Germans, namely Anaheim. Just as earlier communities like Brook Farm in New England and others have failed theirs does as well. The experiment is unsuccessful due to unexpected difficulties as they find the empty and dry expanse of California is not conducive to their plans. While many of them return to Poland it is at this moment that Maryna, longing for a return to the stage, decides to move to San Francisco and mount an American career where she can once again become a leading lady, perhaps a legend. This is, after all, an historical novel and the main characters are based on real people. Maryna is based on Helena Modrzejewska, who at 35 years old was Poland's greatest actress and who emigrated to America. The story abounds with moments when Maryna is in the theater playing Camille or Juliet for adoring audiences. Gradually her stage character takes hold of the reader much as it must have for those audiences. Following her came her husband and her lover, based on the writer Henryk Sinkiewicz (later famous as the author of Quo Vadis, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature). However, not all the real names are changed and , not unlike some other historical novels, famous names drop in from time to time including Edwin Booth and Henry James (later in the story as Maryna has moved on to conquer the London stage; her success there was limited but better by far than that of James whose plays bombed).

This is a novel that, according to the author, was inspired by her own family background as all four of her grandparents came from Poland. She herself, in the three years of the novel's conception, frequently visited "besieged Sarajevo" (the novel is dedicated to her friends in that unhappy city). The main character has luminescent moments, but I found the story as a whole uneven. Ryszard and Bogdan both have moments "on stage" but the rest of the characters fade into the background. They all were on stage as followers of Maryna to America and it is a book worth reading to share the experiences of her dramatic and eventful life.

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Some Favorite Music

The Grand Canyon Suite
by Ferde Grofe


"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music."  - Billy Joel

From an early age I had a serious interest and love of music.  I have fond memories of listening to The Grand Canyon Suite, as it was one of the first recordings with which I began my collection of classical music. And it is classical in the grand romantic idiom with sweeping melodies that painted the vistas of the Canyon, sunrise, the pack animals and storms. It was a wonderful piece to listen to and I still sit back and enjoy it.  

Today, Ferde Grofé remains most famous for this suite that was premiered in Chicago at the Studebaker Theatre, played by Paul Whiteman's band in November, 1931. To this day the Grand Canyon Suite is popular with performers and listeners.  He was born on March 27, 1892, in New York City and grew up in a musical family. When Ferde was very young, the family moved to Los Angeles.  Grofé moved away from home when he was about fourteen; he worked at a number of odd jobs, including bookbinder, truck driver, usher, newsboy, and elevator operator. He studied piano and violin and by the time he was fifteen, he was performing with dance bands. He also played the alto horn (like a small tuba) in brass bands and viola in the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Later, Grofé worked as an arranger of music by other composers, and is best known for his 1924 arrangement for Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The success of this orchestration established Grofé's reputation as a composer and arranger, particularly in the jazz world.  Grofé started working as an arranger and pianist with Paul Whiteman, a jazz bandleader, around 1920. Grofé arranged music and composed original pieces in a symphonic jazz style. Grofé's own works included Mississippi: A Journey in Tones in 1925, Metropolis: A Fantasie in Blue in 1928, and the Grand Canyon Suite in 1931. Each piece painted a musical portrait of an American scene. 

In 1916, Grofé drove across the Arizona desert with some friends to watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. During a radio interview more than forty years later, he described what he saw and felt. He told how he and his pals had arrived and set up camp. The next morning, just before dawn, they got up to watch the sunrise. He described how at first, it was very silent; then, as the day got lighter, the sounds of the natural world began. Suddenly the sun came up and the vision was so dramatic that he couldn't express it in words. Inspired by this experience, Grofé composed a movement of the Grand Canyon Suite called "Sunrise" in 1929. In 1930, he sketched out the "Sunset" and "Cloudburst" sections of the piece, but didn't have time to orchestrate them. He didn't get a chance to finish the Grand Canyon Suite until the summer of 1931. 

