The Pen-Ultimate Word: Re-Views & Inter-Views on Literature, Architecture, & Art

By Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong’s involvement with Anglo-Irish literature has resulted in a literary cooking, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill Press, 1986) and a volume of textual scholarship, “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: the Manuscript Materials (Cornell University Press, 1993). Her essays, stories, poetry, and reviews have appeared in various publications, including American Arts Quarterly, BOMB, Exquisite Corpse, Sea Kayaker, Notre Dame Review, PN Review. Recent titles published with Xlibris are Gazelle: 9 Monologues (2017; 2018), Pentimenti: Selected Memoirs (2018), Healing Fictions: Assorted Essays on Literature & Art (2018), and Two Fables (2020). She teaches in the Humanities Department at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984585639

Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in Leeds and East Yorkshire and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and a Project Grant from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. She now makes her home in Lancashire, and Fossils is her first book. 

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Copyright © 2020 by Alison Armstrong.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Author Photo: Ken Wade

Cover Image: Author's Painting, Oil sketch of the Hudson River

Rev. date: 06/26/2020

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Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

LITERATURE

MODERNISM, THE ROADKILL OF CONTEMPORARY THEORY?

TWO USES OF MIND: THE ART OF ABSENCE

SCRIPTITO ERGO SUM

A MASTERPIECE OF LITERARY DETECTION

BETWEEN IRISH AND IRISH: ISSUES OF ETHNICITY

THE ALIMENTS OF STYLE: or DIGESTING ULYSSES

UNDERSTANDING YEATS AFRESH

HONORING MEMORIES

IT IS HERSELF THAT SHE REMAKES

WORKING WITHIN THE LIMITS OF LOVE

WORD MADE FLESH

CAN ART BE TAUGHT? RATIONALIZING THE IRRATIONAL

ORIGINAL FULL TRANSCRIPTION

THE CASUALLY SUBLIME: Conversations with Robert Kipniss in his Hudson Valley Studio

JOYCE MADE VISUAL

CONTEMPORARY IRISH ART AT AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

End Notes

INTRODUCTION

Nothing has happened until it has been retold.

—Virginia Woolf to her nephew

and biographer Quentin Bell.

W HEN CONSIDERING A title for this collection, I at first decided on The Last Word. But soon I realized that what a reviewer does is share the next-to-last word in evaluating a book or exhibition or event. It is the Reader who has a last word.

As we recall from our academic studies of reader reception theory, the last word is never the final word but a temporary last word occurs with each reading for each reader.

What is a review, anyway? I am lying of a sofa on the deck at the pool at Chelsea Piers overlooking the Hudson River reading a March issue of The London Review of Books in the last week of a hot July. There are many more back issues at home as well as many issues to come. How to deal with the growing stacks of LRB, NYRB, Brooklyn Rail, and those three publications for which I have been partially responsible, Irish Literary Supplement, James Joyce Literary Supplement, and James Joyce Broadsheet? I let the subscription to The Nation expire, inviting the inevitable irksome letters reminding me to renew (imminent betrayal of my ethics is implicit). The New Yorker has been reduced from the relentless but welcome weekly paper magazine to occasional screen time so that I can print out portions at will as enthusiasm and time allow, thus creating smaller stacks of not yet read reviews. Same goes for the capacious and irresistible Dublin Review of Books that arrives regularly by e-mail so portions can be printed out, whenever. As for The Atlantic and Harpers, I rely on the kindness of savvy friends to share relevant reviews and essays as occasions arise. Of Granta, Laphams, Parabola, Paris Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Yeats Annual…we succumb to remorse. The New York Times that thuds against my apartment door at dawn on Saturdays and Sundays can take up to three days to peruse. I pass the bulk of it, sans real estate and sports, to Ken upstairs who really wants only the best sections, the Book Review and especially the Sunday Review that contains a growing number of Op Ed diatribes, I mean reviews of reality.

So I ask myself, and now you my Reader, as I lie in the late July sun on the deck by the River reading the March 7th issue of LRB, is it going to be too tiresome to republish some of the already published (mostly), the already read (maybe), already rejected (in some cases) contents as this book? Taking stock, reviewing a life of varied interests, may be shared as more than a reminiscence of what and how we have thought. For the sake of manners, I’ve omitted reviews of two books with which I took extreme umbrage; while I do not regret my very critical assessments, I realize that my tone was verging on argumentum ad hominum.

