Month: April 2023

The Grand Affair: A Thrilling Biography of John Singer Sargent

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Growing up in Rome in the mid-19th century, John Singer Sargent could not have asked for a better informal education for the world-class artist he would become. He was surrounded by museums overflowing with great art and just as important, his ebullient, energetic American mother hosted gatherings of painters, sculptors, poets and writers. 

Sargent’s mother was obsessed with European culture and may have modeled that enthusiasm for her son.  She also was an inveterate traveler “for her health,” so the family traipsed all over Western and Central Europe with young Sargent watching, studying, sketching–whether in museums or on mountain tops.  It’s fascinating to read about the challenging mountaineering he did in Switzerland with his father, something you might not associate with a man who later spent so much time in salons and studios.

This was a period when living in Europe cost much less than in the U.S. and  Americans like his mother were ravenous for culture of the Old World. Sargent grew up multilingual, voraciously interested in art, and Rome is where he was first exposed to an artistic subject that would be a constant in his life, though somewhat secret: male nudes. 

Whether painter or connoisseur, back then you could appreciate these nudes as the “ideal representation of humanity” without arousing suspicion, but Sargent’s sketches and paintings showed more than just artistic fascination.  Fisher explores this terrain with wit and style, referencing many of Sargent’s sketches and paintings that were unknown during the painter’s lifetime to make this crucial point.   As he puts it, they “stood out as charged, emotional composition.”

Sargent never married and had many deep friendships with male artists and models as long as he lived, while cultivating rich, powerful “iconoclasts and divas” like the famed art collector and Isabella Gardner.  Was he queer?  It seems obvious that he was and that it was part of his unique vision of people which astonished other painters, including tutors and teachers–and eventually made him famous. 

Some of the best writing in the book explores the not-so-hidden gay salons and haunts in Paris, New York, and Venice and how artists, writers, and wealthy men flirted with this subculture or made themselves at home in it. Fisher also deftly explains all the ways in which Sargent often focused on wealth and celebrity in his work while interrogating it as well, with many subtle touches of eroticism.  Fisher couldn’t be a better guide in analyzing paintings: he’s illuminating without ever coming across as academic or dry.

He also deftly analyzes Sargent’s keen business sense: even in his early twenties, Sargent knew how to cultivate wealthy sitters so he could attract more of them and knew what was daring and unique enough to have work publicly displayed.   He did that while remaining in his public persona “understated, hard-working, and self-effacing.” The author does a splendid job charting Sargent’s peripatetic life and the ways in which he presented as comme il faut but was actually innovative and even disruptive in his art, testing the limits of what the public might accept.  That thread is important for contemporary readers who might need some of the painter’s work decoded due to its subtlety.

Given the book’s subject and the gorgeous color plates, it’s strange that the cover is so grim and unappealing.  Fisher’s luscious book deserved better production, something worthy of his subject’s style and genius, worthy of this “painter of luminous complications.”  It also deserved much better copy editing because there are too many missing words and repetitions throughout the book.

All the same, this masterful biography is perfect not just for fans of the painter but for anyone eager to read more about The Gilded Age.  One celebrity after another passes through these pages–including Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Monet, Isabella Gardner–and Fisher ably interrogates the privilege that artists like Sargent benefited from, without sounding like too much of a scold.

Be prepared to spend some time on Google looking up paintings and painters you might not have heard of before. And readers might also want to try Donna Lucey’s brisk and entertaining Sargent’s Women which explores the colorful biographies of the women behind four of his iconic portraits.

A lifelong fan of vivid biographies, Lev Raphael fell in love with Sargent’s portraits in college.  One of the most enthralling exhibitions he’s ever attended was the mammoth 1987 show of the painter’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Raphael has reviewed books for Bibliobuffet, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Washington Post, and The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Tribute to My First Editor

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The famous New York editor who helped launch my book publishing career, Michael Denneny, is dead. He was a founding editor of the highly influential magazine Christopher Street, and in 35 years at Macmillan, St. Martins Press, and Crown published major authors like Edmund White, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Buckminster Fuller while championing gay fiction and nonfiction.

