By Roberta Silman

Joan Acocella is more than a critic. She is a thinker, writing at a time when thinkers are not valued much, when exegesis in places other than scholarly journals sometimes seems like a lost art.

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella. Pantheon, 524 pages, $30

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays by Joan Acocella. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 354 pages, $35

Moving the Moon, A Night at the Acropolis Museum by Andrea Marcolongo. Translated from the Italian by Will Schutt. Europa, 142 pages, $22

It has been a busy summer here in the Berkshires and I apologize for the hiatus. However, now that all the guests are gone and the performances at Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow and the theaters are mostly over, we have to take a breath and figure out how to go forward until the election. I would recommend reading the essays of Joan Acocella, whose work is so precise and wonderful that, while reading them, you can allay your anxieties and fears. And, possibl,y go back to the books she writes so eloquently about, and feast on those.

Acocella — who was born to a Jewish family named Ross, married a man named Acocella and had a son, then divorced and became the partner of philosopher Noel Carroll — died last January at the much too early age of 78. I first encountered her in 2000 when she wrote a little book called Willa Cather and The Politics of Criticism.  Cather is one of my literary heroes, and I have learned more from her work than, possibly, any other American writer. Just as I was getting sick of the lesbian spin on Cather’s life and work, there came, out of the blue, this beautifully written and well-argued antidote to the outpouring of narrow, sometimes hysterical feminist criticism. I became a fan, and read Acocella when she turned up as a dance critic at the New Yorker and when she began to write about writers — both there and in the New York Review of Books. One of my regrets is that I never communicated to her while she was alive how much her criticism meant to me.

The first book appeared in 2007 and is called Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints; its essays include dancers and impresarios like Suzanne Farrell, Nijinsky, and Lincoln Kirstein, as well as writers, from Joseph Roth to Philip Roth to Marguerite Yourcenar to Hilary Mantel. The two saints are Mary Magdalene — in this one I finally understood the importance of the Gnostic Gospels — and Joan of Arc. The second collection came out this year just after she died, and has the awful title of The Bloodied Nightgown, which is what she calls her first essay in the book, about Dracula. But don’t let that put you off. Both books are treasures.

Each essay starts with a book, usually a biography of a writer, but becomes much more than a review. As you read you realize that you are in the presence of a brilliant mind that has used the book she is reviewing to delve into the writer’s life and work as thoroughly as she can. The result is a series of dazzling essays that bring new, important insights into works of literature that you may or may not know. In either case, you will want to know more about the people she writes about. Her method and her confidence remind me of the work of Walter Benjamin and Edmund Wilson. And, with her wonderful sly wit, she is far more interesting than Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, or Susan Sontag. Her knowledge and erudition are staggering, and the adroit way she can put a writer or a book into a larger context is unique. In her Introduction to Twenty-Eight, she says:

As I was deciding what to include … a single theme kept coming up: difficulty, hardship. I am not referring to unhappy childhoods. It is commonly believed that a normal pattern for artists is to endure a miserable childhood and then, in their adult work, to weave that straw into gold …. But that story — early pain, conquered and converted into art — is not what interests me. My concern is the pain that came with the art-making, interfering with it, and how the artist dealt with this. 

Thus, after Acocella has read a biography of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s ill-fated daughter, she reads all that is available about this complicated family and then raises questions about what really happened. How Joyce’s poignant and agonizing love for his possibly schizophrenic daughter informed his work, affected his health, and tainted his relationship with Nora and Giorgio. And then, just as you think you have absorbed more than the mind can hold and still remain calm, Acocella opens up another door and mentions biographies whose “goal is to show that many great works of art by men were fed on the blood of women.” Suddenly we want to know more not only about Joyce but also about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and the Woolfs and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes and Vladimir and Vera Nabokov.

Another standout in that first book is about Primo Levi, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, whose mysterious death has been called a suicide. Which I have never believed. And, fortunately, Acocella agrees with me. So she explores an often wrong-headed biography of Levi by Carole Angier, and, at the same time, gives us a précis of Levi’s life and work that is the very best I have read anywhere. Here is an example of her discussing the possible suicide, which I am quoting at length to give you an idea of how seductively, yet sensibly, she presents her argument:

A problem here is that we don’t know if Levi committed suicide. As the Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta pointed out in a measured essay in the Boston Review in 1999, there is good evidence that he did and good evidence that he didn’t. In the months and weeks before his death, Levi said he was depressed, and tortured by living with his now senile mother. Nevertheless, he was full of bustle and plans. He wrote new stories, witty stories. The day before he died, he spoke with a journalist who was writing a biography of him, and suggested that they get back to work. The morning of his death, he seemed fine to those who saw him. Shortly after ten, he told his mother’s nurse that he was going down to the concierge’s lodge, and asked her to take any calls…. Then he walked onto the landing and somehow went over the bannister. Could this have been an accident? Easily, Gambetta says. The top of the railing was no higher than Levi’s waist, and the medication he was taking can cause dizziness. He could have leaned over, to look for someone on the stairs — perhaps his wife, who had gone shopping — and lost his balance. Such a scenario would solve a big problem with the suicide hypothesis: the gruesome and theatrical manner of his death. It is hard to believe that the modest Levi — who, furthermore, as a chemist, knew how to kill himself discreetly — would have chosen such a means. 

