By the time Henri Beyle died in 1842, all his grand ambitions had come to naught. His once-brilliant career as a soldier and a diplomat ended with a dull tenure as the French consul in the obscure Italian port of Civitavecchia. His other career, as a fumbling Don Juan, had long before sputtered to a […]

“He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,” T.S. Eliot once wrote in praise of Henry James. Nowadays this would be no compliment. Inwardness is out of fashion; formal purity has few admirers; aesthetic subtlety is not what our day demands. Instead, novelists are expected to be scouts of information, prophets of

At first it seems like a form of vandalism, what a madman might have done cut loose in an empty city. But quickly we realize it appears everywhere, on every door, the enormous X, out of all proportion, drawn in red paint, a blatant violation but full of purpose. After a while, it starts to

Although by now the image of the Lake District has diminished into a cozy cliché of the pastoral, when William Wordsworth first invited his friends and fellow poets to join him in the area around Grasmere, they were settling in what was considered a remote and barbaric wilderness. Having left behind the conventions of the

Ever since fate brought me to live in New Orleans, I have been full of complaints. First of all, like most life-long New Yorkers, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but New York City. Plus I never could get interested in the commercialized decadence of Bourbon Street; the flowery cliches of haunted mansions, and jazzy

Art historians will disapprove of this book. Serious scholars will deplore it and experts will denounce it. But Peter Robb will have the last laugh, because M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio is pure pleasure for the general reader. Robb reaches down through the obscurity of dank court reports and unreliable rumors and drags a

There is a special aura to the artist who rejects celebrity. In our age of media saturation, we are fascinated by those who do not wish to be known. The painter called Balthus is one of those enigmatic recluses. Wishing his art to speak for itself, he almost never gives interviews. He prefers that catalogs

Early in the year 1917, W.B. Yeats decided that it was time to get married. The planetary conjunctions were perfect. In fact, his cherished astrological charts pointed to October of 1917 as the ideal date for a wedding. It was all settled; he only lacked a bride. He had spent the last twenty five years

I. Failure-haunted in his life-time, Nathanael West could hardly have dreamt that his scattered works would one day be gathered together and preserved for posterity by the Library of America, or that sixty years after his death he would receive the imprimatur of the classic. We can imagine his shock, and his delight, and also

The novels of J.M. Coetzee often take the form of a one-way correspondence. In Foe (1986), for example, a young widow writes over and over to Daniel Defoe, trying to tell the story of her shipwreck. Likewise, Age of Iron (1990) consists of one long anguished letter from an old South African woman to her