I’d been publishing stories for over a decade before approaching this giant of LGBTQ publishing at St. Martin’s Press with a collection of gay stories, but he thought it was incomplete. He knew my work and asked, “Why don’t you bring all of yourself into the book: you’re gay, you’re Jewish, and you’re the son of Holocaust survivors. Nobody has ever written a book quite like that.” He was right, and we launched a beautiful partnership when he offered me a contract for the book that became Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book put me on the map, with dozens of reviews across the country and the Lambda Literary Award it won the year after publication. I’m the figure on the cover. I was doing heavy weights at the gym and Michael thought pairing my body with a skull cap would hit the right notes. It did. Another well-known editor, the late George Stambolian, told me it was “the cover of the year.”

 

Denneny had started at St. Martin’s Press in 1977 when there wasn’t a single mainstream publisher in New York bringing out gay books.  He soon became celebrated as the doyen in that field for hardcover originals and his line of Stonewall Inn Editions, handsomely produced paperbacks of gay fiction and nonfiction.

Michael was an amazingly hands-on editor. He had me bring copies of dozens of stories to New York and we sat on the floor in his bohemian living room and looked at what might fit, what could be left out, what order the stories should take to seduce and enthrall readers. But that wasn’t the end: he and I spent easily seven months after that going back and forth with revisions as he helped me hone each story to make it as clear and forceful as possible. It was a master class in editing and revision, and his insights were never short of brilliant. He’s one of the many editors who have helped me enormously in my career as a teacher and editor myself—and one of the best.

Here’s an example of his help: I had shied away from writing sex scenes, but he said that sex revealed a side of characters that couldn’t be known in any other way and especially with characters who were venturing into new territory, so it was important for me to follow them. I did. The book was a success, winning a Lambda Literary Award after receiving dozens of reviews, most of them adulatory.

Michael admired my sense of humor and urged me to write a mystery series with a Nick and Nora Charles feel. That’s how the Nick Hoffman mysteries were born and that’s how I started getting reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, ended up as a professional reviewer for newspapers and radio stations, got invited around the country and abroad to speak about my work, and saw professors take me on an as a subject for academic essays, papers, and book chapters.

Without Michael, I doubt that Special Archives at Michigan State University’s Library would have pursued my papers for a decade and finally purchased them for a hefty sum.

It’s not self-serving to say that his taste was superb and he didn’t just publish major gay writers, he published Ntozake Shange—and she’s the writer who apparently encouraged him to publish gay authors. I remember Michael made a prediction about my career. He said, “You might never have a best seller, but like Shange, you’ll be making a lot of money doing speaking engagements because people will want to hear you speak from your unique perspective.”

He was right. I’ve done hundreds of invited talks and readings across the U.S. and in Canada, Germany, Scotland, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Israel. Without his intense belief in the value of my work—and its quality—I might never have gotten this far.

Or felt so very grateful.

Blood, Fire, & Gold

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Even if you’ve read a dozen books about Elizabeth I, you might enjoy this study of the Tudor queen and her decades-long rival Catherine de Medici, Queen of France for over a decade and Queen Mother to Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.  The two most powerful women in sixteenth-century Europe, both queens were highly educated and masterful stateswomen.  They learned while young how to navigate dangerous royal courts and religious turmoil, how to stay strong but outwardly pliant when necessary, and how to deal with demanding, powerful men in a world where they would be in the minority as women of power.  Both survived dizzying plots, war, and shifting allegiances “while enemies hid around every corner.” 

The dual biography deftly charts the twisting European alliances that could shift with a marriage as well as a treaty or just the threat of war, and demonstrates what excellent politicians both queens were as they maintained and expanded their power.   Mary Queen of Scots is the perennial wild card for each queen, and the book’s best surprise is its focus  on the fascinating trials and tribulations of an English ambassador to France, Sir Nicolas Throckmorton, who frequently begged to be released from his dangerous and demanding post but was unafraid to speak plainly to the Queen Mother.  

