Day 1: The Arrival

Let’s start at the very beginning: a very good place to start. In the introduction to Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella writes that she originally misunderstood her own motives for selecting the essays to republish in this collection:

I thought I was simply choosing the pieces that I liked best, and wanted to send out into the world again. But as I read through them, a single theme kept coming up: difficulty, hardship. I am not referring to unhappy childhoods. … [T]hat 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.

In that first paragraph she draws the map that will guide most of the essays in the book: they will be sure-footed, elegant biographical studies (often disguised as book reviews; three of them originally appeared in the New York Review of Books and one is the preface to the New York Review Books Classics edition of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity), particularly focused not on the alchemy that transmutes base suffering into shining art, but rather on the human fallout of meeting the demands of art. Acocella wants to counter Edmund Wilson’s image of the artist as Philoctetes, afflicted at once with great talent and isolating stigma. Instead, she plans to foreground what she calls “ego strength”—“meaning (among other things) ordinary, Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment”—and the way possessing that ego strength can carry an artist to more successful times through periods that crush those who lack it.

It’s an interesting project, and if it sounds like it might become a bit sentimental, Acocella’s tone reassures me that it won’t. Her voice is lucid and controlled, and she is clearly unafraid to engage with her material, to make judgments when appropriate, and to communicate those judgments with confidence. This introduction makes me want to keep reading (mission accomplished!), but it also makes me want to sit down with Acocella over coffee and talk art and literature; she sounds like a blast.