Everything works perfectly in Bartlett Sher’s brilliant new production of My Fair Lady. The sets (by Michael Yeargan) are wonderful; the costumes (Catherine Zuber) are splendid; and the cast, led by Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins, is first rate. But above all, the musical, so often seen before, feels entirely fresh.

Sher’s My Fair Lady is actually more faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s original concept of his play, Pygmalion, upon which the musical is based, than any production before, including the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. At the very end of the show, Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-seller instructed in how to be an upper-class lady by Henry Higgins, the gentleman scholar, proudly walks away from her self-centered control freak of a teacher. Even as Higgins persists in asking her for his slippers, she “sweeps out,” as Shaw had directed, to claim her independence.

Ambrose’s spirited Eliza might seem like an anachronism, tailored to an audience suffused with #MeToo sentiments. And Hadden-Paton’s Higgins might be seen as a typical “mansplainer” who just doesn’t get how times have changed. But Ambrose comes much closer to Shaw’s Eliza than Hepburn, or any of her predecessors in the role.

Shaw’s ideal of female emancipation was, in fact, sabotaged from the very beginning. In the first London production in 1914, to the disgust of the author, Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing Higgins gives Eliza (Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell) a loving look, intimating a happy life together. When the movie of Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, was made in 1938, the Hollywood producers insisted on a romantic ending, too. And a similar dose of sugar was sprinkled on the conclusion of the Harrison-Hepburn film.

Like the musical, Shaw’s play, too, was based on an older story, the Greek myth about Galatea, the milk-white beauty sculpted by Pygmalion of Cyprus. After carving his perfect woman out of ivory, he falls in love with her. Answering his prayers, Aphrodite gives her life, and the artist and his feminine ideal live as man and wife. This is a story that could signify many things, but one of the themes is artistic obsession, about a man who only has eyes for his own creation.

Shaw’s main interest, on the other hand, was in class and the role of language in defining social rank in Britain. The art of Henry Higgins, as obsessed as the Greek Pygmalion, is to place people by their accents with absolute precision. He can tell by any given English accent not only in which town someone is born, but exactly where in that town. And naturally, he can detect every shade of social class. When he hears Eliza for the first time, selling flowers in Covent Garden, he can even tell which street she grew up in. His loyal companion, Colonel Pickering, played in the current production by Allan Corduner, is immediately pinned down to his school, university, and last place of residence: Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

This is something of a joke, of course, but only up to a point. Until quite recently, and perhaps to some extent still, British people were cursed or privileged by their class. The right or wrong accent, like the right shoes or the wrong tie, could determine a person’s life. Language shaped one’s identity.

That Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, two of the greatest theatrical satirists of British class, were both Irish is surely no coincidence. They had the acid eyes of born outsiders. Wilde was a libertarian dandy, who ridiculed British conventions. Shaw was a fierce critic of class snobbery, and a defender of women’s rights at a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote.

Higgins, too, in all his incarnations, including Hadden-Paton’s, is a nonconformist of a kind, and rather like Pygmalion, an artist in love with his own creations. His sculpture, as it were, of the ideal woman is thus Eliza. But he also talks a great deal about the human soul, even as he refuses to recognize one in Eliza.

One of the most moving scenes, in the movies, as well as in the current production, is the private celebration after the ball, where Eliza manages to pass for the first time as a grand lady. Higgins is toasted by all his servants: “Congratulations, Professor Higgins, for your glorious victory.” And Pickering sings:

You did it! You did it! You did it!
They thought she was ecstatic
And so damned Aristocratic,
And they never knew that you did it!

All the while, Eliza sits in a corner, utterly ignored, as though she had played no active part in her transformation from a flower girl to a lady, as though she were nothing but Higgins’s artifact. This is also the moment of her rebellion. She throws a fit and pelts Higgins with his precious slippers.

The question is what happens to the human soul when social identity changes. Eliza speaks a new language and has a new set of manners, to match her new jewels and clothes. That Cecil Beaton, who designed the clothes and the sets for the movie of My Fair Lady, will forever be associated with the musical is entirely justified, for the look tells the story. The ladies are so tightly cocooned in their extravagant and fanciful gowns that they appear to be imprisoned in them; evening dress as a kind of bondage.

But who is Eliza now? Where is her soul? Like Pygmalion, though with much less ardor, Higgins falls in love with her, as he thinks: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” But it is not her soul that he loves, but only the well-spoken, beautifully dressed, fine-mannered figure that he shaped.

