"...No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind...Thinking? At last I have discovered it - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist...I am a thinking thing."
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy -
Second Meditation
The NYLS Book Review - Nonfiction
Title: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints - essays
Author: Joan Acocella
ISBN: 0375424164
Format: Hardcover, 544pp
Pub. Date: February 2007
Publisher: Knopf Publishing
Review:
The thirty-one essays presented here are drawn from Joan Acocella’s work over the last fifteen years, most though not all of them first appearing in The New Yorker. The twenty-eight artists include writers of all genres, as well as choreographers and dancers, and the two saints are Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc. There is an additional essay - ‘Blocked’ – which deals with the dreaded phenomenon of writer’s block, along with its frequent companion, as both temporary cure and catalyst – alcoholism. A unifying theme is that of ‘difficulty, hardship’ – but not, stresses Acocella, in the usual sense of unhappy childhoods leading to some form of artistic resolution. Instead, she is concerned with ‘the pain that came with the art-making, interfering with it, and how the artist dealt with this.’ She points out that it is not talent alone that makes for a sustained artistic career – brilliance needs to be combined with ‘more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage.’
Acocella is an enemy of both cliché and sentimentality; the latter in particular is always a dirty word for her, and the lack of it – a quality which she admires in, for instance, the writing of Primo Levi – is always likely to draw forth praise. She also exhibits a mature, matter-of-fact feminism. By and large, she seems to suggest, there is no need to bang on about it; she is understanding of, for example, Simone de Beauvoir in her inability to break away from, or even fully comprehend, the subservient role she played in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Beauvoir’s critics should read some history books,’ she remarks. But on occasion a righteous anger will nevertheless erupt, as in the essay on the writer M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote nothing for twelve years while living as her father's housekeeper: 'Those who lament the dissolution of the American family - kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes - should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women's blood.'
Acocella believes that art matters. She cares about good books as 'sources of wisdom and delight', and it is no accident that her essay on the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov – ‘The Soloist’ - should be the most moving in the collection. ‘In him,’ she writes, ‘the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism – that experience has order, that life can be understood – is clearer than in any other dancer on the stage today.’ This essay, written in 1998, tells of Baryshnikov’s return to his home town of Riga in Latvia, twenty-four years after his defection to the West. He gives a transcendent performance and the usually reserved Latvian audience, including the president of the republic, stand and cheer. This performance as witnessed and related by Acocella seems to represent not only a personal homecoming, but the rejoining of a fractured Europe, and because Acocella does not ‘do’ sentimentality, this rare release of emotion is particularly powerful.
By the end of Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints one certainly feels better educated as well as vastly entertained. I loved her comment on Carole Angier’s biography of Primo Levi (‘As for his life, the position she takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She's okay. We're okay. Why wasn't he okay?') as well as her description of Cecil B. De Mille’s film about Joan of Arc: 'The movie fairly pullulates with people running around in Pied Piper outfits.'
Written by Virginia Rounding for The NYLS Book Review. All rights reserved.
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