I have a review of this book published in Rain Taxi Review of Books online. Check it out!

Review of Carole Maso's Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

For the new year, let's revisit a great writer and a great painter:



Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
by Carole Maso
2002, Counterpoint Press
hardcover
170 pp.


Whenever I read Carole Maso, I start writing like her. And so it’s the words and impressions that linger, hovering above the page, insistent, repeating: Broken. Fragment. Meditation. Accident. Votive.

Composed in Maso’s unique poetic and fragmentary style, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo is many different things at once: a highly condensed biography of Kahlo’s life, a voice for her words, and Maso’s artistic “conversation” with Kahlo.

Beauty is Convulsive samples freely from biographies of Kahlo among Maso’s own writing and impressions. We’ve become used to this style from filmmakers and rap artists, but it is still unusual in books, where we’re accustomed to more singularity of voice, clear quotes and citations with footnotes and page numbers. Maso’s rendering of Frida Kahlo requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a willingness to experience Kahlo’s life as we abandon our usual literary constraints.

The book focuses on three defining elements of Frida Kahlo’s life. The first is a serious bus accident in her adolescence which had repercussions throughout her entire life, including chronic pain in her back, legs and feet, and an inability to have children. Her subsequent miscarriages make up another recurring theme. And the third is her marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Maso’s sometimes halting, disjointed writing style suggests a life lived in fits and starts, as in Votive: Child:

“Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was
Frieda [sic] Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color
if only
alegria

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.” (19)

One of the hallmarks of Carole Maso’s writing is repetition of words and phrases, and Votive features in the title, as well as in the text, of many of the pieces in this book. Votive: Vision, Votive: Courage, and Votive: Sorrow, are among the pieces that lead the reader on a meditation, a wish, a prayer on elements of Frida Kahlo’s life, almost as if you are walking the stations of the cross. In between the Votives and other pieces are short epigrammatic quotes from Frida herself, each entitled “Accident”, which serve as interludes:

“I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.” (65)

“Nevertheless I have the will to do many things
and I have never felt “disappointed by life”
as in Russian novels. (75)

In her choice and placement of text from her journals, Maso not only gives voice to Frida Kahlo, but also highlights Kahlo the poet, particularly when writing about Diego:

“From you to my hands I go all over your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours. . . Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. . . .”(34-35)

Lest you start to believe that Maso is merely a collage artist, arranging the words that Frida has written and what others have written about her, Maso intertwines her own meditations on the artist’s life and her work:

“She remembers when her mouth -- pressed to the ear -- to the
hum of the paint the blood:
don’t kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him.” (91)

Add to this quotes from others who knew Frida Kahlo, including Diego himself, Alejandro, who was involved in the accident with Frida, and notes from her doctors, and gradually, contemplatively, you get a picture of the woman and the artist, and the effect she has on those who wish to enter her world.

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas

I have done book reviewing for Rain Taxi for over ten years. I have decided to repost some of my older reviews here. I am fortunate in that Rain Taxi gives me books that I request or in areas that I request, so these are all books that I have really liked. I hope you will check some out after reading these.

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
Margaret Hooks
Princeton Architectural Press


As a long time devotee and student of Surrealism, it came as something of a shock to be handed a book on an artist and patron central to the careers of several prominent surrealists that I had never heard of before, Edward James. How was it possible that I had never read his name in any other biography or group history of Surrealism, had seen him in no exhibitions, no bibliographies I had ever encountered? What kind of Surrealist “pedigree” could this person possibly have?

A writer and artist, James’ first novel, The Gardener Who Saw God, received critical acclaim and even went into multiple publications. Despite consistently solid reviews for his work, one negative review, accusing him of attempting to “also buy himself a reputation as a poet” caused James to become discouraged and cease publishing under his own name. “I could have had anything I wanted,” James laments, but because I was rich, no one accepted me or thought of me as a poet.” (36) James focused his energies for a time on other artists. Behind the scenes, he was one among many key players in the production and distribution of Surrealism, underwriting the Surrealist journal Minotaur as well as the Surrealist Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He supported Salvador Dali financially and by helping materially to coordinate exhibitions for Dali as well as for Rene Magritte (whose Le Reproduction Interdite is said to be one of two portraits that Magritte did of James, showing him from the back). Despite James’ involvement with many prominent Surrealists throughout his life, Hooks points out that James never claimed the label for himself, understandably so, given the legendary infighting over the purity of the name Surrealism, held tightly by Andre Breton, and his tendency to “excommunicate” artists, along with James’ own sense of exclusion from the literary world.