To end the play, or film, or musical, with the artist and his creation falling into romantic bliss is indeed a betrayal of Shaw’s intentions. For to be free, in the way Shaw wanted women to be free, Eliza has to break with Higgins. And Higgins is too much of an artist to be content with being tied down in a conventional marriage anyway. His famous song, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” in which he advises, “Let a woman in your life, and you invite eternal strife,” may sound like the expression of a typical male chauvinist. And in a way, that is just what it is. But it is also the sentiment of a man who can only live for his work.

And so, they must part ways. Shaw actually wrote an alternative ending for the movie with Leslie Howard. In that version, which the producers rejected, Eliza marries the penniless upper-class twit Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and runs her own flower shop. This, too, seems unsatisfactory. It is much better to turn around and walk away, as Lauren Ambrose does with such panache.

My Fair Lady, directed by Bartlett Sher (book by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe), is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York, through January 2019.

The post Doolittle Done Well appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin are good friends. This is not surprising, since the seventy-seven-year-old Japanese photographer and the younger American are engaged in something similar: they make an art out of chronicling their lives in photographs, aiming at a raw kind of authenticity, which often involves sexual practices outside the conventional bounds of respectability. Araki spent a lot of time with the prostitutes, masseuses, and “adult” models of the Tokyo demi-monde, while Goldin made her name with pictures of her gay and trans friends in downtown Manhattan.

Of the two, Goldin exposes herself more boldly (one of her most famous images is of her own battered face after a beating by her lover). Araki did take some very personal photographs, currently displayed in an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Sex, of his wife Yoko during their honeymoon in 1971, including pictures of them having sex, and of her death from cancer less than twenty years later. But this work is exceptional—perhaps the most moving he ever made—and the kind of self-exposure seen in Goldin’s harrowing self-portrait is largely absent from Araki’s art.

Araki is not, however, shy about his sexual predilections, recorded in thousands of pictures of naked women tied up in ropes, or spreading their legs, or writhing on hotel beds. A number of photographs, also in the current exhibition, of a long-term lover named Kaori show her in various nude poses, over which Araki has splashed paint meant to evoke jets of sperm. Araki proudly talks about having sex with most of his models. He likes breaking down the border between himself and his subjects, and sometimes will hand the camera to one of his models and become a subject himself. But whenever he appears in a photograph, he is posing, mugging, or (in one typical example in the show) holding a beer bottle between his thighs, while pretending to have an orgasm.

If this is authenticity, it is a stylized, theatrical form of authenticity. His mode is not confessional in the way Goldin’s is. Araki is not interested in showing his most intimate feelings. He is a showman as much as a photographer. His round face, fluffy hair, odd spectacles, T-shirts, and colored suspenders, instantly recognizable in Japan, are now part of his brand, which he promotes in published diaries and endless interviews. Since Araki claims to do little else but take pictures, from the moment he gets up in the morning till he falls asleep at night, the pictures are records of his life. But that life looks as staged as many of his photographs.

Although Araki has published hundreds of books, he is not a versatile photographer. He really has only two main subjects: Tokyo, his native city, and sex. Some of his Tokyo pictures are beautiful, even poetic. A few are on display in the Museum of Sex: a moody black-and-white view of the urban landscape at twilight, a few street scenes revealing his nostalgia for the city of his childhood, which has almost entirely disappeared.

But it is his other obsession that is mainly on show in New York. It might seem a bit of a comedown for a world-famous photographer to have an exhibition at a museum that caters mostly to the prurient end of the tourist trade, especially after having had major shows at the Musée Guimet in Paris and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. But Araki is the least snobbish of artists. The distinctions between high and low culture, or art and commerce, do not much interest him. In Japan, he has published pictures in some quite raunchy magazines.

The only tacky aspect of an otherwise well-curated, sophisticated exhibition is the entrance: a dark corridor decorated with a kind of spider web of ropes that would be more appropriate in a seedy sex club. I could have done without the piped-in music, too.

Sex is, of course, an endlessly fascinating subject. Araki’s obsessive quest for the mysteries of erotic desire, not only expressed in his photographs of nudes, but also in lubricious close-ups of flowers and fruits, could be seen as a lust for life and defiance of death. Some of these pictures are beautifully composed and printed, and some are rough and scattershot. One wall is covered in Polaroid photos, rather like Andy Warhol’s pictures of his friends and models, except that Araki’s show a compulsive interest in female anatomy.

