Dennis Hollingsworth

Nice Guys Finish Last

This morning's perusal of Arts and Letter's Daily (a link I've lost in the hub bub of lost data -bookmarks- several months ago) reveals a deep well of gems. This one in particular reminds me of an abiding thought that I have been tending that history (and I extend this to art history) is a collection of stories of people behaving badly. Think about it. The Bible is chock-a-block with this stuff. Thucydides wouldn't be who he is/was if it weren't for the knuckleheads in Sparta. I read Plutarch's Lives of Alexander as a kid, talk about high jinks back in the day. (And today. I remember thinking how people haven't changed a bit since 300 B.C.). Ditto, Salinger's Holden Caulfield. A list would go on and on.

So, imagine my delight as I clicked on this link:

Michael Dirda
An acclaimed Spanish novelist offers quirky portraits of famous writers.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, February 5, 2006; BW15

WRITTEN LIVES

By Javier Mar?as

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

New Directions. 200 pp. $22.95

It's difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits of Rimbaud, Turgenev, Rilke, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes and a dozen other literary eminences. "The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors," writes the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Mar?as, "is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters." That wry sense of amusement characterizes Mar?as's approach. Though he acknowledges the artistic greatness of his chosen writers, he prefers to point out and relish their personal oddities, all those quirks, eccentricities and obsessions that make them neurotically and sometimes pitiably human.

Note too, that the reviewer, Michael Dirda, is a Spanaird. This compelled me to Google (damn them for letting China off he hook recently) the term "picaro", which led me to this rich link (8 pages, I'm so excited).

I'm fingering my "One-Click" Amazon button. Then, I came across this paragraph which makes me think of the act of blogging itself:

The chapter on the self-important Mann is a comic masterpiece:

"Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: 'Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!' "

(Ahem.)

Well. I've always said that temerity is an occupational hazard for the creative types.