Paul Klee, mystery man
Some highlights the Sunday Times Book Review:
A new biography about Arthur Koestler, The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell made the cover. Koestler’s work, The Sleepwalkers, was one of the books that launched me during adolescence into a lifelong interest in the philosophy and history of science. (Koestler’s book led me in turn to one of the most seminal books of my teenage years, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn.) Based on the review by Christopher Caldwell, Koestler’s personal life falls into that oft-encountered category of I-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-acknowledge-that-a-brilliant-person-is-a-flaming-jerk-in-real-life (and there are oh so many artists who are cohabiting in that particular domain.)
Here’s a taste:
Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”
That’s a great line, one that I’ll use again: “Yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”
Continuing on a theme of the great ones who aren’t so great in real life: John Simon has reviewed The Bauhaus Group, Six Masters of Modernism by Nicholas Fox Weber. Highlighting the lives of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef and Anni Albers, Weber spends time exposing the personality quirks of Klee:
While helpfully discussing the work of Paul Klee, Weber also makes hay of the painter’s eccentricity. Klee was more involved in communicating with birds and plants than with human beings. He never in his life thought of concealing what was either childlikeness or schizophrenia, and blithely expressed it in his art. His upscale marriage to Lily Stumpf, a doctor’s daughter, provided him not only with an accompanist for his violin playing, but also with her income as a piano teacher when she was not being treated for “nervous disorders.” Paradoxically, this very modern painter seems to have played only Haydn, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.
Although he was the chief nurturer of their only child, Felix, and passionately involved in cooking, Klee was almost as devoted to Fritz, his beloved cat, to whom “he always sent greetings” in his letters home. “Laundry is the household task I haven’t tried yet,” he once wrote. “If I could take it on, I’d be more universal than Goethe.” Whereas in his favored park walks he would stop to talk to a snake, his class lectures were often incoherent balderdash. But his epistolary accounts of what he cooked or ate were clear and explicit.
Weber dwells on Klee’s sexual ambivalence. His subjects included cross-dressing and hermaphroditism, dominatrixes and evil androgynes. As he wrote, “When girls wept I thought of pudenda weeping in unison.” In his lectures, he mostly discussed natural phenomena; his first lesson was: draw a tree.
To him, Ravel’s music was coarse, and his friend Hindemith’s “stark.” He ate “more cauliflower than anyone else in history,” considered Americans the only ones ignorant of how to live, frequently spoke a single word instead of a sentence and conducted to the gramophone records the Gropiuses played. Klee’s eyes, Weber writes, “usually were looking upward, as if connecting with the heavenly sphere.” And despite his “belonging to the obscure reaches of the cosmos, two of the essentials of his life — food and art — were of a piece.”
A final debunking of public vs private image, and this one done by the artist himself: Jonathan Dee’s review of J. M. Coetzee third “autobiographical” installment/novel, Summertime. Coetzee lingers in that zone between truth and fiction, personal aggrandizement and self-abnegation, inviting the reader to ask difficult questions.
The vandalism Coetzee commits upon the easily checked facts of his own life ultimately serves to sharpen a question that does seem genuine, and genuinely self-indicting: Doesn’t being a great artist demand, or at least imply, a certain greatness of spirit as well?
“Consider,” says Julia. “Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about — isn’t it? — intimate experience. . . . Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
Yes and no. The gap between the life we live and the one of our imagination can be gynormous. Not a requirement for genius but certainly a common (and very human) shortfall.
Fascinating reading, though sometimes I think we’d all be better off knowing a little less of the personal about the geniuses among us.
And I do like that Otto Katz rebuttal!
It’s a loaded gun, to be sure…
[…] Paul Klee, mystery man Some highlights the Sunday Times Book Review: A new biography about Arthur Koestler, The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell made the cover. Koestler's work, The Sleepwalkers, was one of the books that launched me during adolescence into a lifelong interest in the philosophy and history of science. (Koestler's book led me in turn to one of the most seminal books of my teenage y … Read More […]