capsule reviews
jean strouse on sargent, the velvet touch, nixon agonistes
Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (Jean Strouse, 2024)1
Once again, I am surprised to discover how snide people were about Sargent when he was alive. In this book, Jean Strouse frequently quotes one critic, Roger Fry, who apparently never tired of dissing Sargent as (for instance) “striking and undistinguished as an illustrator and non-existent as an artist.”2 (A quote that is apparently from the same piece of Fry’s: “Wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist.”3)
However, there are lots of charming details present here to make up for this fact—like the part where Sargent had a stamp that just said “DAMN” that he apparently used often to mark (for instance) reviews he didn’t care for.
Or this excerpt from one of his letters:
How can one explain to you, and remain your friend and sincere well wisher, that lunching out is one of the things one dreads the most in a life beset with nightmares? Especially at a season when there are only about four hours of daylight. If I were blind or paralyzed you would see me dropping in daily and enchanting you with my cheerful presence—that time may shortly come—but for the moment I can still sit up and tint my little pictures, singing merrily the while.
In any case, this book is (as its subtitle indicates) about the friendship and patronage Sargent cultivated with the Wertheimer family, and it uses that relationship to examine the social status of Jews in England and Europe—the ways in which they were successfully accruing status and wealth in the late 1800s and early 1900s—and gestures at this wider story’s abrupt and violent end in the Holocaust. The Wertheimer family itself was clearly marked both by great fortune and by personal tragedy (at least one child was a suicide and another died in fascist Italy).4
Jean Strouse wrote one of my favorite biographies (Alice James) and for that reason I was really on pins and needles waiting to read this one. Unfortunately, and I do hate to say this, it’s not really as good as Alice James, just as a book, even though the detective work Strouse accomplishes throughout is extremely impressive. It just doesn’t feel finished—anecdotes and facts keep getting repeated, for instance, as if the different parts of the book were written in isolation from each other and never really harmonized. In short… I felt like I was reading something that was four-fifths baked. I don’t think it’s not worth reading at all, but it was less than I hoped.
However, I now require a stamp that says DAMN. Writing “ack” in the margins of an ARC ain’t the same! Trying to decide if I’d settle for this stamp that says “no good.”
The Velvet Touch (Jack Gage, 1948)
This movie is sort of like if Repeat Performance and All About Eve had a baby. Rosalind Russell plays an actress who wants to break free from her tyrannical producer/ex-lover, who only casts her in vapid comedies, and do real drama (in the form of Hedda Gabler). She’s also, unrelated to this desire, fallen in love with a different, albeit equally tyrannical man (an architect). Her producer tells her that if she doesn’t back out of Hedda Gabler and drop her new lover, he will go and tell the new man some unpleasant facts about her past life.5 In a struggle, she accidentally kills him.6 But through a series of lucky coincidences, nobody even knows she was ever in his office. It’s not simply that nobody suspects her. Nobody could suspect her.
Is this movie a “noir”? Not really. More than anything, what it feels like is a remake of some Hitchcock movie that doesn’t exist. It’s hard to make the case for this movie as a forgotten masterpiece, in many ways it doesn’t quite work, but I loved it.7 That is largely down to Rosalind Russell, who is incredible in it as a truly haunted woman—haunted by the possibility she’s wasted her talent, haunted by the possibility that she hasn’t any talent, haunted by all the men she once thought she loved, haunted by the blood on her hands.8 I’m not sure she truly regrets killing her ex-lover, but there’s some collateral damage involved in his death, and there she seems to believe herself to be truly guilty of something.
There’s a moment in the movie’s final act where her current lover casually drops that he’s always known she killed her producer. (This revelation itself is not a big twist.) After this moment, she moves and acts like a new person. (She breaks up with him then and there.) She suddenly and decisively comes into her own artistic greatness. His statement clearly completely liberates her—not from guilt itself, but from something else. Maybe he frees her from the fear of guilt. After he reveals his knowledge to her, she can finally look at her dripping hands and say: yes. I did that.