Genitalia, as the source of life, are literally objects of worship in many Japanese Shinto shrines. But there is something melancholy about a number of Araki’s nudes; something frozen, almost corpse-like about the women trussed up in ropes staring at the camera with expressionless faces. The waxen face of his wife Yoko in her casket comes to mind. Then there are those odd plastic models of lizards and dinosaurs that Araki likes to place on the naked bodies of women in his pictures, adding another touch of morbidity.

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Komari from “L’Amant d’août” (“Suicide in Tokyo”), 2002

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Kinbaku (Bondage), 1979

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Tokyo Comedy, 1997

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Nobuyoshi Araki: Winter Journey, 1989–1990/2005

But to criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point. When the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was prosecuted in the 1970s for obscenity after stills from his erotic masterpiece, In the Realm of the Senses, were published, his defense was: “So, what’s wrong with obscenity?”

The point of Oshima’s movie, and of Araki’s pictures, is a refusal to be constrained by rules of social respectability or good taste when it comes to sexual passion. Oshima’s aim was to see whether he could make an art film out of hardcore porn. Araki doesn’t make such high-flown claims for his work. To him, the photos are an extension of his life. Since much of life is about seeking erotic satisfaction, his pictures reflect that.

Displayed alongside Araki’s photographs at the Museum of Sex are a few examples of Shunga, the erotic woodcuts popular in Edo Period Japan (1603–1868), pictures of courtesans and their clients having sex in various ways, usually displaying huge penises penetrating capacious vulvas. These, too, have something to do with the fertility cults of Shinto, but they were also an expression of artistic rebellion. Political protest against the highly authoritarian Shoguns was far too dangerous. The alternative was to challenge social taboos. Occasionally, government officials would demonstrate their authority by cracking down on erotica. They still do. Araki has been prosecuted for obscenity at least once.

One response to Araki’s work, especially in the West, and especially in our time, is to accuse him of “objectifying” women. In the strict sense that women, often in a state of undress, striking sexual poses, are the focus of his, and our, gaze, this is true. (Lest one assume that the gaze is always male, I was interested to note that most of the viewers at the Museum of Sex during my visit were young women.) But Araki maintains that his photographs are a collaborative project. As in any consensual sado-masochistic game, this requires a great deal of trust.

Some years ago, I saw an Araki show in Tokyo. Susan Sontag, who was also there, expressed her shock that young women would agree to being “degraded” in Araki’s pictures. Whereupon the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was there too, said that women were probably lining up to be photographed by him. Interviews with Araki’s models, some of which are on view at the Museum of Sex, suggest that this is true. Several women talk about feeling liberated, even loved, by the experience of sitting for Araki. One spoke of his intensity as a divine gift. It is certainly true that when Araki advertised for ordinary housewives to be photographed in his usual fashion, there was no shortage of volunteers. Several books came from these sessions. 

But not all his muses have turned out to be so contented, at least in retrospect.

Earlier this year, Kaori wrote in a blog post that she felt exploited by him over the years (separately, in 2017 a model accused Araki of inappropriate contact during a shoot that took place in 1990). Araki exhibited Kaori’s photos without telling her or giving her any credit. On one occasion, she was told to pose naked while he photographed her in front of foreign visitors. When she complained at the time, he told her, probably accurately, that the visitors had not come to see her, but to see him taking pictures. (The Museum of Sex has announced that Kaori’s statement will be incorporated into the exhibition’s wall text.)

These stories ring true. It is the way things frequently are in Japan, not only in relations between artists and models. Contracts are often shunned. Borderlines between personal favors and professional work are blurred. It is entirely possible that Araki behaved badly toward Kaori, and maybe to others, too. Artists often use their muses to excite their imaginations, and treat them shabbily once the erotic rush wears off.

One might wish that Araki had not been the self-absorbed obsessive he probably is. Very often in art and literature, it is best to separate the private person from the work. Even egotistical bastards, after all, can show tenderness in their art. But in Araki’s case, the distinction is harder to maintain—this is an artist who insists on his life being inseparable from his pictures. The life has dark sides, and his lechery might in contemporary terms be deemed inappropriate, but that is precisely what makes his art so interesting. Araki’s erotomania is what drives him: aside from the posing and self-promotion, it is the one thing that can be called absolutely authentic.