The Grand Canyon Suite has five movements, including "Sunrise," "Painted Desert,"  and "Sunset."   While the most famous movement is called "On the Trail",  with music that imitates the "clip-clop, clip-clop" of a donkey's hooves,  my favorite is the concluding "Cloudburst" movement that briefly reprises the "On the Trail" theme followed by a terrifyingly vivid depiction of a thunderstorm and concluding with the emergence of the moon and transcendent music that resounds with joy.

Thoughts in a Journal

Paper Covers Rock 
by Jenny Hubbard


"Lose an arm in the tow, 
shed the shell, breathe
farewell in the waves."  (p 130)

"Poetry is a way of seeing the world with your feelings." (p 148)

The book opens with the narrator explaining why, after two years of letting the journal his father gave him when he went away to boarding school lay fallow on his shelf, he is now writing in his journal. The narrator, Alex Stromm, is writing the journal for himself spurred to do so by the death of his friend and classmate, Thomas Broughton, from drowning. Alex's thoughts, feelings, and overall reaction to this event comprise the rest of the novel. The story he tells involves another friend, Glenn, and a special teacher, Miss Dovecott, who is just a few years older than Alex, the junior student, and who encourages his writing especially his budding efforts at poetry. As he records his thoughts in the journal his relationships, both school and family, become clearer. There are a few touching moments such as Alex's letter of condolence to Thomas' parents that opens, "I have been wanting to write for a couple of weeks now, but I did not know exactly what to say or how to say it, so I have put it off. Now I realize that I will never know exactly what to say or how to say it. . . " (pp 64-65) Both the poetry and the prose in the book limn a young student of above-average ability. The writing ability helps Alex express his feelings about both love and death as he tries to move forward in his school life. Near the end of the book he writes, "...and he'll leave it as others have left it, as others will leave it, boys stepping into who they are without ever having known who they were." (p 163) , suggesting he still has work to do, and he is developing the maturity to do so.

The book is laced with literary references, primarily to Moby-Dick which inspired Alex's literary nom de plume of "Is Male". This is both a literary reference and a symbol of his young male hormones that are as much a reason as any for his crush on Miss Dovecott. The tone throughout is one of mystery and melancholy; mystery as to the nature of Alex's involvement with the death of his friend Thomas and melancholy as his feelings are poured out over the pages of his journal. The result is a subtle portrayal of how one teenager matures through dealing with loyalty, honor, and love in a boarding school environment.  While the novel is reminiscent of John Knowles' A Separate Peace, it does not quite match that novel's literary heft.  However, I was impressed with the author's lucid prose and moved by the slight story. I appreciated young Alex's appreciation of reading in the opening pages when he wrote in his journal, "Read to your heart's content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content." (p 2)


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An American Dreamer

Heaven's My Destination 
by Thornton Wilder

"George Brush is my name;
America's my nation;
Ludington's my dwelling place
And Heaven's my destination."
(Epigraph for the novel)

"Brush returned slowly to his room.  Before beginning to pack, he stood at the window and looked out into the rain.  "I talk too much," he said to himself in a whisper.  "I must watch that.  I talk to damn much."" (p 28)

An informed and realistic look at the struggles of the depression era, Heaven's My Destination is a comic picaresque tale that defies categorization. It was Wilder's fourth novel and second after the wildly popular The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The hero of the story, George Brush, is an other-worldly figure whose single-minded pursuit of a philosophy that seems like pure hokum, but through his earnest devotion to its strange principles somehow seems to make sense--in an odd way. He needs a certain strength of character to persevere in this earnest pursuit because almost all the people he meets are married to a common sense that either rejects his entreaties or runs away from him in fear and misunderstanding.