From his break with Dali, Hooks takes us briefly through what might be described literally and figuratively as James’ years “in the desert.” He travels through the American southwest, through Taos, New Mexico and Mabel Dodge’s artistic community therein, and ultimately landing in California, where he continued to circulate among artists and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, who introduced James to the Vedantic movement, of which he became a follower. In this time, James also began to travel back and forth to Mexico, and it was during these travels that he found what would become not only his home, but the site of his greatest artistic creation of all, his legacy of a surrealist environment and estate, among the hills, waterfalls, and lush vegetation outside of the small town of Xilitla. From here, the book diverges from the standard artist biography to give us the blow-by-blow history of the creation of Las Pozas.

If Surrealism represents a way of looking at, thinking about, and moving through the world, Las Pozas, James’ Surreal Eden, is a surrealistic world in itself to be lived in. Hooks articulates in detail James’ vision as well as his challenges and triumphs in realizing his works of art. He finds a kindred spirit and lifelong friend in Plutarco Gastelem Esquer, a man who is able to translate James’ ideas and sometimes seemingly impractical sketches into actual objects. James employs many of the people of Xilitla in the building of Las Pozas, not only providing patronage to artists this time, but bringing an economic infusion to the entire town. It is in the project of Las Pozas itself, as well as his friendship with Plutarco, that James finds the society and artistic acceptance the eluded James in his younger days.

If there is one shortcoming to the book, it is possibly not even a problem of the text at all, but with the difficulty in capturing visual and visceral artistic experiences that are so central to this story. Hooks provides photos of and also describes in detail many elaborate and fascinating pieces created by James throughout his life, many of which would be considered installations or even performance art pieces today, from Monkton House in England, with its purple façade and self-designed wallpaper and carpeting to the structures, sculptures, and edifices of Las Pozas. It’s a daunting, if not impossible task, to fully appreciate these pieces without being able to experience them. And perhaps this daunting task also explains, in part, James’ low visibility in the narratives of contemporary art history.

The book’s extensive photographs helps a great deal in this regard, but cannot fully ameliorate the situation. The photos include detailed photos and close ups of many of the pieces from Las Pozas, which hint at the scope of the project. This scope includes not only the size of the pieces and structures themselves, such as the Bamboo Palace the Stairway to the Sky, which completely dwarfs the cabin it stands behind, but also includes the space occupied by Las Pozas itself. Hooks does provide a map that shows the layout and area of Las Pozas, but it is difficult to appreciate on a visual level without being able to see the pieces in relationship to each other or to the larger landscape. Likewise, the book opens with a description of the current city of Xilitla, but we see only one photo of the town, taken in 1940, just before James’ arrival. I found it difficult to not only hold in my mind the building of these amazing works of art, but also to visualize the context in which is was built and now stands, a context and often contrast, which Hooks tries very hard to describe for us.

That said, Surreal Eden does what many good art biographies and histories do: remind us of what gets forgotten and left out of “official” canons. Hers is not the first biography of James, but adds to a body of work that includes two previous biographies as well as James’ own writings. Through these, and through the potential to renew interest in Las Pozas, which still stands today outside of Xilitla, James has the chance he always desired to be taken seriously as an artist in his own right.

Review of The Voice Is All, a biography of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson

This review previously appeared in the Spring 2013 Edition of Rain Taxi.

Normally, when you break up with someone, you cut your losses and move on. If that someone is a writer, you might occasionally read a little bit of their work, usually hoping it’s not very good, reaffirming that you broke up with them because they lack depth, maturity, and talent. Only a few, exceptional, dedicated ex-lovers keep up with everything the other person goes on to do. Novelist and Kerouac biographer Joyce Johnson falls into the last category. Her love affair with Jack was over fifty years ago and he died in 1969, but apparently she is still haunted, or at least intrigued, by his ghostly presence in her life and as well as in American culture, as this is her third book about Kerouac.

Johnson has chosen to write about the beginning of Kerouac’s life, from his very early childhood to his writing of On the Road, roughly until the period when she dated Kerouac. What is immediately striking about the book is that while most biographies of artists are rather dull in the beginning—treating the artist’s early life as something you have to get through in order to get to the heart of the artist that can only be understood by dredging up the past—Johnson’s biography is immediately interesting, probably because so much of Kerouac’s work is autobiographical and begins with his own early childhood experiences. In its best moments, this is a true “literary biography.” It addresses many personal details about Kerouac’s life and relationships, ultimately tying almost everything back to Kerouac’s writing, from the death of his brother in his early childhood to the way people in his life became the characters of his novels and short stories, depicted both sympathetically and acrimoniously.