The second book is looser and more wide-ranging than the first — with essays about Dracula, the Waughs, Grimm, Job, the two Plinys, Angela Carter, Natalia Ginzburg, as well as people in popular culture like Richard Pryor, Elmore Leonard, and Edward Gorey. In the preface to this recent book Acocella addresses the now questionable principle which prevailed when both she and I were educated: “that the evaluation of art would exclude any discussion of the artist’s inner life.” She goes on:

In an early and famous statement of the rule, T.S. Eliot wrote that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It took a while for people to realize that Eliot’s exaltation of escape from personality had something to do with his miserable marriage, and that any poem, any painting, has deep-dwelling roots in the artist’s moral experience…. I was schooled by teachers who believed in Eliot’s rule … but I could not do without the life. It was too exciting to watch these people, most of them young, with no money and no prospects, find their way into art. 

None of us can do without the life. Which she weaves in an uncanny way with the work to give us essays which belong in every library that prides itself on giving the next generation a clear, trenchant look at what was important to us.

Among my favorites in this second book is her essay called “Ladies Choice,” about Louisa May Alcott:

Of certain novelists it is said that they had only one book in them, or only one outstanding book. Such novels tend to have certain things in common. They are frequently autobiographical: Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe, A Legacy, by Sybille Bedford, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. And they often have a force or a charisma, an ability to get under your skin and stay there, that other books, even many better-written books, don’t have. Some people complain that university syllabi don’t accord Little Women the status of Huckleberry Finn, which they see as its male counterpart. But no piece of literature is the counterpart of Little Women. The book is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel. 

Acocella is more than a critic.  She is a thinker, writing at a time when thinkers are not valued much, when exegesis in places other than scholarly journals sometimes seems like a lost art. The beauty of her prose is that it is so accessible, and the beauty of these essays is that she cares so passionately about these lives and the wonderful work they have given us. It is hard to accept the simple fact that she is gone.

But instead of ending this review on a plaintive note, I would like to conclude with a look at a little volume from Andrea Marcolongo, an Italian writer in her 30s who now lives in Paris and who has written two previous books called The Ingenious Language and Starting From Scratch: The Life-Changing Lessons of Aeneas. I have not read the earlier volumes, but this one, called Moving the Moon, A Night at the Acropolis Museum, arrived while I was thinking about Acocella. It is original and engaging, and made me think about those marbles, which we used to visit so often when Bob and I and our first child lived in London, in an entirely new way.

The premise is simple: Marcolongo has been invited to spend a night in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, surrounded by the “scarred beauty of the Parthenon.” So what she gives us is a meditation rather than a memoir or an essay. While she weaves the facts of her own life, how she came to study Greek and moved to France and became a writer, she is also writing about her father’s death and, most important, the theft of the beautiful Parthenon marbles, commissioned by Pericles in the Golden Age of Greece (around 450 BC) and torn from their place of origin to land in London’s British Museum, where they still reside and are known as The Elgin Marbles.

She intersperses her narrative about Lord Elgin and his wife Mary at the beginning of the 19th century with all sorts of questions about colonialism and imperialism — then, and now — and how they affect the history of art. She catalogues in great detail how this particular theft gave rise to Lord Byron’s efforts to help Greece achieve independence, and how his famous poem “The Curse of Minerva,” was, in some way, a form of redemption for that grievous theft. Here is how she puts it:

Life is written not with caresses but with scars. It’s the pages ripped out in anger that most impact our biographies.

We must kneel to misfortune with gratitude, making pain our teacher and guide. Because, as with the Parthenon, in life it doesn’t matter so much what you lose. It matters what you do with that loss.

But first you have to realize that you have lost something.

In this sense, Byron’s poem did to the afflicted spirit of the Greeks what the sun does to a field of poppies after days of rain: it made their heads turn upward. And once they straightened up, after centuries of humiliation, they finally began to demand a reckoning for all that had been lost and stolen.

It seems like a paradox. Actually, it is. With Lord Elgin, England had taken away the Parthenon marbles, never to return them again. But in the bargain England lost its most romantic poet to Greece. By condemning the theft of those marbles, Lord Byron helped lead Greece to freedom, and died for the cause. 

Marcolongo also reminds us of how much art, especially African art in the 20th century, has been appropriated by invaders and thieves. She raises questions about how museums acquire art, about why a painting like the Mona Lisa will probably remain in the Louvre forever although it was “born” in Italy. But it is those Phidian marbles that have been ripped from their place of origin that are her main concern. And this is where her classical education, which she received against all odds, stands her in such good stead. Toward the end of the book she says:

The marbles and monuments now found in European museums, far from the resin-scented Greek wind, are but a fragment of the ones lost to the predatory frenzy of the West in those years. A vast number of sculptures and fragments have been swallowed up by the black hole of history and we can’t demand justice for them now; they’re like victims whose killer hid their bodies.

A few years later, in 1821, the Greeks waged a desperate war to regain their dignity, driving out the Turks and taking back their place of honor among the nations of Europe. 

From the very start of the independence that they fought body and soul for, Greece would devote itself to tending to its archeological heritage with heroic ardor, like Antigone determined to bury her brother’s body after it had been left to the dogs.  

I think Joan Acocella would admire this new book by Andrea Marcolongo, and it cheers me to know that a young writer halfway around the world is writing about literature and history with the same fearlessness that makes me love Acocella so much.

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Roberta Silman is the author of five novels, a short story collection, and two children’s books. A forthcoming second collection of stories, called Heart-work, will come out as a paperback and ebook later this fall. Her most recent novel, Summer Lightning, has been released as a paperback, an ebook, and an audio book. Secrets and Shadows (Arts Fuse review) is in its second printing and is available on Amazon. It was chosen as one of the best Indie Books of 2018 by Kirkus and it is now available as an audio book from Alison Larkin Presents. A recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has reviewed for the New York Times and Boston Globe, and writes regularly for the Arts Fuse. More about her can be found at robertasilman.com, and she can also be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.