The events in this very episodic novel are the epitome of what has come to be called quixotic, named after the pursuits of Cervantes' Don Quixote and his humble partner Sancho Panza. They said that Quixote suffered from a sort of madness and that might be an apt explanation for the strange behavior of George Brush. It is likely that Wilder drew on his short stint teaching at the University of Chicago where he taught Cervantes among others. His lectures were popular and they apparently provided him with ideas for future writing. The picaresque hero he created was a wandering man in search of home and family. More than once he says that he believes he should put down roots and have "founded an American home". He says to an acquaintance, "You know what I think is the greatest thing in the world? It's when a man, I mean an American, sits down to Sunday dinner with his wife and six children around him" (pp 22-23) He aspires to "settle down and found an American home." When he tries to persuade a young woman to marry him and share "a fine American home", he enlists the help of his prospective sister-in-law to convince Roberta, the reluctant bride.  "Will you go and ask her to come here?" George pleads.  "And, Lottie, listen: we'll have a nice home somewhere and you can come in all the time for Sunday dinner, and the whole family can come in from the farm, too.  We'll have some fine times, you'll see."(p 170)

He values his home above his job, just one of his notions and one of those that is more understandable than most of them are. More often he is pursuing windmills with ideas like the notion in the opening episode of the novel that banks are built on fear and everyone should take their money out of banks. While in a small town selling books door-to-door he suddenly has an epiphany: he must remove his money from the local bank and he immediately goes to the bank to do this.  But he also lectures the Bank manager on the evils of banking and the fears upon which it is based.  By the end of the chapter he is being escorted out of town while people are lining up for a good old-fashioned run on the local bank. It is the first of several incidents that mix his strange philosophy with the realities of depression-era America. Often the humor is tinged with a sadness that makes you wonder how poor George can maintain his earnest and naive sincerity in the face of a real world that just does not get it.

The book is an anomaly in my reading experience and certainly an anomaly among American novels written during the Depression. Wilder's realism portrays the struggles of the era, but it is a portrayal that is colored by shadings of farce and high comedy that provide a depth of humor missing too often when considering this era. While George Brush is rigid and puritanical in his thinking he is also sincere and earnest. His straightforward approach upsets the powers that be including evangelists, priests, and local leaders; he finds himself seduced, persecuted, misunderstood, arrested, married, and converted. It is clear, however, that whatever else he may be, George Brush is a sincere man who believes that what he is doing is right, no matter what the cost. For him, he believes, things will work out in the end. The result is a delightful journey, both picaresque and picturesque, of an American dreamer searching for a home in his and our great country.


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Two Great Dramas

 The past two weekends I've had the great pleasure to attend productions of dramas by two of the greatest playwrights in the history of literature.  In Chicago the company of Shaw Chicago is currently performing a reading of Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, thought by some to be his greatest play.  A week ago I attended a showing of Coriolanus by Shakespeare in the series of videotaped live performances from the National Theatre Live from London.  Here are my comments on both of these great plays:

                   Saint Joan 

by George Bernard Shaw


"There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent, and that is all [there is] about it. It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us."  -  George Bernard Shaw


"The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and order in all directions, and establishing in their palce the unfettered action of Humanity . . ." (GBS writing in The Perfect Wagnerite.)
In Saint Joan Shaw attempted, and perhaps achieved, a masterpiece based on this conception. The play is a perfect example of the hero as victim transformed into savior. In the first scene the Robert de Baudricourt ridicules Joan, but his servant feels inspired by her words. Eventually de Baudricourt begins to feel the same sense of inspiration, and gives his consent to Joan. The servant enters at the end of the scene to exclaim that the hens, who had been unable to lay eggs, have begun to lay eggs again. De Baudricourt interprets this as a sign from God of Joan's divine inspiration. It is with this simple beginning that the spirited spirituality of the seemingly innocent young Joan begins to take over the play to the point where she is leading the French troops against the British. Her voice exhibits a lively purity that is augmented by an unlimited imagination. Both her voice and her visions are inspirational, but cannot protect her from ultimate betrayal. The result of that betrayal leads to the end that we are all familiar with.
Shaw's play features Joan as an outsider who seems lonely only when she is among those who voiced the common opinions of the day. Her multi-faceted personality is hidden behind her single-minded pursuit of a vision of god's design for her life. Saint Joan is a tragedy without villains. The tragedy exists in a view of human nature where the incredulity of intolerance of both religious and secular forces battle each other. It is made even more interesting by Shaw's epilogue that brings the play into the current time and provides an opportunity for Shaw to discuss the play with the audience. Whether this play is truly great or almost great it is definitely Shaw at his dramatic best.



