Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Robert Morgan (LSU Press): “Poe knew only love, love, love,” wrote D. H. Lawrence; “He died wanting more love, and love killed him.” I reckon that “only” is more Lawrence’s than Poe’s—the Englishman also called love “the prime cause of tuberculosis”—but the fact remains that, as a chronicle of erotic dysfunction, Poe’s biography makes Sons and Lovers look like The Seven Storey Mountain. In the new Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Morgan counts roughly a dozen women of amatory consequence in the Virginian’s life, beginning with his English-born mother, Eliza Arnold Poe, who died before he turned three, and running through the unattainable Sarah Elmira Royster, to whom he was twice engaged twenty-three years apart. Morgan’s achievement, then, is to square Poe in love with Poe the polymath—the poet, author, editor, and critic, of course, but also the mystic, the scientist, the alcoholic, and the landscape gardener. “There is no explanation for genius,” as Morgan cautions, but as in Poe’s macabre tales, the effect is more gripping than the cause. —RE
“Yamamoto Masao: Ambrotypes” at Yancey Richardson, New York (through January 6): “So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination,” wrote the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki all the way back in 1933. The remark comes from his essay “In Praise of Shadows,” a short credo celebrating what he considered to be Japan’s unrivaled treatment of light and shadow in art; in his estimation, Japanese art alone is capable of producing highlights of “other-worldly whiteness” and shadows possessing “immutable tranquility.” Whether Tanizaki is correct about this exclusivity is a question for another day, but such intense and mysterious contrasts of light and shadow are indeed on display in Yamamoto Masao’s “Ambrotypes” at Yancey Richardson, New York. Quiet and poetic, the contemporary photographer’s minute works on glass plates are high in drama and detail, but intimate nonetheless. See them before the show closes this Saturday. —LL
“Stars & Stripes,” performed by the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, New York (January 8): Most composers season their works with musical quotations only sparingly; Charles Ives grabbed the salt mill and twisted away, interpolating (often simultaneously) Protestant hymns, brass-band marches, Stephen Foster songs, and street noises into his tangled soundscapes. It turns out such experimentation was in the blood: Ives’s father was a bandleader in Danbury, Connecticut, and had a habit of stationing his ensembles at the four corners of the town park, ordering them to converge at a central point, each playing a separate tune. On the subject of fours, perhaps it’s fitting that Charles’s first mature work of length is his String Quartet No. 1 (1896), which runs the gamut of Protestant hymns, including, to beautiful effect, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” This coming Monday at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, hear the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players in this fine introduction to Ives together with other works by American composers, including Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, George Gershwin, Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, and Amy Beach. It’s an American potpourri of which Ives would approve. —IS
A Villa in Tuscany: Writers, Aristocrats and a Life with Hugh Honour and John Fleming, by Susanna Johnston (Gibson Square): Shelley called Italy the “Paradise of exiles,” and so it was for the British-born art historians Hugh Honour (1927–2016) and John Fleming (1919–2001), who made a rackety but alluring life for themselves, first as joint amanuenses to the aging man of letters Percy Lubbock, and later as chatelains of the Villa Marchio, just outside the Tuscan city of Lucca. Susanna Johnston, who died last year, was a lifelong friend of Honour and Fleming, and her poignant memoir of their times together, A Villa in Tuscany, out now in England and coming soon in America, is a worthy tribute to a fascinating duo. Look out for a full review from me in a forthcoming issue of The New Criterion. —BR
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #83: Christmas carols (& other timely music).” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
Dispatch:
“Blake reconsidered,” by Julia Friedman. On “William Blake: Visionary” at the Getty Center, Los Angeles.
From the Archives:
“Scenes of a Russian winter,” by William Jay Smith (April 1996). On a Russian winter journey of an American Fulbright professor at Moscow State University, lecturing on contemporary American poetry.