At worst, like all biographies, it is a collection of names and date that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the overall narrative, telling a tale of Jack that bounces from home to home to adventures—at sea, in New York, and ultimately, on the road—as well as relaying information about the people in his early life and the roles they ultimately ended up playing in his books: the boyhood friends, burgeoning writers, criminals and drug addicts, all powerful influences and characters. It is when Johnson gets into the story underneath the details, trying to get into his psyche, that the book really shines. Using his journals, novels, biographies of Kerouac, and her own personal experience, she attempts to explain some of Jack’s mental states and what motivated him in his life and in his writing. For example, talking about his marriage to Edie Parker, Johnson writes:

Here was another sobering ending in Jack’s life—one of the failures and mistakes he hoped his book would redeem . . . He was in a troubled mood one afternoon in late August after he had spent the previous night looking through a family album . . . in the city, he reflected gloomily, the people he knew felt threated by what a family album represented. (222)

In moments like this, it is easy to see the influence of Joyce Johnson the novelist on her nonfiction: I occasionally found myself stopping to ask, “how does she know what Jack was thinking?” For the most part, though, you don’t question that—you just enjoy the ride, the way you would read a novel without questioning the omniscient narrator. For the more skeptical reader, there is an acknowledgement of the role of Johnson’s assistant in helping her to wade through Jack’s extensive journals and papers, and at the end of the book, of course, there are extensive notes. She has, it would seem, a fairly firm footing into Kerouac’s psyche, both from memory and from research.

Johnson appears to have very genuine affection for Kerouac. She addresses Kerouac’s failings head-on, but does so in a generous and loving manner. Writing about Kerouac’s much-discussed relationship with his mother, Johnson says “his inability to make a commitment to any woman other than his mother took me a while to understand . . .” In this same section, she talks about one factor in the break-up of their relationship being Kerouac’s womanizing, which “went on very openly after he became famous, though he did try not to hurt me (186).” You can see the genuine affection that the two of them maintained for each other throughout their lives, “judging from what he wrote about our time together in Desolation Angels.”

Kerouac is famed for writing the quintessential road novel; On the Road played a large part in establishing the automobile and the road as part of the mythology of America. Yet Johnson talks about his affinity to his French roots throughout his life. He struggled with mastery of writing in English, as opposed to the joual, a primarily spoken form of French, that he grew up with in his early days and that he frequently returned to. Describing it as lacking “layers of subtlety and politeness,” this may in fact, explain some of Jack’s straightforward style of writing, as opposed to the more baroque style of the French writers that he had initially revered. Chapters like “Franco-American Ghosts,” “A Half-American Boyhood” and “White Ambitions” in particular discuss this continuing issue as something Jack struggled with throughout his life, rather than something that was “settled” for him early on.

Working between two languages can result in a split psyche for a writer, and ultimately, you get a sense of Jack’s ambivalence towards most things in his life: his family and personal relationships, as well as his need to be involved with groups, from his boyhood to the Beat Generation writers. Johnson also talks about the way that Jack wrestled with libertinism versus Catholic morality. This is something that Kerouac would struggle with his whole life, particularly towards the end when he had become fairly conservative and seemed to have turned his back on Allen Ginsberg, for example, in his infamous drunken rant on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Reading Johnson’s biography, it is easier to see that this was actually a reflection of a lifetime of contradiction between two sides of himself, but also the reflection of a lifetime of feeling pulled in multiple directions.

Avoiding, for the most part, the incessant mythologizing about Kerouac that still pervades Beat studies today, The Voice Is All adds a great deal to our understanding of Kerouac, showing how the writer can be understood by knowing the man.

Review of Carole Maso's Mother and Child

My review of Carole Maso's Mother and Child is up at Rain Taxi. It's a gorgeous book, as always, and also a very relevant series of allegories for our time. Read the review, then read the book!

Carole Maso’s work to date has been characterized by a lush, almost otherworldy writing, a style in which the reader experiences everything more deeply—the beauty of the world as well as heartbreak and longing. On top of this, her writing constantly folds back on itself. Maso’s work often goes off into what seem to be tangents, yet as soon as you go with her down a path, she will lead you (sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully) back to the previous idea, braiding stories together. . . .

Read on here:

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012fall/maso.php