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Nobuyoshi Araki: Erotos, 2013

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Flowers, 1985

“The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki” is at the Museum of Sex, New York, through August 31.

The post Araki, Erotomaniac appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)

This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By going back into the world of his childhood, he found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and who tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists it could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas, or the later novel A Bend in the River (1979), his various books on India, or even his 1987 masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center (1984). It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his own voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world, and how he puts this in words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how people see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place, too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “The Crocodiles of Yamassoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, about how they see themselves fitting in. African Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes in a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held onto a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false mimicry. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretentions of religious fanatics, Third World mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, England, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. The man was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I am not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning India politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin in 1991, when he was being feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.) This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work up a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness, he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches his shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man asks for a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No. Let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, the visit “ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of El Dorado, a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped in vain to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By returning to the world of his childhood, Naipaul found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas or A Bend in the River, his various books on India, or even his masterpiece, The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center. It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world and how he puts this into words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how they see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, of how they see themselves fitting in. African-Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes into a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held on to a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false imitation. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretensions of religious fanatics, third-world mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. He was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I was not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning Indian politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

On Hyde Park Corner in London, facing the Duke of Wellington’s old house, where one can still see a giant sculpture of a fully nude Napoleon towering over the hall, stands a curious monument known as the Royal Artillery Memorial. A huge sculpted model of a Howitzer gun points to the sky on top of a Portland stone plinth. Around this phallic symbol of deadly force, designed in the early 1920s by Charles Sargeant Jagger and Lionel Pearson, stand a couple of bronze soldiers. And on one side lies a dead artilleryman covered by his greatcoat. The text engraved in the stone under this fallen soldier reads: “Here was a royal fellowship of death.”

The monument commemorates the 49,076 men of the Royal Regiment of Artillery who died in World War I. There has been much controversy over it ever since it was unveiled in 1925. Some of the criticism concerns the questionable taste of paying such monumental tribute to a Howitzer. It might be construed as a crude example of militarism.

In fact, however, the problems some people have had with it, especially in the years soon after the catastrophic war, were about something else. Jagger, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, wanted to inject a note of realism into his sculptures; the bronze soldiers are not idealized in any way. They look weary, hardened by bitter experience, almost dazed, like those soldiers staring at nothing in the famous Vietnam War photographs by David Douglas Duncan. And then there is the dead man under his coat.

This was not the usual way the Great War was remembered officially in Britain, Germany, or France. Abstractions—tombs of the unknown soldier and the like—were favored, or classical allegories, especially popular in Germany, of soldiers as nude Greek heroes holding up swords, or Christ-like figures expressing the beauty of sacrificial death. One of Jagger’s soldiers, leaning back with outstretched arms, could be likened to a Christ figure, but he still looks far more real than people, or at least military and civilian officials at the time, would have wished for. What the monument shows, despite the Howitzer, is not military valor, but the pathos of war.

The Royal Artillery Memorial is one of the works featured in “Aftermath,” the Tate Britain exhibition comparing the impact of the Great War on artists in Germany, Britain, and France. Of the three nations, France is least represented. The really interesting differences are between German and British artists.

As far as war memorials are concerned, Germany too had its controversies. Official monuments tended to be abstract, heroic, and focused on the sacrifice of young blood for the nation. But one of the most beautiful sculptures commemorating the war is Der Schwebende (The Floating One), by the Expressionist artist Ernst Barlach. A war veteran like Jagger, Barlach went for the antiheroic. The floating figure is an angel with hands folded on her chest and the haunted face of a mother grieving over her sons. (The face was actually modeled after the sad countenance of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose younger son died in the war.) The melancholy angel was suspended from the ceiling of a cathedral in eastern Germany in 1927, then removed by the Nazis ten years later as “degenerate art” and melted down to manufacture gun shells. (The one displayed at the Tate is cast from a copy.)

The tension between celebrating the heroic and lamenting the horrors of war was especially strong in Germany. In Britain and France, victory could make up for, or disguise, or at least mitigate the sense of loss. And everything was done to encourage this. In 1919, the British government commissioned William Orpen to do a painting in memory of the Paris Peace Conference. The original idea was to show a tomb of the unknown British soldier set in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles amid the proud figures of various Allied generals and field marshals. Instead, Orpen, who disliked the military brass, decided to paint two emaciated, half-dead ordinary soldiers flanking the tomb of their unknown comrade. The Ministry of Information refused to exhibit the painting. Only once Orpen had erased these awful specters of war was the painting finally displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London.

