The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘Blocked’, by Joan Acocella

Next book on the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella.

Joan Acocella has brought a lot of great things into my life, which is a strange thing to say, on the face of it. She is the dance critic for The New Yorker, that is mainly how I know her name. I do not go to the ballet, I do not seek out new dance companies (not for any good reason, by the way – I’m not against these activities, obviously!), so sometimes I check in with her columns to see what she’s writing about. She’s also a very elegant and pleasing writer. Her prose flows, it’s filled with information, it’s spiky with criticism (elegantly phrased), and I come out of any essay she’s written better-informed, or at least highly pleased. I am so glad I discovered her work.

Ironically, I had read a couple of things of hers before I really put it together who she was. She wrote an enormous profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called “The Soloist”, and I read it and remember it well (I have it in a collection of “profiles” for The New Yorker), but I don’t think I registered who had written it. Her name didn’t mean anything to me at the time.

Years later, I read a piece about a biography of Lucia Joyce (James Joyce’s daughter) in The New Yorker, and bitched about it here – that is back in the dark ages of my site. I had to search for it! The writing leaves something to be desired. I clearly wrote it off-the-cuff. Regardless, I don’t think I put together that “Joan Acocella” was the one who also wrote the huge piece on Baryshnikov. Her name didn’t have any reverb for me. The article came to my attention because it had to do with James Joyce. And I clearly have an opinion about these kinds of “woman-behind-the-man” biographies.

But then, somehow, I put it all together. Joan Acocella is a dance writer. But she also has written many in-depth essays and book reviews for The New Yorker, many of which have now been compiled in this superb collection, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Dear readers, I give this book my highest recommendation possible. It gives the full onslaught of Joan Acocella’s power as a writer and thinker. There are, of course, many dance pieces featured here, and these are not to be missed. But, surprisingly (to me, anyway), it was her book reviews that really struck me. Her interest and focus seems to be on writers in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly writers who were Austrian, and writing about (inadvertently) the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I’ve always been fascinated by that empire, and the Hapsburgs, and all that, but many of these writers are new to me. I will always be thankful to her that she brought Stefan Zweig to my attention. I had heard his name before, of course. He was a giant figure in Austria, pre- World War II, a veritable celebrity who would be mobbed in the streets. He is nearly forgotten today, except by those who have read his stuff. Because of her essay in this book, I read his novel Beware of Pity (she wrote the introduction for the latest translation), and that book blew the top of my head off. WOW. That’s all I have to say. How had I never read this masterpiece before? It’s Shakespearean in scope, and it has in it the rot and the dying glamour of an Empire about to be obliterated. It is generally assumed that it was time for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to go. Empire is now not seen as a good thing. But to many people, the crack-up of that Empire spelled the doom of one of the only egalitarian societies in Europe, an Empire that encompassed many different peoples and languages, living side by side, and the Jews had a chance to flourish. Once the Empire was gone, the Jews were on the run, no longer protected. This is not a popular attitude, it seems particularly 19th century, with its love of Empire and its organization and condescending protection. But read Stefan Zweig on Empire. It adds shadings and complexity to what is seen to be an obvious good. Many of the writers she focuses on come from that area of the world at that time.

But her scope is broad. The same themes emerge: where does genius come from? What does context add to our understanding of someone like Jerome Robbins? What does it mean to be an innovator? Her taste is eclectic, but with a motivating principle behind all of it. I absolutely love her writing. I hope she comes out with another collection. Any time I see her name anywhere as a byline, I will read it. She could write about her grocery list, and I’d take the time to read it.

One of the essays in this collection has to do with the phenomenon of writer’s block. She examines the writers who suffered from it (either mildly, or in its most acute form). She looks at where writer’s block may come from, the various germs of it (too much success too early, or not enough success and validation too consistently), and the anecdotes she chooses to illustrate her thesis are eloquent and moving. She has a way of making things spring to life on the page.

I was mainly touched by the section on Ralph Ellison, so that will be the part I excerpt today.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘Blocked’, by Joan Acocella

“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly once said, “they first call promising.” A subdivision of the early-success problem is second-novel syndrome. The writer produces a first novel, and it is a hit; then he sits down to write a second novel, and finds his brain clenched. Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), was an enormous critical success. It also sold very well, and was made into a movie. His second novel, Middlesex, was published two years ago, and won the Pulitzer Prize. But between those two books lie nine years. I asked Eugenides why. One reason, he said, was that Middlesex was far more ambitious than The Virgin Suicides. (It is a sweeping family chronicle, more than five hundred pages long and full of Greek and American history.) But another reason was the circumstances surrounding a second novel:

No one is waiting for you to write your first book. No one cares if you finish it. But after your first, if it goes well, everyone seems to be waiting. You’re suddenly considered to be a professional writer, a fiction machine, but you know very well that you’re just getting going. You go from having nothing to lose to having everything to lose, and that’s what creates the panic … In my own case, I decided to give myself the time to learn the things I needed to know in order to write my second book, rather than just writing it in a rush because there were now people eager to read it. Finally, of course, I had to leave the country. In Berlin I regained the blessed anonymity I’d had while writing The Virgin Suicides. I got back to thinking only about the book … Now [since Middlesex] I’ve lost the anonymity I had in Berlin and so am moving to Chicago. If things continue to go well, I will end up living in Elko, Nevada.

Eugenid es survived second-novel syndrome, and so do most novelists, but some are felled by it. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee’s first novel, published when she was thirty-four, was an immediate best-seller. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a hit movie. And then came nothing. In 1961, Lee told an interviewer that she was working on her second novel, but that she wrote very slowly, producing only a page or two a day. Maybe we will hear from her yet, but she is now seventy-eight.

We will not hear from Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man (1952), was also a best-seller, and more than that. It was an “art” novel, a modernist novel, and it was by a black writer. It therefore raised hopes that literary segregation might be breachable. In its style the book combined the arts of black culture – above all, jazz – with white influences: Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner. Its message was likewise integrationist – good news in the 1950s, at the beginning of the civil rights movement. Invisible Man became a fixture of American-literature curricula. Ellison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was not just a writer; he was a hero. And everyone had great hopes for his second novel.

So did he. It was to be a “symphonic” novel, combining voices from all parts of the culture. It grew and grew. Eventually, he thought it might require three volumes. He worked on it for forty years, until he died in 1994, at the age of eighty, leaving behind more than two thousand pages of manuscript and notes. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, tried at first to assemble the projected symphonic work. Finally, he threw up his hands and carved a simpler, one-volume novel out of the material. This book, entitled Juneteenth, was published in 1999. Some reviewers praised it, others cold-shouldered it, as non-Ellison.

Ellison’s was probably the most commented upon case of block in the history of American literature, and it was a tremendous sorrow to him. He had other griefs, too. While his integrationist message was welcomed in the 1950s, by the 70s it looked to many people, particularly black writers, like Uncle Tomism, and this stately man was booed and heckled when he spoke at public events. In discussions of writer’s block, it is sometimes said that a writer can be stopped when he outlives the world he was writing about, and for. That may have been true, in part, for Ellison.