The penultimate question, then, is: What is the utility, the function of reading reviews? They are often time-sensitive, which is to say they may be seen as fussing about problems that are out of date, case closed; on the other hand re-reading reviews re-enlivens a buried strata (to mix a metaphor) of history, offers a second look at how we once approached or evaluated or interpreted a then novel situation, or a new book, an art exhibition, a film, an occasion. This world of writing and art and politics and cuisine and beliefs is composed of interpretations; a reviewer is an interpreter rather than just a marketer. A thorough reviewer may inadvertently persuade a Reader not to buy the book or attend the show. But an experience has been shared. A new interpretation may be elicited from a second opinion, even if it is one’s own re-view. A reviewer’s proper task, it seems to me, is not to tell the Reader what to think so much as to share an assessment of the work under review, informed by appropriate qualified knowledge and personal experience. The penultimate, the next to last points of view are offered here as a selection of discrete essays and as signs to point to other opinions.

—AA

Chelsea Pier 60

New York City

Summer 2019

Westbeth Artist Housing

New York City

Spring 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

P ROFOUND AND CHEERFUL gratitude is due to Richard Brown and Pieter Bekker who conspired with me in the Unterengstringen apartment of my long time mentor, Fritz Senn, during the June1979 International James Joyce Symposium, to found a publication devoted to reviewing literature and visual art devoted to James Joyce. By January 1980 we three editors along with Fritz met in Richard’s London flat to fold and staple the first edition of our James Joyce Broadsheet . We went to tell Carl about it at the new London Review of Books .

JJB thrives today 41 years later thanks to the continued collaboration of Richard and Pieter after I returned to America in 1981 to take a temporary editorial position at the newly resuscitated Kenyon Review.

Soon after my subsequent move to New York, I met Bob Lowery at the Irish Arts Center, then joined the historic James Joyce Society that met in the upstairs room of Miss Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart on West 44th; a quaint sign jutting out over the door read Wise Men Fish Here. Many wonderful meetings occurred there in the upstairs gallery overseen by Philip L who collected overdue memberships fees. Sid Feshbach was president who sent out his newsy announcements on postcards written by hand.

I was married in that upstairs gallery at Christmas in 1983 and later held the book party for my Joyce of Cooking in 1986 thanks to Andy Brown’s generosity; in each case he charged me just $40 for the use of the room. The James Joyce Society continued with talks and readings sporadically meeting, either in the penthouse of the Roger Smith Hotel and finally settling in Glucksman Ireland House (NYU) at the bottom of 5th Avenue that also hosts the Annual Yeats Society Taste of the Yeats Sligo Summer School. The iconic Gotham Book Mart is no more, despite valiant efforts by Andy Brown to keep it alive after Miss Steloff passed away, but its reputation still lives in the memories of this dying generation as a haven for literary life. Meantime, thanks continue to be due to fellow reviewers who find in Robert G. Lowery’s Irish Literary Supplement, another venue for the exchange of ideas.

But long before that productive decade of the 1980s in New York, there was Oxford and London (1973-1981). Through my job at Oxford University Press I met poet and critic Ian Hamilton (who signed his negative reviews Edward Pygge) and his new publication, The New Review, re-envisioned from the prior small format Review. I was employed as circulation manager by the Press, which made weekly trips down from Oxford to Greek Street offices a happy duty. But at the same time, I was embarking on a post-grad degree under the supervision of Richard Ellmann who insisted that my interest in Joyce must be replaced with my parallel interest in W.B. Yeats. And so I labored for nearly two decades as textual scholar editing the manuscript materials in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland, re-reviewing and preparing, in three countries on two typewriters (Pica and Elite) work for printers whose skills spanned the modern history of printing from the production of hot type and the clacking of linotype machines, then stages of offset to primitive electronic typesetters to photolithography and contemporary computerized whatever they did in the 1990s.

