And by these wonderful circumstances I was once more free again: and I kept my resolution then made, never to fall more into the hands of any recruiter, and henceforth and for ever to be a Managing Editor.
Links:
In The Critic, Norman Lebrecht on Alfred Brendel:
They came up with a strategy that positioned Brendel as the pianist you could trust, the one who put accuracy above ego. In Brendel recordings, every note was justified, and every dynamic matched the score. He sold out halls to an audience that came to be educated, not entertained.
Brendel called his success “rather grotesque.” Americans were mystified: what’s not to like about success? The New York Times devised new synonyms for “boring.” The intensely pianistic Harold Schonberg found him “diligent, literal and not very imaginative.” Brendel said, “I am responsible to the composer and particularly to the piece.”
Away from the stage he cultivated a quirky wit and a genial sociability. One night over dinner with the Menuhins he castigated me for a frivolous article I had written in the Telegraph, categorising pianists as either eggheads or fruitcakes, intellectuals or nutcases. “You put me down as an egghead,” fumed Alfred, “when I am obviously a fruitcake.” Just another evasion?
[We linked to a piece Brendel wrote about Haydn in WRB—Apr. 12, 2025, which has certain resonances:
Haydn was a formalist, the composer who put the house of music into order, and at the same time an audacious adventurer, as well as the musical humorist par excellence. He was popular and “simple,” but he was also complex. He was naively religious but also an exponent of the Enlightenment. He was ironic and sophisticated, but at the same time a revolutionary. He was “the friend of the house who is always welcome without having anything new to offer,” but also the master of surprise and amazement. He incorporated both harmony and contradiction, risk and inner confidence.
One of the main purposes of this newsletter is to quote “Tradition and the Individual Talent” a lot, but I will forbear that pleasure here. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in Literary Review:
James Stourton reviews a book about collectors (A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now, by James Delbourgo, August 12):
Delbougo is interested in changing perceptions of collectors. Antiquarian taste, established by Horace Walpole, is illustrated by the hero of Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, Oldbuck, a hoarder if ever there was one, “trammelled by a sublime whimsy of disarray.” Romanticism reinforced the idea of collecting as a kind of compulsion. In the late nineteenth century, Freud recast collecting as a symptom of psychological maladjustment, a substitute for sex and pleasure. Thanks to Freud, collecting “became seen as a response to repressed neuroses stemming from events early in the life of the individual.” Delbourgo describes how Freud’s views have been developed by the likes of Otto Fenichel, Werner Muensterberger and Jean Baudrillard. The discussion reaches a troubling climax with an examination of Hannibal Lecter and a discussion of serial killers and kidnappers as collectors of women.
Many of Delbourgo’s case studies come from fiction. He invokes such novels as Balzac’s Cousin Pons, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, Huysmans’s À rebours, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to which he devotes four and a half pages. He might also have considered Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé and Visconti’s Conversation Piece. When you examine novels featuring collectors, you do indeed get a very strange view of them. Selfishness, greed, obsession and madness are among the characteristics on display. Lonely obsessives do exist among collectors, but have writers of fiction created a caricature? The author’s emphasis on late nineteenth-century collectors as pathologically weak and dangerous—as put forward by Huysmans—is only part of the picture.
[I am not sure that anything in À rebours is “dangerous,” necessarily, except to Des Esseintes himself (and, I grant, that unfortunate tortoise). There collecting becomes almost a purely interior exercise; Des Esseintes locks himself away from the world and retreats into his collection.
If I were to suggest another literary study—one where the desire to collect is not an inner retreat but a demand to collect the entire world—I would pick Blood Meridian (1985):
The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
Collecting is a means of controlling, and the judge finds the best way to deal with the threat posed by things outside his collection is to collect everything and so remove the threat. —Steve]
Zoe Guttenplan reviews a book about the people who design fonts (Type Designers of the Twentieth Century, by David Jury, September 12):
Take Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison, a Monotype employee. Times New Roman is among the most famous typefaces in the world, the only one Morison designed, and has its roots in the 16th century. When Edmund Hopkinson, acting advertising manager of The Times, visited the Monotype office in 1929 to try and persuade them to buy ad space in a “printing supplement” The Times would put out later that year, he added as a last enticement that The Times would handle all the design and typesetting in house. Morison, the story goes, slammed his fist on the table and said that “Monotype would do better to pay to keep The Times compositors away from their advertisement.” He followed up his outburst with a rant about “the iniquities of the current state of The Times.” Hopkinson was impressed. Morison was hired shortly afterwards.
[You hear many stories about the different things you used to be able to do to get hired, although I have not yet heard anyone recommend “rant about the iniquitous state of your potential employer.” It is delightful to know that this worked at least once.
Perhaps even more delightful, though, is the image of Linotype and Monotype competing with each other by coming up with more and better typefaces only available on their machines. I am imagining a Coen brothers-type scene in which William Randolph Hearst’s attempts to (supposedly!) manufacture a war with Spain are repeatedly interrupted by dueling salesmen yelling about advancements in kerning. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
The differences between Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Kubrick’s film adaptation
Types of guy who don’t like Shakespeare
A Poem by Fulke Greville and tropes involving the moon
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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