During the war, too, there was great official resistance to depicting anything approaching the reality of battle. One of the best British war artists, C.R.W. Nevinson, did an oil painting in 1917 entitled Paths of Glory. It shows two soldiers lying dead in the mud in front of the barbed wire of a trench they were perhaps ordered to make a dash for. The real thing undoubtedly would have looked much worse. But the picture was still banned by the military censor. A year later, Nevinson showed it anyway, covered with brown paper inscribed with the word “censored.”

National differences become particularly clear in the depiction of maimed soldiers. Thousands of men in all three countries had half their faces blown off, or had missing limbs, or were horribly disfigured by mustard gas attacks. In France, these men often appeared in public events celebrating the victory and were shown in photographs to remind people of the suffering of common soldiers. This did not happen in Britain. There is a famous series of portraits by Henry Tonks, displayed at the Tate, of men with mutilated faces, but at the time these were only used for medical purposes. It was left to German artists to produce the most gruesome images of battlefield carnage. A famous example is the series of etchings made in 1923–1924 by Otto Dix, entitled The War: rotting corpses in waterlogged trenches, skulls filled with maggots and worms, faces that are barely recognizable as human.

Inspired by Goya’s prints of wartime atrocities, Dix did these prints from memory; he had been a machine gunner on some of the worst battlefields. Whereas Tonks’s drawings were initially only seen by doctors, Dix’s etchings were published as folios and widely shown. Even the techniques of the two artists tell a story. The drawings by Tonks are in pastel colors, not so different in tone from the landscapes by genteel English watercolorists. The monochrome pictures by Dix are dark and aggressive, as though etched in a fury. Dorothy Price writes in her essay for the exhibition catalog:

Many scholars have observed how the corrosive processes involved in the etching technique, in which large holes can be bored into the plate by acid, mimics the expressive potential of Dix’s subject matter.

There is nothing like this in British or even French art. There are French paintings of ruined landscapes, like André Masson’s ochre oil painting La route de Picardie (1924), and pictures of barbed wire, trenches, and bomb craters by British war artists like Orpen, Nevinson, and Paul Nash. Some are very good: Wire (1918–1919), by Nash, for example, gives a vivid impression of the ruined landscape in Flanders or northern France. But the atmosphere is melancholic. These artists, some of whom had witnessed the same shocking scenes as Dix, lacked the ferocity of German artists.

One of the most interesting British painters of the period was Stanley Spencer. Like Nevinson, he had served in an ambulance unit on several fronts. And like so many artists of his generation all over Europe, he was marked by the war forever. But far from glorifying manly action or wallowing in the gore, Spencer related to the dead in an intimate and gently spiritual way. Dead soldiers and horses rise from their battlefield graves in The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1929). In a painting from 1922, Unveiling Cookham War Memorial, villagers in Cookham, where Spencer lived, mourn their kin as the War Memorial is unveiled (see illustration on page 84). But there is no rage in these pictures, just sadness, Christian faith, and a certain air of whimsy; while some mourners look distressed, others in their striped blazers and white ducks lounge on the sun-dappled lawn. The dead are recalled in a country at peace.

This was far from being the case in Germany, a nation that was morally unhinged and torn apart by violent revolutionaries and roaming war veterans lusting for revenge. Compare Stanley Spencer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1920) with Albert Birkle’s Cross Shouldering (Friedrichstrasse) (1924). Spencer’s Christ can barely be seen as he passes by a very English house in the High Street of Cookham, surrounded by clerics and ordinary folks, looking like angels in the moonlight. Gentle Cookham is a long way from turbulent Berlin, where the torment of Birkle’s emaciated Christ is observed with a mixture of amusement and contempt by hard-faced men and women who, in a different setting, could be among the typical crowd at a lynching. What is missing in Spencer’s art, and that of most of his peers in Britain, is the menacing air of violence.