And before that? There was the congenial Ohio State University Department of English, with Maurice Beja who would be my M.A. supervisor (my subject was both Joyce and Yeats), the introduction to Joyce’s Ulysses by an exotic Swiss visiting instructor, Fritz Senn. After the teargas, after the riots of May 1970, after the awakening to a world of literary criticism outside the bounds of a city that had produced James Thurber and O. Henry (sometime resident of the Ohio State Penn), as well as a police department that physically attacked and denigrated us long-haired hippy intellectuals, I knew I’d be a scholar and perhaps a writer. And before that…? A child’s attempts to read the reviews and comprehend the cartoons in Aunt Mildred’s New Yorker magazines in the 1950s. Uncle Woody told me that when I grew up I would be able to understand them. I mostly do, now.

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I am grateful to the following editors for acknowledging that I retain all copyrights and may reprint my material that initially appeared in their publications:

Richard Brown and Pieter Bekker, founding editors of James Joyce Broadsheet in Leeds, England; Robert G. Lowery founding editor of Irish Literary Supplement and James Joyce Literary Supplement; John Matthias, poetry editor of Notre Dame Review, South Bend, Indiana; Michael Schmidt, founding editor at PN Review and Carcanet Press in Manchester, England. I also extend thanks to Sandra L. Sanderson of American Arts Quarterly and to David Morton, commissioning editor at Progressive Architecture, two publications that have long since ceased to function. And to Robert Kipniss, many thanks for his kind permission to reproduce his artwork. All have been a pleasure to work with.

A.A.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAQ, American Arts Quarterly

CUP, Cambridge University Press

ILS, Irish Literary Supplement

JJLS, James Joyce Literary Supplement

JJB, James Joyce Broadsheet

PN Review, Poetry Nation Review

LITERATURE

Casting a Cold Eye—Yeats’s Epitaph, [rev. of Yeats’s Epitaph: A Key to Symbolic Unity I His Life and Work by James Lovic Allen (Univ. Press of America, 1982) in ILS (Spring 1983).]

Modernism, the Road-Kill of Contemporary Theory? [rev. of The Future of Modernism, Edited by Hugh Witemeyer (Univ. Michigan Press 2000) in JJLS (Spring 2005).]

‘Two Uses of Mind: The Art of Absence," [rev. of the novel, Atchley, by David Green (Rhinebeck, NY: Station Hill Press, 1998) in Notre Dame Review Number 10, (Summer 2000).]

Scriptito Ergo Sum [rev. of The Spire, by Bruce Arnold (Lilliput Press 2003), ILS (Fall 2004)].

A Masterpiece of Literary Detection [rev. The Scandal of Ulysses: The Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth Century Masterpiece, by Bruce Arnold. (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2004) in ILS, (Fall 2005)]

Between Irish and Irish: Issues of Ethnicity [rev. of The Cambridge Com-panion to the Irish Novel, Edited by John Wilson Foster (CUP, 2006) in JJLS (2008).]

The Aliments of Style: or Digesting ‘Ulysses’,[rev. of Stephen and Bloom at Life’s Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, by Lindsay Tucker (Univ. of Florida Press, 1984) in ILS No. 20 ( June 1986).]

The Trials of ‘Ulysses’ [rev. of exhibition of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ in the lobby of the Federal Court House, Manhattan. In ILS (Spring 1986).]

Forthcoming: A New ‘Ulysses’, rev. of Hans Walter Gabler’s Ulysses: The Corrected Text (Random House, 1986) in ILS Spring 1986).]

A Decade of Yeats Studies [rev. of Yeats Annual No. 10, Warwick Gould, Editor, in ILS (Fall 1994).]

Marsh’s Library and its Early Fine Bindings [rev. of The Decorated Bindings in Marsh’s Library, Dublin, by Mirjam M. Foot. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), in ILS (Fall 2002).]

Understanding Yeats Afresh, [rev. of Irish Writers in their Time: W.B. Yeats, Edited by Edward Larissy (Irish Academic Press, 2010) in ILS Spring 2011).]

Honoring Memories, [rev. of Irish Essays by Denis Donoghue (CUP, 2011), in ILS (Fall 2012).]

It is Herself that She Remakes, [rev. of Little Witness, poems by Connie Roberts (Dublin: Arlen House, 2015) in ILS 2017).]

Working Within the Limits of Love, [rev. Of Word/Play/Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, Edited by Robert Archambeau (Ohio University Press/Swallow, 1999) in PN Review 129 (Spring 2000).]

"We Live