Marcel Proust: Breaking the Bonds of Time

The Prisoner by Marcel Proust. Translated by Carol Clark. 384 pp. Penguin Classics

The Fugitive by Marcel Proust. Translated by Peter Collier. 271 pp. Penguin Classics

Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. Translated by Ian Patterson. 374 pp. Penguin Classics.

(Note: The Prisoner and The Fugitive are combined in one volume. The two books shown are British imports, not yet available from Penguin Classics in the U.S. Prices may vary.)

“The Prisoner” and “The Captive,” the fifth and sixth volumes of “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, are also collectively known as the Albertine novel. Both share the unhappy theme of the first book, “Swann’s Way”: the role of jealousy as the prime motivator of love. In “Swann In Love,” the dilettante Charles Swann is obsessed with Odette de Crecy, known for her loose morals. The more she stays aloof from Swann, the more he pursues her. In “The Prisoner” and “The Fugitive,” Marcel, the narrator, is living with Albertine, a woman he met in volume three, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” while vacationing during the summer with his grandmother at a seaside hotel in Balbec.

Marcel is consumed with hints and allegations that Albertine is a lesbian. He interrogates others regarding her past, restricts where she goes and whom she sees, and basically keeps her as a captive in his apartment in Paris. Though he is the captor, he becomes a captive himself in the same setting. Once she is his captive, his jealousy abates somewhat and he resolves to leave her–only to find that she has left first. While Albertine’s death through a horse-riding accident ends their tortured affair, Marcel continues with his posthumous investigation of her lesbian afffairs.

In the final volume, “Finding Time Again,” Marcel has gotten over Albertine and is living in Paris, suffering from bombardment during WWI. In addition to the war, the theme of mortality is starkly rendered at a ball he attends, populated by figures he has not seen for many years. At first, he believes that he must be at a costume ball, since he cannot recognize anyone. Soon, though, he realizes how everyone has deteriorated due to the ravages of time.  

What, then, rescues the narrator from the cycle of time and enables him to find it again? He has a number of experiences toward the end that resemble the famous opening episode of “In Search of Lost Time,” when he has tea and madeleine and, by a process of association, sees the entire town of Combray spring up before him. The past is connected with the present and experienced again, proving that it has never left him. Further, through deciding to write the book that we have just finished, he will also recover his entire past. Proust’s narrative, then, comes full circle and is self-contained.

Written in memory of my mother, Dorothy Tone (1923-2006), who introduced me to the writings of Proust and an entire world of art and literature.

"The Village": An Elegy for America's Artistic Center

The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues by John Strausbaugh. Illustrated. 624 pp. Ecco. $17.99 (paperback)

Sitting on a bench at Washington Square Park, having an espresso at Caffe Reggio, listening to music at the Bitter End, and wandering Cornelia, Jones, Barrow, and other winding streets that don’t follow Manhattan’s grid, one can almost imagine that Greenwich Village remains a center of bohemia and artistic experimentation. Armed with a good walking guide, one can visit the spots associated with famous artists and movements. That Village no longer exists, a reality that John Strausbaugh ruefully acknowledges in his outstanding history.

Strausbaugh’s narrative is encyclopedic in scope and teeming with Village characters, major and minor. Starting his narrative at a time four centuries ago as Manhattan gradually developed from its southernmost reaches, he quickly moves into the bohemian movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Marxism, Freudianism, free love, women’s emancipation and avant-garde art held sway. Every cultural and political movement is accounted for, as the Village gained a reputation as a countercultural haven: the New York School of abstract expressionists, the Bebop jazz musicians, the Beat writers, the folk-music scene, the ‘60s radicals, and the gay liberation movement. Along the way, we meet legendary figures: Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, John Reed, W.H. Auden, Jackson Pollock, Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs. We also stop in at legendary writers’ bars such as the Lion’s Inn and the Whitehorse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. And, of course, there are storied music venues, whether the Village Gate for jazz or Gerde’s Folk City for folk.

This captivating history reaches a melancholy climax, one recognized by anyone who has witnessed the Village’s contemporary evolution. The author recaptures the long history when the Village was a magnet for young artists and writers. Now, it’s affordable only to investment bankers and corporate lawyers, as “…skyrocketing prices drove resident bohemians and artists out of the Village…” This “shiny and new” gentrified area of upscale shops and restaurants is a far cry from a Village once known for its artistic and cultural experimentation and political dissent. Strausbaugh’s powerful history reminds us of those traditions and celebrates them, in an outstanding narrative that is ultimately elegiac.

“Love & Mercy”: Inside Brian Wilson

Listening to the early Beach Boys, no one would realize the anguish and the genius that made up Brian Wilson. His songs about surfing, the beach and hot rods played into the stereotype of young Southern Californians in the early- to mid-1960s. The young Brian (Paul Dano) wrote about this life, but did not live it. He was abused by his father (Bill Camp), heard sounds in his head, and was eventually too anxious to tour with the band. While the group took off for Japan, the fragile Brian stayed back and promised to come up with a great new repertoire.