In some ways this movie is a creation of the Hays Code—that is, we know it has to end with our heroine getting caught and punished, because those are the rules. You could imagine a version of it made a couple decades later where Russell’s character might, for instance, keep trying to turn herself in, only to fail because there is no evidence of any kind linking her to the crime. That’s not an option here. Part of the movie’s achievement is that it satisfies the moral conditions of the Code without in fact having her get caught or punished (or having her actions brushed away as self-defense). She ends the movie in a state of perfect freedom. But to understand what I mean you’ll have to watch it yourself.
Nixon Agonistes (Garry Wills, 1970)
I finished Nixon Agonistes on New Year’s Eve. Absolutely a book I think people should read, even if they have no interest in Nixon,9 though it helps if you do.10 (I wonder if Garry Wills is aware of Nixon’s… what I can only call “pookiefication”… online these days. Probably not.)11 For one thing, if your education was anything like mine (possibly it wasn’t), your grasp on the events that took place in America after World War II can only be called “sketchy.” But these things happened and they matter if you want to understand how and why things work the way they do today.
There are some sections from the later parts of this book that are so clear and lucid I found myself wishing they were reprinted as standalone articles—in particular, a long discussion by Wills about what it means to vote for a president, which I thought was great and which would have performed a useful service in cutting through a lot of dumb conversations online and offline a few months ago.
It also made me think quite a bit of 2016, when the ways in which people were distinguishing “liberalism” as a philosophy12 felt like they were making useful, necessary clarifications—something which basically collapsed well before 2020, as being anti-“liberalism” became more about vaguely “transgressive” (defined as, whatever I think some mom in my head would hate) vibes and less about being anything in particular yourself.13 Like ha! remember that! thinking clearly about what you actually thought! Am I doomed to live in the world’s stupidest circle, etc.
Anyway, it’s a good book, but I’m going to talk about something only tangentially related to it. One thing I found myself thinking about as I read it is that Garry Wills’ critique of the cult of liberal individualism is convincing and yet, from the standpoint of this future time when people online are often happy to make up reasons why it’s unfair to expect anybody to do anything, maybe a little… too convincing.
I find myself going yes, you’re right, the cult of Emersonian self-reinvention and self-making is bad, but, Garry (after 700 pages, I feel we’re on a first name basis), there are people out here arguing it’s liberal individualism to say “if you DoorDash all your meals you are wasting a lot of money.” In the last couple pages, Wills addresses himself to me (as it were) with an air of “do I need to say this” exasperation:
In the same way, no one denies that thrift, prudence, industry, and self-discipline are components in any balanced approach to human virtue. What was evil about the ethic of earning was the belief that the degree of man’s success was the measure of his human worth, that true success meant one must accomplish everything for oneself, that those who accept “something for nothing” are inferior beings.
What I found myself reflecting on after finishing the book is that there may be nothing worse for people than something that appears to be, but is not, real virtue—close enough to the real thing to poison the concept in advance for many, but not, in the end, the real thing. It is fact good to be industrious and to work at things, good to be resilient and to be able to take care of yourself, good to have autonomy and the option of re-inventing yourself. Not everybody can do these things, but if you are, for instance, somebody who is unable to take care of yourself, you probably experience that as meaningful deprivation—because… it is.14
So sometimes I’ll be reading something and a person will end up tying themselves in knots trying to talk about their own life without sounding like they’re shaming people for whom these things are not possible (or less possible). So you’ll read these things that are like “the cult of work is bad haha we live in a capitalist hellscape haha but for me, personally, I find my mental health improves when I am working, though of course your mileage may vary…” And on the one hand, I get it, because for every person trying to express “working makes me feel better” this way there are probably twenty rise-and-grind influencers out there going “if you’re in debt it’s because you have failure mindset which is your fault you parasite.”
But on the other hand, it’s like… we all know accomplishing something makes us happier! Even if it’s just building a model London out of toothpicks! Actually I’m not sure why I said “just.” A model London out of toothpicks would be impressive.
