New Criterion articles from April 1999

New Criterion archives from April 1999

Notes & Comments: April 1999.
April 1, 1999... The one unforgivable sin The controversy surrounding the awarding of an Oscar for lifetime achievement to Elia Kazan this spring has passed. Yet the political mindset that produced this preposterous and sometimes vicious controversy...

History repeating itself: liberalism and foreign policy.
April 1, 1999... Just as there has been no genuine alternative to the liberal political tradition in America, as Louis Hartz pointed many years ago, so in foreign policy both the higher principles and the baser urges shaping America's relations with the rest of...

"No other book": Randall Jarrell's criticism.
April 1, 1999... Randall Jarrell once wrote, in praise of William Carlos Williams, "When you have read Paterson you know for the rest of your life what it is like to be a waterfall." Yet there's another way to ascertain what it is to be a phenomenon that flows,...

Eca de Queiros.
April 1, 1999... There is a photograph of the Portuguese novelist Jose Maria Eca de Queiros (184-5-1900) surrounded by his friends in a Lisbon salon in the late 1880s. They all convey a notable elegance of attire and toilette--striped pants, burnished top hats,...

Max Beckmann & the School of Paris.(Max Beckmann, Saint Louis Art Museum)
April 1, 1999... The immediate response to "Beckmann and Paris" is a classic, brow-smiting, "Of course!"(1) Setting the modern German master's paintings alongside pictures by the French artists he admired and regarded as his peers is the obvious way to think...

"Three prayers of Telemakhos".(poem)
April 1, 1999... I Father, I know this sea better than my blood. Each night the waves invade, unattended, storming this shore ceaselessly, shushing me with authority I haven't the strength to oppose. And so I wait. And for what?...

An observer of charms & hurts: Dosso of Ferrara.(Giovanni Luteri, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)
April 1, 1999... The exhibition "Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara" comes as a delightful surprise.(1) It is delightful in showing for the first time a marvelous and somewhat eccentric painter. It is a surprise because he has never been on the...

The women come & go.
April 1, 1999... When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. --T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land One of the funniest things in that comic...

Illustrations of inertia & compromise.(Review)
April 1, 1999... From James to Conrad to Forster, the loaded and fateful moral choice has always been the centerpiece of the modern novel. Sometimes, as in Lord Jim, the moment of choice is discrete and fleeting; Jim's spontaneous flight from the wreck of the...

The New Oxford Book of English Prose.(Review)
April 1, 1999... In Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Prose (1925), there is a one-paragraph selection by Arthur Clutton-Brock arguing that the cardinal virtue of poetry is love and that of prose justice. Poetry, I take Clutton-Brock at least in...

All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Timothy Steele All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. Ohio University Press, 366 pages, $34.95 cloth $16.95 paper One odd side effect of the growing interest in formal poetry over the last fifteen...

Lord Byron's Jackal.(Review)
April 1, 1999... David Crane Lord Byron's Jackal. HarperCollins UK, 398 pages, 19.99 [pounds sterling] "Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined that Shelley's should...

The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century.(Review)
April 1, 1999... David Fromkin The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century. Knopf, 253 pages, $25 Here, in a brisk but never breathless telling, is the story of man--how he came to be, how he made the world,...

Under Gemini.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Isabel Bolton Under Gemini. Steerforth Press, 133 pages, $12 paper When she was in her early sixties, Mary Britton Miller (1883-1975), who after twenty years of publishing had found no success as a lyric poet, reinvented herself as Isabel...

Zarafa.(Review)
April 1, 1999... Michael Allin Zarafa. Walker & Company, 215 pages, $22 Stately, elegant, wholly benign, all neck and spots and huge brown eyes, the giraffe strides silently through our consciousness from earliest childhood on. Any five-year-old master of...

Repeating the old lies.(biography)
April 1, 1999... As a biographer, I'm often more puzzled than enlightened by personal interviews. Establishing the facts is tricky enough, and the truth can be elusive. The people I talk to may be old, in frail health, or have failing memories. They sometimes...