 Brian was tremendously impressed with The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” and responded with compositions that made up another classic rock album, “Pet Sounds,” which, in turn, inspired The Beatles. The rest of the Beach Boys were puzzled by Brian’s experimental new album; cousin and band member Mike Love was openly hostile. He was unimpressed by the fact that the critics loved it and, as did fans in England. Sales were relatively low in America and Love did not want to disrupt the formula. Brian, however, did not want to continue with the same sun and fun themes.

 “Love & Mercy” switches back and forth between the young Brian and the older man (John Cusack), who added drugs to his toxic psychic issues. At this point, he was on the verge of complete mental collapse and controlled by a lunatic psychologist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). He meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a Cadillac dealer and an exceptionally understanding woman who falls in love with Brian and defeats Landy through legal means.

 Whether encountering the humiliations of his father, the lack of support by his band, and the regimen imposed by his psychologist, Brian is a passive character without the resolve to push back. He is liberated only by Ledbetter, the woman who became his wife. Brian is fulfilled and alive only in the studio, where he can collaborate with musicians and create the sounds he hears within. As “Love & Mercy” shifts seamlessly back and forth between the young and older Brian, it also movingly portrays both his torments and the innovations that made him one of rock’s creative geniuses.

“Richard Estes: Painting New York City” at the Museum of Arts and Design

Richard Estes is one of the leading artists in the photorealist movement, which dates back to the 1960s and 1970s. As is clear from a current exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design, he focuses on New York City in his paintings, which are so detailed that they look like photographs. This impression is deceptive; actually, Estes takes a number of photos of a scene and shifts objects before working on a composition.

The result is always a remarkable study of light, shadows and, especially, multiple window reflections.  Estes’ photorealism, however, is related to realism as virtual reality is related to reality. Those who live here will not recognize this New York City. Many of the scenes have few if any people. The surfaces are slick, shiny, clean and antiseptic. Estes’ superb technical skills are put to the service of a cold vision. In contrast, the artist Red Grooms, for all the cartoon-like aspect of his work, presents the city as raucous and filled with a wild variety of humanity. His is ultimately the more realistic, lived-in vision.

The museum takes a unique perspective on Estes as a craftsman. In emphasizing his creative process, the exhibition presents the photos, silkscreens and woodcuts that are the raw materials of Estes’ art.

Above: "Columbus Circle Looking North," 2009

“Richard Estes: Painting New York City” continues through September 20, 2015, at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, NYC, 212-299-7777, www.madmuseum.org

"Mac Conner: A New York Life" at Museum of the City of New York

Ads in The New Yorker and the New York Times for the Mac Conner exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York associate him with the "Mad Men" television series with good reason. Conner, 100 years old, is an illustrator who work for ads and magazines, including Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, reflected the American culture of the '40s, '50s and 60s. Illustrators such as Conner played an integral role in postwar ads and in women's magazine stories (see illustration above for "Let's Take a Trip Up the Nile," This Week Magazine, November 5, 1950). Conner's art celebrated postwar materialism and reinforced traditional sex roles, yet it took a darker turn as the '50s progressed and "the age of anxiety became a familiar theme. He illustrated stories dealing with juvenile delinquency (the focus of the film "Blackboard Jungle, 1955) and troubled relations between men and women. During the '60s, images depicting an exclusively white America and happy housewives became increasingly dated with the civil rights and women's movements; however, Conner richly documented an entire American cultural period as depicted in this fascinating exhibit.

"Mac Conner: A New York Life" continues through February 1, 2015, at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street), NYC, 212, 534-1672, www.mcny.org

Byzantium By The Hudson: "New Art City" by Jed Perl

New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century by Jed Perl. 641 pp. Vintage. $18.95 (paperback)

A renaissance took place during the 1950s in downtown Manhattan, when the abstract expressionists held sway. Jed Perl captures a period when artists painted and exhibited in Greenwich Village; drank at the Cedar Tavern; argued at their forum, The Club; and found success at uptown galleries and the Museum of Modern Art.

Younger painters came to New York to learn from older abstract artists and teachers such as Hans Hoffman and from each other. Painter Willem de Kooning said that that New York was “really like a Byzantine city.” Perl describes the atmosphere: “Tenth Street… was a village within the metropolis, and artists and writers… could go for days and weeks without setting foot outside their own sometimes overstimulating neighborhood.”

Perl emphasizes the artists’ sense of individuality. They were part of a movement, but they refused “to accept any style… that had been thrust upon them.” These artistic rebels were ambivalent about their eventual commercial success and new public roles. They worried about a loss of independence and wondered if the museums had more influence over the direction of modern art than they did.

Qualms about commercialism did not bother the Pop artists who came along in the 1960s. In Andy Warhol’s paintings of celebrities, dollar bills and Campbell’s soup cans, we instead see a deadpan reflection of American commercialism. Painter Al Held spoke for others when he rejected the earlier painters’ subjectivity: “The Abstract Expressionists covered everything up with this sensibility and feeling…” For Held, there was to be “No spiritual overlay.”