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Another Sargent hater: Walter Sickert, who wrote a whole piece against “Sargentolatry.” This one was actually pretty funny because I recently finished reading Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, in which Sickert features pretty unflatteringly. You can’t distract me Sickert—you have blood on your hands.…
kind of Taylor-coded… if u think about it…
Oddly, they are unrelated to the Wertheimer family that would be (unsuccessfully) villainized and prosecuted by Coco Chanel. (Imagine having a legal claim so bogus that even the Nazi regime has to be like sorry, we don’t have the ability to take away the property of these Jews.)
It’s not clear that these “facts” will even be true, only so lurid that they will make future intimacy impossible.
Not that it matters in this kind of movie, but it’s pretty clearly self-defense. I think she could get off with manslaughter at the worst.
If nothing else, the movie has some great lines; Rosalind Russell’s rival in love says of her that the problem is “she’s here today and here tomorrow.”
One thing she is, interestingly, not haunted by is her age—it’s not “aging actress desperately grasps at last chance for love” etc. Refreshing!
kind of Taylor-coded… if u think about it…
It’s real and it’s… something…?
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I am a normie lib (because I refuse to spend time reading books about economics).
Obviously, there were lots of writers preserving this distinction with care before 2016 and continued to do so after, but there were also many writers and podcasters etc for whom “liberalism” became essentially “the scolding mom that lives in my head.”
Ask Me How I Know
Nice bit about virtue and the aversion we all have to apparent virtue that might not be true virtue. FWIW, this may be a particularly Christian perspective, as Jesus in the Gospels spends a lot of time attacking other Jews as "actors" (Gr. hypocriteis) for demonstrably following the Law of Moses. As someone with a very Christian upbringing, this caused no end of trouble for me, since I was measuring my virtue by my ability to be utterly consistent in what virtuous conduct I was capable of (not much, when I was younger).
In retrospect, this kind of thing seems pretty culty on Jesus' part, and not a particularly good way of evaluating someone's conduct. The older I get, the more it makes sense to me to evaluate people's conduct in independent spheres of life, and recognize that not everyone is good at everything. If you work hard, and are thrifty, and build up a successful business, that's a good thing, with its own reward. If you get mad that there are poor people who need help from charities or the state, then you're not a good person in that respect. Yes, there's a logical consistency in your choices and the vices you ascribe to others, but it's also a virtue to do things for people when they are suffering, and you're doing the opposite.
The Wills quote made me think of Diderot's book "Rameau's Nephew" which seems like something you might enjoy. If you follow John Ganz, I'm sure he has written about it, because Hegel draws on it in the Phenomenology. The book itself is very accessible, but it's written at this point where there's still a royal court, and people with sinecures and others living by earning a place at the tables of those with wealth. Rameau's nephew is one of those parasites (this is the original meaning of the word) and talks about the ups and downs of a life where being cancelled means no meals for the foreseeable future. The narrator takes the position that it's much more satisfying to rise early, work hard, and earn a living for yourself. The pleasure of the book arises from the fact that the narrator is so boring in comparison to Rameau's nephew, who sounds like a person today who hates their job. Every mode of living has its risks and rewards, Enlightenment liberalism was never going to fix everything, but (pace Wills) Catholicism certainly won't.
If you ever get a chance to write a capsule review of Moore and Cambell's "From Hell", I would love to read it. I feel like it's the comic book with the best claim to being a work of art for the ages. I have no idea how it reads to someone who's not a comic-book person, though. I read what you wrote a while back about feeling like the pictures get in the way of enjoying the writing - if that's still the case, you might try reading Bill Griffith's book on Ernie Bushmiller and "Nancy". Bushmiller's "Nancy" comic has the virtue of being the most efficient comic ever produced - Spiegelman once said that it takes more energy to avoid reading a "Nancy" strip than to read it - and Griffith reproduces a bunch of excellent examples, with explanations of how they work. It's a detailed explanation of how to read comics, using the comics that are the easiest to read, and that can only be read as comics.
In his new memoir, Daniel Handler mentions putting "DB" in margins as he edits for "Do Better." (He originally got this as the main, frequent annotation to a screenplay draft)