The historian George L. Mosse, who escaped from Nazi persecution in Germany as a young man, argued that German life was brutalized by the militarism of World War I. People had become inured to death and cruelty. Men tested by the fire and steel of battle were exalted by nationalist writers such as Ernst Jünger. War veterans felt emasculated, humiliated, and useless in peacetime. Only the camaraderie of collective violence would revive their spirits. Mosse wrote in his book Fallen Soldiers, “War itself had been the great brutalizer, not merely through the experience of combat at the front, but also through the wartime relationships between officers and men, and among the men themselves.”¹

This may have been true. But why wouldn’t such relationships—and such experience—have had a similar effect on British and French men? The difference must lie in the outcome of the war. Mosse also wrote:

England and France, the victorious nations, where the transition from war to peace had been relatively smooth, were able to keep the process of brutalization largely, if not entirely, under control. Those nations like Germany which were not so fortunate saw a new ruthlessness invade their politics.

In other words, it was not so much war itself that brutalized German politics as the much rockier transition to peace. The humiliation of losing the war no doubt had something to do with this. It is harder for defeated soldiers to adapt to civilian life than victorious ones. But the militarization of German life had begun well before the war. Kaiser Wilhelm II was already spouting a lot of the belligerent and anti-Semitic rhetoric that was later taken up by the Nazis. And the contempt for democratic politics, both on the left and the right, was much greater in Germany than in Britain or France. Certainly the consequences of wartime defeat were more devastating in Germany: the economic dislocation, the moral collapse, and the harsh conditions in German cities where men and women would do anything to scrape by. No wonder that the prostitute became one of the main symbols of Weimar Period culture, especially in the visual arts.

Like the maimed veterans, war profiteers were a conspicuous presence in all the nations at war. They, too, found their way into paintings. But consider the difference between Nevinson’s portrait of such a figure in He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son (1918), and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen’s The Profiteer (1920–1921). Superficially, the two men look remarkably alike: well fed, self-satisfied, thin-lipped, beady-eyed. But on the mantelpiece behind Nevinson’s profiteer is a photograph of his son, who died in the war that made his father rich. The painting is ambiguous, both slightly repellent and sad. Davringhausen’s figure, sitting in a sterile ultra-modern office with a smoldering cigar at his elbow and a glass of wine on his desk, is more threatening; not quite the fat-necked brute you see in pictures by George Grosz, but still swinish enough.

Grosz’s graffiti-like caricatures of life in Weimar Germany express a kind of voluptuous loathing for the dislocated society of postwar Berlin. Men are either wrecks of war, begging in the streets on crutches, ignored by well-dressed passersby, or they are lecherous pigs, obese cigar-chomping bosses, or uniformed thugs. Grosz wrote in 1922:

People have created a rotten system—with a top and a bottom. A handful of them earn millions, while untold thousands have barely enough to exist on…. My task is to show the oppressed the true faces of their masters. Man is not good; he is like cattle.

Bertolt Brecht could not have expressed it better.

What gives so many drawings by Grosz their louche allure is that he reveled in the rottenness he professed to hate. The streets of Berlin, with their cripples and whores and pimps and plutocrats, provided the inspiration for his best art. The British artist who was most clearly influenced by Grosz was the marvelous Edward Burra. He, too, loved painting shady dancing halls, lesbian bars, hookers, and other lowlife characters (not just in London but in Paris, Mexico, and Harlem). His art can be as lurid as Grosz’s Berlin pictures: the strutting prostitute in her pink finery in Saturday Market (1932) or the goons ogling a naked dancer in Striptease (Harlem) (1934). What is missing is the loathing. Burra doesn’t hate; he is fascinated, amused, and invigorated by the seamy vitality of urban life.

Grosz, together with such artists as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, was part of the Dada movement, a nihilistic, absurdist artistic reaction to the supposedly rational world that produced the slaughter of World War I. Originating in Switzerland during the war, Dada spawned groups in Paris and New York, as well as in Berlin. Parisian Dadaists, led by such figures as André Breton and Tristan Tzara, scandalized people with zany theater performances, ballets, and manifestos. But the scandals were more artistic than political, and often injected with doses of mad humor. French Dada was a major influence on Surrealism.

German Dada was more aggressively political. In the words of Grosz:

If [Dada] expressed anything at all, it was our long fermenting restlessness, discontent and sarcasm. Any national defeat, any change to a new era gives birth to that sort of movement. At a different time in history we might just as well have been flagellants.²

Collage was a favorite Dada form—fragmented images patched together that made no logical sense or were deliberately provocative, such as John Heartfield’s Fathers and Sons (1924), showing Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg with uniformed children and skeletons marching in the background. Heartfield and Grosz also made a grotesque human figure out of a tailor’s dummy, with a prosthetic leg and a light bulb for a head. It was called The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (1920).