A book of this breadth takes in more than Abstract Expressionism and Pop; there are realists, collagists, minimalists and assemblage sculptors, along with the influential critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Perl’s emphases are sometimes questionable; he treats Hoffman and de Kooning in depth, while giving short shrift to Pollock, Rothko and Kline. The closing chapter on the empiricism of painter Fairfield Porter and minimalist sculptor Donald Judd seems too narrowly focused. These reservations, however, are set against the strength of this study as a whole; in New Art City, Jed Perl fully lives up to his ambitious goal, to depict the artistic excitement, crosscurrents and innovation that made New York the artistic capital of the world for two decades.

"The Postmodern Turn": Explaining the Loss of Explanations

The Postmodern Turn by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Illustrated. 306 pp. Guilford. $18.95 (paperback)

For readers new to postmodernism, the last chapter of "The Postmodern Turn" should have been the first. True, the first chapter refers to the end of grand narratives and the loss of faith in universal explanations found in postmodern theory. It is in the last chapter, however, that the major themes of postmodernism are fully outlined: the rejection of unification in favor of complexity; the renunciation of fixed meaning for ambiguity; the abandonment of truth for relativity, and the breakdown of rigid boundaries of knowledge for interdisciplinary study.

"The Postmodern Turn" delineates the difference between the modern and the postmodern, while asserting that we are living in a transitional period between the two. Modernism saw the artist as an isolated genius whose creations were original and monumental and whose purity of style was rooted in the "high arts." These pillars of modernism are denied in postmodern literature: "Instead of deep content, grand themes and moral lessons...postmodernists...are primarily concerned with the form and play of language..." 

The grand spiritual and emotional themes in the modernist abstract expressionist painting of the 1950s were forsaken by pop artist Andy Warhol, who emphasized commercial culture, and by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who appropriated everyday objects and broke the barriers between "high" and "low" art. In architecture, the purity of the International Style, characterized by minimalist glass and steel boxes, gave way to buildings that eclectically borrowed from different periods. In the sciences, quantum physics and chaos theory introduced a measure of indeterminacy in place of a mechanistic view of the universe.

Politically, the rejection of universal schemes to save humanity resulted in a fragmentation of social movements. In identity politics, previously marginalized groups, such as gays, minorities and women, asserted their own historical narrative: "Identity politics bears the influence of postmodern theory, which is evident in its critique of modern reductionism, abstract universalism, and essentialism, as well as in its use of multiperspectival strategies that legitimate multiple political voices."

Best and Kellner also emphasize how the existentialists, with their attack on absolutism in philosophy, were precursors to the postmodern thinkers. The authors provide illuminating insights into the ways in which postmodernism evolved into a contemporary cultural force.

"The Mayor of MacDougal Street" by Dave Van Ronk

The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk. 246 pp. DaCapo Press

Years ago, I was listening to a folksinger play in Washington Square Park and noticed a sign on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists." An adolescent, I wondered what that meant. In "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," the late folk and blues artist Dave Van Ronk wrote that this sign was famously placed on the guitar of Woody Guthrie. While I highly doubt that I actually saw Guthrie, the anecdote reflects the fact that anyone who had the slightest connection to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the late 1950s to the mid 1960s will find something to spark a memory in this finely detailed book.

The book sat on my shelves for too many years until I was inspired to read it after seeing the film "Inside Llewyn Davis." The Coen brothers, who directed the film, adapted a number of scenes from this account of the life of Van Ronk, who remained a prominent member of the Village folk scene for decades. He earned his moniker, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," and there is now a Dave Van Ronk Street, dedicated in 2004, in Greenwich Village. His autobiography, written with Elijah Wald, reflects the fact that, as Bob Dylan put it, "In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme." Van Ronk's deep involvement in the folk scene is reflected in the fact that he knew everyone: Dylan; the recently departed Pete Seeger; Joan Baez; Tom Paxton; Joni Mitchell; Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs, and more. Concomitant with the folk scene was an acoustic blues revival, and Van Ronk formed friendships with its prominent African-American artists: the Reverend Gary Davis, Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Mississippi John Hurt. And, of course, Van Ronk performed and attended concerts at all of the legendary Village folk clubs and coffee houses: the Kettle of Fish, Gerde's Folk City, the Cafe Bizarre,  the Cafe Wha? and the Bitter End.

Van Ronk was both an entertaining raconteur and a contrarian. A lifelong leftist, he viewed the New Left of the 1960s as "a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on." He disparaged Dylan's lyrics when the latter went electric for their "unintelligibility." Van Ronk's assessment of the music of the 1960s, however, was too dismissive. He allowed that the Beatles were "sweet and amusing and had some very interesting ideas." Regarding the folk period itself, he wrote, "...very little of what got put down had much permanent value." If that is the case, why write this book? He also wrote, "...we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell–but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington." In the folk genre, such artists are indeed comparable to the classical and jazz greats. Regardless, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street is incomparable as a portrait of a folk music era and scene that, despite Van Ronk's dissension, produced artists and music of lasting influence.