Coriolanus
by William Shakespeare

"He is their god. He leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than nature,
That shapes man better; and they follow him
Against us brats, with no less confidence
Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,
Or butchers killing flies."(Act IV, scene vi)

Several years ago I read this play as part of a class at the University of Chicago.  It was a revelation that entranced me with its drama. Even so, the warrior Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, rarely pausing to soliloquise or reveal the motives behind his prideful isolation from Roman society. Instead, the play demonstrates his character through his actions and his relationships. The relationship with his mother, Volumnia, is the most important of these. The tension of her love for him reaches heights that are only exceeded by those of Coriolanus fame as a warrior for Rome.
This is not the Rome of the Caesars but that of the early days when the republic was in its formative stages. It was a city concerned with warring neighbors like the Volscians who are an ever-present enemy. While Caius Martius' success in battles with this enemy lead him to military honors and earn him the name Coriolanus, he does not have the temperamental qualities that would allow him use these accolades for political purposes. He is held back by his own nature and his situation leads to banishment by the crowds who once cheered him. His speech to them as he leaves Rome is memorable:
"You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."(Act III, Scene iii)

It is, for me, the best of the lesser-known of his plays and stands tall by the side of the other two great Roman history plays, Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra. In particular, the psychological depth of the character of Coriolanus, his relationships with his mother and subject Romans, and the dramatic action make this play a delight to read.

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A Comic Tragedy

Tender Is the Night 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald


“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.”  ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night 

 
The novel opens with a beautiful young women, Rosemary Hoyt, surrounded by a group of acquaintances on the French Riviera. Though very beautiful, filled with superficially attractive people, this opening seemed to me to be drawn out and slow as Rosemary soon meets the Divers, Nicole and Dick, who will become the central interest of the story for much of the rest of the novel. After this somewhat meandering start I was not really impressed with the story until the beginning of Book Two when the novel flashes back to 1917 and the arrival of twenty-six year old Doctor Richard Diver in Zurich. Thus begins the story of the psychiatrist and his wife, Nicole, and eventually Rosemary, a special friend among others. To the extent that the novel has any core story to hold it together it is here in Book Two and in the Third and final section of the novel. Nicole and Dick come to life as real characters, but the other characters in the novel do not share their strength of character. The identities of too many of the people who wander in and out of the story seem in flux, hard to pin down and harder to remember. Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is a good example of one character for whom this was true.

Undoubtedly the novel's greatest asset is Fitzgerald's prose style which can be dazzling with colors and detail descriptions like that of the Riviera that opens the book. The plot begins with Rosemary's infatuation over Dick. 
"For a moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything."(p 31) 
That Diver was married, sometimes happily, was not an obstacle to her erotic bliss. It is only later in the story that the complexities of Nicole and Dick come to the foreground and ultimately his personal destructiveness combines with her insecurities to determine the direction of their relationship. The deterioration of their relationship can be seen in the influence that her money (Nicole was immensely wealthy) had on Dick's life and feelings. 
"Living rather ascetically . . . he maintained a qualified financial independence. After a certain point, though, it was difficult--again and again it was necessary to decide together as to the uses to which Nicole's money should be put. Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods and money. . . It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work."(p 170) 
And on and on, Dick's guilt and rationalizations gradually contributed to a wall that divided them and grew larger as Dick drank more and spent more time with Rosemary.

Fitzgerald spent several years working on the novel. That plus its ultimate serialization in Scribner's Magazine may be part of what seems a sort of disconnectedness. There are also his own personal difficulties with drunkenness, his wife Zelda's insanity, the breakdown of his marriage, and his own personal anger at the burden of these situations. All of this is mirrored in the fictional account of Dick and Nicole, with Dick somewhat unsuccessfully becoming his wife's psychiatrist. Ultimately the novel becomes a comic tragedy in the modern sense. Its brilliant moments make it interesting reading that is only slightly marred by flaws of character and identity.

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