Kurt Schwitters was one of the main practitioners of this type of art. He coined the nonsensical word Merz for his collages, sculptures (Merzplastik), and interior designs (Merzbau). The idea was to assemble works from the most disparate sources—he built a kind of memorial column out of old newspapers, photographs, and figurines, topped with the death mask of his first-born child, who died as a baby in 1916. Schwitters explained Merz as follows: “Everything had broken down…new things had to be made from fragments…new art forms out of the remains of a former culture.”

The other movement that fanned out across the world, all the way to Iowa, where Grant Wood did his strangely detached, slightly eerie paintings, was Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity: reality seen and depicted through unflinching eyes, devoid of sentimentality. This was Otto Dix’s definition: “If you are painting a portrait of someone it is best not to know him. I only want to see what is there, the exterior.”

British artists like Paul Nash painted landscapes from this point of view, with the same hallucinatory realism as Wood. But Grosz, Dix, Max Beckmann, and other German artists added a distinctly political twist. Their sharp eyes took in the worst, most brutal aspects of postwar urban life, to protest the hideous social conditions of their society. Their pictures of sex murders, torture rooms, and rape were labeled “degenerate art” under the Nazis. Hitler favored heroic classicist nudes, sentimental German landscapes, or paintings of wholesome blond German farmers tilling the native soil. The “degenerates” were often sympathetic to the political left, whereas the classicists (think of Arno Breker’s sculptures of muscle-bound Aryan males) are associated with the right.

Things were not quite that simple, however. One of the revelations of a recent show at the Neue Galerie in New York, entitled “Before the Fall,” as well as the catalog of a recent exhibition in Frankfurt, “Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic,” was that the German artists of the 1920s and 1930s could not always be so neatly classified. New Objectivity had both a “left” and a “right” component; realism could be a form of social criticism but also an expression of restored order. Even those categories could be quite fluid. Franz Radziwill, for example, was affiliated with New Objectivity, was friendly with Otto Dix in the 1920s, and mixed with the radical left. His paintings of airplanes and battleships, of ruined houses under doom-laden skies, owe something to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, something to the modernist fascination with technology, and something to New Objectivity too.

In 1933, Radziwill joined the Nazi Party and the next year painted Revolution, a morbid image of a dead stormtrooper in front of a kind of ghost house with two hanged men outside. Another painting from that period, The Steel Helmet in No Man’s Land, shows just that: a dead soldier’s cracked helmet in a bleak and broken stretch of land under a beat-up barbed wire fence. It isn’t quite clear what these paintings, done in a spooky magical realism, are supposed to mean, especially since Radziwill repainted parts of them after 1945 to conform to changed times. The hanged men were not in the original painting. And he claimed that the helmet picture was a protest against war, even though in 1933 it was seen as a tribute to patriotic sacrifice.

A more interesting artist than Radziwill was Rudolf Schlichter. His 1924 painting of a weary-looking prostitute named Margot, holding a gold-tipped cigarette, adorns the cover of the splendid catalog of the “Splendor and Misery” exhibition. Schlichter was a typical example of what the Nazis regarded as degenerate: an early Communist, a friend of George Grosz, a Dadaist, a member of the New Objectivity, and a painter of Berlin decadence (he was especially fond of high-heeled women’s boots). But in the late 1920s, he spent more time with right-wing intellectuals like Ernst Jünger, whom he portrayed, joined the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, and turned to Catholicism. This didn’t stop the Nazis from confiscating his art. After the war, he became a Surrealist, and is sometimes called the German Salvador Dalí.

By the time Hitler came to power, the extraordinary flowering of German art was over. The democratic decade after World War I in Germany was marked by corruption, violence, and vice, and it produced some of the greatest art of the twentieth century. After 1933, under one of the most brutal regimes in human history, German art was lifeless, mediocre, and sentimental. Some of the more conservative New Objectivity artists, like Georg Schrimpf, were still permitted to show their neo-Romantic landscapes. Dix, whose earlier work was banned and who was fired as an art teacher, resorted to painting dull landscapes and family portraits full of just the kind of sweetness that the New Objectivists had tried so hard to avoid.

I believe it was Jean Genet who once remarked that he no longer had any interest in traveling to Germany after the Nazis took over. Once the state itself, and not an urban underclass, had become the main source of crime, art lost its subversive purpose.

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