I wish the book had been more thoroughly copy edited.   That would have eliminated readers being told three times in a short space that Thomas Cramner was Archbishop of Canterbury and that Frances II was nine years old two paragraphs apart.  Or having to look up the translation of the French title of a religious work that Elizabeth gave us a gift even though it was highly controversial in France. Paranque says nothing at all about the controversy.  And good copy editing would have eliminated repetitious diction as well as odd phrasing like  “appease tensions” in place of “ease tensions.”  Some long conversations during negotiations between England and France could also have been summarized.

Paranque is no Alison Weir, Leanda de Lisle or Dan Jones, and the book doesn’t quite live up to the jazzy title.  But there are some good stories here, like the gruesome joust that wounded France’s King Henry II, Catherine’s husband, and led to his miserable death.  The intervention of a famed surgeon is an unforgettable classic of bizarre medical practice in that period.   Even more fascinating is elderly Elizabeth’s interview with a French envoy, dripping with jewels in her gorgeous dressing gown, bosom exposed, a picture of sad ruin and abiding grace.

Lev Raphael has been reading about the Tudors since elementary school. He has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and three public radio stations.  He hosted an interview show where guests included Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

Marrow and Bone

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Jonathan Fabrizius is a journalist living comfortably in 1980s Hamburg thanks to a rich uncle, but his thoughts often turn to the Nazi years and the end of WWII when his family fled East Prussia.  His mother died in a cart giving birth to him and that death and the chaos of flight sometimes seem more real than the life he’s living.

Out of the blue, he gets an assignment to travel in a luxurious new Japanese car into former East Prussia to report on local culture while the driver and another passenger record the route for a future rally.  And the fee is tremendous: 5,000 marks with negotiable expenses.

As he thinks of it, “his job was to write an article about the cultural riches of the People’s Republic of Poland.”  Given that he’s traveling through a once-German region that was called Masuria, despite new Polish names for towns, those riches don’t seem very Polish or even much in evidence.  He’s most impressed by a massive medieval fort built by the Teutonic Knights and a huge Gothic redbrick church.  Such churches in northern Europe are his obsession.

The tone of dark and sometimes bizarre humor is set almost immediately by the work his Swedish girlfriend is doing to curate a museum exhibition on cruelty.  She’s gathering materials about massacres and torture with a museum director who actually believes that excessive “pedantry” can be a form of “secondary” cruelty–and so can hit-and-run accidents.

There are no accidents on Jonathan’s off-kilter road trip, but it’s broken up by an unexpected robbery, encounters with curious peasants and obnoxious German tourists, meals that are inconsistent or not available, shabby hotels, and Jonathan’s travel companions. They work for the car company:  Hansi is a famous race car driver with epic adventure stories behind him and chatty Frau Winkelvoss wears twenty-six necklaces, harem pants and a blizzard of scarves as she and Hansi help record the route in meticulous detail. Their “map” will guide drivers in some future rally.

Jonathan’s snark is his shield against feeling anything much at all.  A typical observation: When Frau Winkelvoss can’t get good coffee at a Polish café he notes “Presumably during the war there wouldn’t have been any coffee here under the Germans either.”

The trip into his past (and Germany’s) challenges and then slowly strips away his sarcasm as he comes closer and closer to where his parents died and to an infamous concentration camp–that he can’t get into.

In Europe Kempowski is considered one of Germany’s greatest postwar writers but I hadn’t heard of him until I was on a book tour for the memoir My Germany and a professor said I had to read his book Have You Ever Seen Hitler? It’s based on interviews with people who lived through the rise and ruin of Nazi Germany and had wildly different opinions of their Fuehrer.  The book is a stunning record of a country where many people worshiped Hitler like a god,.

Equally stunning is the richly layered and detailed novel All for Nothing, set in an East Prussian manor house whose inhabitants see waves of refugees fleeing the Russian troops.  That book and this one have particular bite because Kempowski apparently himself witnessed waves of refugees as a teenager near the end of WWII.

Marrow and Bone is a sobering meditation on memory, forgetting, and the price paid for both.

Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money and twenty-six other books in many genres.